Jonathan R Fardy - Althusser and Art: Political and Aesthetic Theory

First published by Zero Books, 2020
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., No. 3 East St., Alresford,
Hampshire SO24 9EE, UK
www.johnhuntpublishing.com
www.zero-books.net

For distributor details and how to order please visit the Ordering section on our website.

Text copyright: Jonathan Fardy 2018

ISBN: 978 1 78904 307 5
978 1 78904 308 2 (ebook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019931657

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

The rights of Jonathan Fardy as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Design: Stuart Davies

UK: Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
US: Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, 7300 West Joy Road, Dexter, MI 48130

We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

I want to thank the good people at Zero Books for agreeing to publish this short text and for their dedication to thinking about radical politics and theory in new ways for new times. It was not long after submitting this text for review that I learned that I am for the first time a father to be. I dedicate this book to that future and my wife, Amy Wuest, Ph.D., who continues to be my most trusted intellectual interlocutor and my partner in all things political and philosophical.

The thought of Louis Althusser (1918-1990) seemed for a long time to have been eclipsed by history. Althussers life-long battle with depression and anxiety culminated in the killing of his wife, Hlne Rytman in 1980 and his subsequent confinement to a mental institution for five years. Less than a decade later, the Berlin Wall fell, followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and finally Althussers death. Marxism, and especially Althusserian or structuralist Marxism, slipped into the rearview mirror. So why now return to Althusser? And why return to his aesthetics? Let me take each of these questions in turn.

Return is a key term in Althussers lexicon. In 1965 with the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital , Althusser called for a return to Marx (which closely paralleled Jacques Lacans call for a return to Freud). Althussers call for a return to Marx was a call to shed the burden of established readings. Althussers new reading of Marx produced a new theory of reading itself. Althusser developed a theory of symptomatic reading, a mode of reading attentive to the symptomatic way in which Marxs texts are marked by epistemological stress points. These points of stress, Althusser argued, resulted from Marxs effort to think within the discursive constraints of inherited epistemological forms Ricardian economics, Hegelian philosophy, and nineteenth-century materialism and Marxs effort to theoretically transcend the limits imposed by these forms of thought. To return to Marx meant a break, even an epistemological break, with the ways of knowing and reading Marx long established in the political and theoretical conjunctures of historical class struggle.

What I propose is a return to Althusser in a similar sense; I propose a new way of reading Althussers political theory in light of his few writings on art and aesthetics. I will argue that Althusserianism is not only an explicit political theory, but an immanent and implicit aesthetic theory. Althusserianism is a thinking according to a certain aesthetic of theory itself. What I call Althussers theory of theory is a theory that thinks in and through aesthetics.

The phrase Althussers aesthetics may surprise some. To be sure, his work is not principally identified with aesthetic theory. However, many of his most esteemed students, especially Jacques Rancire and Pierre Macherey, have centered their post-Althusserian Marxist theorizing around the question of art and aesthetics. This very fact indicates that there was something in the discourse of Althusserianism that led to reflections on the relation between aesthetics and politics. But more centrally, in Althussers work itself, we find a trace of aesthetic theorizing in Reading Capital , especially in Althussers theorization of symptomatic reading, which is a form of reading that functionally reads Marxs texts as a kind of literature marked by particular, peculiar, and symptomatically revealing words and rhetorical constructions. Moreover, Althusser wrote two important essays on art. He wrote on the theatre of Carlo Bertolazzi in For Marx and the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini in Lenin and Philosophy . This book will work from these peripheral writings back to the center of Althussers theoretical work in order to show the profound connection between Althussers reflections on art and his political theory. But I will also show how Althusserianism can be functionally reconstructed as raw material, in Franois Laruelles sense, for the production of a new form of aesthetico-critical theory that compels serious consideration of the role that aesthetics plays in the practice of theorizing.

My aim in the next four chapters is two-fold. The first is to delineate the contours of Althussers aesthetics and to show how this maps onto and transforms how we can read Althussers early work. The second aim is to establish an invented genealogy of Althusserianism as the search for an aesthetic form for the surpassal of the theory-practice dialectic. Chapter one examines the origins of Althusserianism as articulated in For Marx and Reading Capital of 1965. Chapter two examines Althussers two articles on aesthetics and shows how his readings of theatre and painting reveals a paradox at the heart of Althusserian theory that politically manifests as the difference between manual and mental labor. Chapter three focuses on the work of Rancire and Macherey. Rancires 1974 critique of Althusserianism, Althussers Lesson , marked Rancires break with his former teacher and would lead him to consider the educative and theoretical apparatuses that, like Althusserianism, reproduce the division of labor and the inequality of intelligences enshrined in capitalist relations. The chapter also explores Machereys 1966 text, A Theory of Literary Production , which is in large part an application of Althusserian theory to the study of literature and literary form. The very existence of A Theory of Literary Production testifies to the dimension of aesthetic reflection immanent in Althusserian theory. Through the critique and affirmation of Althusserianism, represented by Rancire and Macherey respectively, we can better grasp the aesthetic legacies immanent to the Althusserian mode of theoretical production. I then turn to the work of Franois Laruelle and his theory of non-philosophy, and in particular his concept or clone of raw material, to reconstruct Althusserian theory as an aesthetic and creative practice of theorizing. Finally, I place Althusserianism in an invented genealogy, stretching from Karl Korsch through Althusser and his students to Laruelle, as the search for a form of theorizing that aimed to surpass the theory-practice dialectic and the idealism that underwrites that dialectical construction. Chapter five offers a conclusion and a view to the future prospects for reorienting theory as aesthetic practice.