Crossing De Man with Althusser: Chiasmus and the Literary Theory of Michael Sprinker

James J. Paxson Crossing De Man with Althusser. Chiasmus and the Literary Theory of Michael Sprinker Michael Sprinker's work in criticism and theory can be divided into three general areas: first, there is the historical materialism for which he was best known, the study of ideology and history as the grounds for literary production following the thinking of Marx and Louis Althusser. His 1994 book, History and Ideology in Proust, represented a comprehensive achievement in this domain. Second, there is the devotion to the rhetorical deconstruction of Paul de Man which, though not the basis of a regime for reading as extensive as his Althusserian work, furnished Sprinker with a climactic subject for the history of modern theory—the production of de Man's sdence of literary critirism constellated around its esoteric master tropes. Third is Sprinker's continued though often ignored employment of neo-Aristotelian formalism in the mold of the Chicago Critics. Not only a statement in the history and theory of historicism and deconstruction, Sprinker's 1988 Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism proffered an equally comprehensive picture of the Chicago School's historical emergence. I consequently think that fuller understanding of Michael Sprinker's contribution to criticism and theory needs to see these three areas as never mutually exdusive. They reinforce each other. But each area as well seems to enable fuller mutual understanding; i.e., the paramount problem in Sprinker's theoretical work—how to define ideology while grasping the autonomy of that realm called "the aesthetic"—can continue to benefit from the analytical regimes, alternatively "Althusserian" and "de Manían," that he himself instituted with rigor. If Sprinker hadn't executed these mutually rranscoded systems of thought with each other per this or that hermeneutical project, say, Proustian narrative or the spedai matter of this brief essay, the paintings of Leonardo Cremonini, it is so as an instance of the "unfinished " nature of ideology's project, as Sprinker would finally conclude regarding Althusser's own understanding of history's trajectory and its related production of the aesthetic. And in the further spirit of Sprinker's own rigorous protocols for reading , I want to treat one of those unfinished topical problems by going further into the de Manían domain of analysis. That is, I shall go further with Sprinker's own response to Althusser's famous explanation of the "deformation " handled in Althusser's "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." I thus draw mainly on two important treatments of the Althusser-Cremonini issue in Sprinker's own work: the final pages of Imaginary Relations and the deliberate crossing over of the two theoretical domains I've delineated in one of Sprinker's final essays, "Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man" (which appears in Tom Cohen, et al., Material Events). In short, the way to a fuller 168 the minnesota review understanding of the relations of history, ideology, and the aesthetic, in the context of Cremonini as he serves both Althusser and Sprinker, comes via the de Manían road of the master trope—a road in this case tantalizingly evident but oddly suppressed first by Althusser and then by Sprinker. Coming as something of an anticlimax in Lenin and Philosophy (though it had priorly appeared in Lire Ie Capital), "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstracf' expresses Althusser's theory of an art that represents the reification of commodity relations among human subjects and institutions: the "deformed" faces of Cremonini's paintings (which verily defy description or ekphrastic recreation in any kind of art criticism in the first place) still indicate bodies that stand in relation to each other; these relations turn out to be the relations of capitalist production. This second-order allegory Althusser asserts in order to foreclose the high humanist symbolism of expressionism attributed by conventional criticism to Cremonini's blurred, swiped, and twisted humanoid and zoomorphic figures. Rather, Cremonini's "faces corroded by the air, gnawed and seemingly amputated" (LP 234) are profoundly material and materialist; they depict not personalities or souls in some metaphysical state, but "the abstract relations which constitute [humans in their] being" (240). They suffer, thus, from a structural property—deformation, not...