Editor’s Note

Once again we at Italian Culture are very happy to present to our readers a collection of papers that reaffirms our Association's global presence, with articles from Great Britain, Italy, and Canada, in addition to the United States. We are also pleased that this volume reflects our membership—our contributors include both junior colleagues and more established scholars—and its broad array of interests while casting into relief the philosophical interests of many of the Association's members with articles on Antonio Gramsci, Giulio Preti, and Emanuele Severino; and an original interview with Antonio Negri.

"From Sociological to Ontological Enquiry: An Interview with Antonio Negri" offers fresh insight into this thinker's intellectual development prior to Empire. Indeed, Negri narrates for our readers the development of his thought from the 1960s until the present and discusses his early engagement with Marx's Grundrisse, his interpretations of Spinoza and Machiavelli, and his theory of globalization while clarifying his position on other twentieth-century thinkers such as Althusser, Foucault, and Agamben.

Benedetto Fontana's article, "The Democratic Philosopher: Rhetoric as Hegemony in Gramsci," deepens our understanding of the Gramscian concept of hegemony, understood as the consensual alliance of individuals and groups as a means of organizing culture and power. Fontana links Gramsci's notion of hegemony to the ancient classical controversies regarding the relation between philosophy and rhetoric, and dialectic and politics to demonstrate how Gramsci's "democratic philosopher" subverts the dichotomy separating politics and thought.

Giovanni Mari investigates both the problem of historical knowledge and the question of the relationship between language (understood as a constitutive element of intersubjectivity and reality) and history through his analysis of the rethinking of Marxism, Pragmatism, and Logical Empiricism carried forth in Praxis ed Empirismo by Giulio Preti, one of the most interesting figures in Italian philosophy over the second half of the twentieth century.

Alessandro Carrera challenges the assumptions of Emanuele Severino, one of Italy's leading and most controversial contemporary philosophers, arguing that Severino lacks an articulated theory of interpretation. What for Severino are "simple" entities are, for Carrera, highly elaborated "public" concepts that require a strong level of social practices if agreement on them is to be reached.

Ethical issues are at the core of Eugenio Bolongaro's analysis of Bertolucci's search for a new cinematic form in The Spider's Strategem. For his part, Cristian Muscelli provides our readership with an original psychoanalytic reading of Pirandello's novel Uno, nessuno e centomila, while Anne O'Connor's article on the Risorgimento, "L'Italia: La terra dei morti?," will appeal to those who are interested in topics in Italian studies and hodoeporics, or travel literature.

In "Notes on the Presence of Boccaccio in Cristoforo Landino's Comento sopra la Comedia di Danthe Alighieri," Simon Gilson conducts new research into the ever-engaging issue of the relation of Latin to the Italian vernacular. In telling the specific story of the use of Boccaccio in Landino's commentary on the Divine Comedy, Gilson produces palpable results that flesh out many issues for specialists in his field.

In addition to recognizing our authors' genuinely original contributions to our knowledge of their topics, I would also like to use this space to thank the staff at Michigan State University Press, especially Margot Kielhorn and Carol Cole, for their collaboration and support; and our associate editor, Alison Cornish, and our editorial board for their contributions to the ongoing improvement and success of this journal. Special thanks go to our book review editor, Norma Bouchard, for her many efforts toward making that important component of Italian Culture representative of the intellectual breadth and vitality of our membership, and to the executive of the AAIS for its strong and continuing support of this journal. And many thanks, of course, to the membership of the AAIS and our readership.

Finally, I would like to extend a very warm welcome to the new members of our board, Marcia Landy, Hermann Haller, Graziella Parati, and Pierpaolo Antonello.