ABSTRACT
One of the most common cliches that the avant-garde movement had acquired after its historical stage of the early years of the twentieth century, was the one related to the belief of an endless innovation — the myth of the new. Edoardo Sanguineti proposed a concept of the avant-garde which was based not on myth but on dialectics: a dialectics between market and museum and between the 'heroic-pathetic moment' and the 'cynical moment.' He always advocated an interpretation of materialism which was wide-ranging in its approach and went far beyond a rigid distinction between base and superstructure. His direction, even from the early years during which Lukacs's views were dominant, was one which went back to the Walter Benjamin–Bertolt Brecht legacy. Sanguineti's criticism becomes very acute and sharp: a real and unyielding 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Indeed, in the construction of his writings it is possible to see an anarchy of forms.
