Perry Anderson - Timpanaro among the Anglo Saxons The recepti | Марксизм и критическая теория (Marxism and critical theory)

Perry Anderson - Timpanaro among the Anglo Saxons

The reception of a thinker outside his own culture is always unpredictable, often paradoxical. The case of Sebastiano Timpanaro is not untypical. In his own writings, there are plainly two principal cultures of reference outside Italy German and French. Germany: homeland of classical philology, of historical materialism, and of psychoanalysis that is, of the objects of his great books on Lachmann, Marx-Engels and Freud. France: homeland of Enlightenment materialism, and (antithetically) of 20th century structuralism. So: Diderot and Holbach object of some of his deepest allegiances; Saussure-Lévi-Strauss-Lacan-Althusser of his most devastating attacks. Beyond such landmarks, Timpanaro had a fairly wide knowledge of both intellectual landscapes. Many other figures from each country populate his writings: from Schlegel, Bopp, Gödel, Meringer, Korsch, Brecht on one side, to Laplace, Boutroux, Zola, Martinet, Sève on the other.

By comparison, Timpanaro had scarcely any points of direct contact with English culture. The only real exceptions lay in the technical field of philology itself: Housman, Dodds, Lloyd-Jones, Kenney. Beyond this specialized area, he had little traffic with English culture as such. The situation was not quite the same with Anglophone culture in a wider sense, since there were a number of American scholars of linguistics Bloomfield, Sapir and Chomsky with whose writing he was acquainted. But overall, there is no question about the distribution of his external attention. The Franco-German axis dominates massively.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii129/articles/perry-anderson-timpanaro-among-the-anglo-saxons