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It was Gramsci's great historical insight that the anachrorticity of the Marxist base I superstructure as model for the interpretation of lived social relations enabled him to collapse its hierarchized disciplinary structure and to retrieve the indissoluble relationality of the "fields" of knowledge production-being, the subject, culture, politics-that had hitherto been epiphenomenal to economics. The foregrounding of this relationality, as well as the exemplary philological work of editing and translating the Prison Notebooks, also constitutes Joseph Buttigleg's major contribution to Cramsci studies.
Key Words: Postmodern, Poststructuralism, De-struction, Politics of Spectrality, Hegemony, Empire
[I]t is not exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes and between languages. From this perspective then all things are indeed counter, original, spare, strange. From this perspective also, one can see the complete consort together contrapuntally.
-Said, Culture and Imperialism
Joseph Buttigieg's Columbia University Press edition of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks is not simply a very much welcomed scholarly contribution to the Anglo-American archive; it is also and, to me, above all a very important-indeed, major-contribution to Gramsci scholarship and criticism.1 Thanks to his careful translation of Gramsci's Italian text into English and judicious arrangement of Gramsci's fragmentary writing and, not least, his meticulous scholarly commentary and historical notes, we now, for the first time, have a Gramsci who is tethered to the violent historical world in which he lived, acted, thought, and wrote. Prior to Buttigieg's edition, the Gramsci that was made available to the Anglophone world by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith's Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Gramsci 1971), however useful, was a more or less abstracted Gramsci, by which I do not simply mean an essential Gramsci selected from the Protean body of his work, but also a free-floating Gramsci who could all too easily be appropriated by what the late Edward W. Said called "traveling theory." Buttigieg's edition-his translation, his commentary, his chronology, and,...