Un lapsus di Marx. Carteggio (1956-1990)

In this volume, edited by Luca Baranelli, are collected and annotated 123 letters that Cesare Cases and Sebastiano Timpanaro exchanged between 1956 and 1990. For the German scholar Cases (Milan 1920) and the classical philologist Timpanaro (Parma 1923-Florence 2000) the definitions of their subjects are particularly inadeguate because of the multiple theoretical, ethical, cultural, political and practical interests always present in their correspondence.
The two got to know each other in Pisa in the middle of the Fifties - when both were teaching in secondary schools in the town and province - and from then on they fostered a long friendship especially though an intensive exchange of letters. In their letters, sometimes written quite close together and at others at even long intervals, they discuss with passion and rigor philology (Latin, German, Marxist), philosophy, linguistic, Marxism, materialism, literary criticism, psychoanalysis and politics. With clear, logical argumentation they make the reader participate both in their studies and literary and cultural predilections (that did not always coincide) for authors like Manzoni and Leopardi, Marx and Freud, Lukács and Adorno, Brecht and Thomas Mann, or for great scholars, less well known, like Graziadio Isaia Ascoli and Domenico Comparetti (to whom the Appendix is devoted). The title of the volume alludes to a lapsus that Timpanaro had discovered in the Fifties in a famous passage of the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels, which he discussed with his German scholar friend in some letters of 1960. Over the long period of time of these letters, Cases and Timpanaro already active few years with articles and essays on their respective fields of study and reserch published their main books, often outside the limits of their own discipline. In some respects this correspondence is also a summary - with announcement and projects for articles, despatches or exchanges of extracts and books and with comments often following them - of a twofold, intensive scientific and intellectual actvity.
Besides the interest the themes of the correspondence arouse, the reading of them gives an intellectual pleasure for beyond the ordinary. Among the most amusing letters, we can stand out the one written in Latin by Cases in April 1957, those of 1970 on toothache and structuralism and the ones on ancillary gossip about Marx. Irony, humour, at times, biting sarcasm alternate with the sense of human fragility and pietas, with hope and disillusion. Thanks to the freedom allowed by an informal and a two-way dialogue between friends, this correspondence offers hints and ideas, even at the dawning stage, that are to be found again in a fuller, more articulated form in the published writings of Cases and Timpanaro.