"MARX 1818-2018: AESTHETIC TRACES OF HIS LEGACY", in "Studi di estetica", n. 12, 3/2018

This issue of "Studi di estetica" (12, 3/2018) also includes a small, special section on Karl Marx and his influence on aesthetics on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of his birth. So the title of this part of the volume, of this special section of this issue of "Studi di estetica", is: "MARX 1818-2018: AESTHETIC TRACES OF HIS LEGACY". It includes 3 articles from international authors who are well-known scholars of Marx and Marxist aesthetics. I provide here the absracts of the 3 articles: (1) This article carries out a detailed reading of Marx’s theory of sensual alienation in the Economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Drawing on recent French scholarship arguing that alienation should be grasped as a loss of objectivity (rather than subjectivity), I show that Marx develops a curious aesthetics of non-objectiv-ity. By reading the Economic and philosophical manuscripts in light of later, related arguments in the Grundrisse and Capital, I challenge the widespread notion, pri-marily associated with Louis Althusser, that the 1844 Manuscripts are guilty of a humanist essentialism. The aesthetics of (non-)objectivity can be seen as a battle-ground between two opposing corporeal tendencies of the worker under capital-ism: the unaccommodated body, shorn of all objectivity, and the (utopian) “totally developed individual” referred to in Capital, vol. 1. Ultimately, I argue that the 1844 Manuscripts contain the rudiments of a theory of aesthetic education which, read through the lens of the Grundrisse and Capital, can be interpreted as an emergent theory of cultural revolution. (2) In this article, it is argued that Gramsci’s conception of hegemony ought to be located not simply in the theory and praxis of Leninism but also in Gramsci’s read-ing of Machiavelli. By situating such a reading in relation to Nietzsche’s notion of will to power, it is possible to defend Gramsci’s political theory against some of the criticisms leveled by those who decry the “hegemony of hegemony”. Such a reading of the concept of hegemony enables us to understand the idea of “com-mon sense” as oriented towards the distribution and redistribution of the sensible. (3) Focusing on the Marxist theorist Anton Pannekoek, this article left communist im-pulses in 20th and 21st century aesthetic practice. The point of departure is Panne-koek’s theory of revolutionary mass action – centred around the general strike – and its aesthetic as well as political implications and repercussions. The text then proceeds to discuss the workers’ council as the nucleus of socialist self-organization and the avant-garde’s use and indeed fetishization of that concepts, and ends with a more speculative section on the potential contemporary relevance of Panne-koek’s writings on epistemology, the history of science, and evolution.