The Encounter with Gramsci’s Work Will Not Take Place (1975–1978)

Abstract

This article aims to explain how Gramsci's work was ultimately not received, welcomed and read in France in the late 1970s. After a long period of semi-clandestine circulation, without access to his complete works, there was a Gramscian ‘renaissance’, which was highly political in the context of Eurocommunism (1972-1976). However, by 1977-1978, Gramsci had disappeared from the French public sphere. This story is told here as a series of actes manqués and foreclosures of the Gramscian object. From these aborted meeting with the great French intellectuals of the time at the EHESS in 1975 to the notable absence of French intellectuals in the transalpine debates surrounding the Florence Colloquium in 1977. In between, there was the tragic, or tragicomic, fate of a complete edition of the Cahiers by Gallimard, which had great difficulty in being published and only came out after the fashion had already passed. This is also an opportunity to pay tribute to the solitary Gramscian scholars, such as Robert Paris and André Tosel, who did so much to keep the flame of the great Italian philosopher alive in the ruins of Gramscianism after the 1980’s.