Memes and monsters of the interregnum: Gramsci between the times

Faced with a continually mounting array of shocks, surprises and shifts, there is an understandable search for frames to describe these confusing conditions. A combination of the collapse of previous certainties with the lack of a new paradigm solidifying has led many to depict the present moment as an interregnum. This is not a neutral term, to use it is to bring forth the poetic phrasing of Antonio Gramsci: ‘the old is dying and the new cannot be born’. Through a genealogical engagement with Gramsci’s prison notebook entry, this paper traces the remarkable trajectory of the term from obscurity to being adopted by commentators across the political spectrum. The paper considers Gramsci’s original prison notebook entry, observes the lack of engagement with it during the 1960s and 70s when other parts of his work were picked up. Indeed, it was only following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the entry being coterminously invoked by two influential scholars, Zygmunt Bauman and Slavoj Žižek. The paper examines how Bauman and Žižek each offered a template for how interregnum has been used in the years since. In the first mode, as represented by Bauman, Gramsci’s entry is placed at the beginning of the analysis and then serves as a frame for the subsequent discussion of maladies identified. In the second mode, as found in Žižek, interregnum appears at the end as part of the argument’s grand finale. In both renditions, Gramsci is deployed to buttress already established arguments. The paper surveys some more interesting and provocative engagements with the entry in recent years presented by Carlo Bordoni, Wolfgang Streeck and Adam Tooze. These are an exception to the more common trend of Gramsci’s interregnum being flattened and thinned out, reduced to an analytical meme. Bemoaning the death of the ‘old’ and the rise of ‘monsters’ is much easier than seriously reckoning with the contradictions and difficulties of an expanding empty space, one devoid of historical guarantees or clear precedents.