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The essay investigates, unveils, and freshly interprets the "eccentric" physical design structure and format of Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, drawing upon research conducted by Margaret Fay and on experience designing a Web-based version of the famous document that takes into account and discloses these neglected features. It takes issue with interpretations both for and against its subject matter that assume it is a humanist text interested in "Spirit," and reemphasizes Marx's sensual materialism to disclose his artful method of "immanent critique," similar in many respects to the work of avant-garde visual artists. The neglect of these aspects is thought to be the effect of a dominant, logocentric world-view and a resultant aesthetic lacuna in traditional interpretations of Marx and Marxism. Concepts useful to a nonhumanist Marxism are thereby legitimated even from this, hitherto unlikely, source. Other texts by the author (Tedman) revert to this interpretation as a basis for extrapolating an aesthetic (sensual, felt) level to human social practice, and to corresponding Aesthetic State Apparatuses, that link with Althusser's concept of an ideological level and Ideological State Apparatuses.
Key Words: Manuscripts, 1844, Art
The "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844" (untitled originally, and for brevity here the EPM) are well known as representing the first concerted attempt by Marx to clarify and synthesize his thinking. Marx wrote the EPM between April and August 1844 while in Paris. En route to Germany at the end of August, Engels visited Marx for ten days. This was the first proper meeting of Marx and Engels. Engels may have referred to the writing of the EPM in his first known letter to Marx written on his return at the beginning of October 1844. Here he says Marx should "see to it that the material . . . collected is launched into the world as soon as possible."
At this time, Marx was editing and contributing to the German newspaper Vorwarts! published in Paris from January to December 1844. In the autumn of 1844, the French government, at the request of the Prussian authorities, sued one of its editors, Karl Bernays, who was sentenced to imprisonment and fined for his criticism of the reactionary system in Prussia. In January 1845, the Guizot ministry expelled Marx and a few other staff,...