A thinker’s most fecund ideas often appear outside their expected domain

Evidence

From these propositions (still in need of elaboration) there derive for the historian of culture and of ideas a number of research criteria and critical canons of great significance. It can be that a great personality expresses the more fecund aspects of his thought not in the section which, or so it would appear from the point of view of external classification, ought to be the most logical, but elsewhere, in a part which apparently could be judged extraneous. A man of politics writes about philosophy: it could be that his “true” philosophy should be looked for rather in his writings on politics. In every personality there is one dominant and predominant activity: it is here that his thought must be looked for, in a form that is more often than not implicit and at times even in contradiction with what is professly expressed. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1432

Categorization

• SEED: A hermeneutic canon: when reading Islamophobia’s theorists (Said, Foucault), one should seek their operative concepts in the supposedly ‘extraneous’ writings rather than the canonical statements.
• XREF: connects to: A thinker’s core innovations lie dispersed, needing extraction and synthesis