Abstract

The long debate in Marxism and Post-Marxism on the relationship among language, society, politics, economy, discourse, and materiality is an essential intellectual and political challenge to historical materialism. This dispute is particularly important regarding the change and transformation of social and historical formations. Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci is considered the exception in this debate since he, early in his philosophical and philological education and later in his intellectual and political activity, insisted on the critical relationship between hegemony and language. For Gramsci, the interplay of coercion and consent in hegemony cannot be properly grasped without language. Hence, the gist of our article is to provide a simultaneous critique of linguistic and revolutionary subject. The change is immanent to linguistic and political agency. In this paper, we analyze Gramsci’s categories of linguistic historical materialism and question to what extent they adopt and develop this immanent variation in linguistics and politics.