Da Althusser a Polanski: temporalità differenziale e infrazione della teleologia nella pedagogia materialista di El Nost Milan

This article offers a critical analysis of El Nost Milan by Carlo Bertolazzi (1893), reread in light of Louis Althusser’s essay “The ‘Piccolo,’ Bertolazzi and Brecht. Notes for a Materialist Theatre” (1962), later included in For Marx (1967). Althusser’s interpretation highlights how the dramaturgical structure of the play is grounded in the coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities and in a structural disjunction between consciousness and material reality. Far from being a mere example of verist theatre or popular melodrama, El Nost Milan emerges as a scenic dispositif that renders visible the ideological conditions of subjectivation. The absence of catharsis and the fragmentation of the plot produce, for the spectator, an experience of rupture and estrangement that undermines the myths of bourgeois consciousness and opens onto the possibility of a materialist pedagogy. On this basis, the article proposes reading the drama as an exemplary text of critical pedagogy, in which education is not founded on the transparency of consciousness but on interruption, incompleteness, and the tension between what is shown and what remains structurally absent. From this perspective, a cursory compari-son with Roman Polanski’s Carnage (2011) resonates in showing how the dissolution of any conciliatory expectation and the cyclical reiteration of conflict can acquire pedagogical significance by laying bare the opacity of social relations and the insufficiency of dialogical rationality. El Nost Milan thus makes it possible to conceptualize education not as the transmission of contents or the formation of a unified subject, but rather as the staging of a discontinuity: an experience that reveals the ideological mediation of every formative process and redefines pedagogy as a practice of critical dislocation within the structures of history and society.