Surface Critique: Althusser, Foucault, and the Problem of Ricardo

Against the idea that thinkers such as Althusser practice a form of ideology critique that is equivalent to a style of “deep reading,” at issue is a model of critical analysis that attends to what is readily perceptible on the surface but not conceptualized as such. In the mid-1960s, Althusser and Foucault, not unlike Lacan, propose similar models of reading that focus on what is visible yet invisible insofar as not fully recognized. However, Ricardo serves as a nodal point dividing Althusser’s and Foucault’s otherwise strikingly parallel modes of adjacent reading, or surface critique: for Althusser, Ricardo’s difference from Marx represents the break between ideology and science; for Foucault, Ricardo and Marx are entirely of the same moment.