Althusser’s Authorless Theater

In his commentary on what he calls Althusser’s dramaturgy, Étienne Balibar notes the importance of theater as a metaphor and in its literal, material existence as an organized space in which both visibility and invisibility are staged. This essay attempts to explore the importance of the figure of machinery in Althusser’s work: stage machinery but also the machinery and apparatuses by which the world of subjection is simultaneously staged and disrupted. This theater is also a theater of war and as such is an authorless theater, a production in the double sense of the term of absent or metonymic causes.