ABSTRACT

In January of 1929, Gramsci writes from his prison cell in Turi to Tatiana Schucht, expressing great satisfaction about the fact that he would finally be able to ‘write’ in prison, to do scholarly work, that is. ‘With this my greatest aspirations as a prisoner will be satisfied’, he comments.’ At this point, he had been in various prisons for over two years. He had been intermittently able to get reading material, often trivial literature and popular novels, but also an entire range of magazines and journals. He had been able to study some and keep up with major Italian cultural affairs. His writing, however, had been limited to the writing of letters, bi-monthly, to family members only. So he had been far from being in a position to do significant intellectual work the way he used to in his pre-prison years. When he was finally permitted to settle down to a writing routine, by early February of 1929, he outlines in the first Prison Notebook something that looks like a research programme he intends to pursue in prison. In a letter he considers this outline as a way to begin to order his thoughts and ideas.2 In this outline, sixteen areas are of interest to him, one of which is entitled ‘Cavalcante Cavalcanti: his Position in the structure and the art of the Divine Comedy’.3 So some research on Dante, the most prominent of Italian poets, was included in his programme. What Gramsci actually put down on the topic does not seem to be very much, however, compared to other issues he included in his outline and which he subsequently managed to research, study and do some writing on in prison. There is some speculation that after a period in which his health deteriorated and after a very serious physical and psychological crisis in the summer of 1931, Gramsci

shortened his research programme, perhaps in fear of not being able to complete any of his projects, whereby Dante was eliminated from the list.4 Yet there is also evidence that it was precisely during the time of what is presumed to be his major crisis that he writes these notes on Dante, particularly in the summer and early autumn of 1931.5 Frank Rosengarten has made several attempts, and quite convincing ones, to underscore, in spite of their brevity, the significance of these notes by linking the Cavalcante episode and the immense family tragedy it contains according to Gramsci’s interpretation, to Gramsci’s own existence in prison, which, as the letters from prison, particularly those to his young sons and his wife Giulia Schucht, reveal, bespeaks an immense tragedy of its own.6 What strikes me about Gramsci’s notes on Dante is not so much their small number, which is on some level explicable by Gramsci’s undoubtedly limited express interest in the topic. Judging from the way he pursued other topics in prison, his persistence in ordering books and articles from Tatiana Schucht for his study of the history of Italian intellectuals, or of the problem of a theory of history and historiography, he surely seems not to be inordinately interested in a literary topic such as Dante. And at one point he says something to that effect. The entire Dante business is, he writes, ‘of small importance, because I have never aspired to become a dantista and make great hermeneutical discoveries in that field’.7 And he adds that this little study of Dante ‘has been useful to me, as a check on my own memory’.a So what strikes me is not the possible insignificance of these notes in Gramsci’s express overall research programme, but rather their possible significance. Their brevity, that is, should not keep us from interrogating them as to what their possible critical and theoretical value might be. Indeed, brief as they are, these notes are unusually dense. And it is their extraordinary density that makes them unusually suggestive to me. I think that they show many of the characteristics of Gramsci’s research programme: not only some of his ways of seeing, of thinking, of feeling an object, but also possibly the relation of his ways of seeing to the structure of his life-world which is, at the time of his notes on Dante, not the structure of a life-world in general, of a social, intercommunicative world, but of a life-world in prison. There are, as we shall see, some elements in his reading of Dante that lend themselves, due to their semiological and structuralist components, to reconstructing a version of Gramsci’s theory of the subject which brings him into the vicinity ofother major twentieth-century critics. And there are, in addition, elements in his

way of pursuing a project which lend themselves, due to their phenomenoIogicaI components, to reconstructing a version of a theory of consciousness in relation to knowledge which brings him into the vicinity ofother major twentieth-century theorists. What I see emerging from the phenomenology of Gramsci’s life-world in prison and its relation to his ‘insignificant’ Dante scholarship are the contours, as I shall argue in the following pages, of a critical theory of the subject where a theory of the sign and a theory of perception interlock. In this respect Gramsci moves in the orbit of phenomenology as we know it from Merleau-Ponty, and of sociological linguistics also, as we know it from VoloSinov. Moreover, Gramsci seems to experiment here with a theory of representation that is reminiscent of Roland Barthes. In Gramsci’s notes on Dante, designed perhaps as literary criticism to challenge the dreadful timelessness ofprison, there potentially resides a theory of the conditions of possibility of the operations of consciousness which, by profitably combining a Marxist version of structural linguistics and phenomenology, moves in the direction of a theory of signification or communication, urgently needed for a study of the micrological, material, linguistic operations of ideology and domination. That such a linguistically oriented theory of the subject is useful not only for the study of the effects of hegemony, but also, and by inference, for the study of the possible operations of a counterhegemony as well, is surely something Gramsci had in mind. To what extent the critical practices which can be retrieved from Gramsci’s account have relevance for our own times is a different question which I will address in my last two chapters.