Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin: A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4217
Nota critica su Giovanni Pizza, L’antropologia di Gramsci: Corpo, natura, mutazione, Milano, Carocci, 2020, pp. 182; Fadi A. Bardawil, Revolution and disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the binds of emancipation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 280; Tilla Rudel, Walter Benjamin: L’angelo assassinato, traduzione di Lorenza Canepa, Milano, Excelsior 1881, 2007, pp. 182 [ed. orig. Walter Benjamin: L'ange assassiné, Mengès, Paris, 2006, pp. 208].
application/pdf
2239-625X
4217
1
en
Alexander Koensler
Anuac
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin: A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
9
Review articles
2020-07-29
2020-07-18
2020-07-29
2020-07-29
251-259
1
Alexander Koensler
2020/07/29
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4217
251
University of Perugia, Italy
2239-625X
1
en
259
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin: A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/4217/3824
9
                                               2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259




                                                                              NOTE CRITICHE

Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin
A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
Alexander KOENSLER
Università di Perugia



Giovanni Pizza | L’antropologia di Gramsci. Corpo, natura, mutazione, Milano, Ca-
rocci, 2020, pp. 182.
Fadi A. BARDAWIL | Revolution and disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the binds of
emancipation, Durham, Duke University Press, 2020, pp. 280.
Tilla RUDEL | Walter Benjamin. L’angelo assassinato, traduzione di Lorenza Canepa,
Milano, Excelsior 1881, 2007, pp. 182 [ed. orig. Walter Benjamin: L'ange assassiné,
Mengès, Paris, 2006, pp. 208].



Prologue
   Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) are
probably among the most cited and least understood political and cultural
critics of contemporary social sciences. Less influential outside the Arab
hemisphere remains Waddah Charara (1942-), a key figure of critical
intellectual history and a protagonist of the Lebanese New Left in the sixties
and seventies, a cultural and political critic, writer and social scientist.
Charara, similarly to Gramsci and Benjamin, offered a deeply engaged
analysis of universal questions regarding the political imagination and the
possibilities of emancipatory politics. The three figures share a number of
captivating characteristics: they all had experiences of intellectual militancy
in times of war, they were all notably “free-minded spirits” that are difficult
to categorise, they all transcend personal, political and academic boundaries
and move considerably beyond conventional routes of academic or political
career paths.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alexander Koensler
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin: A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259.
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-4217
252                                                                      ALEXANDER KOENSLER


   As in the taboo-breaking journeys of personalities of Andy Warhol’s
factory in New York evoked in “A walk on the wild side” by Lou Reed 1, I
reflect in this commentary on the ground-breaking and unconventional
intellectual legacies of these key figures as portrayed in three books:
Giovanni Pizza’s L’antropologia di Gramsci, Fadi A. Bardawil’s Revolution and
disenchantment and Tilla Rudel’s Walter Benjamin: l’ange assassiné.

1st Act: Antonio Gramsci
   Giovanni Pizza’s volume constitutes a sophisticated attempt to follow the
legacy of Gramsci’s concepts and theories in different contemporary
intellectual environments. Moving beyond the classical concept of anthology,
the merit of the book is to offer a highly original perspective on the
trajectories of Gramsci’s thought and how it is applied in a wide array of
fields. As one of the most influential experts on Gramsci in Italian academia
and beyond, Pizza offers in this volume not so much an analysis of Gramsci’s
thought itself, but an examination of the repercussions of Gramsci’s writing
and acting on both Italian and international anthropology.
   Under chapter headings that allude to the grand themes of political
thought, the reader can find thoughtfully crafted itineraries of the “traffic in
theory” (Bardawil 2020) of Gramsci’s concepts on contemporary key
anthropologists in the Anglo-Saxon hemisphere and, importantly and often
overlooked, in a variety of Italian schools of thought. Examining the uses of
Gramsci’s concepts and ideas by authors as Kate Crehan, Jane Cowan, Anna
L. Tsing and Brenda M. Farnell, Pizza outlines how anthropology developed
a set of methods to problematise the “obvious” and questions common-
sense conceptions of everyday life. Importantly, for Pizza, this strand of
research in anthropology distinguishes itself from the study of cultural
difference, as understood for example by Ulf Hannerz (2016) and others.
Departing from the difference between hegemony and domination, the
legacy of Gramsci has shaped directly or indirectly many of those studies
that attempt to analyse the complexities of cultural, corporal and political
elements. Thus, Gramsci has contributed to develop a realm of study that,
similar to Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism later, has the aim of de-
naturalising and de-objectifying, and of questioning how power relations
became perceived as unquestioned.
   Pizza outlines how Jane Cowan, an anthropologist from the University of
Sussex known for her reflections on the conundrum of rights and culture
(2006), combined innovatively in her early ethnography of dance the

1. It was actually Berardino Palumbo (2006: 46) who applied, probably for the first time, Lou
Reed’s poetry as a critical methodological inspiration.


2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
ANTONIO GRAMSCI, WADDAH CHARARA AND WALTER BENJAMIN                              253


Gramscian notion of hegemony with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus. This
conceptual move allowed her to extend the Gramscian notion of hegemony
to bodily processes of incorporation as well, moving beyond what the
concept of habitus would have allowed. Pizza’s volume is not free of an
indirect critique of how Gramsci’s multifaceted ideas have been presented in
relatively reductive terms. For example, in a subsequent chapter, Pizza
outlines how in Anna L. Tsing’s work the same notion of hegemony has been
transformed from an explicit point of reference in her early work (1993) into
an implicit assumption in her later work (Tsing 2005). In other words, Pizza
demonstrates how Gramsci’s concept of hegemony fundamentally shaped
lines of thought in many realms of the social sciences, although this might
not be explicit.
   In other chapters, Pizza traces how Gramsci’s thought has come to
characterise entire schools of thought in Italian anthropology. These are
often overlooked in Anglo-Saxon contexts. Most strikingly, the intellectual
and political engagement of Tullio Seppilli, founder of the first Italian
Institute of ethnology and cultural anthropology at the University of
Perugia, has given birth to a scholarly group in which the political
suggestions of Gramsci and Marx where systematically present in the
background of each research endeavour. Methodologically, Pizza emphasises
how Seppilli’s work reflects profoundly the “rigour of doubt” and the
heuristic potential of dialogical exchange in order to examine the processes
of construction of taken-for-granted concepts in everyday life, for instance
in popular beliefs on health, as an entry point to demystify processes of
hegemony. Conceptually, Gramsci’s understanding of cultural boundaries as
interlinked with dynamics of power has guided both political action and the
theorisation of the social world in ways that imply a complexity that merits
more attention. Another often-overlooked theme of reflection in the books
concerns Gramsci’s understanding of cultural dynamics and identities as
intrinsically fluid in a way that does not allow a reductive interpretation in
terms of hybridity, as popular in contemporary social sciences. As it is widely
known, in an exchange of letters with his wife of Jewish origin Tatiana
Schucht, Gramsci fiercely rejected the idea that different cultural “worlds”
exist, such as exemplified by Christian and Jewish collective identities,
underlining the dynamics of assimilation and cultural interchange. This
relatively fluid notion of cultural boundaries has also sparked criticism, for
instance in Alessandra Tarquini’s (2019) analysis of the trajectories of the
Italian Left and the constitution of Jewish collective identities. She suggests
that precisely this open-minded notion of cultural boundaries facilitated an
underestimation of anti-Semitism in Europe in the period before the Second


                                     2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
254                                                           ALEXANDER KOENSLER


World War. This ongoing debate demonstrates the multifaceted potential of
Gramscian intellectual legacy. In this sense, one of the merits of Pizza’s
work is that it demonstrates how Gramsci’s legacy is far more complex and
multifaceted than is often acknowledged, and his complex personality seems
to appear rather reduced in mainstream applications of his concepts. In
Pizza’s writing, instead, the intricate fascination with a mode of inquiry
centred on the “rigour of doubt” shines out between the lines of a portrait of
an intellectual militant who appeared unrelentingly passionate for debate,
contestation and re-elaboration; a passion that did not stop even with his
imprisonment.

2nd Act: Waddah Charara
   Similar to Gramsci, Waddah Charara experienced the hopes and despair
associated with intellectual militancy, political transformation and war. Fadi
A. Bardawil excavates the trajectories of critical theory beyond its usual
horizon focusing on Charara’s intellectual militancy. His study underlines
the necessity to overcome the common-sense distinction between
“universal” or “abstract” Western intellectuals, and “local” or “particular”
native intellectuals in the rest of the world who cannot aspire to more than
regional prominence. Charara is the co-founder of Socialist Lebanon, a
socialist organisation associated with Lebanon’s New Left in the sixties and
seventies, and is also a cultural critic and academic, engaged with many of
the “universal” challenges of political transformation that have been
debated by intellectuals around the world, i.e.: who are the agents of
political transformation? What are the sites of political transformation?
What are the binds and potentials of emancipatory politics? Socialist
Lebanon was one of the major intellectual vehicles in the Arab world that
articulated a critique of communist stages of development and modernisation
theory in general.
   The merit of Bardawils’ exceptionally delightful study of the archives of
Socialist Lebanon is not only that it breaks down this distinction in classical
postcolonial fashion, but actually dismantles the polarity itself. Arab
intellectuals are often left with the option either to become “Westernised
natives” or to “self-Orientalise”. In contrast, Bardawil traces the
cosmopolitan roots of Charara and his companions back to French and
Anglo-Saxon education overlapping with broader influences from the Arab
world. For instance, Charara grew up in rural southern Lebanon, which was
integrated into broader economic, medical and administrative networks that
allowed its inhabitants to move relatively freely between Mandate Palestine,


2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
ANTONIO GRAMSCI, WADDAH CHARARA AND WALTER BENJAMIN                                   255


Lebanon and Syria. Open borders allowed, for example, visits of Jewish
doctors in Palestine, to sell agricultural products in Jewish or Palestinian
seaports, or to pursue education partly in Beirut, partly in Paris. The
Christian Maronite liberal and pro-Western culture of Lebanon intersected
here with Druze, Muslim, Jewish and European leftist perspectives at many
levels. These experiences seem also to have influenced his later critique of
nationalist and sectarian politics. Socialist Lebanon, founded in 1964,
provided a frame for its protagonists to engage in a cosmopolitan outlook
with Third-Worldist texts, primary texts from the Marxist tradition, locating
itself as a laboratory of political imagination in the orbit of universal leftist
theories. Bardawil recalls one of his interviewees about the vivid intellectual
life of this group:
     There was [Charara] who worked more than the others, and he had an older
     relationship with this line of work than the others, because he had a tight
     relationship with the Unef and the French Communist party. He was a Ba’thist
     beforehand too… Fawaz we used to consider the Leninist of the group, the class
     analysis guy, and the one with organisational conceptions (Bardawil 2020: 63).

   Influenced by the writing of Ibn Khaldun and Antonio Gramsci, Charara
reinterpreted the civil war in Lebanon as a crucial watershed, and not the
1967-war. For most Western-influenced thinkers such as Edward Said and
others, this war, started with the Israeli occupation of the Jordanian West
Bank, assumed a central status in shaking up political consciousness (Abu-
Rabì 2006). In the course of his life, Charara developed an analysis of the
implications of the Lebanese civil war and how the events of this war have
transformed the hopes of the New Left into disenchantment. In particular,
according to Bardawil, this period was pivotal for the development of
Charara’s autocritique of militant intellectuals. Factional and national
identities replaced the more cosmopolitan outlook of transformative
politics. In his spirited al-Kirras al-Azraq (The Blue Pamphlet), Charara
reflects in a Gramscian style on the role of intellectuals as vectors of
revolutionary change, taking up as well many theoretical suggestions from
the subaltern studies group around Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and
others. Starting with an analysis of the abstract image of ‘the worker’ as part
of a homogenous group associated overwhelmingly with the material
implication of the class struggle, he develops a fine-grained critique of the
objectification of identity categories in New Leftist discourses, denouncing
many contradictions of universal value (Bardawil 2020: 127). In harsh tones,
Charara predicates “behind the mask of Marxist jargon, a petite bourgeoisie
whose horizon of ambition is constituted by the state apparatus to move
forward; a bourgeoisie that glorifies in talk workers and peasants while it

                                        2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
256                                                          ALEXANDER KOENSLER


does its best [in practice] to retain the differences between itself and them”
(The Blue Pamphlet: 35, cited in Bardawil 2020: 122). Taking up the
consequences of his critique, Charara moved in 1973 into the multi-ethnic
working-class neighbourhood Burj Hammud, northeast of Beirut, in order to
make personal connections with rural migrant workers and live up his ideals.
   In sum, Bardawil’s timely “fieldwork in theory” (2020: 8) offers important
insights into a laboratory of political imagination out of the radar of
mainstream critical theory and explores the cosmopolitical traffic of leftist
theories. His work overcomes the distinction that depicts “Western”
universal theory as opposed to non-Western local theories, highlighting the
transnational modulations of critical theory in a new light and in multiple
directions. The protagonist of the book, Charara, shares with Antonio
Gramsci not only many common aspects of militant intellectuals, including
his first-person engagement that did not stop at threats of war, violence and
major difficulties. As it is the case with many other contemporary militant
intellectuals (Boni, Koensler, Rossi, forthcoming), his own personal story
remains the testimony of a figure that directed his intellectual and political
passion towards many realms of cultural and political life, academia and
politics, shaping deeply contemporary liberal and left politics in Lebanon
and beyond.

3rd Act: Walter Benjamin
   Tilla Rudel’s volume on Walter Benjamin is an empathic analysis of the
personal and intellectual vicissitudes of Benjamin’s exceptional personality,
as well as the legacy of his writings. Rudel, who has followed the traces of
Benjamin, interviewing testimonies and experts, represents Benjamin’s
extraordinary life story and its aftermath as it intersected with some of the
great minds of his time, such as Theodor W. Adorno, Franz Kafka and
Gershom Sholem, as well as some of the most striking events associated with
the rise of fascism and, as in the case of Gramsci, the Second World War.
   Walter Benjamin is portrayed vividly by Rudel as an unconventional and
creative mind, an unbounded “free-minded” spirit, that moves uncontaminated
beyond and above the vicissitudes of institutional or political constraint,
paying a high price for his ability to constantly elude institutional
constraints. This becomes clear from Rudel’s quotation of Hannah Arendt
when describing Benjamin’s writing: “What is really difficult to understand
in Benjamin is that, although he is not a poet, he thinks in a deeply poetic
style” (p. 13). What emerges forcefully from Rudel’s portrait is how Walter
Benjamin moved constantly out of the boxes that society seemed to have


2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
ANTONIO GRAMSCI, WADDAH CHARARA AND WALTER BENJAMIN                                    257


predisposed. And Benjamin travels. He is always on the move: from Berlin to
Frankfurt, from Paris to Moscow, from Riga to Ibiza. This becomes clear from
the events around his post-doctoral research thesis (Habilitation, in the
German academic system) that appears as a literary critique but is
philosophical in substance and thus has difficulty in being accepted by either
a commission of philosophy or one of literature studies. Rudel suggests also
that increasing anti-Semitism contributed more or less openly to Benjamin’s
difficulties finding a place in the academy. However, after a few attempts to
enter the German academic system he travels relatively spontaneously to
Capri, a destination for alternative social experiments at the time2.
   One of the most interesting parts of the book is the careful description of
his encounters in Capri, that seem to open up his intellectual horizon
significantly. Asja Lacis, for instance, depicted by Benjamin himself as a
“Russian communist from Riga” introduces him to socialist and critical
theory, shaping deeply his future writings. The intellectual production of
that period demonstrates some notable shifts towards a more cosmopolitan
outlook on social transformation, overcoming questions of national or
religious identity. This re-orientation also strengthens his life-long
friendship with Theodor W. Adorno, whom he meets with Max Horkheimer
for the first time after his stay in Capri in a café in Frankfurt. Shortly
afterwards he moves to Moscow, where the relation with Lacis turns out to
be a rather tumultuous one.
   Another striking part of the book concerns the story of his suicide. After
delaying his escape from Nazi fascism, he hoped to cross the border between
France and Spain at a time when it was already more than dangerous.
Illustrated with melancholic images of the region, this chapter underlines
how again it was a misunderstanding that led Benjamin to lose hope of
reaching a safe haven in the USA, upon the invitation of Theodor W. Adorno
to come to New York. Beforehand, Gershom Sholem had made several
attempts to invite Benjamin to Jerusalem, promising to support his academic
carrier at the newly established Hebrew University. On one occasion, he also
paid for the trip, but Benjamin, undecided about whether immigrating to
Palestine was the right move, spent the money on another trip to Ibiza. Once
Sholem found out about the death of Benjamin, he was apparently shocked.
He disappeared for about 48 hours and spoke about Benjamin only in 1965,
when he published Benjamin and his angel (Sholem 1981).



2. See, for instance, the movie by Mario Martone, Capri-Revolution, Italy, 2018.

                                           2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
258                                                                  ALEXANDER KOENSLER


Exodus
   All three figures covered in this review are probably not understood well
enough. Gramsci’s and Benjamin’s intellectual legacy has shaped
contemporary mainstream academia, becoming almost unavoidable points
of references for the elaboration what is presented as theory in social
sciences and the humanities. However, their intellectual legacy has often
been reduced to a number of attractive key concepts. The volumes examined
here underline how their multifaceted thinking and acting have often been
misunderstood or reduced to some key-points that fit into an existing
framework. Charara, by contrast, has remained largely outside of
mainstream Western critical theory due to a number of underlying structural
reasons concerned with how the traffic of theory evolves. Their complex life
trajectories in conflictual times, their extraordinary capacity to move beyond
the boundaries of established settings, and their intellectual and political
engagement remain often represented in rather reductive terms. In short,
this walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy has highlighted some of
the vicissitudes of the traffic of theory, overcoming many common-sense
polarities such as mainstream and marginal realms of theoretical elaboration
that will still shape contemporary critical theories for some time.


REFERENCES
Abu-Rabì, Ahmed, 2006, Contemporary Arabic thought, London, Pluto Press.
Boni, Stefano, Alexander Koensler, Amalia Rossi, forthcoming, Etnografie militanti:
      Prospettive e dilemmi, Milano, Meltemi.
Cowan, Jane, 2006, Culture and rights after culture and rights, American Anthropo-
      logist, 108, 1: 9-24.
Hannerz, Ulf, 2016, Writing future worlds: An anthropologist explores global scenarios,
      New York, Palgrave Macmillian.
Palumbo, Berardino, 2006, L’Unesco e il campanile: Antropologia, politica e beni cul-
                                    a
      turali in Sicilia orientale, 2 ed., Roma, Meltemi.
Sholem, Gershon, 1981, Walter Benjamin: The story of a friendship, New York, Shock-
      en.
Tarquini, Alessandra, 2019, La sinistra italiana e gli ebrei: Socialismo, sionismo e an-
      tisemitismo dal 1892 al 1992, Bologna, Il Mulino.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 2005, Friction: An ethnography of global connection, Prin-
      ceton, Princeton University Press.




2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259
                                               2020 | ANUAC. VOL. 9, N° 1, GIUGNO 2020: 251-259




Alexander KOENSLER is Senior Researcher at University of Perugia, Italy, and a
member of the Centre for Documentary Research at Queen’s University Belfast. He
held research and teaching positions at Queen’s University Belfast (UK), University
of Münster (Germany) and Ben Gurion University of the Negev (Israel). Over the
course of the past decade he has carried out extensive fieldwork about Arab-Jewish
activism in Israel/Palestine and the Negev desert. He is author of Israeli-
Palestinian Activism: Shifting Paradigms (Routledge, 2015), Antropologia dell’alimen-
tazione (with P. Meloni, Carocci, 2019) and numerous articles in journals and edited
volumes.
alexander.koensler@unipg.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Alexander Koensler
Antonio Gramsci, Waddah Charara and Walter Benjamin: A walk on the wild side of intellectual militancy
