D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

MUTE CRIES
LOUIS ALTHUSSER BETWEEN

ROBERTO ÁLVAREZ RÍOS AND WIFREDO LAM

bÉCQuer seguín

On August 18, 1977, Wifredo Lam wrote a two-page letter to Louis
Althusser. By 1977, Lam had established himself as the most important
Cuban artist not only of his generation, but perhaps of the 20th cen-
tury. Lam was born in Cuba in 1902 to a Chinese father and a mother
of African and Spanish ancestry. He left the island to study art in
Spain, fi ghting for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War
and eventually seeking exile in France, where he would meet important
fi gures in the art world, including Pablo Picasso and André Breton.
Through Breton’s Surrealist group, Lam’s work reached an interna-
tional audience, and Lam maintained close personal and intellectual
ties to artists in the School of Paris and the New York School. But, in
keeping with his multifaceted heritage, his style—which blended such
disparate themes as orisha from the Yoruba religion, Cubism, and
Surrealism—never fi t comfortably in either school.1

Even before Lam and Althusser corresponded in 1977, it is likely

that they had already met in the 1960s. Lam had held three individual
exhibitions at the gallery La Cour d’Ingres, run by Althusser’s friend
Inna Salomon; his fi rst exhibition there ran from May to June of 1961,

Lowery Stokes Sims, “African American Artists and Postmodernism: Reconsidering
the Careers of Wifredo Lam, Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis, and Robert Colescott,”
in African American Visual Aesthetics: A Postmodernist View, ed. David C. Driskell
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 110–11.

doi:10.1162/ARTM_a_00179

93 93

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Letter from Wifredo Lam to Louis Althusser, August 18, 1977. Image courtesy of Louis Althusser/IMEC.

his last, from May to June of 1976.2 Lam asked Althusser in his letter
for a contribution to an exhibition catalog for an upcoming retrospec-
tive the following spring at the Maison de la Culture in Nanterre, just
outside Paris. Lam’s request was unusual. Althusser was a Marxist
philosopher of some renown, whose day job at the École Normale
Supérieure involved giving lecture courses and seminars on subjects
ranging from Machiavelli to Rousseau. He had become an influential
leftist intellectual figure following the publications, both in November
1965, of For Marx and Reading Capital. These were two collections of
essays: the first, individual; the second, collective, which included
essays from Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, among others.3
Within French Marxism, he had effectively taken the baton from Jean-
Paul Sartre.4 But Althusser’s work circulated well beyond French, or
even European, borders. Thanks to journals such as Pasado y Presente,

2 Michel Leiris, Wifredo Lam (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1970), iii.
3

See Louis Althusser, For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 2005); Louis
Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière, eds.,
Reading Capital: The Complete Edition [1965], trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach
(London: Verso, 2016).
Gregory Elliot masterfully outlines this intellectual history, which also includes Claude
Lévi-Strauss and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his Althusser: The Detour of Theory, 2nd ed.
(Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1–53.

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in Argentina, or Historia y Sociedad, in Mexico, and publishing houses
such as Siglo XXI, his books and essays “circulated as required reading
among Mexican, Argentine, Chilean, Cuban intellectuals” from the
second half of the 1960s onward.5 His writings, which were quickly
translated, reached broad swaths of the New Left in Latin America and
reshaped important debates over populism, the reception of Gramsci,
or anti-Stalinist readings of Marx.6

Althusser’s structural Marxism would also influence later genera-
tions of art historians, ranging from T. J. Clark to Hal Foster, despite
the fact that he had very rarely written on art.7 By the time of his death
in 1990, he had only penned five essays on the subject.8 The irony of
asking a philosopher who, in many respects, only wrote on a narrow
range of subjects was not lost on Lam. He writes in the letter, “Aimé
Césaire, García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Sebastián Gash, and Alain
Jouffroy will contribute to the catalog.” It appears as though the refer-
ences to Césaire, García Márquez, and Carpentier were included in
order to sweeten the request. It is likely that Althusser had met the
writers during one of their many trips to Paris. Lam, Césaire, and
Carpentier also shared strong, though often fraught, connections with
the French Communist Party (PCF), of which Althusser had been a

Jaime Ortega Reyna, “‘El cerebro de la pasión’: Althusser en tres revistas mexicanas,”
Revista Izquierdas 25 (2015): 143.
For Althusser’s reception in Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina, see Jaime Ortega Reyna,
“Incendiar el océano: Notas sobre la(s) recepción(es) de Althusser en Cuba,” De Raíz
Diversa 2, no. 4 (2015): 129–53; Marcelo Starcenbaum, “El marxismo incómodo: Althusser
en la experiencia de Pasado y Presente (1965–1983),” Revista Izquierda 11 (2011): 35–53; and
Anna Popovitch, “Althusserianism and the Political Culture of the Argentine New Left,”
Latin American Research Review 49, no. 1 (2014): 203–22.
T. J. Clark’s development of social art history owes a great deal to his desire to distance
his version of Marxism from Althusser’s. See T. J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave
Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 9–20.
See also Keith P. F. Moxey, “Semiotics and the Social History of Art,” New Literary History
22, no. 4 (1991): 985–99; and T. J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith, “Why Art Can’t
Kill the Situationist International,” October 79 (1997): 23–24. Hal Foster, The Return of
the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1–32.
The essays on art include “A Young Cuban Painter before Surrealism: Álvarez-Ríos”
(1962), “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract” (1966), “A Letter on Art in Reply to André
Daspre” (1966), “On Lucio Fanti” (1977), and “Lam” (1977), the first and last of which are
translated here. See Louis Althusser, “A Letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre” and
“Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben
Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 221–28, 229–42. In addition to his
essays on art, Althusser published several essays on theater during the same period. See
Louis Althusser, “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht” [1962], in For Marx, 129–
51; and Louis Althusser, “On Brecht and Marx,” trans. Max Statkiewicz, in Warren
Montag, ed., Louis Althusser (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 136–49.

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member since 1948.9 But Lam’s
letter to Althusser might also have
been meant as a subtle challenge—
a petition to return, in a sense, to a
subject he’d thought about nearly
fifteen years earlier.

Althusser’s first writing on
art appeared in 1962, and his first
subject was another Cuban
Surrealist, the painter Roberto
Álvarez-Ríos. Published in the
Communist literary periodical Les
Lettres françaises in its November 29,
1962, edition, Althusser’s essay
“A Young Cuban Painter before
Surrealism: Alvarès Rios” reviews
Álvarez Ríos’s first major exhibition,
which took place in the gallery
La Cour d’Ingres.10 The eponymous
solo exhibition, which lasted from
November 21 through December 20,
was organized by Géo Dupin—sister
of the French-Mexican Surrealist
Alice Rahon—and displayed twenty-
five of his works.11 José Pierre, a
member of André Breton’s postwar
Surrealist group, wrote the preface
to the catalog, highlighting

“Un jeune peintre cubain devant le surréalisme: Alvarès Rios,” 1962.

Art review, Les Lettres françaises, Nov. 29–Dec. 6, 1962. Image courtesy

of Cornell University Library.

Aimé Césaire coincided with Althusser in the PCF from 1948 to 1956, visiting Paris often
while he served as a deputy to the French National Assembly. See, for example, Gregson
Davis, Aimé Césaire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 65–67. Alejo
Carpentier also visited Paris often, before establishing himself there in 1967 as Cuba’s
Minister-Counselor to France. Roberto González Echevarría describes his duties as a
“roving cultural attaché” and narrates some of his travels to and from Paris. See Roberto
González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 30, 34–38, 213–14.

10 Roberto Álvarez Ríos’s surname was spelled incorrectly as “Alvarès Rios” in the title of
Althusser’s article. In our English translations, we have corrected with proper diacritics.

11 Álvarez Ríos: Peintures, exhibition organized by Géo Dupin (Paris: Galerie “La Cour

d’Ingres,” 1962), exhibition program; courtesy of the John and Mable Ringling Museum
of Art Library.

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Álvarez Ríos’s use of “primordial and innocent forms” as a metaphor
for creation.12 Yet, for Pierre, the artist avoids the temptation of conde-
scension. Álvarez Ríos, he writes, “does not seek to impose by burn-
ings, genocide and rape of conscience,” conceits so common to many
creation metaphors; he instead seeks “a true renaissance, which would
discard the scum of humanity.”13

Álvarez Ríos had recently moved to Paris from Havana. Born
in 1932, he studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San
Alejandro from 1949 to 1955. In 1958, he moved to Paris in order to
study drawing and painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des
Beaux-Arts, taking part in the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris in both
1959 and 1961, before the solo exhibition at La Cour d’Ingres in the
winter of 1962. By the time that Althusser’s essay appeared in print in
late November, the two had already met. Álvarez Ríos’s brother, a law-
yer who worked for UNESCO in Paris, had met Althusser over dinner
about a month earlier, on October 27, at the height of the Cuban Missile
Crisis. Also in attendance at the dinner were Althusser’s wife, Hélène,
Claudine Fitte, a French translator of the Peruvian writers Jose María
Arguedas and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, and Pierre Gaudibert, who
would later become an influential curator of contemporary art at the
Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.14 Not long after that meeting,
Althusser would invite Álvarez Ríos and his wife over for dinner and
learn that “Rios works in a basement at the Cité universitaire, in a single
room (he’s married), with no space, almost no light.”15

12
13
14

José Pierre, “A l’étonnement du colibri,” in Álvarez Ríos.
Pierre, “A l’étonnement du colibri.”
Louis Althusser to Franca Madonia, October 27, 1962, Lettres à Franca (1961–1973), ed.
François Matheron and Yann Moulier Boutang (Paris: STOCK/IMEC, 1995), 261. Two
more letters in this collection reference Althusser’s relationship with Álvarez Ríos.
See Louis Althusser to Franca Madonia, December 1, 1962, and December 10, 1962, in
Althusser, Lettres à Franca, 289, 294. The second of the letters was originally written in
Italian. Pierre Gaudibert was instrumental in introducing Althusser to a number of art-
ists, including Leonardo Cremonini, the subject of one of his essays on art. See Sarah
Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2010), 51. Gaudibert’s influence on contemporary art curating in France has
received more attention of late, thanks in large part to Wilson’s work. See Wilson, Visual
World, 25, 36, 104–6, 192–93. For a study focused more on institutional history, see
Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of
Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 41,
54–56.
The dinner is referenced in Wilson, Visual World, 222. All citations of Althusser’s
Álvarez Ríos and Lam essays, as well as of Lam’s letter to Althusser, refer to the transla-
tions in the present issue.

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In his essay, Althusser sees in the work of Álvarez Ríos the
“[f]reedom to denounce slavery; to exalt the revolutionary struggle . . . ;
to invoke a future peace.” Freedom and peace, especially, appear to be
the structuring principles that, for Althusser, guided Álvarez Ríos’s
political intervention in art. The humanist language of “freedom” and
“peace,” which might sound peculiar to most readers of Althusser,
points to his own intellectual history, which began in Christianity,
before passing through Hegel, and culminated in structural Marxism.
The Álvarez Ríos essay captures Althusser in the midst of self-criticism,
still holding on to terms from humanism, yet embracing a structural
Marxism centered on ideology critique. During the early 1960s, the
PCF had become embroiled in a querelle du humanisme, pitting existen-
tialism against Marxism and, implicitly, the iconic but aging Sartre
against the young and ambitious Althusser. Althusser’s first public
pronouncement on the debate, “Marxism and Humanism,” would not
be published until two years later, in 1964, and would take aim less at
Sartre’s version of existentialist humanism than at the new policy of
“socialist humanism” developed in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev.
Sarah Wilson has framed the early 1960s as a passing of the baton
from Sartre to Althusser in the world of philosophical writing on art in
France. As she writes in The Visual World of French Theory:

Althusser’s writing on art, compared with Sartre’s, marks a
change between two modes of representation and, indeed, two
different epochs. Sartre’s art writing continued within the mode
of an existentialist humanism which embraced not only Giaco-
metti’s figurative painting and sculpture in the 1940s and 50s
but also the semi-abstract informel work by Lapoujade and the
politicized expressionism of Paul Rebeyrolle in 1970. Althusser,
by contrast, moved from an early experiment with a “colonial”
late Surrealism to the advocacy of a “critical” painting where
the role of theory was important: Narrative Figuration.16

Yet, in 1962 a specific kind of anticolonial art and humanist vocab-

ulary to describe art connected Sartre and Althusser. Sartre, at the
time, had just written the preface for Robert Lapoujade’s catalog for
an exhibition of pieces that depicted torture and the Algerian war.
Althusser, meanwhile, was writing on Álvarez Ríos at the time that the

16 Wilson, Visual World, 40–42.

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artist’s home country of Cuba was standing between more than a cen-
tury of US colonial aggression and the nascent expansion of the Soviet
Union’s satellite states during the Cold War. Sartre’s and Althusser’s
language for describing art prized the blending of concepts such as
peace, freedom, and struggle, and was based on their shared under-
standing of Hegel and, by extension, the fundamental role of aesthetics
in philosophy. Just several years later, however, Althusser’s stance on
the so-called “humanist controversy” would shift dramatically, directly
impacting his writing on art.
Where “Marxism and
Humanism” had focused on
USSR policy, Althusser
increasingly clashed with the
Central Committee of the
PCF over what he called his
“theoretical antihumanism.”
The controversy came to a
head in a meeting during the
spring of 1966 and, by the
time Althusser’s most well-
known piece of art criticism,
“Cremonini, Painter of the
Abstract,” was published in
the winter of 1966, he had
changed the ending of the
article. Wilson notes that its
original conclusion, written
in 1964, had referred to
“man,” whereas the new end-
ing instead substituted “ideology” and structural concepts such as
“element.”17 “Peace” and other words from the Álvarez Ríos essay would
quickly drop out of Althusser’s vocabulary,18 while “freedom” would

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 55.

Roberto Álvarez Ríos in front of the Maison de Cuba in Paris, 1960. Photograph.

Artist’s collection. Image courtesy of Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory

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17 Wilson, Visual World, 62–63.
18 There existed in the PCF a growing resistance to the word “peace” following the Twenty-

Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1961. This resistance
primarily stemmed from those members whose politics more closely aligned with those
of the Communist Party of China, which viewed Khrushchev’s policy of “peaceful coexis-
tence and competition” as a capitulation to imperialism. Though Althusser was careful to
distance himself from Maoism, Gregory Elliot has argued that he was largely sympathetic
to this critique. See Elliot, Althusser, 5–11.

take on a new meaning following the publication, in 1967, of his essay
on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.19 The volumes For Marx and Reading Capital
would solidify this intellectual shift toward structuralism.

In the Álvarez Ríos essay, Althusser argues that Surrealism itself
was undergoing an important intellectual shift. Álvarez Ríos’s exhibi-
tion at La Cour d’Ingres, which featured such works as Vers une trans-
figuration (Toward a Transfiguration), for Althusser, “pose[d] anew the
question of surrealism.”20 Surrealism was thriving in countries such as
Mexico and Chile, where Remedios Varo, Roberto Matta, and other art-
ists were becoming household names. Yet, in France during the early
1960s, Surrealism appeared to be in crisis. The crisis was above all
political. The Algerian war, which had escalated into violence from
1952, pressed the importance of anticolonialism into the conscience of
French Surrealists, so much so that, in 1960, a number of them wrote
the so-called “declaration of the 121,” a statement that included more
than 200 writers, philosophers, journalists, trade unionists, entertain-
ers, and others as signatories.21 In a sense, the “question of Surrealism”
was the Algerian question by another name.

Althusser underscores an intellectual shift within Surrealism
whereby artists began looking to colonial contexts, such as Algeria or,
indeed, Cuba, for new political models of organization and critique. In
1962, Surrealism in France, Althusser writes in the Álvarez Ríos essay,
“is like a church with its masses and its Latin, its syntax and its vocabu-
lary, . . . it even has its prayers.” In other words, Surrealism had become
institutionalized and, thus, intellectually and politically atrophied. His
essay was a way to come to grips with Surrealism’s persistence as an
artistic vocabulary. As he asks in the essay, “Why should the freedom
of Lam, [Agustín] Cárdenas, of Cubans such as Ríos, not to mention
[Roberto] Matta—a Chilean—and other Latin Americans have bor-

19 Whereas in Althusser’s earlier writings on Hegel the concept of freedom “delivers a sub-

ject from his subjection,” his writings during the late 60s and 70s, consistent with his
argument in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” from 1970, treat freedom as
impossible to achieve. Louis Althusser, “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel”
[1947], in The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso,
1997), 90. See also Louis Althusser, “Rousseau’s State of Pure Nature” [1972], trans.
G. M. Goshgarian, Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 May 2016; Louis Althusser, “Rousseau:
The Social Contract,” in Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left, 1972), 113–60.

20 Emphasis in original.
21 Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002), 592–94.

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rowed this language? And, having borrowed it, was that freedom able
to transform it?” His answer: “Without a doubt 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.” In the essay, history
appears as one of those concepts tinged with humanism that Althusser
is still in the process of leaving behind. It sits uneasily next to the
structuralist approach to capitalist relations he would develop during
the middle of the decade. This is why Althusser here argues that mate-
rial history is a distant memory in Europe. Europe, he writes, suffered
“a lost, perverse history whose meaning one wanted to tame at all
costs.” History in Europe, he notes, was something that was not lived
so much as explained, guided by analyses of institutional arrange-
ments rather than those of the individuals who struggled against
them. It is as if the shifting meanings of language across time, for
Althusser, might register the material differences between such
regions as Europe and Latin America. He saw in Latin America a
reversed order of knowledge: history came from intimacy, embodi-
ment, and experience, not from the detachment of institutions. Such
an embodied view of history is certainly problematic, though consistent
with a certain intellectual discourse in France at the time concerning
the Third World. Althusser’s use of history in the essay on Álvarez
Ríos, in line with Sartre’s and others’ humanism, posits human agency
as its motor. One can see this especially in Althusser’s schematic,
which pits Álvarez Ríos and other Latin American artists against the
church of French Surrealism, human agency against institutional
detachment. Althusser was in the midst of disowning this view of his-
tory. Essays such as “On the Young Marx” (1961) began to sketch his
critique of various strains in Marxism that posited a subject to history.
Althusser argued instead that history was a process without a subject.
In the Álvarez Ríos essay, he still praised Latin American art for
grappling with the fundamental materialism of “men and nature, of
slaves and masters, of death and freedom.” Such typologies unwittingly
reified the intellectual hierarchies between Latin America and Europe.
Like many philosophers and intellectuals of his day, Althusser partook
in the routine exoticism of the Third World. Latin Americans, in
Althusser’s telling, used “natural language” and the “discourse of a
nascent history” in their Surrealist paintings. At one moment in the
essay, he describes a painting’s “great harmony among men, skies,

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Roberto Álvarez Ríos, The Universal Dove of Peace, Paris, 1960. Oil on canvas. 130 x 197 cm. 1961. Artist’s collection.

Image courtesy of Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 54.

birds, and women; in a word, happiness.” Althusser’s essay on Álvarez
Ríos paints a picture of a preserved primordial utopia amidst capital-
ism’s alienated dystopia. An artist like Lam, in fact, would have been
the first to challenge such an argument. His interest in Afro-Cuban
subjects ranging from cosmology to kinship can be said to have
stemmed from mainstream Cuban society’s rejection of them during
the 1940s and 50s, and not from their overwhelming presence. Yet
what remains important to note about Althusser’s framing of what,
at first glance, appeared to be a curiously humanist argument is its
structure. “His text,” writes Wilson, “constantly uses the dialectical
play of concepts.”22 The dialectical structure, albeit filled with Hegelian
themes, appears central to understanding Althusser’s shift from an
early, Hegelian Marx to a structuralist Marx. The dialectic again
appeared in Althusser’s work the following year in a text related to
art: a series of conversations he shared with Leonardo Cremonini, pub-
lished anonymously in the monthly Révolution in 1963. For Althusser,
Cremonini’s was “engaged art reflecting the dialectic of the modern
world.”23 It is safe to assume that Althusser would have made the same
claim about Álvarez Ríos.

22 Wilson, Visual World, 55.
23

Leonardo Cremonini and “X,” “Artisanat populaire et artisanat colonisé,” Révolution
(November 1963): 76–79; cited in Wilson, Visual World, 57.

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Perhaps Althusser’s most striking claim in the Álvarez Ríos article

concerns language. He emphasizes the importance of “the singular
difference, so astonishing, between two forms of speaking the same lan-
guage.”24 The language here is Surrealism, and the two forms of speak-
ing it amount to French Surrealism and Latin American Surrealism.
Key to Althusser’s claim is Álvarez Ríos’s fluency in both. “Such is
Ríos’s moving charm,” Althusser continues. “He ‘speaks’ surrealist in
the same way that he ‘speaks’ French: as a language born before him.”
Not unlike his embodied view of history, language here plays an impor-
tant role in connecting disparate material conditions. For Althusser,
Álvarez Ríos’s intimate familiarity with French Surrealism makes his
adoption and transformation of it all the more significant. The same
might be said of Lam, Matta, Cárdenas, and other Latin American
Surrealists who traveled extensively and became well acquainted with
the movement’s evolution in Paris. The anticolonial turn in Surrealism
owes a great deal to them. Álvarez Ríos’s 1962 exhibition, for example,
connected the Latin American and African struggles through works
such as L’Afrique en question. Yet Althusser also writes about “the appli-
cation of his [Álvarez Ríos’s] voice to that language [of Surrealism]: in
his speech, his accent, his syntactic and semantic invention.” Thus, the
essay retains some basic humanist assumptions, such as the singular
ability of individuals to transform such structural aspects of society as
language—assumptions that would all but fall out of his thinking by
the end of the decade.

A rather different Althusser responded to Lam’s letter on October
13, 1977, just over two months after receiving it. Althusser’s return let-
ter contained only his two-page typed manuscript of the requested cata-
log essay, which he titled simply “Lam.” The retrospective in Nanterre,
scheduled for that April, would eventually be canceled. It is unclear
why.25 The exhibition catalog would have featured Althusser’s essay
alongside essays from Aimé Césaire, Gabriel García Márquez, and
Alejo Carpentier. Lam, in fact, had reconnected with García Márquez

24 Emphasis in original.
25

In August of 1978, Lam suffered a massive stroke, paralyzing the left side of his body,
while working in Albissola, Italy. It appears, however, that he was in very good health
until then. See Gerardo Mosquera, “‘My Painting Is an Act of Decolonization’: An
Interview with Wifredo Lam by Gerardo Mosquera (1980),” trans. Coleen Kattau and
David Craven, Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 3, no. 1–2 (2009): 1; see also Lowery
Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923–1982 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2002), 149, 163, 190.

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Roberto Álvarez Ríos, Human Beings, Wars, Invasions, etc. Enough!. Oil on canvas. 200 x 127 cm. 1965. Artist’s collection.

Image courtesy of Sarah Wilson, The Visual World of French Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 56.

just months earlier, in June of 1977, on the occasion of an exhibition of
his lithographs in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Havana, some
of which were created to accompany the latter’s poem “El último viaje
del buque fantasma” (1976).26 A few poems from Césaire and an essay
from Carpentier, together with Althusser’s, would see the light of day
following Lam’s death in 1982, when they were included in a catalog
accompanying three exhibitions in Madrid, Paris, and Brussels to com-
memorate and celebrate Lam’s work.27 In his earlier essay on Álvarez
Ríos, Althusser had explicitly referenced Lam. “In 1950,” he writes,
“still in Havana, [Álvarez Ríos] meets Lam, whose exhibition deeply
affects him.”28 The word “Lam” is italicized, as if emphasizing Álvarez
Ríos’s formative experience and Lam’s towering presence in Cuban art.

26 Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam, 198. See also Lam’s photo next to Márquez in Maria R.

Balderrama, ed., Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938–1952 (New York: Studio
Museum in Harlem, 1992), 97.

27 Louis Althusser, “Lam,” in Wifredo Lam, 1902–1982 (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1983),
118. García Márquez’s essay was not included in the volume. Alejo Carpentier, Untitled,
trans. Aline Vidal, in Wifredo Lam, 29–30; Aimé Césaire, “Wifredo Lam . . . ,” in Wifredo
Lam, 31; Aimé Césaire, “Conversation avec Mantonica Wilson,” in Wifredo Lam, 32; Aimé
Césaire, “Genèse pour Wifredo,” in Wifredo Lam, 32.

28 Emphases in original.

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But, for Althusser, Lam was not a stand-in for an outmoded kind of
Surrealism; he was actively partaking in its reinvention.

In his essay on Lam, Althusser again makes use of what appears to

be a humanist argument as a way of stating the importance of Lam’s
art for European thought. He argues that Lam gives voice to “the mute
cry of a people crushed by centuries of history. In humility such a
refusal of humiliation, in peace the tension of such a violence. This is
why Lam’s world is at once our own: because he lays it bare.” Unlike his
essay on Álvarez Ríos, Althusser’s text on Lam relinquishes the distinc-
tion that had earlier separated Latin America’s “nascent history” from
Europe’s “lost history.” Althusser here no longer laments Europe’s per-
ceived acquiescence to capitalism or celebrates Latin America’s sup-
posed safeguarded connections to nature and humanity. He also does
away with his previous reliance on what he calls “beings and their
forms” and instead locates the process of history at the center of Lam’s
work. But, as with Álvarez Ríos, Lam’s most distinctive ability, for
Althusser, is his use of language. Lam is “this foreign man who speaks
in silence our unknown language, and we hear him.” Whereas Álvarez
Ríos, for Althusser, had two forms of speaking the same language,
Lam has one that appears equally powerful: the ability to speak an
unknown language silently. Though Althusser himself gives few hints,
his reference to an unknown language points to Lam’s syncretic art,
which borrows from numerous traditions, not all artistic, yet belongs
to none of them. Nevertheless, as in his Álvarez Ríos essay, Althusser
identifies Lam’s language, which draws attention above all to a com-
mon experience of historical suffering, as that which bridges the iso-
lated corners of the international art world, reflecting back its own
ignorance and vanity. (He argues, repeatedly, that Lam’s humility is
key to comprehending his impact on art.)

Althusser additionally makes the case, again by way of language,

for understanding Lam’s art in Freudian terms. “Freud spoke of a
strange familiarity, of the uncanny. Lam’s great birds,” he writes,
“made of sun and night and more than birds, are strange perhaps, just
as those enigmatic beings stretched in the infinity of an air too rarefied
not to be the void.” The concepts that guide his analysis—“infinity,”
“the void,” and even “the uncanny”—are, above all, structural and not
humanistic. And one in particular, “the void,” suggests that, though
Althusser explicitly references Freud, he is channeling the thought
of his contemporary, Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s notion of the void is

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105

important for understanding his structural psychoanalysis. In his sem-
inar from 1959–60, commonly titled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan
illustrates his concept of the void with the example of the vase. The
vase, for Lacan, “creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility
of filling it. Emptiness and fullness are [thus] introduced into a world
that by itself knows not of them.”29 The idea is that the vase gives sym-
bolic form to the emptiness inside it by revealing its shape. In other
words, one cannot see the void itself, but rather its effects on other
things.30 Understanding Althusser’s essay with Lacan in mind helps
us reconsider his cryptic statement about Lam’s painting. The reason
Althusser calls the birds in Lam’s painting “more than birds” may be
because, for him, they signify the void. The birds give meaning to a
truth that cannot be perceived directly, but only by way of its effect on
other objects. The metaphor also works in reverse: Lam’s art, like that
of Álvarez Ríos and other Latin American Surrealists, has reinvented
the language of Surrealism, imperceptibly to those in Europe, yet
nonetheless consequentially as well.

Althusser’s adoption in the essay of the language of psychoanalysis

was—as it was throughout much of his career—tepid at best. His
unease with the language of psychoanalysis was also mirrored in his
incorporation of concepts that would, by the 1980s, become associated
with what he called “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the
encounter.” Though much evidence points to a continuation, these
two phrases name what at least superficially appears to be a major shift
in Althusser’s philosophy from the late 1970s until his death in 1990.
With the “materialism of the encounter,” Althusser identified in some
of Marx’s writings an idealist strand that he sought to overcome
through a subterranean reading of his materialist predecessors,
which included Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza,
Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein.
Throughout these writings, he dispensed with his earlier claim con-
cerning philosophy’s scientific disposition and instead, in an echo
of Lacan, asserted the void as philosophy’s only object. As in Lacan’s

Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–
1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992),
120.

30 For a thorough and lucid discussion of Lacan’s concept of “the void,” see Alenka

Zupancˇicˇ, “Ethics and Tragedy in Lacan,” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed.
Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 184–90.

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example of the vase, philosophy’s capacity, for Althusser, was limited
to describing the effects or patterns of truth rather than truth itself.
Philosophy’s only epistemological bases were the following three
theses: matter is all that exists, chance is the basis for its movement,
and new worlds are thus created by chance encounters. Nonetheless,
Althusser’s essay on Lam again catches him in the midst of a transi-
tion, this time from structural Marxism toward what he would, by
1986, call “aleatory materialism.” The essay finds him, while looking at
Lam’s Grande composition from 1960, questioning this new vocabulary
that he will eventually adopt. “[N]eed we speak the risky language of
the encounter?” he asks in the essay on Lam. His answer: “Better that
of the entrance,” which he justifies by arguing that this concept of entry
exists in “the nearest of spaces and the most familiar of worlds.”
Nothing else in the essay, however, clues us in to the reason behind his
rejection of “encounter.” As the 1970s turned into the 1980s, the term
“encounter” would prevail over “entrance” in Althusser’s writing. For
him, the “encounter,” by foregrounding contingency and defeating the
Hegelianism that persisted within Marxism, helped replace the teleol-
ogy inherent to even the dialectical materialism he had championed
just a decade earlier.

Of all his contemporaries, and even of predecessors such as Sartre,
Althusser is perhaps the one most associated with a paralyzing Franco-
centrism that absolutely failed to account for important political, histor-
ical, and aesthetic developments in the Third World. Such narratives,
however, are less true than they appear. For one thing, many intellectu-
als in Latin America apparently did not share this view. Althusser’s
texts became standard references for intellectual debates across Latin
America. His work reached Cuba, in particular, as early as 1966 thanks
to the journal Casa de las Américas and would become a valuable intel-
lectual resource for “breaking with orthodox Soviet forms that loomed
over the development of Cuban Marxism.”31 In Mexico, Argentina,
Chile, and Brazil, Althusser’s work was so widely translated and
debated that one or more so-called Althusserian schools of thought
emerged, often identified with one intellectual figure, such as Marta
Harnecker in Chile or Emilio de Ípola in Argentina.32

What follows are translations into English for the first time of his

31 Ortega Reyna, “Incendiar el océano,” 133.
32

Ibid., 136.

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107

two essays on the Cuban artists Roberto Álvarez Ríos (“A Young Cuban
Painter before Surrealism: Alvarès Rios”) and Wifredo Lam (“Lam”).
These constitute a small attempt to complicate such absolute narratives
and arguments, while acknowledging Althusser’s own perplexing and
often ambiguous relationships with their subjects. For instance, did
Althusser only encounter Álvarez Ríos and Lam because he frequented
his friend’s art gallery, was invited to particular dinners, or received a
petition from one of them via post? Though this may very well be the
case, we will likely never know.

But narratives are never so simple. While it was certainly true, for
example, that Althusser held the party line of the PCF against his own
Maoist students, who had found a reservoir of revolutionary thought in
contemporary China, it was also true that he participated, alongside the
curator Pierre Gaudibert, in the promotion and discussion of Third
World artists. Wilson has even asserted that he maintained an ongoing
correspondence with Álvarez Ríos.33 Throughout his writings on art,
including the essays on Leonardo Cremonini and Lucio Fanti, it is clear
that Althusser’s concerns about contemporary developments in the
Third World pervaded his thought, although they might not have
pervaded other subjects of his writing.34 As Lowery Stokes Sims has
argued, “European and Euro-American artists exercised a proprietary
ownership of the primitive, thus by implication accommodating the
power relationships inherent in colonialism.”35 Althusser’s essays on
Álvarez Ríos and Lam, though they sometimes trafficked in primitiv-
ism, were an attempt to upend this continuation of a colonial relation.
Perhaps the most important way in which Althusser did this was to
skew the relation between himself and his subjects unequally toward
his subjects. Unlike other philosophers, who wrote on very minor
artists, Althusser broke the mold by writing about Wifredo Lam. In
1977, Lam’s celebrity dwarfed Althusser’s by a wide margin; despite
Althusser’s influence in Continental philosophy and Marxism, this
disparity largely holds true today.

For many readers, what these two essays will offer, above all, is a

33 Wilson, Visual World, 222.
34 Sarah Wilson has pointed to Althusser’s engagement with the Algerian war by way of
Cremonini’s images of torture there, as well as with the revelations of the gulag in the
USSR by way of Fanti’s allusions to Moscow conceptualism. See Wilson, Visual World,
40–63 and 99–125.
Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam, 2.

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snapshot of two key shifts in Althusser’s thought—the first during the
early 1960s, from Hegelian Marxism to structural Marxism; the sec-
ond during the late 1970s, from structural Marxism to the “material-
ism of the encounter” or “aleatory materialism.” These snapshots
capture reflections from Althusser on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the
nature of language, and the unfolding of history, among other subjects.
But hopefully the translation of these essays will also present scholars
with an opportunity to build on the work of writers such as Sarah
Wilson in order to reconsider the marginalized role of the visual arts
within French Marxism and so-called French Theory more generally.

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