Thoughts on Gramsci's Need “To Do Something ‘Für ewig’”

Abstract

Prior to being granted permission to keep writing materials in his prison cell, Antonio Gramsci described his Prison Notebooks as the foundation for “disinterested,” “für ewig” studies or book projects. Für ewig, a term Gramsci took from Goethe and which roughly translates as forever, in this context indicates not a retreat into an aesthetic sphere, but an immersion in a historical continuum. Similarly, “disinterested” connotes both a freedom from immediate contingency and the organic clustering of a homogeneous group of topics of study. Together the two terms indicate a shift in forma mentis from that of combatant in an insurrectional “war of maneuver” to strategist of a long-term “war of position” for cultural and ideological hegemony in civil society. In other words, Gramsci would no longer produce texts written “for the day,” as he had as a journalist. Instead, due to the absence of interlocutors, he would write with a hoped-for post-prison existence and with posterity in mind. Thus, Gramsci's use of the term für ewig, in announcing his project, indicates that the intention of the Prison Notebooks was dialectically to impact the present in perpetuity.