Pennies – A Linguistic Analysis of a Statement by Louis Althusser by David Brian Howard

To preserve formatting this article is a download .pdf file.

Artists Statement

Pennies is a short piece of experimental writing which is a form of montage allegorical sketch that draws upon the research of Walter Benjamin on the allegorical poetics of Charles Baudelaire.  I have juxtaposed the sacred and the profane in a manner that I think captures some of the elements of Benjamin’s poetic experiments on poetics, Marxism, and theology while linguistically unraveling one of the more romantic quotations from the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser.   My use of allegory is very critical of the deradicalized versions allegory developed under postmodernism and is part of a research project I’ve undertaken over the last several years to, in part, restore the full critical resonance of Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s concept of allegory for the twenty-first century.

Pennies by David_Brian_Howard