In proposing his ‘post-Marxist Gramsci’, James Martin provides an inestimable service in unpacking the complex and contested legacy of the great Italian activist and political theorist. But beyond what Anglo literary historians would have termed his ‘reception’ (or their Gallic counterparts, perhaps even more suggestively, his ‘fortune’), Martin reads the haloed place Gramsci holds in the post-war Western Marxist tradition as exactly where strident divergences in that tradition have emerged, most particularly between those who, according to him, remain mired in varying modes of left melancholia and those who have successfully mourned the loss of what we used to call the socialist alternative.

The seeds of these divergences, as Martin knows well, lies both in Gramsci’s own strategic and shifting political alliances but also in the fragmented state of his writings, most notably those written under the especially brutal conditions of fascist imprisonment. To this extent, attempts to render a systematic or coherent understanding of the Gramscian corpus meet the same pitfalls encountered in the interpretation of other incomplete or fragmented works, such as those by Sappho, Pascal or the late Wittgenstein (although, as deconstructive colleagues would argue, a completed and coherent opus is no guarantee of conceptual unity). In any case, Martin astutely evokes the riveting sets of what he calls the ‘tensions’ that run through Gramsci’s thinking, culminating in a ‘puzzling mix of reflective open-mindedness and hard-nosed centralism’, and ‘endors[ing] both the primacy of “national-popular” configurations at a political level while remaining attached to the primacy, at an economic level, of class as the historical force grounding subjectivity’. While the existence of these tensions does provide the compelling background for Martin’s at times devastating account of the various ‘selective’ readings of Gramsci that have put his work into the forefront of servicing an ever more divergent set of political concerns and positions, it is also hard not to read as a sign of the times that we are speaking in terms of productive ‘tensions’ rather than of dialectic, whether the contradictions at stake be resolvable or not.

But if any term marks the conflicted legacy of Gramsci’s thought, that would be the concept of hegemony, whose vagaries Martin effectively unpacks in terms of its relation to the state, subjectivity, and ethics.