Immanent Momentum. Some Observations about Gramsci’s Politics of Space

Over the last thirty years there has been a progressive and even more intense link between geography and critical theory, witness to which has been, among other things, the extension into the social sciences of terms such as margin, frontier, limit, and territory. Both the sphere of the humanities and that of geography, in all their ramifications, have been brought up to date from a hermeneutic point of view in line with the following fruitful osmosis: for in literary criticism, the visual arts, town planning and architecture, we are dealing with an important change of the epistemological stance in which we may single out the reaction to the decay of the certainties inherent in modernity from the ending, in Lyotard’s view, of the grand narratives to a general fluidification of the historical subject. This subject, which can no longer be encapsulated within foreseeable schema and which is forced to measure up to phenomena of hybridization and fragmentation, remains in a condition of constant instability.