7
Filozofski vestnik | Volume XLI | Number 1 | 2020 | 7–59 | doi: 10.3986/fv.41.1.01
* University of California, Santa Cruz 
** Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York
Banu Bargu* and William S. Lewis**
Disjecta Membra: Althusser’s Aesthetics 
Reconsidered
Introduction
1
When it came to the arts, Louis Althusser considered himself “uncultivated” 
and, by multiple measures, it can be argued that neither art nor aesthetic theory 
played a significant role in his philosophy.
2
 Gauges include the paucity of pub-
lications in this domain and the comparatively minuscule number of words he 
devoted to writing about art. In addition, when artistic production is mentioned 
in his major works, art is always one among a list of practices: political, eco-
nomic, ideological, scientific, philosophical, each of which is elaborated upon 
in much more detail. An index of interest is also provided by the art-related con-
tents of Althusser’s library, which, apart from Hegel’s and Tolstoy’s aesthetics, 
consist exclusively of Marxist works (Bogdanov, Brecht, Casanova) alongside a 
few art books of the most banal sort.
3
 For their part, after a very typical child-
hood drama of being forced to learn violin, his biographies make no mention of 
the positive influence of music, dance, theater, painting, cinema, or sculpture 
on his intellectual or personal development.
4
With two exceptions, a fragmentary chapter on artistic production in Philosophy 
for Non-Philosophers (1976–78) and an anti-humanist polemic directed at André 
Daspre (1966), the motivations for Althusser to reflect upon, and write about art 
1
 The authors would like to acknowledge their debt to Massimiliano Tomba and Ivo Eichorn 
for help with sources; Stefano Pippa, Jordanco Jovanoski, Dave Mesing, and Joseph Serra-
no, for their valuable comments; and to Olivier Corpet, without whom much of Althusser’s 
work would have remained inaccessible. 
2
 Louis Althusser, Lettres à Franca: 1961–1973, ed. François Matheron and Yann Moulier 
Boutang, Édition posthume d’oeuvres de Louis Althusser 6, Stock IMEC, Paris 1998, p. 181, 
p. 284, p. 799.
3
 IMEC, “Louis Althusser (1918–1990), Bibliothèque Personnelle : Monographies”, Institut 
Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, March 2018.
4
 Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, ed. Olivier Corpet and Yann Moulier- 
Boutang, trans. Richard Veasey, New Press, New York 1995, p. 59, p. 296, p. 394.
8
banu bargu and william s. lewis
and aesthetic theory were exogenous. Friendships with fellow-traveler Giorgio 
Fanti, the critic Pierre Gaudibert, and the gallerist Inna Salomon brought him 
into contact with contemporary visual art and motivated critiques of the paint-
ers Lucio Fanti (Giorgio’s son), Leonardo Cremonini, and Roberto Álvarez Ríos.
5
 
For example, it is clear that Althusser’s interest in establishing a relationship 
with Álvarez Ríos’ brother Renato, a Cuban cultural attaché, and, thereby, with 
revolutionary Cuba was a primary impetus for his 1962 piece on the surrealist 
painter and, further, that Gaudibert provided the connection.
6
 
Another, even more consequential example: a year and a half prior to meeting 
“the Cuban,” Gaudibert had introduced Althusser to Leonardo Cremonini and to 
the painter’s partner, Giovanna Madonia.
7
 This encounter provided the impetus 
for Althusser to engage with the arts in a deeper manner than he had ever before. 
Charmed with the French philosopher, Madonia invited Althusser to visit her 
family compound near Ravenna. There, in an idyllic setting and amidst an ex-
tended intellectually and artistically cultivated family, he met Franca Madonia, 
a childhood friend of Giovanna’s, who had married one of Giovanna’s broth-
ers. A passionate dramatist, intellectual, and student of philosophy, “Franca” 
was to become Althusser’s friend, lover, and passionate interlocutor.
8
 Barring 
Álvarez Ríos and Lam, the majority of his aesthetic writings grew directly out of 
his relationship with Franca and to the Madonia family. These writings include 
the essay on Cremonini but, also, the most detailed textual developments of 
his aesthetic theory: “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)” and 
“On Brecht and Marx (1968).” These dramaturgical works owe their genesis and 
elaboration to the epistolary and amicale links established among Althusser, 
5
 Louis Althusser, “Sur Lucio Fanti (mars 1977)”, in Écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 
II, François Matheron (ed.), Stock IMEC, Paris 1995, pp. 591–96; Louis Althusser, “Entre -
tien avec Giorgio Fanti”, April 1980, Fonds Althusser 20ALT/46/36, Institut Mémoires de 
l’Édition Contemporaine; Althusser, Lettres à Franca, p. 261, p. 274; Harry Bellet, “Pierre 
Gaudibert, écrivain et critique d’art”, Le Monde.fr, (January 23, 2006); Yann Moulier-Bou -
tang, “L’interdit Biographique et l’autorisation de l’oeuvre,” Futur Antérieur/L’Harmattan. 
Numéro Spécial : Lire Althusser aujourd’hui (avril 1997); Bécquer Seguín, “Mute Cries: 
Louis Althusser Between Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam”, ARTMargins 6 (2/2017), 
p. 93; Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations, Yale University Press, 
New Haven 2010, p. 100.
6
 Althusser, Lettres à Franca, pp. 261–62, p. 374.
7
 Ibid., p. vii, p. 374.
8
 Ibid., pp. vi–xi.
9
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
the Madonias, Pierre Gaudibert, and the theater critic Bernardo Dort.
9
 There are 
also at least two transcriptions of relatively informal talks that Althusser gave 
on literary history and art, both dating from approximately the same time. One, 
“A Conversation on Literary History,” is, as G.M. Goshgarian has put it, “more 
exactly, a monologue of over ten thousand words,” interrupted only in three 
places by an unknown interlocutor.
10
 Even though Althusser dates the transcrip-
tion to 1965, Goshgarian notes that it might date from 1963. Second, more or less 
contemporaneous is the transcription of a talk delivered at the invitation of Il 
Teatro Minimo in Forli in the fall of 1963, published in the arts supplement of a 
provincial Italian newspaper.
11
Despite Althusser’s interest in the arts and aesthetic theory being externally 
motivated, temporally limited, and at the margins of his philosophical output, 
there are important reasons to engage with the scattered pieces of art criticism 
and aesthetic theory authored or directly influenced by Althusser. First, these 
reflections are worth our interest because they help us understand and flesh 
out Althusser’s political and philosophical project. This apprehension includes 
his method of symptomatic reading, whose development Althusser attributed to 
his “initiation by Cremonini into the visual world of painting and its discours-
es.”
12
 As his anti-humanism was largely a reaction to the grandiose claims about 
art and culture made by those competing for intellectual influence within the 
French Communist Party, familiarity with his rival aesthetic theory is likewise 
essential for understanding this intervention and what it says about science, 
subjectivity, and history. Further, delving into Althusser’ aesthetics also helps 
to make sense of the relations between productive practices: economic, polit-
ical, ideological, political and scientific, which are as crucial to his thought as 
they are obscure and contradictory. For example, particular ideologies are often 
presented by Althusser as totalizing and insurmountable. If they are able to be 
overcome, it is only by the challenge of a rival ideology based on a different 
class and the struggle between classes. An essential support of (proletarian) 
9
 Ibid., pp. 39–42, pp. 50–51, pp. 181–2, p. 200, p. 384 .
10
 G.M. Goshgarian, “Note on the Text”, in Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism, Polity 
Press, Cambridge, UK and Medford MA 2020, p. xii.
11
 Louis Althusser, “Perché il teatro : Conferenza dibatto promossa dal ‘Teatro Minimo’ di 
Forli deI Professore Louis Althusser”, La Provincia di Forli (January 8, 1964), sec. Supple -
mento al. n/ 1.
12
 Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, p. 50.
10
banu bargu and william s. lewis
class struggle is scientific analysis, correct political intervention based on this 
analysis, and the fortune of a good conjuncture. How the necessary ideological 
transformation for revolutionary practice happens at the level of the individual 
subject and how it is communicated to others remain cloudy. In its similarities 
to and differences from ideological and scientific practices, artistic practice may 
suggest solutions to these mysteries. 
In addition to helping us understand parts of his overall project and its develop-
ment, Althusser’s aesthetic theory is itself a powerful and original contribution 
to Marxist aesthetics.
13
 Implicitly Kantian in its twin emphases on the (relative) 
autonomy of the work of art and on the power of art to transform subjective 
experience, it bears significant resemblances to Adorno’s aesthetics.
14
 Despite 
this, it is unsympathetic to the liberatory thrust of Frankfurt school aesthetics 
as well as to its characteristic Hegelianism.
15
 Another part of its originality is 
that Althusser’s aesthetic theory departs from Lenin and Brecht rather than 
from German Idealism. Like the Russian revolutionary and Berlin playwright, 
Althusser sought neither to reduce art to ideology nor to exaggerate art or the 
artist’s role in socio-economic transformation. Instead, he attempted to develop 
a materialist theory of art which would explain both the specificity of aesthetic 
production as part of the cultural “level” in a social formation – irreducible to 
other levels – and its potential role in the development of a revolutionary con-
sciousness.
16
 In the meantime, he developed an original approach to aesthetics 
that is worth thinking with. Considering the foundational role Althusser has 
played for cultural studies, critical, and poststructuralist theory, especially with 
this theory of ideology, as well as his centrality to postwar continental philos-
ophy and Western Marxism, it is particularly surprising that his approach to 
art and literature has remained relatively underexplored.
17
 If part of this arises 
13
 Warren Montag, Louis Althusser, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York 2003.
14
 Murray W. Skees, “Kant, Adorno and the ‘Work’ of Art”, Philosophy & Social Criticism 37 
(8/2011), pp. 917–20.
15
 We do not have the space here to develop how Althusser’s approach compares to that of 
other Marxist thinkers, such as Lukács, Adorno and Benjamin. We note this as a future 
direction of research.
16
 Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, in Lenin and Philosophy and 
Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, New York 2001, p. 155.
17
 Althusser’s contributions to literary theory fare better than his writings on art. In this area, 
important works include Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, University of 
California Press, Berkely 1976, as well as various article-length studies: James Kavanagh, 
11
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
because of the relative marginality of his aesthetic engagements in his oeuvre, 
this neglect is also a result of an underappreciation of his extant remarks on art 
as they relate to his contributions to Marxist theory.
18
 
Althusser’s writings on art point us to the idea that we need to take aesthetic 
practice seriously as a practice with its own specificity – one that has its own 
logics of determination, rituals of production, circulation, and consumption, 
one that commands effects that need to be theorized on their own terms. In other 
words, analyzing Althusser’s position on art suggests that aesthetics constitutes 
a different register, one that does not fit easily into ideology or science. This dif-
ference is not meant to imply a complete autonomy. Althusser insisted that art 
produces ideological effects and is itself an arena that stages ideology.
19
 Further, 
he claimed that a scientific approach to art (meant in the sense of systematic 
knowledge) was possible as much as the dominant ideological approach.
20
 The 
often repeated and strict distinction in Althusser’s thought between ideology 
and science, a distinction that undergirds his famous thesis of the “epistemo-
“Marxism’s Althusser: Towards a Politics of Literary Theory”, diacritics 12 (1982), Francis 
Mulhern, “Message in a Bottle: Althusser in Literary Studies”, in Gregory Elliott (ed.), Al-
thusser: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Cambridge 1994.
18
 More recently, scholarship that considers Althusser’s reflections on theater has made 
strides in connecting his aesthetic theory with his philosophical contributions, particu-
larly on ideology and materialism: Banu Bargu, “In the Theater of Politics: Althusser’s 
Aleatory Materialism and Aesthetics”, Diacritics 40 (3/2012), pp. 86–113; Banu Bargu, 
“Althusser’s Materialist Theater: Ideology and Its Aporias”, Differences 26 (3/ 2015), pp. 
81–106; Thomas Carmichael, “Structure and Conjuncture Literary Study and the Return to 
Althusser”, E-Rea. Revue Électronique d’études Sur Le Monde Anglophone (3/2005); Sean 
Carney, Brecht and Critical Theory: Dialectics and Contemporary Aesthetics, Routledge, 
Taylor and Francis, London and New York 2013, pp. 50–52; Alejandro Fielbaum, “Material -
ismo y distancia. Brecht en Althusser”, in Actas del Coloquio Internacional Althusser hoy: 
estrategia y materialismo, Marcelo Starcenbaum et al. (eds.), Universidad de la Plata, San-
tiago, Chile 2020, pp. 187–214; Mohammad Kowsar, “Althusser on Theatre”, Theatre Jour-
nal 35 (4/1983), pp. 461–74; Stefano Pippa, “ A Heap of Splinters On the Floor”, SoftPower 7 
(1/2020), pp. 125–44; Malcolm K. Read, “Towards a Notion of the Ideological Unconscious: 
Marx, Althusser, Juan Carlos Rodríguez”, (January 16, 2018); Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc . De 
la théorie du théâtre à la scène de la théorie : réflexions sur « Le “Piccolo”, Bertolazzi et 
Brecht » d’ Althusser, Le Moment philosophique des années 1960 en France, Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, Paris 2011, pp. 255-72.
19
 Louis Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other 
Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, New York 2001, p. 165.
20
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 154.
12
banu bargu and william s. lewis
logical break”
21
 and a point that has attracted endless criticism, does indeed 
come under pressure when aesthetics is considered as a third register that is 
in relation to both ideology and science but reducible to neither. Althusser’s 
relatively understudied position on art also affords a perspective that enables 
challenging empiricist theories of representation (the discourse on art as a “mir-
ror”), on the one hand, and an alternative strict separation between reality and 
knowledge (as adumbrated in Reading Capital), which veers back into idealism 
in the name of negating empiricism, on the other.
All these advantages recognized, it is also true that Althusser’s theory of art is 
contradictory, underdeveloped in places, and it needs to be situated more close-
ly within his overall political philosophy. This paper attempts to provide a clear 
exposition of this theory while still calling attention to its tensions and short-
comings. In particular, Althusser’s penchant for pure philosophical concepts 
supportive of a Marxist science of artistic production was in full force when the 
greater part of his aesthetic theory was produced. Ultimately, the clear separa-
tions Althusser delineated among artistic, ideological, and scientific practices 
were unsuitable to the description of artistic practice he sought to highlight and 
to understand. While he had a chance to revise his metaphilosophy, theory of 
history, and philosophy of science, Althusser never returned seriously to his 
aesthetic work with a self-critical eye. One can, as this essay does, abstract a 
core insight from his aesthetic theory and one can trace its development away 
from Marxist-Leninist reflection theory. This core insight is that the transforma-
tive effect of art on a subject’s ideology is the result of a perceptible dislocation 
between ideology and the real and that this subjective outcome results from a 
parallel displacement visible in the work of art. On either side of this core, things 
remain fuzzy. On one side, one is left with contradictory statements about the 
qualities of the artist and of the art work necessary to this transformation. On 
the other, one has discordant claims about what the subjective outcome of art is 
and whether it transforms ideology, knowledge, or politics. This essay does not 
attempt to resolve these antagonisms. Rather, by calling attention to them, it 
attempts to give an accurate picture of the development of Althuser’s aesthetics 
21
 Balibar maintains that the “epistemological break” is “the philosophical object of Althuss-
er, that which distinguishes his philosophy.” Étienne Balibar, “Althusser’s Object”, trans. 
Margaret Cohen and Bruce Robbins, Social Text 39 (July 1, 1994), pp. 157–58. 
13
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
and to show how the tension between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ concepts evident in 
his broader philosophy also characterize his theory of art. 
Authentic Art
Even though Althusser recognized the complexity of the relationship between 
art and ideology, he nonetheless retained a rather unrefined and common dis-
tinction between “real art” or “authentic art” and art that is “of an average or 
mediocre level.”
22
 He dedicated most of his scant remarks on the subject to the 
former kind, the art of great artists. He had little to say about the latter, which 
probably appeared to him as merely the mechanism of reproducing ideology.
23
The kind of high literature, which came out of the hands of a Tolstoy, Balzac or 
Solzhenitsyn, and not the mass-marketed low-brow novel, in his opinion, qual-
ified as “authentic” and could lay claim to the complex relationship with ideol-
ogy that Althusser wanted to amplify. Similarly, it was only exceptional forms of 
theater (Brecht, Bertolazzi, Beckett), painting (Álvarez Ríos, Cremonini, Fanti, 
Lam), and film (for example, Alain Resnais’s Muriel
24
) that qualified as genuine 
art, based on their “decentering effects, that is, their subversion of humanist 
ideology.”
25
 If most art is simply the uncritical reproduction of ideology, accord-
ing to Montag interpreting Althusser, “the other art, genuine art, begins with 
ideology … only to define itself against it. Indeed, its meaning and purpose de-
rive from the distance it places between itself and ideology.”
26
This strict distinction between two kinds of art finds strong expression in 
Althusser’s early writings on the matter. In his reflections on the first major ex -
hibition of Álvarez Ríos in La Cour d’Ingres in Paris (1962), for example, there 
is an obvious exaltation of the great artist, when he refers to the “masters” of 
surrealism (Lam, Ernst, and Matta). Further, it permeates the way he writes of 
the “profoundness” of Álvarez Ríos’s painting and casts the young Cuban, in a 
22
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, pp. 221–22.
23
 Louis Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, trans. G. M Goshgarian, Bloomsbury, 
New York, 2017, pp. 153–54.
24
 Althusser, Lettres á Franca, p. 571.
25
 Montag, Louis Althusser, p. 30.
26
 Ibid., p. 37.
14
banu bargu and william s. lewis
somewhat patronizing manner, as “that painter who can be great.”
27
 Similarly, 
in his famous essay on “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’” (1962), Althusser refers to Piccolo 
Teatro’s performance of El Nost Milan, a play by Bertolazzi, directed by Strehler 
for a critical Parisian audience, as “extraordinary” and consistently praises it, 
along with Brecht’s Mother Courage and Galileo, as distinct from classical theat-
er.
28
 In “ A Conversation on Literary History,” Althusser points out that “it’s not in 
everyone’s power to produce a cultural object.”
29
 In fact, contemplating how lit-
erary history takes for granted existing works that are already given cultural rec-
ognition, he ponders what a counter-history, based on “literary miscarriages” 
that go without any notice, might look like. “No one knows the thousands and 
tens of thousands of young ladies who, now, write novels every day,” Althusser 
writes. “Their boyfriends know them and they can render service to their boy-
friends. As authors, however, they don’t exist.”
30
 In the mainstream hierarchy of 
aesthetic recognition, which Althusser unquestioningly adopts with a gendered 
contempt toward the ordinary that is difficult to hide, literary history is bound 
up with an “ideology of the aesthetic” that considers the work of art as some-
thing sacred.
31
 Althusser critically notes this as a starting point of a Marxist ap-
proach, but, at least in the early 1960s, remains captive to it in his exaltation of 
great art. Great art, in this approach, is where aesthetics meets philosophy. The 
problem of separating art into two camps is, as Warren Montag has forcefully 
put it, that it actually functions to erase the specificity of art: “in one case it laps-
es into ideology and in the other it disappears into the practice of philosophy.”
32
However, according to Montag, this approach begins to shift, or is at least 
strained, due to the influence of Pierre Macherey. Early on in his letter to André 
Daspre, Althusser approvingly cites Macherey’s essay “Lenin as a critic of 
Tolstoy” (1965) as adumbrating the relationship between art and ideology, in -
viting Daspre to “read [it] carefully”
33
 in response to the questions Daspre has 
27
 Louis Althusser, “ A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos (1962)”, ARTMar-
gins 6 (2/2017), p. 112.
28
 Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht. Notes on a Materialist Theatre”, in 
For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, Verso, London and New York 1969, p. 131.
29
 Louis Althusser, “A Conversation on Literary History”, in History and Imperialism, Polity 
Press, Cambridge, UK and Medford, MA 2020, p. 14.
30
 Althusser, “A Conversation on Literary History”, p. 15.
31
 Ibid., p. 5.
32
 Montag, Louis Althusser, p. 38.
33
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 222.
15
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
raised in his prior letter to Althusser which occasioned his response.
34
 Montag 
writes: “Macherey’s arguments are incompatible with many of Althusser’s pre-
vious statements. While he has taken certain concepts and terms from Althusser 
(and has thus appeared to many readers to have simply extended or continued 
Althusser’s theoretical approach), he has in fact given them a new and differ-
ent meaning.”
35
 For example, Macherey calls into question the big distinction 
between ordinary and exceptional art, views all art to be in a complex relation 
with ideology, moves away from the great artist’s “talent” toward the process of 
artistic production, and locates the aesthetic effect less in politics than in rela-
tion to the field of knowledge.
36
 
Pace Montag, and despite our agreement with him regarding the important in-
fluence of Macherey on Althusser’s ideas (as we will discuss below), Althusser 
never gives up on the distinction between exceptional and ordinary art, which 
largely guides his interest in specific artists and authors and dominates his in-
terpretations of their work. This is the case when he first begins to write about 
art; it continues to hold during the mid-60s when he is at the height of his in -
tellectual productivity now marked by a specifically Althusserian stamp; and 
it remains the case in the late 70s when he pens his last occasional pieces on 
art. For example, when Althusser analyzes Cremonini’s work, especially the fig-
ures of the human with the deformation of their faces, only to conclude that his 
painting is “profoundly anti-humanist, and materialist,”
37
 he likens Cremonini 
to “great revolutionary thinkers, theoreticians and politicians, great material-
ist thinkers.” He locates Cremonini’s works in their path and as a “great artist” 
attributes him an understanding, a knowledge, of the ideological impact of his 
own work comparable to the awareness of revolutionary philosophers and pol-
iticians of the impact of their own political positions.
38
 Wilfredo Lam, whom 
Althusser had earlier referenced in his Álvarez Ríos essay as one of the “mas-
ters” of surrealism,
39
 is praised, fifteen years later, for “paint[ing] at the limits, 
34
 First published as André Daspre and Louis Althusser, “Deux Lettres Sur La Connaissance 
de l’art”, La Nouvelle Critique 175 (avril 1966), pp. 136–50.
35
 Montag, Louis Althusser, p. 39.
36
 Ibid., pp. 39–40.
37
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 239.
38
 Ibid., p. 242.
39
 Althusser, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos”, p. 110.
16
banu bargu and william s. lewis
just as a few others have thought at the limits.”
40
 The “great” artists are only 
matched in their greatness by “great” revolutionary and materialist thinkers, 
who give us, each in their own way, knowledge of the world, an account of the 
laws by which human beings are governed such that they remain unfree, de-
spite the ideologies that paint them as “free.” 
However, Montag is absolutely right to underscore how a more sophisticated ap-
preciation of art’s complex relation to ideology emerges in Althusser’s later writ-
ings, in large part due to the influence of Macherey and because of Althusser’s 
own intellectual trajectory, with his changing philosophical positions reflect-
ing on his assessments on art and vice versa. It is possible to trace the shift in 
Althusser beginning with his letter to Daspre (1966), as well as in “Cremonini” 
(1966), “On Brecht and Marx” (1968), and eventually on his late writings on the 
painters Fanti and Lam (1977). While in the response to Daspre, Althusser still 
retains the distinction between the two forms of art, he recognizes that even 
authentic art is not immune to the humanist ideology that permeates art itself. 
At the same time, however, real art could at least offer an “allusion to reality,” 
the reality of the ideology “from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which 
it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes,”
41
 in the form of an internal 
distance, thereby introducing a possible site for generating a critical or opposi-
tional consciousness. Thus, Althusser finds that works of art bear a “privileged 
relation” to ideology, with the specific function of making it visible, by “estab-
lishing a distance from it.”
42
As Thomas Albrecht has noted, Althusser’s privileging of “authentic” art as 
having a critical relationship with ideology, with potentially transformative 
effects, has been “routinely criticized by the Marxist literary critics who fol-
lowed Althusser, in particular by British Marxists writing in the late 1970s and 
40
 Louis Althusser, “‘Lam (1977)’”, trans. Alberto Toscano, ARTMargins 6 (2/2017), p. 113. Al -
thusser’s text, solicited by Lam himself, was for the catalogue of a retrospective on Lam’s 
work at the Nanterre Maison de la Culture in April 1978. Althusser sent his text to Lam, but 
it was not published because the retrospective was cancelled. Althusser’s text resurfaced 
in 1982 as part of the catalogue of a posthumous exhibition of Lam’s work.
41
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 222.
42
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, pp. 241–2.
17
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
early 1980s, as unreflected formalism.”
43
 This interpretation, which has done 
much to discredit Althusser’s overarching approach to aesthetics, comes out of 
Althusser’s emphasis on the “specificity of art” in distinguishing its relation-
ship with ideology from the relationship of science with ideology. According to 
Albrecht, the critique of Althusser’s formalism takes issue with his ascription of 
the specificity of art to the formal attributes of the artwork, misunderstanding 
what Althusser’s actual distinction entails. For Albrecht, this specificity con-
cerns less an attribute of the artwork itself than the effect of the artwork, i.e., in 
giving a perception of ideology rather than a conceptual knowledge of it, which 
is what science does).
44
 However, most interpreters stop short of offering what 
this “perception” of ideology entails and analyzing the mechanisms of its pro-
duction. Further, this aspect of aesthetics is often obscured by the designation 
of literature, as well as other forms of art, as “ideological forms.”
45
 
If even great art is precarious to the effects of ideology, all the more is the think-
ing about art. For Althusser, art criticism that does not take into account the 
processes of artistic production and that cannot develop a knowledge of the 
“aesthetic effect” would remain particularly prone to the distortions of human-
ism.
46
 Avoiding a naive humanism in art criticism meant building on Marxist 
principles in order to propose alternative concepts to analyze artistic production 
and its effects. In effect, this was a call for a “science” of art – one that could 
accurately theorize and gauge its aesthetic effects. Particularly important was 
to avoid the language of “creation,” which glorified the artist at the expense of 
artistic practice and the mechanisms by which authentic art produces effects. 
43
 Thomas Albrecht, “Donner à Voir l’idéologie: Althusser and Aesthetic Ideology”, Bulletin 
de La Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française 14 (2/2004), p. 3.
44
 Ibid., pp. 9–14. Examples of critiques that focus on Althusser’s formalism include: Terry 
Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, Verso, London 1982, pp. 82–86; Tony Bennett, Formalism 
and Marxism, Methuen, New York 1979, pp. 120–149, among others.
45
 Albrecht’s interpretation is confirmed by the position taken by Pierre Macherey and 
Etienne Balibar in an interview (1978), where they caution against confusing form with 
formalism: “the historical materialist concept does not refer to ‘form’ in opposition to ‘con-
tent,’ but to the objective coherence of an ideological formation.” However, by character-
izing literature as an “ideological form,” they also collapse aesthetics into other forms 
of ideology, thereby obscuring the specificity of the aesthetic form. Pierre Macherey and 
Étienne Balibar, “Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions”, trans. 
John Whitehead Mcleod and Ann Wordsworth, Oxford Literary Review 3 (1/1978), p. 5.
46
 For an overview of different approaches to art criticism, see Aleš Erjavec, “Art and Criti-
cism”, Filozofski Vestnik 40 (3/2019), pp. 147–160.
18
banu bargu and william s. lewis
The conception of the artist or author as creator renders the artwork the result 
of a miraculous, even theological process, an inexplicable act of bringing into 
being. Such a perspective idealizes the subjectivity of the author/artist as having 
the ability to actualize themselves in their work as the outcome of a process that 
resists theorization.
47
 For Althusser, this orientation in art criticism is reflected 
in the coupling of an aesthetics of creation and an aesthetics of consumption, 
revolving around the subjectivity of the artist qua the creator and the recipient 
qua the consumer of art and the view that art itself as an object created and 
consumed. Such an approach reproduced a subject-object dualism (between the 
artist and the work of art and between the consumer and the work of art), which 
had to be left behind for a truly materialist appreciation of aesthetics. The latter 
could only be achieved by criticism that could bring out the knowledge specific 
to art – the “type of critique and knowledge it inaugurates with respect to the 
ideology it makes us see.”
48
 
Challenging the Ideology/Art/Science Trinary
If art’s difference from ideology does not reside in its formal qualities, what 
then is the specificity of the authentic work of art and how does it differ from 
science, which also enjoys a privileged relation with reality? From ideology, 
the difference is slight.
49
 With science, however, the differences are larger and 
revelatory of how art “works.” To identify art’s specificity then, we have to un-
derstand it in its similarities to and difference from both ideology and science. 
One of the clearest definitions of ideology Althusser provides is in Philosophy 
for Non-philosophers (1976). Abstracted from the habits, embodiments, and in -
stitutions of which it is equally composed, he labels ideology: “ideas endowed 
with a capacity for social action.”
50
 Putting this definition into motion as one 
form of cognitive reproduction, ideological practice is further specified “as the 
transformation of existing ideology under the impact [sous l’effet] of the direct 
action of another ideology, distinct from the first.”
51
 A generic example of this 
transformation would be that of existing beliefs about the individual and their 
47
 Louis Althusser, “Letter to the Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March 1966”, Historical 
Materialism 15 (2/2007), pp. 163–65.
48
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 241.
49
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 152.
50
 Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, p. 112.
51
 Ibid., p. 110.
19
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
inalienable right to the products of their labor. This illusion is distinct from, and 
potentially replaced by, the competing communist notion that value, being so-
cially produced, should be socially shared. Both dominant and the opposition-
al ideologies are realized and communicated with “gestures, modes of behav-
ior, feelings, words and ... other element[s] of other practices.”
52
 Though never 
“pure” and always constructed out of and in relationship to other worldviews–
especially the one in dominance, a discrete ideology bears the mark of the so-
cial class whose associations it supports. It also always stands in tension with 
the ideologies of competing classes. Further, specific ideologies are inseparable 
from institutions, which form part of their material support.
53
 In “Cremonini,” 
Althusser, citing Establet, cuts to the chase and simply states that ideology is 
what the Marxist tradition calls “culture.”
54
Is not art, then, as a fraction of culture, just a part of ideology? In the main and 
as mentioned above, Althusser agrees with this reduction. Most art serves only 
to reproduce existing ideologies and the substance of even “great art” is almost 
entirely ideological. In terms of its objective content, art can be said to consist 
predominantly of existing ideologies as these are expressed through the trans-
formation of existing material (“words, sounds, colors, etc.”
55
) into new assem-
blages recognizable as art. Like its content, art’s form is dictated almost entirely 
by existing ideological conventions. In addition, it is this conventionality which 
allows its audience’s identification or “misrecognition” of themselves in the il-
lusion produced by the artist.
56
 
If its production, form, and consumption “take place” in ideology, what, then, 
is the specificity of art? Althusser follows Aristotle and the greater part of the 
“western” philosophical tradition in stating that art provides pleasure to its 
viewer.
57
 In terms of art’s specificity, is art therefore distinguished from ideology 
52
 Louis Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses”, in The Humanist Controver-
sy and Other Writings, 1966–67, François Matheron (ed.), Verso, London and New York 
2003, p. 51.
53
 Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, pp. 112–15.
54
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 165.
55
 Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses”, p. 50.
56
 Étienne Balibar, “Althusser’s Dramaturgy and the Critique of Ideology”, Differences 26 
(3/2015), pp. 8–9.
57
 Warren Montag and Louis Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx (1968)”, in Louis Althusser, 
trans. Max Statkiewicz, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire and New York 2003, pp. 146–47.
20
banu bargu and william s. lewis
by the pleasant affect it induces? No, Althusser avers implicitly in many pieces 
and explicitly in the “Reply to Daspre” that authentic art is distinguished not by 
its ability to provide pleasure but by its “aesthetic content.” As noted above, this 
content or, better put, the relation among the ideological and aesthetic content 
of a work and the ideology of those who regard it evokes an “aesthetic effect” in 
its spectators.
58
 It is this effect and the ability of the artwork to summon it that 
distinguishes authentic art from average art. Albrecht thus correctly contends 
that there is no identifiable formal element inherent in the artwork necessary to 
this effect.
59
 Althusser makes this clear with examples: avant-garde works are ar-
rayed alongside classics as possibly–but not necessarily–productive of aesthetic 
effects. For example, where Ionesco’s absurdist iconoclasm fails to achieve an 
aesthetic effect, Brecht’s beer hall melodramas and Balzac’s realist taxonomies 
succeed.
60
 More proof: among the instances of authentic art Althusser surveys, 
one finds no common formal element (such as self-referentiality, complexity, 
symmetry, spontaneity, temporal abstraction, discontinuity, polyphony, unrelia-
ble narration, conceptuality, meter, novelty, etc.) capable of formally distinguish-
ing authentic from average art. The quality of “greatness” too is insufficient. As 
Althusser cheekily confides in a 1962 letter to Franca Madonia, Racine’s linguistic 
innovations transform “mediocre contents, ... the ‘pulp romances’ of his day” 
into works to be revered. This formal transformation, however, is also that which 
allows his theater to play “a mystificatory role.
61
 For Althusser, as for any Marxist 
shaped by The German Ideology, “mystification” is synonymous with “ideologi-
cal.”
62
 Therefore, greatness may be an element of authentic art but, as with any 
formal element, is not that which distinguishes it from the mediocre. 
If neither greatness nor any formal aspect differentiates authentic from average 
art, then what more can we say about this relation? As mentioned above, average 
art serves merely to reproduce existing ideologies –and this is part of their pleas-
ure- or to flirt with their disruption before restoring the accord between artistic 
58
 Althuser almost always appeals to the visual register in his analyses but there is no reason 
that this critique should not equally apply to works of art that are heard, felt, or tasted.
59
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 154. 
60
 Althusser, “Perché il teatro : Conferenza dibatto promossa dal ‘Teatro Minimo’ di Forli deI 
Professore Louis Althusser”, p. 10.
61
 Althusser, Lettres à Franca, p. 294.
62
 Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Allen Lane, Penguin Press, London 1969, p. 74; Montag 
and Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx (1968)”, p. 140.
21
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
representations of the world and the subject’s ideological representation of the 
same. Authentic art, by way of contrast, manages to open up a space within the 
artwork and in the mind of the spectator. This “void” is the space between the 
mystified world the audience inhabits (and which equally provides the form and 
content of the artwork) and the “real” world. “ Allusion” made, the real is perceived 
or felt in the consciousness of the spectator.
63
 Following Brecht, the internal dis-
tance taken is sometimes referred to as the “aesthetic effect.”
64
 Notwithstanding 
its inspiration, this occurrence is offered in counter-distinction to the “alienation 
effect,” which Althusser identifies as a body of theatrical techniques conducive 
to these psychological effects but not sufficient to their production.
65
 He also sig-
nals something about its production by referring to its work variously as distanti-
ation, void, uncanny, non-space, rupture, break, or displacement.
66
 
To rehearse: the difference between authentic art and average art is that the 
former, while mostly or entirely formed by its creator’s ideological beliefs, man-
ages–in an unspecified way–to interrupt the ideology of its spectators. This 
interruption is a perception, feeling, or view of the distance between the real, 
material processes that produce ideology and ideological beliefs about these 
processes. The space displayed can equally be evident in the work and that dis-
cernible in the viewer’s own consciousness.
67
 Of course, art in its production is 
so closely related to ideological production as to be nearly indistinguishable 
from it. Therefore, it may be better understood as a species of ideological pro-
duction, rather than a different kind. Nonetheless, it is its identity in terms of 
object and process but difference in terms of its reception that permits art to 
have an “aesthetic effect,” that is, to change existing ideologies. 
Affected by the glimpse of the material real to which authentic art “alludes,” a 
spectator’s self-satisfied consciousness is troubled. This disturbance, Althusser 
63
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 66.
64
 Ibid., p. 154; Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading “Capital”, NLB, London 1970, p. 
66.
65
 Montag and Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx (1968)”, pp. 142–44. For a detailed analysis 
of how Althusser modifies the Brechtian method of “distanciation,” see Bargu, “In the 
Theater of Politics”, 98–102.
66
 Montag and Althusser, p. 142, p. 144; Althusser, “‘Lam (1977)’”, p. 114; Louis Althusser, 
“The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)”, p. 142; Althusser, “A Young Cuban 
Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos (1962)”.
67
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 153.
22
banu bargu and william s. lewis
contends, has the potential to modify the spectator’s political consciousness 
and, with this modification, to initiate a new political agenda. Despite this allu-
sion to the real and its potential associated change of consciousness, Althusser 
says outright in the “Reply to Daspre” that authentic art is insufficient on its own 
to achieve political change. For this to happen, he adds, one needs to be able 
to “define the means” of political change.
68
 As is well-known, the only practice 
Althusser specifies as capable of identifying the causal means to political trans-
formation is science and science does so by producing true or correct knowledge 
of its object, the real.
69
 
Based on this summary, it is clear that science, art, and ideology resemble one 
another inasmuch as each is a social, material, and intellectual practice actu-
ally and potentially constitutive of one’s lived relation to the world. Ideological 
beliefs about the world, a psychological constant, can be variously affected by 
the intellectual influence of art and science. Average art, for instance, reinforces 
ideological beliefs and provides an objective example of these beliefs’ reproduc-
tion. Authentic art, on the contrary, interrupts ideology. Allowing one to glimpse 
the world demystified, it transforms and re-orders the subject’s web of existing 
beliefs. Inasmuch as it is successful in this effort, art may motivate political ac-
tion focused on changing the world in accordance with this new orientation. But 
there are no guarantees.
Science, too, transforms ideology and it also does so in relation to the real. 
However, instead of being a felt or perceived relation, this change is conceptu-
al: ideology is replaced with knowledge or knowledge is reordered. Althusser’s 
take on the relationship among science, ideology, the real, and truth has been 
much discussed and will only be rehearsed here in order to draw the distinc-
tions between it, art and ideology.
70
 The concise story is that scientists begin 
68
 Ibid.
69
 Pierre Macherey, “Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scien-
tists”, trans. Robin Mackay, Parrhesia 6 (2009), p. 16.
70
 Andrea Cavazzini, Scienze, epistemologia, società: la lezione di Louis Althusser : Venezia, 
29-30-31 ottobre 2008 : atti del convegno, Mimesis, Milano 2009; Isabelle Garo, “The Im -
possible Break: Ideology in Movement between Philosophy and Politics”, in Encountering 
Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought, Bloomsbury Aca-
demic, New York 2013, pp. 277–80; William S. Lewis, “Knowledge versus ‘Knowledge’: 
Louis Althusser on the Autonomy of Science and Philosophy from Ideology”, Rethinking 
Marxism 17 (3/2005), pp. 455–470; Macherey, “ Althusser and the Concept of the Spontane -
23
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
with ideological or “metaphysical” notions about the world. Then, through sci-
entific practice which includes engagement with the material real, metaphysical 
notions are transformed into true, scientific conceptions of real objects, their 
causes, and relations. 
This essay will not get too into the subtleties of scientific production and how 
Althusser’s ideas about truth and scientific practice changed over the course of 
his career.
71
 One revision though is crucial to challenging the ideology-art-sci-
ence trichotomy. This is Althusser’s abandonment of the division characteristic 
of his classic work between science and ideology. By the late 1960s, Althusser 
did not think that philosophy or any other intellectual practice could separate 
science and ideology in terms of their relationship to truth and reality. Whereas 
before he had argued that philosophy could parse them, he now contended 
that the difference between the two could only be known by their employment. 
Scientific knowledge, once acted upon, leads to correct results, while ideology 
based strategy results in mistakes. Importantly, as with art and ideology, scien-
tific knowledge and ideological beliefs became formally indistinguishable and 
their difference only able to be grasped by their effects.
72
 In the case of authen-
tic art, this effect is psychological and agential, disturbing the spectator’s easy 
conscience and possibly motivating inquiry or action into reality and its trans-
formation.
As François Matheron has eloquently shown, Althusser’s philosophy vacillates 
between “pure” concepts and “impure” ones.
73
 As in the above example, this is 
evidenced in his thought’s diachronic development. However, this inconstancy 
also occurs in discrete texts where a lucid, analytic definition of a concept is 
provided and distinguished from other concepts before its clarity and distinc-
ous Philosophy of Scientists”; Maria Cecilia Padilla and Facundo Roberto Bey, “La Ciencia 
Es Ciencia de La Ideología En Louis Althusser”, Desafios, 28 (1/2016), pp. 371–98; Geoff 
Pfeifer, “On Althusser on Science, Ideology, and the New, or Why We Should Continue to 
Read ‘Reading Capital’”, Crisis & Critique, Reading Capital and For Marx: 50 Years Later 
(2/2015) pp. 124–41.
71
 William S. Lewis, “Althusser’s Scientism and Aleatory Materialism”, Décalages 2 (1/2016), 
pp. 6–26.
72
 Panagiotis Sotiris, A Philosophy for Communism: Rethinking Althusser, A Philosophy for 
Communism, Brill, Leiden 2020, pp. 232–39.
73
 François Matheron, “‘Louis Althusser, or the Impure Purity of the Concept”, Critical Com-
panion to Contemporary Marxism, Brill, Leiden 2004, pp. 503–27.
24
banu bargu and william s. lewis
tion from others is subtly (or not-so-subtly) undermined during the rest of its 
exposition. The power of Althusser’s thought and its debility lie in this manner 
of exposition.
To take this discussion back to art, when Althusser focuses at one time on the 
producer of the art work, at another time on the art object, and at another time 
on the art object’s reception, we can see this compulsion to identify, explicate, 
and separate in his aesthetic theory. This disjunction gives rise to the claim that 
the form of the artwork or the great artist is responsible for the distance taken 
within the mind of the spectator. We also see this drive for purity in Althusser’s 
analysis of intellectual production. There, ideological, scientific, and artistic 
thoughts are neatly separated according to their objects and according to the 
effects that these thoughts have on a subject’s activity. Both science and authen-
tic art, he claims, interrupt ideology and therefore “the reproduction of a soci-
ety’s mode of production”
74
 but they do so in different ways. Through scientific 
practice, the first has the effect of producing true or correct knowledge of the 
real useful to its transformation. Through genuine artistic practice, the second 
generates a perception of or feeling for the real which differs from the subject’s 
previous attitude. 
Alternately and as an example of a rigid analysis becoming more supple, maybe 
it is knowledge of the real that art produces? In “On Brecht” and in most other 
aesthetic texts, he states that art produces no knowledge of the real.
75
 However, 
in “Cremonini,” written in-between the two pieces on Brechtian theater, he says 
of the Italian’s paintings that “we cannot ‘recognize’ ourselves (ideologically) in 
his pictures. And it is because we cannot ‘recognize’ ourselves in them that we 
can know ourselves in them, in the specific form provided by art.” In the next 
paragraph he adds the line already quoted “when [art] exists as a work of art it 
produces as a work of art (by the type of critique and knowledge it inaugurates 
with respect to the ideology it makes us see) an ideological effect.”
76
 How to 
make sense of these contradictory statements? If one sticks to the crystalline 
concepts Althusser delineates or to what he predominately states about art’s 
aesthetic effect, one cannot make sense of them. In many cases, art is said to 
74
 Montag and Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx (1968)”, p. 146.
75
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 146, pp. 152–53.
76
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 165.
25
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
affect perception or sentiment, not understanding. In one case, he states that it 
has a knowledge effect. If one does not want to dismiss the theory entirely, then 
one must notice the moments of impurity, the moments when Althusser mud-
dies concepts and sends them in relation to one another. This is what he does in 
the second “Cremonini” quote. Here, the artistic work, painted by someone who 
may have no “lucid” knowledge of reality,
77
 “inaugurates” knowledge. Sticking 
to its concept as outlined in most of the aesthetic pieces, art cannot reveal the 
real, it can only ever change sentiment or perception. With Cremonini, though, 
we see it functioning as critique and inaugurating knowledge, a function with 
which science and philosophy are exclusively charged. 
Reading non-pedantically, the solution seems obvious: in changing the sub-
ject’s perception of the world, authentic art may not only inaugurate philosoph-
ical critique and suggest the need for political change, it may also inaugurate 
scientific inquiry necessary to that transformation. Althusser’s very impulse 
to clarity, his Spinozist formalism or rationalism,
78
 often prevented him from 
acknowledging that productive practices are not totally distinct one from an-
other. That they are intermixed, though, almost always slips through either via 
contradictions within texts, as self-conscious revision, or when the matter is 
stated more clearly in another text. The division between science and ideology, 
for instance, was subject to revision.
79
 Moreover, in a text which adopts the lan-
guage of Lacan and of psychoanalysis from 1966 and which replaces the various 
cognitive capacities Althusser usually associates with intellectual practice with 
the word “discourse,” the common effect of science, ideology, and art is clearly 
stated when Althusser writes:
77
 Ibid., p. 166.
78
 Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze, 
Stanford University Press, Stanford 2014, pp. 149–90.
79
 Matheron quotes a revealing passage from a 1962 letter to Franca Madonia when Althusser 
was working on Machiavelli: “I even sketched a description of Machiavelli’s conscious-
ness, his will to realism in contradiction with his ‘derealising’ situation (to have hit upon 
this word was the solution: thus giving the impression that there was something there to 
understand which I didn’t succeed in expressing ina conceptual, clear, exhaustive fash-
ion, but saying at the same time that there was nevertheless something to sense and un-
derstand, identifying a presence that did not manage to grasp itself ...), and then, thinking 
about this formulation again, I was extraordinarily and ironically struck by the fact that, 
in the guise of the supposed consciousness of Machiavelli, I’d spoken about myself.” Ma-
theron, “Louis Althusser, or the Impure Purity of the Concept”, p. 512.
26
banu bargu and william s. lewis
If we compare the different existing forms of discourse–that is, the forms of un-
conscious discourse, ideological discourse, aesthetic discourse and scientific 
discourse-we can demonstrate the existence of a common effect: every discourse 
produces a subjectivity-effect. Every discourse has, as its necessary correlate, a 
subject, which is one of the effects, if not the major effect, of its functioning.
80
A problem with Althusser’s aesthetic theory is that art is never put back together 
with science and ideology to show their overlappings and to trace their common 
effect on a subject’s conscious and unconscious thought. Prima facie, one sees 
only inconsistency.
81
 This lack of accord makes it difficult for the reader to piece 
together how an artist–working with their own mystified consciousness and ex-
isting materials–can fabricate an artwork characterized by a tension between 
the real and the ideological. Seen in terms of the object and its reception, it 
is likewise an enigma how a work of art may inaugurate a knowledgeable cri-
tique of real situations. Nonetheless, by looking closely at the development of 
Althusser’s aesthetics, we can see him wrestling with these self-caused obstacles 
and becoming more sophisticated in their resolution, albeit without ever resolv-
ing them and while often slipping back to his earlier formulations.
82
 A singular 
example of this, detailed in the next section, is Althusser’s overcoming (with the 
help of Pierre Macherey) the limitations of Engels’ and Lenin’s aesthetics. In a 
way that is impossible if we consider only the elements of his aesthetics in their 
purity, we can also turn to his analysis of specific artists and their output for an 
understanding of how art works that is more subtle, philosophically tenable, 
and illustrative of his theory’s originality. Unlike the rigid demarcation of artis-
tic, scientific and theoretical practices just rehearsed, the critiques of Cremonini 
and Bertolazzi, Solzhenitsyn and Fanti, Álvarez Ríos and Lam provide exam-
ples of the ways in which artists fabricate works of art capable of inaugurating 
knowledgeable critiques of existing, concrete situations. 
80
 Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses”, p. 48.
81
 Indeed, even in “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses” Althusser is inconsistent. In 
Note 2, subject-effects seem to be primarily attributed to ideological discourse. See Al-
thusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses”, p. 50.
82
 In this slippage, comparison can be made to Althusser’s mature judgement of Marx, con-
tinually struggling but ultimately unable to free himself from the Hegelian dialectic. Louis 
Althusser, “Marx in His Limits”, in Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87, 
Verso, London and New York 2006, p. 42.
27
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
Elements of a Materialist Aesthetics
Despite Althusser’s inconsistencies, slippages, and reliance on “impure” con-
cepts, his writings on aesthetics do present us with original insights, both con-
ceptually and in terms of the challenge they present to already existing formula-
tions, especially within Marxism. However, it must be noted that the conceptual 
innovations Althusser made in approaching aesthetics and the ways in which he 
posed the problem of aesthetics, namely, in relation not only with the usual ele-
ments of art criticism (especially its focus on the artist and their creative expres-
sion) but with history, ideology, subjectivity, and the possibility of knowledge, 
have developed in conversation with the important work that Pierre Macherey 
carried out in the domain of literary analysis. When Althusser cites Macherey in 
his response to Daspre, he indicates that Macherey’s article on Lenin’s reading 
of Tolstoy is “only a beginning” but indicative of the “direction in which we are 
working.”
83
 Macherey’s intervention thus stands as the result of a collective dis-
cussion of Althusser and his students/cothinkers, or at the very least, its results 
are endorsed by this collective “we.”
84
 In the same letter, Althusser promises 
further studies on this subject that are shortly forthcoming, a promise that never 
materializes except for Macherey’s work on the subject.
85
 As a result, it is im-
portant to turn to Macherey’s work in order to identify the significant points of 
contact, convergence, and confluence for the specifically Althusserian approach 
to art and to trace Macherey’s role in its development.
86
83
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 222, our emphasis.
84
 Recognizing the collective nature of the intellectual and political work that Althusser and 
his students at the École Normale Supérieure carried out in the 1960s, Warren Montag 
writes that it “ought to be regarded as a collective body of work whose writers functioned 
more as scribes than as authors, recording ideas that had so thoroughly circulated be-
tween individuals that their originator could no longer be discovered.” Warren Montag, 
Louis Althusser, p. 15.
85
 The exception is Macherey’s book-length intervention, which was published later in the 
same year. See Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, Routledge, London 2006.
86
 According to Montag, Macherey’s approach is profoundly shaped by Spinoza whose rel-
evance for the field of aesthetics has not simply been neglected but, rather, necessarily 
“excluded.” This implicit influence of what Montag provocatively names a “counter-aes-
thetics” may also be one of the sources of the “impurity” of Althusser’s concepts, espe-
cially as the Spinozist thematics stood in tension with the influence of Kantian concepts 
in Althusser’s thought. See Warren Montag, “Spinoza’s Counter-Aesthetics”, Intellectual 
History Review 30 (3/2020), pp. 411–427.
28
banu bargu and william s. lewis
I. From Author as Creator to Author as Traveller
When we turn our attention to Macherey’s essay on Lenin as a reader of Tolstoy, 
then, what do we find? Macherey’s essay begins by noting the absence of a sys-
tematic Marxist theory of aesthetics and outlines only a brief lineage, which 
moves from the scant references in Marx and Engels (and Marx’s book on Balzac 
that was never written) to Plekhanov and Lafargue’s work. This is at least one of 
the reasons why, Macherey argues, Lenin’s writings on Tolstoy, occasional pieces 
as they are, are so precious. These writings, spanning three years between 1908-
1911 are pre-revolutionary but gestational in terms of delineating a “Leninist 
aesthetics” bound up with the question of “scientific socialism.”
87
 What makes 
Lenin’s interpretation of Tolstoy crucial (in addition to the absence in the Marxist 
literature it fills) resides in its ability to think together the aesthetic and the polit-
ical, and more specifically, to articulate their complex relationship.
For Macherey , and we can assume by extension for Althusser, the study of Lenin’s 
writings on Tolstoy reveal in a rough sketch the specific elements necessary for 
an aesthetic theory that is Marxist. It should be noted that while the writings in 
question penned by Lenin, and Macherey’s analysis of these writings, are devot-
ed only to literature as a specific art-form, it is clear that for Macherey they repre-
sent insights that are applicable to other forms of artistic production. These ele-
ments comprise of: (1) the complex relation of the author/work to their historical 
period (and the contradictions of this period), (2) the relationship between the 
work of art and ideology (and thus, between that of ideology and the historical 
period in question), and finally (3) an explication and critical reworking of the 
metaphor of the “mirror,” which Lenin deploys to express Tolstoy’s relation to 
his age and its contradictions. In elaborating each of these elements, Macherey 
produces original concepts, concepts which inform, even if they are not explic-
itly discussed by, Althusser’s reflections.
One of the first tasks of Macherey’s intervention is to emphasize the necessity 
to put the artwork in historical context. In so doing, however, he critically ex-
amines the assumption of an immediate, “spontaneous” relation between the 
work of literature and the lifetime of its author, on the one hand, and the time 
of its composition, on the other. Instead, Macherey argues that in analyzing 
87
 Pierre Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, in A Theory of Literary Production, pp. 118–19. 
First published in La Pensée 121 (1965).
29
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
the historicity of the work of art one must be able to delineate the appropriate 
time frame by analyzing the broader social and political transformations taking 
place (and are thus somehow expressed in the artwork). For Tolstoy, this is the 
period between 1861 and 1905, a time when feudalism is disintegrating and the 
development of capitalism is continuing apace, with huge social consequences 
for the peasants. The periodization is introduced by Lenin, earmarked on one 
end by the legal reforms that ended serfdom, if only de jure, and on the other 
end by the 1905 revolution. Lenin thereby casts this period of decline and dis -
solution of old Russia and the simultaneous emergence of a bourgeois order as 
the Tolstoyian age.
Macherey does not dispute this analysis but also notes that the author’s rela-
tion to their age is still not straightforward. He writes: “Generally, the writer 
is behind the times, if only because he [sic] invariably speaks after the event. 
The more he is involved with the materially immediate, the more difficulty he 
experiences in writing.”
88
 Macherey thereby introduces a temporal lag in the au-
thor’s production, complicating an easy periodization. Macherey further notes 
that “[s]ome writers are involved with the secondary or anachronistic tenden-
cies of their time.”
89
 Thus, for a proper Marxist theory of literature (or any form 
of aesthetic production), while it is important to contextualize the artwork in a 
historical age based on the content of the work, it is also necessary to recognize 
that the work may appear out of its time, or coming after its own age, insofar 
as it expresses processes that are not synchronous with one another or which 
cannot be understood as having begun or ended in precise moments in time. 
Macherey’s analysis, then, builds on Lenin and opens greater space for the mul-
tiple histories of different layers of a social formation and nonlinear and non-
synchronous temporal elements that may coexist in the same historical age, all 
of which go into the making of the artwork’s complex historicity.
90
Macherey points out that this complex historicity (or the relationship between 
the author/artwork and their age) can best be understood as a result of the me-
diation that enters into this relationship. The specific ideology, which mediates 
88
 Ibid., p. 120.
89
 Ibid.
90
 This approach is famously theorized in Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital”, pp. 
103–10.
30
banu bargu and william s. lewis
the author and their age and disrupts any semblance of a linear, direct or trans-
parent relationship, is ideology. However, Macherey, following Lenin, is quick to 
problematize this mediating term. At issue is not a uniform and total ideology; 
instead, the ideology that mediates the author’s relationship to history is one 
among multiple ideologies that make up the historical period, each authored 
by a specific class that is part of the social make-up in a particular conjuncture. 
Macherey writes: “a historical period does not spontaneously produce a single, 
monolithic ideology, but a series of ideologies determined by the total relation of 
forces; each ideology is shaped by the pressures upon the class which generates 
it.”
91
 If Tolstoy is able to convey “a certain knowledge of his age,”
92
 albeit in a 
manner that is incomplete (incomplete because partial, i.e., mediated by the spe-
cific lens of a specific ideology), this is because he drew upon the viewpoint of the 
peasant. This viewpoint is inevitably incomplete and partial, but also more com-
plicated than simply being a reflection of the author’s class position vis-a-vis the 
social structure. Even though Tolstoy the man comes from an aristocratic family, 
Tolstoy the author expresses the experience of a different class – that of the mu-
zhik. To account for the difference, Macherey puts forth the idea of the “social 
mobility” of an author; he uses the image of a “traveller” to express the author’s 
ability to migrate away from their own class origins to a different class position, 
a movement that enables the author not to be bound by their own relationship 
to the social structure.
93
 Tolstoy, then, is “the count with the heart of a muzhik” 
who, like others who produce artistic works of value, is a traveller within his own 
society, which grants him the ability to convey the contradictions of the age. 
Althusser builds on this idea of the author as traveller within his own society, 
unbound by his class origins or even his own political positions, when he refuses 
to concede to Daspre that the author (in this case Balzac) must have changed 
his reactionary personal political positions in order to convey a critical sense 
of his present with his writing. For Daspre, Balzac’s critical aesthetic effect can 
be understood as a function of Balzac’s political views, not despite them. For 
Althusser, by contrast, it is precisely the strength of Balzac’s own views, his com-
mitment to his political ideology that allows him to create an “internal distance” 
from that ideology. Althusser writes of Balzac: “his peculiar, reactionary political 
91
 Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, p. 128.
92
 Ibid., p. 126.
93
 Ibid., p. 127.
31
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
positions played a decisive part in the production of the content of his work.”
94
 
This is because the content of an artwork is determined by so much more than 
simply a reflection of the author’s class position or ideological commitments. 
The idea that the (great) author/artist is marked by their ability to convey some-
thing about ideology that is ultimately irreducible to their subjectivity and ideo-
logical investments is taken to its logical conclusions with Althusser’s comments 
on Cremonini’s work. In praising Cremonini’s radical anti-humanism, Althusser 
not only extensively comments on the painter’s artistic trajectory and the artis-
tic elements in his work that conform to this anti-humanist position, but he also 
draws attention to how the painter effectively erases himself from his own can-
vases. Cremonini refuses the temptations of self-recognition in his work, freeing 
his work from carrying the ideological stamp that marks it as his “creation.” If 
both Macherey and Althusser want to move away from the dominant conception 
of author/artist as creator, Macherey’s proposal of an author as traveller trans-
forms in Althusser’s hands to one that travels toward the erasure of the author/
artist altogether. This erasure is not simply the author/artist’s absence, it is a 
presence that takes the form of an anonymity, a desubjectivation, an absence, 
an ability to move from the author/artist as the subject of artistic creation to art 
as a labor of production of artistic works through which “the structure of the 
world,” the “structural effects of the real relations which govern [subjects]” can 
be expressed.
95
 Cremonini is “present in his painting in the form determined by 
the relations he paints,” Althusser writes, “in the form of their absence, i.e. in 
particular, in the form of his own absence.”
96
 So, too, for Macherey, “the artist 
produces works, in determinate conditions; he does not work on himself but on 
that thing which escapes him in so many ways, and never belongs to him until 
after the event.”
97
 Does this reformulation not bring aesthetic production closer 
to scientific production?
II. Breaking the Artwork as Mirror
For Macherey, the relation between the work of art and history is mediated by 
ideology. It is important to account for the artist’s “gift” – the particular stamp 
94
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, p. 224.
95
 Althusser, “Cremonini”, p. 239.
96
 Ibid., p. 240.
97
 Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, p. 77 . Also see Montag, “Spinoza’s Counter-Aes -
thetics”, pp. 80–82.
32
banu bargu and william s. lewis
that artist puts on the work, which prevents it from being reducible to the ideol-
ogy contained within it.
98
 Departing from Lenin, Macherey wants to distinguish 
the artistic work from being simply a tool of ideological dissemination, on the 
one hand, and a documentary of existing conditions, on the other. He argues 
that literary criticism and its specialized conceptual toolbox are necessary to 
bring out the knowledge inherent in the artwork. This knowledge is neither sci-
entific, nor ideological. At the same time, it is intimately related with how ideol-
ogy mediates between the work of art and its conjuncture.
An artist’s work contains many contradictions: “both the contradictions of his 
age and the deficiencies involved in his partial or fragmentary view of those 
contradictions.”
99
 In Tolstoy’s case, this entails both the contradictions of a 
“post-Reform, but pre-revolutionary era” in Russian society and the problem of 
understanding these contradictions through the mediation of a peasant ideolo-
gy. As a result, while Tolstoy’s work embodies the devastating consequences of 
capitalist development as it affected the landed aristocracy and the peasantry, 
it does not register either the development of the bourgeoisie or the proletari-
at.
100
 This means that the historical period and its contradictions are not simply 
reflected in the artwork, as if the artwork held a mirror to its present, but are 
refracted by the selective or partial point of view afforded by the author’s ideo-
logical prism. But even then it is problematic to assume that the artwork simply 
reflects a part in the whole as if it were mechanically reproducing a knowledge 
of that social reality. 
This is where developing a Marxist kind of aesthetic-literary criticism, one that 
is different from and superior to “bourgeois criticism,” runs into problems, 
problems posed, in fact, by the writings of the foundational figures. In both 
Engels and Lenin, there is a tendency to appreciate “socialist” or materialist 
artwork as one that reflects social life in its reality, offers an accurate portrait of 
social relations, disrupts illusions about reality.
101
 This approach is also reflect-
ed in Lenin’s choice of appellation to characterize Tolstoy. More than once does 
Lenin call Tolstoy the “mirror” of the Russian revolution. However, this image 
98
 Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, p. 129.
99
 Ibid.
100
 Ibid., p. 127.
101
 Harold Osborne, “The Doctrine of Reflection in Soviet Aesthetics”, The British Journal of 
Aesthetics 23 (3/1983), pp. 252–58.
33
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
creates problems for Macherey because it suggests that what an artwork does 
is to offer a “reflection” in the sense of a “reproduction or facsimile.”
102
 Already 
in Lenin, the metaphor of the “mirror” stands not for an immediate reflection 
of reality (as in an accurate depiction of the life-world of the peasants) but the 
reflection of broader truths about the revolution. According to Lenin, Tolstoy not 
only failed to understand the revolution but he also stood aloof to it. In precisely 
both counts, he reflects the Russian revolution like a mirror because his attitude 
was just like the actual participants of the revolution who failed to understand 
it – despite their participation in the events – and stood aloof from the “real 
historical tasks” presented to them by the unfolding of the events.
103
Lenin finds Tolstoy’s works to be laden with “glaring” contradictions: on the 
one hand is his ability to portray Russian life, his protest against its hypocrisies, 
his critique of the state, property, and the church, his unmasking of capitalist 
exploitation and its brutal consequences; on the other hand, his preaching of 
submission to the masses, his doctrine of nonresistance to evil by violence, his 
articulation of a more refined form of religion, his advocacy of abstention from 
politics, and his moralization of political conflict. But these contradictions, 
argues Lenin, are not accidental. Rather, they express the contradictory con-
ditions of Russian life: on the one hand, the coming apart of the patriarchal 
countryside and the abolition of serfdom; on the other hand, the ambiguity re-
garding what order is taking shape in its place; on the one hand, the pent-up 
hatred of the peasantry, on the other hand, their despair in the absence of class 
consciousness and the politics of alliance and struggle with the proletarians 
that would follow from that consciousness. In other words, Lenin argues that 
Tolstoy’s contradictions express the contradictions of a peasant-bourgeois revo-
lution, one that is utopian, even reactionary, but with socialistic and critical ele-
ments. Overall, Tolstoy holds a mirror, acts as a mirror, to the immaturity of the 
oppressed classes in terms of their revolutionary preparedness and resilience.
In light of Lenin’s analysis, Macherey faces the difficult task of steering the met-
aphor of the mirror away from any connotations that the artwork presents an 
exact reproduction of reality or that what is reflected is the same as what the 
author saw in that reality. Wanting to avoid the temptations of a “mechanical 
102
 Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, p. 135.
103
 For Lenin’s articles on Tolstoy, see “Appendix” in Macherey, A Theory of Literary Produc-
tion, pp. 334–361.
34
banu bargu and william s. lewis
analysis,”
104
 and to emphasize the partial, selective quality of the artwork in re-
flecting its own historical era, Macherey contemplates alternative metaphors of 
a “distorting mirror,” a “broken mirror,” multiple mirrors, and a “blind” mirror 
(in certain areas).
105
 None of these does the work. Instead Macherey has to do a 
lot of acrobatics to salvage the mirror metaphor (though unsuccessfully) and to 
reconcile the contradictions among Lenin’s changing positions across essays. 
Over and over, he comes back to the basic point: “the mirror is not a simple re-
flecting surface.”
106
 Instead, he asserts, the image on the mirror is “deceptive.”
107
 
Exasperated, and exasperating, the effort to salvage the mirror metaphor keeps 
falling apart in the essay, leading Macherey to make two important interven-
tions. First, he moves from the conception of “reflection,” a connotation of the 
mirror impossible to expunge, however much he tries, to the conception of “ex-
pression.” Rather than saying that Tolstoy’s work reflects his age, considering 
the contradictions in its context and within the artwork itself, as well as their 
complex relationship, Macherey finally opts to assert that it is expressive of its 
age, and the ideology through which it lives its age, meaning “an indirect figu-
ration which arises from the deficiencies of the reproduction.”
108
 And second, 
Macherey points out that there is an ineluctable distance between the ideology 
and the artwork that expresses it, a distance that makes it possible “to escape 
from the domain of spontaneous ideology, from the false consciousness of self, 
of history, and of time.”
109
 Leaving aside the allusion to “false consciousness” as 
a slip of the pen, we can see how Macherey reformulates the problematic of art 
away from prior materialist concerns based on its relationship with history, with 
historically situated social conditions and their contradictions, toward a new 
basis in its relationship with ideology. What art makes visible in its “mirror,” if 
one can speak of a mirror at all, is ideology, its illusory nature, its “capturing” 
of subjects, its inevitable contradictions that ideology works so hard not to rec-
ognize as contradictions. Thus ideology is “not simply reflected by the mirror of 
the book; ideology is broken, and turned inside out.”
110
 Macherey suggests that 
104
 Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, p. 136.
105
 Ibid., p. 135, pp. 138–9, p. 143.
106
 Ibid., p. 137.
107
 Ibid., p. 141.
108
 Ibid., p. 144.
109
 Ibid., p. 148. 
110
 Ibid.
35
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
this can be understood as “an internal displacement of ideology” – “this is not 
ideology contemplating itself, but the mirror-effect which exposes its insuffi-
ciency, revealing differences and discordances, or a significant incongruity.”
111
With these two interventions, we can see how Macherey thus formulates the 
core of what will constitute Althusser’s approach to art: the expression of an 
internal distance of ideology from within ideology. Let us turn to Althusser. It 
will be recalled that in his response to Daspre, he defined art in the following 
terms: “What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, 
‘perceiving ‘ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing ), is the ideology 
from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, 
and to which it alludes.” His definition of art as “alluding” to reality can now be 
better understood as a choice against the highly compromised metaphor of the 
mirror and its attendant problematic of “reflection,” which, thanks to Macherey, 
Althusser can avoid.
112
And further, we find the idea of the displacement art enacts within ideology, 
when Althusser writes, acknowledging Macherey’s work and building on it: 
“Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a ‘view’ of the ideology to which their work al-
ludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an 
internal distanciation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. 
They make us ‘perceive’ (but not know) in some sense from the inside, by an 
internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held.”
113
When Althusser takes up the mirror, which he does in relation to some of 
Cremonini’s paintings in which he experiments with mirrors, it is no longer de-
ployed as a metaphor of how reality is reflected in the artwork but rather as an 
111
 Ibid., 149.
112
 A decade later, rejecting a simplistic understanding that literature presents a reflection 
of the material reality of society, Macherey and Balibar situate it as the result of a mate-
rial practice arising out of determinate social relations and intervene to distinguish the 
category of “reflection” in materialist analysis from an empiricist conception in which it 
is equated with “mirroring.” They argue: “The reflection, in dialectical materialism, is a 
‘reflection without a mirror’; in the history of philosophy this is the only effective destruc-
tion of the empiricist ideology which calls the relation of thought to the real a speculary 
(and therefore reversible) reflection.” Macherey and Balibar, “Literature as an Ideological 
Form”, p. 5.
113
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre”, pp. 222–23.
36
banu bargu and william s. lewis
opacity that separates a human from its own image. It is the mirror that “looks,” 
not the man or woman staring into it; it is the mirror that “sees” in a way that is 
indifferent to the particular man or woman staring.
114
 It is the mirror that refuses 
a story of genesis; it shows the relations between the objects and the human 
beings that they are in relation with but not their causes, only an “inexorable 
circle” of relations.
115
 This is why these mirrors need, or at least why Cremonini 
introduces, verticals that challenge and disrupt the circle of ideological recogni-
tion. These remarks echo Macherey’s final reworking of the mirror metaphor at 
the end of his essay on Lenin: “The mirror extends the world: but it also seizes, 
inflates and tears that world. In the mirror, the object is both completed and bro-
ken: disjecta membra. If the mirror constructs, it is in an inversion of the move-
ment of genesis: rather than spreading it, it breaks. The images emerge from this 
laceration. Elucidated by these images, the world and its powers appear and 
disappear, disfigured at the very moment when they begin to take shape. Hence 
the childish fear of the mirror which is the fear of seeing something else, when it 
is always the same thing.”
116
 We name our work after Macherey’s powerful evo-
cation of the image of the world in scattered fragments, broken by the peculiar 
“mirror” of literature, as it best encapsulates our effort of piecing together an 
Althusserian aesthetics from its remains – the scattered remains in the shadows 
of Althusser’s oeuvre. Disjecta membra: always fragmented, ever disseminating, 
both completing and breaking what Althusser is, complicating his legacy, and 
yet remaining distinctively Althusserian still.
The Internal Distances Taken
How do Althusser’s various marginal and occasional writings enable us to piece 
together his core insight, namely, that “materialist” art is distinguished by cre-
ating an “internal distance” within ideology? Here we mine his commentaries 
on different works to show how his theorization of that distance from the ideol-
ogy that they grow from and stage came to life in relation to different ideological 
formations with which he was engaged theoretically and critically: humanism, 
Stalinism and official Soviet ideology, and imperialism. Each of his interven-
tions in art focuses on selected artists/authors whose works enact that internal 
114
 Althusser, “Cremonini”, pp. 234–35.
115
 Ibid., p. 235.
116
 Macherey, “Lenin, Critic of Tolstoy”, p. 150–51.
37
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
distance from one of these ideological formations. His deployment of examples, 
though differing in the depth of engagement, works to demonstrate how materi-
alist art functions with respect to ideology. 
I. Critique of humanism: Cremonini, Bertolazzi
Technically, “The Humanist Controversy” lasted only one year, from March of 
1965 when La Nouvelle Critique published Althusser’s attack on “Real Huma-
nism” to March of the next year when the French Communist Party adopted a 
“Resolution on Ideological and Cultural Problems.” This resolution supposedly 
settled the intraparty philosophical debate between humanism and anti-hu-
manism in favor of the former.
117
 When one looks at Althusser’s whole career, 
it is clear, however, that this was just one skirmish in a long battle between the 
anti-humanist position in philosophy he sought to articulate and a moralizing 
tendency in art and philosophy which took many forms: liberal, bourgeois, ex-
istentialist, Catholic, Marxist, evolutionary, and personalist.
118
 
The generic position of humanism is that there is something intrinsic and spe-
cial about human beings which must be respected and encouraged. That which 
humanists identified as special varied: it could be that humans are free, creative, 
rights-bearing, altruistic, united in their existential situation, marked out by 
God for some purpose, or that they have a special and universal essence which 
they are in the process of realizing. In the early 1960s, after Stalinist “diamatics” 
had been rejected and when something like the last variant of humanism list-
ed above became the French Communist Party’s official philosophy, Althusser 
mustered considerable philosophical resources in order to combat it. 
Within the Party, the humanist position was represented by officials and intel-
lectuals such as Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre, and Louis Aragon. For good 
117
 William S. Lewis, “Editorial Introduction to Louis Althusser’s “‘Letter to the Central Com-
mittee of the PCF, 18 March, 1966.’”, Historical Materialism 15 (2/2007), p. 133; Frédérique 
Matonti, Intellectuels Communistes : Essai Sur l’obéissance Politique : “La Nouvelle Cri-
tique” (1967–1980), Editions la Découverte 2005, p. 71.
118
 Louis Althusser, “The International of Decent Feelings”, in The Spectre of Hegel: Early 
Writings, François Matheron (ed.), G. M Goshgarian (trans.), Verso, London and New York 
1997 , pp. 21–35; Althusser, “Marx in His Limits”, p. 12; Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: 
A Memoir, p. 179; Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, “Le mouvement personnaliste français des 
années 1930 et sa postérité”, Politique et Sociétés 17 (1-2/1998), pp. 219–37.
38
banu bargu and william s. lewis
reasons, these thinkers rejected the Soviet thought that had guided the Party 
during the post-war period and they were trying to modernize by appealing to 
potential members and allies beyond the core to which the Party had been re-
duced. In place of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, these “thought leaders” adopt-
ed an explicitly Hegelian-Marxist philosophy. Seeking pedigree, they traced this 
philosophy to Marx’s writings prior to 1845 when the concept of human alien -
ation and its dialectical development through history to a reunion of human 
beings with their full power and produce played central roles.
119
 Explicitly re-
jected by these Humanist Marxists was the “economist” thesis associated with 
Marxism-Leninism which held that the logic of production drives historical 
transformation. Also rejected was its corollary, which had it that all culture is 
determined by its relation to economic production. Though still alienated by 
capitalist exploitation and by its associated ideological superstructure, another 
common thread that united each of these thinkers was the belief that human 
beings can realize their full potential through voluntary acts of self-creation.
Who exactly was performing or leading these acts of self-realization and what 
they consisted of was not consistently identified by Party humanists: Garaudy 
argued that humanity, in its diversity, is in the process of realizing the human 
essence in different ways and that we can all learn from each other.
120
 His was 
a kind of “new age” humanism avant la lettre. Aragon and Lefebvre endorsed 
political struggle but they also thought that the “creative activity” of a cultural 
avant-garde could transform socio-economic and political relations and there-
by help to end humanity’s self estrangement.
121
 What united humanist Marxists 
most of all was the belief in a knowable essence to human beings. This essence 
and full freedom were yet unrealized and its expression divided among classes 
by capitalism.
122
 However, the idea of “Total Man” provided a normative meas-
ure of human flourishing against which conditions of non-flourishing could 
119
 Edmund Demaitre, “In Search of Humanism Marxism-Leninism”, Problems of Communism 
14 (5/1965), p. 19. 
120
 Didier Gauvin, “Un intellectuel communiste illégitime: Roger Garaudy”, Université Gre-
noble-Alpes 2016, pp. 297–97.
121
 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 2009, 
p. 50, p. 152, pp. 159–60; Lewis, “Editorial Introduction to Louis Althusser’s ‘Letter to the 
Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March, 1966’”, pp. 142–43.
122
 Richard Eldridge, “Althusser and Ideological Criticism of the Arts”, in Explanation and 
Value in the Arts, Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds.), 1st ed., Cambridge University Press, 
Cabridge 1993, p. 198.
39
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
be measured and towards the realization of which politics could be oriented. 
Further, cultural production, including the arts, could be mustered in its real-
ization.
123
 
 
In contradistinction to Marxist humanists, Althusser criticizes the notions of 
human essence, alienation, and the telic theory of history associated with its 
eventual overcoming as pre-Marxist. In place of these ideological concepts, he 
emphasizes the “mature” Marx and references him as the founder of a science 
of history rather than as the originator of a dialectical and telic philosophical 
anthropology.
124
 The assertions associated with this reading of the mature Marx 
are that – somewhere around 1845 – Marx abandoned Hegel’s philosophical 
method and Feuerbach’s philosophical anthropology and founded a materialist 
science of history. This science is based on the discovery that what it is to be 
a human being is determined by a culture’s mode of production and the role 
that one plays in it. Another of its discoveries is that there is no logic to history 
save for that it consists of class struggle. It also holds that modes of production 
and therefore human subjectivities and social relations are amenable to trans-
formation through class struggle.
125
 An addendum to this last claim relates to 
Althusser’s insistence that Marx originated a novel and correct science of histo-
ry. Specifically, and as explicitly counterposed to Marxist humanism, it is that 
this transformation is only possible with a scientific understanding of the mate-
rial forces which shape humans and their socio-economic relations.
126
Given this background, we can better understand the interventions into art 
criticism Althusser undertook in close proximity to the humanist controversy 
and which were shaped by the battles within Marxist philosophy and aesthet-
ics which gave rise to that conflict during the first half of the 1960s.
127
 The first 
of these interventions is Althusser’s defense of the Piccolo Teatro’s 1962 pro -
123
 G. M. Goshgarian, “Introduction to The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, 1966–
67”, in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, 1966–67, Verso, London and New 
York 2003, pp. xi–lxi; Lewis, “‘Editorial Introduction to Louis Althusser’s “Letter to the 
Central Committee of the PCF, 18 March, 1966’”, pp. 142–45.
124
 Matonti, Intellectuels Communistes : Essai Sur l’obéissance Politique : “La Nouvelle Cri-
tique” (1967-1980), p. 81.
125
 Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital”, pp. 122–3.
126
 Althusser, For Marx, p. 168, p. 229.
127 
Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, pp. 58–60.
40
banu bargu and william s. lewis
duction in Paris of Bertolazzi’s 1893 melodrama El nost Milan. The second is 
his take on the retrospective exhibition of Leonardo Cremonini’s paintings at 
the 1964 Venice Biennale. Though markedly different in terms of subject matter, 
both focus on artists whose works consciously and intentionally enact an inter-
nal distance from humanist ideology and, thereby, reveal the real condition of 
human beings.
128
 With El nost Milan, Althusser argues that spatial and temporal 
dislocations inherent to the play’s structure accomplish this work. By way of 
contrast, Althusser traces the diachronic development of Cremonini’s painterly 
depictions of human figures in order to make the case that Cremonini progres-
sively decenters the human subject. The result, he claims, is that the viewer’s 
ideological identification with the figures depicted becomes complicated.
129
 
To take El nost Milan first and to situate it in context, Althusser wished to defend 
its importance and aesthetic worth from the disregard of Parisian audiences and 
from the contumely of the capital’s critics.
130
 Apparently, when they were not 
bored, these critics could only see in Piccolo Teatro’s production the tired revival 
of a dead form: the melodrama, which makes use of stock characters, dramat-
ic, well-trodden plots, and outsized emotion to engage its audience.
131
 Rather 
than viewing the work as passé, Althusser emphasizes the tension within the 
piece between this passé form and its staging. In order to capture this strain, 
Althusser analyzes the play in terms of four dislocations. The first two dislo-
cations, spatial and temporal, are “latent” within the play and brought to the 
fore by Giorgio Strehler’s directorial choices. The latter two are the result of the 
dislocations made visible by the play and take place both on stage–in the form 
of a character’s transformation–and beyond the footlights in the audience’s 
consciousness.
132
The temporal dislocation in the play is affected by the décalage between the 
two historical senses of time that the piece juxtaposes. The first temporality 
Althusser labels “tragic time.” It is the procession typical of the melodrama, 
that duration within which history takes place and dramatic events unfold. 
Interestingly, and in a move that may render the first-reading of this essay diffi-
128
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, pp. 157–66.
129
 Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)”, p. 142.
130 
Ibid., p. 141.
131
 Ibid., p. 131.
132
 Ibid., p. 151; Pippa, “A Heap of Splinters On the Floor”, p. 14.
41
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
cult for a Marxist reader who thinks dialectics are generally positive, Althusser 
labels this time “dialectical” before adding that the dialectical transformation 
characteristic of this duration is that of a “false dialectic.” By the end of the 
piece, this false dialectic will be compared to the genuine dialectical transfor-
mation of the heroine’s and audience’s consciousness.
133
 
In the case of El nost Milan, the actual events of the melodrama and, therefore, 
of tragic time and of the “false dialectic” take up very little of the running time. 
As one of the Parisian critics put it, the plot revolves around three characters: 
“the vengeful father, the punished crook, and the young woman who sticks to 
her guns.”
134
 Ostensibly, the play is about a young woman, Nina, torn between 
the designs of two men. The first, her father Peppon–a “fire-eater” in the circus, 
wishes to spare his daughter from the harshness of lumpen-proletariat life. He 
wants to raise her right and to keep her from falling in with a criminal element. 
This possibility and this class is represented by Nina’s love interest, the clown 
and crook Carloue, nick-named “the Togasso.” Like any melodramatic villain 
worthy of a nick-name, the Togasso’s intention is to seduce the virtuous young 
woman and to use her for his own nefarious ends. This conflict is introduced at 
the end of the first act in “lightning” fashion and, indeed, Carloue does abuse 
Nina in the second. With Togasso’s murder by Peppon, the dispute over Nina’s 
path is resolved at the end of the second act with the same alacrity. The drama 
of the third act is consumed with Nina’s reaction to her father’s confession that 
he has killed for the sake of her honor and her rejection of the bourgeois re-
spectability so tragically gifted for a sub-proletarian life of her own choosing.
135
 
Like the déroulement of the events of the first and second act, this climax and 
denouement takes up only a few minutes of the third acts’ running time. 
So where in this story is the tragic dialectic and why is it false? Althusser is 
subtle in his analysis and points out that the dialectic exists in multiple places: 
onstage, in the audience, and in the history of the melodramatic form. Onstage, 
it is represented in the figure of the father, Peppon, who has invented for Nina 
“the fiction of an imaginary condition, and encouraged her in her romantic illu-
133
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 151.
134
 Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, “‘El nost Milan’, de Bertolazzi par le Piccolo Teatro de Milan”, Le 
Monde.fr (June 15, 1962).
135
 Roger Pic, “[El Nost Milan, Texte de Carlo Bertolazzi : Photographies / Roger Pic]”, image, 
Gallica, 1962, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b84200619.
42
banu bargu and william s. lewis
sions.”
136
 Likewise entranced by this fiction, the play’s spectators identify with 
the imaginary possibility of escape into bourgeois respectability and the father’s 
desire to bestow it.
137
 After all, don’t we all want the same thing for our children? 
The dialectic is then set in motion by the conflict between Peppon, who wants 
nothing more than the conventional “best” for his daughter: marriage, security, 
and respectability, by Carloue, who wants to use her, and a heroine, Nina, tossed 
between the two. Nina transcends this conflict, and thus provides an antithesis 
as well as a satisfying ending, but only in a tragic manner. This resolution is in 
keeping both with the conventions of the melodrama and the expectations of 
the audience. “Yes,” they say as they exit the theater, “life is just sometimes like 
that, especially if one is a member of the underclasses.” Later, in the essay “On 
Brecht and Marx,” Althusser will label this type of reaction a “fictive” risk. The 
audience takes pleasure in the possibility that their ideas about the world will 
be upset by the events of a play but, in the end, the drama only ever toys with 
this interruption.
138
 In the end, the members of the audience recognize the world 
they believe that they occupy in the logic of the play. 
Althusser, however, suggests that there is another reading to the play than the 
merely tragic and that, in Nina’s escape from her father, we see both tragedy and 
liberation from bourgeois convention. Stefano Pippa labels this choice an act of 
“disinterpellation.”
139
 It is the conduct of a subject refusing to recognize herself 
in the dominant ideology as it is represented by her father’s and indeed the au-
dience’s own wishes. What allows this choice, which is not quite free but none-
theless genuine, is precisely Nina’s eventual contact with “the real,” which, in 
turn, allows her to reject her father’s dialectical myths.
How is this contact with the real made? How do Nina and the audience which 
identifies with her both see it? Althusser attributes this perception to the genu-
ine dialectic facilitated by Strehler’s spatial and temporal choices. In this regard, 
Althusser repeatedly calls attention to the choice of the director to present the 
melodramatic elements as swiftly as possible and to have these events appear 
136
 Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)”, p. 133.
137
 Per Brandt, “Fiction et Philosophie. Les Notes d’ Althusser Sur Un Théâtre Matérialiste 1”, 
Revue Romane 1 (January 1, 1977), p. 37.
138
 Montag and Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx (1968)”, p. 147.
139
 Pippa, “A Heap of Splinters On the Floor”, pp. 131–32.
43
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
“in the wings, somewhere in the corner of the stage.”
140
 What otherwise fills the 
time and space of each act are the trivial doings of minor underclass characters, 
the “flotsam” of the past. In the first act they are interminably “discussing in-
dustry, politics, and, almost, the future, but only just and with difficulty.” In the 
second, we see another group of them barely surviving. In the third, yet another 
configuration of the Milanese underclass almost disappears into the walls.
141
 
One critic wondered if this imbalance between plot and depictions of the under-
classes stemmed from the director’s nostalgia for the realism of Eugène Sue or 
from a misplaced love for its Soviet variety.
142
 Althusser, though, tried to under-
stand what this juxtaposition accomplished. His verdict was that the diminution 
of dialectical time and space: the time of the story, and the augmentation and 
foregrounding of the chronicle of the Milanese sub-proletariat in their “wretched 
existence” expresses the dissociation or “absence of relations” between the two 
temporalities displayed within the proscenium.
143
 The ostensive subject, the trag-
ic melodrama is acted against the background of the realistic “chronicle” and, 
due to this proximity, the viewer naturally assumes that they must be related. 
If the spatial and temporal relations between the two were reversed and the 
events of the play given center stage, Nina’s story could function as synecdo-
che. However, the sheer imbalance between the compressed unfurling “plot” 
of the play, acted in the wings, and the time and space devoted to a chronicle of 
“discussions and disputes which are either abortive or reduced to nothingness 
by a consciousness of their futility,”
144
 suggest that Nina’s relationship to both 
worlds is more complex. While her father exists in lightning-tragic time and 
wholly identifies with the values which support the stories permitted to exist 
within it, Nina’s rejection of these values and affiliation with the wretched of 
Millan forces a different type of reckoning. Yes, as with all dialectic, there is a 
synthesis of the two times but this does not mean that they become identical; 
in the spectator’s head as, eventually in Nina’s, the two are held apart. On the 
one hand, there are the values and rules of the ideological world the melodrama 
represents and with which the spectator identifies. On the other, there is the real 
140
 Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)”, p. 138.
141
 Ibid., pp. 132–33.
142
 Poirot-Delpech, “‘El nost Milan’, de Bertolazzi par le Piccolo Teatro de Milan”.
143
 Kowsar, “Althusser on Theatre”, p. 465.
144
 Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht (1962)”, pp. 135–7.
44
banu bargu and william s. lewis
world of a sub-proletariat stuck in a post-Risorgimento existence. In these dislo-
cated worlds, the agency Nina exhibits appears as a “free” choice made possible 
by the perception of the real conditions of her existence. The effect of the spatial 
and temporal dislocations is, therefore, to reveal the melodramatic conscious-
ness of Nina’s father and of the spectator “as a veneer on a real condition.”
145
In the essay on the Piccolo Teatro, the terms “humanism” and anti-humanism 
are not mentioned. Despite avoiding the terms, it is clear that the false dialectic 
of the melodrama, the story which matches up with the spectator’s worldview, 
has all of the characteristics of a humanist ideology, albeit in bourgeois rather 
than Marxist guise. Represented by the father and occupying tragic time, this 
mystified consciousness recognizes that we live in a world of difficult circum-
stances and that we may be forced to make choices. Not unsophisticated, the 
tragic consciousness “knows” that it may even be the case that one’s status as 
a woman or as a member of the underclass makes these circumstances all the 
more difficult. However, by its own agency and actions, it also holds that it is 
possible to overcome these circumstances and to arrive at a less alienated state 
or, at the very least, to be true to oneself. Nina’s choice to reject these norms is 
not, however, presented as self-realization. Rather, it is presented by Althusser 
as a moment when Nina glimpses the true reality of the Milanese underclass 
and rejects the dream of bourgeois respectability. After this choice, Nina is in 
some ways more free than she was before. This is not because she has realized 
her essence; it is because she has stopped living in the world of ideology. With 
her choice to forsake her father’s gift, she thereby places herself back into the 
system of real relations which constrain her and which were previously invisi-
ble. By showing the “absence of relations” between the bourgeois humanist ide-
ology and the objective situation that stands as its contrast, Nina, Strehler, and 
the Piccolo Teatro, Althusser claim, exhibit to the viewer their true relation …  
united by a lived relationship.
146
 
Compared to El nost Milan in 1962, the relation of Althusser’s criticism to the -
oretical anti-humanism is much clearer in the case of Leonardo Cremonini. As 
with the Piccolo Teatro, Althusser is motivated to defend an Italian friend’s art 
145
 Ibid., pp. 138–39.
146
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 135.
45
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
against French critics who see it as a poor example of a tired form.
147
 However, 
if not by 1964, then certainly by the time the final French-language version of 
the piece was published in 1966, the conflict with humanism had become acute 
and Althusser’s response to it well-rehearsed.
148
 As in “Piccolo Teatro,” we see 
Althusser moving fluidly (and confusingly) between the artist’s intention, the 
formal qualities of the work(s), and the effect of the work on the audience. In 
this critique, however, the relevant temporality is not parallel and plural but lin-
ear and singular. In the progression of Cremonini’s tableaux and development 
as an artist, Althusser claims, we see him move from an ideological, humanist 
project, concerned with connecting humans to nature, to a genuinely anti-hu-
manist practice of painting where both the artist and the “human” are effaced.
149
 
One of the things that Althusser clearly admires about Cremonini’s paintings is 
that they are materialist. By this, he means that they are neither landscapes, nor 
portraits, nor narrative but, rather, that they consist of assemblages of material 
things: stones, water, rocks, beach balls, human bodies, mirrors, all placed in 
relation within the canvas. Though Cremonini’s early tableaux exhibit a kind of 
spontaneous materialism, Althusser contends that they are also recognizably 
humanist. This is a strange thing to say as these daubs began with the geolog-
ical–rocks and sea, moved to the vegetable–stems and sky, and progressed to 
animals–bones and skins. Humans were not the focus. Eventually, though, hu-
mans were added into these assemblages and connected by line to the scapular 
angles and slim stems. According to Althusser, what makes these works in their 
succession humanist is that they speak to an evolutionary origin: the human 
has evolved from nature and has a special place within it.
150
In the painter’s next stage, Althusser views Cremonini’s paintings as suggesting 
that the human figure stands in relation to the natural, just not as its end. A logic 
of natural progression of things to man gives way to a logic of differences among 
things and man.
151
 This difference is not just expressed in the human figures’ 
relation to the natural, which shifts from nest to cage, but in their relation to 
one another and to themselves. These intra-human relations are depicted as a 
147
 Ibid., p. 157.
148
 Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, pp. 57–58.
149
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 153, p. 165.
150
 Ibid., pp. 159–60.
151
 Ibid., p. 160.
46
banu bargu and william s. lewis
kind of incomplete circuit. In shabby rooms, Cremonini’s figures look at mirrors 
but see no self-image reflected. When they sleep, the mirrors look at them. As 
Sarah Wilson points out, this is all a visual representation of the “mirror stage”. 
However, the stage is not complete and, as any reader of Lacan knows, if one 
cannot recognize oneself, then one cannot misrecognize oneself as a coherent 
and whole subject.
152
 Therefore, the human-formed “non- subjects” depicted by 
Cremonini can only be what they are: objects in abstract relation to the other ob-
jects which circumscribe their space and their possibilities for action. Mirrors –  
men – water – rocks – wardrobes “‘depict’ the fact that the objects and their 
forms, though related among themselves, are only so related because they turn 
in the same circle, because they are subject to the same law, a law which now 
‘visibly’ dominates the relations between the objects and their men.”
153
After casting humans from any story of natural origin and then visually depicting 
them as neither being identical to their own notions of themselves nor respon-
sible for their own relations, Althusser argues that Cremonini and his paintings 
progress to one final visual critique of humanist ideology. Spying paintings from 
this phase, anonymous French critics at the Biennale labeled them hackneyed 
expressionism. However, Althusser views them as confirmation of his (and 
Cremonini’s) materialist antihumanism.
154
 Guessing what the critics were think-
ing, Althusser acknowledges that the “monstrous” “deformed” faces Cremonini 
paints in this phase could be read as indictments of modernity, of the pressures 
that deform the genuine human subject and which trouble its soul. In order for 
the spectator to identify with such expressionist portraiture, they need to see 
themselves in it. In this sense, Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon’s paintings of 
“deformed” subjects reflect back to us our anxious interior states. Inasmuch as 
we recognize ourselves in their figures, we reaffirm the universal human experi-
ence as the true subject of the painting.
In contrast to what expressionist figures signify, Althusser argues that Cremoni-
ni’s monstrous representations of the human face accomplish something alto-
gether different. Unlike the well-known visages of The Scream (1893) or Untitled 
152
 Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, Norton, New York 2006, pp. 
78–79; Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, p. 58.
153
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 160.
154
 Gen Doy, “Materializing Art History”, Art History (1998), p. 178.
47
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
(Pope) (1954), Cremonini’s faces are characterized not by deformity but by 
de-formation.
155
 In them, the “humanist-religious ideology of the function of the 
human face” is short-circuited. The viewer no more recognizes herself in these 
faces than does Nina’s father – still living through and in bourgeois humanist 
ideology – recognize himself in the historyless “flotsam” that surrounds him. 
Part of what makes portraiture appealing, even of the expressionist “ugly” kind, 
is that we recognize ourselves in it. Even dressed in purple, ermine, and crowns, 
painted subjects appear “like us.” What Althusser says about Cremonini’s final 
stage of painting is that he makes this identification impossible. Yes, we see 
figures that are recognizably human but these figures are not a representation 
of ourselves as we are used to thinking about ourselves: that is, as whole indi-
viduals endowed with agency and capable of free choices. Because of the way 
Cremonini paints them, we can only perceive these figures as human-shaped 
material objects de-formed by and fixed in relations to other material objects. 
The result of this dislocation of the human subject and the fixing of humans 
according to the relations which govern them evidences, Althusser argues, “a 
profoundly anti-humanist and materialist understanding.”
156
 
II. Critique of Stalinism and official Soviet ideology: Solzhenitsyn, Fanti
If one of Althusser’s ongoing preoccupations was the critique for humanism, 
another was to delineate a rigorous Marxist philosophy (first the quest of a phi-
losophy of Marxism, later turned into the quest for a philosophy for Marxism) 
purified from the distortions, deformations, and reductions that arose from its 
Stalinist inflection, and its further ossification at the hands of the official Soviet 
state apparatus even after the ostensible announcement of de-Stalinization. 
Thus, Althusser was particularly interested in challenges, theoretical, literary 
or artistic, to Stalinism, especially those that had the potential of bypassing hu-
manism, which he considered as a liberalizing influence on communist poli-
tics. Already in his letter to Daspre, Althusser cites Solzhenitsyn as an author 
who makes visible the “lived experience” of Stalinism, or what he refers to as 
“the ‘cult of personality’ and its effects.”
157
 The choice of Solzhenitsyn is guid-
ed by Daspre’s original letter, so Althusser does not delve into an analysis of 
155
 Althusser, “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”, p. 163.
156
 Ibid., pp. 163–64.
157
 Althusser, “A Letter on Art”, p. 224.
48
banu bargu and william s. lewis
Solzhenitsyn’s novel. Instead, while he asserts that Solzhenitsyn’s work offers 
a view of Stalinism from within, by effecting an internal distance from it, he re-
ally mobilizes the example to underscore the distinction between “reality” and 
“lived experience” of that reality. Arguing against an empiricist approach to art, 
and the reflection theory, Althusser writes: “This ‘lived’ experience is not a giv-
en, given by a pure ‘reality’, but the spontaneous ‘lived experience’ of ideology 
in its peculiar relationship to the real.”
158
 This move allows Althusser to put forth 
the argument that whereas art and science may share this “lived experience” as 
their object, the kind of knowledge produced by each on the basis of the same 
object remains distinct from one another. While Solzhenitsyn’s novel captures 
the effects of Stalinism as they have been lived by subjects experiencing it, it 
does not offer an understanding that science would: namely, “the conceptual 
knowledge of the complex mechanisms which eventually produce the ‘lived ex-
perience’ that Solzhenitsyn’s novel discusses.”
159
 Nor can it offer ways to over-
come the effects of “cult of personality” – which is the domain of politics.
Nonetheless, the assertion of Solzhenitsyn’s novel in making visible the ef-
fects of Stalinism is just that, an assertion that is unsubstantiated in the ab-
sence of analysis. However, a similar point is made by Althusser, this time in 
greater depth, in relation to the work of Lucio Fanti about a decade later. In 
1977, Althusser pens a catalog entry for Fanti’s exhibition in Paris at the Krief-
Raymond Gallery. In this short text, Althusser characterizes Fanti’s painting as 
“painting an ideology,” the official ideology of the Soviet Union, but he also 
emphasizes that this painting is not simply the reproduction of that ideology. 
Instead, he finds in Fanti’s arresting work the production of a “miniscule interi-
or distance, which destabilizes [that ideology], identifies it and denounces it.”
160
 
Fanti paints Soviet sculptures, paintings, and museum objects – personas and 
artifacts of official ideology – but in painting them he practices an “implacable 
décalage.” The ideology in the photographic images that Fanti paints is not im-
mediately available as ideology; instead, it has permeated not only the objects 
of the photographs – the statues and and paintings – but also the “symbolism 
of the figures, the framing, the type of landscape” in which these objects are 
158
 Ibid., p. 223.
159
 Ibid., p. 224.
160
 Althusser, “Sur Lucio Fanti”, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, p. 593.
49
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
found.
161
 “The photographers pictures [clichés] framing/composing the ideolog-
ical clichés at one-thousandth of a second,” writes Althusser. By painting the 
photographs of official ideology, is Fanti reproducing their clichés? Is he simply 
playing with them, while repeating them? Althusser answers these questions in 
the negative. Instead, Fanti enacts a décalage, exposing these images for what 
they mean. Through this décalage, he turns the usual into the unfamiliar, high-
lights the absence in the midst of presence, and unveils the ossification of an 
ideology which has permeated all facets of everyday life with its iconography. 
Offering a commentary that moves through Fanti’s various pieces, including 
the ones subtitled with Maiakovsky’s suicide note, Althusser notes how Lenin 
and Maiakovsky maintain ghostlike existences that haunt their own statues, 
insisting on a truth that cannot be wished away: “Words of a dead man, very 
dead, [yet] still alive in what he denounced.”
162
 Fanti makes us see the truth of 
Soviet ideology, beneath the constructed identity of the “new human,” the de-
politicization and emptying out of a vision – “these gigantic electrifying pylons 
of a Communism lacking only Soviets!”
163
 If the specters of marching workers 
above the young pioneers in his painting “Grandchildren of the Revolution [I 
nipoti della rivoluzione]” (1969) were not sufficient to capture the hope of a dif -
ferent future, there stood in his “Electrification plus the Sentiment of Nature 
[L’électrification plus le sentiment de la nature]” (1977) the ghostly presence of 
a huge pylon over a landscape, with an inexplicable light shining through the 
darkness surrounding the tall pine trees, encapsulating its lost promise.
164
Althusser’s reading of Fanti’s artwork could not have given a stronger endorse-
ment of how materialist art – even in its most ironic, poetic, and dreamy forms –  
has the capacity to convey a “reality,” which one may dare call the “truth,” of an 
ideology. Althusser’s piece, commending Fanti for “reveal[ing] the naked truth,” 
ended with the dramatic declaration: “only naked kings reign.”
165
 Reflecting 
Althusser’s disillusionment with the official ideology of the Soviet Union, his 
comments on Fanti appear as a necessary detour, a tragic coming to terms. In 
Sarah Wilson’s words, “Althusser’s self-investment in the Fanti preface may 
161
 Ibid., p. 592.
162
 Ibid., p. 593.
163
 Ibid., p. 591, p. 593.
164 
For Lucio Fanti’s paintings, see http://www.documentsdartistes.org/artistes/fanti/repro1.
html
165
 Althusser, “Sur Lucio Fanti”, p. 594.
50
banu bargu and william s. lewis
be read as an oblique detournement of the Communist genre of confessional 
‘self-criticism’ (originating in the first Moscow show trials). At an acute moment 
of political crisis and personal dismay, apprehending the possible disintegra-
tion of the global Communist system, Althusser was, indeed, using the USSR as 
a ‘necessary detour’ to speak of himself.”
166
 Of his disillusionment.
167
III. Critique of imperialism and peaceful co-existence: Álvarez Ríos, Lam
Finally, Althusser’s commentary on two other painters – Álvarez Ríos and Lam –  
are interesting in how it mobilizes their work as exemplars of a distanciation, 
this time through vocabularies of surrealism, from imperialism. Althusser’s 
essay on Álvarez Ríos, his first writing on art, is composed prior to the devel-
opment of his distinctive formulations as well as the influence of Macherey’s 
interventions. That being said, a retrospective analysis of his text in light of his 
later formulations, reveals similar insights, though lacking in the conceptual 
vocabulary that came later. Althusser attributes to certain painters an ability to 
transform a largely institutionalized (and thereby tamed) genre and pinpoints 
how Álvarez Ríos enacts this transformation. More importantly, the genre, in 
this case surrealism, has come to represent a geopolitical divide informed by 
the world’s political conjuncture. Writing on the heels of the Cuban missile cri-
sis, the ideological atmosphere is saturated by American imperialism and its 
defiance. This crisis should be understood against the recent and violent back-
ground of France’s war in Algeria, which had already raised significant ques-
tions about imperialism. In line with the PCF, to which Althusser had become 
a member in the late 1940s, Althusser interpreted American imperialism as the 
main threat in the Cold War, a perspective largely shaped by the hegemony of 
the USSR within the international communist movement. As a result, the PCF’s 
ambivalent and delayed response to the Algerian War manifested in its adoption 
of a general call for peace. As Bécquer Seguín has also argued, the Algerian 
166
 Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, pp. 120–21.
167
 This disillusionment and his growing criticism of the PCF are reflected in Althusser’s more 
well-known writings from the same period. See, for example, Louis Althusser, “On the 
Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party”, NLR I/104, (July–August 1977”), 
pp. 3–22; Louis Althusser, “The Crisis of Marxism”, Marxism Today (July 1978), p. 215; Louis 
Althusser, “Marxism Today”, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scien-
tists & Other Essays, Gregory Elliott (ed.), Verso, London and New York 1990, pp. 267–80; 
Althusser, “Marx in His Limits”; Louis Althusser, “Some Questions Concerning the Crisis 
of Marxist Theory and of the International Communist Movement”, Historical Materialism 
23 (1/2015), pp. 152–78.
51
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
war had led French surrealism into a crisis, compounded with the leftwing am-
bivalence about decolonization.
168
 In this conjuncture of the height of the Cold 
War, Álvarez Ríos’s cultural biography as a young Cuban painter coming to Paris 
prompted Althusser’s sympathies, according to Sarah Wilson, as well as a cata-
logue preface by “the Surrealist doyen Jose Pierre, who evoked magic, eroticism, 
spirituality,” against which Althusser’s politically charged take becomes even 
more pronounced.
169
In his essay, Althusser posits surrealism as a current that has largely become 
institutionalized and therefore lost its critical edge, even as he acknowledges 
how it lives on in the works of such painters as Ernst, Matta, and Lam. Against 
this background, he casts Álvarez Ríos as one of the “youths” in whose painting 
surrealism is “being born again.”
170
 The renaissance of surrealism against its 
death, ossified “like a church with its masses and its Latin, its syntax and its 
vocabulary, its lamentation of an old literary organ at the end of the nave, its 
passwords,” renews our faith – its prayers, which had become familiar mum-
bles, come alive again and teem with meaning. This is because in the hands of 
Álvarez Ríos, as with other non-European painters (Cuban and Latin American) 
such as Lam, Cardenas, Matta, surrealism is transformed. These painters could 
transform the language of surrealism because of “the effect produced by the 
profound affinities with the living past of a world, with the matter of a working 
class life that is close by: that language does not have there the same meaning 
it had here.”
171
If one determinant of the ability of these painters to transform surrealism is their 
proximity to a working class reality, one that is also much more alive for them 
than it is for the “church” of surrealists, another is that history “there” is a “liv-
ing past,” an “open unconscious,” in direct contrast to the way is occluded and 
buried “here.” Althusser’s class-based antagonism sits over a geographic breach 
between a “there” – Cuba and Latin America – and a “here” – France, Europe – 
reflecting the difference between the new world, with its rising prominence, and 
the old world, ossified and dying. His comments reflect an acknowledgement 
168
 Seguín, “Mute Cries”, p. 100.
169
 Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory, pp. 53–54.
170
 Althusser, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos (1962)”, p. 110.
171
 Ibid., p. 111.
52
banu bargu and william s. lewis
that imperialism and anti-imperialism constitute the main ideological contra-
diction of the global political conjuncture, pitting the Western, imperialist camp 
against the socialist world. On one side of the breach within surrealism rests a 
proximate revolutionary history, a discourse of freedom based on the history 
of slavery and the revolutionary struggle to overcome it and transform society; 
on the other side only a conjuring of the specter of a fading and domesticated 
history – “the incantation of a lost, perverse history whose meaning one wanted 
to tame at all costs.”
172
 The new and the old, the south and the north, surrealism 
alive and reinvigorated and surrealism ritualized and emptied out: “Hence, the 
singular difference, so astonishing, between two forms of speaking the same lan-
guage: here, the tense speech of a freedom less delivered than called upon to be 
born; there, an almost naive voice that speaks of men and beings.”
173
Further, addressing Álvarez Ríos more specifically, Althusser likens the transfor-
mation he enacts in surrealism to his speaking French – a language “born before 
him” and a language that he was not born into. Álvarez Ríos’s voice does not sim-
ply reproduce the language he is speaking but transforms it “in his speech, his 
accent, his syntactic and semantic invention, in the transformation of these turns 
and figures.”
174
 This is how the language of surrealism avoids death – by being 
taken up by a speaker who can speak it in his own, foreign, way, bringing it to 
bear on the present. The result: “Everything is thus displaced.”
175
 In one of the 
few paintings he comments upon, Althusser writes of David’s Sling: “a crowd of 
brothers that merges with the shoreline of an island all the way to the sea, with 
their outstretched arms as their only weapons against the monster of a thousand 
cannon blocking the sky.”
176
 The references to “peace” and “freedom” echo the 
discourse of the PCF at the time, while also reflecting a “routine exoticism of the 
Third World,”
177
 characterized by references to a certain “naivete,” a “natural lan-
guage,” a “great harmony” between human beings and nature, a “happiness” 
that juxtapose it to the learned “abyss hidden in the night” that is Europe.
172
 Ibid. 
173
 Ibid.
174
 Ibid., p. 112.
175
 Ibid.
176
 Ibid., p. 111.
177
 Seguín, “Mute Cries”, p. 101.
53
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
Similar themes resurface when Althusser writes for Wilfredo Lam’s exhibition 
to be held in Nanterre in 1977 upon the painter’s request. Lam, Althusser writes, 
strikes a cord in him even at the first encounter: “Unbeknownst, it was already 
part of me.”
178
 And with each foray into Lam’s work, Althusser confesses that he 
discovers that Lam “had always preceded me.”
179
 Not only does Althusser reg-
ister Lam’s pioneering role in surrealist painting, but he also shows his respect 
for his legacy, joining Lam in the quality that he attributes his work: humility. 
A humility marked by nativity to a foreign land and its riches, perhaps even a 
“primitivism.”
180
 Lam has already articulated in his painting the sense of a dif-
ferent world Althusser is only coming to discover and perceive by the encounter 
with his work. Lam’s world is teeming with creatures, plants, animals, and hu-
mans; in it nature is alive, bodies naked, faces mute. The immediate presence 
of nature, raw, loved, vivacious, is implicitly counterposed to their absence for 
Althusser and his world. Lam reminds Althusser of something he knew but for-
got, something always-already and not-yet, a nature that already preceded him 
but also encountered for the first time, something entirely foreign yet, like a 
“miracle,” audible and recognizable, something to which he has already cor-
poreally surrendered. How otherwise can we understand the novelty and dif-
ference of the world to which Lam belongs and which he conveys: “this man, 
who comes to us from the end of the world, the other one, from the edge of an 
endless ocean, this painter who traces in such long or dense lines birds beasts 
flowers creepers jungles and humans never before seen, this foreign man who 
speaks in silence our unknown language, and we hear him.”
181
 It is because Lam 
speaks the language of the unconscious. But unlike Freud’s “uncanny,” that 
strange familiarity, Lam gives a “familiar strangeness.” This is because Lam’s 
art makes “his” world ours, without assimilating it into our own. He retains the 
strangeness, the otherness for us to encounter. That nature, foreign and alive, 
unassimilable, and uncolonizable, in Lam, we soon find out, is part of us, even 
if that part is buried deep in our unconscious. For Althusser, Lam’s distinctive 
quality as a painter resides in his ability to transcend the distance and differ-
ence between his world and that of the viewer. 
178
 Althusser, “Lam (1977)”, p. 113
179
 Ibid., p. 114.
180
 Seguín, “Mute Cries”, p. 108.
181
 Althusser, “Lam (1977)”, p. 114.
54
banu bargu and william s. lewis
Written in a much more personal register than his earlier texts on art, Althusser’s 
take on Lam is that his work nonetheless shares the basic quality of art – that of 
enacting a critical distance from ideology. What is this ideology? The answer to 
this question reveals how Althusser has moved in his political diagnosis in the 
supervening years. Now at stake is the ideology of a global peace, of “peaceful 
co-existence” and cooperation between the two camps.
182
 We can see this ideolo-
gy thanks to Lam, “because he lays it bare.”
183
 Althusser commends Lam’s abili-
ty to disclose the deep tensions that permeate this global peace, as a result of ac-
cumulated histories of violence and relations of inequity. Having characterized 
Lam as hailing from a different world, from the limits of that world, he conveys 
how Lam thus paints “the mute cry of a people crushed by centuries of history,” 
a world whose suffering and dignity he thus opens to us. Here we encounter the 
divide Althusser had formerly characterized surrealism as being marked with – 
the south and the north, the anti-imperialist shores of the Atlantic and the old 
Europe. Lam paints at the limits of his own world; he thus also paints the limits 
of Althusser’s world and the ideology that sustains their imagined unity. Lam 
unveils the violence that has attempted to oppress and humiliate his people, 
what has led to their suffering and then muted their cries. Althusser takes note 
of Lam’s defiance of that humiliation and violence as well as the ideology of 
peace that covers it. Lam is timeless – a true “master” – who stretches from the 
past into the depths of the present and yet he signifies a new world being born in 
defiance of the old. Althusser ends his note: “I discover him: I have known Lam 
forever. He was born before us, the oldest painter in the world: the youngest.”
184
 
Conclusion
So, too, we can write: We discover Althusser: we have known Althusser forev-
er. At once familiar and strange, Althusser’s scattered reflections on literature, 
painting, and theater allow us to piece together these fragments – at once intui-
tive and sophisticated, overdetermined and undertheorized, brilliant and banal, 
novel and predictable, reflective of the sharpness characteristic of Althusser’s 
pen while also dynamic, impure, and contradictory. Even after this charitable 
182
 A slightly more detailed version of the political diagnosis can also be found in Louis Al-
thusser, “Book on Imperialism”, in History and Imperialism, pp. 100–101.
183
 Althusser, “Lam (1977)”, p. 114.
184
 Ibid.
55
disjecta membra: althusser’s aesthetics reconsidered
reconstruction, there remain multiple issues with Althusser’s aesthetics which 
threaten its coherence with the rest of his philosophy and that limit its novelty. 
For us, an important limitation is Althusser’s reliance on notions of “great” or 
“authentic” art and on the related supposition that such art is created by great 
artists. Reading Althusser symptomatically, we can see this insistence as an ide-
ological holdover from a bourgeois theory of art, one that Althusser explicitly 
sets his aesthetic and political philosophy against. Not only that, we can see 
that these holdover notions compromise the ability of his aesthetic theory to rec-
ognize and make sense of the diversity of artistic phenomena and their effects. 
As such experiences are necessary to overcome existing ideologies and to put an 
issue on the political agenda,
185
 limiting the site of their production to great art-
ists, working in traditional media, with the support of traditional institutions, 
blinds the critic to artistic experiences which may be initiated neither by a single 
subject, nor occur in a traditional medium. In fact, these works may not even 
look like “art” endowed with the rituals of cultural recognition at all. It is our 
belief that such “everyday” and extra-institutional displacements, dislocations 
that enlarge and democratize the field of aesthetic production may also have 
that subversive and transformative effect on subjects viewing and participating 
in them as the plays of the Piccolo Teatro, the novels of Balzac, and the paint-
ings of Álvarez Ríos, Cremonini, Fanti and Lam had on Althusser. Inasmuch as 
these “everyday” and extra-institutional displacements achieve such effects, 
they may, thereby, help initiate radical political change. 
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