Jonathan Fardy Althusser and Art: Political and Aesthetic Theory

BOOK REVIEW

London, Zero Books, 2020. 80 pp., £7.99 pb
ISBN 9781789043075

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books | November 15, 2020

The focus of Althusser and Art is the first phase of Louis Althusser’s intellectual project – the earlier ‘theoreticist phase’ – concerned with the theorisation of Marxist theory. For Althusser, Marxist theory had to take itself as its own object. This project to renovate the political practice of the French Communist Party by renewing Marxist theory is evaluated negatively by Fardy. Althusser is charged with fetishizing the corpus of Marx’s work, of failing to conceive theorising as a creative practice and of reaffirming a suffocating division of labour in which a theoretical dictatorship reigns over political practice. Althusser and Art returns to Althusser’s theorisation of theory and, although it isn’t actually a study of Althusser’s marginal writings on art, it discusses in some detail his essays on Carlo Bertolazzi’s 1893 play El Nost Milan and the painting of Leonardo Cremonini. It introduces a theoretical legacy of Althusserianism in the work of Korsch, Macherey, Rancière and Laruelle. This legacy becomes the search for an aesthetic form that could surpass the division of theory and practice.