By Warren Montag
The e-book of Louis Althusser's autobiography, the longer term Lasts endlessly, shattered the parable of Althusser as austere structural Marxist. It not just illuminated the non-public lifetime of this public philosopher, yet urged that his formerly released works can be learn very otherwise. Louis Althusser is the 1st significant evaluation of Althusser's paintings because the booklet in French of millions of pages of essays, books and letters unknown sooner than 1990, and makes a robust case for a thorough reconsideration of his paintings within the gentle of this new fabric. Focusing fairly on Althusser's writings on paintings, theatre and literature (as good as these of Althusser's collaborator, Pierre Macherey), Warren Montag lines the contradictory improvement of Althusser's notion from the early sixties to his autobiography. extra fabric contains an annotated bibliography of texts through and on Althusser, and the ebook additionally includes a formerly untranslated essay via the theorist on Brecht and Marx.
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Additional info for Louis Althusser (Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan
Sample text
Art thus takes on a crucial role: only when the concepts of which ideology is fabricated are "displaced" (one rnight just as weIl say "deconstructed") will it be possible to think differently and set out on the road to a properly scientific knowledge of history. It was precisely this subversion of the ideology of the subject that attracted Althusser to the art of Leonardo Cremonini. In his paintings, according to Althusser, there are no objects, places, moments, or even people. The familiar world of discrete individual objects and beings with its distinctions between the animate and the inanimate, between nature and culture and therefore between the human and the natural is subjected to a pro cess of decomposition.
Those women at the dressing table do not see themselves though they look at themselves in the mirror, even that young woman does not see herself, though we see her naked desire on the back of the looking-glass she holds in her hand: it is their mirrors that see them, and see the circle of their sight, though the mirrors are blind. , 235) Cremonini's figures look into the mirror but do not see themselves, or they are se en without seeing themselves in mirrors: in his paintings there is no origin, no center except perhaps that deferred and displaced beyond the boundaries of the canvas.
The important characters and their interactions often occupy a corner of the stage. Further, they are dwarfed by crowds in Towards a New Reading of Althusser 25 the first act and by empty space in the second and third. The effect of the play's spatial and temporal organization is a profound decentering. We are made to feel and to see the weight of ernptiness on diminutive lives, of anonymous crowds on individuals. We feel the passage of a time in which nothing happens and nothing is said in a world where no honor is possible, not even through sacrifice because even sacrifice is deprived of rneaning; it is a world whose truth is "silence, immobility and nothingness" (Althusser 1969, 136).