Politics and letters anyone? This is the story of the trials and tribulations of the researcher. I want to begin this blog with a letter recently written to me from Italy. It reads: ‘I am Mauro Lacirignola the personal assistant of the widow of Prof. Colletti, Fauzia Gavioli Colletti. First of all Miss. Fauzia would like to say thank you for keeping alive the memory of her husband. The only place where you can find what are you looking for is in Rome at the Lucio Colletti’s library home museum and archive of excellence (Cipriano Street number 28, Rome). There you will find everything about Lucio’s studies, his books, his papers, his mail and all articles in national and international newspapers about him and his personal politics and history. Unfortunately, our library will be evicted next month because our Study Centre, for the sake of our national economic crisis, it is no longer able to maintain and sustain economically the archive. The state does not help us and even the city of Rome, which seems to have forgotten who was Lucio Colletti for the city and for the nation. For now I may suggest you the last book of Colletti Il paradosso del Capitale: Marx e il primo libro in tredici lezioni inedite. If there are any further developments we will inform you as soon as possible’.
Now the politics. For many years I have been writing about the Italian political and legal philosopher Lucio Colletti who became notorious towards the end of his life as he moved from the left to the right and joined Silvio Berlusconi’s political party. Recently I have been looking at the late 1960s correspondence between Lucio Colletti and the French philosopher Louis Althusser and wanted to find out where I could see the whole archive so that it could be translated into English and subsequently interpreted. The occasion of this letter, written as an email and sent to my university email address, was initially a research inquiry from me to the Centro Lucio Colletti, an archive set up after Lucio Colletti’s death in 2001 in his home city of Rome, Italy. The Centro Lucio Colletti opened its doors. A fitting tribute to the legacy of Lucio Colletti, collecting together Colletti’s books and papers and sponsoring philosophical and political events, Centro Studi Lucio Colletti was housed in a former residence of Lucio Colletti in Rome. The centre was run by Colletti’s widow Dotessa Fauzia Gavioli. Unfortunately, as the letter to me testifies, the Centre was evicted in June 2014. Why should we care, in the twenty-first century about Lucio Colletti? Razmig Keucheyan, in his book The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today, defends the idea of keeping Colletti’s memory alive:‘A fascinating case, which still awaits an in-depth study is that of the Italian Lucio Colletti…Like Althusser in France (with whom he corresponded and who held him in high regard), and under the influence of his master Galvano Della Volpe, Colletti defended the idea that the break made by Marx with Hegel was sharper than commonly thought.’
