Abstract: This essay reads Gramsci's political expectations through his early love letters. Gramsci claims to know revolution in Italy is near right up to Mussolini's takeover of the country. He describes his amatory relations with the Schucht sisters in parallel terms and expects from their relations the kind of union he advocates for Italy. Gramsci's love relations would unite south and north and would satisfy his need for communal Bergsonist sympathy. That personal expectation too does not work because, in the letters, it is based on the kind of impossibility of attainment whose qualities are explored in Proust. Gramsci's personal life has the structure of his politics, and his politics suffers from the Proustian blindness of his personal life. This personal side to Gramsci's politics, understood through Proust's analysis of attachment to a transformative love object, suggests why for him the actual state of Italian politics cannot be grasped.
Eyal Amiran (Wed,) studied this question.