Sebastiano Timpanaro (1923-2000) – classical philologist, militant Marxist, cultural historian of 19th-century Italy, interpreter of Leopardi, denouncer of Freud – was one of the boldest and most original leftist intellectuals of the 20th century. Born in Parma to a physicist for a father and historian of ancient Greek science for a mother, Timpanaro moved with his family to Pisa in 1930, thence to Florence in 1967. He graduated in classical philology from the University of Florence in 1945, writing up his undergraduate thesis on Ennius quite literally as the bombs of WW2 rained down around him. Radicalised by the direct experience of fascism and the horrors of the war, Timpanaro became a committed socialist in the Socialist party of Italy (PSI) – then still a revolutionary socialist party – in 1946, along with his mother and father. For the Timpanaros, revolution quite literally began at home.
With the promise of imminent socialism retreating in the post-war period, Timpanaro and his circle on the left of the PSI became dismayed at the rightwards, reformist creep of the established parties on the so-called parliamentary left. Timpanaro and his mother were instrumental in the splintering off of the Pisan chapter of the PSIUP (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity) in 1964, which breakaway Timpanaro lived again in the formation of the PdUP (Party of Proletarian Unity) in 1972, both of which new births proved ultimately ill-fated attempts to preserve revolutionary socialist principles against the pressures of the coming ‘historic compromise’ of the PCI (Italian communist party) with the centre-right Christian democrats. Throughout this rightwards drift, Timpanaro’s politics remained stoutly Leninist, firmly materialist, and Trotsky-sympathetic. His hostility for the PCI remained unwavering, and his contempt for any attempts to redeem Stalinism and Maoism as socialism worthy of the name made him an increasingly minoritarian figure on the left. His heterodox Marxism – a strange, verging on beautifully awkward soldering of non-dialectical historical materialism, enlightenment faith in science, and the heroic pessimism of the poet Leopardi – increasingly alienated him from the mainstream currents of both the extreme and the parliamentary left, especially after the ‘new left’ autonomists such as Lotta Continua took on the mantle of vanguard. Timpanaro left organised party politics in 1976, but continued to struggle on through a range of written contributions, in letter, screed, article, book. Unlike many old revolutionaries of the post-war floruit, Timpanaro never bent the way the wind was blowing; he remained an antagonistic anti-capitalist till the very end, only adding some hints of green environmentalism to his lifelong burning red.
While Timpanaro’s Marxism was markedly heterodox for its cultural moment (though in many respects orthodox from, say, a Leninist perspective), his relationship with classical antiquity showed the same blend of eccentric and mainstream. Thanks to a crippling public speaking neurosis, Timpanaro never taught in a university: he taught in a middle school from the end of the war up until 1959, at which point the neurosis became too much even to appear down the front of a classroom of 13 year olds; he then became a four-day-a-week in-house proofreader at the publisher Nuova Italia in Florence. Timpanaro’s day job was always a step removed from what he considered his central métier: classical philology. But while the material conditions of his employment buffered him from the suffocating world of Italian academia, he found other good ways to drown in it. Not only socially – as his voluminous and close correspondence with hundreds of Italian, particularly Tuscan university intellectuals shows – but spiritually: even the most cursory glance at Timpanaro’s philological output reveals a strict technician trained in the most venerable traditions of 19th-century German formal philology, from Johann Hermann, via Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Eduard Norden, right through to Giorgio Pasquali, Timpanaro’s greatest teacher and influence. Unlike other players of BNC, there is no discernible impact of Timpanaro’s radical politics on the way he thought of and wrote about antiquity. Indeed his philological engagements tended to be a kind of ‘micrology’, his typical output being a long article on a very specific topic, sometimes on a single word (e.g. ilicet), all fairly dry and rigorously linguistic in approach. Like Timpanaro himself, this work could have lived happily in the 19th century. By Timpanaro’s own admission and self-flagellating self-analysis, his politics and his philology tended to run in parallel and competition, two separate entities of a zero-sum game, each stealing time from the other. In some ways, his career is a testament to the possibilities of a ‘non-integrated’ personality – a splitter rather than a lumper, a fox rather than a hedgehog, a doer of many things in simultaneity and series without the privilege of reconciliation.
There are, however, many cases of traffic flowing in the other direction: not so much Timpanaro’s politics inflecting his philology, but his training in the enlightenment rationalisms of formal philology informing the rest of his hefty intellectual and political practice. There are obvious moments, such as Timpanaro’s most famous book, the Freudian Slip (Italian edition 1974, English 1976), wherein he uses the principles of common errors in manuscript transmission to challenge the questionable methods of Freudian over-explanation of verbal slips in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Such an attack on Freud was pointedly countercultural at the time, given the widespread ‘psychologisation’ and psychoanalysis-worship of Western Marxism in the 60s – a turn that Timpanaro found deeply objectionable. Here, then, Timpanaro’s experience as a philologist was directly marshalled to make a stinging political intervention.
Timpanaro’s early philological work on Ennius, and then subsequently his book on the philological practice of Leopardi, got him interested in the history of conjecture in textual criticism: the art of suggesting a change in the transmitted text because the scholar thinks it more closely approximates what the ancient author wrote, even when there is no manuscript authority to back this up. Timpanaro saw the abuses of this phenomenon throughout the centuries, and so became a fairly committed sceptic of conjecture; his was a slight textual conservatism that shied away from the over-creative, trigger happy interventions of the ghosts of editors past. But this early experience with conjecture led to Timpanaro’s general discomfort with the fetishization of human subjectivity and infinite creativity, which then informed his concept of a harsh and unconsoling materialism in Sul materialismo (1970): humans were not infinitely active beings always capable of transcending the limitations of their lot; objective reality usually shackled their possibilities through the natural curses of old age, illness and death; humans were done to as much as they did, prisoners of the accusative case as much as drivers’-seat inhabitants of the nominative. It was Timpanaro’s first contact with ‘the transmitted text’ and the people who thought entitled to modify it beyond recognition that partly made him double down on the objective, ‘external’ reality of human suffering that would, in his eyes, always remain untouched, even in a socialist paradise.
Timpanaro was also so much more than these paragraphs have suggested: his contributions in the fields of 19th-century cultural history and linguistics, as well as Italian literature (Leopardi of course, but also the maligned Edmondo De Amicis) make him one of the greatest interdisciplinary thinkers of the last century. But for our purposes, namely the relation between classics and communism, he still breathes inspiration. Perhaps not so much for the possibilities of radical politics to transform our vision of the classical world, as for a new potential of a seemingly superannuated, crustily old-school wave of classical studies to drive new advances on the left. Many urgent, brilliant voices in classics are today rightly spotlighting the reactionary roots and conservative complicities of classical philology. Timpanaro shows it didn’t, it doesn’t always have to be this way.
This profile was written by Tom Geue
