„To live in a Glass House“. Gramsci and Benjamin, or what becomes of historical materialism when the personal is political

In the world of absolute transparency in which we live, where nothing is private any longer, but in which the preservation of individual freedoms has paradoxically taken on a new political charge, for example, with the pandemic, comparing the reflections of Benjamin and Gramsci on these issues is particularly fruitful. This paper analyses the prophetic force of both thinkers' investigations of the crisis of the separation between public and private at the basis of the bourgeois subject, in order, despite their differences, to accentuate their similar approach to historical materialism and their common commitment to configuring a new collective in which the personal is political. The point is that not only in both of their attempts to define the field of political action, the classical distinction between structure and superstructure fell apart. But, for both thinkers, the ambiguity of the ongoing dissolution of the separation between public and private in the modern age emerged also, from a one side, as simultaneously deeply worrying and, from the other side, a reservoir of political potential.