American critics read Gramsci only after deconstruction had already fixed their frameworks
Evidence
For if he was one of those who ‘set the terms’ for American criticism during that period, it was not through his growing concern with political engagement or his later turn towards Marxism but through his ‘existentialism’ and, specifically, his very early work, The Psychology of Imagination. Furthermore, the younger critics who came of age at this time read the later Sartre, if at all, not directly but through the disparaging critiques of Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and others. More generally, Lentricchia’s two contrasting lists – of those who ‘set the terms’, and of the absences – makes it quite clear that what came to be known later as ‘Western Marxism’ was not a part of the intellectual formation of that generation of American critics, and by the time the more radical among them began to read these other kinds of theorists, their basic critical positions had been formed quite solidly by deconstruction, etc. When any sustained reading began of Gramsci, whose name was to be much abused in later theorizations, his work was as a rule read into a theoretical position already framed by Derrida and Paul de Man, Foucault and Lyotard; the question was how to assimilate Gramsci into this pre-existing structure. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 93
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader theme of how theoretical canons get absorbed in distorted sequence — parallels the Milgrom piece on how institutions form only under specific conditions, here intellectual.
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: to what extent does this ‘read late into an existing frame’ pattern describe how other non-Western thinkers got absorbed into Western theory?