Sebastiano Timpanaro Is the Freethinking Marxist Today’s Left Needs
Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro published a dazzling, unconventional series of works, ranging from the natural sciences to the problem with Freud’s psychological theories. Timpanaro’s versatility and heterodox spirit should be an example for today’s left.
A wall in 1953 covered with posters for the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Socialist Party, on whose left flank Sebastiano Timpanaro was active until 1976. (Mondadori Portfolio / Getty Images)
Sebastiano Timpanaro’s name barely resonates beyond Italy nowadays. But he remains a truly compelling figure of the postwar international left. While he was a card-carrying and active member of various Italian socialist parties in his prime between 1947 and 1976, Timpanaro made a host of enduring contributions as a heterodox and, in his own terminology, “inorganic” intellectual of the radical left.
In addition to his home field of classical philology, where he studied the history and interpretation of Ancient Greek and Latin texts, Timpanaro also made sharp critical interventions on subjects as diverse as Italian poetry and prose, the history of materialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and linguistics. Timpanaro’s voice — pessimistic, funny, blunt, jargon-free, remorselessly antibullshit — deserves all the hearing it can get.
Between Two Cultures
Timpanaro was born in 1923 in Parma, just after the beginning of Benito Mussolini’s two-decade reign. He grew up in an educated but by no means wealthy household, the son of two high-school teachers. While Timpanaro’s parents were, he recalled, “reticent rather than resistant” under fascism, they opposed the regime enough to make life slightly complicated.
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