Linguistique et philosophie de la praxis chez Gramsci

This essay is devoted to Gramsci’s reflection in his Prison Notebooks on language discourse and on languages; its aim is to show how this reflection constituted one of Gramsci’s main contributions to Marxism, which up to that time had not had an autonomous theory of language discourse. In this, particular importance is assumed by the notion of translatability, developed in an original direction in the Notebooks. The essay therefore deals with the two most immediate premises of Gramsci’s reflections. The first of them is constituted by the debate on language and nationalities in the revolutionary Russia of the 1920s, in relation to the new federal set-up of the soviet State and to the start of anti-illiteracy campaigns. The second premise is constituted by the thought of Antonio Labriola who, while not having been able to provide any personal contribution to linguistic thought, had shown great interest in this subject, which he knew above all through the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Heymann Steinthal.