The prison notebooks were a deliberate strategy against political self-abandonment

Evidence

It is against this background that the achievement of the Prison Notebooks should be seen. When first arrested he had written to Tatiana: “I am obsessed by the idea that I ought to do something für ewig … I want, following a fixed plan, to devote myself intensively and systematically to some subject that will absorb me and give a focus to my inner life.” His first concern was to resist, to find a means of reacting against the transformation of his existence that imprisonment entailed—the switch from participation in a collective enterprise to isolation and the danger of self-abandonment, from day-to-day struggle to a perspective that must needs be a long-term one, from the optimism of the will that is essential to any political activity to what must often during Gramsci’s imprisonment have come very near to despair. The greatest danger for any political prisoner is that under the impact of his new situation the very reasons for his past struggle and his present plight will come to lose their validity for him. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 236

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s prison notebooks as self-preservation against despair connects to the reader’s module on revolutionary subjectivity and will—relevant to later social-movement readings on how theory sustains political identity under repression.