The prison Notebooks’ fragmentary form shapes how his concepts must be read

Evidence

Gramsci was often writing—as in the Prison Notebooks—under the most unfavorable circumstances: for example, under the watchful eye of the prison censor and without any other books from which to refresh his memory. Given these circumstances, the Notebooks represent a remarkable intellectual feat. Nevertheless, the “costs” of his having to produce them in this way, of never being able to go back to them with time for critical reflection, were considerable. The Notebooks are what they say—notes—shorter or more extended but not woven into a sustained discourse or coherent text. Some of his most complex arguments are displaced from the main text into long footnotes. Some passages have been reformulated, but with little guidance as to which of the extant versions Gramsci regarded as the more “definitive” text. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 78

Categorization

• XREF: The methodological caution here — that Gramsci’s concepts must be carefully disinterred from their concrete contexts — feeds directly into how the reader should carry hegemony and common sense into Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Every sentence in Critical Theory essays must be read through the whole essay — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 541