Gramsci coined ‘catharsis’ to name the acquisition of revolutionary consciousness while evading prison censorship.

Evidence

The highly original use here of the word “catharsis” to indicate (roughly speaking) the acquisition of revolutionary consciousness was perhaps suggested to Gramsci by his mental habit of selecting terminology unlikely to alert the suspicions of the censor. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2556

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Gramsci’s idiosyncratic technical sense of ‘catharsis’ as the transition into revolutionary consciousness.
• SHARE: A niche tidbit for anyone who works on Gramsci or on coded language under censorship — the censor-evasion origin of a core term.
• BMF: Evokes the dictionary-of-the-dystopia device in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, where political concepts are smuggled and renamed to survive state surveillance; also resonant with Orwell’s Newspeak.