Il cittadino sive subalterno

Abstract

The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion, and as the specular opposite of the figure of the citizen. This understanding derives from the Subaltern Studies collective’s creative reading of partial English translations of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion of subaltern classes in Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals a very different understanding of the constitution of subalternity. In particular, the notion of “subaltern capacity”, the dialectical nexus of hegemony and subalternity, and the figure of the “citizen sive subaltern” are proposed as ways of comprehending the contradictions that define the modern citizenship itself as a process of “subalternization”.