There have already been two publications1 based on the lecture that Sartre gave in Rome on 12 December 1961, as part of his 12–14 December meeting at the Gramsci Institute with PCI intellectuals and others close to the PCI. The first of these was in Italian, appearing in Aut Aut journal (no. 136–7, July– October 1973) under the title ‘Soggettività e marxismo’;2 the second was in French, appearing in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes (no. 560, March 1993) under the title ‘La Conference de Rome, 1961: Marxisme et subjectivité’.3 These two versions were established independently of one another, on the basis of the transcription of the recording of Sartre’s lecture, with the editors of Aut Aut offering an Italian translation. For the Les Temps modernes version we (MK) also used this transcription, which was entrusted to us by the Hungarian philosopher Tibor Szabó, though we also added in a few syntactical changes to make it easier to read. The differences between the two versions are minimal and are not cause for divergent interpretations.
Even if in the strict sense this is not a Sartre text – since the manuscript either no longer exists, or remains impossible to find, and the tape of Sartre’s lecture is lost – its reasoning and its thematic are, nonetheless, very much those of a text of his.
So why this new edition, after the text has already been published in both French and Italian? Subsequent to the appearance of both versions, we got access to a new element, namely the transcription of the discussions sparked by Sartre’s lecture. These discussions continued throughout the whole of 12 December and the mornings of each of the following two days, with interventions by Paci, Luporini, Lombardo-Radice, Colletti, Della Volpe, Valentini, Semerari, Piovene, Alicata, and Cardona, as well as Sartre’s own responses.4 It seems that most of Sartre’s interlocutors made their interventions in French – in a few cases, they apologised to Sartre for instead making their points in Italian – meaning that the Italian-language transcription of the debates is for the most part a translation. Our retranslation back from the Italian has sought to respect the spirit of these interventions, perhaps sometimes to the detriment of sticking to the letter of the text.
We are not publishing the whole discussion, which would have made for rather too thick a volume. Our criterion in choosing the texts has been to retain the elements and moments of the discussion that help further clarify Sartre’s reasoning, and even to enrich it. Given this criterion, we have left aside the interventions that seemed digressive, or which looked too much like debates internal to Italian intellectuals.5
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1An English translation of Sartre’s lecture as well as the postface by Fredric Jameson both appeared in New Left Review 2:88, 2015. This English translation was based on the 2013 French edition (Paris: Les Prairies Ordinaires), edited by Michel Kail and Raoul Kirchmayr.
2Founded in 1951, Aut Aut is a prestigious Italian philosophy journal whose current editor-in-chief is Pier Aldo Rovatti. The issue containing the text of Sartre’s lecture is presented as a ‘fascicolo speciale’, with the title ‘Sartre dopo la Critique’. Sartre’s text appears on pp. 133–51 and a few elements of the discussion that followed on pp. 152–8.
3With an introduction by Michel Kail, ‘Introduction à la conférence de Sartre: La conscience n’est pas sujet’ (pp. 1–10) and followed by some remarks by Tibor Szabó (‘Note annexe: Sartre, l’Italie et la subjectivité’ pp. 40–41). We would like to take the opportunity to warmly thank Claude Lanzmann, the director of the journal, for generously allowing us to republish this text in the present edition.
4The tape of these exchanges is also lost. Many thanks to Paolo Tamassia for recovering the typescript of these discussions at the Gramsci Institute, and for entrusting the text to us; and to Gabriella Farina for helping us in our exchanges with the Institute. Both are eminent representatives of Sartre studies in Italy.
5Here we would like to thank our publisher Nicolas Vieillescazes, a driving force behind this publication, who contributed to this project with very useful assistance and great enthusiasm.