Yet the notebooks must be read whole to resist partisan interpretation of Gramsci

Evidence

We decided from the outset that there should be no attempt to offer any general interpretation of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks themselves, or any attempt to discuss the significance of his thought within Marxism as a whole. Gramsci has perhaps suffered more than any Marxist writer since Lenin from partial and partisan interpretation, both by supporters and opponents; the Prison Notebooks themselves, read seriously and in all their complexity, are the best antidote to this. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 241

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the editors’ scaffolding warning — worth holding as a meta-note that any later selective use of Gramsci (including the Islamophobia field’s borrowings) is itself a partial reading.
• XREF: The warning against decontextualized quotation of a theorist parallels how Said’s Orientalism and Foucault’s biopolitics get selectively imported into later fields.

Related

• Gramsci’s notebooks are too fragmentary for definitive claims about his project. (similarity 0.87)
• The prison Notebooks’ fragmentary form shapes how his concepts must be read (similarity 0.87)
• The Prison Notebooks comprise thirty-three fragmented, partially revised notebooks. (similarity 0.84)
• Censorship forced Gramsci’s political commentary into opaque, allusive form in prison (similarity 0.83)
• Prison censorship forced Gramsci to rewrite his notebooks using veiled language. (similarity 0.82)
• Gramsci’s major theoretical work was written in prison without library access (similarity 0.81)
• A thinker’s authentic works supersede co-authored attributions (similarity 0.80)
• Prison censorship forced Gramsci to read Marx mostly through Croce’s commentaries (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci rejected any Marxism that separated knowledge from how it is acquired (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci borrowed non-Marxist concepts while redefining them within Marxist discourse (similarity 0.78)
• Posthumously published works must be read provisionally, not as definitive (similarity 0.78)
• Tracing how Marxism got absorbed into other philosophies requires delicate analysis of hidden connections. (similarity 0.78)