The Prison Notebooks: Antonio Gramsci's Work in Progress

The sprawling text of Gramsci's prison notebooks has been described variously as fragmentary, incomplete, cryptic (or, rather, encrypted to circumvent the attentions of the prison authorities)-descriptions that, more often than not, have served as a prelude to and a justification for reconstructing the text, filling its lacunae, or unlocking its hidden meaning. The most valuable and abiding aspects of Gramsci's text are all too easily obscured or quite simply overlooked by the impulse to tame it, normalize it, paraphrase it so as to make it conform to habitual ways of thinking. Paying attention to small things, focusing on the particular: this is the most important aspect of Gramsci's "method,'' which he equated with philology.