LIAS Lecture Gramsci’s Southern Question: “An Infinite Contradiction”
LIAS Senior Fellow Ranabir Samaddar
24. Nov
What makes the “Southern Question” a fundamental issue of social transformation? In this LIAS Lecture, Senior Fellow Ranabir Samaddar explores how Antonio Gramsci’s engagement with southern Italy connects questions of nation-building, colonialism, capitalism, democracy and social change. At the heart of the lecture is the tense relationship between North and South – and the idea of an “infinite contradiction” that continues to shape social and political orders.
Date: Tuesday, 24 November 2026, 6:15–7:45 p.m.
Location: Campus Lecture Hall 3
LIAS Co-Director Maud Meyzaud (moderation)
When scholars and experts study the Southern Question (ital. Questione meridionale), it seems as if it were particular only to Italy and Italy’s programme of national unification, which Antonio Gramsci attempted to address as a crucial problem for Italy’s revolution. This blindness to the history of what we may call the “Question of South” in social transformation has cost us an appreciation of what Gramsci was attempting. Equally, it has cost us our understanding of the Southern Question as a general problematic for social transition and transformation—indeed, as a general question of our time. The Southern Question is a historical combination of issues of nation making, colonial relation, religiosity, revolution, peoplehood, economic development, nationality, gender, global political economy, logistical apparatuses, and many more – all these congealed in a territorial mode.
As we delve into The Southern Question, we must keep in mind that Gramsci’s incomplete text on the Southern Question makes it urgent and polemical, as if the text were violently formulating the need to engage with the South from a proletarian point. Italy’s national unity and consolidation had benefited the North, which was the foundation of the Italian bourgeois state. The gains had bypassed the South. The subordination and marginalisation of the South, and its eventual exclusion from the dominant elect nation presented a colonial relation. The Southern Question was one of a remainder, what would remain after the bourgeois transformation of the nation. Gramsci’s references to Naples tell us that the southern city carried imprints of conflicts and contentious claim makings – and in that sense a permanently unstable relation between capitalism and democracy, or if you prefer, capitalism and nation making, stability and instability, and order and violence. The relations take a geographical form as they exhibit a range of political, economic, and cultural dimensions. These relations exhibit themselves within the Southern city. At the same time, the Southern Question in many ways makes the city of the South a counterfigure to the stability, liberal culture, and power of the North. The binaries are linked, mediated, and mutually determined. Or, to use a phrase made famous by the philosopher Etienne Balibar, the spirit of “an infinite contradiction”.