Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought 9781501301414, 9781441146366, 9781441152138

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Notes on Contributors Michele Cangiani is Associate Professor, in the Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia (Italy). He is a member of the Board of Directors, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy. Recent publications include: ‘Freedom to plan: on Kapp’s institutional outlook’, in Social Costs and Public Action in Modern Capitalism, ed. by W. Elsner, P. Frigato, P. Ramazzotti (Routledge 2006); ‘From Menger to Polanyi: The Institutional Way’, in Austrian Economics in Transition, ed. by H. Hagemann, Y. Ikeda, T. Nishizawa (Palgrave Macmillan 2010); ‘Karl Polanyi’s Institutional Theory: Market Society and Its ‘Disembedded’ Economy’, Journal of Economic Issues, XLV, 1, 2011. Katja Diefenbach is Advising Researcher at the Theory Department, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, where she directs a research project on the notion of politics in post-Marxism. She has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Berlin, and the Faculty of Philosophy III, Humboldt University, Berlin. Her research interests are the relationship between Marxism and post-structuralism, in particular the readings of Spinoza in Althusser, Deleuze, Agamben and Negri. Recent publications include texts on post-structuralism and post-workerism in Inventionen, ed. by I. Lorey et al. (Diaphanes 2011), Becoming Major, Becoming Minor, ed. by V. Brito et al. (JVE 2011); Virtualität und Kontrolle, ed. by H.J. Lenger et.al. (Textem 2010); Andersheit, Fremdheit, Exklusion, ed. by B. Heiter et.al. (Parados 2009). Sara R. Farris is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science in Princeton (2012–13) and an Associated Researcher at King’s College, London. She is a sociologist and political theorist. Her main interests include classical and contemporary social and political theory, migration studies, gender studies, intersectionality, critical discourse theory. She is the author of Politics Enchanted. Religion, Subjectivity and Nationalism in Max Weber (Brill 2013) and co-editor of La Straniera. Informazioni, sito-bibliografie e ragionamenti su razzismo e sessismo (Alegre 2009). She is the author of numerous articles on sociological and political theory, international migrations and gender studies. She is member of the Editorial Board of Critical Sociology and Corresponding Editor for Historical Materialism. Giorgos Fourtounis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University (Athens). One of his major research interests is French post-war philosophy, especially (post)structuralism and historical epistemology, particularly in the works of Althusser, Foucault and Canguilhem. He publishes regularly on these topics and is co-author (with A. Baltas) of Louis Althusser and the End of Classical Marxism: the Precarious Immortality of a “Null” Philosophy (Athens 1994, in Greek).

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Isabelle Garo is co-director of the Seminar Marx au XXIe siècle, l’esprit et la lettre at the Sorbonne and co-editor of the journal Contretemps. She is the author of numerous articles and books on philosophy and Marxism, including Marx et l’invention historique (Syllepse 2012); L’idéologie ou la pensée embarquée (La Fabrique 2009); Marx, une critique de la philosophie (Seuil 2000), and editor of Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, lecteurs de Marx: La politique dans la philosophie (Démopolis 2011). Pascale Gillot is Member of the research team Institut d’Histoire de la Pensée Classique at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon. Her work concerns the relationship between early modern theories of mind and subjectivity, and contemporary approaches in the analytic philosophy of mind as well as in the French tradition. She is the author of L’esprit. Figures classiques et contemporaines (CNRS Editions 2007) and Althusser et la psychanalyse (PUF 2009). She has co-edited, with Pierre Cassou-Noguès, Le concept, le sujet et la science (Vrin 2009). G. M. Goshgarian taught American literature and civilisation for 11 years at the University of Burgundy in Dijon before becoming a fulltime freelance translator from French, German and Armenian into English in 2000. He has translated three collections of Louis Althusser’s posthumous writings into English for Verso Books, including introductions. He is currently working towards the publication in English translation of a number of unpublished books and other texts by Althusser. Gal Kirn is currently Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. He completed his dissertation in philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Ljubljana), where he combines contemporary French philosophy (especially Louis Althusser) with the history of the emergence of revolutionary Yugoslavia and its tragic break-up. He is a co-editor of Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (JVE 2012); editor of Postfordism and its discontents (JVE, B-Books and Mirovni Inštitut 2010) and co-editor of New Public Spaces. Dissensual political and artistic practices in the postYugoslav context (JVE and Moderna Galerija 2009). He comments on politics in the Slovenian weekly Objektiv. In his hometown Ljubljana he participates in the Workers-Punks University. Katja Kolšek is Research Fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie, the Science and Research Centre of Koper (Primorska, Slovenia) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Humanities (Primorska, Slovenia). Her research interests include theories of ideology, problems of contemporary philosophy of politics, dialectics and materialism, work of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. Her current research focuses on the questions of Chinese dialectics and Alain Badiou’s Maoism. She also translates modern and contemporary Chinese fiction into Slovenian. Recent publications include: ‘Philosophy of the Late Althusser as the Science of the Void’ (Problemi 2007); ‘Economy as the Ideological Superstructure of the Contemporary State: the Neoliberal Attack on Public School’ (Problemi 2010, in Slovenian); ‘Democracy as the Philosophical Concept’ (Filozofski vestnik 2010, in Slovenian) and The Other of Democracy: Problems of Immanence and Otherness in Contemporary Theories Of Democracy (Koper 2011, in Slovenian).

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Mikko Lahtinen is a Senior Lecturer in political science in the University of Tampere (Finland). His research interests include the history of political philosophy, the history of ideas and theories of political action. His several publications on Althusser and on materialist politics include Politics and Philosophy. Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism (Brill 2009). He has also contributed Althusserian entries to the Historisch-kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Argument). Rastko Močnik is Professor of Theory of Discourse and Epistemology of the Humanities in the Philosophy of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He has published extensively in the fields of literary theory, the critique of political economy, history of socialism, cultural theory and sociology. His major books include: Three Theories: ideology, nation, institution (Ljubljana: založba 1999, in Slovenian); Global Economy and Revolutionary Politics (Ljubljana: založba 2006, in Slovenian). He also contributed an article on ‘Ideology and Fantasy’ to The Althusserian Legacy (Verso 1993). Warren Montag is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has published widely on Marxism, contemporary French philosophy and the history of philosophy. He is the author of Louis Althusser (Palgrave 2002); Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries (Verso 1999) and The Unthinkable Swift: the Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man (Verso 1994). He is co-editor of Masses, Classes and The Public Sphere (Verso 2001) and The New Spinoza (Minnesota Press 1997). He is the editor of Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal. Vittorio Morfino is a Senior Researcher in the History of Philosophy at the Università di Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Substantia sive Organismus (Guerini 1997), Sulla violenza. Una lettura di Hegel (Ibis 2000); Il tempo e l’occasione. L’incontro Spinoza Machiavelli (LED 2002); Incursioni spinoziste (Mimesis 2002) Il tempo della moltitudine (Manifestolibri 2005) and Spinoza e il non contemporaneo (Ombre corte 2009). He has edited Spinoza contra Leibniz (Unicopli 1994); La Spinoza Renaissance nella Germania di fine Settecento (Unicopli 2000); L’abisso dell’unica sostanza (Quodlibet 2009), as well as the Italian edition of the late writings of Louis Althusser (Mimesis 2000). He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and of Décalages. Ceren Özselçuk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Her research intersects the fields of post-Althusserian thought, Marxian political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism. She has published and co-authored essays in edited book volumes and a number of academic journals in English and Turkish, such as Rethinking Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Subjectivity and Toplum ve Bilim. She is currently finishing a book entitled, Economic Necessity, Political Contingency and the Limits of Post-Marxism (forthcoming in Routledge, New Political Economy Book Series). Ozren Pupovac is a philosopher and social theorist based in Berlin. He studied In Zagreb, Warsaw and London. He was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Schiller Universität in Jena. He has published on Marxist philosophy and the (post)-Yugoslav

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political context, and translated works of Badiou, Rancière and Althusser into Serbo-Croatian. His work focuses on contemporary French thought, German idealism, Marxism and the question of the subject. Since 2008, he runs, together with Bruno Besana, the ‘Versus Laboratory’ research platform. Jason Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) as well as numerous articles on Althusser, Negri, Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Economics and Politics for the Historical Materialism book series. Among his publications on Althusser are: ‘The Althusser Effect: Philosophy, History, and Temporality’ (Borderlands 2005) and ‘Primitive Accumulation: The Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism’ (Rethinking Marxism 2002). Panagiotis Sotiris is Adjunct Lecturer in Political and Social Philosophy in the Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean, in Mytilene. His research interests include Marxist philosophy, the work of Louis Althusser, post-Marxist theory, and the theory of imperialism. He is the author of Communism and Philosophy. The Theoretical Adventure of Louis Althusser (2004, in Greek). Peter D. Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. His research interests include Marxist theory and philosophy, the history of modern political thought and theories of the political. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill 2009). He is also the translator of Antonio Negri’s Goodbye Mr Socialism, (Seven Stories Press 2008); (with Alberto Toscano) Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s, Philosophy in the Present (Polity 2009) and (with Sara R. Farris) Mario Tronti’s The Autonomy of the Political (forthcoming 2013). He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism: research in critical Marxist theory. André Tosel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nice. His research interests include political philosophy, the history of Marxism and philosophies of globalisation. His publications include Marx et sa critique de la politique (Cesare Luporini and Etienne Balibar (Maspero 1979); Praxis: Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste, (Editions Sociales 1984) and Le marxisme du 20e siècle (Syllepse 2009). Caroline Williams is Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is author of Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject (Athlone Press 2001) as well as articles on Spinoza, Althusser, Lacan, Castoriadis, poststructuralism and subjectivity. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Spinoza and Political Critique: Thinking the Political in the Wake of Althusser. Frieder Otto Wolf is Professor for Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin and a former member of the European Parliament. He is the translator and editor of the complete works of Louis Althusser in German. He is a co-Initiator of the German network ‘Forum for a New Politics of Labour’ and currently president of the German Humanist Association (HVD). He is a member

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of Advisory Editorial Boards of Das Argument, Historical Materialism, Cosmopolitiques and Écologie et Politique. His books include Die Neue Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes (Frommann-Holzboog 1969); Radikale Philosophie (Westfälisches Dampfboot 2002) and (as co-author) Europe’s Green Alternative: A Manifesto For a New World (Black Rose Books 1992 and 1996).

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Introduction: Encountering Althusser A detour of theory

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he work of Louis Althusser and his associates in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to rethink the philosophical and political potential of Marx’s thought. The publication in 1965 of For Marx and Reading Capital quickly took on the dimensions of a genuine event, both for Marxist theory and in the wider critical intellectual culture, not only in France, but internationally. On the one hand, those two volumes proposed a renewal of Marxism by means of its elaboration as a rigorous theoretical research programme in critical dialogue with, but possessing its own relative autonomy from, left-wing political practice and organisation; on the other hand, these interventions combatively declared the emergence of a current of Marxist theory with ambitions to measure itself against the most advanced theoretical developments that had occurred outside the Marxist tradition in the twentieth century, as a mode of ‘immanent politicisation’. This operation aimed to strengthen the materialist tendency within Marxism, detaching it from economistic and evolutionist deformations and all idealising figures of reconciliation. Althusser’s attempt to write a philosophy for Marx purified of onto-theological remainders began as a search for a non-Hegelian dialectic without guarantees, but soon led him to undertake a series of theoretical ‘detours’, passing by way of limit-readings of Marx with political philosophers of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Rousseau) and, subsequently, those belonging to what he would come to call a forgotten ‘underground current’ of materialist thought (Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, later supplemented with Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein and Deleuze). What emerged from this line of research was a differential and topological analysis of societies within the capitalist mode of production and a radically renewed theory of ideology, inspired in part by another long theoretical detour he continuously made throughout his intellectual life, via Lacan’s return to Freud. The style of thought and sometimes contradictory substantive theses that came to be known as ‘Althusserianism’ rapidly developed into one of the most influential intellectual paradigms that defined the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. It gave rise to a wide variety of new initiatives in many disciplinary fields, on an international scale. Equally as significantly, the prominence of Althusserian themes and approaches stimulated a series of vigorous debates in which the main coordinates of the ‘contemporary radical thought’ of those years were delineated. Yet the theoretical dimension of Althusser’s work was always directed toward political ends. Althusser’s attempt to ‘reinvent’ Marxism as a sophisticated theoretical paradigm was never an end in itself. Rather, his ‘detour of theory’ aimed to stimulate political renewal in the French

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and international communist movements in the long decade straddling 1968. His fidelity to the French Communist Party (PCF) and the model of party organisation as such was not without ambivalence. On the one hand, Althusser’s criticism of economistic, evolutionist and revisionist positions from within the PCF had the effect of convincing many young activists to stay within a party from which they may otherwise have departed. On the other hand, his interventions were also taken as providing support, albeit not without contradictions, for breaks with communist party orthodoxy, particularly by those attracted to Maoism. While remaining within the PCF, and keeping his distance from traditions to the left of it, Althusser issued increasingly stronger criticisms of his party from the 1960s onwards, until he sought open conflict in the late 1970s, claiming that the party leadership attributed to itself ‘the ideological guarantee of a kind of Absolute Knowledge’, even to the extent of ‘reproducing in the Party itself, in the difference between its leaders and its militants, the structure of the bourgeois State’.1 Changes in the political conjuncture in the 1980s – coinciding with personal tragedy in Althusser’s own life, when he killed his wife Hélène Rytman in an act inexplicable to himself2 – saw an increasing marginalisation of his work and the debates associated with them. Many of the themes explored in Althusser’s work, such as the critique of essentialism, humanism, teleology and philosophies of the subject, remained important reference points for philosophical discussions. However, the Althusserian initiative’s distinctive articulation of theoretical practice with a specifically Marxist form of political engagement increasingly appeared to many to be unable to confront the new challenges of the ‘crisis of Marxism’ (ironically, announced by Althusser himself), and a new politico-philosophical conjuncture marked by the rise of various ‘post-socialisms’ and ‘post-Marxisms’. The ‘moment of Althusser’, it seemed, had definitively passed; as ‘a transitional formation, the product of a very specific theoretical and political conjuncture whose mutation helps to explain its fate’,3 Althusser’s thought was consigned to the past, a remnant, to which one could seemingly only return in a nostalgic way.

Renewals Recent years, however, have witnessed a renewed interest in Althusser’s thought, as a younger generation of researchers interpret it in very different forms.4 In the first instance, this is due to the prominence of some of Althusser’s former students and those influenced by him in contemporary critical thought, such as Balibar, Rancière, Macherey, Badiou, Žižek, Laclau and Butler. The themes developed by these authors, also and perhaps even most significantly in their criticisms of and departures from classical Althusserian positions, have allowed hitherto neglected elements of the original Althusserian synthesis to become visible. Among the most significant of these themes, one could mention the problematic status of theoretical anti-humanism in a period of the ‘return of the subject’, notions of ideological subjection and interpellation, of over- and underdetermination and articulation, and the relationship between structure and conjuncture. These discussions have indicated the extent to which seemingly settled debates of the past still have the potential to engage critical energies in unforeseen and productive ways. Perhaps even more importantly, the posthumous publication of some of Althusser’s writings from different stages in his intellectual development, published in English under the

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titles of the Humanist Controversy and Other Writings and particularly the so-called ‘late’ writings collected in the Philosophy of the Encounter,5 has encouraged an intense international discussion and debate of Althusserianisms old and new. The central topics of these debates have ranged from the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, of the ‘encounter’ as both philosophical concept and political construction, of the nature of politics and the political, to the internal cleavages in Althusser’s thought itself. The late Althusser’s variously entitled ‘materialism of the encounter’ or ‘aleatory materialism’ can be regarded as a deepening of some of the most productive perspectives of the original Althusserian moment, particularly in the way it offers many points of contact for a dialogue with thinkers associated with contemporary radical thought in its different affiliations, ranging from post-structuralism to post-workerism, deconstruction, left-Heideggerianism, among many others. At the same time, Althusser’s formulation of these themes arguably maintains a stronger connection to the Marxist tradition than many recent post-Marxisms, particularly in terms of his continuing affirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the primacy of politics and the articulation of economics and politics in a theory of the social whole. Representing a novel philosophical position in its own right, the ‘untimely’ arrival of the late Althusser’s thought has thus intersected with and strengthened a widespread revival of interest in the history of Marxism and its possible contemporary forms of inheritance.

Returning to Althusser In his later years, Althusser explored what he called an ‘underground current’ in the philosophical tradition, ‘the materialism of the encounter’, attempting to free it from its historical repression. Concepts such as the encounter, the swerve and the take [prise] became for him a type of golden thread linking such diverse thinkers as Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida in their search of a materialism freed from necessity and teleology. Even more importantly, Althusser’s specific encounter with these authors and problematics enabled him to open up new and unexplored trajectories within his own work. The encounter with Althusser that we propose in this volume is motivated by a similar need: namely, the need to free the thought of Althusser from the repression to which it was subjected until recently, in the long decades of post-Marxisms and the pensée unique. Yet given Althusser’s subterranean influence on so much of contemporary radical thought, this encounter today can only take place in the form of a ‘return’, understood in the specific sense in which his own work was conducted as a return to, or ongoing encounter with, Marx and Marxism. For Althusser, a return to a thinker and the way one reads an intellectual source is never innocent or obvious. With reference to Spinoza, Althusser ceaselessly emphasised that one can read neither a text nor the world in the transparency of their givenness; on the contrary, their internal dislocations reveal any immediate reading to be a religious myth, a ‘yearning for a reading at sight’.6 Consequently, at stake in any return is not simply the repetition of a theoretical formula or its application in such a way one would forever circulate in the fictive immediacy of an originary text, but rather, the reinvention of a philosophical and political wager. Thus, in his return to Marx, Althusser’s principal aim was to think Marx in his historical context, thereby enabling readers to put Marxism into effect in their own times.

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At the same time, by grasping the theoretical repetition of an author as his or her differentiation – in short, by knowing that to do it again is to do it differently – Althusser turned to one of the great theoretical problematics of French critical thought in the second half of the twentieth century: namely, the return to a tradition in order to undo it from within, intensifying its productive contradictions in the act of seeking to efface them. One need only think of Lacan’s return to Freud, in order to analyse repetition as return of enjoyment, as its surplus stepping over the limits of the pleasure principle and seeking an excess over life; Deleuze’s return to Nietzsche, pinpointing the torsion immanent to repetition that makes nothing but difference recur; or Derrida’s return to Heidegger’s formula of being as ecstatic difference to itself, in order to understand the disseminating deferral of difference. Althusser’s texts on Marx’s philosophy reverberate with similarly diverging formulas of a repeating reinvention. Both the originality and aporia of Althusser’s return to Marx can be partially traced back to a very peculiar combination of an epistemological with a ‘deconstructive’ strategy of reading. While Bachelard presupposed that a new scientific approach occurs unreservedly, by destroying the entire metaphorical texture of errors characterising previous positions in a theoretical field, a deconstructive understanding of symptomal reading finds in the old problematic the trace of the new one. The tension generated by this double understanding of the potential of a symptomal study of an author made Althusser constantly repeat his return to Marx, until he finally encountered in him a finite and heterogeneous body of ideas that cannot be reduced to the purity of a theoretical rupture. Rather, it can only be comprehended in the complex construction of an unfinished concatenation of concepts, each opening a specific field of problematisation, each supplementing and differing from the other, across and within their ‘breaks’; in other words, in the ongoing encounter that is the ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’ of Marxism itself as an unfinished project.7

Encountering Althusser The most recent volumes of critical commentaries on Althusser in English date from the early to mid-1990s, prior to the widespread availability of the late Althusser’s texts in the Anglophone world in the last decade.8 This volume seeks to fill this significant gap. The texts collected in this volume originated in contributions to an international conference hosted by the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in October 2009. Additionally, a number of other authors were invited to contribute texts in order to compose a representative volume of contemporary Althusserian scholarship in different fields, in an international (admittedly, largely European) perspective. The division of the texts in four different sections aims to provide a survey of a significant dimension of Althusser’s thought, while also representing an intervention into the existing forms of discussion of the Althusserian legacy.

Aleatory materialism and the philosophy of the encounter The late Althusser’s proposal of the philosophy of the encounter or an aleatory materialism has constituted one of the most fertile fields of investigation in Althusserian scholarship in recent years, giving rise to divergent and sometimes opposed readings regarding supposed continuities

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and discontinuities in the development of Althusser’s thought. Following the publication in French of Althusser’s ‘late’ writings in the 1990s, one interpretative current attempted to argue for a break or even Kehre in Althusser’s thinking, which abandoned the theoretical structure of For Marx and Reading Capital. More recently, another interpretation has emphasised continuities and attempted to demonstrate an on-going break in Althusser’s thought, within and against itself, in an act of self-critical redefinition. Many of the texts in this section subject these readings to philological scrutiny, seeking to delineate the internal coherence of the late Althusser’s incomplete texts, comparing them to his earlier positions, and identifying productive research fields that emerge from these encounters. Their unifying concern is to measure the extent to which aleatory materialism or the philosophy of the encounter can be interpreted and proposed as an intervention into the Kampfplatz of contemporary radical thought. André Tosel’s chapter considers the strengths and limitations of aleatory materialism. On the one hand, for Tosel the late Althusser successfully criticised the logocentric presuppositions of conventional materialisms. On the other hand, Tosel questions whether the new concept enabled Althusser to think the contingent relationship between ideology and class struggle and whether his heterodox genealogy of materialism ultimately ends up imitating traditional forms of philosophy. In a similar way, Panagiotis Sotiris’s text focuses on aleatory materialism both in terms of its points of originality as well as in its contradictions. While Sotiris notes continuities with Althusser’s earlier texts, for instance, in the insistence on non-historicism and on the need for a transformation of philosophical practice, he ultimately argues that the late writings’s emphasis upon the importance of contingent encounters is a source of contradictions. The texts by Giorgos Fourtounis and Vittorio Morfino, on the other hand, offer examinations of the importance of Machiavelli for Althusser’s definition of aleatory materialism. While Fortounis reads the Florentine Secretary’s influence on Althusser through the lenses of the homology between the notions of ‘aleatory encounter’ and that of an ‘absolute beginning’ (both understood as notions of the radical emergence of a structured singularity or ‘aleatory structuralism’), Morfino reads Althusser’s Machiavelli through Darwin. For Morfino, it is the latter author who enables us ‘to pose in a correct way the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over the form’ and to refute Schmittian interpretations of the role played by Machiavelli in the late Althusser’s aleatory materialism. The last two chapters of this section address the question of the thesis of the discontinuity, or even rupture, between the early and the later Althusser. Katja Kolšek’s text argues that the relation between the epistemology of Althusser’s earlier materialist philosophy and the supposed ontology of his later period consists in the void as the object of the parallax view, between overdetermination and aleatoriness. Finally, G. M. Goshgarian demonstrates the continuity between early and late Althusser by showing how Althusser’s theory of the encounter, in which Spinoza’s Ethics in particular played a pivotal role, is prefigured in work from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Albeit distinct from the materialism of the encounter he elaborated from 1972 onwards, Goshgarian’s notion of an ‘early late Althusser’ sets out to indicate the existence of similar problematics throughout the period between 1959 and 1967.

Althusser’s non-contemporaries Althusser’s theoretical production, in all of its phases, was marked by a series of encounters with significant ‘others’, from both within and outside the Marxist tradition. Simultaneously his

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contemporaries and non-contemporaries, not simply in the sense of chronological proximity or distance but also in the sense of uniting and dividing concerns, Althusser’s distinctive readings of these authors helped to define his own project to a much greater extent, and included a much wider range of authors, than is commonly recognised in existing critical commentary. Furthermore, particularly in Althusser’s late writings, we can retrospectively discern ‘subterranean currents’ of influence of which even and especially Althusser was unaware, overdetermining his texts and opening them up to their productive incompletion. The contributions to this section of the volume trace the extraordinary conflictual richness of Althusser’s practice of reading Marx by means of and through his non-contemporaries, who were at the same time Althusser’s own unheimlich interlocutors. Mikko Lahtinen’s chapter introduces Machiavelli as an author occupying a solitary key position in Althusser’s philosophical topology. As the first theoretician of the political conjuncture, Machiavelli is important for Althusser due to his analysis of the conflictual relations of forces that compose a conjuncture and the ‘occasions’ it discloses for intervention. However, in comparison with Gramsci, Lahtinen argues, Althusser evades any concrete analyses regarding the political relationship of intellectuals and masses and the question of organisation. Similar themes are explored in Warren Montag’s chapter, which approaches Althusser’s Machiavelli through one of his encounters with Foucault, the marks of which are only legible in the margins of both authors’ texts. Machiavelli, Montag claims, allowed Althusser to return to the problem of multiple temporalities posed in Reading Capital, in order to emphasise the production of the new over that of reproduction. Montag not only highlights the Althusserian resonances of Foucault’s Machiavelli, but also discerns a tension in Foucault, oscillating between the idea that the prince is an impersonal integration of a conflictual field of forces and the figure of the prince’s reintegration into a paradigm of sovereignty. Peter D. Thomas continues this effort to complexify Althusser’s reading of different authors by revisiting his encounter with Gramsci. Thomas deconstructs Althusser’s early criticism of Gramsci, claiming that rather than the Hegelianising model of the social totality attributed to him by Althusser, Gramsci instead presupposes the non-contemporaneity of the present and an anti-essentialist theory of translatability of politics, philosophy and history – a position to which the late Althusser seemingly comes close, in the interval of a distance taken, in his considerations of a non-philosophy to come. In their respective chapters, Caroline Williams and Katja Diefenbach discuss the enduring presence of Spinoza throughout Althusser’s work. Mapping the internal cleavages in Althusser’s reading of Spinoza, Williams specifies the different usages made of his thought, in order to tackle epistemological, topological and ideological problematics. By highlighting the difference that Althusser introduces between the subject (subjected through interpellation) and the subject of the unconscious (subverting the first position), Williams emphasises in Althusser the concept of ‘a subjectivity without a subject’, which Alain Badiou has characterised as Althusser’s ‘intra-philosophical mark of politics’. Diefenbach, in a different perspective, refers to Deleuze in order to problematise the residual Hegelianism and instabilities in the idea of immanent causality in the early and late Althusser. Focussing on the category of intensive infinity in Deleuze, Diefenbach questions the extent to which traces of Lacan’s causality of the impossible and the Heideggerian influences in the meta-ontological concept of the encounter developed by the late Althusser can be reconciled with Spinoza’s idea of positive determination and dissimilar expression.

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Finally, Sara R. Farris provides a comparative analysis of Tronti and Althusser’s reflections on the state in the 1970s. In their proximity – both declared the crisis of Marxism and the insufficiency of Marx’s theory of politics and state, criticised determinism and economism, and found Lenin’s reflections on the nature of the state to be superior to Marx’s – Farris detects a major cleavage. While Tronti affirmed state mediation as the only possible level of political confrontation, Althusser asserted in the late 1970s the primary role of the masses for a politics aiming to disable the state machinery.

Thinking production and reproduction One of the central aims of Reading Capital was to contribute to the revival of a philosophically informed Marxist critique of political economy. At the same time, chapters in that book and many of the essays collected in For Marx explored themes related to different forms of political struggle and, in particular, the tradition of ideology theory. Classical Althusserianism was constituted by a productive tension between these dimensions of production and reproduction, without ever being able to offer a wholly satisfactory answer regarding the conditions of their relationship or, even more crucially, their transformation. The texts in this section of the collection draw upon both classical Althusserianism and the late Althusser in order to think production and reproduction at the same time, in their distinction and unity, as integral elements of the capitalist mode of production. In particular, they aim to explore the resources that Althusser provides for reunifying perspectives from the critique of political economy and the critique of politics that are often divided in much contemporary postMarxist thought. This section of the collection thus explores the extent to which Althusser’s renovation of a Marxist critique of political economy has the capacity to interact productively with contemporary themes such as political anthropology, necessity versus contingency, class constitution and primitive accumulation. The section opens with an analysis by Ceren Özselçuk focusing on Althusser’s treatment of the concept of economy, which is scrutinised both in terms of the role Althusser ascribed to it in the development of Marx’s critique of political economy and in terms of the tensions that the concept itself creates within Althusser’s own work. Still remaining within the horizon opened by Reading Capital, Michele Cangiani’s text analyses Althusser’s problematic approach to the structure of the first volume of Capital in its productive frictions, that is, as a fruitful misinterpretation which allows a deeper understanding of the Marxian problematic. Moving to Althusser’s texts of the late 1960s and 1970s, Frieder Otto Wolf highlights the problem of reproduction, emphasising in particular the anti-functionalist dimensions of Althusser’s conjugation of the problem of the reproduction of the relations of production and the critique of domination. Finally, Jason Read’s chapter considers Althusser’s ‘aleatory materialist’ phase through the lenses of the category of primitive accumulation. Placing his thought at the crossroad of traditions which include Deleuze, Badiou and Negri, Read attempts to re-read primitive accumulation not just through an engagement with Marx, but with and against the dominant and underground currents within the history of philosophy.

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The materiality of ideology, the primacy of politics Althusser’s work in the 1960s opened the way towards an exploration of the materiality of ideology, particularly in texts such as ‘Marxism and Humanism’ and the famous ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay. Positing ideology in terms irreducible to the consciousness of a subject or a class, Althusser provided elements for theory of the subject as a material effect of ideology, centred on the concept of ‘interpellation’. However, this line of research on ideology was linked to the problem of thinking the state and its abolition in terms of the primacy of politics as a transformative instance that immanently ruptures the relations of production and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Subsequently some of the debates, criticisms and attempted inheritances of Althusser’s thought have tended to assume a binary opposition in terms of thinking about Althusser’s conceptualisation of the relationship between ideology and politics. The texts in the last section aim to reunite the theorisation of ideology and politics in Althusser’s thought, even and especially in its most problematic dimensions. The first text of Isabelle Garo provides a critical synthesis of recent discussions and a general theoretical introduction to Althusser’s continual movement between ideology and politics. Pascale Gillot focuses on the question of ideological interpellation by means of a close reading and encounter with Spinoza and Lacan, arguing for a specific understanding of Althusser’s concept of the subject. Rastko Močnik, on the other hand, attempts to supplement Althusser’s work with concepts drawn from discourse-analysis that were absent or under-theorized in his theory of ideology. He also attempts to answer the question regarding the possibility of a theory of interpellation outside psychoanalysis and its potential articulation with a theory of politics. The last two chapters focus on Althusser’s oscillating conceptions of philosophy and its relations to science and politics. Ozren Pupovac’s chapter revisits Althusser’s critique of the subject, stressing the importance of the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach, whereas Gal Kirn attempts to defend a reading that moves between the tenth and eleventh theses, in the perspective of the project of a ‘new materialism’. Taken together, these contributions emphasise the extent to which Althusser’s famous theses on ideology can only be adequately comprehended in a perspective that foregrounds question of the political constitution of the social formation and class struggle.

Between return and encounter Taken in its totality, this collection presents novel perspectives on the potentials, limits and contradictions of Althusser’s thought, in its various phases. Combining philological studies of recently published texts with re-examinations of classical theses, alongside engagement with the key themes of broader contemporary philosophical and political debates, this volume aims to contribute to the growing recognition that Althusser’s work represents not merely one of the most important historical sources of contemporary radical thought, but also one of its unresolved challenges. Ultimately, returning to Althusser today does not mean to repeat his return to Marx or other thinkers, but to understand how such a strategy of a return to the past can function as a ‘theoretical laboratory’ for encountering the forms of a possible intervention in the present.

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Notes 1 ‘Marxism Today’ (Althusser 1990a), p. 278. See also ‘What Must Change in the Party’, (Althusser 1978b). 2 See the autobiography The Future lasts a Long Time and The Facts (Althusser 1993d) for Althusser's attempt to give an account of his act. 3 Elliott, 1992, p. 34. Elliott further argued that Althusser’s work, ‘occupied a unique and precarious place in modern intellectual history between a tradition of Marxism, which he radically criticized and sought to reconstruct, and a “post-Marxism”, which has submerged its predecessor, and in which the class of ’68 has found its self-image’ (pp. 33–4). 4 Monographs dedicated to parts or the entirety of Althusser’s thought that have been published in recent years include Warren Montag's Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan 2002); Luke Ferretter’s Louis Althusser (Routledge 2005); a new edition of Gregory Elliott’s now classic study Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Brill/Haymarket, 2007) and Mikko Lahtinen’s Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism (Brill 2009). The first issue of the international Althusser studies Journal Décalages, under the editorship of Warren Montag, was published in 2012. 5 Both published at Verso (2003 and 2006, respectively). 6 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 16. 7 Althusser 2006a, p. 174. 8 The three most recent collected volumes in English date from 1993 (The Althusserian Legacy, edited by Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker), 1994 (Althusser: A Critical Reader, edited by Gregory Elliott) and 1995 (Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, edited by Antonio Callari and David Ruccio), though the journal Borderlands dedicated an entire issue to the late Althusser’s thought in 2005, edited by David McInerney. In France, shortly after Althusser’s death, Sylvain Lazarus edited Politique et philosophie dans l’oeuvre de Louis Althusser (PUF: Paris 1993). Sartre, Lukács, Althusser. Des marxistes en philosophie, edited by Kouvelakis and Charbonnier (Paris: PUF 2005) is partly dedicated to Althusser. Jean-Claude Bourdin has more recently edited the collection Althusser: une lecture de Marx (Paris: PUF 2008). In Italy, papers from the international Althusser studies conference in Venice in 2006 were published in two volumes, in Rileggere il Capitale (2007) and La lezione di Louis Althusser (2009), both edited by Maria Turchetto.

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1 The hazards of aleatory materialism in the late philosophy of Louis Althusser1 André Tosel

. . . [T]he ‘philosophy of the encounter’ whose existence, cause and fecundity I will be pleading has nothing at all speculative about it. It is, rather, the key to what we have read of Marx and, as it were, understood of what is thrust upon us: this world, torn between powers in collusion and the ‘crisis’ which unites them in its circle, diabolical because it is almost entirely unknown . . . This detour via theory . . . is there only to enable us to understand politics, that politics in which we are engaged, that politics in which we are ‘lost’ and ‘without bearings’.2

Towards a philosophical reading of the late Althusser

L

ouis Althusser (1918–90) is in danger of fading into posterity because of the tragedy which, on 16 November 1980, made of him the murderer of his wife. The figure cut by this philosopher who renewed Marxist thought in France, and who enjoyed international influence from 1964 to 1978, is now threatened with erasure. The part played in his thought by the psychiatric troubles from which he suffered and from which he sought to cure himself is a legitimate object of study. We are not qualified to pursue this path, but we appreciate the unbearable character of the figure of the criminal philosopher. We choose to retain the image of a liberal and attentive master. We wish especially to interrogate the philosopher’s late thought, that which was sketched out in the 1970s, and which was given public expression in the 1978 text Solitude de Machiavel [Machiavelli’s Solitude] – itself a summary of previous seminars given at the École normale supérieure. It is encapsulated in the sibylline formula ‘materialism of the encounter’, or ‘aleatory materialism’. Its explication can be traced throughout the manuscripts devoted to an autobiography which was intended as a defence of philosophy had he not been

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deemed insane at the moment of the murderous event. The editors of Louis Althusser’s unpublished works have now published his 1992 autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever;3 they have also collected, in the first tome of Écrits philosophiques et politiques,4 the theoretical texts composed in 1982 under the title ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’.5 It so happens that Althusser himself used the themes of certain of these texts as material for an interview with the Mexican academic, Fernanda Navarro (published in Spanish in 1985). This interview, his last public text, was published posthumously in French in the collection Sur la philosophie.6 He himself presents, in these few lines, the essential argument: . . . instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies. My intention, here, is to insist on the existence of a materialist tradition that has not been recognized by the history of philosophy. That of Democritus, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau (the Rousseau of the second Discourse), Marx and Heidegger, together with the categories that they defended: the void, the limit, the margin, the absence of a centre, the displacement of the centre to the margin (and vice versa), and freedom. A materialism of the encounter, of contingency – in sum, of the aleatory, which is opposed even to the materialisms that have been recognized as such, including that commonly attributed to Marx, Engels and Lenin, which, like every other materialism of the rationalist tradition, is a materialism of necessity and teleology, that is, a disguised form of idealism. It is clearly because it represented a danger that the philosophical tradition has interpreted it and deflected it towards an idealism of freedom . . .7

Against the rationalist tradition of materialism. Elements of a geneaology A surprising genealogy Althusserian research initially presents itself as the genealogy of the underground current, or, rather, as the revelation of discontinuous moments in this karstic river along with the revelation of philosophical theses which are held to be pertinent, and all this without the least historical analysis of this discontinuity or of its causes. The unpublished version of the text does not always coincide with the elements retained for the interview, ‘Philosophy and Marxism’, since this eliminates Spinoza from the presentation of the whole. The current of this materialism thus includes Democritus, Epicurus (and therefore Lucretius), Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, the Rousseau of the second Discourse, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. Let us examine the significant characteristics.

Epicurus He is in many ways the eponymous hero. He offers the basic model which is indissolubly physical and ontological. Epicurus is the first philosopher whom Marx studied in his doctoral thesis, and whose originality he stresses as lying in the process of decomposition of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics through the development of a theory of the clinamen of atoms, a

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theory he singles out as an anticipation of free subjectivity. Althusser does not evoke this Marx. It is the contingency of things which interests him. At the beginning of Epicurean philosophy: rain. The rain of atoms falling through the void, propelled by their own weight. Yet almost instantaneously – we do not know precisely when or where – an infinitesimal deviation occurs from the predicted trajectory: an atom, instead of continuing to fall indefinitely in its series, in parallel with other series, collides [choque] with another atom, which then collides with others. It produces a pile-up which follows an immanent order of exponential reproduction. The physical properties of atoms (size, speed, weight) are of less import than that which enables their reciprocal collisions, that of linking themselves together, attaching themselves to each other to form provisional aggregates. Thus is born a world which is neither necessary nor the only possible one, which is not the result of an intention, nor of an end, nor of any other reason, but the causal-contingent fact of being there; and yet it can be enlarged to other atoms which encounter it and which it links to itself. It is only thus that this relatively stabilised world can develop its own laws (of a physico-materialist kind). An infinity of worlds of this kind is born: none of them is assured it will last, each of them can disaggregate and die – as it is born – by chance, a mere case. No logos, no pronoia, nothing guarantees the eternity of such a singular world. It can undergo – accidit – ruptures of linkages, as delinked atoms return to their parallel trajectories in the void. Only the atoms and the void are eternal; worlds are born and die continuously. Worlds are transitory. Thus we have the nucleus of the model which will constitute the materialism of the aleatory encounter: subjectless, without end(s), and which succeeds the homonymous process. As Jean-Claude Bourdin remarks, in a suggestive study,8 Epicurus is decisive in that he enables the conjunction of a critique of the principle of reason, dear to the whole rationalist tradition, with a rational explanation. A mode is always a given organisation, a singular combination of atoms. Only this organisation, its singular form, distinguishes one world from another world. It is possible to render intelligible the laws that define it, laws proper to it, and which are therefore singular and transitory. But no reason, no meaning,9 no principle presides over, commands, or desires – prior to the alogical fact of the clinamen – the possibility of such a world. ‘Before’ this determinate world, with its meanings, its reasons, its principles, its determinate laws, there is nothing; ‘there is’ a nothingness of meaning, of reason, of principle. There is the void, there is no world, because the rain of parallel series of atoms in the void does not constitute a world. It does not confer the meaning of a world on the atoms whose existence is merely virtual. It is the deviation that makes a world [fait monde] and that gives the atoms the minimal necessary movement for a world to take, for meaning to be produced, for it to make itself mean [pour qu’il se fasse (du) sens]. Only the encounter is cosmo-genetic and productive of meaning, of reasons, and this meaning and these reasons are determinate – they have no universal and eternal meaning: they are the meanings and reasons of this world alone. They are all the meaning and all the reasons of this world. The existence of the rain of atoms in the void is the ontological nothingness, the nothingness of world [le néant de monde]. This nothingness is not the paradoxical negative matter from which the Judaeo-Christian God draws out the world to create it ex nihilo. It is the condition of possibility for the world as such and it is subtracted from the action of a principle of creation which combines intelligence and volition, cause and reason of the highest. Nothingness remains a condition through the assumption of world [la prise de monde]. Deviation – unjustifiable, without reason, without law – is itself an evanescent, unpredictable, impredicable limit; it is itself the aleatory, and if we accord it

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the status of a principle, it is a principle which erases itself, denies itself, a principle beyond principles, a principle without archè, an anarchic principle, a non-principle. This reading radically devalues all materialisms to come – including the diverse forms of Marxist materialism: the dialectical materialism of Engels or Lenin, Gramsci’s materialism of praxis, or (the last) Lukács’ materialism of social being. It criticises them as so many metaphysical rationalisms obsessed with the question of meaning and reason. Aleatory materialism uncouples the materialist enunciation from the principle of reason with which it is traditionally associated and which is manifested by an unstable mixture of necessity and finality as attributes of the process of the real. There, where the materialist tradition declares that nothing is born of nothing and that nothing is without determining, if not inclining, reason, the Epicurean materialism of the encounter affirms that nothing justifies the fact of the world. This nothing is a neutral space, void of worldness, void of principle and of reason, of meaning and of law. The thematic that connects an origin, a subject and an end is discredited; it is this thematic that defines the idea. Thus, the question of knowing which is primary – thought or being, matter or spirit – is the primordial (ursprüngliche) philosophical question according to Engels (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy), according to Lenin (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism), and according to Louis Althusser himself in the 1970s; but this question now loses all pertinence because of its rationalist a priori – that of primordiality or originarity. From now on, no first or last instance reason can be invoked. Materialism remains the mirror image of idealism; it is a reversed idealism. Idealism and materialism (including the Marxist variant) result from the rationalist economy of the same hypothetical Grundfrage to which they intend to offer opposed responses. It is the question that must be abandoned.10

Machiavelli His presence is no surprise, we know. Althusser, indeed, accords him a decisive importance in that Machiavelli is the first to give aleatory materialism its political dimension and it is his own conceptuality that seems to have led Althusser recurrently to seek in Epicurus a ‘pure’ philosophical equivalent. The problem of Machiavelli is that of the foundation of a new political world, a popular and national Italian state (to take up here the Gramscian reading). This creation is to be effected with those atoms known as Italian populations assembled in infra-state political unities, under the domination of foreign armies. These populations fall through the void of sixteenthcentury Italy, and yet they all aspire to unity. The problem is how to produce the deviation that will be constituted by the intervention [survenance] of a man endowed with political virtù, capable of ensuring the encounter of these separate conditions (the plurality of political forms, the aspiration towards national unity). Everything hangs on the existence of the Prince, that nameless man who does not pre-exist his own action, who is confronted with the task of using fortune, the unpredictable contingency of an indifferent temporality, in order somewhere in Italy, at some atomic point, to join together the Italians around some grand project. ‘A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place’.11 The Machiavellian version of the aleatory model is unique in that the encounter of elements increases [démultiplie], splits up into several levels. It is a system of encounters commanding one another. Indeed, as Federico Dinucci explains in his substantial work,12 with the encounter of Prince and place is combined the encounter – through the Prince’s action – of fortune and virtù, this latter being the encounter of a human element (the capacity to produce and to respect laws) with an animal element, which is itself already doubled (the lion’s force and the

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fox’s cunning). The totality is overdetermined by a final encounter, that between the regional level, the national level and the international level. No law of historical necessity governs each of these levels; it is rather chance, hazards, an always precarious possibility that the encounters may or may not occur, may or may not endure. This model implies a dissociation between elements and subjects. Each subject is de facto constituted at a given level, with the possibility of linking itself to other subjects, and can be considered as the result of a link which, at a subjacent level, has already occurred. The aggregatory point of the new Prince induces shifts in the subject function. The model also has repercussions for the determination of historical causality: we do not reason according to the necessity proper to the logic of the fact considered as accomplished and according to its laws of synchronic constitution (‘the spirit of the laws’ dear to Montesquieu, Louis Althusser’s other author), but according to the contingency of the fact to be accomplished.13 Laws are constructed, so to speak, under the jurisdiction of the fulfilled. There is no law of the act of fulfilment which is identical to its fulfilled fact [à son fait même]. No law of this kind organises the process which ‘must’ be fulfilled in a conjuncture, the latter opening its always impossible possibility. Fulfilment arises from the effectivity of a practice-under-way which nothing predetermines or guarantees. The laws of fulfilment are immanent to the process which is realising itself and can only ever be thought ex post, from the point of view of the accomplished or non-accomplished act. They are not travel itineraries.

Spinoza He is analysed in the 1982 text. The hypothetical and unfinished character of the account perhaps explains why this analysis would disappear in 1987. Althusser gives an unexpected reading (perhaps inspired by certain developments in the work of Alain Badiou) based on a central thesis: the object of Spinozist philosophy – God-Nature – is identified with the void. Essentially, Spinoza would go back over the whole of Western philosophy in order to make the void his central philosopheme, ‘God’. To begin with God, who is the unique substance of all modes under all of their attributes, is effectively to say that one begins with nothing. The all-principle is translated into the nothing-principle, into nothing principal [en rien de principe]. The all is none of its determinations; they fall within it into a plenitude which is that of the void. From this borderline neo-Platonic thesis follows a reinterpretation of the infinity of attributes which fall like rain, parallel to one another without ever meeting. But it just so happens that in man there occurs – it is a fact that one can but state – an encounter without interaction, without dualism, of the two attributes which constitute him: extension and thought. Man is indeed the case of an ‘exceptional parallelism . . . [an] assignable but minute parallelism of thought and the body . . . In sum, a parallelism without encounter, yet a parallelism that is already, in itself, encounter thanks to the very structure of the relationship between the different elements of each attribute’.14 A final consequence: if there is nothing to say of God, who is but nature, then there is also nothing to say of knowledge. It is a fact, ‘homo cogitat’; and thought is simply the succession of the modes of the attribute ‘thought’, which ‘refers us, not to a Subject, but, as good parallelism requires, to the succession of the modes of the attribute “extension”’.15 What is important is the de facto constitution of thought in man. The majority of men and of peoples, and therefore history and politics, remain at the level of the first kind of knowledge, that is, the imaginary, the illusion of thinking without actually thinking, as Machiavelli well understood.

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Yet the imagination is not so much a kind of knowledge, a faculty, as ‘the only world itself in its “givenness”’.16 ‘The imaginary as world’ is a ‘unique totality that is not totalized, but experienced in its dispersion, and experienced as the “given” into which we are “thrown” and on the basis of which we forge all our illusions [fabricae]’.17 Thus we can return to the second kind of knowledge. If this world is that-beyond-which-there-is-nothing, this nothing is that of nature and its attributes, of which philosophy alone can know, by common notions, those of which man is the case: that is, the world itself thought according to common notions. Which is as much as to say that by its ontological condition the world remains ‘given before them [the common notions, Tr.], as that prior to which there is nothing’.18 Knowledge of the third kind is nothing other than knowledge of historical singularities, of their history and of their necessary imaginary structuration (as in those studied by the Theological-political Treatise, the history of a Hebrew people under Moses), philosophy contenting itself with deconstructing the values of morality and of religion as ends in themselves. If, by its work of deconstruction, philosophy enables the emergence and construction of other possibilities of worlds, these latter will be equally and differently as imaginary, and other encounters will ensue. Spinoza thus realises a complex model of aleatory materialism, constructed from the double encounter of the more theoretical Epicurean model and the political Machiavellian model; he then unifies these models in his conception of knowledge as simple fact – there where the appropriation of the given world differentiates itself [se différencie].

Hobbes Contrary to the order of historical succession, Althusser presents Hobbes after Spinoza so as to effect ‘a transition from Spinoza to Rousseau’. This choice is a paradoxical one. In his classes devoted to modern natural law at the École normale supérieure, Althusser criticised as the original form of bourgeois juridical ideology that whole current of thought which projects onto the state of nature a foundational anthropology – and this in a time of revolutionary upheaval – the better to assure its ideological and political objectives: the realisation of a legally constituted state [État de droit] endowed with an absolute power, enabling the free activity of its subjects, understood as economic agents. Althusser attempts to make up for the unjust readings of Hobbes by recognising that he was able to think the radicalism of a genesis of power starting from the encounter of desiring and calculating atoms driving the void before them [faisant le vide devant eux], but forced to cede to the necessity of authorising this sovereign power in order to prevent their self-destruction. As it stands, this development would be contradictory if it were to rehabilitate the transcendental contractualism alien to Machiavelli and the Spinoza of the Political Treatise (inspired by Machiavelli). In any case, it remains incomplete, since Hobbes’s absolute state is presented in its capacity to produce peace and the free development of individual activities, that is, to absorb itself in this task whilst rendering useless the demonstration of its power of constraint. In this sense, it could even be defined as a presupposition of the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state. This, indeed, leads one to rethink – beyond the preceding critique of natural law – the relation between liberal anarchism and Marxist anarchism.

Rousseau The Rousseau of the Discourse on Inequality leads us back to those same classes on modern natural law of 1963–4 and to the texts published in the Cahiers pour l’analyse on the Social

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Contract. It is the distinction between the state of pure nature and the state of nature that enables him to move beyond Hobbes and to present the materialism of the encounter thought not through a physical ontology, nor a politics, nor a political ontology, but through a theory of history. In the state of pure nature, men roam in the void of the forest without encountering one another until the clinamen constituted by a climactic and geological modification forces them to associate with one another and, after several discontinuous attempts, to engender a social world, resulting in a heretofore unsuspected perfectibility, the pure expectation of a becoming that might not have been [un devenir qui aurait pu ne pas advenir]. The nothingness of society is thus the condition for all society. And the movement of society is not a teleology ruled by the necessity of its end. History is made behind men’s backs, without their conscious cooperation, as a function of the contingent change in conjunctures – as proved by the leap from the youthful state of the world to the state of society, founded on private property, the division of labour and the dialectic of inequalities which henceforth becomes necessary – right up to a state of war and the first contract, the dupes’ contract by which the rich promise juridical protection (which is nothing but domination) to the poor, who exchange their voluntary servitude in return for an illusory peace. Rousseau makes of history a process without a subject, one whose rhythms are set by the transformations issuing from aleatory encounters where socialised human nature is constructed within determinate conjunctures. The profundity of Rousseau’s theory of history effects in advance a critique of teleological and necessitarist [nécessitariste] philosophies of history obsessed with their end in the revolution (French or otherwise). It consists in the fact that Rousseau ‘thinks the contingency of necessity as an effect of the necessity of contingency’.19 The historical materialism of the encounter proper to Rousseau is superior to that of Marx, who was ‘constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution’.20

The ‘Heidegger constellation’ For now, let us skip the moment of Marx, who belongs to this history only on account of his suffering its lessons and providing its radical reformulation. The final moment of this discontinuous genealogy is Heidegger, or rather what we prefer to call the ‘Heidegger constellation’, inasmuch as the Heidegger who interests Althusser is not so much the thinker of the forgetting of Being and of the inspection of being by technique, as the Heidegger interpreted by Derrida, accomplishing the critique of western metaphysics initiated by Nietzsche, and continued in a rather cavalier manner by Deleuze and Wittgenstein. It would be vain to ask of these pages a rigour to which they do not aspire. It is more a matter of ‘translating’, to give it a solid base, the common foundation shared by all these philosophers: namely, a critique of the rationalism of the entire philosophical tradition and of its principle of reason. From this perspective, the 1985 interview is more explicit. Heidegger is presented as he who makes the end of the history of western philosophy correspond with its beginning: Epicurus. The latter inaugurates aleatory materialism; Heidegger gives an ultimate version of it. The repetition of Epicurus’s gesture – to refuse the question of the origin and of the end – is realised in the perspective of a deconstruction of philosophy as dominated by idealism, non-aleatory materialisms included. It is effected in full consciousness of what is at stake: the calling into question of the principle of reason. Althusser’s reference to Leibniz seems to suggest that he had read the essay of Heidegger devoted to the principle of reason. ‘Heidegger would say that idealism, just like materialism, obeys the “principle of reason”, that is, the principle according

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to which everything that exists, whether ideal [idéel] or material, is subject to the question of the reason for its existence’.21 Idealism is haunted by a single question which divides into two, since the principle of reason bears not only on the origin, but also on the end: indeed, the Origin always, and very naturally, refers to the End. We can go further still: the question of the Origin is a question that arises on the basis of the question of the End. Anticipating itself, the End (the meaning of the world, the meaning of its history, the ultimate purpose of the world and history) projects itself back on to and into the question of the Origin. The question of the Origin of anything whatsoever is always posed as a function of what one imagines to be its end. The question of the ‘radical origin of things’ (Leibniz) is always posed as a function of what one imagines to be their final destination, their End, whether it is a question of the Ends of Providence or of Utopia.22 It is in this context that Althusser refers to the Heideggerian ‘es gibt’ as a ‘unique proposition’ of the materialism of the encounter in its defining feature [sa pointe aiguë] which is a refusal of order – whether it be rational, moral, religious, political or aesthetic. The notion of order is that which conjoins the origin and the end. The materialism of the encounter, in ‘rejecting the Whole and every Order, rejects the Whole and order in favour of dispersion (Derrida would say, in his terminology, “dissemination”) and disorder’.23 ‘“[T]here is” = “there is nothing”; “there is” = “there has always-already been nothing”, that is to say, “something”, the “always-already” . . . of each thing over itself, hence over every kind of origin’.24 Or again: ‘A philosophy of the es gibt, of the “this is what is given” . . . “opens up” a prospect that restores a kind of transcendental contingency of the world, into which we are “thrown”, and of the meaning of the world, which in turn points to the opening up of Being, the original urge of Being, its “destining”, beyond which there is nothing to seek or to think. Thus the world is a “gift” that we have been given’.25 We must note the equivocation of this reading: it fails to take into account that for Heidegger something is lost in this passive-active ‘giving’ [‘donne’] – namely, the harmonious relation [juste rapport] of Being – and that this loss is the motor of the history of metaphysics, the forgetting of the gift of Being. The problematic of the gift and of donation risks inflecting with a negative onto-theology the pure fact of occurrence [le pur fait du constat de la survenance] or ‘accidence’ which itself presupposes no such ontological loss. That, perhaps, is the reason why in the 1985 text it is Wittgenstein who is identified as having given the best formulation of the unique proposition of aleatory materialism with ‘the superb sentence’ from the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus: ‘die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist . . . hard to translate. We might try to render it as follows: “the world is everything that happens”; or, more literally, “the world is everything that befalls us” [tombe dessus]. There exists yet another translation, which has been proposed by Russell’s school: “the world is everything that is the case” [“the world is what the case is”]’.26 If Wittgenstein’s formulation lacks the history of the underground current of the new materialism – which functions as if veiled, covered up [au voilement, au recouvrement] – it has the merit of no longer thinking the given starting from an act of crypto-religious donation, and of keeping itself as closely as possible to the faktum, to the casus. ‘This superb sentence says everything, for, in this world, there exists nothing but cases, situations, things that befall us without warning . . . singular individuals wholly distinct from one another’.27 Wittgenstein loses historicity in order the better to think ‘the opening of

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the world towards the event’ in its non-subjectable neutrality. Heidegger thinks the historicity of the given’s ‘give’ [la donne du donné] whilst running the risk of gearing this ‘give’ in ‘giving’ [cette donne en donation] towards a theological connotation.

Aleatory materialism between deconstruction of the rationalist tradition and construction of a new conceptuality Henceforth it is possible to regroup in a synthetic manner the fundamental premises of the materialism of the encounter based on its genealogy. These premises form a minor Tractatus Logico-politicus which is divided into two parts: one deconstructive, the other constructive.

The pars destruens This part is not limited to the critique of idealism, understood as that dominant mode of philosophising ruled by the principle of reason. This principle is intrinsically logico-political; it refers to a political power of domination. The principle is Prince and the Prince is principle. It is a power of imposition and of subjection that philosophy denies by presenting it as the power of truth. At this point aleatory materialism integrates Marx, his conception of practice and of ideologies, to make it known to philosophy that it always has an outside that it cannot see, a ‘behind’ that it does not wish to see (as Mauriac has it), and whose existence it imagines. Aleatory materialism is not speculative, but operative or performative. It always intervenes remotely in the transformation of the habitual relations between theory and practice to the extent that it criticises that kind of theory which aims to guide practice without genuinely appreciating its irreducibility. The philosophical tradition, hegemonised by the idealism of freedom, desires to portray itself as the principle which subjects practice and imposes on it its moral, political, religious, aesthetic, or rational ‘values’, under the recurrence of truth. Philosophy is not totally oblivious to the outside world; it comes to an arrangement with it, at once violent and biased. It forces all practices into the domain of its thought and seeks to impose itself on them with the objective of telling them their truth which is the truth of philosophy. Philosophy cheats when it assimilates them and reworks them in accordance with its own philosophical form, it hardly does so with scrupulous respect for the reality – the particular nature – of such social practices and ideas. Quite the contrary: in order to affirm its power of truth over them, philosophy must first subject them to a veritable transformation . . . The ‘philosophers of philosophy’ who set out to master the world by means of thought have always exercised the violence of the concept, of the Begriff, of ‘seizure’ [de la mainmise]. They assert their power by bringing under the sway of the law of Truth (their truth) all the social practices of men, who continue to toil and to dwell in darkness.28 The ‘materialism of the encounter’ encounters practice, or rather practices, according to a different relation than that of the mastery of the concept and the violence of an imposed truth. This relation is the opening of the event [l’ouverture de l’événement], of its recognition

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and of its knowledge; it lowers itself to a relation of experimentation, interminable, beyond all fantasy of definitive domination. ‘Practice is not a substitute for Truth for the purposes of an unshakeable philosophy; on the contrary, it is what shakes philosophy to its foundations; it is that other thing – whether in the form of the “variable cause” of matter or in that of class struggle – which philosophy has never been able to master. It is that other thing which alone makes it possible not merely to shake philosophy to its foundations, but also to begin to see clearly just what philosophy is’.29 It is in this sense that we must understand the specificity of the deconstruction of the idealist tradition and of its principle-prince of reason. It does not merely take up again the Heideggerian destruction of logocentrism, reinterpreted by Derrida. The entire criticism of philosophical categories is an experiment attempting to liberate the philosophical and historical field from the power of imposition and submission that these categories exert over social practices, these latter being understood from the point of view of the mass of men who live the imaginary of their world ‘in darkness’ and ‘continue to toil’. The deconstruction operated by aleatory materialism empties [fait le vide] the idealist mode of thinking so as to liberate positive theoretical elements that it can recover and transform into atomic points for other encounters within other combinations. The materialism of the encounter thus prepares the possibility for worlds. It is a laboratory which enables the dismantling of the nuclear constellation which obstructs – as the invariant of its variations – the opening of the event. This constellation has as its fixed star, as its sun, the principle of reason, the concept-truth, and as its stars the notions of meaning [Sens], subject and origin-end.

On meaning It is the onto-theological and metaphysical idea that there exists a meaning [une signification], a logos, a reason which precedes the world or reveals itself there – in any case, which founds it. The true world is the world of the principle-power realised. It is the fabric of the principle, idea, form, reason, humanity, communism. Here, Althusser refines somewhat the Nietzschean and Heideggerian vulgate via subtle references to the negative ontology of Derrida or to the negative theology of one who, until his death, remained a faithful friend through thick and thin – Stanislas Breton, who, in his work Du principe, opposed to the principle-eminence and principle-all the principle-nothing of neo-Platonism and of Eckhartien mysticism. The void of Meaning frees us from order and opens out onto the disorder of the event.

On substance It is the idea of a unitary substratum that is supposed to guarantee the stability and homogeneity of all ‘accidents’ that arise from it. Hume and empiricism, Nietzsche, all reread by Deleuze, are also called upon. Substance is the product of a procedure which blocks all thought of definite things and all material complexes. It prevents us from grasping that materiality is not limited to that which is studied by the physical or biological sciences, or by economics. There also exists, as Derrida has shown, a scriptural materiality: the trace, an element of all written tissue which imposes the primacy of absence over presence and logocentric representation.

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On the subject An old acquaintance. It remains ever the central category of idealism, especially the idealism of freedom from which even Marx never entirely delivered himself, nor Marxism at its best (see Gramsci and the praxis subject). It is the idea of a stable individuality, present to itself, which aims at realising itself in the continuity of its projects, in the name of its freedom and of its proper rights, all the while oblivious to the ideological mechanisms which interpellate it as such and direct it. It cannot see its own back. ‘[T]he materialism of the encounter is the materialism, not of a subject (be it God or the proletariat), but of a process, a process that has no subject, yet imposes on the subjects (individuals or others) which it dominates the order of its development, with no assignable end’.30 The thesis of anti-humanism is thus taken up again, but inflected. Indeed, the subject is no longer simply included in the structures of interpellation, but is a composition of unities of diverse levels in a sort of fractal geometry of orders of transindividual encounters.

On the origin-and-the-end Another old acquaintance. It is the category which completes the structure of the idealism of freedom. The origin is merely the anticipation of the end internal to a primordial order. We always hypothesise a good, desirable, unitary origin that has been driven to fall [déchoir] – by corruption, division, alienation – into an alterity, an other. But this alterity reveals itself to be susceptible to integration and overcoming. The origin, reestablished and enriched by its development, is the end. There we have a well-known theological matrix according to which the absolute is the unity of three operations: the identitarian operation of remaining in-itself; the transitive operation of exteriorisation in the other, the object, outside of itself; and finally the converse operation of the return-to-itself from the other into an in-itself/for-itself. The deconstruction of this operative system – which, at the same time, Stanislas Breton placed at the centre of his negative theology – is crucial in opening up a theory of history and politics beyond the mythology of philosophies of history. It is henceforth impossible to tell oneself stories about history in its practice. History [l’histoire]: Practice is a process of transformation which is always subject to its own conditions of existence and produces, not the Truth, but, rather, ‘truths’, or some truth [de la vérité]: the truth, let us say, of results or of knowledge, all within the field of its own conditions of existence. And while practice has agents, it nevertheless does not have a subject as the transcendental or ontological origin of its intention or project; nor does it have a Goal as the truth of its process. It is a process without a subject or Goal (taking ‘subject’ to mean an ahistorical element).31

The pars construens The deconstruction complete, it becomes possible to reorder the conceptual atoms which will subdivide [décliner] and form the schema of the construction of a new philosophical world. They are pure concepts, in the sense of lacking concrete objects: void, limits and margins, freedom-power and struggle, and contingency-conjuncture.

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On the void The void is at once nothingness, the nothingness of antecedent reason, and the instance of annihilation [néantification]. Like the Being of Heidegger which differs from beings and the totality of beings, the void which precedes the birth of a world, like the Heideggerian nothing, is the horizon which makes beings possible. It is not absolute nothingness but the non-world, absence, the condition of possibility of any possible world. The nothing of nothingness [Le Rien du néant] is Being, and not being [est être, en non étant]. [A] philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void [fait le vide philosophique] in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous ‘philosophical problems’ (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any ‘object’ whatever (‘philosophy has no object’) in order to set out from nothing . . . We have then the primacy of nothingness over all form, the primacy of absence (there is no Origin) over presence.32 No form, no world can be guaranteed against its being voided [son évidement] by an encounter which will empty it of its structural law, by driving it back into the void, in order to liberate the unforeseen and unpredictable possibilities of another world.

On limits and margins Margins designate the absence of a firm centre and thus the displacement towards the margins of that which in a conjuncture, a state of the world, is given as central and, inversely, of what is marginal towards the centre. Things thus contain in their interior their margins, and vice-versa all things find themselves on the margins, in the margins. A world always lacks a univocal centre to settle its drift [dérive]; it is without teleological orientation. It is like writing according to Derrida: a process of dissemination, a mobile cluster of differential margins, without ever being under the control of a sovereign ‘I’ who would see himself master. A world can have laws but it is worked at the margin and comes up against the limits it produces which an encounter can destroy.

On freedom-power and struggle If the freedom-subject, with its sovereign/ interpellated polarity, is dismissed, room is made for a freedom-power which is intrinsically defined by its capacity to support and initiate struggles. All freedom is a quantum of power which wins its relative autonomy in its world and its world’s laws, and which undergoes a continual variation in its degree of autonomy in line with other forces. Paradoxically for a given world, an unstable hierarchy of powers is constituted. A given world is a dynamic manifested as a conflictual network of forces.

On contingency-conjuncture The principle of reason ultimately gives way to a rule: the thought of contingency. ‘[I]nstead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity

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as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies’.33 Every being (animal, man, society) is nothing but a conjuncture which has been produced through a series of contingent encounters, consecutions [consécutions] which are not the (onto-)logical consequences of a principle-order. Every conjuncture-structure is the aleatory result of a conjunction-event. Henceforth the primacy of the structure heralded since Reading Capital gives way to the primacy of the genesis-conjunction, to the event [l’évènement] which is not an occurrence [avènement]. Philosophy, redefined as aleatory materialism, renounces its pretensions to autonomy; it no longer considers itself a science, let alone the science of sciences. Yet it does not renounce a classic materialist thesis: ‘Philosophy of a materialist tendency recognizes the existence of objective external reality, as well as its independence of the subject who perceives or knows this reality. It recognizes that being or the real exists and is anterior to its discovery, to the fact of being thought or known’.34 Nevertheless, voided of its idealist dependence on the principle of reason, philosophy thinks being as the ‘there is’ [il y a] of the conjunction-conjuncture. It is experimental: ‘our philosopher can conduct experiments on the consecutions [consécutions] of aleatory sequences that he has been able to observe, and can (like Hume) work out laws of consecution, “customary” laws or constants’35 in the case of phenomena which are repeated. But in the case of historical phenomena – those aleatory ‘singular cases’ – this philosophy can only ‘single out “general constants” among the encounters he has observed, the “variations” of which are capable of accounting for the singularity of the cases under consideration, and thus produce knowledge of the “clinical” sort as well as ideological, political and social effects’.36 We must therefore give up on the idea of laws of history or of social practices. Every state of the world can be transformed, in an unpredictable way, according to addition, subtraction, or the modification of an element. Since this singular element conforms only to the case of its deviation, no one can foresee how the structure-conjuncture will be transformed. This state of the world has stability only for a certain indeterminate duration, exposed to the conjunction of elements which will produce another, equally aleatory, conjuncture. It is no longer a question of establishing the laws of the continent of history. We can merely single out constants and trends for a given world and for each of its modified states. These constants and trends are relative to each world, and it is only with caution that we can speak of laws for each conjuncture. Yet there exist no laws ruling conjunctions, which are unpredictable facts; we can merely recognise their accomplished status [leur fait accompli]. The eventconjunction is alone eternal in its empty formality and its ‘taking’ [‘prise’], which is ‘sur-prise’, into conjuncture. The idea of a logic of history should no longer even be proposed. The task of knowing the accomplished fact goes on forever. The same holds for the practice – the virtù – of the disposition of welcoming chance, the surprise of the encounter that can exploit theoretical and political virtue. Even the worst is not assured.

Marx and the fine-toothed comb of aleatory materialism37 It is only now, after this long detour, that we can situate Marx with regard to aleatory materialism. Marx belongs to this genealogy; he is a moment of the underground current. But from

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now on he is especially an element that must be transformed according to the requisites of this materialism. It is no longer a matter of deconstructing the philosophy of history which affects the structural theory of the mode of production and its indisputable contributions. Marx does not belong to aleatory materialism because of this theory taken as a whole and of the discovery of the primacy of the reproduction of the relations of production (and therefore of exploitation). It is the theory of the mode of production itself which is internally contaminated by idealism and the freedom of its categories, and it is this which must be deconstructed. Althusser effectively distinguishes between two conceptions of the mode of production, a ‘totalitarian, teleological and philosophical conception’ and another which is historical, aleatory, and true (even if he does not use the word) – accurate, in any case.

The idealism of freedom and the teleological-essentialist conception of the mode of production The first conception consists in constructing the capitalist mode of production as a combination of elements of which the most important are labour-power, freed from relations of direct dependence, and the capitalist owner [sic] of the means of production. The structure imposing its unity upon the series of elements is a determinate one: the exploitation of the forces of production and of impoverished [démunis] workers. Althusser does not deny the accomplished fact of a mode of domination of the structure over its elements. He merely questions the modality under which Marx thinks this mode; more precisely, the modality of existence of the elements of the combination. Marx presupposes that these elements, ‘our friend the money-owner’ [‘l’homme aux écus’] and ‘bare man’ [‘l’homme nu’], were produced by the decomposition of the feudal mode of production. These ‘products’ are very much distinct, ‘but so thought and ordered as to suggest that they were from all eternity destined to enter into combination, harmonize with one another, and reciprocally produce each other as their own ends, conditions and/or complements’.38 This predestination comes up against the question of the bourgeoisie, posed as the dialectical opposite of its opposite, the dominant feudal class. Supposedly, the beneficiaries of commercial and financial capital, the bourgeoisie is that strange class, ‘capitalist by virtue of its future, but formed well before any kind of capitalism, under feudalism’.39 The bourgeoisie is understood to be an essence that has become the origin and subject of its own development, whose end is to cede the place of origin-subject to the proletarian class, which it also forms as its contrary and which will negate it in the dialectical production of another negation of the negation. ‘[T]he bourgeoisie is indeed nothing other than the element predestined to unify all the other elements of the mode of production, the one that will transform it into another combination, that of the capitalist mode of production. It is the dimension of the whole and of the teleology that assigns each element its role and position in the whole, reproducing it in its existence and role’.40 This essentialist conception replaces the genesis or production of the mode of production with its reproduction. It necessitates the essentialist conception of the other element, the antagonist class which is doomed mimetically to reproduce the destiny of its other. Althusser does not say so in this particular text, but the conclusion nonetheless suggests itself. It is another version of the same dialectical logic, that of the mythical decomposition of a class, at once the culminating and grave-digging moment of the mode of production that ‘produces’

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it as a logical consequence, as an antithesis called to become, in turn, a thesis. This essentialist conception of the reproduction of the mode of production according to the structure combining its elements constitutes an obstacle to our understanding of the real genesis of this mode of production. The conjuncture is idealised into an autoreferential structure; it denies that it is the result, the consecution of the conjunction of elements which are not essences ruled by the philosophical law of the passage from potentiality to act [passage de la puissance à l’acte]. Althusser thus reverses the ‘structuralist’ primacy of reproduction over genesis (supposedly historicist) which he had never ceased to support throughout the preceding years. Reproduction thinks under the recurrence of the accomplished fact that which is the result of a genesis of elements that have ‘taken’ and formed a structure which is a conjuncture. It substantialises these elements into products predestined to unite according to their end, and in the same vein fails to account for the conjuncture as a result of a real conjunction. The question of the genesis of elements and of their encounter has been hidden by the structural a priori which surreptitiously maintains an internal finality of the structure as a goal aimed for by its elements. The self-sufficiency of the reproduction of the structure implies the idealist prejudice of self-reproduction in its mechanisms. Historicism’s criticism of this prejudice, justified from a certain point of view, was excessive; it lacked the historicity of the conjunction, of the aleatory production of the mode of production. Aleatory materialism purifies Marx of what can only be called his idealist materialism, which is, conversely, an idealism of freedom – the bourgeoisie dialectically making way for another class predestined to unite the mode of production according to its own aim. Considered thus, the communism guiding the theory of the mode of production is a new avatar of the reason of the dominant metaphysics.

The aleatory-historical conception of the mode of production Yet, contradictorily, Marx develops a second, historical and aleatory, conception which we can turn against him. Marx against Marx. He develops it most notably in Chapter 24 of Volume I of Capital, which is devoted to historical accumulation, and which is normally read merely as a moving historical intermezzo devoid of any real theoretical import. There he poses, in all its clarity, the problem of the effective encounter between two elements of the capitalist mode of production: ‘our friend the money-owner’ [‘l’homme aux écus’] and the worker, stripped of everything except his labour-power. There are multiple reasons why money ends up in the pocket of the ‘bourgeois’, why the worker ends up forced to sell his labour-power, and which explain differing levels of technical prowess. What counts is the realisation – a singular event which never existed in societies which nonetheless possessed certain of these elements – of a stable encounter between them, combining them into a world. This fact [fait] took place in Europe, and nowhere else at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The fact to be accomplished [fait à accomplir] was produced and, without any prior assurance, it became the accomplished fact [fait accompli] which constituted an epoch and a structure. The aleatory conjunction or combination became a conjuncture; the latter made a structure, imposing its relative necessity and its laws which are merely tendential. The capitalist mode of production is not inscribed in any historical necessity destined to develop from its own essence a providential teleology of freedom. It might well not have been, the encounter between its elements not achieving realisation or not enduring. The fact

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to be accomplished might well not have been accomplished (contingency), but the fact is that it was accomplished and was able to impose its structure and its constraints of reproduction (necessity). It is not a whole which precedes and commands the encounter; it is its simple historical result become world. Necessity of contingency and contingency of necessity: the chapter on primitive accumulation is the Marxist version of Rousseau’s second Discourse. For what is a mode of production? We provided an answer to this question, following Marx: it is a particular ‘combination’ of elements. These elements are an accumulation of money (by the ‘owners of money’), an accumulation of the technical means of production (tools, machines, an experience of production on the part of the workers), an accumulation of the raw materials of production (nature) and an accumulation of producers (proletarians divested of all means of production). The elements do not exist in history so that a mode of production may exist, they exist in history in a ‘floating’ state prior to their ‘accumulation’ and ‘combination’, each being the product of its own history, and none being the teleological product of the others or their history.41 The clinamen is a fact, that of a process, ‘the process of the violent dispossession’ of English peasants who, thrown off their land – now enclosures – by sheep-raisers, are reduced to a state of misery and are drawn to the money-owners as a workforce. ‘There is’ [‘Il y a’] this fact of the money-owners’ diversion [détournement] of the process of peasant expropriation. ‘The fact is that this process took place, culminating in a result that was promptly diverted from its possible, presumed end by “owners of money” looking for impoverished manpower. This diversion is the mark of the non-teleology of the process and of the incorporation of its result into a process that both made it possible and was wholly foreign to it’.42 Capitalism today still remains the aleatory repetition of this diversion. The structure is the conjuncture of a repeated diversion. It remains an event and its laws of reproduction enjoy no eternity. They depend on the repetition of the encounter under modified forms. Thus, what is transformed is the entire conception of the relation of the structure to the conjuncture, since the conjuncture is no longer a case preordained by the structural matrix and reproducing it in its identity. It is the fact always to be accomplished of the conjuncture, always exposed to the risk of another encounter of other elements, or of elements otherwise disposed. The becoming conjuncture-structure of the conjunction forces one to think structure under the conjuncture and the conjuncture under the conjunction. The classic Marxist question of the passage from one mode of production to another is disrupted: it cannot be understood as the liberation of possibles pending actualisation, this latter consisting in reconnecting, in the fullness of a line, the points of the possibles through gradual reform or revolutionary leap. In any case, at the most profound level of domination of the capitalist mode of production, no selfreproduction of its structure as an end in itself is established. The future is unpredictable. Other encounters are not excluded, not even ‘good encounters’ for the ‘men who toil in darkness’. The formal thought of other ‘diversions’ must be maintained in its enigmatic openness. And with them, the empty figure of another Prince – neither a new Prince à la Machiavelli, nor a modern party prince à la Gramsci, nor a prince-principle – a Prince capable of the sole political virtue of diversion. Marx against Marx, we said. And yet, the reflection now complete, it is about more than that. What Althusser is seeking in Marx is not merely the philosophy in its practical state that Capital

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would contain in its theory of the capitalist mode of production and its structural causality, and which would contradict the reference to Hegel’s teleological logic. Henceforth it is this theory itself that is submitted to critique as the product of a tenacious metaphysical rationalism and that is purged of that which linked it to the principle of reason. The critique is carried out by the themes of the underground current of the materialism of the encounter, by a new philosophy, elaborated independently of Marx by Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau and Heidegger, and which becomes the norm for critique of Marx’s rationalist idealism. What, then, is Marx’s originality in this current to which he belongs, partially and contradictorily? Marx’s contribution consists in two interconnected discoveries: a) the discovery of the modern class struggle as outside of philosophy, this struggle effecting the conjunction of elements of the capitalist mode of production, b) the theory of ideologies which inform this struggle and which are themselves involved in a struggle for hegemony. The first implies the assumption of the point of view of ‘the men who continue to toil in darkness’; the second obliges us to deconstruct the necessary illusions under which these men live out their subjection and struggle against it, illusions proper to the idealist materialism of Marx himself, to that idealism of freedom that he shares with both the Enlightenment tradition and the dialectical Hegelian tradition.

On certain hazards of Althusserian aleatory materialism Which is as good as saying that, here, we come up against problems of coherence, theoretical incertitudes, the hazards [aléas] of aleatory materialism. Nothing proves that these two elements – the practice of class struggle and the repetition of its capitalist diversion, the constitutive imaginary under which the struggle is played out – can encounter one another in order to form the conjuncture of a rupture of the mode of production, a ‘taking’ [‘prise’] that forms an event, an event-world. The aleatory character – in the sense of aporetic – of this encounter appears in the function that Althusser always assigns to materialist philosophy, albeit redefined, against the principle of reason.

The aporetic hazard of the philosophical operation defined as ideological hegemony Indeed, especially in the text published in 1985, in the second part entitled ‘Philosophieideologie-politique’, Althusser reformulates his conception of philosophy as ‘in the last instance class struggle in theory’. Althusser maintains a ‘communist’ theoretical and political position: ‘philosophy does indeed represent class positions in theory, that is to say, in the relations it maintains with the most theoretical forms of the human practices and, through them, the most concrete forms of the human practices, class struggle included . . .’.43 Aleatory materialism receives from Marx-Althusser an explicitly theoretico-political function that renders it a practical and historical operation that sees itself as such – an element of the conjuncture. In this last text – we have not seen enough of it – Althusser crosses his own theory of the philosophical operation with the theory of hegemony elaborated by that other solitary reader of Machiavelli, Gramsci, but in some way redeemed of its long-ago criticised historicism. Philosophy acts ‘at a distance’; it operates ‘by way of the ideologies, on real, concrete practices . . . And, to the

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extent that it transforms the ideologies, which reflect the practices even while orientating them in a certain direction, these practices can be transformed in their turn, depending on the variations or revolutions in social relations’.44 How do we go about defining this transformation of ideologies if these latter are mechanisms that produce effects of recognition by which certain notions are recognised as true by subjects who are thus interpellated and who recognise themselves in these notions, hence being forced to constitute themselves as free subjects capable of recognising truth? Since aleatory materialism is based on the deconstruction of notions of a free subject and of ends, the effects of deconstruction will be to break the determinate mechanisms of interpellation but then to form others recognised as more ‘true’. Althusser assigns to aleatory materialism the task of contributing to the critique of the dominant ideology and of elaborating an ‘authentic materialist ideology and of a philosophy that is correct, accurate [juste, correct], in order to facilitate the emergence of a progressive ideology’.45 And yet, aleatory materialism is invited to constitute itself into a philosophy that reproduces the ‘traditional’ operation of philosophy. In carrying out the task of unifying the diversity of the practices and their ideologies – which it experiences as an internal necessity, although this task is assigned it by the great class conflicts and historical events – what does philosophy do? It produces a whole array of categories that serve to think and situate the different social practices under the ideologies. Philosophy produces a general problematic: that is, a manner of posing, and therefore resolving, any problem that may arise. Lastly, philosophy produces theoretical schemas . . . that serve as a means of overcoming contradiction, and as links for connecting the various elements of ideology. Moreover, it guarantees the Truth of this order, stated in a form that offers all the guarantees of a rational discourse.46 This definition does not allow us to define how progressive ideology would distinguish itself from all other ideology, nor to measure how aleatory materialism would unify its deconstructive and its constructive functions, especially if this latter operates according to the procedures of deconstructed philosophy [la philosophie déconstruite]. Gramsci, invoked as the theoretician of ideology ‘unified around the essential interests of the dominant class’,47 was unable to encounter this aporia. Indeed, he defines philosophy as a conception of the world which includes diverse levels, ranging from the common sense of the masses to good sense, all the way to a specialised conceptual structure. The question of the critique of truth as an ideological form of interpellation and as a religious myth does not come up in Gramsci, truth being whatever is the object of a controlled intersubjective recognition. ‘Progressive ideology’, which aleatory materialism is invited strategically to produce, cannot escape the criticism it addresses to philosophical ideology, not least since the notion of progress is inscribed in the rationalist teleology of idealism. The becoming ‘progressive ideology’ of aleatory materialism is indeterminate [inassignable], since the latter must immediately deconstruct as ideology what it is supposed to have constructed. The force of aleatory materialism is to change terrain whilst opening itself to the alterity of the encounter of practices and this alterity implies the re-interrogation of all constituted order and its expression in the dominant ideology. The 1985 text juxtaposes two problematics without proposing the conditions for their coherence [leur mise en coherence].

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The aporetic hazard of the conception of practice The same difficulty is displaced. The philosophical operation is susceptible to producing itself according to two modalities: the idealist-ideological modality and the (aleatory) materialist modality which produces knowledge-effects. And this from the two perspectives from which the production of the philosophy-effect can be envisaged: that of its efficacy over ideologies and that of its aptitude at transforming social practices.

The first perspective: efficacy over ideologies MM

Either: idealism – including its materialist version – transforms ideologies by manipulating them; it unifies them under a dominant ideology by assuming the form of a rational discourse and by reconnecting truth to the principle of reason, that truth which it announces and which interpellates subjects so that they recognise themselves therein. This recognition is that of an order which attempts to render unthinkable its reality as a conjuncture [sa réalité de conjoncture], as the result of an aleatory conjunction. This order is intrinsically ideologico-political and it is materialised in institutions of power [pouvoir], dominating and exploiting the force [puissance] of the masses within a hegemonic social relation.

MM

Or: aleatory materialism disaggregates this dominant ideology by making it appear for what it is and by unveiling the contingent will-to-power which structures the conjuncture by imagining, and by making others imagine, that it realises order. Aleatory materialism frees, and makes free-floating, those ideological elements that ‘represent’ emergent political forces that can encounter one another [se rencontrer] and constitute a conjuncture free of apologetic and teleological representations.

The second perspective: the transformation of social practices MM

Either: idealism dominates the representation of practices and constitutes itself as an instrument, but also a symbolic form. As a philosophical practice, it reinforces the social practices connected to the social domination of the class which holds political power. In the same way, it weakens, virtualises or dematerialises the antagonistic forms inscribed in these practices.

MM

Or: aleatory materialism weakens or breaks representations of practices, and gives access to the alterity of their antagonistic elements by identifying the masses, not as subjects, but as agents of resistance to order and as forces capable of acting towards an order which would no longer be order. We have not advanced: the ideology of the resistance of the masses can only constitute these latter as agents by recourse to the subject-function and to the representation of ends. How do we bring into play the critical difference between subject and agent, between ends and objectives, without presupposing a thought proper to the masses [une pensée de masse] that is refused on principle? How do we call the masses to a wild freedom that deconstructs all order as a product of the principle of reason at the same time as trying to make way for a conjuncture which remains, as a structure, a (relative) order?

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More generally, the construction of a progressive ideological hegemony presupposes a conception of political practice as intervention and as a change in order – that of articulated practices, an order which is not necessarily given but which could intervene. The construction of this order supposes the continuity of social forces, that is, the action of significant trends. The ideology of resistance to be produced cannot but rely on these forces and trends. Yet this conception of practice is opposed to that which defines it as alterity, as an instance of resistance or challenge to the existent order; for Althusser, this is the deaf resistance of the masses. It is the aleatory element which brings about variation in the forms and conditions of hegemony throughout the struggles. Aleatory materialism takes account of this conception but, despite the ultimate return to Gramsci, it cannot integrate in a coherent manner the notion of significant trends, the basis of all ideology. This aporia seems to be definitive.

The hazard of the genealogy of aleatory materialism There remains a final difficulty. Aleatory materialism was formulated in the course of a genealogy of which Althusser is at once a moment and the provisional terminus, but also the thinking moment, that of self-reflection. Yet the idea of an underground current cannot be separated from that of a tradition – broken, but effective. The tradition of the dissolution of the tradition dominated by figures of western rationalism. Althusser here takes up the classic formulations of Engels all the while criticising the specular relation between idealism and a materialism still in thrall to idealism (Engels included). The latter spoke of a struggle between two tendencies, coextensive with the entire history of philosophy. Althusser especially stresses the minority, dominated, hidden character, not only of materialism, but particularly of aleatory materialism. These, aleatory materialism’s modalities of historical existence, demand explanation. Althusser suggests several of them: ‘from Epicurus to Marx, there had always subsisted – even if it was covered over (by its very discovery, by forgetfulness, and, especially, by denial and repression, when it was not by condemnations that cost some their lives) – the “discovery” of a profound tradition that sought its materialist anchorage in a philosophy of the encounter’.48 Forgetfulness, cover-up, repression: these are certainly not equivalent terms, as Federico Dinucci shows,49 and whom we follow on this point: MM

Forgetfulness and condemnation to death return us to the register of the classical history of materialism (such as it is being developed today by Olivier Bloch). Materialism had to confront intolerance and religious and political persecution which sought to destroy it and which often succeeded in doing so.

MM

The cover-up, the discovery that conceals, pertains to strategies other than those of politics; it evokes ontological, impersonal strategies, such as the dynamic of Being according to Heidegger. The history of metaphysics as aletheia, the unveiling of being [de l’étant], is actually that of the veiling of the onto-theological difference. One must think together the originary veiling and the inauthentic unveiling which, blind in its very self-evidence, prevents one from grasping the truth. What is covered over and forgotten is the apparatus [dispositif] of the opening of Being as a complex which brings together elements, void and encounter.

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Repression and misrecognition are still-other strategies, this time originating in Freudian psychoanalysis. Repression is the destiny undergone by an unconscious drive; it is displaced through its collision with another drive and transformed into an element which has lost all manifest connection with that which at the origin remains unconscious, repressed, all the while leaving in its place a representative, a symptom. In this sense, the materialism of the encounter could be seen as a repressed philosophical tendency that demands it be interpreted as a return of the repressed based on traces or symptoms of this completed repression.

Althusser does not question himself over these modalities that open out into a complexity whose ultimate coherence remains to be specified. In particular he uses, by combining them, the schemes of theologico-political cover-up and repression, both of which imply relations of force and displacements. He would have us think forms of compromise, in that neither idealism nor materialism are given in a philosophy in a ‘pure’ form. Indeed, every dominant current must represent in its bosom the very demands of the dominated current whilst deforming them or depotentialising them. Every great idealism (Descartes, Kant, Hegel) allows itself to be transformed, affected by elements of materialism that subsist as traces of struggle and censorship. Every materialism, likewise, allows itself to be affected by the idealism that it fights. It is the fate of the materialism of Marxists, and of Marx himself, who remains an idealist of freedom even in his structural theory of the mode of production, the heart of Capital. No matter what the genealogical scheme upheld, the status of aleatory materialism as a result remains to be seen. And yet, it would seem that Althusser is claiming that the formulation of the conceptuality of his aleatory materialism is without contamination by its other. At the end of this underground history, he repeats these concepts – doubtlessly ‘without objects, being the concepts of nothing’ – according to the form, ‘the simplest and purest, which they took in the history of philosophy, in Democritus and, especially, Epicurus’.50 From one purity to another. The end repeats the beginning, but the repetition is enriched by the underground labour, by clear possibilities to criticise western rationalism in an increasingly radically manner. The obvious risk is that of making this genesis of aleatory materialism into an orthogenesis which is still teleological, and thus subtracted from the conditions which, according to aleatory materialism itself, define history. Idealism would then approach aleatory materialism in that its process of development involves both the slippage of the contingency of its beginning into a pure origin and the mutation of its actual terminus, there where it finds enriched this pure end form projecting onto its genealogy the great shadow of truth. Aleatory materialism would still be philosophy [de la philosophie] in this circle of beginning and end, a critical mimesis of philosophy. It would be unfair to attribute this circle to Althusser without a more in-depth examination. The incompletion of his research must be taken into account. And Derrida’s reading, which is sensitive to logocentric closure – erasure – could have been used to think the return of idealism into aleatory materialism itself. The critique of the principle of reason, in its very execution, reestablishes this very principle itself: Aristotelian banality against skepticism. Nonetheless, this ultimate uncertainty is a problem.

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Of an impossible conclusion Until his death, Althusser remained a communist philosopher, committed to an aporetic communism since, like no other communist philosopher before him, he never ceased to deconstruct communism, in its Marxist form, as imaginary, as the triple myth of origin, subject and end. Notably, aleatory materialism voided this communism at the very moment when the mass movement was undergoing its most terrible historical defeat, becoming almost invisible; in doing so, Althusser also emptied himself out into the active nothing of the restoration of a wild and globalised capitalism. In his aporiai, in the impossibility of constructing – after its deconstruction – a determinate connection between the masses of ‘men who toil in darkness’ and the new practice of materialist philosophy, Althusser hoped in the possibility of an encounter, be it reduced to the purity of a formal outline [épure formelle], between those men whose darkness and conditions of engagement [mise en mouvement] he tragically shared. Of course, the materialist philosopher is the traveller who boards a train in whatever station, not knowing where the train has come from or where it is heading; he tells himself no stories [Histoire].51 He boards the train in motion and experiences the history into which he is ‘thrown’. But he can record sequences of events, experiment, whilst keeping himself ready to be ‘taken’, emptily awaiting the encounter, the conjunction which will constitute a world, the ‘sur-prise’ that could be that of another disaster [désastre], but also that of a felicitous conjunction of stars [astres]. We just don’t know. Translated from the French by Daniel Hartley.

Notes 1 A first version of this text appeared in 2000 in Cahiers philosophiques 84. [The original title is ‘Les aléas du matérialisme aléatoire dans la dernière philosophie de Louis Althusser’. The word ‘aléa’ literally means ‘hazard’, with the dual sense of ‘chance’ and ‘dangerous risk’. The pun on ‘aléas’ and ‘aléatoire’ is impossible to render into English. All footnotes are Tosel’s, except for the explanatory material placed in square brackets.] 2 Althusser 2006a, p. 166. [The second half of this epigraph is taken from a section of Althusser’s original French volume, which appears not to have been included in the Verso translation; see Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1, p. 537.] For a substantial clarification, see Raymond 1997, pp. 167–79. It would be worth taking into account Raymond’s entire development, from Raymond 1973 and Raymond 1975 up to Raymond 1982. In doing so, we could assess what Althusserian thought owes to these works and the ways in which it inflects them towards its own ultimate deconstructionism. That way, we could do justice to the important work of Pierre Raymond, which Althusser at once recognised and denied. 3 [The French version was published in 1992, the English translation in 1994a]. 4 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1. 5 [As noted above, the English translation of Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1 is Althusser 2006a, but this latter work differs in contents: it contains only pp. 341–582 of the former work. See the translator’s ‘Note on the French Texts’ in Althusser 2006a]. 6 [Parts of this book have been translated into English as Althusser 1990a. Other parts are included in Althusser 2006a]. 7 [Althusser 2006a, pp. 261–2].

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8 See Bourdin 2000. 9 [I have translated sens throughout as ‘meaning’, though it also means ‘sense’ or sometimes ‘direction’]. 10 Althusser 2006a, pp. 272–3. 11 Althusser 2006a, p. 173. 12 Dinucci 1998. 13 [In this paragraph, the French verb accomplir is translated as ‘accomplish’ and ‘fulfil’ depending on the context]. 14 Althusser 2006a, p. 177. 15 Althusser 2006a, p. 178. 16 Althusser 2006a, p. 179. 17 Althusser 2006a, p. 179. 18 Althusser 2006a, p. 179. 19 Althusser 2006a, p. 187. 20 Althusser 2006a, p. 187. 21 Althusser 2006a, p. 272. 22 Althusser 2006a, pp. 272–3. 23 Althusser 2006a, p. 188. 24 Althusser 2006a, p. 189. 25 Althusser 2006a, p. 170. 26 Althusser 2006a, p. 265. [The final formulation included in square brackets is in English in Althusser’s original]. 27 Althusser 2006a, p. 265. 28 Althusser 2006a, p. 276. 29 Althusser 2006a, p. 275. 30 Althusser 2006a, p. 190. 31 Althusser 2006a, pp. 274–5. 32 Althusser 2006a, pp. 174–5, 262. [The citation in Tosel appears to be one continuous whole, whereas the English translation contains the final sentence only in the ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ chapter later in the book]. 33 Althusser 2006a, pp. 193–4. 34 Althusser 2006a, p. 274. 35 Althusser 2006a, p. 278. 36 Althusser 2006a, p. 278. 37 [The section title in French is ‘Marx au crible du matérialisme aléatoire’. Crible usually means either ‘riddle’ or ‘sieve’, but there exists an idiomatic French expression, passer au crible, literally ‘to pass something through the sieve’, which means to submit something to a thorough investigation or critical selection. I chose the image of the fine-toothed comb to communicate at least some of this idiomatic nuance]. 38 Althusser 2006a, p. 200. 39 Althusser 2006a, p. 202. 40 Althusser 2006a, p. 202 41 Althusser 2006a, p. 198.

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42 Althusser 2006a, p. 199. 43 Althusser 2006a, p. 270. 44 Althusser 2006a, p. 280. 45 Althusser 2006a, p. 288. 46 Althusser 2006a, p. 287. 47 Althusser 2006a, p. 286. 48 Althusser 2006a, p. 188. 49 Dinucci 1998. 50 Althusser 2006a, p. 190. 51 Althusser 2006a, pp. 277–8.

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2 Rethinking aleatory materialism Panagiotis Sotiris

A

fter the tragic events of 1980, during a period of isolation and public silence, Louis Althusser tried to define a new conception of materialism, which he called aleatory materialism or materialism of the encounter. Although these texts, most of them published after Althusser’s death in 1990, bear the mark of a difficult personal situation, as he was tormented by serious health problems and periodic relapses of depression, they have nevertheless provoked an ongoing debate concerning both their significance and their position within the totality of Althusser’s work. The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the interpretations that have been proposed and also to critically read Althusser’s writings on aleatory materialism.

Readings of Althusser’s later writings An Althusserian Kehre? Antonio Negri has suggested that Althusser’s later writings represent a major theoretical turn, an Althusserian Kehre, describing these texts as indications of Althusser’s endorsement of a postmodern and post-communist perspective.1 According to Negri, Althusser moved away from his previous structuralism and embarked in the quest for a new philosophical and political subjectivity refusing all forms of dialectics. Postmodern totalisation of power leaves no room for dialectical contradictions in social reality, only the possibility of new social and productive forms emerging at the margins and interstices of existing social order. Negri insists that these new social forms necessarily take the form of aleatory ruptures, and instead of a negative philosophy of structures and ‘processes without subjects’, we need a positive philosophy of the resistance and creativity of singular social bodies, with Negri projecting onto Althusser his own ontology of the creative potentiality of the multitude. Similarly, Yann Moulier Boutang has insisted that Althusser, faced with the crisis of Marxism in the 1970s, chose to abandon the theoretical apparatus of historical materialism and any conception of a science of history dealing with modes of production and their succession and forms of transition, in favour of a logic of the singular case and of a notion of the political

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practice as aleatory encounter.2 Ichida and Matheron3 think that the notion of the aleatory which Althusser introduced in his later writings has to be interpreted as the non-dialectic, in the sense of the abandonment of a conception of politics based on the relation between a dialectical order of exposition and the order of things. Callari and Ruccio link aleatory materialism and the possibility of a postmodern Marxism and postmodern politics of the multiple and heterogeneous subjects and identities,4 presenting Althusser’s work as a clear break with classical Marxism and modernism. Modernist Marxism is presented as plagued by essentialism and teleology, with production being the causal centre of social reality and the proletariat as the historical subject of social change. For Callari and Ruccio, there is the possibility of an ‘other’ Marxism, exemplified in the work of Althusser, that counters these essentialist, systemicist and teleological tendencies and offers the possibility to think the heterogeneity, complexity and multiplicity of social struggles and to reject classical Marxism’s premises such as the primacy of the struggles in production or the determination in the last instance by the economic. This postmodern Althusser is also a post-communist one, refusing the basic tenets of communist politics, such as the political centrality of the labour movement. But this reading also has epistemological consequences: Althusser’s insistence on the possibility of treating Marxism as a science and as an attempt towards scientific explanation is discarded.5

Materialist readings On the contrary, G. M. Goshgarian’s Introduction to the Philosophy of the Encounter6 stresses the element of continuity in Althusser’s work, tracing the notion of the encounter in all of Althusser’s mature work, beginning with the book on Montesquieu,7 which is represented as a first clear break with historicism and teleology, and later in the reformulation of materialist dialectics in the 1960s, until its emergence as part of the new practice of philosophy, envisaged as an integral part of a political and theoretical strategy to counter right-wing tendencies and the crisis in the communist movement. According to Goshgarian, Althusser’s rethinking in the 1970s of the crisis of communist politics and the non-accomplishment of socialism in the USSR already included the basic premise of aleatory materialism that an encounter might not take place, or that it might not last. Similarly, he treats Althusser’s insistence on the primacy of class struggle over the contending classes, a basic premise of his works in the 1970s, as analogous to his later insistence on the primacy of the encounter over the forms to which it gives birth.8 Consequently, Goshgarian insists that only by reading the texts on aleatory materialism can we understand the philosophical perspective of Althusser’s political battles in the 1970s. Wal Suchting also provided, shortly before his death, a very interesting reading of Althusser’s later writings,9 in which he suggested that one possible way to understand these texts is though the conceptual strategy introduced by Wittgenstein, and especially the distinction between facts and things. He also insisted on the usefulness of aleatory materialism as a way to dissolve philosophical problems, especially those having to do with the relation of materialism to the development of modern science. André Tosel chooses a more balanced position, at the same time trying to stress an element of continuity in Althusser, basically in his effort to think communism in a non-ideological mode ‘remaining until his death a communist philosopher’,10 also stressing the open questions that mark the formulations of aleatory materialism.

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Mikko Lahtinen has also offered a very interesting reading of the later writings and especially Althusser’s preoccupation with Machiavelli,11 insisting that aleatory materialism is basically a way to theorise the exigencies of political practise and action in the unpredictable terrain of singular historical conjunctures. Vittorio Morfino’s writings on aleatory materialism12 represent an original attempt at a materialist reading of the later writings and they draw clear lines of demarcation with more idealist readings, since Morfino insists on Althusser’s radically anti-teleological and antihistoricist position. Especially interesting is Morfino’s careful reading of Althusser’s theoretical sources and his insistence that certain references by Althusser (for example the imagery of the rain or the void) must be treated more like rhetorical strategies and not like proper philosophical concepts or ontological positions. But the question remains: while one can be in agreement with readings such as those proposed by Goshgarian or Morfino, offering the possibility to treat Althusser’s materialism of the encounter as something opposed to an idealism of the aleatory and as a set of theoretical positions that are in a continuity with Althusser’s earlier formulations, the problem is that there has been a great number of interpretations that insist on a possible idealist reading. Is this a problem of the interpretations proposed, or is it an actual theoretical contradiction in Althusser’s writings themselves? In my opinion, it is not enough to limit ourselves to an effort to salvage the later texts from post-Marxist and postmodernist readings and to present an unbroken continuity in Althusser’s work. Such a reading would be in sharp violation of the protocols that Althusser himself introduced for the reading of any theoretical problematic. Instead, the contradictions in Althusser’s conception of aleatory materialism must be brought to the fore.

The difficulties of being a materialist in philosophy: assessing aleatory materialism A new attempt to think the possibility of a communist practice of philosophy The answer to the question of the continuity of aleatory materialism in relation to Althusser’s previous positions depends upon how one interprets his later writings. I think that the main element of continuity is that they remain inscribed in the politically inspired quest for a materialist practice of philosophy. Despite Althusser’s refusal (and inability) in the 1980s to make any form of public political intervention, it is obvious that he remained a communist in philosophy, in sharp contrast to the theoretical and political anti-communism that marked other conceptions of the crisis of Marxism, from the nouveaux philosophes onwards. Althusser’s effort to rethink materialism does not originate from a general disillusionment with working-class politics and Marxism, but on the contrary from an effort to provide a left-wing alternative to communist politics, based on the centrality of the class struggle and the continuing relevance of the communist project.13 Althusser’s successive redefinitions of philosophy after the abandonment of any possibility of a ‘theory of theoretical practice’, the importance attached to the political character of

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philosophical intervention,14 the distinction between scientific propositions and philosophical positions and in general the emphasis on philosophy not having an object in the sense of the sciences,15 the linking of philosophy, ideology and the class struggle in the definition of philosophy as ‘class struggle in theory in the last instance’,16 all attest to a theoretical effort to think philosophy as both inescapable (the interconnection of ideological class struggle and theoretical practices leads inevitably to philosophical conflicts) and necessary (we have to intervene in a specifically philosophical way if we want to battle the influences of dominant ideologies both in the theoretical and the political field). And the same goes for his insistence on the recurring opposition between idealism and materialism, internalised in any philosophical intervention, as the specific form of the effects of class antagonism on the theoretical plane. In light of the above, Althusser’s references to a new materialist practice of philosophy,17 radically incommensurable with traditional idealist philosophy, a practice that can only work as an intervention, an effort to change the balance of force in the theoretical and political practices, and in no way as a philosophical system, have to be considered as the starting points for any critical evaluation of the possibility of a materialist philosophy.18

Materialism as anti-teleology Equally important is Althusser’s further elaboration in his later writings of his original strongly anti-teleological stance, through the introduction of the notion of encounter.19 I think that the notion of the encounter can indeed be really useful as an attempt to theorise the transition from one mode of production to the other in non-essentialist and non-teleological terms. Transition remains an open question and there have been many efforts to theorise it, from Soviet Marxism’s insistence on the forces of production as the principal aspect of historical development, to more recent attempts to present the emergence of specifically capitalist social property relations in England as the essential aspect of the transition to capitalism,20 all tending to view a certain aspect or element as playing the part of the self-development of an essence that marks the emergence of capitalism as the solution of the historical contradictions of feudalism. The problem is that it is very difficult to bring all the elements present in the expanded reproduction of the capitalist mode of production into the same essentialist historical narrative and treat them as aspects of the relation between an essence and its expressions. The emergence of English ‘agrarian capitalism’,21 the first truly capitalist form of production, the development of Italian banking and credit practices (themselves having to do more with risktaking and handling of foreign-trade costs than with a demand to obtain some part of the total capitalistically extracted surplus-value), the emergence of the absolutist state and the unified, centralised territorial state (as opposed to the feudal fragmentation of territory and political authority), the emergence of ‘bourgeois’ culture and mentality as a result of the development of cities as administrative centres, were not predestined to be part of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, even though this is what effectively took place. The notion of the encounter can help us see the crucial theoretical difference between the transition to a mode of production and its reproduction. In this reading the notion of the encounter marks the break with any form of historical metaphysics and does not preclude the structured character of the social whole. There is nothing contingent in the articulation of these elements as aspects of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. On the contrary, the only way to account for this reproduction

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is the emergence of capitalist relations of production as a structure in dominance.22 This causal primacy of the relations of production holds also for the transition itself: only under the dynamics of the emerging capitalist forms of exploitation and the social forces that came along could this combination have taken place. To Althusser’s warning against any form of historical teleology that the encounter might not have taken place, we must add the materialist insistence on the possibility of historical explanation: the encounter could not have taken place without the emergence of capitalist social forms.

Contradictions of aleatory materialism There also contradictory aspects in the whole conception of aleatory materialism. First of all, we must deal with the problems at the centre of the notion of the encounter introduced by Althusser in the later writings. As Morfino and Pinzolo have stressed,23 there is an oscillation in Althusser’s conception of the encounter. On the one hand it refers to a relational conception of social reality, to the ‘ontology of the relation’,24 exemplified by Marx’s notion of Verbindung.25 We can say that this is the materialist instance of the notion of the encounter. On the other hand, we can say that the notion of the encounter (and the contingent swerve at its beginning) refers to a possible theory of the energetic character of singularities and it is close to the ‘idealism of freedom’ that Althusser himself tried to distinguish from aleatory materialism. Consequently, it is necessary to pay particular attention to the open questions related to the notion of the encounter. What is primary: the atoms or the deviation that forms worlds; the parallel rain or the swerve; the rain of atoms in a pre-existing world or state of affairs or the absence of any world and in this sense reality? It is obvious that from a theory of the non-teleological character of the encounter to a theory of the swerve as radical origin and beginning the distance is small. If we have to remain within the limits of the encounter metaphor, and bring to the fore its materialist potential, then it is necessary to stress that what pre-exists any possible new encounter is not the ‘original’ rain (an image consistent with a conception of the swerve as origin), but rather other encounters (pre-existing modes and forms of production). In this reading, the centrality of the encounter would not imply a theory of the radical origin but an attempt to theorise the constant repetition of both the encounter and the deviation.26 Only if we break from any reading of Althusser’s texts that focuses on the openly contingent character of social forms and of the energetic character of social atoms/singularities is it possible to treat the theoretical couple encounter/deviation as a materialist conception of the conjuncture in the open space of the articulation of social forms and relations, as a new, non-teleological and non-mechanistic way to think the reproduction of social forms and relations. In this sense, encounter is not freedom materialised, nor is deviation the trait of an emerging subjectivity, but the necessary dialectic of social reproduction. That is why it necessary to see more carefully the whole metaphor of the rain (as an image of the parallel movement of atoms before the original swerve) and the problems related to its theoretical position and functioning. To take one example: Althusser’s treatment of Spinoza’s parallelism27 as an example of the rain is a rather strange theoretical choice, since parallelism in Spinoza is not an ontological proposition on the emergence of the world (such as Epicurus’s rain of the atoms) and has much more to do with the relation between thought and extension (in fact, the relation between thought and extension as part of the same ontological level, and

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the rejection of any form of dualism) and with the fact that the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.28 In fact, the very notion of ‘parallelism’ comes from Leibniz, who tried to incorporate Spinoza into his own dualist perspective.29 It seems as if Althusser is at this point trying to fit Spinoza into the whole imagery of the encounter, something made evident by his linking of the formation of ‘common notions’30 to the notion of the encounter. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Althusser takes a rather ambiguous position concerning imagination as the first kind of knowledge. Instead of considering it the prototype of a theory of ideology, as he emphatically did elsewhere,31 he tends to view it as the only way to come in terms with the world in its dispersed and non-totalised character.32 This effort to include Spinoza in the genealogy of a philosophy of the aleatory and the contingent comes in sharp contrast to Spinoza’s rejection of the notion of contingency, and his insistence that things appear as contingent because of inadequate knowledge.33 Althusser’s use of the notion of the void is also contradictory.34 On the one hand, Althusser tends to treat the notion of the void as a reference to the absence of any philosophical object: ‘[a philosophy of the void] begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any “object” whatever’.35 This brings us back to Althusser’s redefinition of philosophy as having no object36 and to his reference to the ‘void of the distance taken’ in Lenin and Philosophy,37 as the description of the way philosophical interventions, although deprived of an object in the sense of the sciences, can have real effects because of their retracing of the line of demarcation between materialism and idealism. Then, there is the possibility of reading the recurrence of void in Althusser’s writings as a metaphor for a relational conception of social reality according to which what exists are fundamentally relations,38 a conception that was at the basis of Althusser’s theoretical innovations of the 1960s (social totality as a decentred whole, structural causality, ‘absent cause’) and his search for a way to theorise historical causality in a way that would not be transitive-mechanical or expressive. On the other hand, a more ‘ontological’ conception of the void emerges in these texts, revealed by Althusser’s understanding of the void pre-existing the formation of worlds in Epicurus, by his reading of Machiavelli and the possibility of the Italian national unity, by his return to Pascal’s effort to elevate the void to the status of philosophical concept,39 by his position that the void must be at the centre of any materialist philosophy.40 This notion of the void can be related to another important part of later Althusser’s imagery, the margin or the interstice,41 which according to Althusser is exactly where the possibility of alternatives and new social and political forms arises,42 with communist relations existing in the interstices of imperialism. The margin and the interstice is also where theoretical and social forms exist which are not conditioned by class struggle: ‘not everything in life is class struggle’.43 But this image of the void has more to do with an Epicurean rain of atoms, where new forms emerge only as swerves ex nihilo, and less with an historical materialist conception of social emancipation being possible because social relations and structures are inherently contradictory, always amidst uneven processes of reproduction and transformation, and therefore constantly open to change. In this sense, we can talk about a fundamentally unresolved tension that runs through the theoretical core of the later writings. On the one hand, it is obvious that the notion of the encounter is a new attempt by Althusser to think the (non-)ontology of a relational conception of social reality in the sense of an absence of both a teleology of social forms and any form of social ‘substance’. This is, indeed, a major question of any materialist social

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theory: how to think the effectivity of social relations, the way they combine social practices and their agents and reproduce themselves, while at the same time acknowledging that there is no ‘deeper’ social substance that guaranties this process and its reproduction. This also leads to another important conclusion: modes of production and social forms are open to change, open to historical transformation, not because of any historical tendency towards progress (and necessary historical stages) but because of their inherent instability. On the other hand, we also have the linking of the encounter not only with chance, a certain randomisation of history, but also with a conception of a constant rearranging of the world through the endless movement of energetic social atoms. As a result, the void acquires a new meaning: it refers to a necessary open space for this movement of social atoms, or the need to create this necessary free space. It is here that the notion of radical beginning and commencement emerges. There has to be nothing in order for something radically new to emerge. The reason why Althusser, at a time of major personal, political and philosophical crisis opts for this image is more than obvious: unable to confront the reality of both the extent of the crisis of the communist movement, a crisis that for many years he recognised and denounced, at the same time refusing to acknowledge its full extent (thus his insistence on a more or less imaginary communist movement to which he addressed his pleas for theoretical and political correction), he fantasises about a radically new beginning. But, as we all know the fantasy of a new beginning – for instance, in personal relations – usually reflects a denial to actually face reality.44 As a result, the void acquires a new significance. It is as if Althusser is insisting that for something new to exist, there has to be a radical absence. But this is also another form of historicism and a philosophy of the origin, as if it were only from nothing that something could emerge. It is exactly here, in this conception of radical absence as a prerequisite for something new to emerge that the encounter/deviation couple tends more towards a notion of the chance and the random.45 There is no doubt that the question of historical novelty, of the possibility of new social and political configurations is crucial for any philosophical position attached to political projects of social emancipation. In order to challenge theoretically the existing social conditions one must insist on the possibility of radical historical novelty. This also has been the line of demarcation between reformist and revolutionary conceptions of politics. Social and political change requires radically novel solutions. Answers to social contradictions must take the form of ruptures. That is why any truly materialist philosophy of history must be a philosophy of events, of the possibility of events. But any attempt to theorise the possibility of new events has to confront two theoretical temptations. The first one is the temptation of teleology in the sense of treating the new as always-already incorporated in the present situation as its inner truth or telos. The other is to treat the new as miracle, 46 as something that was in no way precluded in the contours of the situation and somehow just happens by a radically novel intervention. The question is, therefore, how to theorise the possibility of radically new configurations emerging through the existing conditions. In this sense, one might say that a materialist position insists on radical novelty and beginning but not on absolute beginnings in a metaphysical sense. What is missing in this second conception is that new social forms do not emerge ex nihilo. There is no ‘void’ in history, some form of societal configuration (or an articulation of modes and forms of production) is ‘always – already – there’. What is radically new is exactly the possibility of new social forms and encounters. The void in this sense must not be thought in terms of nothingness but of this absence of any essentialist, historicist form of an ‘intrinsic’

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link between the preceding social forms and the ones that follow then, this absence of any Historical Design or prefigured Progress. And this brings us to another contradictory aspect of Althusser’s later writings, namely his turn towards the singular case, event and fact, a turn that comes close to a kind of atomistic empiricism, leading even to a positive appraisal of Hume. 47 There is the possibility of treating these references as an expression of Althusser’s conception of materialism as nominalism a recurring theme in the later writings48 both in the sense of a radical distinction between real objects and theoretical objects, and on an emphasis on singularity. But even though in the strict sense only singular historical formations and conjunctures exist, these must be viewed, to use Spinoza’s terms, as singular essences, as complex relations not atomistic facts or solitary cases, something that implies that we need a nominalism of relations not ‘things’.49 It is true that Althusser also speaks about constants and sequences and lasting encounters and tries to bring this atomistic conception close to the Marxist notion of the tendential law,50 but the latter refers to the contradictory co-existence of tendencies and countertendencies as a manifestation of the contradictory nature of social reality51 and not to the perception of sequences of relations between singular facts as a result of human imagination and reasoning,52 a position quite far from the original conception of Althusser’s materialism as anti-empiricism par excellence. It is this search for some tangible form of facticity that is at the basis of Althusser’s inability to think, in these later writings, in terms of social forms. Although Althusser’s insistence on the primacy of productive relations over productive forces and on the antagonistic character of class relations was very important and helped the theoretical break with forms of economism and technological determinism and facilitated the recognition of the importance of struggles and movements against the capitalist organisation of production, at the same time it tended to underestimate the importance of social forms, exemplified in his rejection of the theory of fetishism.53 This emphasis on the antagonistic character of social practices tended to underestimate the fact that class struggle does not take place only within antagonistic class relations, but also under the weight of historical social forms that exert their own effects on the class struggle. In this sense, capitalism must be defined not only in terms of capitalist relations of production, but also in terms of the importance of the value form (as an historically specific result of the hegemony of capitalist relations of production without reference to some form of simple commodity production) and all the forms of social (mis)recognition and fetishistic representations it brings along, which is exactly the reason for the contradictory complexity of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, 54 an aspect missed by Althusser.55 Althusser not only chooses to ignore this dimension of social reality, but also tends to reject any form of dialectics. And this leads to the problems concerning Althusser’s effort in his later writings to rethink the possibility of transformative and emancipatory political practice. Althusser for the most part does not turn to his original formulations of a materialist conception of the conjuncture in a structured and over-determined social whole as the starting point of a theory of the political practice, conceived as a complex combination of knowledge of the field and the balance of force and of transformative intervention. Althusser seems as tending towards a conception of the solitary and unstable political gesture that more often than not fails to bring around the desired encounter and leaves no other choice apart from either some form of voluntarist decisionism or just waiting for the unexpected (which can be the inverse version of a messianic or millenarian conception of revolutionary politics). Compared to the theoretical and political

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challenge posed by Marx’s introduction (in the third of the Theses on Feuerbach) of the notion of revolutionäre praxis, it can be considered a theoretical retreat to a pre-Marxist conception of practice.

Is a materialism of the conjuncture enough? Étienne Balibar has suggested that from the beginning there was a certain tension in Althusser’s conception of the dialectic, depending on whether the emphasis was on conjuncture or structure, a tension Balibar describes as the tension between the more ‘Leninist’ or ‘Machiavellian’ emphasis on the singularity of conjunctures and the more structuralist critique of simple and expressive conceptions of the totality,56 a difference that Balibar thinks marks the two articles that introduced Althusser’s conception of the dialectic, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and ‘On the materialist dialectic’.57 However, I think that Balibar offers a rather schematic distinction, implying an unbridgeable gap between these two conceptions. That is why this distinction must be problematised. Althusser’s use of the notion of structure had less to do with Althusser embracing ‘structuralism’ but more with an attempt towards a theorisation of the relational character of social reality (in the sense of the ontological primacy of the relation over its elements) and of the tendency of social forms and apparatuses to reproduce themselves, despite being transversed by social antagonism, a crucial question for critical social theory. Structural causality offers the possibility to negate at the same time a mechanical, one-dimensional conception of structural imperatives and an equally one-dimensional conception of a multitude of conjunctural determinations. That is why instead of treating the structure/conjuncture tension as tragically unresolved, as Balibar does, it is better to treat it as a dialectical contradiction inherent to Marxism as historical materialism. Therefore, the question is not what side to choose, but how to deal with it. But even if we treat the notion of the encounter as an elaboration by Althusser on a materialist conception of the notion of the conjuncture, there is still the open problem of the relation between structure and conjuncture. There is the theoretical danger of reading Althusser’s later writings as the abandonment of any possibility to theorise structural determinations (in the sense of social relations and forms reproduced in the longue durée) in favour of a theorisation of the conjunctural interplay and rearrangement of the elements of social reality. We cannot simply replace the notion of the structure by the notion of the conjuncture as con-junction, as has been suggested by Vittorio Morfino,58 even if this could be in line with Althusser’s own references to lasting encounters instead of structures. Even if we choose to treat structures as stabilised durable conjunctures, this durability is not simply a matter of lasting repetitive encounters; it also has to do, as Althusser himself tried to show, with the intervention of material practices and apparatuses that make possible the reproduction of social relations but also of ideological (mis)recognitions and social forms that create the conditions of this durability.59 As a result, different temporalities co-exist in the particular singularity of each conjuncture60 which is exactly the manifestation of the distinction and dialectic between ‘structural’ and ‘conjunctural’ determinations that Althusser described through the notion of over-determination.61 That is why it is worth going back to Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us, a text written mainly in the 1970s but reworked in the 1980s. In this text, Althusser offers a much more balanced and

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dialectical conception to this relation, stressing especially the political stimulus necessary for any materialist theorisation of historical and social reality. Thus, Althusser writes of Machiavelli: We are no longer dealing with the mythical pure objectivity of the laws of history and politics. Not that they have disappeared from Machiavelli’s discourse. Quite the reverse: he does not cease to invoke them, and track them in their infinite variations, so as to make them declare themselves. . . . But the theoretical truths thus produced are produced under the stimulus of the conjuncture; and no sooner are they produced than they are affected in their modality by their intervention in a conjuncture fully dominated by the political problem it poses, and the political practice required the objective it proposes.62 It is obvious that in this formulation there is no abandonment of any notion of structural determinations and/or laws (as historical tendencies). What is implied is that their only possible materialisation, their only form of existence is in singular historical conjunctures and that the only possible way at arriving at any possible theorisation of them is through the exigencies and open questions that these singular conjunctures pose. And it is here that Althusser’s own self-critical conception of philosophy as intervention can be most fruitful. If historical materialism can never be a closed, rigidified scientific system, but is instead a constant struggle with the complexity and conflictuality of social reality that necessarily leads to such tensions, then there is also a constant need for philosophical interventions as (self)corrections in the form of constantly ‘bending of the stick to the opposite side’. Against the tendency to treat social structures as systems and self-reproducing totalities an emphasis on the conjunctural and ‘aleatory’ aspect is always a necessary correction, but the same goes for the emphasis on the tendency of social forms and modes of production to reproduce themselves against any ‘atomised’ conception of social reality.

Contingent encounter or materialist dialectic? Perhaps the most important contradiction of Althusser’s later writings is his rejection of any notion of dialectics, not only in the sense of a choice of theoretical vocabulary but also in a more profound sense: Althusser’s use of the notion of the encounter (in its more general ontological sense) seems to reject the dialectical character of social contradictions. By dialectical character, we mean that the primacy of the relation over its elements (and of the contradiction over its poles) implies that the contradiction is internalised in each element of the contradiction in a complex process of mutual determination, each pole of the contradiction being in a sense the result of the contradiction itself.63 This leads to an underestimation of the ‘labour of the negative’, not as the self-development of an historical essence or Weltgeist, but as the recognition of the constant effectivity of social antagonism, which constantly prevents social reality from becoming a closed system and creates possibilities of social change. It also leads to the underestimation of the complex and uneven character of social contradictions and the way they are articulated and overdetermined. And this is important since, as Althusser himself showed, it is exactly this contradictory, uneven and overdetermined character of social reality that also makes possible a ‘labour on the “labour of the negative”’, that is, revolutionary politics as transformative social practice.

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Althusser’s rejection of dialectics marks a theoretical retreat compared to his path-breaking earlier effort to rethink, in a non-metaphysical way, contradiction as the basis of a materialist conception of social causality. Althusser seems to be haunted by a very particular conception of the contradiction as the internal self-alienation and new unity of a substance and considers this to be the main problem of Marx’s work.64 As a result, Althusser abandons his own effort to think contradiction in a non-metaphysical way, that is, to think at the same time the priority of antagonism and contradiction over structure and the fact that social relations as antagonistic class strategies are also historically realised as ‘internal’ contradictions of forces of production, of social forms, of forms of hegemony.65 And though Althusser tries to distinguish between the aleatory and the contingent, in many cases he seems to opt for a conception of the chance encounter, an emphasis on historical contingency and surprise, a wait for the unexpected. But in his return to the contingent Althusser in a way forgets a basic theoretical premise of both Marx and Spinoza, namely their conception of the dialectics of freedom and necessity, of freedom as necessity.66 Social change and the emergence of a just society are not the outcome of a chance encounter, but presuppose the intelligibility of social reality. It is the result of the society being determined and us being able to have a knowledge of this determination (especially if we view determinism in the open sense of the contradiction being the basis of social causality) and not indeterminate. In Spinoza’s terms, freedom is a consequence of an intelligible necessity67, and in Marx’s terms it is knowledge of the objective conditions of the class struggle that makes possible the political direction of the class struggle. That the process of knowledge is itself part of the social reality to be known, or that it is not possible to assume a neutral position presents the difficult and dialectically contradictory nature of this process, not its negation or impossibility. This is why we must say, using Althusser’s own metaphors, that although a materialist philosopher does indeed jump on a moving train,68 and he/she is always-already within a particular historical conjuncture, he/she does not simply travel along: on the contrary, he/she tries not only to discern which way the train is going, but how the train moves, what other routes are possible, and finally tries to turn the train towards the direction he/she thinks best, something that Althusser, faced with a profound political, theoretical and personal crisis, thinks impossible. But, in order to do justice to Althusser we can also say that his oscillations are a result of a contradiction that transverses any attempt to formulate a materialist practice of philosophy. On the one hand, we have the effort to bring to the fore the materiality of the social practices themselves as a rejection of any form of ontological dualism and any metaphysical beyond, an effort that runs the risk of empiricism, positivism and misrecognition of the mechanisms which produce social phenomena. On the other hand, there is the need to criticise ideological misrecognitions, to produce theoretically the real as opposed to the obvious of the ideological surface, an effort that runs the risk of theoreticism and a foundationalist approach to knowledge. In a sense, there is no exit from this oscillation, only the successive bending of the stick to the opposite side. But the question is: towards which side? It is obvious that in the 1980s Althusser thought that the main theoretical danger came from a metaphysical conception of the historical possibility of communism. However, today the main danger comes from neoliberal ideology’s pre-emptive denial of any form of intelligibility of history apart from social reality as an aggregation of individual choices and atomised social transactions. That is why it is imperative today to rethink dialectics.

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Conclusion: the necessary return to Althusser It is true that various versions of current radical philosophical theorising focus on forms of immanent materialism, on the effectivity of social antagonism, on a sharp distinction between liberalism and democracy, and on the possibility of events as ruptures and historical singularities. Surely aspects of Althusser’s work resonate with these questions, especially in his later writings. However, there are other aspects of his work that are different and represent Althusser’s ‘anomaly’, to borrow the term used by Negri for Spinoza.69 These are Althusser’s insistence on the possibility to treat historical materialism and psychoanalysis as sciences aiming at the same time at interpreting and changing social (and psychic) reality; his insistence on some form of dialectics (in the form of the necessarily contradictory character both of social reality and the knowledge process); and of course his reference to the communist movement, in the sense of both the historicity of the worker’s movement and the actuality of communism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ (in The German Ideology). A necessary return to Althusser today would mean to go beyond simply reconstructing a materialist conception of singular resistances and refusals, or searching for a politics of the contingent encounter, in order to face the challenge of rearticulating the relation of Marxist theory and philosophy and projects of revolutionary social change.70

Notes 1 Negri 1996a. 2 Moulier Boutang 1997, pp. 100–1. 3 Ichida and Matheron 2005. 4 Callari and Ruccio 1996. 5 ‘Of course, Althusser himself did not help matters by invoking such terms as science, society effect, structural causality, reproduction and so on – terms that a allude to a sense of closure for the objects and methods of Marxist discourse’ (Callari and Ruccio 1996, p. 35). 6 Goshgarian 2006. 7 Althusser 1959. For Goshgarian’s reading of the book on Montesquieu as the emergence of the philosophy of the encounter see especially Goshgarian 2006, pp. xxx–xxxv. 8 Goshgarian 2006, p. xlv. 9 Suchting 2004. 10 Tosel 2006, p. 195. 11 Lahtinen 2009. 12 Morfino 2005; Morfino 2007; Morfino and Pinzolo 2005. 13 On this see Althusser 1994a, pp. 253–69 and 508–26. 14 Althusser 1971a. 15 Althusser 1990a. 16 ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in Althusser 1976a. 17 Althusser 2006a, pp. 274–80. It is worth noting that in the later writings, Althusser mainly repeats the points about the materialist practice of philosophy introduced in the 1976 lecture on the ‘Transformation of Philosophy’ (Althusser 1990a).

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18 It is worth noting that Fredric Jameson has also suggested a similar description of philosophical materialism: ‘Rather than conceiving of materialism as a systematic philosophy it would seem possible and perhaps more desirable to think of it as a polemic stance, designed to organize various anti-idealist campaigns’, (Jameson 1997, p. 36). On the same point of the materialist philosophy being possible only as a materialist practice of philosophy and not as a materialist philosophical system see Macherey 1999, pp. 35–73. 19 ‘1. For a being (a body, an animal, a man, state or Prince) to be, an encounter has to have taken place . . . There are encounters only between series . . . of beings that are the results of several series of causes . . . 3. Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins . . . but also in its effects . . . no determination of these elements can be assigned except by working backwards from the result to its becoming in its retroaction . . . [I]nstead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies’ (Althusser 2006a, pp. 192–3). 20 See for example Wood 1991; 1995; 2002; 2003. 21 Brenner 1976; 1982. 22 Althusser 1969a, pp. 200–16. 23 Morfino and Pinzolo 2005. 24 Balibar 1993a, p. 32. 25 ‘Welches immer die gesellschaftlichen Formen der Produktion, Arbeiter und Produktionsmittel bleiben stets ihre Faktoren. Aber die einen und die andern sind dies nur der Möglichkeit nach im Zustand ihrer Trennung voneinander. Damit überhaupt produziert werde, müssen sie sich verbinden. Die besondre Art und Weise, worin diese Verbindung bewerkstelligt wird, unterscheidet die verschiednen ökonomischen Epochen der Gesellschaftsstruktur’ (Marx 1963). ‘Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors of it. But in a state of separation from each other either of these factors can be such only potentially. For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another’ (Marx 1974, pp. 36–7). Although traditionally translated as ‘union’, the French translation ‘combination’ makes the relational character of the notion of Verbindung more evident. 26 On this, see the reading in Morfino and Pinzolo 2005. 27 ‘The fact that [the attributes] are parallel, that here is an effect of parallelism, recalls Epicurus’s rain’ (Althusser 2006a), p. 177. 28 Spinoza 2002, p. 247 (Ethics, Part II, proposition VII). 29 Macherey 1997, pp. 71–81. See also Gueroult 1974, p. 64. 30 An important aspect of Spinoza’s second kind of knowledge (Spinoza 2002, pp. 266–8, Ethics, Part II, proposition XL, scholia I and II). 31 ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ in Althusser 1976a, pp. 135–6. 32 ‘[Spinoza] not only turns his back on all theories of knowledge, but also clears a path . . . for the recognition of the “world” as unique totality that is not totalized, but experienced in its dispersion, and experienced as a “given” into which we are thrown’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 179). 33 Spinoza 2002, pp. 234, 236 (Ethics, Part I, proposition XXIX and proposition XXXIII, scholium 1). On this point, and in order to do some justice to Althusser, we must say that some of his comments have great theoretical merit, such as his insistence on the gap separating Spinoza and any traditional theory of knowledge or traditional metaphysics in general and on Spinoza’s rejection of any theory of the cogito. See Althusser 1994a, pp. 467–87; Althusser 1997a. 34 On the importance of the void in Althusser’s theoretical trajectory, see Matheron 1997. 35 Althusser 2006a, p. 174.

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36 Althusser 1990a. 37 Althusser 1971a, p. 62 (the original translation uses emptiness instead of void). 38 A position also expressed in Macherey 1979, p. 218. 39 Contrary to traditional philosophical historiography Althusser also considers Spinoza to be a thinker of the void (Althusser 2006a, p. 178). François Matheron, in an editorial note (Althusser 2006a, p. 204) refers to a 1982 paper by Macherey (included in Macherey 1992) as supporting the same ‘paradoxical’ position. I think that Macherey is in fact more cautious and also stresses the differences between Pascal and Spinoza in what concerns the notion of the void. 40 On this notion of the void as the centre of any ‘grand philosophy’, see Althusser 2005. 41 This reminds one of Marx’s references to trading nations of ancient times living in the intermediate worlds of the universe (Marx 1959, p. 225) or usury living in the space between worlds (Marx 1959, p. 412). 42 Althusser 1994a p. 490–1; Althusser 2005. 43 Althusser 2005, p. 191. 44 That is why Ichida and Matheron’s emphasis in the notion of beginning [commencement] in Althusser later writings is a reading which is in sharp contrast to Althusser’s rejection both of a teleological ‘End’ and an equally teleological ‘Origin’ and ‘Beginning’. The following extract exemplifies the idealism of their position: ‘This “non originary nature of the originary”, which is for Logic its sure beginning can we call it, despite whatever Althusser says here, otherwise than “pure beginning”? In its proper inaugural version, immediately discovered by the althusserian systematisation, the process without subject nor end(s), which has always begun, presents itself like the very problem of “a beginning from nothing”: the process exists only in the pure beginning’. Ichida and Matheron 2005. 45 On such a reading of Althusser’s reference to the aleatory, see Moulier Boutang 2005. 46 On this, see Bensaïd 2004. 47 Althusser 2006a, p. 278. 48 See for example Althusser 2006a, p. 265. On Althusser’s nominalism, see Montag 1998a. 49 ‘The elements constituting an individual are themselves complex realities, composed by different parts that coexist in them and are themselves conditioned outside of this relation (rapport) and so then in the infinite, because the analysis of reality is, according to Spinoza, without end and can never lead to absolutely simple beings, from which we could then edify the complex system of their combinations. Properly speaking only relations exist: that is why singular essences, which they are determined themselves, they are not affected by the external chaining of existences. That is why they cannot be reached by an analysis that would discover the simple at the bottom of the complex like a terminal element, an irreducible unity’ (Macherey 1979, p. 218). On the importance of the reference to Spinoza’s singular essences for Althusser’s self-correction of earlier theoreticist deviations see Goshgarian 2003, p. xliii. 50 Althusser 2006a, p. 197. 51 Marx 1959. 52 This is the difference between a materialist position and Hume’s empiricism (Hume 1964). 53 Althusser 2006a, pp. 126–35. 54 On this reading see Milios, Dimoulis and Economakis 2002. And although a great part of recent and important work on the theory of the value-form has been rather Hegelian in its philosophical debts (for example Arthur 2002), I think that only a reworking of these questions in terms of a non-metaphysical and non-historicist materialism such as Althusser’s can help bring to the fore Marx’s immense theoretical revolution.

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55 This had consequences for theoretical trends influenced by him. The Regulation School’s option of a ‘middle range’ descriptive theory of social forms is an example of such an empiricist approach. On the relation of the Regulation School to Althusser, see Lipietz 1993. This does not mean that Althusser is to be blamed for the Regulation School’s shortcomings as some critics of Regulation do (see, for example, Mavroudeas 1999). 56 See Balibar’s ‘L’objet d’Althusser’ in Lazarus 1993, p. 94. 57 Both in Althusser 1969a. 58 Morfino 2005. 59 Althusser 1995a. Althusser’s turn towards the materiality of practices and apparatuses that ensure social reproduction represents in my opinion his self-critical attempt to avoid the danger of treating social structures as a form of a ‘deeper’ social substance. 60 ‘[I]t is only possible to give a content to the concept of historical time by defining historical time as the specific form of existence of the social totality under consideration, an existence in which different structural levels of temporality interfere . . . It needs to be said that, just as there is no production in general, there is no history in general, but only specific structures of historicity’. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 108–9). 61 ‘[I]t cannot be claimed that these contradictions and their fusion are merely the pure phenomena of the general contradiction. The “circumstances” and “currents” which achieve it are more than its phenomena pure and simple. They derive from the relations of production, which are, of course, one of the terms of the contradiction, but at the same time its conditions of existence . . . [T]he “contradiction” is inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which it is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances it governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be called overdetermined in its principle’, (Althusser 1969a, pp. 100–1). 62 Althusser 1999, pp. 19–20. 63 On the importance of the internalisation of the relation as the crucial aspect of a materialist conception of the contradiction, see Balibar 1997a, pp. 298–9. 64 On this, see Althusser 1993a. 65 On this conception of the relation between antagonism and contradiction, see Balibar 1990. 66 It is worth noting that Slavoj Žižek has suggested that the classical position of freedom as conceived necessity (Hegel 1873, §147; Engels 1987, p. 129) must be complemented with its ‘reversal’: ‘necessity as (ultimately nothing but) conceived freedom’ (Žižek 1999, p. 44). 67 On the relation between knowledge and emancipation in Spinoza, see Matheron 1988 and Tosel 1994. 68 ‘The materialist philosopher, in contrast, is a man who always “catches a moving train”, like the hero of an American Western’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 177). 69 Negri 1991. 70 Earlier versions of the arguments presented here were put forward in Sotiris 2008 and Sotiris 2009. The discussions at the 2009 Encountering Althusser Conference at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, where the first version of this paper was presented, were more than helpful. Tasos Betzelos also provided valuable comments and suggestions.

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3 ‘An immense aspiration to being’: the causality and temporality of the aleatory Giorgos Fourtounis

I

n 1962, after the completion of a course on Machiavelli at the École normale supérieure and a severe episode of depression and hospitalisation, in a personal letter, Louis Althusser gives us a clue as to his life-long interest in this unclassifiable and solitary thinker: ‘Machiavelli’s central problem from a theoretical point of view could be summed up in the question of the beginning, starting from nothing, of an absolutely indispensable and necessary new state’.1 In fact, this very notion of a ‘beginning from nothing’, of an ‘absolute beginning’, becomes later the pivotal point of his Machiavelli and Us, which is a sort of palimpsest, bearing traces of nearly the whole of Althusser’s tormented intellectual and personal career.2 In that same letter of 1962, he acknowledges the personal nature of his involvement with Machiavelli’s problem, which thus proves to be for him much more than a detached theoretical problem; it was also his own problem: ‘the question I dealt with: how to begin from nothing . . . was mine’.3 According to Gregory Elliot, this ‘reflected, mutatis mutandis, Althusser’s own relationship to historical Communism’.4 But I think that the ambiguity of this possessive (‘the question . . . was mine’), allows us to discern here an additional, ‘subjective’ dimension: how is it possible, in thought as well as in practice, for a singular individual, like a national state, or a revolutionary movement, but also a subject, to begin, to commence or recommence, from nothing?

An infinite regression This inevitably points to Althusser’s theory of ideology, which, it should be recalled, was the theory of the absolute beginning of the subject, that is, of the subject’s constitution through ideological interpellation, which ‘“transforms” individuals into subjects’.5 Althusser depicts that ‘operation’ of interpellation by the famous ‘theoretical scene’ where an individual in the street is hailed by a policeman and turns his head: the individual, simply by this turning, ‘becomes a

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subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was “really” addressed to him’.6 This, as Althusser admits, ‘entails that we distinguish for the moment between concrete individuals on the one hand and concrete subjects on the other’.7 It is this provisional distinction between subjects and individuals (which are not yet subjects) that allows for the correlation of the subject’s ideological constitution with the Machiavellian absolute beginning: it is a constitution from nothing, in the sense that, in the subject’s beginning, there is nothing that resembles, prepares or prefigures the subject.8 But there is an obvious problem here: since ideological interpellation involves an instance of recognition, indeed a recognition of the self, which is clearly a subject’s ‘faculty’, this transformation into a subject seems to presuppose the very subject that ‘will’ be its outcome. There appears something like an infinite regression here, since the constitution of the subject depends on the constituted subject.9 When and how, then, does the subject really begin? Interpellation acquires thus a paradoxical, aporetic character. We could take as a sort of provisional answer to that paradox Althusser’s suggestion that the moment of constitutive interpellation is not a simple moment, inscribed in a temporal succession,10 but it is a structured one, to which the temporality of the ‘always-already’ [toujours-déjà] is ascribed: ‘. . . [I]ndividuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects’. 11 But this hardly resolves the problem: as Althusser himself admits, ‘this proposition might seem paradoxical’.12 In short, then, the absolute beginning of the subject involves an ontological oddity: How is it possible that something, which in an obvious sense does not yet exist (since it begins ‘from nothing’), to be a necessary condition of the very process that will produce it? This paradox can obviously be rephrased as an aporia of causality: What notion of causality can allow for a process of constitution that presupposes its own effect? Finally, this ontologically and causally intractable circularity is correlative with the equally paradoxical always-already temporality: how is it possible for something sometime to begin to be ‘always-already’? And what does ‘alwaysalready’ mean here? This multifaceted aporia will be an object of this essay.

Structural causality Moreover, the Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation should be posited in the context of the, certainly idiosyncratic, Althusserian structuralism and, more specifically, of the relevant concept of structural causality. We know that the question Althusser raised and tried to address by elaborating that concept was the causal relation between the structure and the complex social reality that the structure determines, the ‘structured whole’. An aporia of causality was also at issue there, an impasse between two dominant notions of causality and the whole: structural causality had to be a way to avoid the dilemma of understanding structure either as transitive-analytical effect or as transcendent-expressive cause of a whole or totality of ‘elements’.13 To tackle this problem, Althusser invokes the Spinozist notion of immanence in order to define structural causality.14 Accordingly, the structure of a complex reality neither follows (as a mechanistic effect) nor pre-exists (as a teleological cause) the elements (and their relations) that constitute it; rather, it is their immanent cause: in contrast to the above-mentioned types of causality, where the cause is independent to its effects, structure’s effects, ‘are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the

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contrary the structure is a cause immanent in its effects . . . [where] the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects . . . [The structure] is nothing outside its effects.15 So, neither the structure nor its elements pre-exist independently of each other. As Althusser himself points out, that Spinozist conception of structural causality was a further elaboration of the concept of overdetermined structure, that is, of ‘the ever-pregivenness of a structured complex unity’.16 In other words, here structure and its specific causality are also attributed an always-already temporality. Thus, on the one hand, the structure is not a combinatory of pre-determined elements, which as such would be non-structural; the structure’s elements are always-already its effects, they are always-already structural elements. On the other hand, we cannot think of the structure as an abstract, formal system of relations and relational positions to be occupied by pre-existing and pre-determined entities, in order that the structure be actualised. As an immanent cause, the structure cannot be thought of as determined and fixed independently of its actualisations: the structure exists only in and by its actualisations; the structure is always-already actualised. Ideology, now, is crucially enmeshed in that relation of immanence between the social structure and its actualisation. Althusser, as it is well known,17 theorises ideology as essentially involved in the reproduction of the relations of production, which amounts to the correlation of it with Marx’s suggestion that ‘men’ should be considered as ‘supports’ or ‘bearers’ of relations and functions.18 Ideology constantly transforms human individuals so that they occupy the structural positions of the social whole and ‘bear’ the complex social structure. It is by this transformation, precisely, that individuals become elements of the structure: ideology transforms individuals to structural elements, that is, into effects of the social structure. At the same time, this ideological instance of becoming element-bearer of the structure is, ipso facto, the instance in which the structure of the social practices becomes ‘actual’: it is the very actualisation of the social structure. As we have seen, this becoming element-and-effect of the structure, and, ipso facto, the actualisation of the structure, is characterised by that peculiar always-already temporality. And it is here precisely, where ideology is crucially involved in the immanent character of structural causality. The structure is actualised through ideology – and, as we just saw, since the structure exists only in and by its actualisations, there is no structure without ideology. Ideology is here the very life of structural causality, it is immanence itself: it ‘intervenes’ in the vanishing point between the immanent cause and its effects, it is the annulled interface between the structure and the structured social reality. Ideology is the very ‘instance’ of the always-already, the instance where humans are always-already effects of the social structure, its most necessary elements, through which it is always-already actualised (and thus exists). Now, as Althusser says, the form under which the individuals become bearers of the social structure is the ‘subject-form’.19 The subject is the elemental form of the structure’s effectivity, the elemental effect of the social structure. Ideological interpellation, transforming individuals into subjects, transforms them by the same token into ‘bearers’ of the complex social structure. Hence the ontological enmeshment, or even identification, of the two ‘always-already’ that we have encountered so far: the always-already of interpellation and the always-already of structural causality, its immanent character itself. Thus, absolute beginning, and its elusive temporality of always-already, becomes correlated with the concept of structural causality as immanent causality, which would be another aspect of the aporetic object of this essay. Elaborating on this, I will suggest that the constitution

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of subjectivity is not just a particular case of absolute beginning; rather, there is an essential reference to subjectivity in the question of the absolute beginning, of the always-already givenness of the structure, even in the question of immanent causality itself.

An absolute beginning In the main part of this chapter I consider the homology between this notion of the ‘absolute beginning’, a ‘beginning from nothing’, as it is discussed in Machiavelli and Us, and that of the ‘aleatory encounter’, the crucial concept of Althusser’s late materialism, as it is developed mainly in ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’.20 In the ‘The Underground Current . . .’, every complex and structured entity, governed in its subsequent history by the relevant structural causality, begins with the aleatory encounter, in the void, of the ‘atoms’ that are going to become its structural elements. As is well known, Althusser will discern two distinct instances in that founding moment, two degrees of the aleatory, as it were: first, the aleatory encounter in the strict sense, that is the contingent bringing-together of some independent ‘atoms’ and, second, after the advent of the encounter proper, the equally aleatory ‘taking hold’ of the atoms that have met, their mutual articulation in structural relations endowed with a relative stability – in short, the constitution of a new structured entity with a tendency to reproduce itself. A crucial distinction is already looming here: that between the elements of the encounter (the ‘atoms’) and the elements of the structure that results from it (its structural elements). Only after the encounter’s ‘taking hold’ do the elements of the encounter become true elements of the new structure, subjected to its structural causality, its structural effects. Now, the void in which the encounter occurs stands for the radical absence of any structural and historical determination of the encounter: it is an encounter between independent elements which, like Epicurean atoms falling in the void of their radical non-relation, are not destined to encounter and, a fortiori, to ‘take hold’.21 Every accomplished encounter could equally not have been accomplished; no necessity, no proclivity favours the encounter over the non-encounter – and, given that the encounter’s ‘taking hold’ is also aleatory, every constituted singularity could equally not have been constituted. But aleatory is not only a matter of whether a new entity will be; aleatory is also what the entity will be:22 ‘nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter, the contours and determinations of the being that will emerge from it’.23 Hence the radical novelty, the essentially unpredictable character of the emergent entity: there is no pre-existing, a priori inferable, essence, into which the new entity can be subsumed; there is no universal law covering the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the encounter, relating them as premises and conclusion, causes and effect. The structure of the new entity is not given in advance, not even as an abstract possibility. Thus, the radical materialist, anti-teleological and anti-essentialist, position of aleatory materialism is condensed precisely in the notion of the primary void of the encounter, which amounts to the radical disparity and independence of the ‘atoms’ inhabiting it, namely the fact that the elements of an aleatory encounter are not historically prepared for that encounter nor marked in advance by the structure to which they will mutually adjust. The encounter and the emergent structure are not the outcome of a single, unitary, continuous and oriented history, intending to an end, necessarily allowing for a subject as the inescapable correlate of its

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finality, that is, of a history with a subject and telos; there is a strong discontinuity (a ‘break’) between the before and the after of the encounter: the new entity is, precisely, new because it is incommensurable to its pre-histories (in the plural). In short, we could say that the void, as the crucial category of aleatory materialism, seems to posit a sharp distinction between the aleatory and the structural, between the aleatory encounter as a whole (in both of its instances) and the persistence of the structured coherence. The most powerful formulation of this distinction is the famous demarcation line between the logic of the accomplishment of the fact, the logic of the contingent production of any singular entity, on the one hand, and the logic of the accomplished fact, the logic of the law-governed reproduction of the entity, on the other. According to Althusser’s emphatic insistence, one should not confuse or intermingle those two ‘logics’, lest he falls into the one or the other version of philosophical necessity, teleology and essentialism. This seems to be the most uncompromising statement of a pure aleatorism,24 which in a sense homogenises the two instances of the encounter, purifying both of them of any structural determination. Accordingly, just as the encounter proper, so its ‘taking hold’ is uncontaminated by any structural effectivity and, more significantly, it is beyond the scope of the new structure’s effectivity and determination; just like the encounter in the strict sense, no cause, no law, no finality or subject, can determine the advent of its ‘taking hold’ either: the ‘taking hold’, too, takes place in the void. Nevertheless, one can trace in that very text the latent presence of another, more nuanced position. I have proposed the term aleatory structuralism for that tendency,25 which, in tension with the one mentioned above, draws a qualitative distinction between the two aleatory instances by implying that the ‘taking hold’ of the encounter is already determined by the effectivity of the emergent structure;26 in other words, the structure that ‘will’ result from the encounter’s ‘taking hold’, intervenes decisively in it. Obviously, there is some kind of retroaction involved here: the ‘taking hold’ of the encounter appears as causally affected by its own effect. Indeed, aleatory structuralism is relevant to the theme of the retroactive character of that instance, which appears sporadically yet persistently in the text, disturbing its manifest logic: ‘No determination of these [structural] elements can be assigned except by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction . . . there is nothing which has become except as determined by the result of this becoming – this retroaction itself’.27 In short, in the context of this aleatory structuralism, the aleatory ‘taking-hold’ of the encounter is the initial and inaugurating moment of the emergent structure’s causality, of its retroactive effectivity over the elements and the circumstances of its emergence, the beginning of the emergent entity’s structural duration – its history. I argue now that these two tendencies determine a crucial antinomy, which traverses ‘The Underground Current . . .’: on the one hand, what can be seen as the text’s central tenor, that is, the overtly pronounced pure aleatorism, intransigently proclaiming the purity of the aleatory from any structural determination and, thereby, sharply demarcating itself from any teleology and essentialism, tends, by its own logic, to relapse to these constitutive philosophical opponents of it; on the other, the subordinated and somehow suppressed tendency of aleatory structuralism – while it seems to compromise the logic of the aleatory, by putting it, at this extraordinary instance of the ‘taking hold’, under the sway of the logic of the structural – is the only one that does justice to the anti-teleological and anti-essentialist thrust of aleatory materialism.

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Let me support my claim. As we have seen, the essential requirement of the aleatory was the disparate character of the encounter’s elements, and thus their qualitative difference from the structural elements of the subsequent structure. In fact, if the whole process of the encounter is not to be governed by its telos, the involved ‘atoms’ must converge at the encounter without being motivated by the structure that they will constitute, without being guided by its structural causality, that is, without being in advance its structural elements. But then, the initially independent elements of the encounter have to be transformed into structural elements: they have to be transformed by the new structure’s effectivity in order to become its effects. And this is precisely the position of aleatory structuralism, the point of its disjunction from pure aleatorism: this indispensable transformation is precisely the ‘taking hold’ of the encounter, where the structure exerts already its effectivity over its own constitution, transforming the independent and disparate atoms into its structural elements. This retroactive transformation, then, this initial moment of the structural causality, is the conditio sine qua no of the aleatory. By the same token, neither the elements nor the structure itself can any longer be thought of as pre-given: the eventual structure is not prescribed in advance, inscribed in some logical space, waiting for the appropriate elements to come and take their allocated places; it cannot be thought of as an abstract possibility, before and beyond its actualisation.28 On the contrary, the dominant tendency of pure aleatorism, that is, the full purification of the aleatory encounter from any structural determination, lacking precisely this moment of the emergent structure’s retroactive effectivity, cannot avoid projecting this transformative moment onto the very origin of these ‘atoms’, as if they were in advance characterised by their eventual structural affinities, and to implicitly posit the structure as a transcendent cause, pre-existent and in advance determining its elements and their mutual attraction. In other words, the constitutive lack in the whole process of any structural intervention that would transform the atoms into structurally related elements cannot but presuppose the presence of the structure as the guiding telos of the whole story. And this clearly undermines the whole anti-teleological thrust of aleatory materialism. Hence those highly symptomatic passages where Althusser asserts the ‘affinity and complementarity of the elements that come into play in the encounter, their ‘readiness to collide-interlock’ [accrochabilité], in order that this encounter ‘take hold’.29 It is the absence of this retroactive transformation that allows (or rather compels) Althusser to hold that ‘an encounter has to take place between beings with affinities [des affinissables]’,30 and, in a more severe compromise of his rupture with teleology, that ‘not just anything can produce just anything, but only elements destined [voués] to encounter each other and, by virtue of their affinity, to “take hold” one upon the other. . .’31 Here, the aleatory encounter lapses into a necessary encounter between an essence-like structure, given in advance as a logical possibility, and its elements, already preformed, teleologically prepared in the context of a total history, elements that seek each other in order to enter their pre-given structural relations. Furthermore, the locus of this antinomy is the notion of the void: on the one hand, the void stands for the absence in the whole process of any structural relation between the encounter’s elements; on the other, that very absence compels the projection of the elements’ eventual structural relatedness to their origins, precisely in the primary void. In the following section of this essay, I will turn to Machiavelli and Us in order to find the means for a treatment of that antinomy, connecting it with Warren Montag’s thesis about ‘an unrecognised conflict at the heart of the text between two incompatible notions of the void’.32

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To conclude, then, the retroactive, initial and initiating, moment of structural causality at the encounter’s ‘taking hold’ is the inescapable condition of the anti-teleological and anti-essentialist rupture of aleatory materialism: only thus, first, the disparate ‘atoms’ of the encounter are qualitatively different from the resulting structural elements and, second, the structure itself is a radical novelty, and not an a priori possibility. To put it in a single phrase, neither the emergent structure nor its elements pre-exist the encounter, that is, pre-exist each other. But, as we have seen, this is precisely the core of the earlier Althusserian theorisation of structural causality in terms of Spinozist immanent causality. The emergent structure’s retroactive effectivity, by which it transforms the originally irrelevant atoms into its own structural elements, is immanent causality itself, where the structure’s elements are always-already its effects and the structure is always-already actualised. Thus, the retroactive character of a structure’s emergence can contribute to the understanding of that always-already temporality, essentially involved in the immanent structural causality. According to the above, always-already does not mean any originary accomplishment of the fact, any more than retroaction means here the teleology of a ‘future’ (but already transcendently present) cause: neither the encounter, nor its taking hold are instances of a history written in ‘future anterior’.33 The always-already temporality is that of a break, of a discontinuity, which is itself in break with any notion of genesis, with any understanding of an individual’s constitution as ‘either the necessary result of given premises or [as] the provisional anticipation of an End’.34 In the light of aleatory structuralism, aleatorism is simply the other name of immanentism,35 in that the emergence of a new, structured singularity cannot be explained by any presumably pre-existent cause, and be thought of by means of any relevant concept of causality; it requires a new cause, which is not included in those present in the encounter, an absent cause,36 a new condition that is not included among the initial conditions of the event: and this can only be the emergent structure and its causality.

The causality of emergent structure Now, as a transition to Machiavelli and Us, and in order to tackle this antinomy in ‘The Underground Current . . .’, we could suggest that the predominance of pure aleatorism therein is correlative with its being cast in the form-theory or in what, in Machiavelli and Us, is analysed as the classical theory’s modality or dispositive.37 In the latter, Althusser gives two major, strongly interwoven, characteristics of it. First, its universalism, that is, the fact that it is pronounced in universal categories, concepts or laws, under which the particular cases are subsumed. There is no novelty or singularity under the sun of this universalism: everything that exists, or will exist, is ‘possible’, ‘allowed’ and in principle predictable. Second, its ‘objectivity’, understood overtly here as a function of universalism.38 Althusser will immediately add that this amounts to a ‘discourse without a subject’, and this, in its turn, amounts to its impartiality:39 theory’s ‘objectivity’ would thus mean that such a discourse without subject is necessarily a discourse on objects that are external and independent to it, with which it does not interfere. By virtue of its modality, then, (classical) theory cannot take sides with any of the objects it theorises nor be characterised by essential reference to an active perspective. So, the correlate of theoretical discourse’s universalism and ‘subjectlessness’ is its ‘perspectivelessness’: it claims to be the ‘view from nowhere’ 40 – a God’s-eye-view, from a transcendent point of radical exteriority.

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Indeed, the discourse of ‘The Underground Current . . .’ assumes such an Archimedean point towards the whole story it narrates,41 encompassing both the ‘accomplishment of the fact’ and the ‘accomplished fact’. Such a unitary point of theorising confers a continuity upon the whole process, otherwise declared as discontinuous: now the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the encounter become commensurable; both the void (with its atoms) and the emergent thing assume the substantial status of a fact or an object. And given the radical priority assigned to the void, I would argue that, under the predominance of pure aleatorism, ‘The Underground Current . . .’ presents itself as a philosophical theory, which has given itself an object, a peculiar object admittedly, but nonetheless presumed as independently existent, ‘a philosophy that represents an ontological fact, that of the void that pre-exists all things’,42 in short, a philosophy of the void, a ‘theory of the radical “origin” of things’.43 Indeed, as Montag points out, the void acquires here the status of the most fundamental object of philosophy, ‘philosophy’s “object” par excellence’.44 It is an ‘ontological conception’ of the void, which existed before everything, haunts the existence and governs the inescapable dissolution of everything, and will exist after everything, the origin and destiny of each and every individual ‘thing’ and of their world.

The aspiration of the Prince Let me now turn to Machiavelli and Us and its central idea of the ‘absolute beginning’. First of all, there is an obvious homology between this idea and that of the aleatory encounter found in ‘The Underground Current . . .’: in Machiavelli and Us, the beginning of the Italian national state aspired by Machiavelli is given explicitly in terms of an aleatory encounter between fortuna and the New Prince’s virtù.45 But fortuna is already an encounter, which aleatorily assembles and ‘arranges’, in certain conditions, in a singular conjuncture, the matter of the encounter – the raw materials of the New Principality, which is to unify Italy’s ‘people’ as a nation.46 The correlate of the void is here the extreme ‘historical nullity, hence emptiness’, or ‘the political vacuum’ of this conjuncture.47 On the other hand, the New Prince’s virtù is correlated with the form that is to be imposed to that matter, the political structure of the New Principality, which would ensure its coherence and duration.48 Thus, absolute beginning is also an encounter in two degrees, which can be corresponded with the above-mentioned two instances of the aleatory, in ‘The Underground Current . . .’: the encounter proper (which assembles the initial elements or the ‘atoms’) and the ‘taking hold’ (which sets the new structure). But now, those two instances are given also in terms of matter and form, as the imposition of a form to a matter. Thus, the initial nothing of fortuna, or the void of the encounter, is now overtly correlated to ‘formless matter’:49 in the perennial language of the matter/form couple, the nothing or the void is the absence of a form that is to be imposed on a present matter. But, on the other hand, Machiavelli and Us presents a double, crucial difference from ‘The Underground Current . . .’. The first aspect of that difference is that it situates Machiavelli’s intervention in view of Italy’s national state in the aleatory space of the ‘accomplishment of the fact’. We are in the midst of nothing, in the void of any reason, cause, finality or subject regarding the advent of the ‘fact’, where no anticipation, no prediction can grasp its ‘contours’; and yet Machiavelli’s text expresses the quest for, and posits the question of, the emergence of a radically new, though intended and somehow pre-meditated, thing: the absolute beginning of Italy as a national state. The Prince expresses the aspiration for an intervention in this aleatory

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space, in order to influence its ‘logic’ and become the decisive, ‘causal’ factor for this accomplishment: the whole issue is how to think the absolute beginning, and ‘what is to be done’ for bringing it about. This, according to Althusser, affects the theoretical modality of Machiavelli and Us – and this is the second aspect of its difference from ‘The Underground Current . . .’: Machiavelli’s discourse takes a stance towards its theme that is not just classical theory’s stance towards its object. Absolute beginning is not, and cannot be, just a theory’s object; it is also an objective,50 a task or a ‘cause’: it is ‘la cosa’ of Machiavelli’s discourse, which here means, Althusser says, both the object, ‘the thing in the singular – the singularity of its “case” and ‘the cause, the task, the singular problem to be posed and resolved’.51 Theory thus, according to Althusser, ‘makes room’ for an element utterly heterogeneous to theory,52 which opens up within it an incommensurable space – that is, something that cannot be subsumed under theory’s universalism and ‘objectivity’, something essentially singular and novel: namely practice, political practice and its ‘viewpoint’;53 in broader terms, we would say, a perspective in struggle, striving for its ‘cause’. Theory thus becomes essentially partisan to that practical viewpoint, it takes sides; it is precisely this partisanship that ‘profoundly affects the classical modality of theory’.54 It is not a theoretical relation to an object, but a relation of partisanship to a ‘cause’; not a transcendent viewpoint to a reality but a perspective immanent to it. Thus, Althusser establishes a correlation of singularity and perspective, in contrast with classical theory’s correlation between universality and ‘objectivity’. Let us be clear on this point: it is not an abandonment of cognitive objectivity; rather, with that modified theoretical modality, a new type of objectivity emerges, freed from the compulsory correlation with impartiality. On the contrary: being partial and partisan turns out to be a condition for this objectivity, since it is only this altered theoretical modality that can adequately capture the reality of a singular perspective and its striving. ‘Theory’ now still yields the actual truth of an objective existence, ‘la verità effettuale de la cosa’, [‘the ‘“actual truth”, hence objective knowledge’,55 Althusser translates and comments], in both of its senses. Now, according to Althusser, this sudden appearance of a perspective occurs ‘in the form of a determinate absence’:56 Machiavelli leaves ‘anonymous’, unspecified, unknown, the two major ‘protagonists’ of the relevant encounter, that is, precisely, fortuna and virtù (or the matter and the form of the New Principality, respectively). This anonymity, says Althusser, should not be taken as an instance of classical theory’s generality and abstraction; on the contrary, it is precisely the way in which the political objective of absolute beginning becomes ‘inscribed in theory’.57 Those ‘protagonists’ are not left undefined like the unknowns of a mathematical relation or a law: they are ‘by definition unknowns’, that is, ‘absolute unknowns’:58 absolute beginning is an aleatory encounter between absolute unknowns. In short, this anonymity stands for the essential difficulty, in ‘theory’ as well as in practice, of absolute beginning: we do not know anything in advance, we have nothing to start with. Unknown is not only the form that is to be imposed on a given matter; what this matter will be is also unknown. This, in a positive way, means that it is not between the known ‘protagonists’ that the encounter will take place. The beginning will occur outside the existing states, political forms and rulers, outside of everything present and known.59 Thus, the nothing of the beginning is correlated with ‘the rejection of all existing political forms’;60 the existing is rejected as already old, and this, in its turn, is the condition of the radical novelty of that which begins.

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But, thus the void turns out to be strictly correlative with the perspective of the beginning: it is only through this perspective that the void is, precisely, a void. Let us remember that this void, the ‘emptiness’ of the beginning’s conjuncture, consisted in ‘formless matter’, in the absence of form in a matter gathered by the fortuna of an aleatory encounter. It is obviously a very peculiar kind of void, consisting in the assemblage of the raw materials of what is to be a New Principality under a New Prince: the void is the presence of matter, as opposed to the absence of form. But the matter is formless only from the viewpoint of the formed matter, of the thing that begins and of its novel form – that is, in the light of the rejection of the existing and known forms; it is from the perspective de la cosa, of that which is (aleatorily) to begin, that the assembled matter is nothing, emptiness, and that the beginning is an absolute one, bringing forth a radically novel thing: ‘if one considers the thing which begins, and is novel because it begins, before it there was something, but nothing of it’.61 Outside this perspective, the initial emptiness is just fullness. As far as the ‘before’ of the beginning is concerned, all the difference between the vacuum and the plenum is made by the perspective of the ‘after’, of the novel thing which begins; the beginning starts from nothing, but there’s no nothing without the beginning. Because of that, a perspectiveless theory is inadequate for this void. The void can be grasped only by a ‘theoretical’ discourse affected in its modality by the essential involvement with this perspective, a discourse that does not simply theorise the void, as an object external to it, but contains it, inscribes it ‘in its own texture’:62 a discourse that ‘makes room’ for it, that ‘arranges and contains a certain place, a certain empty place’.63 Furthermore, if the void is not an object, so as to be theorised, then, by the same token, it is not just ‘there’, pre-existing and given to the theoretical gaze: the void has to be made by the relevant perspective, and this gesture has to be contained, somehow reproduced in advance, by its ‘theory’. What Machiavelli does in his discourse is directly homologous to what has to be done in historical reality, in order for a New Principality under a New Prince to begin: namely, once again, the rejection of the existing and the known as already old and obsolete, ‘a clean sweep of the past’.64 The void then is made by the perspective of something, in relation to which everything present is old, something that, in a peculiar sense, is absent from the present scene, it does not (yet) exist, is not (yet) present and known; something that, in a peculiar sense, is (already) in the future. Furthermore, the void is made in order for that thing to begin, in order to exist: the place is ‘empty in order to be filled, empty so as to have inserted in it the action of the individual or group who will come and take a stand there’.65 So, whatever is to begin, it has not yet its place in the existing field; its place, says Althousser, could not be fixed in the present space, because the thing has not come to ‘take a stand there’ yet. The place is empty of it; otherwise, the place is full. The place is ‘empty for the future’; it is ‘empty, though it is always occupied’.66 The place is empty through an active perspective, which empties the full. If the place of the thing to come is not yet occupied and stabilised, it is because it is the place of a thing that is already fighting for its being, ‘unstable in its very existence, since all its effort must tend towards giving itself existence’.67 It is this very thing, which is to begin, that makes the void, strives to exist therein and already exists through that striving; it is the thing itself that opens up the place of its own existence in order to exist in it, and by that same opening up, it exists. Thus, absolute beginning acquires the retroactive scheme of ‘aleatory structuralism’: a novel formed matter, or a structured entity, retroacts – by the efficacy that is essential to it, by its characteristic structural causality – over its own structuration, over the very ‘taking hold’ of its

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constitutive materials, in an instance which is thus the emergence and the first act of its active cohesion.68 It is by that very retroaction that the new thing precariously imposes itself, enforces its existence on an otherwise exhaustively filled field of competing forces.69 By the same token, immanent causality enters the image and absolute beginning acquires its peculiar always-already temporality. The mutual absolute ‘unknownness’ of form and matter simply means that none of them pre-exists the other; neither can be taken as a given, on which a genesis of the thing may be engendered.70 Once more, the emergence of the thing obeys neither a transitive-efficient, nor a transcendent-teleological causality; once more, the question is neither of the effectivity of a prior cause nor of that of a future cause, but of the immanent effectivity of an absent cause, that is, of a cause that is present through its absence;71 its ‘empty place’ stands for the break of the beginning: the thing does not originate in its pre-history in a continuous manner – hence the essential association of the beginning and the novelty of the thing. And it is now, in the light of absolute beginning, that we can reconsider our initial assertion that, in this issue of the always-already temporality of the structure as immanent cause, an essential reference to subjectivity is involved. First of all, subjectivity is involved in the ‘theoretical’ or descriptive dimension of Machiavelli’s discourse, through the peculiar modality of its relation to its ‘object’. If Machiavelli’s cosa opens up, within ‘the space of pure theory’ (which ‘has no subject’), ‘the space of political practice’, the latter ‘possesses meaning only via its possible or requisite subject’.72 Even though Althusser will immediately express his perplexity towards this sudden appearance, in his discourse, of ‘the ambiguous term subject, which it would be advisable to replace by the term agent’,73 the fact remains that the ‘subject’ (even in quotation marks) re-occurs stubbornly when he tries to make sense of that ‘thing’ which sets its own beginning as its ‘cause’: this thing seems to have inescapably something of a subject, since it ‘aspires’ to exist and already struggles for that existence; it is an aspiring subject, an aspiring being aspiring to be: its empty place, the retroactive trace of its aleatory existence, ‘this political vacuum is simply an immense aspiration to political being’:74 it ‘is empty because it is to be filled and occupied by the “subject”, or agent, of political practice: Prince or party’.75 But, besides the ‘particular relations between the discourse and its “object”’, the specific modality of that discourse also establishes particular relations ‘between the discourse and its “subject”’.76 Thus, in contrast to classical-theoretical discourse ‘without a subject’,77 Machiavelli’s becomes a discourse with a subject. Here there is no question of authorship: here we have to do with a relation completely different to that of the subject of the discourse. Rather, this peculiar relation between this discourse and its subject would have to do with the correlation between objectivity and partisanship, which is essential to it; such a discourse is essentially involved with its own ‘object’. Contrary to the impartiality of classical theoretical discourse – which, being without a subject, was a discourse ‘without an addressee’, such that ‘anyone can make use’78 of its ‘objective’ truth – this one is a discourse with a specific addressee: not anyone can make use of such a discourse.79 Thus, Machiavelli’s discourse is a discourse with a singular, determinate subject, to which it relates not only by speaking of it; it also speaks for, and speaks to that subject, addresses it. Althusser will correlate this complex relation with Gramsci’s characterisation of The Prince as a revolutionary manifesto. It is beyond the scope of this essay to elaborate further on that; for my purposes, it suffices to say that, if the discourse of the absolute beginning is a discourse

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with a subject, to which it is addressed, this subject is the one announced by the discourse’s descriptive dimension:80 it is, once again, la cosa, the thing that strives to begin, the subject of the absolute beginning: Italy’s ‘people’ unified in the form of a national state. This manifesto, says Althusser, while it ‘seems to have for its sole interlocutor a future individual, an individual who does not exist, is in fact addressed to the mass of the common people’.81 More generally, ‘a manifesto is not written for an individual, especially a nonexistent individual: it is always addressed to the masses, in order to organize them into a revolutionary force’.82 But the subject of the absolute beginning is not just the common people, nor just the masses; as we know, it is not some gathered matter, but a political structure and a political force, a political subject, precisely: a matter invested in specific political form, that of the people (in the specifically modern sense of the term, the people as an individual, in the singular) or nation, that is, a national unity in a popular state. If the manifesto’s appeal is towards the people, it is already a popular-national appeal, and, in order to be effective, the people must recognise itself in such an appeal, it must recognise itself as the people or the nation. But, in a sense, such a people is not yet constituted or formed: the masses are yet unformed; or, using Althusser’s expression, ‘the people is not yet “the subject” of history’.83 Thus, the manifesto is appealing to the people in order to constitute it, and the people would become what it is by responding to that appeal (as the people, precisely). In short, here the always-already temporality of the structural constitution of the structure is once again interwoven with the always-already of the subject, and, by the same token, the relation of the manifesto’s discourse to its ‘subject’, the relation of addressing, acquires the modality of interpellation: the subject is constituted by interpellation but, since it is constituted by responding to interpellation, it is somehow presupposed by it: the people, the subject of the absolute beginning, which in a sense is ‘not-yet’, in another sense it ‘already’ is. Indeed, Althusser, concluding all this discussion, and at the same time putting ‘us’ in the place of the addressee of Machiavelli’s discourse, will say that The Prince is gripping because – as much as any writing can – [it] . . . implicates and involves us. He hails us from a place that he summons us to occupy as potential ‘subjects’ (agents) of a potential political practice. This effect of captivation and interpellation is produced by the shattering of the traditional theoretical text, by the sudden appearance of the political problem as a problem and of the political practice in it as a practice; and by the double reflection of political practice in his text and of his text in political practice.84

Aleatory structuralism Let us now return to ‘The Underground Current . . .’, to close our discussion. As we have seen, ‘aleatory structuralism’ manifests itself there at the point where the ‘atoms’ are retroactively transformed into the emergent structure’s elements. Althusser, in several points of the text, implies that the difference between the ‘atoms’ and the structural elements is not just qualitative, it is also ontological: they are different in their respective degree of ‘reality’. The atoms, prior to the encounter, says Althusser, are ‘abstract’ entities, lacking any consistency, property and even reality, while the elements of the resulting entity are real and concrete, with their relational properties, as determined by their structure. Accordingly, the retroactive

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transformation of the former into the latter has also an ontological impact: it is the encounter (or, more precisely, its taking hold) that transforms the un-real atoms to real elements,85 which is the very process of the new structure’s actualisation. Thus, on the one hand, the concreteness and reality of the entity’s elements are clearly due to their being structural; in contrast, the abstractness and non-reality of the atoms are relative to their being un-structured, that is, to their un-relatedness, to their being in the void. On the other hand, though, atoms and elements are materially identical, the encounter adding nothing in order to accomplish the emerging individual: the atoms are the emergent entity’s matter. Thus, a paradox, of an already familiar allure, is involved here: It is clear that the encounter creates nothing of the reality of the world, which is nothing but agglomerated atoms, but that it confers their reality upon the atoms themselves, which, without swerve and encounter, would be nothing but abstract elements, lacking all consistency and existence.86 I argue, now, that, in a manner analogous to Machiavelli and Us, the atoms here are not characterised by lack of structure or form in themselves; what is absent in them is the structure of the emergent singularity. It is from this particular point of view that the atoms are abstract and non-real, that is, to the extent that they are not yet elements of the emergent structure, which thus does not yet exert its determination on them. In themselves, the atoms are not lacking anything, and, a fortiori, they do not lack each other in order to combine in a predetermined structure. Thus, where aleatory structuralism is being manifested, an element utterly heterogeneous and irreducible to classical theory’s modality makes its ‘sudden appearance’ in the discourse of ‘The Underground Current . . .’: a perspective – indeed, the perspective of the novel, emergent singularity and of its emergence. By the same token, as Machiavelli and Us has taught us, a perhaps imperceptible alteration of the discursive modality of ‘The Underground Current . . .’ occurs: aleatory materialism takes the side of that very individual and its emergence. In this light, the abstractness and non-reality of the atoms, their being un-structured, the void itself, is relative to the perspective of the concrete, structured entity that emerges from the encounter. Outside that perspective, those ‘atoms’ are concrete, structured individualities on their own right, with their own perspectives, themselves results of previous encounters, and so on ad infinitum – which in fact de-substantiates the initial image of the primordial void and the originary ‘atoms’, falling in it: strictly speaking, there are neither atoms nor void in themselves, but an irreducible complexity, a universe of individual singularities, each one characterised by its own structure and perspective. The void, with its atoms, can no longer be thought of as a substantial quasi-object or fact. As was the case with Machiavelli and Us, then, it is the emergent structure’s perspective that makes all the difference between the vacuum and the plenum, between the atoms in the void and the elements in the structure’s thickness. The relevant transformation, coterminous with the structure’s emergence, precisely by being relative to the emergent structure’s perspective, has the modality of an ‘objective’, that is, of a ‘cause’: the emergent entity’s ‘cause’. Accordingly, it is also here the case of an active and constitutive perspective, which effects the retroactive transformation of the abstract atoms into concrete structural elements; and to the extent that this transformation is identical with structure’s actualisation, it is also

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characterised by the always-already temporality that is peculiar to it. Let us distinguish the two aspects of this unitary making. First, the perspective in question is indistinguishable from the structural causality, which determines the consistency of the emergent structured entity. As we just said, the existence of the emergent structure is its own ‘cause’: it concerns itself. The structure is not indifferent and disinterested towards its own existence: its being structured is ‘its own business’. It is the entity itself that sets as its cause its very existence and strives for it. It is the case of an active holding together of the emergent structure and by the emergent structure. Thus, something of a desire and a struggle for persistence into being becomes inscribed to structural causality, and, by the same token, structure and its causality come close to the Spinozist conatus and the singular essence of an entity, the actual essence of a thing, which is nothing more than its striving to persevere in its being: the entity desires and struggles to remain structured, to continue to exist as the entity it is; it resists its disintegration. And this active persistence of the individual and by the individual also includes in its efficacy the individual’s primordial constitution, that is, the aleatory ‘taking hold’ of the encounter. The new entity’s emergence cannot be thought of as a quasi-physicalist, purely passive, result. The conatus is not the pure effect of the encounter’s taking hold; rather, this inaugurating moment is already the first act of its drama, the first struggle for the persistence into being – the birth is already a survival. The constitutive perspective encompasses the primordial instance of the emergence. If, as we have seen, the being-structured of the individual is its own ‘cause’, we could not afford missing here another etymological meaning of the cosa/cause, besides those exploited by Althusser himself: not only the thing, not only the cause as task, but also the cause as causa: it is the cause of its own structuration. The structure is the retroactive and always-already effective immanent cause of the structured entity, having no separate existence from it.87 Second, the void, as we have seen, is an inseparable aspect of the primary making of the structure, of its actualisation. The void itself is not a pre-existing object or fact; 88 it is part of the cause of the entity’s emergence and existence – the void is involved with the entity’s conatus. If the relevant perspective is indeed irreducible to a cognitive, impartial theorisation, then it does not just find the void, but makes it, in order to find there its place in the world. And this, following Warren Montag, is a completely different notion of the void, ‘not only irreducible to the first but actively antagonistic to it’.89 The first one, relevant to what I call pure aleatorism, had the modality of a metaphysical or ontological concept, that of a peculiar ‘object’, of philosophy’s fundamental object: the primordial void, ‘that pre-exists all things’; it is the concept of a ‘substance, even if that substance is the negation of substance’.90 According to this second one, which pertains rather to aleatory structuralism, the void is made by the thing that emerges from an encounter, as part of the cause (in both senses) of its existence. This second notion of the void, says Montag, ‘compels us to reverse many of the propositions Althusser advances’,91 propositions that, according to my reading, are in line with the particular deviation of aleatory structuralism which is pure aleatorism. This reversal touches also the sense of the encounter’s ‘taking hold’; now, it does not lead unidirectionally from the void and its atoms to the structure and its elements, but is marked by the constitutive retroaction of the latter, acquiring thus the temporal structure of the always-already. From this perspective, writes Montag, ‘the void is not the condition of the encounter, rather the encounter is the condition of the void, although understood as a verb, an activity rather than a substance’.92

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Thus, instead of being the concept of a theorised object, this notion of the void is a philosophical category, relative to a partial intervention. The void is not the fundamental concept of philosophy in general, but the crucial category of materialist philosophy, which is primarily the materialist understanding of philosophy itself, the self-recognition of philosophy as immanent intervention in reality and not as transcendent contemplation of ‘objects’. It is at this precise point where the ‘taking sides’ of aleatory materialism is manifested, the point of ‘the indissociable simultaneity of thought and action’ that Althusser once tried to capture in the phrase ‘theoretical practice’, as Montag puts it:93 through this category, by which ‘The Underground Current . . .’ hosts and adopts the perspective of the emergent individual’s struggle to emerge, aleatory materialism becomes itself, be it in a tendencial and precarious manner, a ‘philosophy [which] does not find the void, but makes it’ a philosophy that ‘evacuates’ all the perennial and traditionally venerated philosophical problems (of the origin, the meaning, the end etc.), rejects them, in order for itself to exist. If it is a ‘philosophy of the void’, then, in the light of this materialist philosophical category, and in a movement that reproduces that of the emergent entity, whose perspective materially incorporates in its modality, it becomes a ‘philosophy which makes a philosophical void in order to endow itself with existence’.94

Notes 1 Cited in Elliott 1999, pp. xiv–v; emphasis modified. 2 Matheron 1999. 3 Cited in Elliott 1999, pp. xiv–v. 4 Elliott 1999, p. xv. 5 Althusser 1971a, p. 174. 6 Althusser 1971a, p. 174. 7 Althusser 1971a, p. 174. 8 Althusser’s own phrase on what begins in absolute beginning is: ‘before it there was something else, but nothing of it’ (Althusser 1999, p. 6, emphasis added). 9 This is already condensed in the ambiguity of the original formulation of Althusser’s thesis: ‘L’ ideologie interpelle les individus en sujets’, which could mean both that ideology interpellates individuals into subjects and that ideology interpellates individuals as subjects. On this, see Močnik 1993, Dolar 1993 and Butler 1997. 10 ‘. . . [F]or the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession. . .But in reality these things happen without any succession’ (Althusser 1971a, p. 174). 11 Althusser 1971a, pp. 175–6. 12 Althusser 1971a, pp. 175–6. 13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 186–7. 14 For a discussion on this issue, see Montag 1988 and Fourtounis 2005. 15 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 189. 16 Althusser 1969a, pp. 199–200. The phrase is Ben Brewster’s translation of ‘le toujours-déjà donné d’ une unité complexe structurée’ (Althusser 1977a, p. 204). 17 Althusser 1971a.

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18 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 112, compare p. 180. 19 ‘No human, i.e. social individual can be the agent of a practice if he does not have the form of a subject. The “subject-form” is actually the form of historical existence of every individual, of every agent of social practices’ (Althusser 1976a, p. 95). 20 Althusser 2006a. 21 It is an encounter between ‘elements that are independent of each other, each resulting from its own specific history, in the absence of any organic, teleological relation between these diverse histories’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 199). 22 Using traditional metaphysical terminology, we could say that the aleatory character of the encounter’s ‘taking hold’ concerns both the existence and the essence of the individual that will result from it. 23 Althusser 2006a, p. 193. 24 Fourtounis 2007. 25 Fourtounis 2007. 26 Unlike the encounter proper, which is indeed structurally and historically undetermined. 27 Althusser 2006a, p. 193, emphasis added. 28 For an extensive discussion on the logic of radical novelty and the relevant break, see Baltas 2012. 29 Althusser 2006a, p. 191. 30 Althusser 2006a, p. 192–3. 31 Althusser 2006a, p. 192. 32 Montag 2010. 33 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 44. 34 Althusser 2006a, p. 194. 35 That is, contrary to the widespread view, based on the mainstream interpretation of ‘The Underground Current . . .’ as pure aleatorism, according to which Althusser’s late aleatory materialism represents a more or less radical turn, or even a break, in relation to his earlier work (that is, an overcoming of the ‘Althusser of the conjuncture’ over the ‘Althusser of the structure’, to use Balibar’s expressions), a continuity with Althusserian structuralism rather than a Kehre is revealed here – which is also suggested by the term ‘aleatory structuralism’. This continuity can be assessed also by following the thorough genealogy of aleatory materialism in Althusser’s thought, tracing it already in his work of the 1960s and 1970s, by G. M. Goshgarian (Goshgarian 2006, and in this volume 2012). 36 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188. 37 Althusser 1999, pp. 14–15. 38 It is a discourse that is ‘objective because [it is] universal, stating the laws of its object, the concrete instance of the object affording only a particular case of this universal’ (Althusser 1999, p. 15). 39 It is a discourse ‘without a subject, and hence without an addressee . . . Anyone can make use of [it]’ (Althusser 1999, p. 15). 40 Nagel 1986. 41 With the exception, as we shall see, of the points where aleatory structuralism makes its implicit appearance. 42 Montag 2010. 43 Or, according to Montag, of an ‘originary non-origin, a theoretical compromise which in no way escapes the implications of the concept of origins’ (Montag 2010).

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44 Althusser 2006a, pp. 174–5. This is a rather strict denial of his earlier, critical position that philosophy has no objects, that is, no objects external and independent to it, objects with which philosophy itself does not interfere, and that the distinctive feature of materialist philosophy is that it recognizes this fact, most and foremost about itself. On this, see Montag 2010. 45 Althusser 1999, pp. 74–6. 46 Althusser 1999, pp. 74–6. 47 Althusser 1999, p. 54. 48 ‘The peculiarity of virtù is to master fortuna, even when it is favourable, and to transform the instant of fortuna into political duration, the matter of fortuna into political form, and thus to structure the material of the favourable local conjuncture politically . . .’ (Althusser 1999, p. 75). 49 Althusser 1999, p. 54. 50 Althusser 1999, p. 19. 51 Althusser 1999, p. 16. 52 Althusser 1999, p. 80. 53 Althusser 1999, p. 17. 54 Althusser 1999, p. 28. 55 Althusser 1999, p. 7. 56 Althusser 1999, p. 76. 57 Althusser 1999, p. 76. 58 Althusser 1999, p. 76. 59 Althusser 1999, p. 77. 60 Althusser 1999, p. 77, emphasis added. 61 Althusser 1999, p. 6, emphasis added. 62 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 63 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 64 Althusser 1999, p. 79. 65 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 66 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 67 Althusser 1999, p. 21, emphasis added. 68 ‘The beginning is, so to speak, rooted in the essence of a thing, since it is the beginning of this thing. It affects all its determinations, and does not fade with the moment, but endures with the thing itself’ (Althusser 1999, p. 6). 69 If it has the requisite virtù, ‘the capacity to become sufficiently strong to count among [its] forces’ (Althusser 1999, p. 20). 70 Thus, in particular, neither the nation, nor the form of state that is to establish the nation’s ‘independent’ existence pre-exist each-other: ‘a nation can be constituted only by means of a state – a national state’ (Althusser 1999, p. 11); ‘if the nation can be constituted solely by means of a state, the modern state . . . can only be national. This implies that national unity cannot be achieved by a non-national state’ (Althusser 1999, pp. 12–13). 71 In Reading Capital, Althusser refers to the Marxist notion of Darstellung, as one of Marx’s attempts to ‘think the effectivity of the structure’, by which ‘he wants to designate at once both absence and presence, i.e., the existence of the structure to its effects’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188). 72 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 73 Althusser 1999, p. 20.

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74 Althusser 1999, p. 54. 75 Althusser 1999, p. 21. 76 Althusser 1999, p. 14, emphasis added. 77 Althusser 1999, p. 15. 78 Althusser 1999, p. 15. 79 Its truth would be of a particular kind: in contrast with classical theory, its truth would not be ‘valid for any and every subject’ (Althusser 1999, p. 20). 80 Here I leave aside Althusser’s point that, ‘Machiavelli, for all sorts of reasons that would require detailed examination, entrusts to someone else [to a mythical individual: the Prince] the mission of achieving national unity on behalf of a third party: the people’. According to Althusser, ‘this hiatus opens up the vacuum of utopia’, which validates Gramsci’s position that The Prince is indeed ‘a kind of revolutionary manifesto, but a utopian one’ (Althusser 1999, pp. 26–8). 81 Althusser 1999, p. 25. 82 Althusser 1999, p. 25. 83 Althusser 1999, p. 27. 84 Althusser 1999, p. 32, emphasis added. 85 ‘The atoms’ very existence is due to nothing but the swerve and the encounter, prior to which they led only a phantom existence’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 169). 86 Althusser 2006a, p. 169. 87 Let us recall that this retroactive effectivity is, according to my reading of ‘aleatory structuralism’, strictly restricted to the instance of the encounter’s ‘taking hold’, and does not encompass that of the encounter proper, which remains structurally undetermined. Accordingly, the encounter, as such, and a fortiori the deviation which produces it (in the Epicurean imagery of the rain), are not at all the trait of the emerging individual, which would express thus its energetic subjectivity, as Panagiotis Sotiris holds (Sotiris in this volume); on the contrary, it is the passive conditioning of the retro-active efficacy of structural causality. Hence, the emphasis on the ‘energetic character of singularities’, as Sotiris puts it, would be unilateral: it should be always kept in mind that the immanent, retroactive character of structural causality is meant to escape out of the dilemma of passivity and activity, pointing rather to the ‘paradoxical possibility of an “active passivity”, or better, of a beyond passivity by means of passivity itself’, as Étienne Balibar holds concerning the ‘structuralism’ of Althusser, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze (Balibar 2007a, p. 7). 88 Hence, as it should be already understood, I take that any interpretation of the void as a precondition or prerequisite for the emergence of novel forms, which thus would emerge ex nihilo, represents a naïve understanding of Althusser’s late materialism, and consequently any criticism of it based on that interpretation would be superfluous. 89 Montag 2010. 90 Montag 2010. 91 Montag 2010. 92 Montag 2010. 93 Montag 2010. 94 Althusser 2006a, p. 174.

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4 History as ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’: Machiavelli in the last Althusser Vittorio Morfino

Machiavelli and the materialism of the encounter

I

n Althusser’s writings that were published when he was alive, we find only brief and ultimately marginal references to Machiavelli’s thought.1 Nonetheless, the publication of his letters, unpublished work and lecture courses during the last 15 years has demonstrated that if there is any author alongside Marx who Althusser never ceased to interrogate, it was Machiavelli. Althusser’s works on Machiavelli include: MM

a course to Machiavelli in 1962, which has recently been published by François Matheron;2

MM

another course in 1971–2, of which there is an earlier version simply entitled Course;

MM

a later one – with several modifications probably made in 1975–6 – entitled Machiavel et nous3 (the latter is, in fact, a book that Althusser kept in his drawer and never stopped correcting and re-elaborating until the last years of his life);

MM

an article, ‘La solitude de Machiavel’, written in 1978 and published in the first issue of the journal Futur antérieur in 1990 just before Althusser’s death;4

MM

the part devoted to Machiavelli in Courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre, written in 1982 and published in 1994;5

MM

the two excerpts of the autobiography on Spinoza and Machiavelli, which later became part of a project of reconstruction, Unique tradition matérialiste, written in 1985 and published in the journal Lignes in 1995;6

MM

a fragment written in 1986, Machiavel philosophe, which I was able to view in the Imec Archives but which has not yet been published.

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It would be interesting in itself to reconstruct the changes in Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli over the years by relating these variations to the different moments of Althusser’s theoretical production. However, here I prefer to take a short cut and to look directly at his interpretation of Machiavelli in the 1980s, by trying to reconstruct the image and theoretical function that Machiavelli played, particularly in Althusser’s writings devoted to the underground current of materialism. Within Althusser’s production of those years, this is certainly the most significant text from the theoretical point of view. It is the only text – despite its apparently fragmentary nature – that allows us to trace out a project that is sufficiently elaborated on the theoretical level. It is a typescript that François Matheron, editor of the Écrits, presented under the title Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter. These are extremely fascinating pages in which the features of an underground history of a materialism escaping the classical idealism-materialism opposition are provisionally sketched out. Such an opposition is held to be entirely internal to the history of Western metaphysics. This materialism is a materialism of contingency or of the aleatory, not dominated by Leibniz’s grand principe ‘nihil est sine ratione’. Althusser here proposes that he is discovering a ‘profound tradition that sought its materialist anchorage in a philosophy of the encounter (and, therefore, in a more or less atomistic philosophy, the atom, in its “fall”, being the simplest figure of individuality). Hence this tradition’s radical rejection of all philosophies of essence [Ousia, Essentia, Wesen], that is, of Reason [Logos, Ratio, Vernunft], and therefore of Origin and End – the Origin being nothing more, here, than the anticipation of the End in Reason or primordial order (that is, the anticipation of Order, whether it be rational, moral, religious or aesthetic) – in the interests of a philosophy which, rejecting the Whole and every Order, rejects the Whole and order in favour of dispersion (Derrida would say, in his terminology, “dissemination”) and disorder’.7 Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Marx and Heidegger are the main witnesses. Nevertheless, it is precisely the fascination exercised by this text that conceals its greatest risk: as Althusser himself said regarding the Theses on Feuerbach, this is a text that dazzles more than it illuminates; here, one can find flashes of geniality that rip apart perennial philosophical commonplaces, insights that open passages but which, for the most part, are not supported by the patient work of conceptualisation. The main risk is to see here a liquidation of the powerful rationalism of the writings of the 1960s in a philosophy of the event, of chance or, even worse, of freedom. Thus the challenge does not consist so much in denying the ambiguities on which these kinds of interpretations are based, but rather in recognising them and highlighting them, attempting to dissolve them with a theoretical act of force, by putting at the centre of Althusser’s text a thesis that is not written and yet represents its keystone: the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over form. We will need, then, to understand how this thesis relates to the thesis of the primacy of relations over elements that is at the centre of Althusser’s texts of the 1960s. What is at stake, of course, is the very possibility of thinking aleatory materialism without abandoning the path of rationalism.

The primacy of relations over elements As mentioned above, the primacy of relations over elements characterises the works of the ‘first’ Althusser. Justifiably famous is the position in Réponse à John Lewis where Althusser

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states that ‘the struggle of the classes must be put first [Il faut mettre la lutte des classes au premier rang]’.8 The thesis of the primacy of class struggle over the existence of classes may be translated in abstract terms in the thesis of the primacy of relations over elements. We can understand the meaning of ‘primacy’ in the sense of the first proposition of Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘A substance is by nature prior to its affection [Substantia prior est natura suis affectionibus]’.9 It is an ontological primacy to be asserted on an epistemological level against a naïve empiricism that considers things appearing in front of a subject as subsistent reality. In the Positivismusstreit in German sociology, Adorno takes a similar position from a methodological point of view, according to which facts are not the last and impenetrable data, as dominant sociology believed. Rather, in order to be understood, they must be related to the totality. He writes: ‘the interpretation of facts leads to totality . . . There is not any social fact that does not have its place and meaning in that totality. This is pre-ordinate to every single subject that represents the totality in his own monadological constitution’.10 Of course, such a position cannot be taken naïvely; it is necessary to understand the relation it maintains with the tradition of expressive causality from Leibniz to Hegel.

The Hegel/Marx difference Althusser dedicated the final paragraph of ‘The Object of Capital’ in Reading Capital to focusing particularly on the difference between the Marxist and Leibnizian/Hegelian conception.11 Althusser believes that in Capital Marx used neither the mechanistic nor the organicist model of causality, but Spinoza’s concept of a model of immanent causality. The theoretical problem, however, consists entirely in differentiating in detail the Spinozian model from the Hegelian one. At the end of this paragraph, Althusser uses multiple formulations underlining this difference: ‘structural causality’, ‘overdetermination’, ‘Darstellung’, ‘metonymical causality’, and ‘theatre without an author’. In order to shed light on this point, we will try to consider the thesis of the primacy of relations in the tradition of expressive causality. Leibniz holds that relations constitute reality insofar as they order the spatio-temporal structure of phenomena. But if these relations structure the world such as it appears, they nevertheless require two foundations: both a spiritual substance not constituted by relations (and therefore beyond all relation) and a divine intellect, without which, according to Leibniz, nothing would be true. Hegel, in turn, dissolves all substantiality into the most radical relationality. But this relationality is not the pure, unqualified play of action and reaction. It is instead conceived of as the presence of an all-pervading time that orders relations, rather than being constituted by them. This presence is understood to be the contemporaneity of a principle that is immanent to the play of relations (the beautiful individuality, the abstract juridical person, and so on), a power that decides in advance the developments to which the play of relations can give rise. The obscurity at the heart of the interaction [Wechselwirkung] necessarily tends toward the light of the concept: this tension and tendency is lodged ab initio in the schema of simultaneity, the great temporal metaphor of Spirit [Geist]. It seems, then, that both Leibniz and Hegel were able to pose the question of relations in the most radical way; and yet they both seem to have fled in the face of the extreme

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consequences these positions imply. Leibniz’s theory of pre-established harmony, for example, permits substance to enter into the play of relations only on the condition that it maintain the form of a possible essence in the divine intellect. Leibniz therefore reduces relation to the combinatory game of a God cast as both architect and sovereign, a game always already decided in advance by the divine will’s tendency towards good. In the same way, Hegel’s theory of the ruse of reason is said to weave the great tapestry of universal history, a tapestry whose warp and woof is the Idea and whose passions are the individual woven threads. Both pre-established harmony and the ruse of reason make relationality serve the ends of teleology: the primacy of teleology over relationality, we could say, to echo the Althusserian formulation from which we started. In both cases, the conception of time is the secret of this primacy, the theological eternity of Leibniz and its Hegelian secularisation into the synchronicity of the epoch. In Reading Capital, Althusser tries to build a concept of time free from this double claim: the time of totality is neither eternity, nor contemporaneity, but the complex articulation of differential times not harmonised in a simple essence.12 Thus, if the thesis of the primacy of relations, as Althusser himself admits, can be read in the furrow of the idealist theory, it is necessary to find a formula able to express this conception with a force equal and contrary to the tradition of expressive causality. The primacy of chance over relations? In my opinion, the clearest formula is: the primacy of the encounter over form. However, as we have mentioned, this thesis does not appear in ‘The Underground Current’.

The primacy of the encounter over form Theoretically, the most dense pages of the text on the materialism of the encounter are located between the reconstruction of the underground current, from Epicurus to Rousseau, and the interpretation of Marx. Marx certainly does belong to this current; but at the same time, Marx is what is at stake in the entire reconstruction. It is as if Althusser were searching in the history of thought for the conceptual instrument for formulating a new interpretation. It is for this reason that he summarises the results that he has attained just before dealing with Marx: 1 For a being (a body, an animal, a man, state, or Prince) to be, an encounter has to have

taken place (past infinitive). To limit ourselves to Machiavelli, an encounter has to have taken place between beings with affinities [des affinissables]; between such-and-such an individual and such-and-such a conjuncture, or Fortune, for example – the conjuncture itself being junction, con-junction congealed (albeit shifting) encounter, since it has already taken place, and refers in its turn to the infinite number of its prior causes, just as (let us add) a determinate [défini] individual (for instance, Borgia) refers to the infinite sequence [suite] of prior causes of which it is the result. 2 There are encounters only between series [séries] of beings that are the results of

several series of causes – at least two, but this two soon proliferates, by virtue of the effect of parallelism or general contagion (as Breton put it, profoundly, ‘elephants are contagious’). One also thinks here of Cournot, a great but neglected thinker.

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3 Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins (nothing ever guarantees an

encounter), but also in its effects. In other words, every encounter might have not taken place, al­though it did take place; but its possible nonexistence sheds light on the meaning of its ale­atory being. And every encounter is aleatory in its effects, in that nothing in the elements of the encounter prefigures, before the actual encounter, the contours and determinations of the being that will emerge from it.13 To summarise: 1 Every being is the product of an encounter; 2 Every encounter is the effect of other encounters ad infinitum; 3 Every encounter might not have taken place; 4 The being that will emerge from the encounter is not prefigured in its elements.

In exemplifying these theses, Althusser refers to two authors: Machiavelli, who is evoked by means of the figure of Valentino, and Darwin. Darwin’s name, unlike Machiavelli’s, is invoked only once in the entire text. Nonetheless, Darwin’s role does not appear to be a less important one. Althusser uses Darwin against Hegel; what is at stake is clearly Marx, or the possibility of distinguishing between an aleatory and a teleological theory of the mode of production. Darwin is played against Hegel; paradoxically, against the Hegelian reading of Darwin that Marx himself proposed.14 Darwin plays a fundamental role because he provides Althusser with a model for applying the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over form in the treatment of the natural world, of the emergence of any natural form from the complex encounter between a very great number of elements.

Darwin and aleatory materialism Let us now try to read Darwin’s Of the Origin of Species in this perspective. A first theoretical element of fundamental importance is the erosion of the concept of form produced by the observation of species’ variations in their natural state. Darwin remarks that ‘no one definition [of the term species] has satisfied all naturalists’,15 and that ‘the term ‘variety’ is almost equally difficult to define’.16 The monstrosities shade into variety and are a ‘deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species’.17 Species, variety, and monstrosities are, therefore, grades of individual differentiation that are not separated by strong ontological coordinates: which introduces uncertainty and arbitrariness into the naturalist’s classifications. According to Darwin, we have a sort of progressive scale that goes from individual differences, to a more different and persistent variety, up to the subspecies and finally to the species: The passage from one stage of difference to another may, in many cases, be the simple result of the nature of the organism and of the different physical conditions to which it has long been exposed; but with respect to the more important and adaptive characters, the

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passage from one stage of difference to another, may be safely attributed to the cumulative action of Natural Selection . . . A well-marked variety may therefore be called an incipient species.18 A second fundamental theoretical element lies in focusing on the struggle for life as the mechanism for selecting forms. Darwin asks himself ‘how have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organization to another part, and to the condition of life, and of one organics being to another being, been perfected’.19 And ‘how is it that varieties, which I have called incipient species, become ultimately converted into good and distinct species, which in most cases obviously differ from each other far more than do the varieties of the same species?’20 The well-known answer is that useful variations are conserved in the struggle for life. But the expression ‘struggle for life’ must be understood in a broad and metaphorical sense: the concept that underpins it is the reciprocal dependence of all individuals; it is a struggle for life between individuals of the same species, of different species, and finally, of all individuals against the conditions of life. In other words, the struggle for life does not ever act as a simple instance, but rather as a network of infinitely complex relations between the plants, animals and climatic conditions of a determined geographical location. Let us take Darwin’s example: In Staffordshire, on the estate of a relation, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched by the hand of man; but several hundred acres of exactly the same nature had been enclosed twenty-five years previously and planted with Scotch fir. The change in the native vegetation of the planted part of the heath was most remarkable, more than is generally seen in passing from one quite different soil to another; not only the proportional numbers of the heath-plants were wholly changed, but twelve species of plants (not counting grasses and carices) flourished in the plantations, which could not be found on the heath. The effect on the insects must have been still greater, for six insectivorous birds were very common in the plantations, which were not to be seen on the heath; and the heath was frequented by two or three distinct insectivorous birds. Here we see how potent has been the effect of the introduction of a single tree, nothing whatever else having been done, with the exception of the land having been enclosed, so that cattle could not enter. But how important an element enclosure is, I plainly saw near Farnham, in Surrey. Here there are extensive heaths, with a few clumps of old Scotch firs on the distant hilltops: within the last ten years large spaces have been enclosed, and self-sown firs are now springing up in multitudes, so close together that all cannot live. When I ascertained that these young trees had not been sown or planted, I was so much surprised at their numbers that I went to several points of view, whence I could examine hundreds of acres of the unenclosed heath, and literally I could not see a single Scotch fir, except the old planted clumps. But on looking closely between the stems of the heath, I found a multitude of seedlings and little trees which had been perpetually browsed down by the cattle. In one square yard, at a point some hundred yards distant from one of the old clumps, I counted thirty-two little trees; and one of them, with twenty-six rings of growth, had, during many years tried to raise its head above the stems of the heath, and had failed. No wonder that, as soon as the land was enclosed, it became thickly clothed with vigorously growing young firs. Yet the heath was so extremely barren and so extensive that

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no one would ever have imagined that cattle would have so closely and effectually searched it for food. Here we see that cattle absolutely determine the existence of the Scotch fir; but in several parts of the world insects determine the existence of cattle. Perhaps Paraguay offers the most curious instance of this; for here neither cattle nor horses nor dogs have ever run wild, though they swarm southward and northward in a feral state; and Azara and Rengger have shown that this is caused by the greater number in Paraguay of a certain fly, which lays its eggs in the navels of these animals when first born. The increase of these flies, numerous as they are, must be habitually checked by some means, probably by other parasitic insects. Hence, if certain insectivorous bird were to decrease in Paraguay, the parasitic insects would probably increase; and this would lessen the number of the navelfrequenting flies – then cattle and horses would became feral, and this would certainly greatly alter (as indeed I have observed in parts of South America) the vegetation: this again would largely affect the insects; and this, as we have just seen in Staffordshire, the insectivorous birds, and so onwards in ever-increasing circles of complexity.21 Darwin adds that relations are not, however, always as simple as this: ‘battle within battle must be continually recurring with varying success’.22 Therefore selection is not at all a kind of conscious choice of nature (in fact, nature does not really appear as a whole, but only as a ‘web of complex relations’),23 nor does it produce the variations itself. This acts only when weaving the complex relations on individual variations: ‘It may metaphorically be said that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, through the world, the slightest variations: rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life’.24 A third fundamental theoretical element is the Darwinian concept of order and time. Order is nothing other than the temporary balancing of forces in this web of complex relations. It is not some sort of transcendental or immanent nature that leads the action of individuals, but the same complex web of individual actions, the balancing of which can always change: . . . in the long-run the forces are so nicely balanced, that the face of nature remains for long periods of time uniform, though assuredly the merest trifle would give the victory to one organic being over another. Nevertheless, so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysm to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!’25 Time, then, does not have any influence on natural selection, and it should not be thought that ‘all life forms were necessarily undergoing change through some innate law’:26 ‘Lapse of time is only so far important, and this importance in this respect is great, that it gives a better chance of beneficial variations arising, and of their being selected, accumulated, and fixed. It likewise tends to increase the direct action of the physical condition of life, in relation to the constitution of each organism’.27 Order and time cannot, therefore, be articulated in a theoretical syntax that transforms the theory of natural selection – namely, the theory of the complex relations of natural beings – into a philosophy of the teleological evolution of forms. Far from being an incidental reference in

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‘The Underground Current’, Darwin’s theory instead seems to be its invisible centre. Its fundamental nucleus is not the thesis of the evolution of forms (as against fixism), but precisely the primacy of the encounter over form, namely the contingency not so much of the world (a term that does not make sense, according to Darwin), but of every form insofar as it is the result of a complex mesh of encounters. In this sense, the given elements are not there for the sake of the form, but each has its own history, its own effect on the mesh of encounters that takes place, but obviously can also fail. In this way, provided that the telos and the project are rejected (and the correlative concept of nature as order), the thesis of the primacy of encounter over form is perfectly compatible with the primacy of relations over elements: the complex web of relations that constitutes the stable face of nature in a given period is not order and a guarantee of stability, but a complex mesh of encounters, the failure or taking-place of one of which can redesign the web; and so the process may continue, as Darwin writes, ‘in everincreasing circles of complexity’.

The role of Machiavelli Although from the margins of the single occurrence of his name, the role played by Darwin in ‘The Underground Current’ can shed light on Machiavelli’s function. Here, I want to argue that Machiavelli plays a role with respect to politics and history that is perfectly symmetrical to the one played by Darwin with respect to nature. Not, therefore, Marx, as we might have expected – because in reality, as I said, Marx is at stake – but Machiavelli, thanks to whom it becomes possible to play off within Marx’s work itself the aleatory conception of the mode of production as against the teleological one dominant in his thought. By re-reading this passage, everything becomes clear: ‘For a being (a body, an animal, a man, state, or Prince) to be, an encounter has to have taken place (past infinitive)’.28 In the field of politics and history, the philosopher of the primacy of the encounter over form is precisely Machiavelli. In ‘The Underground Current’, Althusser declares it apertis verbis: in Machiavelli, there is an authentic philosophical thought, the importance of which goes far beyond his stereotypical image as the founder of political science. The true reason for the appeal exercised by Machiavelli’s figure over the centuries is due, according to Althusser, precisely to his philosophical position, to his ‘materialism of the encounter’. Let us see how Althusser presents Machiavelli’s fundamental problem in the brief exposition that he provides of Machiavelli’s thought: Machiavelli will be our second witness in the history of this underground current of the materialism of the encounter. His project is well known: to think, in the impossible conditions of fifteenth-century Italy, the conditions for establishing an Italian national state. All the circumstances favourable to imitating France or Spain exist, but without connections between them: a divided and fervent people, the fragmentation of Italy into small obsolete states that have been condemned by history, a generalized but disorderly revolt of an entire world against foreign occupation and pillage, and a profound, latent aspiration of the people towards unity, an aspiration to which all the great works of the period bear witness, including that of Dante, who understood nothing of all this, but was waiting for the arrival

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of the ‘great hound’. In sum, an atomized country, every atom of which was descending in free fall without en­coun­tering its neighbour. It was necessary to create the conditions for a swerve, and thus an encounter, if Italian unity was to ‘take hold’. How was this to be done? Machiavelli did not be­lieve that any of the existing states – and, in particular, any of the papal states, the worst of all – could play the role of unifier. In The Prince, he lists one after the other, only to reject them as so many decaying components of the prior, feudal mode of production, including the republics that are its alibis and captives. And he poses the problem in all its rigor and bare simplicity. Once all the states and their princes – that is, all the places and people – have been rejected, Machiavelli, using the example of Cesare Borgia, moves on to the idea that unification will be achieved if there emerges some nameless man who has enough luck and virtù to establish himself somewhere, in some nameless corner of Italy, and, starting out from this atomic point, gradually to aggregate the Italians around him in the grand project of founding a national state. This is a completely aleatory line of reasoning, which leaves politically blank both the name of the Federator and that of the region which will serve as starting-point for the constitution of this federation. Thus the dice are tossed on the gaming table, which is itself empty (but filled with men of valour).29 Althusser seems to repeat the Gramscian interpretation of Machiavelli as the thinker of the nation-state. In reality, this repetition has the precise function of wrong-footing its philosophy of history, to break the game of mirrors between the Prince and the party that is at the basis of its teleology. Machiavelli, as Althusser tells us, laisse en blanc the name of the federator and the name of the region starting from which this federation will be possible. The origin is crossed out, to use Heidegger’s terminology. In this sense, Althusser characterises Machiavelli’s philosophy as a ‘philosophy of the void’. Thus it will have been noticed that this philosophy is, in sum, a philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void [fait le vide philosophique] in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous ‘philosophical problems’ (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any ‘object’ whatever (‘philosophy has no object’) in order to set out from nothing, and from the infinitesimal, aleatory variation of nothing constituted by the swerve of the fall. Is there any more radical critique of all philosophy, with its pretension to utter the truth about things? Is there a more striking way of saying that philosophy’s ‘object’ par excellence is nothingness, nothing, or the void? In the sev­enteenth century, Pascal repeatedly approached this idea, and the possibility of introducing the void as a philosophical object. He did so, however, in the deplorable context of an apolo­getics. Here, too, it was only with Heidegger, after the false words of a Hegel (‘the labour of the negative’) or a Stirner (‘all things are nothing to me’), that the void was given all its decisive philosophical significance again. Yet we already find all this in Epicurus and Machiavelli: in Machiavelli, who evacuated [fit le vide de] all Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical concepts in order to think the possibility of making Italy a national state.30 Ichida has read this insistence on the void in Althusser in a Schmittian sense, as the void of the decision, therefore as the void that the Schmittian subject is in the very act of the decision

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that gives place to the form.31 Who decides, decides the form, and this decision, which constitutes the subject in its void of content, can only be taken starting from nothing: it cannot be founded on anything else.32 Althusser’s interpretation in reality has nothing to do with this problematic, which is fundamentally a juridical one. Furthermore, Schmitt himself, in his rare references to Machiavelli, ‘seems to think that in Machiavelli there is a thought of the origin of politics, which however does not agree with his own thought on the question of form: absent in Machiavelli, this is instead the horizon in which Schmitt’s thought of the political is inscribed, which is certainly the non-rational root of politics, but grasped from the point of view of its representative formal composition by means of a decisionist gesture’.33 Machiavelli’s philosophy, Althusser argues, voids the whole philosophical tradition. Yet it is not a void that dissolves or that puts in parentheses the necessity of the real in order to open the space of the freedom of a subject (either when this is thought as the void that originates Schmitt’s form, or as the fullness of Benjamin’s messianic Jetztzeit). Rather, it is, on the one hand, the void, the nothing of this subject as an imaginary creator of the form and, on the other hand, the most radical dissolution of all philosophical concepts that mystify this very necessity. In such a perspective, it becomes possible to understand Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli’s insistence on the figure of Cesare Borgia: ‘Machiavelli’s wish is simply that, in an atomized Italy, the en­counter should take place, and he is plainly obsessed with this Cesare, who, starting out with nothing, made the Romagna a Kingdom, and, after taking Florence, would have unified all Northern Italy if he had not been stricken with fever in the marshes of Ravenna at the critical moment, when he was heading, despite Julius II, for Rome itself, to strip him of his office. A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration’.34 What does Althusser mean when he affirms that Cesare Borgia is a homme de rien, parti de rien, et partant d’un lieu inassignable? Valentino is the son of Alessandro VI, protected and counselled by his father and nominated by him as gonfaloniere of the Papal States. Being the son of the Pope is not exactly like starting out from nothing! Yet it was not from him, from a natural son, that the attempt to unify Italy was expected. The void of which Schmitt speaks is the void of the decision which is seen from the point of view of the accomplished fact of the existing juridical and political order.35 The void of which Althusser speaks is the void of the fact still to be accomplished. In this sense, the Schmittian model of secularisation is not applicable to Machiavelli; the God of theology cannot be translated within Machiavelli’s political theory, as it is within that of Hobbes and Hegel.36 According to Althusser, in Machiavelli there is not a subject of politics and history, but a complex interweaving of encounters, each of which can take hold or not, can be brief or lasting, albeit always provisional: In order for this encounter to take place, however, another encounter must come about: that of fortune and virtù in the Prince. Encountering Fortuna, the Prince must have the virtù to treat her as he would treat a woman, to welcome her in order to seduce or do violence to her; in short, to use her to realize his destiny. Thanks to this consideration, we owe Machiavelli a whole philosophical theory of the encounter between fortune and virtù. The encounter may not take place or may take place. The meeting can be missed. The encounter can be brief or lasting: he needs an encounter that lasts. To make it last, the Prince has to learn to govern fortune by governing men. He has to structure his state by training up its men, commingling them in the army (see Gramsci), and, above all, by endowing this state

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with constant laws. He has to win them over by accommodating them, while knowing how to keep his distance. This dual procedure gives rise to the theory of seduction and the theory of fear, as well as the the­ory of the ruse. I leave aside the rejection of the demagoguery of love, the idea that fear is preferable to love, and the violent methods designed to inspire fear, in order to go straight to the theory of the ruse. Should the Prince be good or wicked? He has to learn to be wicked, but in all circumstances he has to know how to appear to be good, to possess the moral virtues that will win the people over to his side, even if they earn him the hatred of the mighty, whom he despises, for, from them, nothing else is to be expected. Machiavelli’s theory is well known: the Prince should be ‘like the centaur of the Ancients, both man and beast’. But it has not been sufficiently remarked that the beast divides into two in Machiavelli, becoming both lion and fox, and that, ultimately, it is the fox who governs everything. For it is the fox who obliges the Prince either to appear to be evil or to appear to be good – in a word, to fabricate a popular (ideological) image of himself that either does or does not answer to his interests and those of the ‘little man’. Consequently, the Prince is governed, internally, by the variations of this other aleatory encounter, that of the fox on the one hand and the lion and man on the other. This encounter may not take place, but it may also take place. It has to last long enough for the figure of the Prince to ‘take hold’ among the people – to ‘take hold’, that is, to take form, so that, institutionally, he instils the fear of himself as good; and, if possible, so that he ultimately is good, but on the absolute condition that he never forget how to be evil if need be.37 Thus is Cesare Borgia – the natural son, excluded by definition from any form of legitimate power – not the metaphor of any political action? Althusser thinks that in Machiavelli there is a theory of politics in its pure state, which far from being able to be thought through the simple models of continuity and discontinuity with respect to history, instead conceives political action within a historicity neither driven by a telos nor waiting for an eschaton. On the contrary, it is the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact; it is fortuna that is never present itself in person and as a simple instance, but as ‘occasion’, as a complex web of encounters situated on different levels. The taking hold or not of each of them modifies the quality of the web as a whole. The encounter occurs between a man and a region, between virtù and fortuna, between the fox, on the one hand, and the lion and man, on the other hand, and finally between the Prince and the people. It is a web of encounters in which there is not a simple inside and outside, a subject that transforms the world by means of his praxis, moving along an imaginary temporal line that goes from the present to the future. Here, we are faced with a complex and plural temporality in which the events constitute and happen precisely in that ‘between’, to which Machiavelli gives the philosophical name of occasione: The reader may object that this is merely political philosophy, overlooking the fact that a philosophy is simultaneously at work here too. A curious philosophy which is a ‘materialism of the encounter’ thought by way of politics, and which, as such, does not take anything for granted. It is in the political void that the encounter must come about, and that national unity must ‘take hold’. But this political void is first a philosophical void. No Cause that precedes its effects is to be found in it, no Principle of morality or theology (as in the whole Aristotelian political tradition: the good and bad forms of government, the degeneration of the good into

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the bad). One reasons here not in terms of the Necessity of the accomplished fact, but in terms of the contingency of the fact to be accomplished. As in the Epicurean world, all the elements are both here and beyond, to come raining down later [là et au-delà, à pleuvoir] (see above, the Italian situation), but they do not exist, are only abstract, as long as the unity of a world has not united them in the Encounter that will endow them with existence. It will have been noticed that, in this philosophy, there reigns an alternative: the encounter may not take place, just as it may take place. Nothing decides the matter, no principle of decision predetermines this alternative, which is of the order of a game of dice. ‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’. Indeed! A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might have not taken place, it may no longer take place: ‘fortune comes and changes’, affirms Borgia, who succeeded at everything until the famous day he was stricken with fever. In other words, nothing guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability. Quite the opposite is true: every accomplished fact, even an election, like all the necessity and reason we can derive from it, is only a provisional encounter, and since every encounter is provisional even when it lasts, there is no eternity in the ‘laws’ of any world or any state. History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about. Simply, one day new hands will have to be dealt out, and the dice thrown again onto the empty table.38 ‘The encounter may not take place, just as it may take place. Nothing decides the matter, no principle of decision predetermines this alternative’. Every decision can encounter or not encounter fortuna, and not only because it is the encounter with fortuna that retrospectively confers to virtù the status of founding decision, as Machiavelli recalls in a very famous passage on the great founders of states.39 It is also because virtù itself and as such is a web of encounters that cannot be traced back to the simplicity of a subject. Therefore, if the form at the level of history and politics takes the name of subject, Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli affirms the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over the subject. It is not a thesis of the inexistence of the subject, but of its always coming in second place with respect to the encounter, or better, with respect to the web of encounters that are multiple and situated on different levels. While constituting the subject, they at the same time constitute its field of action. This thesis marks Althusser’s great distance from Gramsci’s famous interpretation of the party as a ‘modern Prince’. In the latter’s interpretation, indeed, the modern Prince can be translated within the Schmittian scheme of modern politics as secularisation of theology. Gramsci reads the subject-party through the expressive model of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, thus constituting an imaginary internal space in which ethicity dominates, in order to confine violence and cunning in the exteriority of the world. 40 Althusser’s reading of the metaphor of the centaur makes this very subject, its virtù that goes towards fortuna, the result of an encounter, the encounter of the fox, on the one hand, and of the lion and the man, on the other hand. A conjunction, a historical fact among others, which is permanently revocable. Translated from the Italian by Sara R. Farris and Peter D. Thomas.

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Notes 1 On Althusser and Machiavelli see Terray 1993, pp. 137–60; Negri 1997, pp. 139–58; Lahtinen, 1997; Del Lucchese 2006, pp. 52–61. 2 Althusser 2006b. 3 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2. 4 Althusser 1990b; also in Althusser 1998a. 5 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1, pp. 539–76. 6 Althusser 1993b, pp. 71–119. 7 Althusser 2006a, p. 188. 8 Althusser 1973, p. 30. 9 Spinoza 1925, p. 47. 10 Adorno 1969. On this Macherey writes: ‘the totality of which Adorno speaks is not entirely unrelated to substance as defined by Spinoza, substance that conditions all modal determinations insofar as it cannot itself be apprehended modally’ (Macherey 1992, pp. 222–36). 11 Althusser 1996a, pp. 402–3. 12 Althusser 1996a, pp. 272–309. 13 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1, pp. 565–6; Althusser 2006a, pp. 192–3. 14 Lecourt 1983, pp. 227–50. 15 Darwin 1988, p. 34. 16 Darwin 1988, p. 34. 17 Darwin 1988, p. 34. 18 Darwin 1988, p. 43. 19 Darwin 1988, p. 50. 20 Darwin 1988, pp. 50–1. 21 Darwin 1988, pp. 58–9. 22 Darwin 1988, p. 59. 23 Darwin 1988, p. 59. 24 Darwin 1988, pp. 68–9. 25 Darwin 1988, p. 59. 26 Darwin 1988, p. 86. 27 Darwin 1988, p. 86. 28 Althusser 2006a, p. 192. 29 Althusser 2006a, pp. 171–2. 30 Althusser 2006a, pp. 174–5. 31 Ichida 2005. 32 As Schmitt writes: ‘In a normative sense, the decision arose from nothing’ (Schmitt 1996). 33 Galli 1998, p. 108. On Schmitt’s reading of Machiavelli, see Galli 2005, pp. 123–40. 34 Althusser 2006a, p. 172. 35 Concerning Schmitt Taubes writes: ‘With the passing of time I have understood that the jurist has a completely different way of seeing the world. He is called to legitimate it just as it is. It is an innate trait of his formation, in the whole conception of the office of the jurist’ (Taubes 1993).

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36 ‘All the most pregnant concepts of the modern doctrine of the State are theological secular concepts’ (Schmitt 1996, p. 61). 37 Althusser 2006a, pp. 172–3. 38 Althusser 2006a, pp. 173–4. 39 ‘. . . to come to those who, by their own virtù and not through fortuna, have become princes, I say that the most excellent are Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and such like . . . And examining their actions and lives, it is impossible to observe that they owed anything to fortuna other than opportunity; this gave them the material they could make into the form they saw fit; and without that opportunity the virtù of their souls would have been extinguished, and without that virtù the opportunity would have been in vain’ (Machiavelli 1993, p. 264; my emphasis). 40 See the famous passage of the Notebooks, ‘any act is useful or harmful, virtuous or wicked insofar as its concrete point of reference is the modern prince and it augments or fights against his power. He stands in men’s consciences in the role of divinity and as the categorical imperative; he is the basis of a modern secularism and of the complete secularisation of all life and all customary relations’ (Gramsci 1975, p. 953). On Gramsci’s reading of Machiavelli see Frosini 2003, pp. 162–7.

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5 The parallax object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy Katja Kolšek

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he intention of my chapter is to show the possibility of reading Althusser’s materialist philosophy and its problematic articulation between the science of historical materialism and politics, through the parallax view of the object par excellence of Althusser’s philosophy, namely, the void [le vide]. This object is, without doubt, the only object that was present all the way from the earliest to the last of Althusser’s writings, and has already been discussed a number of times. Nevertheless, I shall use this object to argue against the assertion as to the radical ontologisation of Althusser’s late philosophy and the consequent complete omission of his earlier materialist dialectic. I shall seek the causes of the so-called turn in Althusser’s philosophy in a certain kind of contradiction of perspective, the so-called parallax view1 of this object of the void, an indispensable condition for reflecting the true materialist philosophy. It is on these grounds that I shall argue that it is possible to explain the mysterious shift (displacement) from Althusser’s conception of his materialist philosophy (the concept of overdetermined contradiction in his earlier materialist dialectic) to his conception of philosophy as the class-struggle in theory in his later period, followed by the seemingly ontological concept of the aleatory encounter of the rain of atoms of his later texts. I shall propose that the object-concept of the void cannot be read, on the one hand, merely as a rhetorical figure, as the so-called epistemological nullity, as is the case in Althusser’s text in For Marx ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, where it functions as the retroactive effect of the problems of knowledge of the concept of overdetermination; on the other hand, it also cannot be seen as the sheer ontological void of the contingent encounter, which in his late texts on aleatory materialism functioned as the condition of the so-called ‘prise’ of atoms. Contrary to these two sharply contrasting views, I shall read the void dialectically as the same parallax object of Althusser’s philosophy, which seems to have changed in the course of development of Althusser’s philosophy as the result of the gap between two incompatible positions within his attempt to conceive a true materialist philosophy. This object is, indeed, the gap between these two approaches to providing the ‘philosophy for Marx’ (the earlier epistemological one and the later ontological one). This will disprove Althusser’s alleged abandonment of his dealing with of materialist dialectics (the question of overdetermination) in favour of the materialism of the encounter, and demonstrate the continuity in his work.

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The parallax view, Hegel and Spinoza In his devoted attempt to break with the so-called rational kernel of Marx’s dialectic, which still largely rested on the logic of Hegel’s dialectic in Marx’s earlier work, Althusser relied on the findings of the French epistemological school (such as Gaston Bachelard), in order to provide the scientific method for this new materialist philosophy (to ‘speak of the scientific discourse and not of being’).2 The method of this new theory of theoretical practices, according to Althusser, altogether avoids Hegelian dialectics and the philosophy of history, and proceeds in the guise of epistemology (more geometrico).3 The concept of the ‘epistemological break’, which Althusser more precisely detected in Marx’s work around 1845, as the key indicator of his discovery of the concept of the social relation, indicates a break with his previous historicist and humanist foundations of philosophical idealism. The epistemological break marked the rupture within Marx’s work itself, one with which Marx’s engagement with ontological questions concerning the problems of the ‘essence’ of humankind as praxis and the so-called ontology of the production in German Ideology were replaced by scientific (epistemological) problems concerning the constitution of the theoretical object of the science of history.4 The most important task in Althusser’s reconstitution of Marx’s philosophy via the ‘epistemological break’ was the detection of the strict separation of the theoretical from the real object of its science of history, which would be in utter contrast with empiricist ideology (which appertains to the traditional empiricist philosophies of knowledge), and was, according to Althusser, still largely present in Hegel’s dialectic. In The Formation of the Scientific Mind, Bachelard started with the complete denunciation of any world which is not a construct of science. The truth of scientific knowledge was no longer to be assured by the object, as perceived directly as the objective reality of our pre-scientific world; and what is more, the constitutive element of scientific knowledge is no longer the positive reality of, but the break with, previous, quotidian knowledge. Science is not the adequate expression of reality, but rather scientific knowledge is the process of objectification. In short, the only legitimate object of science can be that which science constructs itself.5 The consequences of Althusser’s adaptation of Marx’s materialistic dialectic to the propositions of French epistemology was his conception of theoretical practice as production that would break with the possibility of direct analysis of social formations (the so-called coup d’essence), since it thinks ‘not the guarantees of knowledge, but the mechanisms of production of knowledge’.6 Nevertheless, as is well-known, Althusser’s epistemological period ended with his self-critical writings, in which he accused himself of so-called theoreticism, since he excluded the moment of politics from his conceptualisation of philosophy as the theory of theoretical practice. On this note, Alain Badiou designated Althusser’s theoreticism as an example of ‘quilting’ his materialist philosophy to science, whereas he described Althusser’s later definition of philosophy as the ‘class struggle in theory’ as another example of quilting’7 [suture] of the political event by philosophy as the instance in which politics as class struggle directly enters into the act of philosophy. He also explicitly stressed that both aforementioned positions mean a dead end for any attempt at constructing Marxist philosophy. However, after the period of self-criticism, Althusser invented a new understanding of materialist philosophy, the so-called ‘effectphilosophy’ as the transformation into the topology of pure immanence. The model of this new kind of philosophy is the causa sui in which philosophy finally intervenes into the sphere

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to which it also immanently belongs. In this second constellation of philosophy, the problem of metaposition disappears, since henceforth Althusser’s philosophy acts upon the theoretical and other practices in the form of the Badiouian ‘torsion’ with its exterior practices (the effects of philosophy are strictly immanent).8 Thereby Althusser’s so-called ‘effect-philosophy’ enters into the domain of praxis; it ceases to be interpretation and becomes an act of intervention. The categories of ‘effect-philosophy’ are empty, since they no longer designate reality, and, more radically, philosophy ceases to have an object, since it is no longer the cognitive appropriation of an object. Because this kind of philosophy does not have an object and has no history, it becomes a bare act of demarcation [le vide d’une distance prise]. Alain Badiou observes that this is the point of irreversible de-epistemologisation in Althusser’s philosophy.9 In this respect, in my view Althusser’s ‘effect-philosophy’ nevertheless comes very close to Badiou’s own understanding of the so-called philosophy under conditions. However, there is still an irreducible difference between these two attitudes towards materialist philosophy, especially as far as the question of the problem of the objectively necessary condition of the class position in philosophy is concerned. Namely, from the work Being and Event onwards, Alain Badiou omits the epistemological problems of materialist philosophy in favour of the only valuable truth of ontology, as mathematics, whereas Althusser, in a Spinozian vein, advocates knowledge in production itself, albeit without the possibility of tracing its origin. According to Badiou, Althusser’s ‘effect-philosophy’ remains deeply linked with science. However, this is with one small but important difference: that science now becomes one of its essential conditions, instead of its object.10 Therefore, the central problem of the ‘effect-philosophy’, according to Badiou, is that because of its strict immanent effectiveness, it becomes blind to its effects on ideological and scientific practices and on reality as such – that is, the differentiation between science and ideology becomes impossible. In 1968 Althusser broke with the principles of Spinoza’s philosophy of radical immanence and non-transparency, and introduced the concept of class struggle into theory. From that moment, his philosophy became the ‘representation of class struggle within sciences’ and the representation of ‘science within politics’. From then on, the immanent effects of philosophy as the inner line of demarcation between the Scientific and the Ideological fall under the dependence of class prescription; they form the so-called class position in philosophy. The problem that Badiou sees in this last conception in Althusser’s philosophy is that politics, as one of the conditions of materialist philosophy, now begins to immanently determine the being of the philosophical act as such.11 With this transformation, not only does Althusser violate the Spinozist principle of the transparency or evidence of the truth, but, according to François Matheron, Althusser’s new turn regarding the nature of Marx’s philosophy once more reveals the strange and insoluble ambiguity in Althusser’s work in reference to the either epistemological or ontological question of the guarantee or foundation of Marxist science: As we know, Althusser struggled throughout his life against the notion of the guarantee, whether epistemological or ontological, justifiably stressing the enim of the Spinozist statement: ‘Habemus enim ideam veram’. But this struggle would never have occurred, if it had not been waged against internal demons in the first instance. Precious few thinkers, to use a language that is not Althusser’s, have imparted such intensity to the idea of science without a foundation; and equally few have been so surrounded by the myriad traps of the foundation and the guarantee.12

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The contradictions and difficulties of Althusser’s attempts to ground a philosophy ‘for Marx’ on Spinoza’s thought can also be explained from the point of a specific gap within perspectives called the parallax view. We can argue that the void as the parallax object is precisely the cause of Althusser’s lifelong oscillation between Hegel and Spinoza.13 Althusser’s attempt, like that of many others, to read Marx’s thought through Spinoza as the attempt to overcome the inner rational kernel of the Hegelian dialectic encountered insurmountable obstacles. There is no concept of inner negativity in Spinoza’s substance as the whole, and thus there is no place for the contradiction. This excludes Marx’s concept of class struggle. Negation and limitation exist only from the point of view of finite understanding, and not from the point of view of substance (infinity). From the point of view of infinity there are only positive determinations according to an inner necessity, thus there is an inherent impossibility of the totalisation of substance (except in the form of the ‘bad infinity’) and, therefore, of defining the difference or the rupture between the infinite and finite modes, and of explaining the passage from the absolute to the relative, or from the finite to the infinite. What is more, as Mladen Dolar has pointed out, at that time there was a general trend in French philosophy of an idealistic reading of Hegel, which saw Hegel’s thought regarding contradiction as the pre-established and teleological plan of its ultimate abolition. Hegel’s negativity was generally considered only as the means of attaining the absolute positive identity of the absolute spirit. In the Spinozian universe, there is a clear difference between thought and its object. There can be no kind of equivalence or comparison between them. To think of the limit between the attributes of thought and extension is unsurpassable and even impossible, since there is no contact between them – namely, because the limit is always already surpassed in God. Conversely, it is precisely this split between the object of thought and the real object that is the central problem of Hegel’s philosophy, which he overcomes through his conception of the dialectical movement lying precisely in the form of the failure to overcome it.14 The limit is thus transposed into the interiority between thought itself and the object itself. Their constitutive disaccord becomes the inner positive determination of both. Hegel’s absolute knowledge should not be read as their final settlement in their identity, but only as the reflection of this process. The name of this inner impossibility as positive determination is, according to Slavoj Žižek, the Hegelian subject. It is this irresolvable disaccord, the minimal difference between the Universal and the Particular, which is actually the parallax object.

The void, overdetermination and the materialism of the encounter Among various other theorists, Antonio Negri15 claims that in Althusser’s later work (in texts such as ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, Machiavelli and Us, and so on) an important turn [Kehre] in opposition to his previous work on materialist dialectics took place, whereby ontological questions completely replaced the epistemological problems of the materialist dialectic.16 Despite the fact that there was an enormous turn in Althusser’s later understanding of materialism, and despite the fact that he introduced some classical ontological concepts into his conception of materialism of encounter – such as the Epicurean and Democritian ontology of the ‘swerve’ of atoms, the Wittgensteinian ‘der Fall’ or the analysis

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of Heidegger’s ‘es gibt’, Spinoza’s substance, contingency (aléa) against necessity, and so on – I understand this radical change to be the effect of the specific phenomenon of perspective – the parallax view – which is, in fact, the result of Althusser’s strivings to provide a new concept to materialistic dialectics, most accurately designated by his concept of ‘overdetermination’. In my view, this was by no means a betrayal of his previous epistemological point of view of philosophy as Theory, but evidence of the change of his reflection on the question regarding what epistemology in fact is. The nature of true materialist thought is that ‘true materialism means that the reality I see is never “whole” − not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it’.17 A true materialist philosophy, without succumbing to a mirror relationship between materialism and idealism, must pay regard to the fissure in totality, which is the subject. Althusser’s writings on aleatory materialism are the inclusion of his point of enunciation of the true materialist philosophy in the unresolved epistemological impasse of the concept of overdetermination. This parallax object is neither merely the theoretical object nor merely the real object, but the object-cause, or the split as the object, which causes the two irreconcilable perspectives. Indeed, it is this enigmatic parallax object of Althusser’s philosophy that lies behind the question of the subject in his philosophy. It appears in his texts as the famous figure of the void, and perfectly corresponds to the Lacanian objet a as the very cause of the parallax gap, ‘that unfathomable X which forever eludes the symbolic grasp, and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives’.18 The paradox that this object causes is a precise one: . . . it is at the very point at which a pure difference emerges − a difference which is no longer a difference between two positively existing objects, but a minimal difference which divides one and the same object from itself − that this difference which divides one and the same object from itself − that this difference ‘as such’ immediately coincides with an unfathomable object: in contrast to a mere difference between objects, the pure difference is itself an object: another name for the parallax gap is therefore minimal difference, a ‘pure’ difference which cannot be grounded in positive properties.19 This object is, therefore, not only the cause of Althusser’s alleged turn from the epistemological to the ontological perspective in his materialist philosophy, but also the cause of his troubles with the impossible fusion of Marx’s science of history and Lenin’s politics of class struggle in philosophy. I would argue that the productiveness of Althusser’s philosophy lies precisely in this parallax object and Althusser’s endurance in the undecidability between these two perspectives. He fruitfully exploits the object of minimal difference between the theoretical and the real object, between an epistemological and an ontological perspective, between Marxist science and politics, and at the same time opens a whole new perspective on the nature of the reality of the class struggle. In my view, this is what Alain Badiou meant by the concept of ‘subjectivity without the subject’ in Althusser’s philosophy. Althusser’s philosophical position of enunciation, or the place from which he is speaking, is the point of enunciation of the parallax object as the minimal difference as such; this is also the only point from which, I argue according to Badiou, the truth of politics (as ‘process without a subject’) can be considered as such in Althusser’s philosophy. And that is not in the realm of objectivity of science, nor within the concept of ideological subject (‘ideological state-apparatuses’), but in the concept of overdetermination.

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Overdetermination is in truth the political place. And it must indeed be stressed that overdetermination belongs to the subjective realm (choice, partisanship, militancy), even though it knows no subject-effect (such effects are statist), nor does it verify or construct, any object (such objects only exist in the field of science).20 Yann Moulier Boutang also advances the point that the concept of overdetermination is the one that affords the possibility of understanding the continuity of Althusser’s mature work in his writings on aleatory materialism. In the text Matérialisme comme politique aléatoire,21 he argues that Althusser’s project of aleatory materialism is nothing less than the completion of the thesis on the overdetermination of the contradiction from his work For Marx, and that the aleatory position in his later work can only be understood in conjunction with his previous problematic of the revolutionary rupture that establishes a break in history. According to Moulier Boutang, Althusser’s concept of overdetermination should not be read from the point of view of the special understanding of chance in analogy with the incertitude of the position of an atom in the theory of quantum physics (Heisenberg), which goes hand in hand with the understanding of chance as incertitude or risk by economists from Keynes onwards, and which reconciles determinism and the aleatory (chance). On the contrary, Althusser’s overdetermination should only be thought in terms of the radical discontinuity in history, the event of revolution as the break, since history does not permit several throws of the dice, on the basis of which we would be able to calculate the probability of the revolutionary event. And what is even more important, the concept of overdetermination should, according to Moulier Boutang, be thought only in terms of the science of revolution, which has neither to do with the problem of the instruments of knowledge (the inclusion of an observer within the experience) nor with rational anticipation in the form of retroactive extrapolation from the teleology of the laws of nature.22 The paradox of overdetermination can, in my view, only be understood from the point of view of the parallax object. It is the point from which the concept of overdetermination can be considered scientific and simultaneously thoroughly political. It is in this precise sense that we understand the concept of the void in Althusser’s text Contradiction and overdetermination, where he explains the difficulties of Engels’s argumentation on the logic of ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ in a letter Engels wrote to Bloch. There, Althusser criticises Engels’s elaboration of the problem of considering the unity of the ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ together with the true thesis of the concept of overdetermination as the ‘relative effectiveness of superstructures’ in history as a kind of tautology on two different levels. When Engels does not find an answer to the first problem – of how the relative autonomy of the superstructure goes hand in hand with the thesis of ‘the determination in the last instance by the economy’, due to the impossibility of evaluating the impact of all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events) whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible, such that economic movement ultimately asserts itself as necessary – he passes to another model, the parallelogram of the forces of individual free wills. Althusser disapproves of Engels’s use of the metaphor of a parallelogram of forces based on the elements of the ‘individual wills’ and dismisses Engels’s argument as not meeting the critical standards of Marxist science, which is based on the always-already existing and necessary relations, and not on the bourgeois ideological notion of free will. It is significant that, for Althusser,

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this kind of logical operation is tautological; thus, from the point of view of epistemology, it is always, as he himself writes, ‘void’ or ‘null’. He later argues that the unfruitfulness of this kind of explanation (either bad infinity, on one side, or a logical vicious circle, on the other) resides in the fact that its model of explanation is based on an individual wills, which are actually the atoms as homo oeconomicus of the bourgeois ideology of Hobbes’s, Locke’s and Rousseau’s conatus and general will and Ricardo’s and Smith’s atomistic behaviour. For them, tautology did have a meaning, since they were searching for the basis for their pre-established values.23 Althusser goes on to argue that every scientific discipline is based at a certain level, precisely that level at which its concepts find a content, from the level of a scientific object: otherwise, it falls into the epistemological void, which has philosophical fullness as its counterpart. And that the true contradiction lies in the final resultant is not a matter of economic determination, but a historical event, which is an event of perfectly knowable and definable historical forms. This leads Althusser to his elaboration on Lenin’s way of thinking politics. The ideology of the perfect harmony between Engels’s model and object that he is proposing is only at the immediate level; but beneath this, harmony is postulated, not proved, and in its place we find an indeterminacy that is, from the point of view of knowledge, a void. Hence, this type of explanation does not answer to its object, since it represents at the beginning the very solution that it is supposed to be producing and establishing (the generation of this determination in the last resort). In order to elucidate how the void as the parallax object functions in opposition to the epistemological impasses of Engels’s conception of overdetermination, we shall introduce the specific understanding of causality, which is, as Slavoj Žižek clarifies, at work in Lacanian realm of the Symbolic. By reading the conception of causality in terms of the Lacanian triad of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real, Slavoj Žižek claims that Althusser’s understanding of the mechanical transitive type of causality could be compared to the senseless collisions of the domain of the Real, whilst his understanding of Hegel’s expressive causality could be compared to the realm of Imaginary, insofar as the imaginary structure is imprinted in all parts of the structure. Whereas Althusser’s overdetermined causality could be ascribed to the realm of the Symbolic, since it is a kind of retroactive determination of the foundation with the totality of the founded, as in the case of the overdetermination of the economy by the superstructure. Žižek continues to say that this kind of dialectic of the relation between the foundation and the totality of the relations of the founded content is actually the nature of the complete foundation as the unity of the formal and the real foundation in Hegel’s Logic; and thus Hegel developed a moment that is missing in Althusser’s conception of overdetermination. The basic operation of Hegel’s determination is, therefore, a certain type of the logic of tautology. Hegel’s complete foundation is the foundation of the founded, which once again has to be founded in the relation to the founded. However, this time the tautology is not formal (void), since it contains the moment of contradiction as ‘the identity of the whole with its “oppositional determination”: as the identity of some moment of the Totality − the real foundation − with this Totality as such’. In this sense, Althusser’s concept of overdetermination lacks the moment of subjectivity, which cannot be reduced to the imaginary recognition as the effect of the interpellation, the Lacanian barred subject.24 On the contrary, I would argue that Althusser was in fact aware of this, since he admits that he ‘is not particularly taken by this term overdetermination (borrowed from other disciplines), but [he] shall use it in the absence of anything better, both as index and as a problem, and also because it enables us to see clearly why we are dealing with something quite different from the Hegelian contradiction’.25 If

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we acknowledge the structure of the overdetermination as the structure of the Symbolic, with its constitutive tautological act of the quilting point, we can see that the result of the constitution of the symbolic produces a surplus element, which is the object of the Real (objet a). If Žižek affirms that the empty formal gesture of the tautological act of the Symbolic adds nothing positive to the thing itself, we can reformulate this negative statement, and say that the tautological act in fact adds the nothing as such to the thing itself. This same object of the void reappears in Althusser’s later texts (see The Underground Current of the Philosophy of Encounter); however, it now changes and exceeds the obstacles of previous epistemological point of view. The negation of the object within the second definition of philosophy, as the ‘representation of class struggle within sciences’, becomes the negation as the object in the form of the void. This is Warren Montag’s point in his text ‘The Late Althusser: Materialism of Encounter or Philosophy of Nothing?’. In his discussion of the void in Althusser’s text Machiavelli and Us, Montag claims that the object of the philosophy now becomes the void as such: ‘In “The Underground Current”, the act of demarcation, of taking a distance is substantiated: the void is not practiced but possessed or represented in the form of le néant, or le vide’.26 This proves our thesis that, in later texts, Althusser takes advantage of this void in such a way that it now functions precisely as the point of Althusser’s performative enunciation of philosophy ‘for Marx’ as the main project of his epistemological period. This enigmatic object of the void, which is omnipresent in all of Althusser’s writings on the materialism of encounter, remains the only possible condition of founding a true materialist philosophy. It is, first of all, a powerful weapon, with which Althusser attempts to free philosophy from the grasps of teleology, of the goal and of the origin. Besides the transcendental abyss of nothingness, which is in his view the number one enemy of all materialist philosophy, Montag draws our attention to yet another conception of the void in the text Underground Current of Philosophy of Encounter: one that directly counters the previous one, since it is now the philosophical act of making the void, and therefore cancels out the first concept of the void. Montag claims that the concept of philosophy that ‘makes the void’, with which it releases its heterogeneity, is in fact the void of that philosophy and not the mere affirmation of the reality of the multitude. It is the means of its philosophical liberation of itself (its origins and goals) and becoming the infinite heterogeneity and simultaneity of the thought and act, known as the ‘theory of theoretical practice’.27 This concurs with our understanding of the void as the ambiguous point of Althusser’s enunciation of philosophy ‘for Marx’, which is actually a constitutive part of the materiality it wants to intellectually grasp. But even more so, this is Althusser’s genuine solution of the biggest problem of the relationship between theory and practice (the question of partisanship within theory) as the principal problem within materialist philosophy as such. 28 This is a view of materialist philosophy from the point of view of the minimal difference and a kind of view from within the anamorphosis.29 Anamorphosis is the phenomenon whereby we can either perceive reality seeing one side, excluding the other, or vice versa, or we can only see the other side as a stain on the first; but we cannot possibly see the two sides at once. We can grasp the true materialist philosophy only from within this discrepancy. In the case of Althusser’s materialist philosophy, the discrepancy between theory and the politics of class struggle is only conceivable from within the point of view of the void, the gap as the parallax object and the minimal difference.

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The parallax view in Althusser’s materialist reading of Machiavelli To explain how the void as the parallax object functions in Althusser’s materialist philosophy, we shall take the example of Althusser’s controversial identification with Machiavelli, namely, his direct re-enactment of Machiavelli’s philosophy through his own voice. The fact that in his last period, when writing about the underground current of materialism of encounter, Althusser returned to his text Machiavelli and Us and the word ‘dialectical’ was systematically transformed into ‘aleatory’, according to Wal Suchting, attests to certain assumptions that Althusser’s work on Machiavelli was an anticipation of his aleatory materialism.30 In the text Machiavelli and Us,31 the void functions as the site of Althusser’s point of enunciation of philosophy ‘for Marx’, as the gap between the science of historical materialism as the theory, without the guarantee of the class position, on one hand, and the politics of the proletariat, without the possibility of the voluntary outcome of the historical event of the revolution, on the other hand. This is the point where Marxist theory and Leninist politics paradoxically intersect. I would argue that Althusser’s philosophy of the void as the materialism of encounter in the text Machiavelli and Us is enunciated from within the void as the gap, the minimal difference between theory and political practice. It is a product of a certain theoretical dispositive. This void can be understood in two different senses. The first sense of void (or the short circuit), which Althusser detects and uses in this text, is precisely the parallax perspective of reading Machiavelli’s texts. This kind of gap opens the horizon of the undecidability or aleatoriness of the question for whom Machiavelli’s texts are written: the people or the prince. It enables us to see the interplay of the overlap between Machiavelli’s theory and his political practice, and vice versa. The second figure of the void in Machiavelli and Us is the void of Machiavelli’s fourth theoretical thesis on the essence of a government, the void of the class struggle, which opens the horizon of the aleatory outcome of the science of history in its strict immanence, and internally undermines the logic of the usual understanding of Hegelian dialectic. The figure of this void in Machiavelli and Us anticipates the future aleatory materialism, which functions as the point of the immanent reflection of the concrete and singular historical conjunction, from the point of view of the void as the vacuum, which pulls together the aleatory elements of the historical conjunction. This second figure of the void, which operates as the special kind of negation, is, actually Althusser’s point of enunciation of Machiavelli’s political practice through the science of history (theory). It is particularly present in Machiavelli’s discussion of the laws of history: the famous ‘fourth thesis’, Machiavelli’s ‘position’, as described in the text Machiavelli and Us. This void is another example of Althusser’s use of the parallax view between history and the politics of the class struggle in Machiavelli’s texts. Specifically, the first three of Machiavelli’s theoretical theses are, according to Althusser, three classical theses on the philosophy of history and are reminiscent of the Hegelian triad. The first thesis affirms the infinite invariability of the forms of government. The second, which is the direct negation of the third, pleads the infinite variability and corruptibility of these same forms of government. The third, a kind of negation of the negation of the previous two, asserts the cyclic nature of governments, the invariability of their corruptibility. Nevertheless, the most important of Machiavelli’s theses, for Althusser, is the fourth thesis, which represents Machiavelli taking a position [prise de position].32 However, this

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does not mean negation of the negation in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung, but a negation that is not merely negation, but the complete break and transposition with the logic of the previous three theses.33 Yoshihiko Ichida claims that, according to Althusser, through distinguishing between ‘thesis’ and ‘position’ Machiavelli stirred the whole theoretical space on which his philosophy was founded.34 According to Althusser, Machiavelli was not interested in the cyclic nature of the government, but the duration of the state. He was not interested in the cycle of the infinite repetition of the revolution, but the desire to break from it, the desire to form a government, which would not be one of the dialectic moments in the cycle of its rise and fall, but would form a lasting state. The fourth thesis does not mean classical negation (non-A), but negation in the sense A plus the void (nothing). This void, or nothing, inserts an interval between the theses: it is a case of positive counterposition, which brings in a new space, new content, brought in through negation.35 In Machiavelli’s fourth thesis, there appears a certain kind of significant interval, a void, a leap into the theoretical void, an anticipation.36 Machiavelli breaks with the old framework of theoretical writings on history and politics, since he invents the new object of his theory, which to all appearances resembles the parallax object discussed above. The fourth thesis opens up the possibility of reading Machiavelli’s work as a manifesto. The void of the fourth thesis as the parallax object introduces Machiavelli’s political action, instills the topos of the subject in his texts, the point of Machiavelli’s enunciation. The unusual character of Machiavelli’s texts is the result of the curious phenomena in his texts, where in the end we always encounter a certain kind of ‘deviation’ with regard to his previous theses, a certain kind of void. In the altogether classical theoretical structure of his texts, there is an opening to the uncertainty of the contingent, the aléa, which could perhaps also be read as the introduction of the parallax object between the theory and politics, the minimal difference between the epistemology and the ontology of the object of his enquiry. Machiavelli’s contradictory assertions in his texts from The Prince to the Discourses, are also, according to Gopal Balakrishnan, a part of strategic theory, which is the reason for the difficulty in appraising the epistemological value of these texts; Machiavelli’s texts are full of contradictory assertions and aporiai, since their central point is persistently evasive.37 According to Balakrishnan, these aporiai do not paralyse the texts, but promote the reader’s knowledge of the historical situation: ‘While this effectual truth establishes a threshold of historical plausibility, it never functions in his texts as an absolute limit on thought, bolting it to what merely exists. It is more like a sieve, subjecting the most radical proposals to a rigorous criterion of immanence’.38 Machiavelli’s fourth thesis is, therefore, the parallax object, the gap between his theory and his politics and also his class position. In our view, this point is the point of their contradictory overlapping in the point of the void (nothingness) of the class struggle as the aleatory or contingent ‘void of the future’. With this gesture, Machiavelli creates the radically contingent opening of the Real of the historical antagonism (the class struggle). According to Althusser, without this point, the void, Machiavelli’s texts are inexplicable. The undecidability of Machiavelli’s position, the openness of the question of for whom his texts are written, or who is the subject of his texts, is the essential characteristic for the Marxist reading of Machiavelli. And what is more, it seems that Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli presents Machiavelli as the first thinker to have worked on resolving the parallax view between the science of history and the politics of class struggle through his texts, which was actually the political conjuncture of his time. According to Althusser, they are an example of the ambiguous oscillation of theoretical propositions in the traditional philosophical sense, as if some other instance might undermine them through the instance of political practice.39

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The figure of the void as Althusser’s enunciation of ‘philosophy for Marx’ in Machiavelli’s texts signifies a certain ‘throwing the dice’ anew (in keeping with Machiavelli’s theory), as if Althusser had transposed himself directly into the political conjuncture of Machiavelli’s concrete historical situation. In the middle of Machiavelli’s texts, through the void Althusser reopens the abyss of his political practice, adding a certain void (nothingness) to the theoretical-political conjuncture of Machiavelli’s writings. With this, he once more reopens Machiavelli’s consideration of his political conjuncture, to the verge of the possible theorisation of it, to the pure aleatoriness of history. Machiavelli’s concrete analysis of the ‘verità effettuale della cosa’ thus means political practice through the theoretical view of the parallax between theory and politics. Only from the point of view of the paradox of thinking the unthinkable in the core of the theory is it possible, through the subjective occupation of this excluded and impossible point of the theoretical enterprise, that Machiavelli’s true political practice took place. This is also one of the possibilities of reading Althusser’s rendering of Machiavelli’s thesis and Machiavelli’s thinking of the conjuncture, in its concept of an aleatory, singular case, as an attempt to undermine the Hegelian logic of sublation as the search for the solution of Althusser’s previous problematic of materialist overdetermination. If we assume the presence of the void in Althusser’s text on Machiavelli as the gap between Theory and practice, we can say that this gap, this void, is the place of the practice of class struggle, which is operative immanently in Machiavelli’s theory of history as the open, aleatory moment of the history as such. The object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy par excellence is the nothing as the parallax object, the void, which is the minimal difference between thought and object, and that is the reason why there can be simultaneously partisanship and scientificity in Althusser’s philosophy. On those grounds, I understand aleatory materialism not as the ‘science of revolution’ (see Moulier Boutang), but as a philosophy of an object, of the gap that neither classical science nor classical politics of class struggle as such can grasp. Finally, if we remain faithful to the tradition of Althusser’s symptomatic reading of ‘philosophy for Marx’, this parallax object of the void as the gap between the object of thought and real object in the texts on aleatory materialism represents the belated concept of Althusser’s ‘philosophy for Marx’, which was first proposed as the semi-concept of ‘overdetermination’.

Notes 1 I borrow the concept of parallax object from Slavoj Žižek’s The Parallax View, where he rehabilitates Kantian antinomies through Hegelian dialectics via his reading of Kojin Karatani: ‘The standard definition of parallax is: the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its position against a background), caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, is that the observed difference is not simply “subjective”, due to the fact that the same object which exists “out there” is seen from two different stances, or points of view. It is rather, as Hegel would have put it, subject and object are inherently “mediated”, so that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself’ (Žižek 2006, p. 17). 2 Descombes 1979, p. 142. 3 Descombes 1979, p. 142. 4 See Balibar 1995.

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5 For this point see Riha 2005. 6 Badiou 1993, p. 31. 7 Badiou’s concept of ‘quilting’ designates the intrusion of one of the conditions of philosophy into its act of seizure and declaration. According to Badiou, quilting always appears as a kind of double loss. On the one hand, philosophy starts to name truths itself, and loses its distance from its conditions (it ceases to exist as an autonomous sphere, where the truth can be inscribed), and, on the other hand, the four conditions lose the possibility of their own thinking of the event of truth. According to Badiou, the only possible relation between philosophy and its constitutive other is through the topological structure of torsion (which has the form of a Möbius strip), where philosophy and its conditions are banded in a single surface, without ever directly intersecting each other. In this sense, philosophy remains connected with its conditions in their immanent inscription and as the conditions think for themselves. See Badiou 2009a. For more on the Badiou’s theory of conditions see Zupančič 2004, p. 191–201. 8 Badiou 1993, p. 31. 9 Badiou 1993, p. 34. 10 Both Althusser and Badiou see the very condition of the materialist philosophy in the existence of a certain kind of void, which is the only possibility of the identity of thinking and being that lacks the existence of the guarantee. However, Badiou declares himself a Platonist in a very special sense, namely because he conditions the event of truth as philosophy, without the guarantee of knowledge. Any philosophical naming of the void as the event of truth is, for Badiou, inadmissible. The main problem of the immanent relationship of the philosophy towards its exteriority is its blindness for its effects and therefore the impossibility of its assurance of the class position. In contrast, Althusser is an anti-Platonist, who also fights against the idea of guarantee of knowledge, the prototype of which is Plato’s Idea of the Good, so that according to Balibar we could say that he is doing politics within the cave, which presents itself as a problem of thinking philosophy for Marx. For more on this, see Balibar 1993b, p. 114. 11 See Badiou 1993. 12 Matheron 2008, p. 523. 13 See Macherey 2011. 14 This point is taken from the Slovenian review of Macherey’s book Hegel ou Spinoza? by Mladen Dolar (see Dolar 1984). 15 In ‘Pour Althusser: notes sur l’évolution de la pensée du dernier Althusser’ Antonio Negri claims that Althusser’s aleatory materialism is actually the beginning of the new ontology of resistance and power through the discovery of the vacuity of the centre of totality (see Negri 1993). 16 See Balibar 1993b. 17 Žižek 2006, p. 17. 18 Žižek 2006, p. 18. 19 Žižek 2006, p. 18. 20 Badiou 2005a, p. 65. 21 See Moulier Boutang 2006. 22 Moulier Boutang further argues: ‘And more precisely, it is about explaining the emergence of a revolution. What is chance, uncertain in the sense of economists, inexplicable and uncontrollable in terms of calculus of risk, is an organisation of the event of the revolution . . . In other words, Althusser is interested in the “science” of revolution, in revolutionary politics (and is completely disinterested in the problems of the philosophy of knowledge, in the debate over the determinism in physics). Is there a science of revolution? Does one have to be a dialectical materialist, a historical materialist to think and organise a revolutionary politics? What

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Althusser responds with, to the point of delirium, in his text on aleatory materialism, is more or less the same thing that Pascal does when brushing aside the “useless and uncertain” from Descartes. He irrevocably removes the two materialisms – the historical and the dialectical. Only an aleatory materialist could bear the systematic denial of the “facts” and approach the art of revolutionary politics. The revolution is an irreducible, unpredictable, “overdetermined” event. Unequivocal causality and continuity are of no use, here. Aleatory materialism is politics, but not just any kind of politics: it is the politics of revolution, of the foundation of something radically new. The futility of proofs for the necessity of revolution’s existence’ (Moulier Boutang 2006). 23 ‘Once again, either we trust to the infinite (that is, the indeterminate, epistemological void) for the production in the final resultant of the resultant we are hoping to deduce: the one that will coincide with economic determination in the last instance, etc., that is, we trust a void to produce a fullness (for example, within the limits of the purely formal model of the composition of forces, it does not escape Engels that the said forces present might cancel one another out, or oppose one another . . . under such conditions, what is there to prove that the global resultant might not be nothing, for example, or at any rate, what is there to prove that it will be what we want, the economic, and not something else, politics, or religion? At this formal level there is no assurance of any kind as to the content of the resultant, of any resultant). Or we surreptitiously substitute the result we expect for the final resultant, and duly rediscover in it, along with other, microscopic determinations, the macroscopic determinations which were secreted in the conditioning of the individual at the outset; this expected result, these macroscopic determinations will be the economy. I am obliged to repeat what I have just said of what was beneath the immediate level: either we stay within the problem Engels poses for his object (individual wills), in which case we fall into the epistemological void of the infinity of parallelograms and their resultants; or else, quite simply, we accept the Marxist solution, but then we have found no basis for it, and it was not worth the trouble of looking for it’ (Althusser 1969a, p. 118). 24 Žižek 1992, p. 19. 25 Althusser 1969a, p. 101. 26 See Montag 2010. 27 See Montag 2010. 28 Alenka Zupančič similarly explains the proximity between psychoanalysis and Marxism regarding the question of their scientificity, in that they are both ‘situated within the conflict that they theorize; they are themselves part of the very reality that they recognize as conflictual and antagonistic. In such a case the criterion of scientific objectivity is not a supposed neutrality, but the capacity of theory to occupy a singular, specific point of view within the situation. In this sense, the objectivity is linked here to the very capacity of being “partial” or “partisan”’. Further on, she refers to Althusser’s words in his work ‘Sur Marx et Freud’ (see Althusser 1993c) and goes on to paraphrase Althusser: ‘. . .when dealing with a conflictual reality (which is the case for both Marxism and psychoanalysis) one cannot see everything from everywhere (on ne peut pas tout voir de partout); some oppositions dissimulate this conflict, and some reveal it. One can thus only discover the essence of this conflictual reality by occupying certain positions, and not others, in this very conflict’ (Zupančič 2008, p. 28). 29 ‘This means that the reality is immanently transversed with this basic either-or, which we can perceive in the case of anamorphosis: either consistent reality, which in many places contains stains, or this stain itself as a kind of being, where the other ‘reality’ dissolves into stain . . . One can’t see both at the same time, although it is the same reality’ (Zupančič 2008, p. 28). 30 See Suchting 2004, p. 24n. 48. 31 See Moulier Boutang 2005. The study on Machiavelli was developed from 1972 to 1986. 32 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, p. 88.

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33 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, p. 90. 34 See Ichida and Matheron 2005. 35 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, p. 90–1. 36 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, p. 91. 37 See Balakrishnan 2005. 38 See Balakrishnan 2005. 39 Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, p. 63.

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6 The very essence of the object, the soul of Marxism and other singular things: Spinoza in Althusser 1959–67 G. M. Goshgarian

‘Man alone is a triumphant error who makes his aberration the law of the world’. Louis Althusser, ‘Man, That Night’ (1947).1

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pinoza’s logic of the singular begins to shape Althusser’s philosophy before he discovers it there. It informs a concept of the encounter already active in his 1959 monograph Montesquieu: Politics and History, which opens what we shall call, for the sake of convenience, his early period. Recast as the Marxian topography in For Marx and bent to the service of a general account of the transition between modes of production in Reading Capital, the encounter moves, in 1966, to the centre of what he names ‘the theory of the “encounter” . . . or conjunction’.2 Narrowly construed, this ‘theory’ presents an alternative to geneticist approaches to history; construed broadly, it is nothing less than a sketch of the materialist dialectic, with its historiographical, topographical and ‘epistemological’ subdivisions. It is organised around the Spinozist singular essence, although that term appears only in texts of Althusser’s not intended for publication – oddly enough, since the related Spinozist idea of a ‘cause immanent in its effects’ features prominently in Reading Capital.3 Althusser’s early period closes with an account of the process of knowledge based on the singular essence, the April 1967 publication ‘On Theoretical Work’. This was to be the introduction to a planned book, ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’, which he wrote and rewrote in 1966 and early 1967, then put aside to embark on a deconstruction of his previous thought that led him, by 1972, to the materialism of the encounter, as various still unpublished manuscripts show. Here the encounter, identified with class struggle, has a function akin to that of Derridean différance, which it retains in the critical Marxism, renamed ‘aleatory materialism’ in 1982, on which Althusser continued to work until the end of his career. When does Althusser consciously begin conjugating Marx with Spinoza and both with the encounter? ‘One could do an interesting piece of research in the history of philosophy on the

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subject’, to borrow his 1967 remark about Feuerbach’s impact on twentieth-century phenomenology.4 It would most likely show that, by mid-1962 at the very latest, his bid to forge ‘the discourse of Marx’s philosophy’ by ‘writing at his dictation the text of another discourse’ so as to ‘return to him the speech that is his own’ has become a conscious attempt to lend him a speech that is Spinoza’s.5 It would certainly show that, by 1966, he was explicitly elaborating a Marxism of the singular essence, a term he deems, after hesitating, ‘too dangerous’ for public consumption.6 It might conceivably show that, until 1962, he had only a limited acquaintance with Spinoza. That would only heighten the interest of the chapter of the ‘underground history’ of ‘philosophy’s repressed Spinozism’ which he began writing in the mid-1950s.7 For whether or not his Spinozism initially stemmed from the ‘anonymous encounter of a rediscovery’ or an ‘influence exercised through intermediaries’ (such as Feuerbach and Montesquieu himself), Politics and History credits the Marquis de la Brède with a science of the singular bearing an uncanny family resemblance to the one spawned by ‘Marx’s only direct ancestor from the philosophical standpoint’8 – the ancestor whom Marx never acknowledged and Montesquieu disavowed. What Althusser baptises as the theory of the encounter in 1966 is basically an elaboration of arguments he claimed, in 1959, to have found, not in the Ethics, but in The Spirit of Laws.9 The horizon of the following pages is the relationship between Althusser’s early and late thought. Does the recurrence of elements of the former in the latter attest to a basic continuity? Or are we dealing with an illusion of continuity like the one Marx conjured up when he read surplus-value back into Ricardo, in ‘an immediate substitutional reading’ that Althusser, like Engels, contests, insisting on ‘the novelty of the non-novelty of a reality which appears in two different discourses’?10 That question will not be answered here, because another one must be answered first: that of the internal coherence of Althusser’s early thinking and, especially, the part that the ‘Spinozist encounter’ plays in it. We shall broach the problem by considering, first, the ‘science of the singular’ in Spinoza; second, the status of the concept of Verbindung in a perhaps imaginary Montesquieuanism, a stand-in for a perhaps imaginary Marxism; third, the treatment of the encounter as historical supplement in the 1960–5 essays collected in For Marx and Reading Capital, both issued in autumn 1965; and, fourth, the theory of the encounter as further developed in ‘On Theoretical Work’ and other 1966–7 writings. A postscript dilates on a 1966 note of Althusser’s which, because it mentions the encounter, Epicurus, and Cournot, has precipitated a furious flurry of immediate substitutional readings.11

Spinoza: rediscoveries Our concern in this section is with a handful of Spinozist ideas directly related to what the early Althusser holds to be Marx’s, or a certain Marx’s, science of the singular: 1 Individual things in Marx (such as social formations) are, for Althusser, like individual

things in Spinoza: they are ‘composite bodies’ composed of other composite bodies.12 According to what might be called, in Althusser’s terms, Spinoza’s theory of the encounter and ‘take’, when the result of joining bodies is so to unite them ‘in one action that all are simultaneously the cause of one effect’, they may be considered one individual, ‘a singular thing’.13 In both Spinoza and Althusser, singular things can

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maintain a constant identity through their transformations. They are, in that sense, transcendent, as Jannot’s knife is transcendent of its handle and blade: their structure or ‘form . . . is retained, although there may be a continuous change of the bodies [comprising them]’.14 2 Spinoza distinguishes ‘singular things’ ‘said to exist’ insofar as they ‘have duration’

from abstract-formal (and other) ideas,15 affirming, in Book V of the Ethics in particular, that the ‘most satisfying’ kind of knowledge of these things that exist in a concrete time and place is ‘knowledge of their essences’. Althusser affirms that ‘meaningful’ scientific knowledge is knowledge of the essences of historically existent singular things, whose mode of existence he distinguishes from that of the abstract-formal ideas needed to produce knowledge of them. 3 To obtain the most potent kind of knowledge of singular things, which, according

to Spinoza, are ‘modes’ that express ‘God’s attributes in a certain and determinate manner’,16 one must ‘rise from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain of God’s attributes to the adequate knowledge of the essence of things’.17 When Marx says in the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse that one must ‘rise from the abstract’ to the ‘concrete-in-thought’ in order to obtain scientific knowledge, he means basically the same thing, according to Althusser. 4 Spinoza notes that ‘Aristotle’s partisans’ affirm that ‘God does not have knowledge

of singular things, but only of general’, taking this as proof of their ‘ignorance’, since ‘general things are naught’.18 He proposes a new logic based on the idea that a thing can not only not be considered in the absence of its essence, but that that essence can also not ‘be conceived or be’ in the absence of the thing of which it is the essence.19 While continuing to hold that a scientific concept is the concept of the limits of the variation of its object, real or virtual, the early Althusser claims that Marx mobilised a comparable anti-Aristotelian logic, said to produce knowledge not ‘of the general’, but ‘by the general’.20 This new logic, at the heart of ‘Spinoza’s unprecedented theoretical revolution’, is, according to Althusser, the basis for ‘modern scientific thought’.21 Before Marx ‘open[ed] up a new “continent” to knowledge’ by applying this logic to the hitherto ‘unexplored “continent”’ of history, Montesquieu ‘truly discovered the new lands of history’ by doing the same thing – more or less unawares, like Marx. That may be why ‘Montesquieu’s theoretical revolution’, as interpreted by Althusser, so strangely resembles ‘Marx’s immense theoretical revolution’, as we shall now see.22

Pre-Marxian for-Marxism: Montesquieu sive Marx A convenient starting-point for an examination of the connections between Politics and History and Althusser’s other work down to the mid-1960s is provided by the term Verbindung, an everyday German word meaning ‘connection’ or ‘combination’ in the sense in which Marx writes, say, that ‘through the combination of atoms, each thing appears to become a unity’.23 Marx sometimes also uses Verbindung to name the bond between elements in a mode of

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production, a fact highlighted in Reading Capital. There, it is usually rendered ‘combination’ [combinaison], when it is not left in German. We shall be coming back to this word after a long detour. How is Verbindung translated in Politics and History? It is not translated there at all: the term never appears in Althusser’s first book (or, for that matter, in For Marx). But the concept looms large, notably in a passage defending Montesquieu against the charge of pluralism.24 When discussing the multiple factors that shape real-concrete historical societies, he may seem, we are told, to lapse into a haphazard, quasi-positivist enumeration of a ‘plurality of causes’ ‘discovered separately and then heaped together’ so that ‘the totality is lost in a list’. On inspection, however, the plurality turns out to be no such thing. A ‘chain’ binds Montesquieu’s apparently ‘different truths’ to each other.25 How is this chain designated? In Ben Brewster’s English translation, it is a ‘conjunction’: ‘all these causes, apparently so radically disparate, converge’ in a determinant instance ‘from [whose] conjunction arises what Montesquieu calls the spirit of a nation’.26 The French word is rencontre, now usually rendered as ‘encounter’. If the sentence just quoted were retranslated today (Brewster’s translation appeared in 1972), it might read: ‘What Montesquieu calls the spirit of a nation derives from an encounter of causes that seem radically disparate’. Conjunction, however, is also a faithful equivalent. So are, depending on the context, conjunction-combination, combination-conjunction (Althusser’s 1966–7 translations of Verbindung), articulation, fusion, and even conjuncture or union (‘the union of theory and practice’). In a word, ‘rencontre’ is itself the site of an encounter in Althusser. It begins in Politics and History, where the term names the Althusserian Montesquieu’s ‘topographical’ concept, the idea that a social totality is an overdetermined whole in dominance. The Althusserian Montesquieu maintains, at his ‘most profound’, that a society comprises autonomous levels. His ‘reduced case’ social topography includes two: the nature of a society’s government, a typological abstraction that might be broadly translated as its constitutional or legal forms, and ‘the concrete of that abstract’, its principle, or the ‘disposition’ of its members to live by them. Together, nature and principle form a ‘totality’.27 Despite certain retrospective Hegelian readings (such as Hegel’s), justified by Montesquieu’s flirt with the ‘expressive totality’ and ‘pars totalis’, principle is no mere expression of nature, and harmony at this level is simply the ideal-typical case. In practice, Montesquieu ‘never (or hardly ever). . . gives any but impure examples’ of the nature-principle totality. The examples show, better than his theory, that a society’s nature and principle almost always form a ‘contradictory unity’ that precipitates its destruction when the contradiction becomes acute enough.28 The ‘new theoretical category’ of the ‘totality’ allows Montesquieu to ‘give an answer to the question of the motor of history’. That answer depends on the idea that, of the instances forming the totality, one is ‘determinant’: the principle. The proof is that, when a society loses its principle, no modification of its laws can save it; when its principle is sound, it can survive without laws. Yet Montesquieu does not exclude ‘the effectivity of nature on principle . . . within certain limits’. From this, it can already be seen that the principle is only determinant in the last instance. Hence this ‘type of determination in the last instance by the principle, determination which nevertheless farms out a whole zone of subordinate effectivity to the nature of the government, can be compared with the type of determination that Marx attributes in the last instance to the economy’.29 Such, as interpreted by Althusser, is the basic model of Montesquieu’s materialist dialectic.

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It would, however, be un-Montesquieuan to content ourselves with that, since Montesquieu’s singularity is due precisely to his complexification of his models. To see how, we have to consider the apparently disparate causes that he introduces in describing the particular cases represented by real-concrete societies: read symptomatically, these descriptions reveal the special kind of causality at work in The Spirit of Laws. A society’s principle, ostensibly derived from its nature, is in fact constituted mainly by its manners and morals, that is, the spirit of a nation. This ‘truth’ is not explicitly affirmed, but ‘appears in [the principle’s] corruption’.30 When it is lost, the spirit of a nation ‘effectively take [its] place’ and, if sound, can overcome even the effect of bad laws. Thus we see that the spirit of a nation ‘determin[es] laws in the last resort’. The principle is, in essence, merely the ‘political form’ of the spirit of a nation; the spirit of a nation is its ‘ultimate basis’.31 The principle’s ultimate basis is, as we began by noting, the encounter of causes that seemed radically disparate. These causes are ‘material factors’. Such material factors do not, however, determine laws directly, as is shown by the fact that they can be partially ‘counteracted’ by laws. Their ‘effectivity’ is exercised ‘in a way that is not direct but indirect’, by way of their ‘spiritual’ or ideological ‘expression’. That is, they are determinant insofar as they are ‘completely gathered together and concentrated’ in that expression (or ‘substantial analogy’), the spirit of a nation, which enters, ‘via the principle’, into the social totality, the contradictory unity of nature and principle.32 Let us leave aside what this implies about the materiality of ideology or the consubstantiality of thought and extension in order to concentrate on what matters most here: ‘factors’ are determinant insofar as they merge in a combination conjoined with another combination, and they exercise their determination through the complex whole which results from that encounter of encounters. This ‘strange circular causality’, the late feudal version of structural causality, enabled Montesquieu to think singularity. That is the key to his theoretical revolution, which sprang from the principle that ‘the necessity of history could only be thought in the unity of its forms and their conditions of existence, and in the dialectic of that unity’.33 This unity of ‘forms’ with their ‘conditions’ is, in a more succinct but exactly equivalent formulation, the necessity of contingency (accident). Montesquieu could think singularity because he could think the necessity of contingency, the overdetermination of his nature-principle totality by the material factors that enter into what that totality essentially is. The definition of overdetermination in For Marx is not substantially different: the ‘reflection in contradiction itself of its conditions of existence’.34 Indeed, it may be said that the conception of the ‘topography’ put forward in Politics and History remained basically the same from 1959 to 1967. The significant shifts come with the attempt to think the historical encounter that produces a topography. In 1959, Althusser seemed to think that the problem had already been solved. ‘The law of the unity of nature and principle’ is not just ‘static’, but ‘dynamic’: it enables Montesquieu to ‘make intelligible’ both ‘the concrete totalities in history’ and ‘the changes and revolutions’ in them. We are not, however, quite told how. Instead, Althusser offers a list of the errors that would, if Montesquieu made them, prevent him from explaining the revolutions. Just as he does not ‘analyse the essence of society and provide an ideal and abstract model of it’, so he does not ‘think history in a category attached in essence to pure atemporal models’. Thus he is ‘probably the first person before Marx . . . to think history without attributing to it an end’. Rejecting the idea that history has an end, he also rejects its geneticist correlative,

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the premise that ‘the end of history . . . is inscribed in its origin’; for him, ‘the problem of origins’ is ‘absurd’.35 Again, he does not make history an inconceivable interaction between ‘atemporal structures and a historical genesis’,36 the way the (unnamed) structuralists do, tracing its impurities to historical accidents that are either regarded as ‘contingent’ vis-à-vis ‘the formal necessity of the structure’37 or demoted, as in Hegel, to the level of an inessential content that has its truth in an essential necessity.38 Rather, his ‘history’ ‘is impurity itself’.39 As such, it is – although Althusser does not quite draw the comparison, but only provides the materials for it – like Montesquieuan man, ‘an errant being’ that does not ‘follow a line from which it does not deviate’, but, rather, establishes laws from which it deviates without end. This deviation, however, itself has its laws; and, since Montesquieu distinguishes between his object, the established laws, and ‘the laws of his object (the spirit of laws)’, he can work out ‘the laws of the violation of laws’.40 Thus he ‘disengages’ laws that can explain ‘the concrete . . . diversity’ of all the institutions observable in human history – laws so strict, says Althusser, as to embrace ‘not only bizarre institutions which last, but even the accident that produces victory or defeat in battle and is contained in a momentary encounter’. He transforms what had been an infinite space filled with ‘innumerable works of caprice and accident’ into an intelligible structure governed by laws ‘immanent in the phenomena’ of history itself – in ‘the whole of human history and all its particulars’.41 Politics and History closes with a chapter that illustrates, whatever its intentions, the problem that was to plague Althusser’s attempt, over the next decade, to think historical change with Spinoza: that of explaining the singularity and thus the persistence of a social totality without making it impossible to explain, on internal grounds, its demise. The singularity of his, and perhaps also his Montesquieu’s,42 social totalities was defined by the ‘limits and structure’ of the class dictatorships that held those totalities together, and the aim of the chapter is precisely to demonstrate the defects of evolutionist-reformist accounts of their dissolution. Althusser takes French Absolutism as his example. Contesting, from the standpoint of the Montesquieuan Marx, ‘the classical schema’ and the teleological Marx who made the mercantile bourgeoisie the gravedigger of a capitalist society gestating in a feudal womb, he argues that ‘the whole cycle of its economic activity . . . [was] inscribed in the limits and structures of the feudal State’. It follows that the Absolutist state was not a terrain of class struggle between a declining aristocracy and an ascendant proto-capitalist bourgeoisie, the product of an ‘exceptional situation’ thanks to which the state could stand ‘outside classes and over them’. It was, rather, a new political form imposed by changing ‘material factors’ – for Althusser, the demands of the mercantile economy – on the nobility’s continuing social domination. That is, it remained an integral part of a social combination whose structures and limits continued to be determined in the last instance by the lords’ exploitation of the peasantry. Against this account of a singularity that can persist in its being in and through such massive ‘inner variation’, Althusser’s explanation of its dissolution falls rather short. It amounts to a reminder that nothing less than the dynamics of the ‘journées révolutionnaires’ could abolish the Ancien Régime.43 He returns to the problem in For Marx, this time with reference to the ten journées révolutionnaires that abolished its Russian analogue.

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A philosophical formation turned political The Encounter in For Marx Althusser probably had a theory of the encounter in 1959. He certainly had one four years later. Witness a November 1963 letter in which he gleefully has his addressee declare that ‘contingency, chance, or what Machiavelli calls fortuna’ is ‘the pre-Marxian concept that comes closest to what Lenin calls the encounter of the objective and subjective conditions of any practice whatsoever . . . Knowledge, too, is only ever produced by an “exceptional” encounter . . . in other words, it is produced by a historical conjuncture in which several distinct practices intervene: I can sense, Louis, that you are going to develop . . . this point; I can already sense in your essay the imminence and, as it were, ineluctable necessity of this discovery’.44 Of the passages in For Marx that announce this coming event, two stand out: the twin illustrations of overdetermination that close the summer 1962 ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and its spring 1963 sequel, ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’. The first is about the Russian Revolution and the necessity of contingency, a theme pursued in an appendix on Engels’s letter on determination in the last instance. The second revisits the relation between ‘chance’ and ‘the Necessity of History’, arguing, again with reference to 1917, that a genuinely materialist dialectic has to explain the necessity of (the contingency of) political struggle, something it cannot do if it treats politics as an epiphenomenon of economic contradiction. One claim in particular, memorably formulated in the first passage, repeatedly restated in both, and evoked in the letter just quoted, sums up For Marx’s basic thesis on the history of class societies. We are ‘always’, Althusser writes, ‘in exceptional situations’.45 An immediate substitutional reading might make this rhetorical flourish proof of the non-novelty of the novelty of aleatory materialism’s founding paradox, the ‘originary swerve’. In fact, it is proof of the non-novelty of Marx’s Montesquieuan idea that ‘history is impurity itself’, as For Marx indicates a page or two later, when it points out that historical ‘“purity” itself would be the exception’ for Marx.46 The non-exceptionality of the exceptional situation thus means, put prosaically, that no situation ever reflects a theoretical concept in its purity, but only as ‘specified by . . . historically concrete forms’ (For Marx); in other words, that history must be thought ‘in the unity of its forms and their conditions’ (Politics and History). Even the implication drawn from the idea that these exceptions are really only ‘so-called “exceptions”’47 is non-novel: namely, that the same principles that make the concrete totalities in history intelligible also explain the changes and revolutions in them. To continue to speak the language of Politics and History, this means that the principles which account for the ‘statics’ of these concrete totalities also account for their ‘dynamics’. The only innovation that For Marx introduces on this score resides in the now explicit appropriation of that claim for Marx. Althusser proceeds with the help of a new term, ‘conjuncture’, defined as ‘the very existence of the whole in a determinate situation’. The fact that the whole comprehends a succession of such situations means that it is a singularity comprehending a succession of other singularities, all of which comprise its ‘very existence’. Thus it differs from itself while remaining one and the same singularity. This dynamic stasis is possible, For Marx explains, because the whole in dominance is a ‘structural invariant’ whose invariance exists in the ‘play’ of the contradictions making it up. Hence the contradictions that comprise the limits

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of the unvarying structure (its necessity) also comprise its inner variations (its contingency). Yet, thanks to play, these conjunctural variations of the structural invariant can combine and fuse to produce a ‘global restructuring of the whole’.48 The invariant structure can, in a word, vary to the point of becoming another. Since all its variations are exceptional, none is, not excluding the ‘“exceptional” encounter’ whose particular laws give rise to the general laws of the succeeding structure. So conceived, the theory of the encounter is plainly not an aleatory science of abstract possibilities ‘whose realization or non-realization would depend on. . . a throw of the dice’.49 It does not reduce ‘diachrony’, as structuralism does, ‘to the sequence of events . . . and to the effects of this sequence of events on the structure of the synchronic’, making history ‘the unexpected, the accidental, the factually unique, arising or falling in the empty continuum of time, for purely contingent reasons’.50 On the contrary, it takes its place in a ‘consubstantialist’ theory of Theory, inspired by Spinoza, which has it that in ‘general Theory (the dialectic) . . . is theoretically expressed the essence of theoretical practice in general, through it the essence of practice in general, and through it the essence of the transformations, of the “development” of things in general’.51 The science of the encounter is thus a subordinate branch of the science of the transformation of things: it knows that contingency is not accident, because it obeys the laws of the history that it renders ‘impure’. The encounter is, in its very contingency, knowable, albeit not necessarily knowable in advance. Reading Capital would show by example that it is not enough to make the ‘exceptional’ situation truly exceptional in order to overturn this scheme.

Politics and History in Reading Capital The account of historical change advanced in Reading Capital is based on a theory of the non-homogeneity of historical time that recasts the Montesquieuan-Marxist topography in temporal terms. That each level of the social totality is relatively autonomous, Althusser argues, entails that it develops according to a distinct temporality overdetermined by those of all the others. The time of the whole is thus a time of times that the historian must construct as a combination of distinct, non-contemporaneous histories. This is, in a sense, already a theory of the structure as encounter, inasmuch as it posits the possibility of the simple non-relation of elements, the history of whose relations has to be grasped from the standpoint resulting from the accomplishment of the encounter. What welds these elements together, in other words, is the unprecedented structure produced by their combination, the history of which must therefore be retrospectively constructed. Does the non-necessity of their combining persist in the structure it engenders? Reading Capital’s answer is no. Two passages in the book set out to illustrate the kind of historiography that results. One, by Althusser, characterises the process that brought Marx from an ideological to a scientific conception of history as a transition to a new ‘theoretical mode of production’. Such a shift – ‘the epistemological break’ – was, Althusser believed at the time, analogous to the transition to a new social mode of production.52 The other passage, by Balibar, describes the other term of the analogy, the transition from one mode of social production to another. A new structure (or problematic) arises, Althusser and Balibar argue in their respective registers, out of the unpredictable fusion of distinct elements with distinct histories in a form

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radically discontinuous with the one that precedes it; ‘the meaning of these elements changes with the new structure, which precisely confers on them their meaning’. Althusser sums up his conception of the irruption of the ‘reign of a new logic’, which is not ‘the development of the old one, but literally takes its place’, in a discussion of Foucault. Foucault’s analysis of the sudden emergence of the idea of madness out of the ‘combination’ of ‘a whole series of . . . practices and ideologies’, or of the clinical gaze out of a ‘set of apparently heterogeneous conditions’ is, Althusser suggests, an exemplary account of an ‘ideology which constitutes the prehistory of a science . . . as the real prehistory whose real confrontation with other . . . practices and . . . ideological or scientific acquisitions was capable, in a specific theoretical conjuncture, of producing the arrival of a science, not as its goal, but as its surprise’. This conception of knowledge as only ever produced by an exceptional encounter forces us ‘to abandon every teleology of reason’. It makes the ‘historical relation between a result and its conditions of existence . . . a relation of production, and therefore . . . what we can call, in a phrase that clashes with the classical system of categories . . . the necessity of its contingency’.53 Balibar, with his eye on the transition to communism, tells a similar story about the transition to capitalism. The precapitalist ‘elements combined by the capitalist structure’, he says with reference to Marx’s discussions of ‘primitive accumulation’, ‘have different and independent origins’. To account for the unity of that structure, we need only attend to the ‘meeting’ of ‘elements identified on the basis of the result of their conjunction’. ‘The relative independence and historical variety’, he adds, ‘of the constitution processes of capital are gathered together by Marx into a single word: the constitution of the structure is a ‘find (trouvaille); the capitalist mode of production is constituted by ‘finding already there (vorfinden) the elements which its structure combines’.54 The ‘meeting of the elements’ here brings us back to Politics and History, because we have found it already there. The word translated as ‘meeting’ in Brewster’s 1970 version of the abridged edition of Reading Capital – rencontre – is the one that becomes ‘conjunction’ in his 1972 version of the Montesquieu. If both translations are modified to bring out the connection, we have, in Reading Capital, an encounter of elements with different and independent origins combining and, in Politics and History, an encounter of radically disparate causes converging. ‘This find’, Balibar says, ‘obviously does not imply chance’. The same obviously holds for his find of the find and the concept of the encounter, whether he found them already there in Politics and History or (like Foucault, another student of Althusser’s) derived them from the concept of overdetermination and/or heterogeneous time, likewise traceable to Althusser’s Montesquieu.55 The borrowing or back-formation, however, matters less than the break it announces, apparent in the novelty of the non-novelty of a conceptual pair also found already there in Politics and History. Shortly after (re)introducing the ‘encounter’ and ‘find’, Balibar points out that the principles governing Marx’s totality define both its ‘statics’ and ‘dynamics’. But this, now, is how they differ from the static and dynamic principles that, in the Montesquieuan Marx, render the changes and the revolutions in the concrete totalities of history intelligible. In Balibar’s view, Marx’s static and dynamic principles do not render the revolutions intelligible. They explain only the static dynamics of discrete modes of production (or social formations ‘belonging to’ a mode of production),56 not the dynamic dynamics that replace one with another. To account for the revolutionary transitions, according to Balibar, Marx has to mobilise a theory of the encounter.

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This break with the Marxism of For Marx, if it is one, is not conspicuous in Althusser’s own discussion of transitions in Reading Capital, probably because the key Althusserian thesis that the Marxian ‘break’ rang in the ‘reign of a new logic’ did not have to contend with a developed conception of the new logic’s gradual emergence out of an already existing ‘theoretical mode’. Balibar, however, is explicit. The static and dynamic principles governing the basically invariant structure account for its ‘movement’ insofar as such movement ‘is the effects of that structure [of production] . . . its existence in time’. But that is not ‘its history’. There is no explaining its history with reference to the ‘internal connections’ of the productive structure alone, since that structure ‘cannot be analysed in antagonistic terms’; a (re)productive machine whose contradictions are secondary and derived, it is driven even, indeed, especially, by its own crises. The secondary status of contradiction is confirmed precisely where one might expect it to be contested: even the contradictory tendencies of a mode of production are said to constitute the sort of dynamics that are constrained by a limit they are powerless to exceed. Hence analysis of the structure’s ‘diachrony’ – in effect, its unpredictable beginning and end – must consider a different, truly dynamic temporality, dominated by politics and class struggle.57 More exactly, it must supplement static dynamics with diachronics. Balibar thus blesses what Politics and History bans, the Lévi-Straussian marriage of atemporal structures and historical genesis. That once unthinkable mésalliance is here made possible by the prior divorce of the (re)productive structure from politics and history, and thus from class struggle. It is intended to pave the way for the more perfect union of politics and the transitional structure, already effected in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, which supposedly shows how ‘the economic structure and the class struggle can join together in the unity of a conjuncture’.58 Balibar would later reject this scheme on the grounds that it applied to a comparison between modes of production a concept that For Marx had brought to bear on the ‘historical “conjuncture”’ alone.59 In fact, as will become clear, this symptomatic ‘misreading’ of Althusser actually returned to him the speech that was or, at any rate, had soon become his own.

Reading Capital on writing For Marx The concept of the conjuncture contained in Lenin’s practice of the conjuncture is, Althusser declares in April 1967, a ‘theoretical concept of capital importance’.60 Its capital importance for Althusser is described in a reading of For Marx at the heart of a celebrated passage in Reading Capital on symptomatic reading. Lenin’s map of ‘the structure of the conjuncture in which the Soviet Revolution exploded’, according to this Althusserian guide to Althusserian method, contained the right answer, albeit couched in ‘far from purely theoretical’ terms, to an unposed question. Once he had supplied the question and refined the answer, Althusser was able to apply the result to Marx’s reading of himself: that is, to Marx’s wrong answer to the question of his relation to Hegel.61 Politics and History, as we have seen, rehearses the right answer by drawing a line of demarcation between the Hegelian and anti-Hegelian Montesquieu. For Marx carries out the same operation for Marx, proclaiming that his dialectic is not a version or even an inversion of that invented by the Hegelian Montesquieu’s main heir. Elaboration of the resulting remedial reading of Montesquieu’s and Marx’s relation to Hegel yields nothing less than the materialist dialectic itself: the one practised by Lenin and written out by Althusser at his dictation. It should

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be recalled, lest we miss just how strong a claim this short discourse on method makes for revolutionary practice, that the right conception of Marx’s relation to Hegel figures no more explicitly in Lenin’s theory than in Marx’s. The opposite is the case, as For Marx discreetly points out: when Lenin poses the right question in theoretical terms, he comes up with the wrong answer. ‘It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital’, he says, “enigmatically”, ‘without having understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic’.62 For Marx and Reading Capital contain a crucial unposed question of their own: that of the union of Marxist theory and practice. Does the tribute they pay to Lenin’s practical discovery of the concept of the conjuncture comprise a plea, in the practical state, for the primacy of practice over theory, as Étienne Balibar has suggested?63 Althusser, following the defeat of his and his allies’ March 1966 bid to initiate a left-wing de-Stalinisation of the PCF,64 came to the opposite conclusion. In an extensive October 1967 self-criticism partly motivated by that defeat, he argued that he had made what he had already identified, a year earlier, as the ‘theoreticist’ error of ‘substituting the theoretical question for the political one’. He had, in other words, demoted politics to the rank of an ‘extension of theory’.65 At the level of theory, the root source of that error lay in the definition of philosophy as the scientific Theory of theoretical practice. Theory had not only been entrusted with the task of discriminating between what did and did not count as science – a distinction with obvious political implications in the social sciences, to begin with – but had also, as a science distinct from its object, been deemed capable of doing so from a position above the political fray. The science that took politics as its object was, by the same logic, also apolitical, as a January 1964 letter of Althusser’s spells out: ‘the science of the political is a practice different [than politics]; it is a theoretical practice by nature independent of its application in politics, i.e., of political practice’.66 It follows that the ‘primacy of (political) practice over theory’, as Althusser conceived it in this period, goes hand-in-hand with the idea that the practice of politics cannot produce theoretical concepts, but only the indispensable raw material for them. The most ‘Machiavellian’ passages of For Marx, those in which Althusser sings ‘the politician’s’ praises, say nothing else. Observing the first Russian Revolution in his ‘Letters from Afar’, Lenin, we are told, affirms that it succeeded so quickly because, in this ‘extremely unique historical situation, absolutely dissimilar’ material factors ‘merged . . . in a strikingly “harmonious” manner’. (As the author of Politics and History is only too happy to point out, ‘Lenin himself stressed certain words in this passage’.) Yet it was not the ‘extremely unique’ situation that produced Lenin’s sure grasp of it. An extremely general Theory did: the ‘Theory of the “development” of things in general’ allowed ‘this incomparable theoretical and philosophical formation turned political’ (Lenin, as described in Reading Capital) to understand ‘the way the situation developed’ in 1917. As for the theoretical thesis – or, more exactly, since the politician does not produce theoretical theses, the ‘thesis of relevance to Theory’ – that Lenin defended in this situation, it consisted in an acknowledgement that political practice should be based on Theory, not the other way around, even – indeed, especially – in the ‘extremely unique situation’. Hence it is precisely in the heat of battle, in What Is to be Done?, that we find Lenin ‘reminding Marxist political practice of the necessity for the “theory” which is its basis’ [qui la fonde] with the slogan ‘without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary praxis’. Having thus made it clear that ‘to distinguish between the two practices . . . is the heart of the question’, Lenin could go on to ‘concern himself with something else’: applying what a ‘tested science had taught’ and would continue to teach him, even about his own unprecedented practice of the unique.67

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‘On theoretical work’: the theory of the encounter and la verità effettuale della cosa The 1966–7 theory of the encounter rewrote the theoreticist Theory of the union of theory and practice – a union of Theory with ‘its’ practice that hardly merited the name. The alternative set out from a concept of the concept as combination. It is sketched out in Reading Capital and brought onto centre stage in ‘On Theoretical Work’. It provides further evidence of the capital importance of the Leninist idea of the conjuncture in Althusser, and grounds his reassessment of the status of the theory produced by practice – beginning with the theory of the conjuncture itself. Before considering it, let us say a word about the new conception of philosophy that it involves. In spring 1966, Althusser began to retreat from the position that Marxist philosophy is a science, which he last defended in an April 1966 extract from an early version of ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’.68 In a June lecture, he affirmed that there was a ‘difference in theoretical status’ between philosophy and science that he had previously ‘evaded’, but declined to go into the ‘long string of related developments’ which this distinction promised to bring in its wake.69 He sums up the most important of them in an August letter: To the extent that its object is to think the history of the production of knowledge and, therefore, the articulation of theoretical practice with the other practices, and of the other practices with each other – an articulation that always constitutes a conjuncture – philosophy is a theory of the dependence of theoretical practice on the other practices and, simultaneously, a theory of theoretical practice and the other practices: thus it has the specific function of situating its own reflection in this conjuncture of dependence. Hence it must meet other demands than a science (which has to do with an object that has alwaysalready been defined and situated, not with the conjuncture that situates it). This explains the practical function of philosophy, a function reflected . . . in its practical relation to the concrete conjuncture that it is its object to think. This practical function of philosophy has nothing to do with political pragmatism . . . but is a political function nonetheless, justifying what Lenin called a partisan position in philosophy and thus, in a very elevated sense . . . what we can call the primacy of politics in philosophy (not over it). This point merits elucidation. I’m working on it.70 Althusser’s new approach can be illustrated with reference to Lenin’s conception of the conjuncture itself. It would have been the task of a ‘scientific philosophy’ to determine, via the ‘science of politics’ under its tutelage, whether that conception counted as theory. The task of a philosophy aware of the primacy of politics is, rather, on the basis of its assessment of the theoretical conjuncture, to intervene with historical materialism in favour of Lenin’s idea. No sooner said than done: Lenin’s concept of the conjuncture, Althusser declared in 1967, was a ‘theoretical treasure’ that ‘was there, within reach’, and yet ‘remained sterile’, because ‘no one “discovered” it’.71 No one, that is, before Althusser, who had long since discovered it and put it at the centre of his enterprise, in a conjuncture in which the concept of the conjuncture and the related science of the singular were vital to the preservation of the Marxist dialectic. Now, with the anti-theoreticist turn we have just described, Marxist philosophy further discovered the real

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basis for its discovery, and the error of the earlier, theoreticist explanation of it. Diagnosing the inevitable theoretical blindness of the ‘politician’ groping his way through a history perceived in the opaque, non-scientific ‘modality of a current existence’, For Marx had blindly diagnosed its own blindness to the fact that political practice could produce, in that mode, what Althusser no longer hesitates to call ‘important theoretical, even philosophical discoveries’.72 In brief, one of the philosophical lessons of the Leninist practice of the political conjuncture was that the political conjuncture thinks. It thinks in an encounter of theory and practice which produces what Althusser conceives of, in this period, as a Verbindung, a term to which we now return, although we have never really left it. It makes its formal debut in Reading Capital. It owes its prominence there to the fact that, as we have briefly noted, Marx uses it to designate two different connections: the one between the elements of the main thing he discusses, the social formation, and the one between the elements of the main idea he invents to discuss it, the mode of production. Althusser and Balibar, with Spinoza in mind, seize on this verbal coincidence, unmarked in Marx himself, in order to suggest that the connection between these empirical connections and the connection between these conceptual connections is one and the same connection. Thus each of the levels of a social formation is said to be a ‘Verbindung’ of ‘different elements’, while the social formation as a whole is a ‘specific combination of its peculiar elements’. As we saw a moment ago, the history that produces this ‘static’ combination is likewise a combination: witness the conjunction that gave rise to Marx’s science of capitalist society, a combination of its ‘three sources’, other ideological elements, and revolutionary practice; or, again, the diverse historical forms, different in different times and places, which, according to Balibar, combined to produce one and the same result, capitalism. The theory of these combinations, Reading Capital claims, is itself a combination: the Marxist dialectic or topography is a ‘structure which combines’, a ‘systematic combination of categories’, an ‘articulated’ and ‘hierarchized combination of concepts’.73 The 1966–7 theory of the encounter focuses on these connections and the connection between them. Proceeding as it did from a continuing ‘interest in Spinoza’ that had been neither ‘vague’ nor ‘indeterminate’ when ‘the Althusserian paradigm’s central features were elaborated’,74 but, on the contrary, had presided over their elaboration, the now explicit identification of the (result of the) Verbindung or encounter with the Spinozist singular essence was by no means a conceptual innovation, not even in the sense that it conferred theoretical existence on ideas hitherto available only ‘in the practical state’. The innovations of 1966–7 sprang, rather, from an attempt to resolve the problem spawned by the already consummated ‘posthumous encounter’75 between Spinoza and Marx: to use Althusser’s own term, a ‘theoreticism’ that left him unable to explain the transformation of theory by non-theoretical practice or the revolutionary transformation of a social structure that has ‘taken hold’ and so achieved the ‘dynamic stasis’ of a singular essence. There follows a summary of the main tenets of the theory of the encounter, based on still unpublished or posthumously published 1966–7 writings by Althusser as well as ‘On Theoretical Work’. However schematic, the summary unmistakably shows that Althusser was attempting to translate the Marxist dialectic into Spinozist terms in this period; the footnotes ‘peg’ his ‘translations’ to some of the more obvious source texts in Spinoza, which we evoked in setting out. Since even good readers of Althusser have woefully underestimated his deep engagement with Spinoza in the first half of the 1960s, we highlight, en route, two of the more

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striking traces of that engagement in his early work, tokens of the many others that spring to the eye when For Marx and Reading Capital are examined through the lens of the theory of the encounter. 1 ‘The universal exists only in the particular . . . and specificity universally appertains to its

essence’. Knowledge is a ‘scientifically specified universality’.76 This fundamental Spinozist thesis is the fundamental premise of the theory of the encounter. As we have seen, it is attributed in a dozen different ways to Montesquieu in Politics and History. In Reading Capital, Althusser attributes it to Marx and, in its ‘practical formulation’, to Lenin. The formulation cited above is drawn from the spring 1963 ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’; it is a quotation from Mao. Althusser restates the idea in a note circulated to his collaborators in October 1966 and again in ‘On Theoretical Work’, in a form taken directly, the reference to Aristotle included, from Spinoza, who, however, continues to go unnamed: [It is] ‘absolutely necessary to reject’ the Aristotelian conception of ‘“generality”’, with its ‘categories of inclusion and subsumption’. The process by which Marxist knowledge grasps its singular object, Althusser goes on, involves neither deduction from theoretical concepts, nor their reduction to the level of facts [as one ‘reduces data’], nor the subsumption of facts under them. It is grounded in a new kind of logic that can be termed a ‘case logic’, in view of Althusser’s examples of the kind of thing that manifestly cannot be accounted for without recourse to it: the individual sessions of a psychoanalytic cure or concrete historical conjunctures.77 Whence the Spinozist ‘epistemology’ of the theory of the encounter. 2 All materialist theory exists to provide ‘meaningful’ knowledge, which is knowledge of

things that exist ‘in the strong sense’: those endowed, or once endowed, with ‘real, concrete’ historical existence.78 3 The Marxist science of society exists to provide knowledge of two such real-concrete

things: ‘determinate social formations . . . either their individuality (the structure of a social formation) or the modes of this individuality (the successive conjunctures in which this social formation exists)’.79 4 The ‘individuals’ comprising the objects of Marxist knowledge are complex

combinations or ‘conjunction-combinations’.80 5 The concepts (singular essences) of real-concrete things are, like their objects,

complex combinations or ‘combination-conjunctions’. To produce knowledge of them, abstract-formal concepts must be combined with ‘determinations of the singularity of concrete objects’ which can only be established by practical ‘observation and experiment’. Such combinations of concepts and ‘facts’ yields what Althusser calls, in unpublished jottings, the ‘conceptual singular essences’ that provide knowledge of ‘real singular essences’.81 This is a formalisation, in Spinozist terms, of the conceptual Verbindung or ‘synthesis of many determinations’ which, according to Reading Capital, Marx forges to account for the essences of singular things (and theorises in the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse, Althusser’s Spinozist-Marxist source-text). It should be noted that, in Politics and History, ‘essence’ is connoted negatively, as one might expect: Montesquieu is praised for setting out ‘not from

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essences but from facts’. Thereafter, ‘essence’ is used positively, the justification being that Marx has a ‘classical’ predilection for the metaphor of surface phenomenon and inner essence. Thus, For Marx, defending the principle that ‘the soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation’, points out that the concept of the concrete at work here is a ‘theoretical concept with its basis in the very essence of the object’, while Reading Capital affirms that what distinguishes a science for Marx is ‘the form of the systematicity of [its] “essences” (theoretical concepts)’.82 In a word, For Marx and Reading Capital speak a thinly veiled language of singular essences, codified here. The last major ‘epistemological’ principle of the theory of the encounter distinguishes Althusser’s Spinozism from nominalism: 6 ‘Theoretical concepts in the strong sense’ are necessary but not sufficient to provide

‘meaningful knowledge’, which is knowledge of real-concrete objects. They are necessary because they ‘produce knowledge of “forms”’ (the ‘capitalist mode of production’ is one such essential, formal idea). They are insufficient because they have ‘abstract-formal objects’ that do not exist in the strong sense, but ‘have a very specific form of existence . . . distinct from the form of existence of real-concrete objects’.83 Three further propositions of the theory of the encounter bear on the emergence and demise of ‘individual’ [social] structures: 7 A structure results from ‘an encounter of several distinct, definite, indispensable

elements, engendered . . . by different genealogies that are independent of each other’ ‘and independent (in their co-existence, in the co-existence of their respective results) of the existing structure’.84 8 A structure is ‘radically new in relation to all that . . . preceded its own irruption’ and

‘obeys . . . laws entirely different’ from those of the structure preceding it. It ‘begins to function all of a sudden’, when its elements enter into a conjunction that will “take hold”’ to form it.85 9 The specific nature of a new structure’s elements depends on that new structure,

whose effects they become once it ‘takes hold’. Then ‘their contents change, and their interrelationship does, too’. In other words, ‘the significance they take on as a result of the position conferred upon them in the new structure must be thought with reference to this new structure, not the structure to which they belonged’.86

The theory of the encounter: history and politics How did this further elaboration of the 1959–67 theory of the encounter serve its immediate ends: providing an alternative to theoreticism and accounting for the possibility of radical historical change?

History The Althusserian theory of history developed by its bad side. The three last-named elements of the theory of the encounter, recurrent in Althusser’s work from Politics and History through

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Reading Capital to ‘The Underground Current’, were, in 1966–7, part of a structure shaped by the conception of revolutionary social change that Balibar had drawn from his putative misreading of the notion of the historical conjuncture in For Marx. This conception offered a solution to the problem that Politics and History had no doubt unwittingly posed to the ‘Spinozist Marx’ by demonstrating that the French feudal order had persisted in its being from the Dark Ages to the Sun King and beyond: if a mode of production – or social formation87 – was a singular essence that ‘retained its form’ despite or even thanks to the ‘continuous change of the bodies’ comprising it, how was radical transformation of it possible? Althusser’s letters and manuscripts make it clear that he posed the problem in these terms in 1966–7. ‘The capitalist mode of production irrupts from [an] encounter’, he writes in an August 1966 letter to his psychoanalyst; ‘once the new structure has irrupted . . . it functions atemporally . . . reproduc[ing] itself endlessly’. The thesis that a mode of production is ‘eternal’ ‘is a bit much’, he concedes, coming ‘from a man [Marx] who spent his time explaining that the capitalist mode of production was historically limited and thus . . . mortal! Yet this ‘atemporal “synchronic” reproduction’ was ‘the absolute condition of its “production”’. How then could Marxists think its dissolution? Balibar’s ‘un-Althusserian’ answer was enthusiastically espoused by Althusser. Montesquieu-Marx’s ‘static and dynamic principles’ would have to be supplemented by others to account for revolutionary change. The supplement was, precisely, the theory of the encounter, the theory of genuinely historical time, produced by the conjunctural unity of ‘the economic’ with a special ‘time’ of the class struggle.88 It follows that the Marxist science of social formations comprehends two distinct theories: topography, to explain their functioning, and historiography, to account for their irruption. These two theories stand in a hierarchical relation: ‘Marx’s fundamental discovery’, ‘the Topography’ defines ‘the structure of the object whose history is to be thought’ and, as such, is ‘logically prior [préalable]’ to Historiography. Historiography studies ‘the laws of [the structure’s] existence, transformation, and non-transformation’, revealing ‘new effects or new “laws” that Topography could not’. It does so by ‘taking up the “play” within the Topography; this by itself makes it dialectical’. Althusser presents this relationship between structure, play and history as proof that ‘structure’ does not ‘abolish’ history, but forms the condition for thinking it, an idea introduced in For Marx. Down to the composition of Sur la Reproduction (begun early in 1969) or a bit before, this was the structure that lent the theory of the encounter, one of its ‘elements’, its ‘place, meaning, and role’.89

Politics The most innovative aspect of the 1966–7 theory of the encounter lies in an attempt to show how the Marxian ‘synthesis’ produces a ‘scientifically specified universality’, while making room for the idea that communist political practice can produce elements of this theoretical Verbindung. The theses that Althusser tentatively advanced here before abandoning the enterprise remain sketchy, but their general outlines can be discerned. Unsurprisingly, they turn on the idea that this synthesis is a combination of combinations. What is the place of ‘facts’ in a theory such as Althusser’s, which proclaims that veritas norma sui, et falsi est?90 The parameters of his 1966–7 answer had been established by For Marx and Reading Capital. First, a ‘fact’ is, according to Reading Capital, ‘a relation of

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“combination” . . . consubstantial with the entire mode of production’, a rather forbidding formulation that seems to mean that a fact is one aspect of the overall effect of the complex structure to which it belongs. It follows that, second, ‘in the experimental sciences, at least’, ‘facts’ are theory-laden, to use a terminology that is not Althusser’s: ‘phenomena’ are transformed into ‘facts’, as he says in For Marx, by the theory of the structure to which they belong – not only by a system of theoretical concepts, but also by the realisation of those concepts in a technical apparatus.91 The second idea is manifestly influenced by the epistemology encapsulated in Gaston Bachelard’s dictum that a ‘phenomenotechnique’ is a ‘reified theorem’.92 Its direct relevance to Marxist theory is already indicated in For Marx by the thesis that ‘all political practice in the history of Socialist and Communist movements constitutes an inexhaustible reservoir of concrete “experimental protocols”’ for historical materialism, an idea reinforced by Reading Capital’s affirmation that Marx’s politics ‘intervened in his theoretical practice in the form of objects of experience or even experiment’.93 Building on the analogy between experimental science and historical materialism in a theoretical-political conjuncture that had taught him that political practice could produce ‘important theoretical, even philosophical discoveries’, Althusser now argues that, in the political domain, phenomena are transformed into facts by the theoretically informed actions, in a particular conjuncture, of communist parties. The ‘data’ resulting from such conjunctural interventions are combined with theoretical concepts, brought to bear either directly or by means of the approximate equivalent of a scientific ‘technical apparatus’, such as organisational forms, leadership techniques, and slogans. When the political practice in question is ‘correct’, it can produce concepts that ‘“realise” theoretical concepts in the concrete knowledge of concrete objects’. Althusser calls them, ‘provisionally’, ‘empirical concepts’.94 Forged by the conjunctural encounter of theory and practice, they ‘bear on the determinations of the singularity of concrete objects’.95 By combining these empirical concepts, in turn, with the right combination of abstract-formal concepts, theory produces a ‘combination-conjunction’ of the kind that Althusser calls, after Marx, a synthesis of many determinations, and also, after Spinoza, a singular essence. How does ‘the form of the systematicity of the “essences”’ of a science accommodate the Spinozist logic of the specificity of the universal? Althusser’s answer, partially developed in mainly unpublished drafts, sets out from a note in For Marx which observes that a general theory rarely comprises ‘a unified theoretical system’ in ‘reflected form’, but is, rather, made up of ‘regional theories that coexist in a complex and contradictory whole’.96 Each such regional theory has an abstract-formal object, which means, in 1966–7 as in For Marx, that it delimits a field of objective possibilities, some virtual and others real. Since these fields overlap, regional theories effectively compete for ‘control’ of the same terrain, primarily, it would seem, by classifying their objects in accordance with incompatible regional grammars. The resulting conflicts cannot be settled at the regional level, for no regional theory can legitimately adjudicate relations between regional theories. That function would fall to the higher-level ‘general theories’ to which regional theories belong. General theories, however, bear the same relation to regional theories as regional theories do to singular essences or groups of them. Hence the same problem arises at the general as at the regional level. On the conception Althusser defended until 1966, it would have fallen to the scientific Theory of general theories, philosophy, to resolve it. For the theory of the encounter, however, the Theory of theories has become the Theory of their encounter at a

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particular moment, which means that there can be no Theory of general theories: ‘to say that philosophy is the Theory of the conjuncture of existing Theories is to say that it is not the Theory of existing Theories . . . but only the Theory of their articulation in their current conjuncture . . . of which philosophical Theory is itself an element’. The problem of the correct articulation of regional theories can therefore only be settled by a struggle at the level of theory, lending a quasi-military cast to the metaphor of the theory of the ‘encounter’. The result, to judge from Althusser’s examples, can be a new map of the frontiers between regional theories, with a reorganisation of the relations between existing regional theories and a redefinition of their respective objects, or even the emergence of an as yet non-constituted regional theory, an empty place for which is provided by one or another general theory. The outcome of such an encounter is not necessarily the subordination of each regional theory to one particular general theory. A regional theory can fall under the purview of more than one, Althusser pointed out in autumn 1966, adding that this may even be ‘quite common’.97 Correspondingly, it must be the case that a singular essence can result from the combination of an empirical concept elaborated on the basis of, and combined with, abstract concepts drawn from different regional theories. A formalisation of the Spinozist logic of the singular as Althusser elaborates it from Politics and History on would presumably proceed along these lines.

Postscript The path that led Althusser beyond the theory of the encounter did not pass by way of a nominalism that reduced the real to a random succession of cases or conjunctures; complex combinations to wholes made up of simple, indivisible elements; contradiction to its conditions of existence; or – it comes to the same thing – structure to a synonym for the effects in which it is immanent. Rather, the first station on the road to aleatory materialism was the idea of the ‘continuing break’, the forerunner of the concept of an ongoing encounter that has primacy over its (complex) elements and forms in the same way as the encounter of class struggle has primacy over classes or contradiction has primacy over its terms. Even in the 1980s, which saw Althusser somewhat truculently vaunting the merits of nominalism (‘not merely the antechamber of materialism, but materialism itself’)98 and cultivating a vaguely atomist terminology, it may be doubted whether he himself was an atomist or nominalist. The pivotal element in his thought of the period was, rather, to hazard a term that is not his, an ‘archi-encounter’ conceived as a (de)structuring force that can only ever engender a whole quite literally constituted by the always only provisional suspension of its dissolution and, in that specific sense, by the retroactively defined ‘void’ from which, for as long as it manages to subsist, it never ceases to emerge. That said, there is no denying the troubling proximity of nominalism to the science of the singular: Althusser’s admonition, in ‘On Theoretical Work’, that ‘it is not easy . . . to resist the temptations of empiricism (for which only concrete-real objects exist)’ and ‘formal-abstract objects’ do not exist, has all the allures of a confession. The claim that the conjuncture represents ‘the last degree of the real’, prudently dropped from the published version of the same text, is but a step away from the notion that only conjunctures are real; and one can certainly imagine a vaguely Althusserian theory of the encounter founded on the shifting sands of the idea that ‘the successive conjunctures in which [the] social formation exists’ are the only

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modes in which it exists, the more so as Althusser does indeed affirm in the same ‘posttheoreticist’ period that the Theory of theory, insofar as it exists at all, exists only in conjunctural form.99 Nothing prevents us from supposing that every ‘always exceptional’ situation, no longer bound by the identity of a formation, could constitute an absolute exception to the rule of its predecessor. The kaleidoscopic whole would then follow a line from which it unceasingly deviates. It might even be supposed that the only theory capable of plotting such a line would be one that each conjuncture would have to produce afresh. Where do we find this line that deviates from itself from one end to the other, if not in the mystery novel, which weaves its mystery even as it unravels it? Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, for instance, arranges to ‘replace its apparently simple line by a direct inversion’ of it. It thereby points the paradox informing any story and, arguably, any history as well: for a fictional narrative worthy of the name is inevitably elaborated by ‘the contingent and the necessary’ in such a way as to render the ‘real’ ‘always arbitrary’. In that respect, it resembles one of those trick pictures in which we first see a landscape, and then a hat; once we see the hat, everything else disappears ‘in a new configuration of elements’, until the hat unexpectedly becomes the landscape again. The adventure story, for its part, offers a prolonged variation on the same theme. Here, ‘every moment is a thunderclap, a discontinuity, an advent’. The adventure story, with its innumerable works of caprice and accident, embodies the happy nominalist’s dream: ‘a continuous encounter with novelty and surprise’. For the theory of this continuously discontinuous encounter, we need only turn back to ‘The Rue Morgue’, which discovers or rediscovers it ‘in a new myth of the clinamen’. The original of this mini-theory of narrative as the necessity of contingency unbound is to be found in the section of A Theory of Literary Production that Pierre Macherey wrote in the first half of 1966. After taking sharp issue with structuralist literary critics’ penchant for reducing the literary work to an ‘ideal and abstract model’, Macherey outlines the theory put to work in his more practical chapters, analyses of the process of ‘singularisation by which the [literary] text is constructed’.100 Althusser closely followed the composition of these chapters in 1964–5. He took notes on the more theoretical section of the text shortly after the whole was published as a book in June 1966, concentrating on the passages just evoked. The notes, accompanied by a page of more general remarks on ‘the theory of the encounter’, read, in part: 1. Theory of the encounter or conjunction (= genesis . . .) (cf. Epicurus, clinamen, Cournot) (theory of the deviation cf. Epicurus) . . . 2. Theory of the conjuncture (= structure) . . . Philosophy as general theory of the conjuncture And, surrounded by curly brackets and underlined four times: Theory of the clinamen[.] First theory of the encounter! These jottings constitute, to date, the only available documentary evidence for the idea that an atomist, nominalist, literally ‘aleatory’-materialist current driven deep underground in Althusser’s early work at last fought its way to the surface in his later writings101 – unless, contrary to what we have argued in the preceding pages, his Spinozist-Marxist theory of the singular was only cover for it, hiding it the way the hat hides the landscape.

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Notes 1

Althusser 1997b, p. 170.

2

‘Diverses notes’ [1966], Alt2.A11–02.05 (Imec archives, Althusser Fond 2, File A11, Dossier 2, Folder 5); Althusser 2012a, ‘On Genesis’, p. 1.

3

The term ‘chose singulière’ makes a single appearance in Balibar’s contribution to the first French edition of Lire le Capital (Althusser, Balibar et al. 1996, p. 654). It disappears from the second edition.

4

Althusser 2003, p. 90.

5

Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 146, p. 144 (emphasis in the original, as always hereafter except where otherwise noted).

6

Letter of 23 October 1966 to Yves Duroux, Alt2.A8–01.07; letter of 13 September 1966 to Franca Madonia in Althusser 1998b, p. 712; Althusser 2003, p. 30. Late in June 1966, Althusser chaired a major planning meeting for a seminar on Spinoza that he was to have led the following academic year at the École normale supérieure. It was cancelled because he was hospitalised from November 1966 to February 1967.

7

Althusser 1998a, p. 31; see Althusser 1997b, p. 102.

8

Althusser 2003, p. 90; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102 (translation modified).

9

In the 1972 ‘Machiavelli and Us’, Montesquieu becomes a thinker of ‘things in general’, a foil for the master-thinker of the truth of ‘the thing [cosa] in the singular’, Machiavelli – ‘the equal of Spinoza’, says a 1986 addendum to the text (Althusser 1999, pp. 16, 103). Montesquieu is partially rehabilitated in 1982 (Althusser 2006a, p. 187). See also footnote 42.

10 Althusser and Balibar 1970 pp. 149, 168. 11 See, for example, Goshgarian 2006, lx–lxi. 12 EII P13, L3, Ax2. 13 EII P13, Def; EII Def7. 14 EII P13, Ax 3, L4. 15 EII P8 Cor. 16 EI P25 Cor. 17 EII P40 Schol2. 18 Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, Part I, Chapter 6, Paragraph 7. 19 EII Def2. 20 ‘Diverses notes’ [1966], Alt2.A11–02.02 (Althusser Fond 2, File A11, Dossier 2 Folder 2); see Althusser 2003, p. 65. 21 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102; Althusser 2003, p. 30. 22 Althusser 2003, p. 173; Althusser 1972, p. 107 (see Althusser 1969a, p. 77n.), p. 34; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 182. 23 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 1, p. 39. 24 Communist critics such as Roger Garaudy and Gilbert Mury later attacked Althusser himself for pluralism: see Althusser 1969a, p. 163, n. 2 (see pp. 177, 201). 25 Althusser 1972, pp. 54–5. 26 Althusser 1972, p. 56. 27 Althusser 1972, pp. 48, 52–3; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 220. 28 Althusser 1972, pp. 45–6, 49, 52–3; see Althusser 1969a, p. 103; Althusser 1999, p. 16.

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29 Althusser 1972, pp. 46–7 (translation modified), pp. 50, 52–3. 30 Althusser 1972, p. 56. The key sentence in this passage is misleading in the English version (‘Of course, Montesquieu does not say in so many words that the manners and morals or spirit of a nation constitute the very essence of the principle of its government. But he does set out from principles as the pure forms of the government: their truth appears in their corruption’), because the idiom that introduces the second sentence, il en va de, is mistranslated (a rare slip in an excellent translation). The second sentence should read: ‘But the same holds for principles as the pure forms of the government: their truth appears in their corruption’. 31 Althusser 1972, pp. 56–7. 32 Althusser 1972, pp. 53–6. 33 Althusser 1972, pp. 31, 58–9. 34 Althusser 1969a, p. 209. 35 Althusser 1972, pp. 20, 29, 48, 50. 36 Althusser 1972, pp. 44–5. 37 Althusser, ‘Notes sur Lévi-Strauss: Sur La Pensée sauvage’ [1962?], Alt2.A60–04, nos. 9 and 10: ‘Comment l’arbitraire devient-il nécessaire?’ (Althusser Fond 2, File A60, Dossier 4). 38 Althusser 1997b, p. 73. 39 Althusser 1972, p. 48. 40 Althusser 1972, pp. 34–6. 41 Althusser 1972, pp. 21, 34, 43, 47. 42 In 1959, Althusser presents the last chapter of Politics and History as a historically informed supplement to Montesquieu’s text, not a symptomatic reading of Montesquieu. In 1962, he affirmed that Montesquieu was a ‘disguised theoretician . . . of the subordination of certain human groups to others’ (Althusser 1998a, p. 38). In 1976, he claims that Montesquieu recognised – albeit ‘blindly’ – that the (feudal) state is ‘class violence transformed into law’ (Althusser 1978a, p. 34). 43 Althusser 1972, pp. 50, 100–5. 44 Unposted letter of 24 November 1963 to Lucien Sève, Alt2.C6–02 (Althusser Fond 2, Correspondence). 45 Althusser 1969a, pp. 104, 215. 46 Althusser 1972, p. 48; Althusser 1969a, p. 106. See Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 192. 47 Althusser 1969a, p. 106; Althusser 1972, p. 59; see Marx 1993, p. 610, cited in Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 192. 48 Althusser 1969a, pp. 210–16. 49 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 226. This ‘anti-structuralist’ phrase was added to the second edition of Reading Capital. The corresponding passage in the first edition says the same thing less emphatically (Althusser, Balibar, et al. 1996, p. 65). 50 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 108. 51 Althusser 1969a, p. 169. 52 ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ [1966–7?], pp. 53–4; see Althusser 1990a, p. 52. Althusser had dropped the idea of theoretical modes of production by mid-1967. See ‘Projet d’une lettre à Voprossy filosofi’, Alt2.A9–03.01, third sheaf (Althusser Fond 2, file 9, Dossier 3, Folder 1). I thank Gregory Elliott for making the version of ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ cited here available to me. 53 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 44–5, 157; Unposted letter of 24 November 1963 to Lucien Sève, Alt2.C6–02.2 (Althusser Fond 2, Correspondence).

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54 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 280–3. 55 In a June 1967 interview, Foucault endorsed Althusser’s prescriptions; see Foucault 1994, pp. 587–8. 56 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 42. 57 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 285–97. 58 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 293. 59 Balibar 1973. 60 Althusser 1990a, pp. 62–4, 67. 61 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 33. 62 Althusser 1969a, p. 200. 63 Althusser 1990a, p. 65; Balibar 1991a, p. 40. 64 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 50. For a brief account, see Goshgarian 2003, pp. xxii–xxxix. 65 Letter of 2 September 1966 to Michel Verret; ‘Rectification [19]67’, Alt2.A9–05.01 (Althusser Fond 2, File A9, Dossier 5, Folder 1), pp. 43–4; ‘Note critique et autocritique pour le lecteur de Pour Marx et Lire le Capital, 16 oct. 1967’, Alt2.A9–05.07 (Althusser Fond 2, File A9, Dossier 5, Folder 1 and File A9, Dossier 5, Folder 7), pp. 3–4. I thank Michel Verret for making his correspondence with Althusser available to me. 66 Letter of 22 January 1964 to Michel Verret. 67 Althusser 1969a, pp. 168–9, 177n., 179–80; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 76n. 68 Althusser 1966a, p. 117. 69 Althusser 2003, pp. 11–12. 70 Letter of 14 August 1966 to Michel Verret. 71 Althusser 1990a, p. 65. 72 Althusser 1969a, pp. 177–8, 179; Althusser 1990a, p. 65. 73 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 41, 45, 58, 60, 64, 68, 189, 282. 74 See Thomas 2002, p. 74. Thomas nevertheless takes a certain (insufficient) critical distance from Warren Montag’s contention that ‘Althusser’s assertion in Elements of Self-Crtiticism that he, Balibar, and Macherey “were Spinozists” . . . was nothing more than a retrospective construction, the very condition of which was a renaissance in French Spinoza studies that took place at the end of the sixties’, Montag 1998b, pp. xi–xii. 75 Althusser, ‘Introduction à la philosophie’ [1977?], p. 100. I thank Warren Montag for making the version of ‘Introduction à la philosophie’ cited here available to me. 76 Althusser 1969a, p. 183. See EII Def2. 77 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 192, p. 172; Althusser 2003, p. 65; Althusser 1990a, p. 49; Althusser 1998b, p. 712. See Spinoza, Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-Being, Part I, Chapter 6, Paragraph 7. 78 Althusser 1990a, p. 50, p. 46. See EII P8 Cor.; EV P25. 79 Althusser 1990a, pp. 46–7. See EII P8 Cor.; EII P13 Ax3 Lm4. 80 Althusser 1990a, p. 46. See EII P13, Def; EII P13 L3 Ax. 81 Althusser 1990a, pp. 46–8; ‘Diverses notes’ [1966], Alt2.A11–02.02. See EII P40 Schol2; EII P25 Cor. 82 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 41; Althusser 1990a, pp. 46–8; Althusser 1972, p. 20; Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 83–4; Althusser 1969a, pp. 206–7. It is Mao Zedong who, in ‘On Contradiction’, cites Lenin (Lenin 1963–70 Volume 31, p. 166) to the effect that ‘the very substance, the living soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation’.

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83 Althusser 1990a, pp. 50–2; EII P5; EII P 8 Cor. 84 Althusser 2003, p. 296; Althusser 2012a, ‘On Genesis’, p. 2. See EII P13, Ax 3, L4. 85 Althusser 1996b, p. 59, p. 61; Althusser 2012a, ‘On Genesis, p. 2; EII P13 Def. 86 ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ [1966–7?], Alt2.A8–02.02 (Althusser Fond 2, File A8, Dossier 2, Folder 2), p. 87; Althusser 2003, p. 61; EII P13 Ax3 Lm4. 87 A note added to the second edition of Reading Capital blames the confusion caused by the term ‘social formation’ on Marx, who is said to use it as both ‘an empirical concept designating . . . an existence’ and ‘an abstract concept’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 207n.). 88 Althusser 1996b, pp. 61–3; EII P45 Schol. 89 ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ [1966–7?], Alt2.A8–02.02 (Althusser Fond 2, File A8, Dossier 2, Folder 2), pp. 67, 81–7; Althusser 1969a, p. 126; ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ [1966–7], Alt2.A8–01.01 (Althusser Fond 2, File A8, Dossier 1, Folder 1), p. 34. 90 EII P43, Schol. 91 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 181; Althusser 1969a, p. 184n. 92 Bachelard, 1949, p. 103. 93 Althusser 1969a, p. 113 (translation modified); Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 60. 94 Althusser 1990a, pp. 47–9, 63; ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ [1966–7], Alt2. A7–02.03 (Althusser Fond 2, File A7, Dossier 2, Folder 3), pp. 4–6. In For Marx, curiously, ‘empirical concept’ is used as a synonym for ‘empiricist concept’ (Althusser 1969a, p. 207). 95 Althusser 1990a, p. 47. See EII P40 Schol2; EV P36 Schol. 96 Althusser 1969a, pp. 184–5n. 97 ‘Diverses notes’ [1966], Alt2.A11–02.02 (Althusser Fond 2, File A11, Dossier 2, Folder 2); Althusser 2003, pp. 64–5. 98 Althusser 2003, p. 270; Althusser 2006a, p. 265. 99 ‘‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ [1966–7], Alt2.A7.02–03 (Althusser Fond 2, File A7, Dossier 2, Folder 3), pp. 19–20; Althusser 1990a, pp. 47, 52. 100 Macherey, p. 26, 34, 36–7, 43, 57, 77. 101 An idea prominent in Ípola 2007.

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7 Althusser, Machiavelli and us: between philosophy and politics Mikko Lahtinen

T

he relationship between Marxist theory (philosophy and science) and revolutionary politics (economic and political class struggles) remained a central problem for Louis Althusser through his intellectual life. In the following chapter, I will try to argue that, despite Althusser’s so-called self-criticism of the ‘theoreticism’ of his early works, and despite his later emphasis on the ‘primacy of the class struggle over Marxist theory’, there remains a tendency towards ‘semi-theoreticism’ in Althusser’s Marxism. His most promising attempt to overcome this tendency was his ‘aleatory’ interpretation of Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. For Althusser, Machiavelli was not only one ‘aleatory materialist’ among others, but ‘the first theoretician of the political conjuncture’, or the first theorist who tried consciously and consistently ‘to think in the conjuncture’. Although this represents a novel contribution to the study of Machiavelli, this interpretation has not yet received the recognition that it deserves.

From political philosophy to the primacy of class struggle Althusser’s interest over several decades in the history of political philosophy – in eighteenthcentury French political thought as well as in Hobbes, Locke and Machiavelli – was nothing new to those who attended his lectures at the École normale supérieure in Paris or who had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the widely-circulated copies of his lecturenotes.1 Of Althusser’s writings on political philosophy, the only ones to be published during his lifetime were his study on Montesquieu and his analysis of discrepancies in Rousseau’s theory of the social contract.2 Even on the basis of these two texts alone, however, it becomes clear that Althusser’s critical objective was to analyse philosophical ideas within the contexts of the social contradictions and class struggles of their time. Althusser encapsulated his objectives in his 1975 ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’ by reference to his own definition of philosophy at that time, according to which philosophy, in the last instance,

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is ‘class struggle in theory’. According to Althusser, this definition, emphasising the primary nature of the class struggle, ‘implied a reversal of the traditional relation between philosophy and politics’. Hence, it was also possible for Machiavelli to ‘be considered a philosopher in a strong sense’, ‘even if he says almost nothing about philosophy’. Descartes, on the other hand, ‘even if he says almost nothing about politics’, ‘can nevertheless be considered a political thinker in a strong sense’.3 In his 1959 study of Montesquieu,4 Althusser had been interested not so much in Montesquieu’s ‘philosophical life’ as in how he took a stand in contemporary politics both in and with The Spirit of the Law: ‘But I am also thinking of another life. Of the life too often masked by the very same discoveries that we owe to him. Of his preferences, his aversions, in short, of Montesquieu’s parti pris in the struggles of his age.’5 During the next decade, the 1960s, Althusser defined the problem of the relationship between theory and class struggle as the central question in both Marxist theory and the ideological struggle. In the article ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’, dated spring 1963, the focal points of Althusser’s analyses are Lenin’s thesis that ‘the soul of Marxism is the concrete analysis of a concrete situation’ and Marx’s formulation about dialectics as a revolutionary method ‘rather than the theory of the fait accompli’.6 The problematic of the inter-relation between theory and practice is also a central theme in the different stages of Althusser’s self-criticism (from summer 1966 onwards) as well as in his later views during the 1980s.7 In his last interview, with Fernanda Navarro in 1987, he characterises the relationship between philosophy and ‘ideological hegemony’ as follows: ‘Even in its most abstract form, that of the works of the great philosophers, philosophy is situated somewhere in the vicinity of the ideologies, as a kind of theoretical laboratory in which the fundamentally political problem of ideological hegemony – that is, of the constitution of the dominant ideology – is experimentally put to the test, in abstract.’8 Althusser was lecturing on Machiavelli as early as 1962, but the importance of Machiavelli to Althusser has become clear to a wider audience mainly after his death, through the posthumously-published writings Machiavelli’s Solitude (published in German in 1987, English in 1988 and French in 1990), his autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time (published in 1992), the manuscript titled The Only Materialist Tradition (published in 1993), his letters to Franca Madonia (published in 1998) and particularly his lectures titled Machiavelli and Us, published in 1995.9 Finally, with the publication of Machiavelli and Us, it also became indisputable that Althusser had a more appreciative attitude towards Gramsci’s perspectives – as, indeed, his students have also recounted – than could be deduced from his influential, but one-sided and philosophically abstract (theoreticist) critique of Gramsci’s ‘historicism’ and ‘philosophy of praxis’.10 It is also interesting to note that the first version of Machiavelli and Us was written at the same time as the important work Elements of Self-Criticism (written in 1972, published in 1974). As G. M. Goshgarian has shown in his brilliant prefaces to the English translations of the posthumously published texts, the self-criticism did not mean that Althusser retracted the central theoretical views that he had developed in the beginning and middle of the 1960s, encapsulated in his anti-teleological critique of the Leibnizian and Hegelian expressive totalities or emphasis on materialism. The changes above all concerned how Althusser perceived the relationship between Marxist philosophy and the economic-political class struggle of the masses. With his self-criticism, this question was directed more clearly than it had earlier been with regard to his own intellectual role and actions as a ‘communist in philosophy’.11

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As early as the summer of 1966, Althusser self-critically stated that his theories of ‘theoretical practice’ and ‘the epistemological break’ had isolated theory from ‘non-theoretical’ social practices. Goshgarian summarises the basic problem of Althusser’s conception before the self-criticism as follows: ‘Theory became theory by virtue of a distantiation that ruled out both its internal determination by ideology and its direct intervention in ideology; a theory, by definition, had no practical relation to the ideological practices with which it broke’.12 In this context, Althusser started to criticise the theoretical conceptions of ‘theoreticism’ he had advanced in his earlier study Reading ‘Capital’ (first published in 1965), which he now saw as an ‘over-reaction’ against the ‘absolute historicism’ of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis. Althusser had argued that a central problem in Gramsci’s thinking was that ‘the real philosopher is simply the politician’.13 The first stage of his self-criticism had been preceded by a resolution from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party (PCF) to dissociate itself from the Stalinist tradition and to adopt the viewpoint of ‘humanist Marxism’. Louis Aragon and Roger Garaudy, intellectuals on the Central Committee, had intellectually central roles when the resolution was being debated in the winter of 1966. Althusser lost the battle, and the resolution-document published in L’Humanité on 15 March 1966 was based on the views of Aragon and Garaudy. Althusser wrote a long letter to the Central Committee in which he aimed to show the theoretical problems contained in the resolution. The letter, however, was never sent.14 For Althusser, the defeat was a harsh experience and also a concrete example of the complex relationship between philosophy and politics: in the case of class struggle, theory cannot be simply applied to practice from the outside.15 On the other hand, with his isolated position within the PCF, Althusser understood that he lacked the possibilities for political intervention, and thus the only way to have any influence was ‘by way of pure theory, that is, philosophy’.16 Withdrawing into ‘pure theory’ did not mean, however, a return to the ‘theoreticism’ of Reading ‘Capital’, but rather, a continuation of his self-criticism and further work on the problematic of the relationship between theory and practice. For example, Althusser planned to publish a book on the union between theory and practice; but from the extensive material he drafted, only the long article ‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme dialectique’ was submitted for publication, and this was only published in the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes (April 1966). This had been written before the ‘humanist controversy’.17 In February 1968, in the year of student- and worker-radicalism, an interview with Althusser titled ‘Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon’ was published in L’Unità. Althusser emphasised the importance of Lenin, who had been rejected by philosophers, to the critique of French academic philosophy. Althusser discussed Lenin’s importance in a more systematic way in Lenin and Philosophy, published at the same time: [A]cademic philosophy cannot tolerate Lenin (or Marx for that matter) for two reasons, which are really one and the same. On the one hand, it cannot bear the idea that it might have something to learn from politics and from a politician. And on the other hand, it cannot bear the idea that philosophy might be the object of a theory, i.e. of an objective knowledge.18 Althusser agreed with Lenin’s statement that the majority of philosophy teachers were ‘pettybourgeois intellectuals functioning in the bourgeois education system as so many ideologists inculcating the mass of student youth with the dogmas – however critical or post-critical – of

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the ideology of the ruling classes’.19 In the L’Unità interview he also emphasised that left-wing intellectuals had a ‘long, painful and difficult re-education’ ahead of them if they wanted to become ‘ideologists of the working class’ (Lenin) or ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci). The precondition for development was ‘an endless external and internal struggle’.20 Althusser presented his self-criticism against theoreticism in a more systematic form in Elements of Self-Criticism, written in 1972 and published two years later. The object of the self-criticism was also now his speculative definition of philosophy from the early 1960s as a ‘theory of theoretical praxis’, which ‘represented the highest point in the development of this theoreticist tendency’.21 Even now, he emphasised the ‘primacy of the class struggle’ in relation to philosophy and theoretical praxis, which was encapsulated by his new philosophical definition adopted soon after Reading ‘Capital’: ‘philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory’.22 In his theoreticist stage, the juxtaposition had been the opposite, that is, the ‘primacy of theory over practice’.23 The question was not, however, about whether philosophy should be seen as a less important activity than previously, but rather, the fact that the ‘ground’ on which philosophy is based lies outside it, and usually goes unnoticed: ‘all the social practices are there in philosophy . . . in the same way that the stars are in the sky’.24 Instead, Althusser’s own philosophy was to lie within the sphere of the class struggle taking place on the theoretical terrain. Althusser attempted a new philosophical-ideological intervention against the leadership of the PCF after the party suffered a bitter defeat in the French legislative elections in March 1978 and the Socialist Party (PS) led by François Mitterrand became the largest left-wing party. A series of four articles was published in Le Monde, in which Althusser strongly criticised the leadership of the PCF for ‘building fortifications’ between the party and the masses. He defined the relationship between the party and the masses as the decisive issue for the PCF, and proposed that they ‘abandon the fortifications’. Here, he was referring to Machiavelli’s principle according to which the prince must not ensconce himself in the fear of his own subjects, but rather must earn their love and respect.25 Therefore, the Communists would have to bring back to life ‘a theory which will not dodge mass initiatives and social transformations, but which will, on the contrary, openly face them and impregnate and nourish itself with them’.26 Now the ‘primacy of the class struggle’ also meant that the connection to the masses was the condition of life for Marxist theory.

A semi-theoreticist position Although Althusser’s self-criticism increasingly emphasised the importance of the ‘union’ or the interaction between theory and practice, he never put forwards any concrete analyses concerning intellectuals and the masses in relation to questions of organisation as Gramsci had done in his Prison Notebooks. Using Gramsci’s terminology, we could say that Althusser did not analyse the organisational-political connections between Marxist science and philosophy in relation to the ideologies or senso comune of the masses or the intellectuals and other elites. Thus, the effects of the possible change in this relationship on philosophical-scientific institutions and practices themselves also remained outside the focus of Althusser’s observations or, at the most, remained critical – also self-critical? – of the ‘petit-bourgeois position’ of teachers of philosophy or other intellectuals.

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The essential questions in Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis – questions about ‘learning from the masses’, about philosophy ‘as the critical element of the senso comune of the masses’, or about the views of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ and the analysis of social institutions and practices linked to it as well as their transformation – do not have a central role in Althusser’s thinking, despite the emphasis of the connection to the masses in his 1978 critique of the PCF. Althusser’s analyses of the political-historical positioning of theory in social reality are, indeed, clearly less substantial and more abstract – ‘semitheoreticist’ – than the cultural-materialistic analyses of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. For Gramsci, philosophy also appeared as a concrete social-cultural practice, whereas for Althusser, philosophy – as well as his own role as a philosopher – remained primarily a ‘theoretical practice’ in abstracto. When Althusser, for instance, writes about ‘the class struggle in theory’ he does not reflect very much about what kind of effects this could have on the material practices and institutions of philosophy or the sciences, or about how a revolutionary Marxist science and philosophy would or should be articulated in relation to the economic-political struggles that the working class engages in at a given historical conjuncture, that is, by ‘changing the world’. In Althusser’s analyses, even the intellectual who has adopted a Marxist, anti-humanist theoretical position seems to remain a researcher or philosopher-theoretician who spontaneously reproduces the division between intellectual and material work typical of capitalist class society. The positioning of theoretical work and its subjects in their materialist relationship – not only ‘in theory’ – to capitalist social contradictions and class struggles should be a very central theoretical question in Marxist theory, not merely a ‘political’ or ‘sociological’ one. Given this positioning and materialist relationship, even Marxist intellectuals can reproduce in their personal practice the dominant division between academic scientific work (or philosophy) and ‘society’. In this constellation, a scientist or a philosopher can come spontaneously to understand him- or herself as a solitary individual who is impelled to play the harsh survival games of capitalist society. Compared to this solitary figure of a philosopher or a scientist, Gramsci’s definition of the ‘democratic philosopher’ opens up a completely different perspective: He is a philosopher convinced that his personality is not limited to himself as a physical individual but is an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment. When the ‘thinker’ is content with his own thought, when he is ‘subjectively’, that is abstractly, free, that is when he nowadays becomes a joke. The unity of science and life is precisely an active unity, in which alone liberty of thought can be realised; it is a master-pupil relationship, one between the philosopher and the cultural environment in which he has to work and from which he can draw the necessary problems for formulation and resolution. In other words, it is the relationship between philosophy and history.27 Even though Althusser, after his self-criticism, did not continue to explicitly maintain his earlier abstract theoreticist critique of Gramsci’s ‘philosophy of praxis’, he never really recognised the subversive core of Gramsci’s concept of philosophy or of the philosopher. The ‘philosopher’ remained, for Althusser, a solitary figure, not ‘an active social relationship of modification of the cultural environment’.

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‘The first theoretician of the conjuncture’ and Althusser scholarship As is well-known, Althusser withdrew from public life after his 1978 critique of the PCF, until the tragic events of November 1980 brutally dragged him to the centre of attention. After the posthumous publication of previously unpublished works, it became clear, however, that Althusser had not ceased writing, but rather had developed his views on the ‘underground current of materialist philosophy’, ‘real materialism’, ‘aleatory materialism’ or the ‘materialism of the encounter’. However, he did not leave Marx behind. On the contrary, by studying the history of the ‘underground current’, he also tried to establish a foundation for his proposed analysis of Marx’s Capital.28 Between 1982 and 1986, he also reworked the manuscript Machiavelli and Us; among other things, he changed the references from ‘dialectical materialism’ (as a ‘Marxist philosophy’) to ‘aleatory materialism’ (as a ‘philosophy for Marxism’).29 Studies of the posthumously published later writings of Althusser have discussed their contradictions, the shortcomings in his argumentation and reasoning, as well as the conceptual problems and inconsistencies in the fragmentary developments of ‘aleatory materialism’.30 There are few studies, however, that systematically analyse the centrality of Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli or consider how Machiavelli and Us can be placed in relation to Althusser’s overall thinking, particularly his views on philosophy and its relationship with the ‘class struggle undertaken by the masses’ at different stages of his self-criticism.31 This kind of research can also help us to see Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli’s The Prince as a promising attempt to place theoretical and ‘political’ practices in an active relationship. In various writings discussing Althusser’s posthumously published works, especially his later manuscripts and notes, Machiavelli has appeared as only one materialist of the ‘underground tradition’ among others – from Epicurus to Heidegger and Derrida. Perhaps the neglect of Machiavelli has been aided by the fact that, according to the spontaneous-academic concept of philosophy, Machiavelli has not been considered – despite Althusser’s remarks – as a ‘philosophically’ important figure. It should be kept in mind, however, that of all the thinkers of the ‘underground current’, Machiavelli is the only one to receive a detailed and systematic analysis in Althusser’s later writings. Also, for this very same reason, the interpretation of Machiavelli in the ‘aleatory’ texts of the later Althusser should have a considerably more central position than it does in the existing Althusser scholarship. In the Althusser scholarship, only François Matheron, Emmanuel Terray and Antonio Negri have focused on Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli and its culmination in Machiavelli and Us.32 In the philosophically-focused writings of Vittorio Morfino – who has worked more systematically with the later writings of Althusser – Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli is introduced as an object of analysis, and briefly so in Federico Dinucci’s and in André Tosel’s interpretations of aleatory materialism, in Yoshiyuki Sato’s book on power and resistance in Althusser, Deleuze and Derrida, and in Filippo Del Lucchese’s substantial analyses of the concept of ‘occasione’ in Machiavelli.33 In the writings of Jean-Claude Bourdin, Yann Moulier Boutang and Wallis A. Suchting on aleatory materialism, Machiavelli is only mentioned as one ‘aleatory materialist’ among others.34 In the introduction written for the original French-language edition of Machiavelli and Us, Matheron only provides the background to the manuscript and does not present a more detailed analysis of it. Gregory Elliott’s introduction to the English

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edition is also rather cursory, given its brevity.35 Matheron’s 2001 article ‘Louis Althusser ou l’impure pureté du concept’, on the other hand, contains a discussion of several pages of the central arguments in Machiavelli and Us (for instance the book The Prince as a manifesto, and Machiavelli as a theoretician of the conjuncture).36 Apart from Goshgarian, of the above-mentioned interpreters Morfino and Negri are perhaps those who have most highlighted the continuity between the philosophical-theoretical views that Althusser presented at different times.37 Morfino also makes interesting comparisons between the later Althusser’s ‘aleatory materialism’ and his earlier views, and, indeed, uncovers ideas in his later writings that had already occurred in his writings from the 1960s (albeit sometimes appearing only in the margins).38 Negri, on the other hand, has argued that, besides the continuity, there is a particular positive turn, die Kehre, in Althusser’s thinking, realised by his aleatory materialism. In my own research, I have tried to justify the important theoretical continuities.39 An even more important aim in my study has been to highlight the aspiration permeating Althusser’s thinking, an aspiration to present a theoretically-argued starting-point for the possibility of political intervention. The basis for such argumentation is the unconditional rejection of the Hegelian idea of the expressive totality. Instead of the ‘self-development’ of the Hegelian historical totality, the question was about a complex social formation and the need to understand it ‘conjuncturally’.40 In ‘On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and Resources’, an article Althusser wrote in 1967 in the early stage of his self-criticism, it becomes clear that he considered the ‘conjuncture’ in particular as a substantial concept in terms of Marxist history and political theory: To take only one example, Lenin’s political texts (analyses of the situation and its variations, decisions taken and analyses of their effects, etc.) give us, with dazzling insistence, in the practical state, a theoretical concept of capital importance: the concept of the ‘present moment’ or ‘conjuncture’ . . . Only a little attention is needed to grasp the decisive import of this new theoretical concept. Not only does it retrospectively cast light on the distinctiveness of the Marxist theory of history, on the forms of variation in dominance within the social structure on the basis of determination in the last instance by the economic, and thus on historical periodisation (that ‘cross’ of the historians); not only does it for the first time permit the enunciation of a theory – that is, a genuine conceptualisation – of the possibility of political action, detached at last from the false antinomies of ‘freedom’ and ‘necessity’ (the ‘play’ of the variations in dominance in the conjuncture), and of the real conditions of political practice, in designating its object (the balance of class forces engaged in the struggle of the ‘present moment’); not only does it allow us to think the articulation of the different instances whose combination of overdetermined effects can be read in the conjuncture – but it also allows us to pose, in a concrete manner, the problem of the union of theory and practice – that is, one of the most profound questions of dialectical materialism, not only in the domain of political practice but also in the domain of theoretical practice.41 The ‘conjuncture’ was indeed one of the most central concepts connecting the different stages of Althusser’s work.42 It already had an important theoretical position in Althusser’s writings from the beginning of the 1960s, particularly in the articles contained in For Marx, first published in 1965. The ‘conjuncture’ also played a central role when Althusser attempted to (re-)construct a theory of Marxist history from Marx’s Capital, and particularly from Lenin’s

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political writings, that could offer a theoretically appropriate starting-point for the analysis of the conditions of political activity. Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli as ‘the first theoretician of the conjuncture’ is guided by Gramsci’s interpretation of The Prince in the Prison Notebooks as a passionate political manifesto: ‘The Prince is not a book of “science”, understood academically, but of “immediate political passion”, a party “manifesto” that is based on a “scientific” conception of the political art’. Furthermore, Machiavelli’s works are ‘expressions of a personality that wants to intervene into the politics and the history of his country and in that sense they have a “democratic” origin’.43 With Gramsci’s interpretation as his starting-point, Althusser analyses The Prince both as Machiavelli’s specific political act in his own conjuncture, and as a unique analysis in the ‘practical state’ of the conditions of a specific political act. I have characterised this double viewpoint with the terms ‘practice of The Prince’ and ‘practice of the prince’,44 the former referring to the political intervention Machiavelli carries out with his book in his own conjuncture, and the latter to the political practice of the prince that emerges in the book. Emmanuel Terray hits the nail on the head when he says that ‘Althusser himself returns to these affirmations, pointing out that a manifesto of a moment both analyses a conjuncture and proposes an action’.45 In his short article, in which he refers only to ‘Solitude of Machiavelli’ (Machiavelli and Us had not been published at the time when Terray wrote his article), Terray does not, however, systematically analyse Althusser’s analysis of Machiavelli. Perhaps due to the lack of Machiavelli and Us, Terray also ends up making the excessively polarised conclusion that in the absence of a real Marxist political theory, it is futile to attempt to graft Machiavelli’s political theory onto Marxism, notwithstanding the undeniable similarities. When we come to the role of the masses – who are, after all, as the ‘Reply to John Lewis’ reminds us, the ones who make history, a far from Machiavellian formula – then rejecting this graft becomes inescapable.46 Machiavelli and Us, however, which related to Althusser’s views as to the possibility of political intervention as well as his theory of the ‘conjuncture’, or his comparison between The Prince and The Communist Manifesto, could have shown Terray that there was no basis for such a polarised conclusion. On the contrary, it is important to take seriously Althusser’s view that ‘Machiavelli went a lot further than Marx on a number of issues, for example in trying to conceive the conditions and kinds of political action in its pure form, that is to say at the conceptual level. What struck me again was the radical manner in which he took account of the chance nature of every conjuncture’.47 Despite everything, Terray – along with Matheron, Negri and Tosel – nevertheless remains one of the few commentators to have noted that, for Althusser, The Prince was, besides Lenin’s political writings, a rare example of both a theoretical problematic of a political intervention and a political intervention in and with a text. All this points to the fact that Machiavelli should not be reduced to a single thread in Althusser’s fragmentary and, in many places, contradictory ‘aleatory materialism’.48 Althusser’s interpretation of Machiavelli is an important achievement, which (together with Gramsci’s interpretation) deserves much greater recognition than it has received so far.49 Such recognition should be strived after not simply for academic reasons, but also because Althusser’s ‘philosophy of the conjuncture’ and ‘aleatory’ interpretation of Machiavelli could help us to enact a definitive break with the semi-theoreticist positions that continued to plague Althusser’s ongoing self-criticism.

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Althusser’s thesis in Machiavelli and Us, that Machiavelli was the first thinker who tried consciously and consistently ‘to think in the conjuncture’ is a highly important contribution to and in the Marxist theory of politics. Althusser learned from Machiavelli that the Marxist theory of politics should not be only a general explanation of political struggles and contradictions, but rather should both be an active and conscious intervention into the political-intellectual struggles in an existing conjuncture and also include a theoretical reflection of that intervention. Although Althusser himself never made a systematic analysis of the concrete social-cultural practices of Marxist political theory – unlike Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks – in Machiavelli and Us he offers a brilliant ‘non-theoreticist’ analysis of how Machiavelli undertook his intervention in and by The Prince in his own ‘aleatory’ Italian conjuncture. The theoretical and practical problems and challenges in Machiavelli’s historical conjuncture (early merchant capitalism) – or the problems and challenges in Althusser’s own conjuncture (capitalism in the era of the Cold War) – were clearly different from the problems and challenges that confront contemporary radical thinkers in twenty-first century capitalist societies and the era of neo-liberal globalisation. The Machiavellian-Althusserian problematic of ‘thinking in the conjuncture’ remains an important resource for contemporary struggles, however, because it emphasises that we need not only radical theory, but also radical intellectual practices and theoretical reflections on these practices, if our thoughts are to become ‘effective truths’ in our own conjuncture.

Notes 1 Althusser 1959; Althusser 1972. See Matheron 2006, p. 19; see also Goshgarian 2003, p. xi. Already in his 1975 ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’, Althusser discussed Machiavelli, Hegel, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Kant as individual objects of study (Althusser 1976a, pp. 166–7). The lectures contained in the collection Politique, histoire de Machiavel à Marx, published in 2006, dealing with Montesquieu and other eighteenth-century French philosophers, date from the 1955–6 academic year, the Rousseau lectures from 1965–6 and the Hobbes lectures from 1971–2 (Althusser 2006b, Summary). It was in the 1972–3 academic year that Althusser first gave his lectures on Machiavelli based on the Machiavelli and Us manuscript. 2 Althusser 1972, pp. 9–109; Althusser 1972, pp. 111–60. 3 Althusser 1976a, pp. 166–7. 4 Althusser 1959. 5 Althusser 1972, p. 14. 6 Althusser 1969a, p. 180, 206. 7 It is important to note that Althusser analysed the relationship between philosophy and the class struggle already in his writings from the early 1960s, even though later he indeed described his objectives at the time as being limited by a ‘theoreticist’ tendency. With this he referred, above all, to his definition at that time of philosophy as ‘a theory of theoretical practice’, which he used in particular in Reading ‘Capital’. It is more difficult, however, to discern the tendency towards ‘theoreticism’ in Althusser’s articles from the early 1960s, collected together in For Marx, particularly those in which the object of his analysis is the ‘revolutionary leader Lenin’. 8 Althusser 2006a, p. 287.

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9 See Althusser 2006b. Only the first part of Althusser’s manuscript The Only Materialist Tradition, which focuses on Spinoza, has been published in English (Althusser 1997a). The latter part, which focuses on Machiavelli, is presently only available in French (Althusser 1994a, pp. 488–507). 10 Althusser and Balibar 1970, especially pp. 126–37. On the problematical aspects of Althusser’s critique, see Thomas 2009; and Sotiris 2008 on the political background of Althusser’s critique of Gramsci’s Marxism. 11 Goshgarian 2003, especially pp. xiii–xxii; Goshgarian 2006, especially pp. xiv–xvi and xxxix–xlvii. 12 Goshgarian 2003, pp. xiii–xiv. 13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 128; see Goshgarian 2003, p. xv. 14 See Lewis 2007, pp. 133–51; for Althusser’s letter, see Althusser 2007; see also Goshgarian 2003, pp. xi–xv; and Matheron 2000, pp. 170–5. 15 See Goshgarian 2003, p. xx. 16 Althusser 2006a, p. 253; see also Suchting 2004, p. 4. 17 Goshgarian 2003, p. xi. 18 Althusser 1971a, p. 37. 19 Althusser 1971a, pp. 37–8, 67. 20 Althusser 1971a, p. 16. 21 Althusser 1976a, p. 124. 22 Althusser 1976a, p. 124; see an early formulation (from 1967) in Althusser 2003, p. 217. 23 Althusser 1976a, p. 124n. 19. 24 Althusser 1990a, p. 249; see also Koivisto 1993, p. 63. 25 Machiavelli 1994, Chapter 20. 26 Althusser 1978, pp. 39 and 45. 27 Gramsci 1971, pp. 350–1. 28 Althusser 2006a, pp. 188, 260. 29 Althusser 2006a, pp. 244, 258; see Matheron 1995, pp. 41, 163. 30 Suchting 2004 has systematically mapped the inconsistencies; see also Tosel 2005, pp. 190–5. 31 See Lahtinen 2009. The second edition of Elliott’s Althusser. The Detour of Theory (Elliott 2006) contains a useful, long ‘Postscript’ and a bibliography of the Althusser scholarship undertaken since his death, as well as a bibliography of Althusser’s published writings. 32 Matheron 2001; Terray 1996; Negri 1996a; and Negri 1997. Negri and Hardt’s Empire discuss the Gramscian viewpoint on Machiavelli’s The Prince as a political manifesto, as developed by Althusser in Machiavelli and Us (Hardt and Negri 2000, pp. 63–6). 33 See Morfino 2002, pp. 90–1, 94, 97 102–3; Morfino 2006a, p. 21; Morfino and Pinzola 2005, pp. 152–5; Dinucci 1998, pp. 11–12; Tosel 2005, pp. 173–6; Sato 2007, pp. 198–201; Del Lucchese 2002, p. 62n. 61, where he refers to Althusser’s view on Machiavelli as the ‘first theoretician of the conjuncture’. 34 Rather strangely, I would argue, in two of the most recently published general introductions to Althusser’s work (Montag 2003; Ferretter 2006) little space is given to Althusser’s later thinking, and his interpretation of Machiavelli is completely ignored. 35 Bourdin 2005, pp. 140–2; Moulier Boutang 2005, pp. 163–4; Suchting 2004, pp. 24, 28–31, 34–5, 40, 66; Matheron 1995, pp. 10–14, 21, 39–41; Elliott 1999, pp. xi–xxii. 36 Matheron 2001, pp. 380–4. 37 On the interpretations of the possible Kehre in later Althusser’s thinking, see Sotiris 2008.

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38 Morfino 2002, especially p. 87; see also Morfino 2006a, where he emphasises anti-essentialism as a thread permeating Althusser’s thinking. 39 Lahtinen 2009. 40 See also Koivisto and Lahtinen 2010. 41 Cited in Althusser 1990a, pp. 64–5. 42 Koivisto and Lahtinen 2010, pp. 1509–12. 43 Gramsci 1975, pp. 1928–9. 44 See Lahtinen 2009, Chapters 4.3 and 4.4. 45 Terray 1996, p. 262. 46 Terray 1996, p. 273; French original published in 1993. 47 Althusser 1993d, p. 220. 48 Lahtinen 2009, Chapter 4. 49 Machiavelli and Us has also been almost completely bypassed in Machiavelli scholarship, which in recent decades, at least in the English-speaking academic world, has been one-sidedly dominated by the ‘republicanistic’ interpretation of Skinner and his students. After the publication of Machiavelli and Us, it is clear that the ‘effective truth’ is not the whole truth about the nature of Machiavelli’s thinking and its possible importance. In my book (Lahtinen 2009), I pay attention to the most central problems of Skinner’s interpretation, which unfolds against the background of the interpretations by Althusser (and Gramsci).

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8 Conjuncture, conflict, war: Machiavelli between Althusser and Foucault (1975–6) Warren Montag

I

t is surely not a matter of chance, that is, of underdetermination, that the very possibility of a philosophy of the conjuncture or even a concept of conjuncture, giving theoretical status to a notion that had hitherto existed almost exclusively in a practical state, was itself conjunctural, posed as a problem and as a question only under very specific conditions. In fact, it is tempting to say that this moment was more an interval between conjunctures than a conjuncture, the moment that the revolutionary tide of 1968 had not only reached its highest point, but had begun to recede. If there is a commonplace lag between practice and the theory that never quite catches up with it, the lag was of short duration. Marxism and the organisations in which it was incarnated had, with few exceptions, begun a long period of decline and eventual collapse. A long wave of revolutionary challenge had given way to a period of reaction from which we have not yet begun to emerge, and mobilisation had given way to demobilisation, to the inevitable theoretical disorientation, and not simply retreat, but what we might call philosophical panic and flight into the most imbecilic forms of economic and political liberalism. But the very idea of an ‘interval’ between conjunctures, as if conjuncture were another word for historical period, would correspond precisely to the notion of history that Althusser severely criticised as early as Reading Capital: the entire problematic of periodisation, consisting of dividing time, understood as a continuum, into a ‘succession of one dialectical totality after another’.4 The phrase ‘dialectical totality’ refers not only to the ‘contemporaneity of time’, in which ‘all the elements of the whole coexist in one and the same time’, and ‘each expressing the others and each expressing the social totality that contains them’, but even to the very idea, apparently so central to structuralism, of the synchronic, a system whose elements are not only entirely contemporaneous to each other, but ‘conspire together’, not only as elements but as functions of the totality that defines them.5 Althusser’s critique of the dominant notion of historical time, while noted by many commentators, failed even to raise significant doubts about this notion, and we cannot begin to count the number of critics who, by way either of explanation or attack, insisted that Althusser took

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the side of synchrony against diachrony and therefore of structure against history. In part, this can be explained as ‘theoretical resistance’ to a threat that activated the defenses of philosophy and social thought. At stake was not only the seemingly inescapable, and therefore necessary, idea of the linear continuity of time, but more strikingly and provocatively, the very notion of the present and, therefore, also of presence as ‘the absolute horizon’6 beyond which nothing can be thought or known. The consequences, not only theoretical but practical and political, of the conception of what we might call the presence of the present or the present understood as presence – or, to use Althusser’s phrase, the co-presence of its elements – were serious. Such postulates as ‘nothing runs ahead of its time’ or ‘humanity only poses those problems for which solutions already exist’, guided generations of revolutionaries to failure after failure in which teleological gradualism alternated with an eschatological or messianic perspective in which faith replaced analysis. In fact, Althusser’s detour through Machiavelli stops just short of a reversal of Marx’s dictum, suggesting that humankind regularly if not necessarily poses those problems to itself for which there exist no solutions: the absent Prince who is not even potentially or possibly (but not actually) present, that is, an impossible Prince, an impossible solution. It is around this precise point that Althusser’s detour though Machiavelli allows him to return to the question of historical time posed in Reading Capital. The present can no longer be described by the term presence, or even as the temporally distant presence of possibility, which then poses the problem of the transition from the possible to the actual. Instead, the conjuncture, according to Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli, is a specific relation not between the actual and the possible, but a relation within an actuality without residue or remainder between the antagonistic forces that constitute it. Significantly, both Althusser and Foucault produced works – major works – in the wake of 1968 (I say the ‘wake’ as if a ship had sailed off, abandoning them – and us) that were read in that conjuncture as precisely a denial of conjuncturality, theories of ideological apparatuses or the disciplines that were driven to ever more efficient forms of subjection by the very resistances that sought to overthrow them, but which only succeeded in consolidating their power with a dialectical cunning. These works appeared to many readers to offer a perverse guarantee of the submission of bodies and forces. One could object, as I have elsewhere, that such interpretations can arise only from the most selective of readings. As Althusser himself said of Marx’s Capital, however, we read only those ‘fragments which the conjuncture had “selected” for us’7 and it is as if the conjuncture had selected those fragments of Althusser’s and Foucault’s texts that tended to suppress or rule out the very idea of conjuncture. Further, we could understand the ideological state-apparatuses essay as a ‘bending of the stick’ away from the ultra-left voluntarism that flourished immediately after the events of May, and the work on Machiavelli as a ‘correction’ of this correction, and therefore as a further bending of the stick in the opposite direction, not towards voluntarism, but away from functionalism and defeatism and towards a theory of the conjuncture. In a similar way, Foucault’s excursus on power in the section on method in the History of Sexuality was undoubtedly a response to the prevailing readings of Discipline and Punish. He proceeds, indeed, by citing in the form of questions to be answered by him the criticism often aimed at his text: ‘Must it be said that we are necessarily “in” power, that we do not escape it, that there is no absolute exteriority to it because we would be inescapably submitted to its law? Or that history being the ruse of reason, power itself would be the ruse of history – that which always wins?’8 It was

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in response to these questions that Foucault would not only underscore the multiplicity of confrontations and sites of resistance that characterise the ‘complex strategic situation’ in a given society, but would offer a definition of ‘revolution’ as the ‘strategic codification of’ these points of resistance, a rare but not unknown ‘radical rupture’.9 Althusser would go even further: ‘Machiavelli does not think the problem of national unity in terms of the conjuncture; it is the conjuncture itself that poses negatively, but objectively, the problem of Italian national unity’.10 Here, he returns to the question of the laws or logic of history and their exceptions that he had explored in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in For Marx, only to conclude that the exceptions – the success of the Russian and the failure of the German revolutions – cannot be understood in relation to the law or logic whose necessity they have somehow eluded. Instead, Althusser declares that the exception is the rule or the law, a law of the exception. In the case of Machiavelli, as understood by Althusser, there can exist no logic of national development of which a given conjuncture would be an expression or emanation: imperfect, degraded, and so on. In fact, there can no longer be a deeper or structural history outside of or beyond the conjuncture. To search for this other history, this other time, is the functional equivalent of seeking the signs of God’s will in terrestrial matters. It is here, in this element of Machiavelli’s thought, that Althusser confronts and takes his distance from Gramsci (specifically, in The Modern Prince), that other great theoretician of the conjuncture. For Gramsci, the notion of conjuncture understood as an account of the ‘different levels [gradi] of the relations of force’ is insufficient,11 above all because all such relations of force depend on the relation between the infrastructure and superstructure. By understanding this primary relation, one can, and indeed must, ‘distinguish organic movements (relatively permanent)’ from movements that may be termed ‘conjunctural’ (and which appear as occasional, immediate and almost accidental). The conjunctural is the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘ephemeral’; its conflicts leave the basic nature of a society untouched, and a strategy oriented to these conflicts is doomed to irrelevance – it is, at best, the realm of the tactical.12 For analysis to focus on the conjunctural in place of the organic is a profound error, leading to economism, which takes superficial ‘order’ as a sign that the great historical contradictions have not yet matured, and voluntarism, which mistakes the ephemeral crisis for a revolutionary situation. In contrast, to grasp the organic level means that one can understand the apparently paradoxical endurance of fully-‘matured’ historical contradictions, which, far from ushering in the new epoch, instead give rise to an enormous effort to conserve and defend the very order in which these contradictions took shape, an effort that is not only successful in the short term, but for decades. The obvious question, here, which Gramsci understandably did not pose, a fact that links him to Machiavelli and his unposed questions, is, if the ‘old’ order is able to persist for decades after the maturation of its essential contradictions, then why not, at an extreme, at least in theory, for centuries, millennia, and so on? To forestall just such a question, the question to which everything in his analysis points, Gramsci retreats to Marx’s formula: ‘Mankind only sets for itself such tasks as it can solve, since . . . the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist’. The Modern Prince is precisely that entity able to transmute the potential into the actual. For Althusser, Machiavelli’s New Prince or Gramsci’s Modern Prince are condemned to a merely conjunctural existence: there is no other, organic, realm to which they can appeal or whose knowledge could guide their practice and guarantee the efficacy of their actions or interventions. Their place is in the conjuncture, ‘in its very texture, made of opposing and

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intermingled forces’; but this place, their place, is an ‘empty place’. 13 This empty place [lieu vide] is, however, not a void, nor is it even empty at all. On the contrary: it is ‘always already occupied’.14 Further, it is not even a point in space, because ‘the space of politics has no points and is not a space except metaphorically’.15 Althusser leaves no empty space or gap in the conjuncture through which an event might arrive like a miracle conjured or simply foreseen by the Prince: even the void itself is voided. And it is here, at this point in Althusser’s analysis of Machiavelli, the point at which it is suspended, leaving Althusser’s readers to reach diametrically-opposed conclusions, that Foucault resumes the discussion, as if in continuation of it. He reminds the reader that the analysis of power has remained ‘fascinated’ by the ideas of sovereignty and law (a fascination that has grown immeasurably stronger since Foucault’s death, through such figures as Schmitt and his interpreters), while the ‘field of force relations’ which might precisely empty sovereign decision of all but a verbal existence has been repressed from the theoretical field of vision. ‘One of the few’ to escape this blindness was, according to Foucault, Machiavelli, who ‘thought the power of the Prince in terms of relations of force’. Now, Foucault declares, it is necessary ‘to go one step further and move beyond the character [le personage] of the Prince and decipher the mechanism of power on the basis of a strategy immanent in the relations of force’.16 The term personnage, properly speaking, signifies neither the (objective) ‘person’ nor the (subjective) ‘personality’ or ‘character’ of the Prince, but instead reduces the Prince to nothing more than a (hitherto necessary) fictional character in the drama of political theory. Such a reduction, perhaps better understood as a translation, has the effect of demonstrating that the figure of the Prince has served as an anthropomorphic, individualising and thus inadequate concept of what Foucault calls, very much in the spirit of Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli, a (and not the) strategy immanent in a conflict of forces. The Prince, however, does not, for all that, disappear: it is the name of that always composite coalition of forces that is, strictly speaking, not the cause but the effect of this strategy, nothing more than its selfreflection or, to use Foucault’s expression, its codification. Foucault’s brief comment on Machiavelli also sheds considerable light on an idea that might initially appear far not only from Machiavelli or Foucault, for that matter, but also from the notion of conjuncture, and was often taken as its opposite: the idea of structural causality proposed by Althusser in Reading Capital. It was, perhaps, only in speaking of Machiavelli – and, therefore, at a safe distance from the themes of revolutions betrayed, deferred and abandoned – that Althusser could say openly that historical necessity does not exist prior to or outside the conjuncture, which would then be understood as its imperfect or degraded expression. Rather, historical necessity exists in and only in its conjunctural realisation. The necessity or cause of the conjuncture is ‘structural’, ‘the structure of the conjuncture’, absent from, as Althusser maintained, or immanent in (to follow Foucault) its effects. Thus, conjuncture is not the name of a random or haphazard list of elements, determinations or circumstances; it is, instead, the codification of multiple relations of force. The ‘system’, as fragile and unstable as a system can be, that these forces form – in their very antagonisms – determines the movements of displacement and condensation that ensure that ‘the solitary hour of the last instance’ never comes. If Machiavelli served as Althusser’s privileged interlocutor, he emerges in Foucault’s work as something like a catalyst: his theoretical presence (or immanence) produces a transformation and allows something new to be thought and said, while his absence allows the persistence

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of the already thought. It is precisely this presence or absence that explains the important differences that separate the theorisation of power in the History of Sexuality from that which dominates the lectures posthumously published as Society Must be Defended (both written around the same time in 1976). While both texts share a rejection of the model of power grounded in sovereignty and its juridical legitimation, as well as a rejection of the repressionmodel of power, they diverge sharply in their understanding of power as ‘a perpetual battle’. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault explains that power must be understood as ‘the multiplicity of relations of force that are immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens or reverses them’.17 Further, this model of struggle, not simply of a relation of forces that might result in a homeostasis, but of ‘mobile’, ‘unstable’ confrontations without any possibility of a lasting equilibrium, Foucault argues, may provide ‘a grid of intelligibility of the social order’, which is in turn nothing more than the ‘complex strategic situation’ of which a given society is composed. In such a space, ‘binary and massive divisions’ occur only ‘occasionally (parfois). But more often, it is a matter of mobile and transitory points of resistance, introducing into a society cleavages that are displaced, fracturing unities and inciting regroupments, passing through individuals themselves, breaking them down and rebuilding them, marking irreducible regions in them, in their bodies and minds’.18 It is predictably at this point, a mere three sentences later, that Foucault invokes Machiavelli, ‘one of few’ to conceive the power of the Prince, not on the stable foundations of nature or right, but on the ever-shifting terrain of force relations in which the Prince or sovereign is nothing more than the strategy that allows him to rule. It would be easy, and perhaps inevitable, to assume that when in Society Must Be Defended Foucault writes that ‘power is war’, and that he regards war as ‘the eventual principle of the analysis of relations of power’, he is simply restating the theses cited above and that there exists a fundamental continuity between the methodological statements in History of Sexuality and Society Must be Defended. There is perhaps no better index of the fundamental difference between these texts and their conceptions of power and society than the discrepancy in their treatment of Machiavelli. If in History of Sexuality, he was ‘one of the rare’ thinkers to conceive sovereign power (the power of the Prince) as nothing more or less than an effect of an unstable field of force relations (always in the plural in History of Sexuality, while this is hardly ever the case in Society Must be Defended) whose very boundary cannot be fixed, he is named (along with Hobbes, with whom Foucault often couples him) in the first lecture in Society Must be Defended only in order to secure his exclusion from the genealogy of the ‘theory of war as the principal of the functioning of power’ (theirs are ‘false paternities’).19 Later, in the third lecture, the audience is again warned that though when we think of the ‘power/war relation, power/ force relations’,20 we often think of Machiavelli and Hobbes, we should not do so. Foucault devotes significant attention to Hobbes’s notion of war as the original condition of humanity: the war of all against all is not just a war, but the war, the war of which all other (subsequent) wars are merely episodes. However, Foucault cautions, this war is not a war in the ordinary sense of the term. There is no violence or bloodshed; it is that general condition, like stormy weather characterised not by the presence of rain and wind, but only by the increased likelihood of their occurrence, in which pre-emptive ‘representations’ both deter aggression and stimulate renewed hostile representations on the part of the ‘aggressor’.21 In an important sense, this play of representations is worse than actual violence, in that nothing

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can be settled or resolved and there can be no distinction between aggressor and victim or winner and loser. This is precisely the savage equality that makes civilization impossible: to build is to invite plunder; destitution (or at least the appearance of destitution) becomes the surest guarantee of survival. It is to escape this condition of fear and misery that individuals will freely consent to enter into an agreement with each other to confer their rights of self-government on the sovereign. Whether this original consent is given before or after the establishment of a sovereign state, and whether that state is established through institution or conquest, is irrelevant. By choosing to continue living, one has in effect consented to subjection. Foucault remarks that, while Hobbes’s words might seem destined to shock his readers, he reassures them with the discourse of rights and contract.22 What, then, is to be said about Machiavelli, who does nothing to reassure his readers, and for whom the discourse of right and law, like the discourse of morality, serve only to obscure la verità effetuale della cosa, the reality of the relations of force that alone determine the meaning of the conjuncture, the singular essence of the present? The answer is simple: according to Society Must Be Defended, Machiavelli (who wrote a book, his favourite book in fact, on war) has nothing to say about war, or at least ‘the war in civil society’.23 Machiavelli writes about and from the point of view of the Prince; the partisans of social war regard ‘the Prince as an illusion, an instrument, or, at best, an enemy’.24 For Machiavelli, according to the lecture of 18 February 1976, ‘the relation of force [note that ‘relation’ is in the singular] was essentially described as a political technique that had to be put in the hands of the sovereign’.25 One week later, in the lecture of 25 February 1976, Foucault acknowledges the criticism that such a remark might elicit and outlines his response to this criticism: ‘[Y]ou might object that Machiavelli did not just give the Prince advice – whether it is serious or ironic is a different question – about how to manage and organise power and that the text of The Prince is full of historical allusions. You might say that Machiavelli also wrote the Discourses. But for Machiavelli, history is simply a source of examples, a sort of collection of jurisprudence or of tactical models for the exercise of power’.26 What is significant, here, is not the inadequacy of Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli, but rather the theoretical effects of the exclusion of Machiavelli from the theorisation of social conflict in Society Must Be Defended, especially in relation to History of Sexuality. What does this exclusion allow or compel Foucault to do, and what does it prevent him from doing? Everything would seem to condense around the question of war, or perhaps the relation of war to power conceived as a field of force relations. We must acknowledge at the outset that the question of war, especially social war, is not simply a historical question, one possible way of analysing power; he announces very clearly in the second lecture that he seeks to investigate the history of the concept of war precisely because he intends to use it as the ‘principle of analysis of the relations of power: can we find in bellicose relations, in the model of war in the schema of struggle or struggles, a principle to help us understand and analyse political power in terms of war, struggles and confrontations’.27 Foucault then proposes a five-year plan for his research: ‘for the next five years it will be war, struggle, the army’.28 The plan, of course, was never realised, not so much because Foucault reached an impasse but because, at least in Society Must Be Defended, by virtue of his line of inquiry he produced the very theoretical obstacle that prevented him from moving forwards in the direction outlined in Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality.

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Let us begin by noting that the word ‘war’ occurs exactly three times, and even then only in a single paragraph (once with quotation marks) in the entire section on ‘Method’ in History of Sexuality. And although the paragraph is similar in certain respects to several passages found in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault quite strikingly takes his distance from Clausewitz (whose name does not appear in History of Sexuality) and his theory of war: ‘Should we turn the expression around, then, and say that politics is war pursued by other means? If we still wish to maintain a separation between war and politics, perhaps we should postulate rather that this multiplicity of force relations can be coded – in part, but never totally – either in the form of “war” or in the form of “politics”; this would imply two different strategies (but the one always liable to switch into the other) for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable and tense force relations’.29 The question with which Foucault begins the passage in fact represents an interrogation of what was advanced as a proposition in Society Must Be Defended: ‘At this point, we can invert Clausewitz’s proposition and say that politics is the continuation of war by other means’.30 The inverted proposition leads to some surprising conclusions: ‘power relations, as they function in a society like ours, are essentially anchored in a certain relationship of force [rapport de force] that was established in and through war at a given historical moment that can be historically specified’.31 Here, power relations (in the plural), even if they are not reducible to, are nevertheless ‘anchored in’ [ont essentialment pour point d’ancrage] a single relationship of force established by war. And there is no question about the nature of war in Society Must Be Defended. Foucault repeats the formulation throughout the lectures: ‘the binary schema of war’. We cannot miss the functional resemblance between Foucault’s proposals and the mechanistic Marxism that he so vehemently rejects. Here, a political superstructure is anchored in a base, itself characterised by the struggle between two antagonistic forces, locked in a single combat that determines the plurality of lesser struggles floating above its anchorage. He goes as far as to entertain the following (Machiavellian) objection: ‘You will say to me that we cannot from the outset confuse power relations with relations of war. Of course not. I am simply taking it as an extreme case to the extent that war can be regarded as the point of maximum tension, or as force relations laid bare [la nudité mê’me des rapports de force]’.32 Thus war, far from being the intensely overdetermined result of a singular concatenation of force relations, becomes the hidden truth of what would appear to be irreducibly diverse and unequal, the binary organisation that lies concealed under the appearance of heterogeneous dispersion. No longer the merely contingent outcome of a multiplicity of unstable relations (in the plural) of forces (also in the plural), the binary opposition is constitutive of the theory of war in civil society: ‘the war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode, is basically a race war’.33 If Foucault is right, Machiavelli, the thinker of both war and politics as strategies ‘for integrating these unbalanced, heterogeneous, unstable and tense force relations’,34 has no place in such an exposition. While one could imagine and in fact find in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries discourses on race and race struggle that do not correspond to any simply binary division (early modern Spain, totally absent from the account of the discourse on race war, provides a telling example), Foucault insists that: ‘[The] social body is basically articulated around two races. It is this idea that this clash between two races runs through society from top to bottom that we see being formulated as early as the seventeenth century. And it forms

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the matrix for all the forms beneath which we can we can find the face and mechanisms of social warfare’.35 Social warfare, by the nineteenth century race war, is re-written as class war and the irreducible struggle – inscribed in the physical (if not biological in the modern sense) differences that defined the contending races, whose conflict could never reach resolution, but only the alternation of conquest and submission – becomes a struggle between social classes, whose antagonism was purely historical and as such susceptible to the resolution (which Foucault calls dialectical) represented by classless society. It is precisely the notion of race war’s antagonism without any possibility of reconciliation, in which the brute fact of conquest and occupation established a relation of force that had to be maintained by the victors and could never be forgotten by the vanquished, that for Foucault rendered it superior theoretically to its degradation into class war, with its dialectical pretensions. For Foucault, race war must of course be carefully distinguished from what he calls modern ‘biologico-social racism’, which, far from imagining two originally distinct races, has its origin in ‘the splitting of a single race into a super-race and a sub-race’,36 even if modern racism will reinscribe the discourse of race war in the campaign to exterminate its ‘vital enemies’. ‘For the next five years it will be war, struggle, the army’.37 We know that such a programme was never realised and that even as he explored the theory of social war, he admitted to finding it ‘boring’ or troubling. The idea of the binary structure of social war expressed in a perpetual or nearly perpetual relation of force that defined society as such renders the idea of conjuncture, as it emerges in the encounter between Althusser, Machiavelli and the Foucault of History of Sexuality, unthinkable. In fact, it confers a certain continuity on the society in which it reigns: all its phenomena can be referred back to this essential binary opposition. We are left, then, with a paradox: the conjuncture that made it possible to think conjuncturality no longer simply as a concatenation of events, but as a multiplicity of force relations, the conjuncture that Foucault would refer to in his opening lecture in Society Must Be Defended as the period from 1956 or 1966 to 1976, a period characterised by the ‘criticability’ of things and the ‘friability’ of the terrain, suffered its own shift in the balance of forces. There is something extraordinary in these few passages: Foucault does not say, or does not only say, that what he had written previously (on power) was wrong and, therefore, could not or should not be continued; he refuses the gesture of renunciation so common in that year of 1976 (when ex-revolutionaries became ‘new philosophers’). Instead, he says, in so many words, with greater courage and lucidity, speaking from a point that is not a point, on a line that is not a line, a non-line of demarcation that cuts across present and future, that it is not or will no longer be possible to think what we have thought, as if the theoretical ground, once so fertile and pliable, was turning to stone beneath his feet and things once open to our gaze were closing in on themselves in muteness and opacity.

Notes 1 ‘Analysis of Situations. Relations of Force’ (Gramsci 1971, p. 180). 2 Balibar 2009, p. 14. 3 Foucault 1978, p. 93.

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4 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 94. 5 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 96. 6 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95. 7 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 13. 8 Foucault 1978, p. 95. 9 Foucault 1978, p. 96. 10 Althusser 1999, p. 18. 11 Gramsci 1971, p. 175. 12 Gramsci 1971, p. 178. 13 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 14 Althusser 1999, p. 20. 15 Althusser 1999, p. 21. 16 Foucault 1978, p. 97. 17 Foucault 1978, p. 97. 18 Foucault 1978, p. 96. 19 Foucault 1997, p. 19. 20 Foucault 1997, p. 19. 21 Foucault 1997, p. 19. 22 Foucault 1997, p. 98. 23 Foucault 1997, p. 19. 24 Foucault 1997, p. 59. 25 Foucault 1997, p. 164. 26 Foucault 1997, p. 169. 27 Foucault 1997, p. 23. 28 Foucault 1997, p. 23. 29 Foucault 1978, p. 93. 30 Foucault 1997, p. 15. 31 Foucault 1997, p. 15. 32 Foucault 1997, p. 46. 33 Foucault 1997, pp. 59–60. 34 Foucault 1978, p. 93. 35 Foucault 1997, p. 60. 36 Foucault 1997, p. 61. 37 Foucault 1997, p. 18.

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9 Althusser’s last encounter: Gramsci Peter D. Thomas

‘A subterranean current’

I

n his final texts, Louis Althusser nominated a ‘repressed’ and ‘almost completely unknown materialist tradition in the history of philosophy’ to which he signalled his intention to affiliate his final philosophical thoughts.1 He described this tradition as the ‘underground current of the materialism of the encounter’: it included, among others, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza and Hobbes, the Rousseau ‘of the second discourse’, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida.2 It is in relation to these thinkers that the so-called ‘late’ Althusser’s philosophy has often been discussed in the years of its initial reception, as commentators have sought to reconstruct a coherent tendency, if not system, from largely posthumously published texts.3 Yet there is a strong case to be made that these philosophical passions were, in the last instance, overdetermined by another more directly political problematic, not always visible in the letter of Althusser’s texts but discernable everywhere in its effects upon them: namely, Althusser’s encounter with Gramsci. More than any other figure in the Marxist tradition except for its founders (and arguably, even more than Engels), Gramsci was Althusser’s persistent agonist, the other major interlocutor of Marx with whom, above all others, he repeatedly felt the need ‘to settle accounts’.4 On numerous occasions in different phases of his development, Althusser returned to Gramsci in order to gain new resources and perspectives in changed conjunctures. Thus, his famous reflections on the wake of May 1968, partially published in English as ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, offered an Althusserian ‘translation’ of the Gramscian notion of a ‘hegemonic apparatus’;5 during the debates in the PCF in the mid to late 1970s on the thesis of the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the later ‘Crisis of Marxism’ announced by Althusser himself, Gramsci, and a particular Eurocommunist interpretation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, were continually interrogated in a series of texts; the remarkable ‘Marx in his limits’, which may be regarded as Althusser’s ‘last political will and testament’, tellingly breaks off in the middle of a discussion of Gramsci’s theory of the state and the ‘autonomy of politics’.6 At the foundation of this encounter, or at least one of its first significant, textually explicit traces, lies the chapter ‘Marxism is not an historicism’ of Reading Capital. The central theoretical propositions of this chapter defined what came to be known as ‘classical’ Althusserianism. Given the importance accorded to the critique of Gramsci here, as representative of a theoretical

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problematic that went far beyond him to include most initiatives in Western Marxism, it would not be inaccurate to regard Reading Capital, viewed from a certain perspective, as an attempt at an Anti-Gramsci, or at least as the conscious negation of the theoretical and political consequences of certain supposedly Gramscian theses. Above all, Althusser attacked Gramsci’s proposal that the philosophy of praxis was ‘the absolute historicism’ (read by Althusser with the indefinite rather than definite article).7 Fundamentally, Althusser argued, the philosophy of praxis involved a relapse into a pre-Marxist, ‘expressivist’ notion of the social totality, founded upon a conception of the temporal present as an essentially unified and coherent ‘presence’ of Geist, expressed and omnipresent in all of its component parts. The temporal present itself was grasped as merely an ‘essential section [coupe d’essence], [a] ‘vertical break’ in historical time . . . such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence . . . which thus become immediately legible in them’.8 Given its fame and influence, there is little need to rehearse Althusser’s full argument here. What is particularly interesting for the purposes of this study is the nature of the relation that Althusser argues links Gramsci’s ‘absolute historicism’ to Hegel’s ‘absolute knowledge’. For the Althusser of Reading Capital, both Gramsci and Hegel posit an integral and expressive relationship between ‘temporality’ and ‘philosophy’, whereas a properly Marxist concept of philosophy should rigorously refuse its reduction to mere temporal trace. He argued that If Marxism is an absolute historicism, it is because it historicizes even what was peculiarly the theoretical and practical negation of history for Hegelian historicism: the end of history, the unsurpassable present of Absolute Knowledge . . . There is no longer any privileged present in which the totality becomes visible and legible in an ‘essential section’, in which consciousness and science coincide. The fact that there is no Absolute Knowledge – which is what makes the historicism absolute – means that Absolute Knowledge itself is historicized. If there is no longer any privileged present, all presents are privileged to the same degree. It follows that historical time possesses in each of its presents a structure which allows each present the ‘essential section’ of contemporaneity . . . Hence the project of thinking Marxism as an (absolute) historicism automatically unleashes a logically necessary chain reaction which tends to reduce and flatten out the Marxist totality into a variation of the Hegelian totality.9 Most damagingly, it also tended to reduce the distinction between Marxism, in its ‘scientific’ dimensions, and other conceptions of the world. According to Althusser, Gramsci had not understood the importance of the early Althusserian distinction between science and ideology for the constitution of a genuinely Marxist philosophy. Emerging from an epistemological rupture with a previous ideological problematic, the qualitatively new science of historical materialism laid the foundation for the elaboration of a qualitatively new philosophy (dialectical materialism), which would be capable of defending the scientific from the (ever-present) threat of the return of the (superannuated but still effective) ideological.10 Gramsci, having failed to acknowledge this distinction, and having furthermore reduced science to a mere ‘superstructure or a historical category’ which ‘ultimately [reduced] science to history as its “essence”’,11 could not do more than think the ‘relationship between Marxist scientific theory and real history according to the model of a relationship of direct expression’.12 Marxist theory

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was thus unable to be distinguished from the history from which it organically emerged.13 The specificity of Marxism – its unique triangular articulation of politics, philosophy and science – was annulled. ‘The theory of history’ was collapsed into ‘real history’, ‘the object of knowledge’ was confused with ‘the real object’, and dialectical materialism disappeared into historical materialism.14 Unwittingly, Gramsci had thus reduced Marxist philosophy to a mere reflection of its time, structurally homologous with any other ‘organic ideology’, according to the proposition that ‘nothing can run ahead of its time’,15 Althusser’s not entirely accurate gloss on Hegel’s oft-misquoted proposition that philosophy is ‘its own time comprehended in thoughts [Gedanken]’.16 ‘The present’, Althusser argued, in both Hegel and, following him, in Gramsci, ‘constitutes the absolute horizon of all knowing’.17

‘An almost completely unknown materialist tradition’ This critique stimulated a wide-ranging debate, not least of all in the Italian and French Communist Parties.18 In its turn, it gave rise to a more detailed philological engagement with the Prison Notebooks, resulting in the revision (for example, Christine Buci-Glucksmann) or substantial correction (for example, André Tosel and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, among others) of Althusser’s theses and judgments.19 Nevertheless, the image of Gramsci presented in Reading Capital won, and continues to enjoy, wide assent, to different extents in the different national Marxist theoretical cultures. Its success does not consist primarily in the continuing authority of specific ‘classical’ Althusserian theses (many of which were soon amended, substantially modified or even abandoned by Althusser himself). Rather, it can be viewed in a widespread acceptance of Althusser’s characterisation and assessment of Gramsci’s position as a strong form of a ‘weak’ historicism, and its concomitant marginalisation in contemporary philosophical debates. Given Gramsci’s prominent presence in so many other fields of scholarly enquiry, from cultural and literary studies, linguistics and anthropology to sociology, political science and history, the minor role played by the Prison Notebooks in both Marxist and non-Marxist philosophical discussions today is particularly conspicuous. In this sense, Althusser’s offensive achieved its primary objective. Despite the sophistication and influence of Althusser’s critique, however, recent philological work founded on Gerratana’s 1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks has demonstrated the extent to which it ascribes positions to Gramsci that are not to be found in his texts.20 In particular, Gramsci’s notion of the philosophy of praxis as ‘the absolute historicism’ does not reduce Marxism to a mere expression of the Hegelian matrix from which, in part, it emerged. On the contrary, with this critical appropriation of this central Crocean term, Gramsci aimed to indicate precisely the historical and theoretical distance that separated Marx’s thought both from Hegel’s and from that of his latter-day imitators. This characterisation was founded upon an historical analysis of historicism as both philosophical doctrine and political current in the ‘long nineteenth century’; Marxism was posited as the ‘absolute’ form of this tradition not according to a model of absolute knowledge, in which it would function as a finally attained consciousness of history which, qua consciousness, allows the present to be fully contemporaneous with and transparent to itself, but rather in the sense that it represented a possible resolution of the contradictions of the previous historicist tradition. Rather than the

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Hegelianising, emanationist model of the social totality presented by Althusser, Gramsci’s complex identification of philosophy and history, under the aegis of politics, instead presupposes an anti-essentialist theory of translatability and the necessary non-contemporaneity of the present. In turn, this gives rise to a definition of philosophy not as the expression of an essence (the temporal and logical priority of which would guarantee the unity of the ‘present’s’ manifold expressions, including – pre-eminently – its philosophical realisation), but as a particularly intense form of organisation – and potentially, transformation – of this constitutive heterogeneity. Influenced by his university studies in historical linguistics, and stimulated above all by Lenin’s reflections on the difficulty of ‘translating’ the language of the Russian Revolution into the languages of Western Europe,21 Gramsci expands the concept of translation beyond strictly linguistic phenomena to embrace a much wider range of social practices. The famous couplets of the Prison Notebooks – East and West, civil society and political society, the national and international, war of position and war of manoeuvre – are all thought in terms of productive mutual ‘transposition’ between different registers. ‘Translatability’ also gradually comes to assume the status of a central organising perspective of Gramsci’s philosophical reflections in the Prison Notebooks, indicating a relational and thus anti-essentialist methodology of philosophical research.22 For Gramsci, the relationship between philosophy, politics and history was not to be thought in terms of a hierarchy of casual relations, but in terms of their dialectical interpenetration, each comprehending the others in their own particular modes. Above all, the notion of translatability is central to Gramsci’s notion of the relationship of theory and practice, which he posits not as a simple unity of theory and practice (such a unity being premised upon their prior and continuing distinction), but as the process of their active identification through the intensification of relations of translation. Theory and practice thus come to be immanent to each other through a process of progressive experimentation, as the practical dimensions of theory, as a form of highly mediated organisation, encounter the theoretical dimensions of emergent practices, conceived as new forms of organisation in nuce. This perspective also provided Gramsci with the outlines of a decentred conception of social formations that can legitimately be regarded as both a precursor and alternative formulation of the key Althusserian concept of ‘overdetermination’. ‘Translation’, in this perspective, is an eminently political practice, in the sense of a transformative instance of constitutive relationality that cannot be reduced to a process of originary or retrospective unification. Grasped in its fullest sense, it involves the construction of lines of communication between different practices whose relations are not premised either on interiority, in the sense of an identical essence or an ‘Ursprache’ immanently present in all, or on exteriority, in which discrete essences confront each other in subject-object relations. For all of their similarity, however, there remains a significant difference between the Gramscian and Althusserian formulations: while the ‘economic’ continued to occupy a central position in the early Althusser’s conception of ‘regions’ of a social formation (and thus provided a functional, if not essential, founding instance), Gramsci instead emphasises the transformative relationality of politics as the decisive point of mediation of practices that are comprehended, not in spatial terms, but in their historical movement, without origin or goal, as intensifications of relations of domination and subalternity. Due in large part to this emphasis upon the primacy of difference, nothing could be further from the native temper of Gramsci’s thought than the notion of an ‘essential section’, an

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expressivist totality, or an homogenous present contemporaneous with itself. Althusser’s mistake here may have been to have lazily assumed, perhaps prompted by the hearsay he later admitted had overdetermined his reading of Gramsci, that the Prison Notebooks had uncritically taken over precisely this element of Croce’s thought that they are at such pains to refute.23 For Croce, the present is truly and necessarily identical with itself, contemporaneous in all the component parts of an omnipresent Spirito that contains (synchronic) ‘distinctions’ but not (diachronic) ‘real differences’. Croce’s Spirito – unlike at least one version of Hegel’s Geist, which depends upon precisely that which it is not – can tolerate nothing exterior to itself.24 Croce’s thought, unlike Gramsci’s, presupposes a conception of the present as ‘an “essential section”’; indeed, the Althusserian concept of an ‘essential section’ seems almost designed to capture precisely the difference between Croce’s ostensibly ‘immanentist’ ‘reform’ of Hegelianism, and Gramsci’s emphasis upon the dimensions of Hegelianism (‘especially for its attempt to overcome the traditional conceptions of “idealism” and “materialism’’’) that could be re-proposed in a more strongly non-metaphysical and political register.25 In reality, Gramsci conducted an unrelenting struggle against Croce’s ‘diluted’ absolute historicism, arguing that its metaphysical ‘residues’ were not incidental or contingent but constituted the metaphysical ‘hard core’ of his research programme.26 Gramsci pursued this critique on two fronts: on the one hand, he argued that Croce’s ‘history of freedom’ was a tendentious history of the present written from the standpoint of the victors, a ‘history according to plan’ [storia a disegno], ‘ably disguised’;27 on the other hand, he pointed to the unbridgeable abyss between Croce’s categories and the history they claimed to comprehend. His thought remained speculative, and in this sense Gramsci could argue that the speculative ‘residue’ of theology and metaphysics in Croce’s thought ‘is not a residue, it is a “whole”, it is the entire method of philosophising, and for it any affirmation of “historicism” is vain, because it is a case of speculative “historicism”, of the “concept” of history and not of history’.28 In Gramsci’s positive alternative to this neo-idealist conception, however, ‘the present’ is necessarily non-identical with itself, composed of numerous ‘times’ that do not coincide but are constituted by their relational difference. Rather than expressive of an essence equally present in all practices, the present for Gramsci is precisely an ensemble of those practices in their different temporalities, struggling to assert their primacy and thus to articulate the present as an achieved rather than originary unity. This notion of the constitutive non-contemporaneity of the present is one of the fundamental themes of the Prison Notebooks. It is explored in a variety of forms, ranging from the complexity of composite bodies on a mass scale to the ‘molecular’ composition of personal identity and individuality. One of the central forms in which this dislocation is played out occurs at the level of the constitution of the ‘person’ [la persona] trapped in a condition of subalternity to statal forms of organisation, stability and regulation – the Gramscian alternative to a theory of the subject, whether derived from a philosophy of consciousness or regarded as the necessary foundation for political agency. Such a bizarrely composed personality ‘contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over’.29 Compiling an inventory of the ‘infinity of traces’ of the historical process that constitute such an incoherent present is the starting point for elaborating a critical knowledge that would be capable, not of mastering these contradictions in an act of self-consciousness,30 but of positing itself as an ‘element of contradiction’.31

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For Gramsci, language itself gives ample evidence of the fractured nature of historical time, insofar as its constitutively metaphorical nature reveals layers or sediments of different historical experiences sitting together in an uncomfortable modus vivendi: ‘current language is metaphorical with respect to the meanings and ideological content that words have had in previous periods of civilisation . . . Language changes with the transformation of the entire civilisation, through the emergence of new classes in the culture, through the hegemony exercised by one national language on others etc, and takes up precisely metaphorical words of previous civilisations and cultures’.32 Similarly, dialects and national languages confront each other not in hierarchical relations of degeneration or purity but as performative indices of different tempos of historical development, ultimately linked to the conditions of political subalternity or hegemonic direction that shape the communities of their practitioners.33 The present of individual nation-states is similarly fractured, in the relations between urban centres and rural peripheries (one role of which is to provide the metropolitan present with an image of its past, giving rise to and being played out in the temporal dislocations of ‘national presents’ of internal migration). On an international level, the hegemonic relationships between different national formations consign some social formations to the past ‘times’ of others. Gramsci’s most famous characterisation of the underdeveloped East in comparison to the advanced West, which he derived from Lenin and Trotsky’s reflections on the success of the Russian Revolution and the failures of revolutions in the West, has sometimes been read as presupposing a normative and progressivist notion of capitalist development, or even an ‘ideal type’ of the modern state absent in an ‘exceptional’ Orient.34 In reality, however, the distinction here between East and West, and their unification within a world system, is analytic rather than substantive; it allows us to grasp the fact that the tempo and efficacy of imperialist expansion itself progressively imposes an ‘essential’ unity on the disparity of different national historical experiences. Above all, the non-contemporaneity of the present in Gramsci is a function and symptomatic index of the struggle between classes. The present, as the time of class struggle, is necessarily and essentially out of joint, fractured by the differential times of different class projects. Once again, in this conception, difference rather than unity is primary. Far from presupposing it, Gramsci demonstrates that the notion of a unified present is not objectively nor immediately given, but rather, is a function of the social and political hegemony of one social group seeking to impose its own ‘present’ as an insurpassable horizon for all other social groups. Concretised via the hegemonic apparatuses that organise, ratify and stabilise the social relations of the established order, this ‘present’ does indeed come to constitute an ‘absolute horizon’, not simply of ‘knowing’, but also, and more decisively, of the possibilities of action. Insofar as we can talk of a unified present or contemporaneity in Gramsci, it only emerges tendentially, as the function of a class’s hegemonic project that has progressed to the constitution of its own form of ‘political society’, as the organising instance of the associations of ‘civil society’ that it interpellates – or more precisely, subjugates – as its subaltern raw material. There is thus an ongoing – and always incomplete – struggle to unify any present, to produce a contemporaneity or coincidence of times that aims to efface its reality as a Kampfplatz of contradictions that are not simply conceptual, but realised in the form of opposed interests of social groups. A unified present is ‘inessential appearance’, the contingent image the ruling class crafts of its own project embodied in statal institutions, viewed from the perspective of the eternity it claims to embody.

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Yet ‘there is a struggle between two hegemonies, always’, Gramsci famously wrote.35 There are always (at least) two class projects that attempt to mobilise, in the case of the subaltern strata, or (dis)organise, in the case of the ruling group, disparate class forces on the terrain of the civil society of the (bourgeois) integral State, in order to secure their ratification in the institutions of political society. The ‘time’ of the one denies the full presence of the other. To adopt an opposition proposed by Alberto Burgio, the time of already constituted political power for Gramsci is the time of duration, ‘the development of an inert time, mere quantity adequately measured in chronological terms . . . an empty time’. The time of the subaltern classes, on the other hand, initially condemned to endure such duration, is fractured by the possibility of another present. Gramsci is here not very far from the Jetztzeit of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. When the subaltern classes set out to make history or ‘to constitute [their own] epoch’, they ‘rupture this continuum’, shattering its linearity and filling up this empty time ‘with an event (an ensemble of events) that modifies the rhythm, the intensity, the meaning itself of historical movement, imparting to it an acceleration and determining its progress’.36 In this possible ‘present’ and this possible future we encounter the possibility not of a supposedly ‘genuine contemporaneity’, understood as a synchronisation of different times, but of an interweaving of an ensemble of temporalities in non-hierarchical relations of translation in a ‘regulated society’, Gramsci’s version of the notion of a non-state state.37 Far from comprehending philosophy as the spiritualist expression of an essence that is also legible in other practices, Gramsci defines it in similarly political terms, as an instance of organisation or transformation.38 Unlike Croce’s qualitative distinction between philosophy and ideology, and unlike the early Althusser’s assertion of the incommensurability of the scientific, proper to Marxist philosophy, and the ideological, the organic expression of its time, Gramsci argues that the distinction is quantitative, rather than qualitative. In one of the richest passages in the Prison Notebooks, he argues that ‘philosophy is the conception of the world that represents the intellectual and moral life (catharsis of a determinate practical life) of an entire social group conceived in movement and thus seen not only in its current and immediate interests, but also in its future and mediated interests’. On the other hand, Gramsci here defines ideology as ‘any particular conception of groups inside the class that propose to help in the resolution of immediate and circumscribed problems’.39 Neither of these formulations can be interpreted as positing a direct expression of an unified, self-present essence, since both are mediated by the organisation of interests of classes and class fractions. Ideology is not conceived, as the early and arguably even later Althusser would have it, as ‘organic’ to its age, as emerging from it in a direct and immediate fashion.40 Rather, it represents a particular partial aspect of it (‘instrumental’ resolution of immediate problems of a class, as they are understood by a limited strata of its leadership). In this perspective, philosophy is an even more ‘artificial’ moment of any particular present in comparison to ‘ideology’, because it is only achieved through complex processes of mediation of both present and ‘absent’ elements, ranging from historical assessment, to analysis of the concrete conjuncture, to ‘prevision’ of the future in the form of a project and programme.41 Rather than anchored in the strictly a-historical realm of the scientific, philosophy in this Gramscian perspective is distinguished from ideology insofar as it is fully elaborated in the dialectical relations of organisation (‘political society’) and association (‘civil society’) in the ‘integral State’. One of the roles of all philosophy hitherto has been not only to ratify and reflect such a violently unified present, functioning as its ideal complement, but also actively to organise it, albeit at a high level of institutional and conceptual mediation,

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as a ‘conception of the world’. As Gramsci formulated in an early phase of his carceral project, ‘what is “politics” for the productive class becomes “rationality” for the intellectual class’;42 or to use the remarkably Gramscian words of the later Althusser, philosophy functions as ‘a form of unification of the dominant ideology’.43

‘Hidden’ and ‘minor’ structures Was Althusser’s misguided critique therefore merely a case of overweening pride going before a fall, of polemical excess? Althusser himself admitted to being unsure of the fairness of his critique (albeit only privately, in a letter to his Italian translator Franca Madonia, from the period when he was completing Reading Capital), suggesting a fundamental theoretical uncertainty hiding behind the rhetorical bravura of his adopted public persona.44 Was it thus merely a case of ‘bad’ philology, perhaps necessarily – but no less culpably – in a period before the publication of Gerratana’s critical edition of the Prison Notebooks (1975)? Or were there reasons internal to the early Althusser’s own project, even and especially in its polemical excess, that led him to focus on the theme of contemporaneity and to assert that Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis was haunted by essentialist reductions? In this case, it would almost be as if one Althusser was acting out a (self-)critique of another Althusser, one Althusser projecting the positions of another Althusser onto his most significant Marxist ‘other’: an ‘esoteric’ against an ‘exoteric’ Althusser, to adopt a Straussian distinction; the Althusser who had entered the party as a militant intent upon reforming it, versus the public persona of the ‘theoretician’ he adopted to pursue his ‘Spinozist’ strategy of occupying the party’s theoretical strongholds from within in order to destroy them;45 For Marx versus Reading Capital, or even, within the former work, the author of ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ versus ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’; the time of political intervention, versus the duration of the mode of production; in short, as Balibar has suggested (and problematised), Althusser the practitioner of an intervention into the (philosophical, political) conjuncture versus Althusser the ‘Theorist’ of structure.46 In other words, would the early Althusser’s critique of Gramsci amount to a case of a ‘bad’ conscience expunged through transference? Such an explanation would be in accord with an influential tendency in recent Althusser scholarship, which emphasises the constitutive tensions, if not contradictions, of the original Althusserian synthesis. According to this perspective, one of the consequences of the early Althusser’s and colleagues’ ‘flirtation’ with structuralist terminology had been the subordination of conjuncture to structure, or the transformation of the open terrain of class struggle into a stable, self-affirming system. Structure, following this reading, would be understood as an ‘essential section’ in which all of the elements of the whole are immediately present. In its turn, overdetermination would then become the mere influence of all elements upon each other, or in the terms Gramsci adopted from Gentilian terminology to describe Croce’s system, a mere constellation of ‘distinctions’, producing the pluralism Althusser elsewhere explicitly repudiated.47 ‘Structure’ would thus signify the closing in upon and within itself of a selfreferential articulation of elements, posited in a synchronic contemporaneity. It would become unable to accommodate the political moment – that is, the conjuncture as the distinctive dimension in which a given ‘empty time’ of the state is ruptured by the ‘epoch-making’ intervention of the popular classes – which alone could open it. In other words, ‘conjuncture’, a

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central concept of Althusser’s early project, threatened to turn into a ‘minor structure’ or, in the terms Gramsci expropriated from Croce and turned against the Neapolitan philosopher himself, ‘a “hidden-structure God”’.48 These risks remained ambivalent in the early work of Althusser and his colleagues, constituted as it was by a tension between the (at least) ‘two Althussers’, between the two tendencies or temporalities that had crystallised in the ‘Althusserian Moment’.49 Arguably, it was only in later self-styled ‘Althusserianisms’ and the stereotypes fashioned by their critics that the most damaging (and metaphysical) of their consequences were realised, in a caricature of the much richer conception of the ‘social whole’ that lay behind Althusser’s admittedly potentially misleading ‘theoreticist’ rhetoric.50 Nevertheless, a series of critical remarks and caveats in For Marx and Reading Capital show that Althusser was well aware of these temptations and attempted to work against them, without for all of that being able to eliminate them entirely.

From the ‘class struggle in theory’ to a ‘new practice of philosophy’ It was only with Althusser’s self-critiques of the late 1960s and early 1970s that a potential alternative to this ‘theoreticist deviation’ began to take concrete shape. According to some commentators, in the course of these self-critiques, ‘Althusser progressively destroyed the theses he had constructed’,51 eventually dismantling the conceptual scaffolding on which his earlier project had been built. In particular, Marxist philosophy is no longer conceived in Althusser’s later texts as the guardian of scientificity, at a remove from politics itself; on the contrary, it is now characterised in directly political terms, as ‘class struggle in the field of theory’. Significantly, however, while developing this self-critique, Althusser does not explicitly revisit or retract the critique of Gramsci in which those ‘theoreticist’ positions had first been worked out; rather, revealingly, he largely implicitly shifts his objections from the directly philosophical (‘historicism’) to the political terrain (the theory of the state presented as ‘Gramscian’ by Italian Eurocommunists in this period in particular). Althusser’s political or even ‘politicist’ orientation intensified throughout the 1970s; by the time of ‘Marx in his limits’ in 1978, and arguably even more so in his attempted systematisation in the 1980s of earlier meditations on ‘a materialism of the rain, the swerve, the encounter, the take [prise]’,52 it crystallised into what is arguably an entirely new project. Those elements that remained, such as the negation of all forms of teleology, the attempt to destabilise the traditional conception of the relationship of contingency and necessity, or the central concept of overdetermination, have led one significant contemporary reading to stress the substantive continuities in Althusser’s development.53 This interpretation has reacted against an earlier interpretation that arose immediately following the posthumous publication of the writings of Althusser’s solitude, which suggested that ‘aleatory materialism’ (only one of the late Althusser’s designations for his thought, and perhaps the least accurate)54 represented a ‘Kehre’ in Althusser’s thinking.55 This potentially productive perspective, albeit partisan and philologically questionable, was then soon banalised in the assertion that it perhaps even constitutes a departure from the Marxist tradition tout court.56 Insofar as the more recent reading’s emphasis upon the continuities with Althusser’s earlier project allow us to read these

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late writings as resources for the renewal of the Marxist tradition rather than its abandonment, it constitutes a welcome corrective. Nevertheless, the general direction of the most sophisticated contemporary Althusser scholarship can have the unintended consequence of downplaying the significant differences between the later and the earlier writings that are found alongside – and sometimes, precisely within – such continuities. This is to say that it is not merely a question of ‘two Althussers’, or an ‘early’ versus ‘late’ Althusser, to adopt the common caricature of the terms of his influential reading of Marx. Rather, it is much more a case of the ‘emptiness of a distance taken’ within Althusser’s thought itself,57 of his ongoing break with and return to himself, within and across the different moments of his project’s enunciation. This ‘distance’ is intensified rather than reduced in the final phases of his thought, without finding any stable or definitive resolution. It gives rise to an internal tension between the substantive and formal dimensions of his project. While the former open up a new dynamic that potentially goes beyond the determining perspectives of Althusser’s earlier work, the latter remain tied to them, in a moment of negative critique, which ultimately threatens to overpower his new substantive orientation. Substantively, the materialism of the encounter consolidates lines of research that, at least in potential, overcome the ‘theoreticist’ limitations of the approach of the early 1960s and even, arguably, its residues in the works of the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Althusser declares in ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ that ‘all reality, all necessity, all Meaning and all reason’ emerge from the ‘lasting encounter’, or ‘the accomplished fact in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End’, he has definitively abandoned any claim either to a scientificity or to a philosophy that is not ‘organic’ to its time.58 Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to argue that ‘the thesis that there exist only cases, i.e. singular individuals wholly distinct from one another, is the basic thesis of nominalism’, and, following this, that nominalism is ‘not merely the antechamber of materialism, but materialism itself’.59 The distance taken from the earlier attempt rigorously to distinguish between the ‘real object’ and the ‘object of knowledge’ could not be greater; now, Althusser claims that knowledge can only be produced by working on the ‘real object’ itself, which is redefined as the encounter, constituted in its contingency and fragility. The ‘real object’ is here grasped as a conjuncture of conjunctures, or an unstable constellation of encounters that continually threaten to give way to other encounters, ‘decomposing’ themselves, as it were, from within. The encounter has always-already achieved its constitutive incompletion, conceived as a process in continual renewal, rather than a fixed state. ‘The encounter may not take place’, Althusser notes, or it ‘may no longer take place’.60 The ‘Meaning’ and ‘reason’ that arise from it and which exist only within it thus also may not take hold, or may no longer take hold. They are entirely dependent upon the articulation of the encounter or conjuncture they attempt to grasp in thought, determined and defined by no structure that precedes or goes beyond them. This is the ‘present’ that, for the late Althusser, ‘constitutes the absolute horizon of all knowing’.61 Can we therefore say that in these final texts, conjuncture has finally dispensed with its metaphysical corruption in the concept of structure that haunted the project of For Marx and Reading Capital? Certainly, Althusser now strives to find a mode of thought adequate to thinking the specificity of each conjunctural encounter on its own terms, rather than subsuming them as variations on an enduring structural theme. Implicitly dispensing with his previous qualitative distinctions between ideology, science and philosophy and thinking their

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dialectical implication, he now posits thought as a constitutive and active element of each such conjuncture, a theoretical moment internal to and determined by it. Althusser would here appear to be very close to Gramsci’s equation of history-politics-philosophy, as the various ‘attributes’, in a Spinozist sense, according to which a constitutively non-contemporaneous present can be immanently comprehended, in relations of continual reciprocal translation. It may thus seem that the late Althusser finally returned to the troubling intuition that had originally prompted him to set out on his long adventure, or detour, ‘advancing masked’ through the strongholds of a degenerating Diamat and its derivatives, which he had acted out in negative and polemical terms in Reading Capital’s critique of Gramsci. That is, at least one dimension of the materialism of the encounter would seem no longer to hide politics behind appeals for the autonomy of philosophy; rather, here Althusser boldly steps forward and attempts to politicise the notion of philosophy itself. No longer the guarantee of the veracity of revolutionary politics, philosophy is now identified as the property, in all senses of the term, of ‘the party of the state’. For this perspective, a possible future proletarian ‘non-state state’ will have the need not of a ‘philosophy’, whether Marxist or not, but of a ‘non-philosophy’.62 Althusser’s attempt to theorise the simultaneously theoretical and political preconditions for its emergence undoubtedly constitutes one of the primary reasons that the publication of his late writings has been greeted with such enthusiasm.63 In a period that has witnessed other powerful attempts to inherit the dynamic of the original Althusserian paradigm in terms of a ‘return’ of and perhaps to philosophy ‘itself’, this dimension of the late Althusser’s project has seemed to offer the outlines of a possible Marxist non-philosophy-to-come.64 At the same time, however, the late Althusser continues themes from his earlier work that reduce the potentially explosive force of this new orientation. Formally, the philosophy of the encounter seems to be distinguished by the way in which it treats the question of ‘Marxist philosophy’. While this treatment is indeed different from central formulations in Althusser’s early work, it is nevertheless also remarkably similar in certain decisive respects; in the intertwining of ‘elements of continuity and innovation’, it is, pace Negri, ultimately the former and not the latter that ‘acquire hegemony’.65 For Marx and Reading Capital had attempted to explicate a philosophy of Marxism, the philosophy buried in Marx’s work ‘in a practical state’. In the period of his self-critiques, Althusser had argued that its successful excavation would reveal not ‘a (new) philosophy’, but rather, ‘a (new) practice of philosophy’.66 The novelty of this practice of philosophy was indicated precisely by its status as a properly Marxist philosophy, or as a philosophy adequate to the ‘immense theoretical revolution’ introduced by Marx into the history of Western Philosophy. The philosophy of the encounter, on the other hand, strives to be, at the most, not a philosophy of Marxism, but a (non-)philosophy for Marxism. The earlier ambition of replacing Diamat as the ‘true’ philosophy of Marxism is entirely abandoned, as Althusser adopts what seem to be more modest ‘activist’ postures. This ‘non-philosophy’ will merely attempt ‘to account for what Marx thought’ in Capital, to be capable of comprehending the conceptual discoveries that he put to work there.67 It is notable, however, that while the claims of Marxist philosophy have been downgraded, those of philosophy itself have not. Arguably, philosophy remains the ‘absolute horizon’ of knowing for the late Althusser, even and especially in its negation. As Matheron not entirely unfairly notes, ‘the primacy of science in the 1960s, which is already a primacy of philosophy, was succeeded by the absolute primacy of philosophy in the enigmatic texts of the 1980s’.68 This primacy is maintained in a transformed and negative mode; as a ‘non-philosophy’ for

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Marxism, the philosophy of the encounter takes its distance from all philosophy hitherto – and thereby leaves it intact. ‘Philosophy’, that is, remains the positive figure that defines this ‘non-philosophy’, in its negative and structurally subaltern relation, as that which it is not, or more precisely, that which it fails to become.69 This formulation of the philosophy of the encounter remains, despite Althusser’s intentions, merely ‘a (new) philosophy’, assimilable to a notion of philosophy as an instance of organisation and domination to the precise extent that it does not formulate a coherent alternative to it. It is unable to produce that ‘transformation’ within the practice of philosophy that Althusser had indicated in 1976 as necessary in order to break the persistent capacity of ‘philosophical form’ to subordinate other social practices and reshape them within itself,70 as a ‘laboratory for the theoretical unification and foundation of the dominant ideology’.71 It was Gramsci who, foremost among all of Althusser’s interlocutors, had insisted that the ‘historical epoch’ opened by Marx’s thought consisted, among other things, in the possibility of practising philosophy in such a way that it would not only oppose the existing philosophy of the ‘party of the state’, but would also lead to the transformation of the very nature of philosophy: a new form of philosophy that would be both a laboratory for and an enactment of the self-regulating society it aimed to bring into existence. As Gramsci argued, the ‘originality [of Marx’s thought] lies not only in its transcending of previous philosophies but also and above all in that it opens up a completely new road, renewing from head to toe the whole way of conceiving philosophy itself’.72 No longer practiced as a speculative command or an instance of exterior ordering, Gramsci’s reformulation of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis aimed to be immanent to the social and political relations in which it is elaborated, functioning as the critical dimension of those practices and reconfiguring them as self-organisation ‘from below’. Crucially, Gramsci’s proposal was not content to cede ‘philosophy’ to the existing dominant order, but struggled to redefine it as the theory of the elaboration of such forms of association of the irreducibly diverse. In this sense, we might say that Louis Althusser’s first and most enduring encounter remains waiting for his last reflections, both as their immanent critique and as their necessary supplement.

Notes 1 Althusser 2006a, p. 168. 2 Althusser 2006a, p. 168. 3 See Morfino 2005 for an important reckoning of accounts with Althusser’s frequently elliptic references in these texts. 4 François Matheron, seemingly eager to distance Althusser’s thought, in any of its phases, from a Marxist matrix, has claimed that ‘aside from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and – occasionally – Gramsci, Marxist references in Althusser’s texts are fairly rare and most of the time pretty imprecise’ (Matheron 2008, pp. 518–19). If we leave aside the obvious performative contradiction of Matheron’s qualification, his assertion still remains, in strictly philological terms, incorrect. In particular, references to Gramsci, both implicit and explicit, abound throughout all of Althusser’s text. 5 For a critical discussion of the relation between these concepts, see Bollinger and Koivisto 2001. 6 Althusser 2006a, p. 150.

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7 For Gramsci’s original formulation, see Q11, §27. References throughout this chapter are to the critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana (Gramsci 1975). The numbers that follow the letter Q [Quaderno] indicate the notebook, while numbers following § indicate a note. The English critical edition of The Prison Notebooks, edited by Joseph A. Buttigieg, now comprises three volumes (Gramsci 1992; 1996; 2007), containing Notebooks 1–8; notes included in those volumes can also be located according to the notebook and number of the note. 8 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 94. 9 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 132. 10 On the theme of the ‘scientific’ foundations of (Marxist) philosophy for the Althusser of For Marx and Reading Capital, see Goshgarian 2003, p. xii et sqq. 11 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 133. 12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 131. 13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 132. 14 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 137. 15 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95. 16 Hegel 1991, p. 21. 17 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95. 18 Tosel 1995a and 1995b provide comprehensive overviews of the ensuing debate in France, while Liguori 1996, particularly pp. 132–52, reconstructs the Italian discussion. Lo Iacono 2012 provides an extensive overview of the reception of Althusser’s thought in Italian Marxism. For recent reflections on both the historical and contemporary significance of Althusser’s critique and concept of historical time, see Hindess 2007 and Macherey 2005. 19 See Buci-Glucksmann, 1980; Tosel 1995a, in particular pp. 5-26; Haug 2006. 20 I have previously attempted to analyse the philological errors of Althusser’s critique in Thomas 2004 and 2009, particularly pp. 243–306. 21 See Q11, §46. 22 The theme of ‘translatability’ in The Prison Notebooks constitutes the focus of Boothman 2004. Ives 2004 examines the concept both in relation to other Marxist thinkers and significant currents in twentieth century linguistics. Frosini 2011 emphasises the importance of the concept of ‘translatability’ for the elaboration of Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis; see in particular pp. 31–3. 23 ‘Now, I must confess that the best studies that I have been able to read on the “thought” of Gramsci have not really dissipated the “theoretical” doubt to which I refer’. Althusser 1971b, pp. 341–2. 24 On this theme, see Frosini 2003, in particular pp. 126-7. See also the interesting if partial reading of Hegel developed in Coassin-Spiegel 1997, in particular pp. 39–53. For a novel reading of Hegel as a theorist of irreducible alterity, see Finelli 2004. 25 Q4, §11. 26 See, for example, Q8, §224. 27 Q10II, §41xvi. 28 Q8, §224. A particularly acute analysis of Gramsci’s critique of the a-historicity of Croce’s categories can be found in Roth 1972, p. 68 et sqq. 29 Q11, §12. 30 Q11, §12. See the delicate analysis of this theme in Gerratana 1997. 31 Q11, §62.

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32 Q11, §24. 33 Gramsci explores the political implications of this insight of historical linguistics in his final notebook (Q29), particularly with the elaboration of a critique of normative grammar – a veritable materialist grammatology avant la lettre. 34 ‘In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West, there was a proper relationship between State and civil society’ (Q7, §16). 35 Q8, §227, p. 1084. 36 Burgio 2003, pp. 19–20. 37 On the notion of a (self-)regulated society in Gramsci, see Q6, §65; Q6, §88; Q7, §33. Morfino 2009 explores the Spinozian (and Machiavellian) dimensions of a notion of non-contemporaneity as ensemble of ‘durations’. 38 See Q7, §35, where Gramsci argues that ‘everything is politics, even philosophy or the philosophies . . . and the only ‘philosophy’ is history in act’. Rather than a politicism, this line of reasoning gives rise to a theory of the primacy of politics as transformation. 39 Q10I, §10. These are not Gramsci’s only definitions of philosophy and ideology in the Prison Notebooks, which include a range of ‘critical’, ‘neutral’ and ‘positive’ definitions of each term. For alternative and more extensive treatments of Gramsci’s notions of ideology, see Jan Rehmann 2008, particularly pp. 82–101, and Liguori 2004. Gramsci’s discussion here of the distinction between the two thought-forms is particularly significant, however, when considered in relation to the early Althusser’s alternative attempt to theorise the passage from ideology to philosophy: Althusser conceived the passage as an epistemological one, whereas Gramsci insisted that this question of (the form of) knowledge was overdetermined by augmentation or diminution of the capacity to act. In this sense, it is Gramsci and not Althusser who comes closest to reproposing Spinoza’s critique of the limitations of Cartesian epistemology within the Marxist Weltanschauung. 40 See the nomination of ideology in ‘Marxism and Humanism’ as ‘the very element and atmosphere indispensable to [the] historical respiration and life’ of human societies. Althusser 1969a, p. 232. While Althusser later produced more sophisticated accounts of the notion of ideology, the notion of the organic and necessary character of ideology arguably remains a constant in his theoretical evolution. Cf. the discussion of ideology in ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ in Althusser 2006a. 41 On the political status of the concept of ‘prevision’ for Gramsci, see Badaloni 1981. 42 Q1, §151. 43 Althusser 2006a, p. 259. 44 See the letter of 2 July 1965, in Althusser 1998b, pp. 623–4. 45 See Althusser 1997a, pp. 10–11. 46 See Balibar 1994. See also Ichida and Matheron 2005. 47 Althusser 1969a, pp. 201–2. 48 Q10II, §41i. G.M. Goshgarian 2006 contains an important discussion of the relation of conjuncture and structure in Althusser’s development, as does Lahtinen 2009. 49 Gregory Elliott 2006 provides a sophisticated delineation of the ‘moment of Althusser’, born from the events of 1956 (Khrushchev’s secret speech, crisis in the international Communist movement) but crystallising in definite and irrevocable ways in the changed conjuncture of the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s – the self non-contemporaneity of a distinctive intellectualpolitical project. 50 Montag 1998a and Fourtounis 2005 in particular have provided a more complex reading of the Spinozist dimensions of the project of For Marx and Reading Capital. Read 2007 points to the ‘unfinished’ nature of the early Althusserian notion of ‘theoretical practice’ and suggests how

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a deepening of its Spinozist dimensions, particularly in Macherey’s work with the concept of philosophy as an ‘operation’, helps to overcome some of it contradictions. 51 Matheron 2008, p. 504. 52 Althusser 2006a, p. 167. 53 See for example Morfino 2005, Goshgarian 2006, Turchetto 2009 and Lahtinen 2009. 54 On Althusser’s different terminology, and relatively late emergence of aleatory materialism, see Goshgarian 2006. 55 For the most influential formulation of the ‘Kehre’ thesis, see Negri 1996a. 56 Representative of a more general ‘post-Marxist’ interpretation is Vatter 2004. For a salutary critique of the politically overdetermined errors of this reading, see Montag 2004. 57 Althusser 1971a, p. 62. 58 Althusser 2006a, p. 169. 59 Althusser 2006a, p. 265. See also Althusser 1997a, p. 11; and, for an exploration of the consequences of this claim, Suchting 2004. 60 Althusser 2006a, p. 172. On the theme of the always incomplete and thus ongoing ‘taking hold’ of the encounter, see Morfino 2005 and Suchting 2004, particularly p. 30. 61 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95. 62 Althusser 2006a, p. 259. 63 For representative examples, see McInerney 2005 and Read 2005. 64 Among a number of recent attempts to argue for Badiou’s inheritance of significant dimensions of Althusser’s project, see the different approaches and emphases of Feltham 2008, pp. 1–31 and Bosteels 2011, pp. 50–76. 65 Negri 1996a, p. 58. 66 Althusser 1971a, p. 68. 67 Althusser 2006a, p. 258–9. 68 Matheron 2008, p. 514. ‘Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject’ in Badiou 2005a would seem to concur with the notion of such a continuing priority of the philosophical in Althusser’s development. 69 In a maudlin spirit, Althusser will even argue, in the mock interview ‘Philosophy and Marxism’, that it would be possible simply to translate and update existing philosophies for the analysis of our own historical period. See Althusser 2006a, p. 260. A similar implicit perspective is present in Balibar’s proposition that ‘there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be’ (Balibar 1995, p. 1). Philosophy here comes to function as an ‘absent centre’ around which Marx’s interventions are forced to revolve, in their excess or destitution – ‘extremes’ that are only defined as such due to a prior ordering of discourses in which ‘philosophy’ continues to occupy a privileged position of reference, prior to and independent of attempts to transform the forms of its constitution and practice. 70 Althusser 1990a, p. 245. 71 Althusser 1990a, p. 260. 72 Q11, §27.

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10 Althusser and Spinoza: the enigma of the subject Caroline Williams

In the broad sense, every philosophy is practical and political: an Ethics’.1

Introduction

T

here is an abiding presence of Spinoza throughout the corpus of Louis Althusser. This chapter is devoted to an exploration of this most nuanced and diverse presence of Spinoza, ranging from Althusser’s epistemology in Reading Capital to discussions of the subject and ideology in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ and ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’. By tracing these diverse readings of Spinoza, the discussion hopes to shed light upon some of the ruptures and continuities in Althusser’s oeuvre. I argue here that there are several readings of Spinoza, and that we should pose not only the question of why Althusser reads Spinoza, but also which Spinoza is most useful to his political project. My aim is not to prioritise Spinoza over other thinkers close to Althusser and considered in this volume of essays (such as Machiavelli), but I am nonetheless proposing to make a case for the persistence of Spinoza’s thought throughout Althusser’s oeuvre, and I extend this persistence to thinkers who work and think in his wake, from Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar to Alain Badiou, among others. Indeed, a more specific aim of the present discussion is to consider the precise theoretical shape of Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism, and the mutual imbrication of philosophy and politics implied by this formulation. In his Metapolitics, Alain Badiou credits Althusser with the opening up of ‘the enigma of subjectivity without a subject as the intra-philosophical mark of politics’.2 How might Althusser’s own reflections assist in the intellectual task of thinking subjectivity without the subject, and hence outside all political idealisms? What might we understand by the notion of ‘philosophical rupture’, and how might we approach the idea of dis/continuity in Althusser’s thought? When we think about the notion of philosophical ‘rupture’, we may be led to reflect upon a whole host of theoretical

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constellations (from the early epistemological break as a separating or ruptural activity, a transition between ideology and knowledge, a distinction or shift, marking the rational partition/demarcation between the different sites of science and ideology; to a later conception of philosophy itself as a ‘ruptural exercise’: a continuous rupture without end). It is in this latter sense that Althusser writes of philosophy as its own proper object (or without a ‘real’ object, ‘without conditions’, as he would say), or as a laboratory where thought is practiced as the taking-up of a position or thesis.3 Thus, Althusser writes of the need for ‘. . . every philosophy to make a detour via other philosophies in order to define itself and grasp itself in terms of its difference: its division [its rupture, we might say]’.4 It is through the paradox of incessant rupture that philosophy is able to occupy a position, develop a strategy, a thought of practice, to ‘think practice via that thought’, and through this process to create political (that is, ideological and material) effects. It is in this primarily strategic sense, I wish to suggest, that Althusser occupies the terrain of Spinoza’s philosophy: in order to utilise it – somewhat creatively – for his own ends, by developing theses that Spinoza would likely ‘never have acknowledged’ but that did not ‘contradict his thought’.5 And it is in this strategic sense, deepened over time and inevitably unfinished, that the appeal to Spinoza persists throughout his writings, from Reading Capital to The Philosophy of the Encounter. As related in his autobiography, Althusser was also fascinated by Spinoza’s own philosophical strategy. In the Ethics, Spinoza had transformed the conception of a transcendental God (Substance) as the transitive cause of all things, prior to the world he creates. By understanding God as identical with Nature, as well as being self-caused [causa sui], Substance itself became the continuous production and differentiation, composition and decomposition, of the many diverse (infinite) forms of its being. It is this move that constitutes, for Althusser, Spinoza’s ‘unparalleled audacity’, and the ‘unprecedented theoretical revolution’ produced by his thought. Not only did Spinoza ‘take over the theoretical places fortified and occupied by [his] adversaries’ (namely, the theological problem of God’s power and existence), ‘. . . he established himself there as if he were his own adversary . . . and redisposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely around, as one turns around cannons against the fortress’s own occupants’.6

Althusser reads Spinoza Thus I will not begin my discussion by attempting to compartmentalise and delineate the multifaceted and often performative oeuvre of Louis Althusser. Indeed, research by Étienne Balibar (who claims that his legacy is nothing but the unpredictable succession of conjunctures), Gregory Elliott, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, and other contributions to this volume, already caution against such a move, or have presented in nuanced textual studies the complex genesis of its development.7 Certainly, we can no longer speak simply of an early or a late Althusser. My argument here also warns against such drawing of boundaries, since I suggest the persistence of Spinoza’s philosophy throughout his thought. Indeed, and complicating matters somewhat, Geoffrey Goshgarian has argued in his brief and incisive discussion of the utilisation of Spinoza that Althusser sometimes mobilises a reading of Spinoza against an earlier Spinoza-inflected position, thus implying, perhaps, that Althusser’s reading of Spinoza may at best have some quite different (competing/contradictory?) emphases, and at worst

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lack rigour and consistency.8 In Reading Capital there is certainly a sense in which Althusser’s usage of Spinoza, to the extent that it veers towards an epistemological opposition between science and ideology, presents only a partial rendering of the latter’s account of knowledge in the Ethics, and hence reduces the materialist effects of his philosophy. At a cursory glance, one might suggest that the overly rationalist or formalist reading of Spinoza that marks the epistemology of Reading Capital is later supplemented by a more finely drawn ontological and political reading in later pieces such as the Ideology essay. Yet, at other times still, a metaphoric and sometimes imprecise or underexplored reading of Spinozist concepts emerge (for instance in relation to bodies, conatus, and ‘individuals’, of which Althusser occasionally speaks but without much qualification).9 This only complicates the interpretive framework. If we were to trace the genealogy of a number of key concepts in Althusser’s philosophy – from Science, Subject, Object, Imaginary, to Practice, Production, Materialism (of an aleatory kind) – we would find the imprint of Spinoza’s philosophy. I will focus in particular on the Spinozist dimensions of two problematics in Althusser’s theory, namely those governing his concepts of knowledge and the subject. I will argue, in short, that there are several readings of Spinoza present in Althusser’s corpus, such that we should ask not only the question ‘why Spinoza?’ but also ‘which Spinoza’? In order to approach the first question, we must briefly draw attention to the veritable renaissance of Spinoza scholarship in France in the 1960s that made Spinoza a constant source of reference and discussion within Althusser’s intellectual circle, preceded also by Cavailles, Canguilhem and Desanti.10 Aside from Deleuze, a known scholar of Spinoza who had at least some dialogue with the Theoretical Working Group established by Althusser in the mid-1960s (to whom he gave his article on structuralism for comments), and Badiou, whose utilisation of Spinoza was rather, and continues to be, one of critical tension – both Balibar and Macherey had, and continue to have – a productive interest in Spinoza and became well-known Spinoza scholars, the latter producing the highly influential ‘Althusserian’ monograph of 1979, Hegel ou Spinoza.11 As its title suggests, the encounter of the two philosophers produces no synthesis, but instead a line of divergence, a limit-position that produces something wholly new. Spinoza haunts Hegel’s philosophy, and it is only in the search for singular points of intersection and interaction between the two that a truly Spinozist discourse may develop. In this way, for Macherey, Spinoza’s philosophy has a strange actuality, and it is, I quote, ‘living or present . . .because its problems and some of its concepts, independently of every explicit citation, nonetheless in the absence of their author continue to accompany other forms of thought . . .’12 Indeed, in Reading Capital Althusser had already drawn attention to the absence of this author in the history of philosophy, where a repressed Spinozism unfolded ‘as a subterranean history acting at other sites in political and religious ideology and in the sciences, but not on the illuminated stage of visible philosophy’.13 As for the rationale of his own Spinozism, Althusser records this in his Essays in Self-Criticism such that no reader could now call him a structuralist. The necessary detour taken via Spinoza was made to elucidate Marx’s own detour via Hegel: ‘In Spinoza’s anticipation of Hegel’, he writes, ‘we tried to see, and thought we had succeeded in finding out, under what conditions a philosophy might, in what it said or did not say, and in spite of its form – or on the contrary, just because of its form, . . . because of its positions – produce effects useful to materialism’.14 The position occupied by this engagement with the philosophy of Spinoza was to have a ruptural effect, marking out a distinctive (Spinozist) topography of Marxist science outside the infected

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ideological space of bourgeois socialist humanism (located in, for example, John Lewis, Jorge Semprun), existential phenomenology (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), historicist Marxism (primarily Lukács) and, of course, in the forms of knowledge supporting these (variously: humanist or subjectivist, historicist, empiricist and positivist). Famously, Spinoza had claimed that truth (in a nominalist sense) contained its own sign.15 It requires no external referent to support its concept since, as Althusser recalls, ‘the object of knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distinct and different from the real object . . . the two objects must not be confused: the idea of the circle, which is the object of knowledge must not be confused with the circle, which is the real object’.16 Truth is immanent to the idea (or the object-in-thought) such that it requires very little stake in the everyday world of real objects from which empiricism develops its truth. Empiricist forms of knowledge require no separation from, or dislocation with, the ideological impurities of the object, because the real essence, the kernel of the object, is merely hidden within it. Rejecting the dualisms in which ideological forms of knowledge always invest, (for instance dualisms between purity and impurity of the object, the subject of perception and the world to be discovered, essence and appearance, the visible and the invisible), Althusser’s topography of knowledge (at this stage) had three levels that broadly echoed Spinoza’s own account of the gradations of knowledge. To very briefly recall, these were ‘Generalities I’ – the raw material, real objects, never pure and always contaminated by ideological residues; ‘Generalities II’ – the problematic or cluster of concepts that must be worked upon and transformed by science; and finally ‘Generalities III’ – the theoretical field where science produces, via immanent reflection, its own theoretical objects and new concepts, and practices a rational conception of knowledge with its own conditions of truth and consistency. In this way, not only was the form of the concept produced by science Spinozist in shape – giving rise to the concept of the effectivity of the structure upon its elements, namely the Spinozist ‘idea’ of structural causality – but the method itself claimed to mirror Spinoza’s account of the transition from the inadequate and fragmentary knowledge of the first kind, to the derivation of common notions or generalities that are not directly found in the immediate experience of the body or imagination, to the third kind of knowledge, variously interpreted by scholars as an intuitive knowledge of singular essences, the movement of causation, and an intellectual love of God under the form of eternity. I will here leave to one side the open question of Spinoza’s own rationalism, which may be called into question when we place the Ethics in the frame of his political writings, and when we give due recognition to the role in both Althusser’s and Spinoza’s systems of the dynamic operation of the imaginary and imagination (as that which ‘both destroys and reconstructs’, to use one of Althusser’s later formulations) and its relation to the composition of the political body.17 In the case of Spinoza’s conception of knowledge (which is never extrinsic to the conditions of its production, found in its attributes), as Macherey observes, ‘the real of thought is not the real considered from another viewpoint but is the real transformed’.18 If, as Althusser later claimed of Spinoza, he ‘. . . refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world “expressed” by the state of their bodies’, then it might be argued that the third kind of knowledge may very well need the imaginary knowledge of the first kind.19 To suggest that ‘nothing precedes science’, that knowledge, like Substance or Nature, is its own species of production which establishes its own limits, implies further that, from a Spinozist point of view, the production of science may nonetheless be bound up with the process or practice of its production into which spontaneous

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ideology may seep and spill. The constitution of knowledge, then, is resolutely materialist. In the practice of politics, too, Althusser was well aware that ideology could strengthen its hold by swallowing up its adversary, or that the two could become locked into a battle wholly internal to ideology. This was Althusser’s political worry, as well as one that beset his epistemology; and yet at this point in Reading Capital he endeavoured to stay within the limits of both fields, rather than entering the void outside of them.20 Did Althusser’s theory (at this point) remain outside the more dynamic formulation of knowledge presented by Spinoza’s philosophy? It would be one-sided to view Reading Capital merely as a statement of Althusser’s theoreticism (even if he retrospectively saw it as such), as if structural necessity bore no brook with contingency, and as if a timeless structure of knowledge presented no ‘symptoms and effects’ produced in turn by ‘the conjunction of the material, technical, social, political and ideological conditions which determine it.21 Later, Althusser wrote of the eternity of ideology as to mark out a similar claim of invariance, but he continued, nonetheless, to focus upon the historical singularity of ideologies. Before turning to consider the second problematic of my discussion, that of the subject, and specifically Althusser’s anti-humanism, let me briefly supplement the discussion with reference to Althusser’s 1965 research-paper ‘Three Notes on the Order of Discourse’.22 This text is instructive on a number of levels, not least through its status as a work-in-process, where the process of its production bears its mark upon the final draft. As noted by Althusser in a letter to Balibar, he had initially planned that this piece, originally designed for circulation within the Theoretical Working Group established at the time, would be part of ‘a true work of philosophy [Elements of Dialectical Materialism] able to stand as our Ethics’.23 For my purposes here, the text stands as a useful bridge between Reading Capital and the ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay, underscoring the importance of the singularity of the human sciences rather than their subsumption by structuralism, and initiating a new theoretical object: the unconscious and its relation to ideology, which, sadly would remain underdeveloped in Althusser’s later well-known reflection on the structural function of ideology and its constitution of the subject (both of which are anticipated in the latter sections of ‘Three Notes’). The thrust of the essay concerns the respective roles of ‘general’ and ‘regional’ theories, where regional theories are theories of theoretical objects (the unconscious, the capitalist mode of production, language, aesthetic objects, madness, and so on) and general theory (there can be more than one, and they must be differentially articulated) serves to frame and conceptualise the objects investigated. As Althusser writes, ‘That which exists . . . is real objects (which I today call, using a concept of Spinoza’s, “singular essences”): the knowledge of real objects presupposes the intervention of the concepts of the general theory and the regional theories involved, plus the (empirical) knowledge of the determinate forms of existence that make for the singularity of these essences’.24 The core of the working-paper (one that Badiou was to respond to in his Theory of the Subject), was a discussion – at times highly critical – of Lacanian psychoanalysis which, lacking a general theory, falls prey to ideological forms of structuralism (specifically that linked to Levi-Strauss, from whom Althusser establishes his own distance).25 Indeed, it is to a general theory of the Sign that psychoanalysis must adjust/address its object, as well as to that of historical materialism. According to Althusser, these ‘two attributes’ must be differentially articulated (just as Spinoza, ‘[tempers and corrects] the parallelism of the attributes . . . by the concept of substance . . .which plays the role of the concept of the articulation of the attributes’.26 I will not begin to deconstruct the strange, metaphoric usage

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of Spinoza, here, but instead unpack some of the rich content behind it. Within the discussion of the unconscious and ideology, Althusser starts to lay the groundwork – and more – for an engagement between psychoanalysis and historical materialism, and for the psychoanalytic aspect of ideology, particularly via the troublesome notion of interpellation. Here, we receive a useful supplement of that: ‘I propose the following idea: that the subject-function which is the characteristic effect of ideological discourse in turn requires, produces or induces . . . a characteristic effect, the unconscious-effect or the effect subject-of-the–unconscious, that is, the peculiar structure which makes the discourse of the unconscious possible’.27 Thus, it is not just a subject-effect but an unconscious effect too, that is produced by ideology. Althusser takes some time setting out the properties and characteristics of a theory of the unconscious, framed by a theory of the signifier but also by the discourse of ideology via a second general theory), drawing attention to the circularity and duplicity present in this redoubling-process of ideology and the subject (which are, we must recall, both author and subject of their own ideological submission), which require each other as if by a principle of necessity. Hence, ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’.28 Remarkably, in some open questions at the end of ‘Three Notes’ we also find Althusser suggesting that the theoretical utility of the concepts of the unconscious and the subject of the unconscious have perhaps come to an end, or ‘cannot be employed unequivocally’, or at least are appropriate only in a qualified sense.29 For Althusser, the Spaltung, lack or absence of the subject (in the field of signification) theorised by Lacan, actually ‘opens up alongside a subject . . . it is not a subject, but something altogether different’.30 This comment offers me the opportunity to return to some of Althusser’s most interesting and penetrating anti-subjectivist reflections, the form of which recur throughout his corpus in the idea of the process without a subject or goal. Framed by his Spinozism, this formulation may still offer the seeds for considering the subject in another way – as something altogether different.

Althusser with Spinoza: subjectivity without the subject I would like to preface this second part of this chapter with a reference to Badiou’s discussion of Althusser in Metapolitics, where he credits Althusser with the opening-up of an ‘enigma of subjectivity without a subject as the intra-philosophical mark of politics.31 Badiou’s claim, here, is a complex one, since his position is one of an inescapable proximity and debt to Althusser’s philosophy and simultaneously a clear distance from it. For example, Badiou makes clear his dissatisfaction with the ‘statist’ configuration of Althusser’s theory of ideology, and its failure to recognise the autonomy of (non-state) ‘situations’, those historical irruptions and events that escape the logical function of ideology. Yet Badiou nonetheless recognises the efficacy of the concept of overdetermination as an indicator of historical novelty, of what he will later call a ‘logic of emergence’, and his work bears many stamps of a reflection upon a process of subjectivisation that is no longer tied to the ideological structure imparted upon it by Althusser but still shares the rejection of phenomenological philosophical motifs framing theories of the subject.32 Now, in a quite general, qualified sense, one might suggest that the concept of the ‘process without a subject or goal’ functions as a helpful shorthand for the philosophical form of the Althusserian project. Its central motif is to be found in the ‘Reply to John Lewis’ where history,

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against all historicisms and philosophies of praxis, is presented in this quasi-anonymous form.33 But it is also the characteristic form of science where there can be no subject, and likewise of psychoanalysis where the subject is displaced by a signifier. And it even finds its place in the ‘Philosophy of the Encounter’, which is presented as ‘the materialism not of the subject (be it God or the proletariat) . . . but of a process, a process that has no subject, yet imposes on the subjects (individuals or others) which it dominates the order of its development, with no assignable end’.34 Without imposing any logic of continuity upon the different inflections of these texts, I wish only to highlight the sense in which each of these formulations presuppose not an evacuation of the problematic of the subject, but an insistence upon a careful account of its conditionality and its singularity. There is, perhaps, no need to underline to his readers that Althusser’s rejection of humanism, like Spinoza’s, was a strategic rejection, and must be attributed to the latter’s radical monism and anti-Cartesianism. Indeed, years before critics had pronounced structuralism’s ‘death of subject’, or its reduction to an inert, passive determinant, Althusser had articulated a vehement attack on Levi-Strauss. He argued that, whilst his form of structuralism demystified all philosophies of consciousness by ‘subverting the subject’, it did so only by positing a system or structure of which the subject was a mere function. If theoretical humanism was displaced, then, it was by endowing some other order or system of rules with intentionality and unity.35 Althusser was famously misunderstood – and certainly held guilty – by Perry Anderson and others for his assertion of the Spinozist basis of his philosophical project. Althusser’s turn to Spinoza clearly did not constitute a departure from Marx, but rather a necessary detour designed to enrich the latter’s materialist speculations, particularly about ideology.36 It is in this context that we must view Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism.37 This was not simply a displacement of the subject, but a self-conscious reframing of its conditions of possibility. No longer to be viewed as a sovereign, intentional being, and the constituent ground of meaning, Althusser and Spinoza were concerned precisely with the production – and reproduction – of the subject; how the subject was constituted and how forms of individuality were composed and preserved over time.38 It was in Spinoza’s radical understanding of this imaginary constitution (supplemented, of course, by Lacan) that Althusser would later claim to rediscover ‘the matrix of every possible theory of ideology’,39 and also find the resources for his novel conception of ideology: ‘Spinoza’s “theory” rejected every illusion about ideology, and especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world “expressed” by the state of their bodies’.40 In this way, Althusser’s materialist rendering of ideology dispensed with every idealist philosophical tendency, as all references to the subject, belief, actions and ideas were inserted into the materialist practices through which all modalities of interpellation occurred. Such practices and rituals, he argued, worked to tame and discipline, normalising and subjecting the body to certain régimes of thought and action. Whilst critics have sometimes argued that what is missing from Althusser’s Spinozist account of voluntary servitude or subjection is an account of how the subject itself may work retroactively upon the ideological structure that determines it (that which Deleuze has named ‘folded force’), Althusser celebrated Spinoza’s attempt to understand the imagination as the fulcrum upon which the lived world respires.41 In Spinoza’s Ethics we find an account of how the imaginary works on an affective level via specific modes

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of identification and imitation, as well as, perhaps more significantly, a penetrating theorisation of the ambivalence and vacillation at the centre of these imaginary identifications that force the boundaries of its capture of consciousness. If, as we have indicated above, Althusser began to probe the psychoanalytic aspects of this problem in ‘Three Notes’, he perhaps considered it a problem without a solution. In relation to his project, it was, as he wrote to a friend in 1977, ‘a limit that had not yet been crossed’.42 Might Althusser have found further resources in Spinoza’s own elaboration of the production of individuality, that which Balibar, utilising Simondon, has named via the concept of transindividuality?43 In a classic textual analysis of Spinoza’s concepts of consciousness and conscience, Balibar also makes a general observation relevant to the question that I have opened up here. He states, quite correctly, that ‘one of the reasons why certain currents in modern philosophy, in spite of their divergences (logicists, structuralists, vitalists. . .) are specifically interested in Spinoza is precisely that they view him as an adversary of “subjectivity”’.44 This has been, he adds, the main focus of debate around the objectivist interpretation of Spinoza. Balibar’s analysis of the text finds in Spinoza not a subjectivist reading to correct the former one, but rather a process of consciousness without a subject.45 Indeed, it is this concept that makes it impossible to speak of the subject in Spinoza. ‘In the Ethics’, Balibar concludes, ‘we find something very odd in classical philosophy: an anthropology of consciousness without a subject’.46 What does Balibar mean by this curious expression? A full response to this question would take us too far from our immediate subject-matter. However, Balibar’s observation, here, resonates with that of Badiou noted above, and intensifies the anti-idealist formulation of the subject shorn of all reference to interiority and reflection. In Badiou’s case, in both Theory of the Subject and more recently Logic of Worlds, the subject becomes a formal process, a sequence of continuities and discontinuities, a truth-event that allows the creation or emergence of figures, forms, bodies of all kinds in the world. In this sense, it is a kind of ensemble, a locus of truth and meaning produced by a given situation. This is far from the fictional status of the subject of ideology proposed by Althusser, but Badiou’s formulation also recognises – and in a quite Spinozist way – the degree to which this composite existent can be a body of very different kinds: a poem, an army, an ecosystem, in short a configuration or incarnation of a certain sequence of events. In short, a strange formalisation of subjectivity without the metaphysical baggage of the modern concept of the subject. In many senses, Althusser’s own later writings were moving in a similar direction to Badiou, for whom a certain attentiveness to the aleatory emergence of the subject of truth, to the events that philosophy and ideology do not, and perhaps cannot produce or explain, in short, an interest in the throw of the dice and the singular instance of historical truth, were common themes.47 Indeed, in the ‘Philosophy of the Encounter’ Althusser writes of the figure of the aleatory as the very absence of beginning. We earlier described philosophy, with Althusser, as a ruptural exercise without a ‘real’ object. Here, the emphasis is the same: philosophy has no object; it sets out from nothing in order to endow itself with existence, in order that an aleatory encounter may take hold and give birth to new figures.48 History with neither telos nor cause, ‘. . . where the dice are thrown back on the table unexpectedly . . . or the elements are unloosed in a fit of madness that frees them up for new, surprising ways of taking-hold [de nouvelles prises surprenantes]’.49 In Althusser’s text, there is also a strong line of argument linking Spinoza to Democritus, Lucretius, and Epicurus, to Machiavelli, Hobbes and onwards to the others who form the

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subterranean current mentioned earlier in Reading Capital. We know, from one of Spinoza’s Letters, of his affinity with these thinkers (rather than with Plato and Aristotle).50 Indeed, we might qualify further and defend Spinoza’s philosophy as a materialism of the encounter where, as Althusser notes, the parallelism of the attributes is already the product of an encounter which creates (or crystallises, to use Althusser’s Simondonian phrase), figures of individuality – or relations between elements – from the simplest to the most complex: an atom, a body, a man, a state, a prince, to use Althusser’s examples, here; all raining down: an infinity of possibilities.51 A large part of Spinoza’s ontology and his politics is devoted to an understanding of the variety of modes of affective composition of bodies, where imagination acts as an anonymous conductor of affects.52 I will conclude with Althusser’s comments on this, likely written with disenchantment towards his earlier objectivist reading of Spinoza and with a strong regard for many of the themes raised above. I will quote only part of this long extract: A strange theory, which people tend to present as a theory of knowledge (the first of the three kinds), whereas ‘the imagination is not by any means a faculty, but, fundamentally, . . . only the world in its givenness’. With this slide [glissement], Spinoza not only turns his back on all theories of knowledge, but also clears a path for the recognition of the ‘world’ as that-beyond-which-there-is-nothing, not even a theory of nature – for the recognition of the ‘world’ as a unique totality that is not totalized, but experienced in its dispersion, and experienced as the ‘given’ into which we are ‘thrown’ and on the basis of which we forge all our illusions [fabricae] . . . For Spinoza, politics is then grafted on to the world’s imaginary and its necessary myths . . . But the theory of the imaginary as a world allows Spinoza to think the ‘singular essence’ of the third kind which finds its representation par excellence in the history of an individual or a people, such as Moses or the Jewish people. The fact that it is necessary means simply that it has been accomplished, but everything in it could have swung the other way, depending on the encounter or non-encounter of Moses and God, or the encounter of the comprehension or non-comprehension of the prophets.53 In this passage, one of his final reflections upon Spinoza’s philosophy and politics, we see clearly the figure of the imaginary as an anonymous process, as well as its critical relation to the notion of ‘subjectivity without a subject’. These remain creative concepts, whose development in the context of the kind of materialist position suggested by both Althusser and Badiou offers up interesting paths for future research.

Notes 1 Quoted from Althusser’s 1966 notes cited in Gosgarian 2003, p. lvii. 2 Badiou 2005a, p. 64. 3 Althusser 2006a, p. 279. 4 Althusser 1976a, p. 133. 5 Althusser 1976a, p. 132. 6 Althusser 1997a, pp. 10–11. 7 Elliott 1998; Montag 1998a; Negri 1996a.

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8 See Goshgarian 2003, pp. xv–xviii. 9 See, for example, the discussion in Althusser 1997a, pp. 12–13. 10 For an excellent critical exegesis of the role of Spinoza in relation to these thinkers, see Peden 2011. 11 See Macherey 1979, and the recent translation with an excellent historical introduction by Sue Ruddick: Macherey 2011. 12 Macherey 1998, p. 126. 13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102. 14 Althusser 1976a, pp. 134–5. 15 Althusser 2006a, pp. 273–4. 16 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40. 17 Althusser 2006a, p. 178. For further discussion of these Spinozist themes see Williams 2007; 2010. 18 Macherey 2009, p. 25. 19 Althusser 1976a, p. 136. 20 For a discussion of the function of the concept of the void in Althusser’s thought, see Matheron 1998. 21 Althusser 1976a, pp. 148–9. 22 Althusser 2003, pp. 33–84. 23 Althusser, 2003, p. 34. Bruno Bosteels suggests that the four discourses distinguished by Althusser in ‘Three Notes’ anticipate Badiou’s own discussion of the four procedures of truth that define the conditions of philosophy. This is also the case for Logics of World, where Badiou develops a theorisation not only of the affective structure of the subject within a given truthprocedure, but also of the type of truth-procedure in which such figures of the subject appear. See Bosteels 2011, pp. 49, 62–7. See also Badiou’s own discussion of Althusser’s politics and epistemology in Badiou (2012). 24 Althusser 2003, pp. 35–6. 25 See the discussion in Althusser 2003, pp. 19–32. 26 Althusser 2003, p. 65. 27 Althusser 2003, p. 53. 28 Althusser 1984, p. 44. 29 Althusser 2003, p. 77. 30 Althusser 2003, p. 78. 31 Badiou 2005a, p. 64. 32 See Badiou 2005a; 2009b; 2009c. 33 See Althusser 1984, pp. 61–139. 34 Althusser 2006a, p. 189. 35 For a discussion see Althusser 2003, pp. 19–32. 36 See Althusser 1976a, Chapter Four; and Thomas 2002. 37 It is important to point out that Althusser’s anti-humanism has political as well as philosophical ends. It was directed against the PCF’s endorsement of Khrushchev’s reforms in the USSR, whose ‘creed of the whole man’ and the overcoming of alienation was supported in France by an opening of a dialogue between Christianity and Marxism, as well as the advocacy of a peaceful road to socialism. It was thus against this humanist politics, as well as against what was perceived as the idealist and spiritualist strands of contemporary philosophy, that the anti-humanist argument was directed.

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38 Warren Montag has argued that it was, indeed. for tactical, political reasons that Althusser removed all reference to the ideological state-apparatuses as sites of struggle and instead presented the theory of interpellation in a functionalist way. It is useful, therefore, to consult Althusser 1995a for a more interventionist account of ideology. 39 Althusser 1997a, p. 7. 40 Althusser 1976a, p. 136. 41 For Deleuze’s discussion, see Deleuze 1988. 42 Althusser 1996b, pp. 4–5. 43 Balibar 1997b. 44 Balibar 1992, p. 37. 45 For a development of this anti-humanist argument in a Althusserian-Spinozist frame, see Williams 2010. 46 Balibar 1992, p. 50. 47 See for example, Brassier and Toscano 2004. Any future research-project developing this theme would have to take as its point of departure Bosteels’s important recent study Badiou and Politics, which was published after the main body of this chapter was written. The central value of Bosteels’s book lies in its rearticulation of the theoretico-political field of Althusser through Badiou. Indeed, the argument developed here reinforces Bosteels’s observation that ‘the importance of Althusser’s legacy for Badiou’s own philosophical project remains unsurpassed perhaps even by the influence of Sartre, Lacan, or Heidegger’ (Bosteels 2011, p. 50). 48 Althusser 2006a, pp. 191–2. 49 Althusser 2006a, p. 196. See also the discussion by Fourtounis in this volume. 50 Spinoza 1985, Letter 56. 51 See Morfino 2006b. 52 I develop this reading in Williams 2007. 53 Althusser 2006a, p. 179.

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11 Althusser with Deleuze: how to think Spinoza’s immanent cause Katja Diefenbach

‘God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’.1 Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics.

Althusser’s symptom

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n a reading that announces reading itself as one of its first problems, in the 1960s Althusser pursued the question of how to render Marx’s thought philosophically precise, and to separate it from its evolutionistic, anthropocentric and speculative elements while still remaining in the field of Marxism. This occurs in a double sense: he pursues this question and is pursued by it. The stake of the question lies in what Althusser calls his detour – via the path of philosophy to intervene in the politics of the French Communist Party (PCF).2 As a result, the question of how to render Marx philosophically precise becomes the symptom of Althusser’s writing. It indicates the status that Althusser attributed to Marx’s name. This name testifies that philosophy is subject to the primacy of revolutionary politics. It obliges a clarification of how a thought that advocates the precedence of non-theoretical over theoretical praxis can become politically effective without relapsing into an ‘interpretation of praxis’ that is ‘its pure and simple digestion or, if one prefers, internalisation’.3 A comparison with Blanchot’s reading of Marx suggests that Althusser aims to translate the distance separating philosophy and politics within philosophy itself. While Blanchot lets the three voices of Marx (the philosophical, political and scientific) stand beside one another without connection – separate, disparate, ‘as if they were juxtaposed’4 – and in their untranslatable distance unsettle the determinations of theory and praxis, Althusser’s concern is to define the distance between these categories, which is to say, to find the language of their translation, and to spell out the politics inherent to philosophy. The first formula of this politics was to identify Marx’s epistemological break, the points at which he separates himself from his idealisations; the second was to establish partisanship in philosophy, that is, to effect

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interventions, to force contention with other positions, and to think one’s own conflictual difference.5 For Blanchot, however, philosophy’s stepping-forth to an outside into which it is enfolded also implies another passage: an intervention in the imaginary self-relation of philosophy. He rejects the claim of being able to determine within philosophy the threshold between politics, science and philosophy, and pushes Marx’s different modes of writing to the point at which they experience ‘the senseless play of writing’6 itself. It is only in his late manuscripts that Althusser comes to speak of such a deconstructive politics of philosophy, one that discusses the inappropriability of the political and the encounter with non-sense.7 Previously, he had not been interested in such a deconstructive approach, but in the immanent determination of the relation between philosophy, science and politics. The self-inscription of theory in the social topology that theory develops is his formula for the determination of this relationship. Althusser asks: at what point in a topology, in which the displacement of the positions of effectivity between social instances is defined, does theory situate itself? Where in the course of the re-inscription of theory into theory is the site of its political effectivity? From where, in its distance to non-theoretical praxis, does it yield political effects?8 My text starts with the hypothesis that Althusser locates the political effectivity of Marxist philosophy in the dispute over the problem of immanent causality. Althusser relentlessly repeats the question of how Marx’s topological analysis of the capitalist mode of production can be translated philosophically into the idea of an immanent or structural causality that invalidates Hegel’s immanence model. In the process, he crosses out, one after the other, his previous formulations of this question, to set in motion new formulations in the wake of these crossings-out – a rare and harsh self-deconstruction, in which Althusser, in search of the threshold that would link, through their distance, philosophy and class struggle, does not stop ‘thinking differently, speaking differently, developing another conception of history’.9 The question of immanent causality, with which, according to Althusser, Marxist philosophy is rendered precise, is thus shown to be a site of fracture in his thought, one marked by unstable and changing terminology. In the sense of a symptomatic reading, it is precisely here that the pivotal problem that moves Althusser’s thought is found, without it being possible for him to pose it unequivocally.

Immanence is only immanent to itself My text undertakes only one intervention. It sets up a series of encounters between Althusser and Deleuze to show the theoretical instabilities distinguishing the idea of immanent causality in the early and late Althusser. In the first encounter between Deleuze and Althusser, it is a matter of discussing the references to Lacan’s idea of the absent cause and the quasi-Hegelianisms that persist in the concepts of the complex structured whole, the overdetermined contradiction, and the determination by the economic in the last instance. In the second encounter, the theoretical indecision in Althusser’s aleatory materialism is at stake, which refers back to his considerations on Lacan’s causality of the impossible in the 1960s, and the influence of the Cercle d’épistémologie and its journal Cahiers pour l’analyse.10 In Althusser’s late ‘materialism of the encounter’, without a word of explanation, an existential-ontological concept of the event collides with a Deleuzian concept of the event. In the first case, the event represents an exception from the laws of becoming, a suspension in ontological groundlessness and quasi-transcendental discontinuity. In the second, the event expresses torsions

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or ‘critical points’ in becoming.11 The principle of causality is not discarded, but supplemented with the principle of expression.12 Accordingly, the event does not simply take place on one plane as a kind of original deviation, but on two planes: on the plane of a differential field, which Deleuze calls the virtual, and on which ideal and non-localisable relations vary; and on the plane of individuation, on which these relations, while embodying and positioning themselves, are actualised in singular ways. An event is not followed by its subsequent stabilisation or solidification, like ‘mayonnaise when it emulsifies’,13 but a non-representative, dissimilar explication, a ‘becom[ing] expressive’.14 One event is articulated by another: ‘a double series of events which develop on two planes, echoing without resembling each other’.15 By reading Althusser with Deleuze one sees, in the final analysis, that the late Althusser aims to free materialist thought from the ‘principle of sufficient reason’, while Deleuze writes a materialist metaphysics that wrests from this principle an anomalous turn. Let us put it this way: if to ground means to determine the indeterminate, Deleuze searches for a type of ‘determination which is not opposed to the indeterminate and does not limit it’.16 The theoretical site in which the encounter between Althusser and Deleuze takes place in the present text is centred around their Spinoza-inspired conceptions of immanent causality. The extreme asymmetry of this site should not be forgotten. Compared with Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, Althusser remains elliptic and superficial. In his few references, he concentrates above all on the first two ontological and epistemological books of the Ethics, a reading that, as Tosel points out, removes from Spinoza ‘every ethical-political dimension’.17 Nevertheless, what links Althusser and Deleuze is the thesis that the thought of immanence cannot be obtained by simply opposing it to transcendence; rather, the problem consists in how quasi-transcendent questions – about the event, the excess of being, the difference between reproductive and productive repetition, in a word, about the new – can be thought immanently. It is a matter of grasping a kind of trans-immanence in immanent terms. In the process, Althusser and Deleuze attempt to exclude four operations: to think immanence as something or the One (substantialisation); to make it immanent to a thing or a subject (deification of human, labour or revolution); to let it become absolutely reflexive (interiorising movement of a self-unfolding whole); or – as in left-Heideggerianism – to retain transcendence in the form of a void or a space left vacant after the retreat of all first principles, to which immanence is exposed in the form of the inappropriable or inaccessible. Unlike left-Heideggerianism, Althusser and Deleuze grasp immanence not as the enclosing or including of a being subsisting in itself, which is to say, as a prison that needs to be forced open through transcendence and ecstasy.18 What Nancy calls Marxist immanentism – the idea that human beings find their essence in their labour and their works, an idea that, according to Nancy, also destroys the communist idea of community by linking it to the self-appropriation of man-as-producer19 – represents for Althusser and Deleuze a reduction of immanence to human praxis, its enclosure in the anthropological. For both authors, the significance of Spinoza is based on the radical rigour with which the latter made clear that immanence is only immanent to itself.20 In the 1960s Althusser summarised these thoughts in the theoretical figure of structural complexity, which makes it necessary to think ‘a distance and an internal dislocation (décalage) in the real, inscribed in its structure’.21 This distance demands that social formations are grasped topologically, that is, through the arrangement of their different instances (economic, ideological, political, and so on) and the logic in which these instances in their ‘relations of relative effectivity’22 displace one another. The critique of the political economy is thereby freed of the ‘myth of a community of labouring men’

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that allows one to imagine history ending in the self-transparency of a community consisting of nothing more than the combination of its constitutive activities – a trans-individuality without conflict, excess or expression – in other words, a ‘mode of production without relations of production’.23 Althusser and Deleuze agree on rejecting Marx’s early idea of an absolute human self-activity, in which self- and world-transformation coincide. Trans-individuality never amounts to transparent reciprocity. There is always a distance and an expression of this distance that prevent an immanentist closure of being. This hypothesis separates Althusser and Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza from Negri’s perspective, at the centre of which is the multiplicity of constitutive activities that singularise to the extent that they agree, so that a great crystal of reciprocal acts comes about: ‘the common in its most expansive figure’.24

Impossible or immanent causality? Althusser’s encounter with Deleuze confronts us with the question of how the distance immanent to the structure is thought. In both authors, the problem of determination is focused on the question of what occurs in this distance. This question acquires particular incisiveness in view of the fact that for Spinoza there is no gap, no empty space in extension, so the thought of distance implies a certain disassociation from Spinoza, or a clarification of what is understood by this distance inscribed in the structure, of its status or activity.25 Althusser discusses the theme of immanent causality, which effects the differentiation of a structure, by combining two divergent arguments: first, the cause is present in its absence; second, the cause is immanent in its effects: ‘The absence of the cause’, Althusser writes, ‘is the very form of the interiority of the structure . . . in its effects’.26 These two arguments come from different models of causality. That Althusser, in the section on structural causality in Reading Capital, refers to Lacan’s impossible cause and Jacques-Alain Miller’s metonymic causality27 shows that, in the attempt to detach the relation between cause and effect from mechanical and teleological models, he cannot decide between the Lacanian idea of a withdrawn cause and the Spinozian idea of an immanent cause. What is the difference? For Lacan, the distance in being can be traced back to a constitutive lack, a gap or hole, which is torn open by a cause that remains in retreat. It does not represent a simple non-being, but a ‘function of the impossible’.28 The absent cause thus becomes the counter-concept to the law. Laws describe how mechanisms act on each other and are displaced in their effects. However, the cause refers to the lack or the non-functionality – which is to say, the impossible – through which mechanisms of being, the psyche and reproduction are first installed. This ontological and existential primacy of a retreat within being, which brings about a ‘missing’ or ‘gaping’, is translated by Lacan into the category of truth. There is only truth concerning the impossible. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks in 1964 in Action of Structure, this impossible cause calls forth the function of a misrecognising subject that relentlessly attempts to fill and suture the lack in being. That Althusser, strengthened by the influence of the Cercle d’épistémologie, refers to theories that see the structure as organised by the function of an absence that acts reflexively on the elements of the structure as internal negativity (‘the whole is there insofar as it is excluded, sublated; it is there because it is lacking’,29 as Hyppolite summarised this theme in Hegel), raises the question of the extent to which Althusser’s use of categories of Lacanian-Hegelian origin, such as nothingness, the void, the absent whole, can

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be reconciled with a Spinozian model of causality. Here, Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza provides a theoretical alternative. Of decisive importance is that Deleuze reads Spinoza through the short-circuiting of two major axioms: a speculative axiom and an individuation-theoretical axiom. The first deals with the differentiality of the One (translated by Deleuze into the concepts of the plane of immanence or the chaosmos). A univocal substance constituted of infinite attributes (‘[b]efore all production there is thus a distinction’30) is expressed in modifications producing ‘correspondences without resemblance’.31 For Deleuze Spinoza’s ontology of difference therefore begins with an original theory of the distinction in the infinite. The attributes are not parts of the substance, which are distinguished among each other as x from y; they cannot be counted, but represent ‘dynamic or genetic elements’32 that are only formally distinguished in the substance. They are the indeterminate being, which Deleuze attempts to think with Spinoza, and which does not represent something undifferentiated, but what he calls the differential 33 – potentialities [potentialités]34 that are to be expressed, articulated, embodied, and will thereby make themselves. In order to develop this idea of a differential being, Deleuze introduces into Spinoza’s ontology Duns Scotus’s idea of a non-numerical, formal distinction.35 Being is not divided into parts, into species and genera, but is difference in itself: a single materiality in differential expressions, which are articulated in and by intensive degrees. This multiple substance, which for Spinoza represents the immanent cause of all things, and suspends the classical opposition between one and many in favour of the differentiality of the One, does not therefore represent anything withdrawn or absent. That refers directly to the second major axiom of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza: that of an individuating expression. With this second axiom, he takes up Spinoza’s theory of the mode, in order to think the movement in which the differential individuates non-representatively in dissimilar explications.36 For Spinoza a mode individuates the absolute potentiality (potentia) of nature (God), which is immanent to it, since ‘[f]rom the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes’.37 Spinoza passes here from the ‘what?’ to the ‘how?’, from the primacy of essence to the primacy of its expression. That is to say, the singular essence of the mode is not a fixed quality, but a quantitative degree in which the productivity of nature expresses itself and is expressed. Even if Deleuze thinks the self-expression of differential being as life, and never stopped presenting himself as a vitalist, he pushes, in certain parts of his writings, the manner in which immanence is lived, made or practiced by modal things to negative and subtractive limits in order to establish the notion of ‘a negativism beyond all negation’.38 This idea of a positive constitution of the negative presents an alternative to the quasi-transcendental status of the void or nothingness in the late Althusser that ‘ungrounds’ (entgründet) everything that is. To sum up, one can say that Deleuze and Althusser converge at the question of how a structure differentiates through its distances, while they diverge at the question of absence. To increase their convergence Deleuze attempts, especially in Difference and Repetition and ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, to align the dual terms virtuality/actuality with Althusser’s dual terms structure/conjuncture. He identifies the virtual, which he understands as a system of non-localisable relations and singular points, with the structural.39 With reference to Althusser, Deleuze conceives structure as a pre-extensive, topological space, in which positions are distributed – for example, ‘relations of production and property relations which are established not between concrete individuals but between atomic bearers of labourpower or representatives of property’.40 Even if the object of their study is fundamentally

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different (Althusser thinks the problem of the capitalist mode of production, Deleuze that of ontogenesis), they share the question of the structure’s time of actualisation. For both Deleuze and Althusser time cannot be understood by simply observing how one actualised form follows another; rather, one comprehends the function of time by investigating how it passes ‘from the virtual to the actual, that is, from the structure to its actualizations’.41 Or, as Althusser explains, the first subject of Marxism is not the historical development of the modes of production, but the question of the ‘society effect’,42 hence the problem of how a mode of production (defined as one structure in a complex structure) reproduces itself in differential effects throughout the whole of society. The thought of virtual structures is not atemporal, but distinguishes history from becoming (Deleuze), or result from effect (Althusser).43 What separates both authors, however, is that for Deleuze the effects of the structure do not represent functions of the impossible, they do not proceed from an absent cause. Deleuze never tires of showing that Spinoza’s thought destroys the category of the im/possible – or the in/compossible, as Leibniz would say. That means that the virtual being of the substance (in its infinite attributes) does not lack reality. For Deleuze, it is misleading to say that the substance, ‘which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects’,44 as does Althusser. ‘The virtual’, Deleuze writes, ‘is fully real in so far as it is virtual . . . [It] must be defined as strictly a part of the real object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension’.45 The self-evidence with which, in the context of Althusserianism, Lacan’s causa ablata is analogised with Spinoza’s immanent cause (when for example Miller takes Spinoza’s reading of the Bible as an example of a reading procedure ‘that seeks, across its taking-place, the specific lack that supports the structuring function’46), is from Deleuze’s perspective untenable. The divergence that appears with this question is best shown at the point at which Deleuze himself comes closest to the causality of the impossible. In ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’, a text that, as Kerslake and Stolze have shown, testifies to the attention with which Deleuze, in the second half of the 1960s, followed the Cercle d’épistémologie and the Lacanian-Althusserian scene at the École normale supérieure, Deleuze comes back to the figure of a missing object = x that he introduced in Difference and Repetition.47 With reference to Lacan and Miller he declares this object to be an ‘empty or perforated site’48 of the structure, which organises its displacements, but which itself remains withdrawn. He considers the idea of a negative distance through which an absent structure refers back to itself. Finally, however, he overwrites this with the idea of a disjunctive synthesis. Onto the concepts of the void, the lack and the gaping hole, he grafts the ‘idea of a positive distance’,49 with which the intervals or interstices immanent to a structure are conceived to be affirmed by being expressed. It is a matter of another form of oscillation. Where Lacan says, ‘there is a hole, and something that oscillates in the interval. In short, there is cause only in something that doesn’t work’,50 Deleuze says, there is a distance and something that oscillates in the interval. In short, there is cause only in something that works: the individuation of an intensity (also when it is anomal and dysfunctional).

Hyppolite’s lesson One can thus see that Althusser and Deleuze share the attempt to think immanent causality with Spinoza, albeit in divergent ways. Their common starting point is the dissociation from

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Hegel’s model of causality aimed at the self-mediation of the absolute. On a number of occasions, Deleuze refers to Althusser’s critique of this movement of self-mediation as a ‘monocentring of circles’, whereby Hegel, in the attempt to think the movement of the infinite through the finite, would remain in the element of representation.51 For Hegel, the different moments of the process of being and thought describe the path on which the absolute, due to the power of negativity, is developed through the different. In comparison, Althusser and Deleuze insist on thinking the different other than as a negative distance through which being refers to itself. They come together in the intention to investigate with Spinoza the positive, distributive and displacing causality of the differential. At the same time, however, especially Althusser, on the basis of his reference to Lacan’s causality of the impossible, and the use of the category of the complex structured whole, is confronted with the question of ‘what is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think against Hegel’.52 For Hegel himself is one of the most radical thinkers of immanence, for whom, particularly in the Science of Logic, there is neither beginning nor end, but only the actuality of the infinite, which drives the finite things out beyond themselves and mediates them. One could say that Althusser and Deleuze detach themselves from Hegel at precisely the point at which the latter idealises the immanent movement of the infinite by confining the differences, through the negation of negation, in a self-referential process, thus leading to the unity of the relationship of self and other, that is, to the self-representation of the absolute. Althusser and Deleuze intervene at the point at which Hegel constructs a unity of mediations, which he raises to the subject of mediation itself. What are the characteristics of this intervention? For both Althusser and Deleuze, Hyppolite’s reading of Hegel, especially his book Logic and Existence,53 is of a significance that should not be underestimated. Both find in this reading a refined, non-anthropological interpretation of Hegel, one also aimed against Kojève’s reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hyppolite formulates a precise and productive point at which Deleuze and Althusser can distinguish themselves from Hegel. In Deleuze’s review of Logic and Existence, written in 1956, Deleuze adopts fundamental hypotheses from Hyppolite’s interpretation of the Science of Logic for his own thought. These include the determination of philosophy as an ontology of difference, the absolute exclusion of any anthropology, the substitution of the question of essence by the question of sense (expression), and the emphasis that there is no second world beyond appearances.54 The point at which Deleuze raises an objection against Hyppolite’s Hegelian ontology is the thesis that being can only be difference to the extent that difference is pushed to the absolute, which is to say, to contradiction: ‘Speculative difference is the Being which contradicts itself’. Deviating from this formula, Deleuze develops his theoretical programme of writing an ontology of difference in which difference does not go as far as contradiction, ‘because contradiction would be less than difference and not more’.55 This programme attempts to think difference in itself. Difference is no longer grasped as a determined distinction of something from something else in the interior of the concept, but as the differential that is actualised in differences: ‘instead of something distinguished from something else, imagine something which distinguishes itself – and yet that from which it distinguishes itself does not distinguish itself from it . . . We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself, as in the expression “make the difference”’.56 As I have shown, Deleuze grasps this making of difference as an intensive individuation of thought and being. What is at stake is to get rid of all representative determinations of difference: identity in the concept; opposition in the predicate; similarity in perception; and analogy in judgement.57

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Spinoza’s model of causality is one of the most important paths via which Deleuze attempts to think the intensive genesis of difference in this sense. Althusser also incorporates Hyppolite’s interpretation of Hegel’s thought into his rigorous anti-Hegelian stance. He takes up the closing remarks of Logic and Existence, where Hyppolite notes that the young Marx destroys Hegel’s radicalism by projecting Feuerbach’s speculative anthropology into the Phenomenology of the Spirit, making from each objectification an alienation, from each alienation a human alienation, and from the whole history of the alienation of the spirit the history of the alienation of the human subject: ‘Now, as M. Hyppolite has very well noted’, Althusser writes, ‘nothing is more foreign to Hegel’s thought than this anthropological conception of history’.58 Spinoza’s idea of immanent causality is precisely the distance that Althusser introduces into Marx to separate him from the reference to Feuerbach’s critique of Hegel, that is, from the whole theme of emancipatory sensibility and human alienation. This explains Spinoza’s prominent position in Althusser’s reading of Marx. Spinoza’s name designates the epistemological break that Althusser discerns in Marx’s works, or what Althusser later calls class struggle in theory, that is, the work of theoretical delineation, thought’s activity of separation.59 When in Althusser’s ‘philosophy for Marx’ the struggle for the concept of immanent causality is at stake, the reading of Spinoza is the detour that Althusser takes to destroy another detour – the one made by Marx via Hegel.60 In a lecture held in Hyppolite’s seminar in 1968, titled ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’, Althusser puts aside for a moment the theme of his critique of Hegel (the reduction of history to the cumulative internalisation of a principle) to discuss Hegel’s positive influence.61 He points out that Marx finds in Hegel the decisive category of his method of presentation – the category of the process without a subject: ‘Marx was close to Hegel in his insistence on rejecting every philosophy of the Origin and the Subject’.62 In the Science of Logic, by equating being directly with non-being, Hegel declares that everything has already begun, and the continuity of the process consists in its discontinuity and extension – or, as Nancy writes, ‘the infinite or the absolute will be presented in no determined figure. There will be other figures, but they will now be known for what they are: successive forms in passage, forms of passage itself’.63 For Althusser, Hegel’s rejection of the origin ‘as a philosophical issuing bank’64 makes his thought into the theoretical premise of materialism. Through the absence of the beginning and the end, the foundation and the completion, Hegel in the Science of Logic is thus an irreducible differential thinker. At the same time, however, Althusser shows that Hegel created new ways of thinking the delegations of origin and subject: Hegel’s subject, Althusser writes, ‘is the process itself in its teleology’.65 Correspondingly, for Hegel truth is total and totalising; there is only truth concerning the whole. Even if this whole is never globally present, it inserts the differences in the ‘anamnestic interiority’66 and self-referentiality of the spirit. In other words, the whole fulfils itself in the immanent arrival of its own concept. With reference to Derrida’s (thus actually Heidegger’s) idea of the crossing out (rature) with which a metaphysical category ‘is effaced while still remaining legible’,67 Althusser shows how Hegel subsequently reintroduces the origin by way of the reflexivity of the process. What we find in the Science of Logic, Althusser writes, is ‘the theory of the non-primordial nature of the origin’.68 As with Deleuze, the crux of Althusser’s reception of Hyppolite lies in introducing Spinoza’s model of immanent causality as a radical critique avant la lettre of Hegel’s subjectivisation of the whole and the related teleologisation of dialectic. Hence, after Epicurus, Spinoza is made the actual and most radical thinker of a process without a subject or goal which inscribes a

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forgotten trace into a materialist dialectic in which the elements of a structure do not express a movement of cumulative internalisation, but of decentring overdetermination.69 Unlike Deleuze, for Althusser the detour via Spinoza comes at a price, ‘[f]or the adventure is perilous, and whatever you do, you cannot find in Spinoza what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction’.70 As against this verdict, Macherey attempted to show that one could trace in Spinoza a new concept of contradiction that has to be understood as a ‘struggle of tendencies that do not carry within themselves the promise of their resolution’.71 Instead of suggesting that Spinoza simply subtracts the negation of negation from the movement of contradictions, as Macherey does, readers of Spinoza such as Del Lucchese hold that Spinoza has replaced the concept of contradiction with that of conflict, thus making Spinoza a thinker of ‘the themes of limitation, crisis, and destruction’.72

Structural causality But how does Althusser conceive the category of a process without a subject or goal in a Spinozian sense? What happens in this process? In Reading Capital, in which he introduces the concept of structural causality,73 Althusser basically gives the same answer as in For Marx, only now it is not oriented to the problem of the political break (condensation, displacement or fusion of contradictions, dislocation of their internal aspects), but to that of the reproduction of social formation. His answer is that the reproduction process has to be pinpointed in the mechanism by which social elements in their degrees of effectivity are displaced on the basis of their relational positioning in the structure. With this topological model, Althusser particularly wants to remove Hegel’s model of causality from Marxism – although he does not endeavour to examine more precisely the Hegelian-Marxist or value-theoretical positions in the new readings of Marx in the 1960s and ‘70s.74 Relatively schematically, he attempts to replace what he calls the expressive model of causality in the Leibniz–Hegel line, in which the whole is conceived as harbouring an inner principle that is articulated by ‘phenomenal forms of expression’.75 In doing so, Althusser works with three arguments, by which he subverts his strategy to separate Marx’s model of causality from Hegel:76 the assumption of a determination by the economic in the last instance; the idea that the structure forms a complex whole composed of a series of elements that, in their topological relations, are supposed to partially internalise each other, since they are conceived as mutually conditioning each other. With the hypothesis that the structure expresses itself in the displacement of degrees of effectivity between relatively autonomous elements, Althusser takes up Marx and Engels’s idea of a totality of social relations that reaches far beyond the economic, and consists in the interaction of really distinguished elements, which are only determined ‘in the last instance’77 through the realisation of surplus value. So as not to withdraw to a relativist position of infinitely mutating interactions, Althusser claims it would be necessary to take up the idea of a primacy of determination by the economic that unifies the play of differences between social elements by determining the displacements of their degrees of effectivity.78 That means the relations of production do not affect other social relations directly, but only via the displacement of the degrees of effectivity in and between the relations of production, the juridico-political and ideological instances. In other words, the economic determines nothing but the relation which becomes prevalent in the overall structure; it determines the relational logic in which

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the degrees of effectivity vary in the structure. Thus, in the first place, it becomes necessary for Althusser to clarify the position of the economic in the topology into which he translated Marx’s base-superstructure schema. The key task is ‘to reveal the site occupied in the structure of the whole by the region of the economic, therefore to reveal the articulation of this region with other regions (legal-political and ideological superstructure), and the degree of presence (or effectivity) of the other regions in the economic region itself’.79 As already in For Marx, Althusser explains this dislocation of degrees of effectivity through a complex movement of partial reflection. By assuming that the social instances mutually condition one another in their existence, Althusser infers that they internalise the position that they occupy in the structure. Hence relations are not thought, as in Spinoza, through the intervals that they articulate, but through their terms, which form a kind of higher individuality by reflecting and interiorising their relational position in the complex structured whole.80 According to Balibar, the difference between Marx’s and Foucault’s idea of the ‘structure of social conflict’ can be located precisely in this Hegelianising figure of complex reflection. In Foucault there is no, at least no strong or stable, interiorising mechanism from which, retroactively, the logic arises that determines the metonymic mode in which the complex whole reproduces itself (by dislocating degrees of effectivity). In other words, the relationships in which social mechanisms displace themselves in their effects ‘do not form a superior unity or individuality’. Their terms do not become, through the partial internalisation of the relationship itself, ‘the functions or the bearers of the relationship’.81 This means that the process does not subjectivise itself. Here it should be added that although Foucault does not think the category of struggle through a sort of complex dialectic in which the terms of a relationship partially internalise the relationship itself, he conceives the transformation of modes of regulation in this way. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault explains (clearly adopting an Althusserian figure of argumentation) that the dispositif of discipline has not been replaced by the dispositif of security; what has changed from one to the next is only the ‘system of correlation’ between social mechanisms ordered in ‘complex edifices’ in which nothing but the ‘dominant characteristic’ is displaced.82 None other than Deleuze attempts to push Foucault to the point of not primarily thinking reflexive and overdetermined relationships between stratified social elements, but the expressive becoming of unformed functions.83 Already in 1969 Hyppolite pointed out to Althusser that it would not be easy to separate Marx’s from Hegel’s idea of determination by attributing to one ‘the complexity of an effective overdetermination’, and to the other ‘the complexity of a cumulative internalization’.84 The partial reflexivity through which Althusser still defines overdetermination relates, for Hyppolite, to precisely the idea of structures that Hegel develops in the Science of Logic, especially in ‘The Doctrine of Essence’: ‘There he describes structures in which the essential and unessential are reflected in one another, in which the existential condition of a dominant contradiction are an element in the contradiction itself’.85 However, Althusser’s achievement in rendering inoperative a series of simplified ideas of determination in Marxism should not be underestimated, above all: the direct and mechanical determination of the superstructure through the base; the reduction of the relations of production to intersubjective relations, or to one of their basic patterns (the struggle for recognition); the evolutionistic periodisation of modes of production through one single principle that drives the universalisation of the particular (division of labour); and the essentialist understanding of the value-form as a principle of abstraction that determines all concrete historical forms in their passage and movement. In doing so, however, he overlooks that in the Ethics

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Spinoza develops the idea of a creative determination and an intensive relation that is relatively independent of its terms. On a number of occasions, Warren Montag has drawn attention to correspondence from 1965 in which Macherey sets out for Althusser how Spinoza’s model of immanent causality is characterised above all by the idea of the intensive infinite. The logic of an absent whole that totalises the interrelation of its parts is, according to Macherey, even in Althusser’s complex variant of totalisation via differential dislocations, rejected in Spinoza’s thought. With reference to Deleuze’s Lucretius commentary, Macherey declares that the immanent expression of the infinite that traverses the finite, which Spinoza wants to theorise, cannot be grasped in the metonymic effects of a complex whole: ‘Nature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum which does not totalize its own elements. There is no combination capable of encompassing all the elements of Nature at once, there is no unique world or total universe’.86

Pars intensiva When in the first half of the 1960s Althusser attempted to render Marx philosophically precise via Spinoza, he integrated into this operation a series of Bachelardian theorems. As against the myth of a continual progress of thought, the French epistemological school – Bachelard, Cavaillès, Koyré, Canguilhem – holds that science proceeds in a discontinuous way in the course of breaks and unforeseeable leaps. Bachelard, in particular, points out that a new science does not simply assert itself in an area in which there had previously been an absence of knowledge, but has to establish itself against prescientific positions, against ‘a tissue of positive, tenacious, interdependent errors’.87 Althusser takes up Bachelard’s thesis that a new set of problems spans a theoretical field at whose edges earlier positions are localised, which represent variants of wrongly posed questions and often form an epistemological pair, a ‘bipolarity of error’.88 Accordingly, Althusser sees Marx and Spinoza’s thought of causality as being framed by two major ‘epistemological obstacles’,89 by Descartes’s model of mechanical, and Leibniz’s model of expressive causality, which was taken up by Hegel, and in which each part represents a pars totalis articulating the principle of the whole.90 With the schematic framing between two erroneous variants, Althusser misses the manifold references that entered into Spinoza’s concept of the immanent cause, especially the idea of creative determination that characterises the emanative cause in Neoplatonism. While Althusser simplifies the problem of causality through polar schematisation, Deleuze, in a reverse operation, makes it more complex by showing how Spinoza integrated into his ontology Neoplatonist, scholastic and Renaissance philosophical elements. In a sort of secret history of a philosophy of immanence, Deleuze reconstructs how Spinoza ‘grafted an expressive immanence of Being onto the emanative transcendence of the One’.91 He starts by arguing that Plotinus’s emanative and Spinoza’s immanent cause both remain in themselves. The emanative cause, however, stands over being, and its effects leave the cause that remains in itself. They are nothing but the things that follow, the descending things, emanations representing the degradations of a being that flows out of and down from an eminent One. For Deleuze, Spinoza’s radicalism lies in the hypothesis that the effects remain in the cause just as the cause remains in itself: ‘From this point of view the distinction of essence between cause and effect can in no way be understood as a degradation. From the viewpoint of immanence the distinction

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of essence does not exclude, but rather implies, an equality of being; it is the same being that remains in itself in the cause, and in which the effect remains as in another thing’.92 For Deleuze, due to the equality and univocity of being, immanence is not to be separated from the idea of expression; the substance expresses itself in its effects, while on a second level the effects express themselves in the substance as dissimilar modifications. This second level is that of ‘the very production of particular things’,93 the ontogenetic level, which Althusser does not discuss in Spinoza. This omission leads him to miss the two fundamental characteristics of Spinoza’s model of causality: first, that determination is affirmative and positive; second, and directly related to this, that the cause is not absent but explicated through its effects in a non-representative, non-resembling expression. Althusser described the activity of the immanent cause only through the displacements of ‘indices of effectivity’, which are determined by the positions that social relations occupy ‘in the mechanism of the whole’.94 However, in Spinoza, expression primarily has nothing to do with the interaction between the parts of a whole, but with the activity of what medieval scholasticism calls a pars intensiva, an intensive part or intrinsic degree. While for Deleuze it is the individuation of such a degree that occurs in the structure’s internal distances, Althusser restricts himself to saying that its dislocation takes place in this distance, without analysing the type of activity characteristic of the degree itself. Deleuze turns to Spinoza because the latter’s philosophy of expression makes it possible to think this degree in terms of the individuation of the intensive or the indeterminate (both assumed to be differential in themselves), and thus to reject Hegel’s basic alternative, which Hegel himself so often attributed to Spinoza: either ‘the indeterminate, the indifferent, the undifferenciated or a difference already determined as negation, implying and enveloping the negative’.95 As against Hegel’s idea that each determination is a negation, Deleuze refers to Spinoza in order to think determination as affirmation – or in Spinoza’s own words: ‘That through which things are said to be determined to produce an effect must be something positive’.96 The following theses are therefore linked: the cause affirms itself in its modifications; the modifications express intensive degrees of the cause; the indeterminate is not an indifferent abyss, but the internal differentiation of the cause itself. Here, everything depends on thinking difference not as distinction, but as that by which distinction makes itself (as the differential). Analogous to the planes of the virtual and the actual, Deleuze shows that there are two planes of intensive quantity in Spinoza: that of the essences and that of the existences. As singular essences the modes constitute an (eternal) degree of nature’s intensity or potentiality; as embodied existences they articulate this degree affectively in fluctuating transitions between minimal and maximal thresholds. This distinction refers to a major difficulty in Spinoza’s thought, which is discussed by both Macherey and Deleuze – namely, how the physics of bodies and the theory of essences relate.97 Here, we are confronted with two different concepts of parts. As extensive part, the mode builds a whole made up of an infinite quantity of parts, which in turn are formed from an infinite quantity of most simple bodies. An extensive thing – an individual, as Spinoza says – is always a composite thing that exists as soon as it subsumes a certain quantity of infinite parts within itself and organises them within a specific correlation of movement and rest. This bodily existence of things is transitory. The bodies compose themselves in encounters and then decompose themselves, enter into larger connections or are destroyed. Here, causality and determination are transitive and mechanical: ‘A mode comes into existence, not by virtue of its essence, but by virtue of purely mechanical

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laws which determine an infinity of some extensive parts or other to enter into a precise given relation, in which its essence expresses itself’.98 While the extensive parts act on one another mechanically, and are displaced within their compositions, the intensive parts express the potentiality of the substance in a singular degree. When a metastable composition emerges from the interactions of extensive parts, and corresponds to a singular essence, extensive and intensive parts come together to constitute a thing that strives ‘to persevere in its being’.99 This function of perseverance that Spinoza calls striving (conatus) has nothing conservative about it; it is the process by which an essence affirms its singularity, and thus difference itself. In the final analysis Spinoza does not focus on the essence of things, but on the expressive act through which it is articulated and tested, not by imitating the essence but articulating its potential between minimal and maximal thresholds. That the thing strives in its differenciation makes out of the conatus a kind of springboard of existence. Here, extension and intension accompany one another in Spinoza. The interactions between bodies refer to variations of affect. In a good encounter between bodies, which brings about a supplementing or linking of parts, the body experiences joy, which is expressed in an increase in the potentiality to act; in a bad encounter it experiences sadness and a reduction of its potentiality to act. Thus extensive bodily states (affections) correspond to intensive variations of potentiality (affects). This path is discontinuous, but it makes possible radical torsions in becoming. For Spinoza it arises from the middle of imaginary and affective fluctuations, and might pass from the maximisation of the joyful passions to active affects (thought) and to happiness. In other words, the linking of extensive affections and intensive affects can trigger rational ideas; thinking commences from below, locally, within the imaginary. Starting from a little joy one reaches the first cause-ideas (common notions), and can potentiate and activate oneself further. As also Althusser takes up in his theory of ideology, the imaginary ideas and passions, however, will never disappear; one cannot eliminate the imaginary relations one establishes to the problematic conditions of one’s existence, one can only radically change them. The constitution of freedom is for Spinoza a path that proceeds from social and psychic conflict and must traverse it again and again: ‘Such is the difficult path of salvation. Most men remain, most of the time, fixated by sad passions which cut them off from their essence . . . The path of salvation is the path of expression itself: to become expressive – that is, to become active; to express God’s essence, to be oneself an idea through which the essence of God explicates itself, to have affections that are explained by our own essence and express God’s essence’.100

Destructured and unbound In his book Hegel or Spinoza, published in 1979, Macherey undertakes what Althusser announced with his reading of Marx, but blocked through terminological instabilities and Hegelianising references. Macherey supplements Althusser’s operation; he does what Althusser demanded, developing out of Spinoza’s model of causality the theoretical figure of a process without a subject or goal. In doing so, he too takes a detour. He follows Hegel’s reception of Spinoza to uncover the strategy with which Hegel introduces himself as the true thinker of the absolute, who grasps the substance in the form of a ‘negative unity of the self’.101 What Macherey shows is Hegel’s misreading, in which the acuity of Spinoza’s ontology of difference remains misunderstood up to the moments in which Hegel’s and Spinoza’s thought

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converge. Macherey pinpoints the way in which Hegel systematically misrecognised Spinoza’s anticipation, through his critique of Cartesianism, of the theoretical reasons why Hegel himself broke with Kantian anthropology and rejected the external difference between being and cognition, turning it into the internal difference of being itself. Compared to Hegel’s conception of being as identical to difference (i.e. as mediation), Macherey claims Spinoza’s ontology of difference to be more radical, as it cancels the internal teleologisation of the process of the absolute.102 In Spinoza there is no unity of mediations that becomes the subject of mediation itself. The book ends with the hypothesis that in Spinoza, due to the doctrine of attributes, the idea of an intensive infinite, a positive determination, and a non-finalistic causality, there is a sketch of a materialist dialectic ‘that function[s] in the absence of all guarantees, in an absolutely causal manner’.103 Although, with these ideas, Macherey draws on central elements of Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, he avoids every individuation-theoretical interpretation of Spinoza’s model of causality. As in Althusser the dimension that makes the Ethics into a book of practical liberation is not discussed by Macherey in 1979. He discards the hypothesis of a selective life, in which, in a process of internal differentiation, a thing maximises the joyful passions to leap into active affects,104 and remains committed to Althusser’s reading strategy to deploy Spinoza’s thought as a distance separating materialist and idealist dialectics. Despite his enthusiasm for Macherey’s precise reading, Stanislas Breton emphasises that this strategy not only introduces an ‘unacknowledged teleology’ – the materialist dialectic as last horizon of thought – but also ignores the sutures between materialism and idealism. According to Breton one of these sutures runs along the idea shared by Spinoza and Hegel of absolute causality (causa sui), which for Breton – here following Heidegger – refers to the fact that materialism and idealism are linked in the principle of (sufficient) reason.105 In his late texts, Althusser takes up this argument and declares, with reference to Heidegger, that materialism and idealism meet where they obey the principle ‘according to which everything that exists, whether ideal or material, is subject to the question of the reason for its existence’.106 Althusser counters this principle with an alternative principle that – as André Tosel explains in this volume – represents a non-principle: the aleatory or the deviation, the atoms’ swerve. Althusser’s late ‘materialism of the encounter’ culminates in the thesis that an event expresses a deviation that is groundless and lawless. Nothing precedes it. It renders all transitory laws inoperative. Once again, the question of the ground shows the divergence between Althusser and Deleuze, which is due not only to different readings of Heidegger, but also to a different idea of immanence and causality. In ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ Althusser vacillates between, on the one hand, the idea that an event expresses an individuation, the process of an interlocking of atoms, of a grasping or a varying of relations between heterogeneous series, and, on the other, the idea that an event absolutely precedes its grasping or ‘take’ [prise], that it constitutes an exception, a cut, over which ‘no law presides’.107 The interpretation of the encounter inspired by Deleuze is reduced to a few sentences: after the brief reference to a ‘primacy of positivity over negativity (Deleuze)’,108 Althusser describes the encounter as something that occurs between ‘series (séries) of beings that are the results of several series of causes’.109 Here, Althusser draws on Deleuze’s concept of the virtual as varieties of relations and singular points that are distributed along at least two rows of elements. A synthesising event, which takes place in this field of pre-extensive, ideal connections, is not a pure contingency, a lawless act, arising without reason, and destructuring and unbinding the embodied

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and instituted relations, but the affirmation of differences, or what Deleuze calls a disjunctive synthesis. The ancient atomism, from which Althusser takes the model of the encounter, has, according to Deleuze, conceded ‘too much independence’110 to the atom, and reduced the thought of the swerve [clinamen] to spatiotemporal relations. What is lost thereby is the intensive character of the expression that Deleuze ascribes to a virtual encounter: the change of a differential relation or a potentiality. Put very schematically, at stake are different ways of thinking Heidegger’s idea of being as difference. ‘[I]t was only with Heidegger’, Althusser writes, ‘that the void was given all its decisive philosophical significance again’.111 For Althusser, the void is thus that which ungrounds and unbinds the factual; it testifies to ‘transcendental contingency’,112 that is, it revokes all provisional laws, everything that has stabilised in the form of sense, purpose or principle. Hence, for Althusser, an encounter is not the individuation of the differential, but something transcendent in the Heideggerian sense, a stepping out in itself of the existing, with which it deactivates its juridical-factual bonds: ‘Transcendere means to step over; the transcendens, the transcendent, is that which oversteps as such . . . Dasein itself oversteps in its being and thus is exactly not immanent’.113 Although in Difference and Repetition Deleuze draws on Heidegger’s idea that the distance between Being and beings is nothing negative, but difference, fold, question,114 he criticises Heidegger to the extent that the activity of difference is thought as a retreat, as a withdrawal in the very act of presentation. That is opposed to Deleuze’s idea of immanent causality, to determine the indeterminate without limiting or negating it. Difference does not retreat; it expresses itself. Unlike Althusser, Deleuze does not therefore open the principle of the ground to Heidegger’s abyss, in which the indeterminate ‘conceals itself in the act of presentation or manifestation as the non-given in givenness’,115 but to the virtual, which is neither withdrawn nor undifferentiated, but in which the indeterminate exists as the intensive. In the ‘materialism of the encounter’ Althusser understands structure not in this sense of the virtual in Deleuze – a non-totalisable multiplicity of causes – but as a process that starts after the event: the stabilisation of a set of laws as soon as the elements of an encounter take hold, interlock and co-stabilise one another. Structure is here replaced and cancelled-out by the concept of conjuncture, to which Althusser ascribes an internal character of process and differentiation. It is a becoming-necessary and becoming-form, ‘just as water “takes hold” when ice is there waiting for it, or milk does when it curdles’.116 By losing the concept of structure (understood in the sense of the virtual), one loses the possibility to think an immanent and affirmative differentiation of difference in the Spinozian tradition. In some respects, Althusser’s late concept of the encounter seems to be comparable to Badiou’s thought. When at the beginning of the 1980s Badiou passes from a dialectic of destruction to a meta-ontology of the event, he discusses the event as ‘what escapes the facts, and from where the truth of these facts can be assigned’.117 This corresponds to the quasi-transcendental status of the void in the late Althusser, which makes it difficult to think this void as a subtractive effect of the encounter or conatus, as Warren Montag and Giorgos Fourtounis attempt in a radical limit-reading.118 They have to push the late Althusser to his most extreme margins to be able to graft onto the idea of the clinamen as a principle of pure contingency the Deleuzian idea of the clinamen as conatus, which does not manifest contingency but, on the contrary, the plurality of causal series which cannot be brought together into a whole.119 However, Althusser’s idea that a purely contingent encounter subsequently becomes necessary by becoming stable, by making itself consistent – thus ‘curdles’ or ‘solidifies’

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– recalls the procedure of fidelity that Badiou defines at the beginning of the 1980s as what subsequently gives an impossible event political consistence.120 To return to the opening question, the political effects that the late Althusser attempts, in the contention over the concept of causality, to generate through philosophy (if such a thing is possible at all) point in a different direction from Deleuze’s effects. While Althusser tends to think politics in the function of the impossible – to seize a situation when all conditions for such a seizure are missing – the late Deleuze pushes his idea of individuation to ever more subtractive versions, to think a political existence of the negative beyond negation – an expressing that subtracts or voids: it undoes individuality, it eliminates the perceptible, it gives preference to the not.121 If, for Deleuze, the event is a torsion in becoming that yields neutralising and subtractive effects, for the late Althusser it is a radical interruption in becoming. That is the site at which Spinoza leaves him. Henceforth, reading Althusser with Deleuze will help to register the problems characterising their respective thinking of politics. During times of radical political renewal – new forms of social struggles, anti-colonial liberation movements, and the spreading uprisings of an anti-capitalist student and working-class youth – the fidelity to the PCF and the assumed necessity of party organisation drove Althusser, step by step, to ever sharper criticism of the party, particularly following its Eurocommunist turn, as well as to a continual reformulation of a Leninist or Machiavellian idea of the political act; at the same time, he proved himself to be almost incapable of thinking the multiplicity of radical struggles and inventing new modes of non-authoritarian organisation. Starting from the opposite position, and recognising something that Althusser had difficulty acknowledging, and thus drawing the consequences (the fact that the party normalised the proletarian struggles), Deleuze claimed that the distance between the idea of political organisation and ethical individuation could be short-circuited by way of one single philosopheme: the intensive different/ciation of being. In his thinking of minoritarian politics he thus omitted that the act of political organisation and ethical singularisation are not one and the same praxis. Translated from the German by Benjamin Carter.

Notes 1

Spinoza 1985, EIP18, p. 428.

2

See ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 253.

3

Althusser 1994b, p. 41.

4

‘Marx’s Three Voices’ in Blanchot 1997, p. 98.

5

See ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in Althusser 1976a, pp. 165–6.

6

‘Marx’s Three Voices’ in Blanchot 1997, p. 100.

7

[. . . der aleatorischen und provisorischen Beschaffenheit des Seins entsprechen . . .] in Althusser 2010a, p. 72: ‘Which word to use to think the consistency of this subversion, . . . which in the interior of philosophy . . . will hold a discourse on philosophy that scatters and destroys its being, that is, its effects, without leaving it?’. The chapter is included neither in the Écrits philosophiques et politiques nor in Philosophy of the Encounter. It corresponds to the tenth chapter of the manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ was decoupled.

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8

See Althusser 1994b, p. 42.

9

[. . . der Anspruch, anders zu denken . . .] in Althusser 2010a, p. 19. This paragraph directly precedes the chapters that have been edited under the title ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’.

10 The Cahiers pour l’analyse were issued between 1966 and 1969 by the Cercle d’épistémologie at the École normale supérieure (ENS). Among the editors were JacquesAlain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, François Regnault and Alain Badiou. See the translation and contextualisation of the Cahiers by Peter Hallward, Christian Kerslake, Ray Brassier and Knox Peden, http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/. Accessed March 2012. 11 Deleuze 2001, p. 189. 12 Here, Deleuze writes a genealogy of expressive causality that is radically different from that of Althusser. The latter links Hegel and Leibniz, arguing that both think a totality whose parts contain, in the immediate form of their expression, the essence of the totality itself. Deleuze, however, links Spinoza and Leibniz. At the end of Expressionism in Philosophy he explains how, by defining expression as dissimilar explication of an univocal substance, Spinoza is more radical in his thinking of expression than Leibniz (see Deleuze 1990a, pp. 321–35). 13 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 192. 14 Deleuze 1990a, p. 320. 15 Deleuze 2001, p. 189. 16 Deleuze 2001, p. 275. On the deconstruction of the formula omnis determinatio est negatio, which Hegel ascribes to Spinoza, see Macherey 2011, pp. 113–22. 17 Tosel 1994, p. 209. In Althusser 1995b and 2006a we find a couple of remarks on the status of affections and affects in Spinoza, although they are not really integrated into the idea of the encounter. On this marginal position of Spinoza in the late writings, see Tosel in this volume. 18 See Deleuze and Guattari 2003, p. 47: ‘The reversal of values had to go so far – making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism) from which the Transcendent will save us’. 19 See Nancy 1991, pp. 1–19, 58–60. 20 See Deleuze and Guattari 2003, p. 48: ‘Spinoza was the philosopher who knew full well that immanence was only immanent to itself and therefore that it was a plane traversed by movements of the infinite, filled with intensive ordinates’. Compare Nancy 2004, pp. 11–2. 21 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 17. 22 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 100. 23 ‘Marx in his Limits’ in Althusser 2006a, pp. 36–7. 24 Hardt and Negri 2009, p. 181. 25 See Spinoza 1985, EIP15Sch, pp. 421–4; ‘Letter 13 to Oldenburg’ in Spinoza 1985, pp. 207–12. 26 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188. 27 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188; Miller 2009. For causa ablata see Lacan 1977, pp. 20–3, 125–9. 28 Lacan 1977, p. 129. 29 Hyppolite 1997, p. 162. 30 Deleuze 1990a, p. 182. 31 Deleuze 2001, p. 184. 32 Deleuze 1990a, p. 80. 33 See Deleuze 2001, pp. 214–21.

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34 Both Spinoza’s Latin concept of potentia and Deleuze’s French concepts of potentialité and puissance are translated as potentiality in the present text. This should not to be understood in the sense of the Aristotelian dynamis, a potentiality that has to be realised, but in the strict anti-Aristotelian sense of a pure differential or an intensive degree, as is argued below. 35 See Deleuze 1990a, pp. 64–7. 36 Deleuze distinguishes the plane of virtual differentiation from that of actualising differenciation. He calls their relation différent/ciation; see Deleuze 2001, pp. 244–8, 279–81. 37 Spinoza 1985, EIP16, p. 424. 38 Deleuze 1997, p. 71. 39 See Deleuze 2001, p. 183. 40 Deleuze 2001, p. 186. 41 ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ in Deleuze 2004, p. 180. 42 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 65. 43 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 65–6, and Deleuze 1995, pp. 169–76. 44 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 189. 45 Deleuze 2001, pp. 208–9. 46 Miller 2009 and, in the French original, Miller 1968, p. 101. 47 See ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ in Deleuze 2004, pp. 184–91; Deleuze 2001, pp. 103–5, 109, 120–24; Stolze 1998, pp. 51–63; Kerslake 2009. 48 ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’ in Deleuze 2004, p. 188. 49 Deleuze 1990b, pp. 172, 173, 175. 50 Lacan 1977, p. 22. 51 See Deleuze 2001, pp. 310–11; Deleuze 1990b, p. 361. 52 Foucault 1981, p. 74. 53 See Hyppolite 1997. 54 See ‘Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ in Deleuze 2004, p. 15–16. 55 ‘Jean Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence’ in Deleuze 2004, p. 18. 56 Deleuze 2001, pp. 28–9. 57 See Deleuze 2001, p. 262. 58 ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’ in Althusser 1972, p. 182. 59 See Althusser 1976a, pp. 58–9, 165–75. 60 See 1976, pp. 134, 141, 178. 61 See Althusser 1972, pp. 181–6. 62 ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in Althusser 1976a, p. 178. 63 Nancy 2002, p. 8. 64 ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in Althusser 1976a, p. 179. 65 ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’ in Althusser 1972, p. 183. 66 Derrida 1982, p. 43. 67 Derrida 1997, p. 23. 68 ‘Marx’s Relation to Hegel’ in Althusser 1972, p. 184. 69 See Althusser 1969a, p. 101. 70 ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ in Althusser 1976a, p. 140.

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71 Macherey 2011, p. 212. 72 Del Lucchese 2009, p. 1; see also Tosel 1994, pp. 28–31. 73 See above all the chapters ‘Marx’s Critique’ and ‘Marx’s Immense Theoretical Revolution’ in Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 165–93. 74 For Germany, see for example the works of Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt. 75 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 186. 76 On this discussion see Montag 1998a, pp. 64–73; Fourtounis 2005, pp. 101–18. 77 Engels 1934, pp. 81–5. 78 See ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in Althusser 1976a, p. 183. 79 Althusser and Balibar, 1970, p. 179. 80 See Althusser 1969a, p. 206. 81 Balibar 1991b, p. 52. 82 Foucault 2007, p. 8. 83 See Deleuze 1988, pp. 59–78. 84 Althusser 1969a, p. 101. 85 Hyppolite 1973, p. ix. 86 Deleuze 1990b, p. 267; see Montag 1998a, pp. 71–3. 87 Bachelard 1968, p. 8. 88 Bachelard 2002, p. 30. 89 On the idea of the ‘epistemological obstacle’ see Bachelard 2002, pp. 24–32; Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 186–7. 90 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 17, 96, 187. 91 Deleuze 1990a, p. 176 92 Deleuze 1990a, p. 172. 93 Deleuze 1990a, p. 14. 94 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 106–7. 95 Deleuze 2001, p. 52. 96 Spinoza 1985, EIP26Def, p. 431. 97 See Deleuze 1990a, pp. 201–15; Macherey 2011, pp. 146–62. 98 Deleuze 1990a, pp. 209–10. 99 Spinoza 1985, EIIIP6, p. 499. 100 Deleuze 1990a, p. 320. 101 Hegel 2010, p. 212. 102 See Macherey 2011, pp. 85–6. 103 Macherey 2011, p. 213. 104 In ‘The Encounter with Spinoza’ Macherey argues that Deleuze elides all traces of ambivalence from Spinoza in not recognising, for example, that the passions in Spinoza, even the joyful ones, due to their oscillating nature, could never accumulate in such a stable and consistent way that they would build a path to the common notions and active affects. See Macherey 1996, pp. 152–7. 105 Breton 1983, pp. 63, 85–6. On the principle of sufficient reason compare the Leibniz–Clark correspondence in Leibniz 1989, p. 321; Spinoza 1985, EIP11Def, p. 417: ‘For each thing there must be assigned a cause, or reason, as much for its existence as for its nonexistence’.

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106 ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 272. 107 Althusser 2006a, p. 194. 108 Althusser 2006a, p. 189. 109 Althusser 2006a, p. 193. 110 Deleuze 2001, p. 184. 111 Althusser 2006a, p. 175. 112 Althusser 2006a, p. 170. 113 Heidegger 1982, p. 299. 114 See Deleuze 2001, p. 65. 115 Kukuljevic 2011, to whom I owe the motivation to consider Deleuze’s notion of indetermination in comparison to Althusser’s notion of overdetermination. 116 Althusser 2006a, p. 192. 117 Badiou 1985, p. 69. 118 See Fourtounis 2007; Montag 2010, pp. 168–9. 119 See Deleuze 1990b, pp. 269–70; Deleuze 2001, p. 184; Montag 2010, p. 168. 120 See Badiou 1985, p. 77. 121 See Deleuze 2007, p. 391; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 279; Deleuze 1997, p. 71.

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12 Althusser and Tronti: the primacy of politics versus the autonomy of the political Sara R. Farris

Introduction

B

eginning with Norberto Bobbio’s provocative declaration in 1975 that there is not a theory of the state in Marx,1 the problem of the relation that communist parties should have with the state, and of the adequacy of Marxist analysis on this matter, were at the centre of an animated debate involving Italian and French Marxist intellectuals in particular.2 Although reflections on the status of Marxist theory regarding politics and the state had a longer tradition, the specific historical and political circumstances in which this debate took place, especially in France and Italy, greatly influenced its articulation and scope. On the one hand, in both countries the events of 1968–9 had profound consequences on the redefinition of the far-left political landscape in the following decade; on the other hand, both the PCF and the PCI began the 1970s with a popularfrontist agenda seeking to make wider alliances in the electoral arena in order to increase their vote. In this context, the problem of updating Communist political practice vis-à-vis bourgeois institutions had an immediate theoretical and political urgency. The years between 1976 and 1978 in particular were crucial, both in Italy and France. Marking an unprecedented success for the PCI and a bitter defeat for the PCF, the 1976–8 triennio coincided with important turning-points in the electoral strategies and politicaltheoretical elaboration of the left in general, and of these parties in particular. Louis Althusser played a key role in this, not only in France, where he intervened critically in the 1976 PCF congress-debate, but also in Italy. At a 1977 conference in Venice he stimulated a lively discussion after openly announcing Marxism’s crisis-situation and the absence of a Marxist theory of the state. His provocative exploit in Venice was followed by numerous interventions and publications involving the whole spectrum of Marxist intellectuals on both sides of the Alps; amongst them, the former ‘workerist’ Mario Tronti.3 Although Tronti did not participate in the Venice conference, was not in direct dialogue with Althusser and did not refer directly

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to the latter’s positions, his diagnosis of the absence of a Marxist theory of politics and the state came very close to that of the French philosopher. However, Tronti’s therapy was rather different, and it became the target of numerous critical reactions from both former workerists and other Italian Marxists. Whereas Althusser’s emphasis upon the important lacuna in the Marxist theoretical apparatus on the issue of the state arguably had the aim of defending a certain Marxist ‘orthodoxy’ against reformist political inclinations and theoretical elaborations, Tronti’s proposed remedy was, rather, ‘heterodoxy’ and ‘hetero-integration’.4 Without any claim to compare their respective positions overall, my aim in this chapter is to read the two authors in parallel,5 in order to reconstruct the main lines along which both Althusser’s and Tronti’s positions in this debate unfolded. In particular, I will show, first, how they both declared a crisis of Marxism and the insufficiency of Marx’s theory of politics and the state; second, how both Tronti’s and Althusser’s criticisms were directed at a certain determinism of the base-superstructure formula that established a direct continuity between the economic and the political; third, how both Tronti and Althusser regarded Lenin’s elaboration in relation to the state to be superior to Marx’s, and strove to interpret Lenin’s hermetic passages on these issues as the key to a renewal of Marxist politics. Nevertheless, despite their common initial premises regarding the question of a Marxist theory of the state, Tronti and Althusser arrived at rather opposite conclusions: on the one hand, the theory of the autonomy of the political in the case of Tronti, and, on the other hand, the theory of reproduction as the state’s key function and the primacy of politics in the case of Althusser. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the opposition between the two perspectives should be read as symptomatic of a fundamental theoretical/political antithesis between a ‘politicist’ position that assigns primacy to what I call ‘the political forces’, in the case of Tronti, and a position that attempts to translate the anti-economicist stance of the primacy of the relations of production into terms of the primacy of class struggle, in the case of Althusser.

Tronti: the ‘autonomy of the political’ After the social eruptions of the years 1967–9, the situation of the Italian left at the beginning of the 1970s was far from rosy; rather, it was one of extreme difficulty and even isolation. On the one hand, the political climate at the beginning of the 1970s had unquestionably shifted to the right with a revamped centre-right coalition run by Andreotti and Malagodi replacing the previous centre-left formula. On the other hand, the strategy of the PCI after 1973, strongly influenced by the coup in Chile, was recast under the umbrella of the historic compromise with the DC (Christian Democracy). In Berlinguer’s presentation, the historic compromise was not only the way to avoid an authoritarian solution in the country, but also the Via Regia to pull Communists out of their political isolation by attracting popular forces to the PCI project of building ‘a new historic bloc to a higher level’.6 According to Gundle, the PCI’s confidence in its capacity to exercise its hegemony in Italian society in this way was founded upon two presuppositions, ‘both of which seemed credible in the climate of the mid seventies’.7 First, it was felt that the break-up of the old equilibria of the pre 1968–69 period had not merely shaken the confidence of the ruling classes but deprived them of the consensus

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on which their authority ultimately rested. Thus the labour movement and its chief political representative were presented with a unique, it not altogether clear-cut, opportunity to inherit the leadership of the popular components of the old bloc and force the more conservative ones to concede an increasing measure of their power. Second, there was a firm belief on the left that Italian capitalism had reached a point of no return. The oil crisis, galloping inflation and a general breakdown in the pattern of monopoly-led development initiated in the years prior to the economic miracle provided the left with a real chance to intervene and advance an alternative, more socially-oriented model of development in which the market for private consumer goods, whose expansion had constituted the cornerstone of the previous twenty years of growth, would also be subject to question. The crisis, it was felt, made the transition to some form of socialized economic system objectively necessary.8 It is particularly this second presupposition that one should bear in mind when reading Mario Tronti’s interventions on the state and Marxist theory of politics in the 1970s. Closely linked to the specific nature of Italian politics in the early 1970s, which saw a decreasing autonomy of the social, namely, a weakening of the workers’ and students’ movement in comparison to the 1960s, Tronti introduced the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ in 1972 at a conference in Turin chaired by Norberto Bobbio. Tronti’s main argument on the ‘autonomy of the political’ is outlined in two texts: the 1971 Postscript to Operai e Capitale [Workers and Capital] and the 1977 pamphlet entitled Sull’autonomia del politico (On the autonomy of the political) which includes the intervention at the 1972 Turin conference and the transcription of a seminar organised by Salvatore Veca in Milan in 1976. Tronti’s position in these texts can be briefly summarised as follows: ‘the political’ (to be understood as the institutions of power and the practice of taking and keeping power) cannot be analysed as a super-structural level, as had been the case, according to him, in ‘vulgar Marxism’. Rather, in Tronti’s words, The very term ‘political’, ‘the political’, is just as strange in the Marxist tradition as the term ‘autonomy’. This is because we are introducing not only a new name, but also, I would say, a new category into our discourse. What does this category contain within itself? . . . The political holds together two things, the state plus the political class.9

The inadequacy of Marxism As the political was the combination of very concrete institutions – the state and the political class – an understanding of its ‘autonomy’ required a rethinking of the Marxist toolbox, which Tronti considered to be outdated. First of all, according to him, the deterministic reading of the base-superstructure relation, according to which ‘everything that happens . . . at the so-called above level is moved by what is below’, was a ‘simplification’.10 Marx’s supposed scheme of continuity between the development of capital and of the political had thus been historically demonstrated to be incorrect. The failure of this model, in terms of both its explanatory and predictive power, was due to the lack, if not complete absence, of a theory of politics and the state in Marx, insofar as for Tronti, Marx ‘does not effectively advance a critique of politics, but of ideology’.11 As he put it:

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it must be said that in ‘the critique of politics’ – if we put aside the critique of political economy for a moment – Marx does not manage to go beyond this epoch, which is the epoch of the origins of capitalism. In 1858, as you know, the critique of political economy was supposed to include the famous six books, that is, capital, landed property, wagelabour, the state, international trade, and world market, as outlined in the famous letter to Lassalle of 22 February 1858. This was Marx’s work programme. Then, capital alone took up four books. Apart from that, all the rest, from landed property onwards, including the analysis of labour itself, is not deepened enough, as has already been said; among these leftovers, there is also the problem of the state. I would say that on the theme of ‘politics’, on the theme of the ‘political’, Marx’s youthful works perhaps say more than his mature ones. A work like the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right perhaps says more than all the other little passages, the little phrases that have been taken out of the various contexts and historical works of Marx and put together, thus forming what is, in my view, a political thought spuriously attributed to Marx. I repeat, Marx’s discourse on capital seems to me to be entirely projected forwards, that is, entirely looking at the real development, while Marx’s discourse on the state looks backwards, that is, at the apparent development this political problem had received. When Marx undertakes a critique of politics, he does not manage, in my view, effectively to conduct a critique of politics. Rather, he provides a critique of ideology . . . The thesis that there is first an economic power and then a political power, and these forms of power fundamentally coincide – which is Marx’s thesis (they coincide in reality and are only formally divided, that is, real coincidence and purely formal distinction) – is understandable precisely in the light of early capitalism.12 As the final lines in the above passage suggest, for Tronti the ‘political’ gap in Marx’s thought was due to the fact that historical materialism itself was ‘a product of early capitalism’. Later historical developments, however, as a result of the continuous confrontation between workers and capital, led to what he called the ‘necessity of a political elite, and of a professional political elite to which to assign the management of power’.13 Such a political elite had to develop, above all, a ‘capacity of mediation’ between capital and wage-labour. It followed for Tronti that historically, ‘from this necessity of a professional political elite, a mediator, there derives the equally historical necessity, so to speak, of an art of politics, that is, of particular techniques for the conquest and conservation of power, of a science of collective practical activity, divided from the analysis of individuals’ and groups’ action. A science of practical collective activity, a science, precisely, of politics’.14 The Marxist theory of politics was, for Tronti, inadequate for grasping the developments that had occurred within the state and within the body of knowledge and techniques that were linked to it, for it was embedded in a time prior to such developments. The only exception to this generalised judgement of inadequacy, for Tronti, was represented by Lenin, the figure ‘who gave social democracy a theory of the party’.15 Tronti’s Lenin was the militant who ‘brought Marx to St. Petersburg’, that is, the historical figure that had been able to reveal practically the poverty of the social-democratic gradualist theory by achieving a communist revolution where it was assumed to be impossible. However, Lenin had been able to develop what Tronti called the ‘laws of tactics’ not because of his proximity to workers’ struggles but, on the contrary, due to his distance from them. Indeed, for Tronti, Lenin’s ‘logic was based on a concept of political rationality that was absolutely autonomous from anything, independent from the class interest

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itself, common if anything to the two classes’.16 In what might be regarded as an attribution to Lenin of a conception of the ‘autonomy of the political’ avant la lettre, Tronti also invoked Max Weber. True theory, high science, was not within the field of socialism, but outside and against it. And this entirely theoretical science, this scientific theory, had as content, as object, as problem, the fact of politics. And the new theory of a new politics arises both in great bourgeois thought and in subversive working-class praxis. Lenin was closer to Max Weber’s Politik als Beruf than to the German workers’ struggles, on which was mounted – a colossus with feet of clay – classical social democracy.17 As he particularly highlighted in subsequent years, Tronti’s consideration that Marxists (with the exception of Lenin) did not formulate useful indications for understanding the functioning of politics and the state, and his conviction that the latter became the object of a sophisticated science and theory, particularly in the enemy camp of bourgeois thought, increasingly led him to resort to non-Marxist political thinkers in order to fill this gap in Marxist theory. For Tronti, it was in fact this science, this ‘art’ of politics, that the Italian communist intelligentsia had to grasp as their autonomous raison d’être, without any thought of merely deducing them from a study of the economic situation.

The political cycle of capital The conception that ‘the political’ has its own autonomous dynamics, that is, the idea that it is autonomous from everything that is not power, namely from society, and from ‘what was conceived, in general, to be the foundation [fondamento] of power’,18 was founded on the presupposition that there is ‘a different rhythm of development between the political and the social’19 due to the ‘existence of a political cycle of capital . . . that has its specificity compared to the classical economic cycle of capital’.20 In this way, we arrive at what we could call the specifically political [lo specifico politico], namely, the specificity of the political cycle with respect to the economic cycle. There lies the problem of why Marx’s scheme of a continuity of development from the economic to the political did not historically work and why, on the contrary, it was the opposite that occurred.21 The ‘specificity of the political cycle with respect to the economic cycle’, for Tronti, resulted from a fundamental discontinuity between the economic and the political. This, according to Tronti, was visible in the usual ‘belatedness’ of the political as compared with the economic. Furthermore, the understanding of the delay was the key road to the ‘codification of Marx’s political thought’.22 Precisely the delay of the political as compared to the economic, or in other words, ‘the fact that we always have in front of us a so-called new economy, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, always have a so-called old politics’ was, for Tronti, ‘the warning-signal that must make us aware that, in the end, the base-superstructure relation, precisely on this terrain, does not work’.23 An example of this was the ‘flaw of rationalisation, the weak efficiency

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of the political apparatus’ that Tronti argued to be discernible in the Italian case in particular, in which the capitalist modernisation and industrialisation of the 1950s and 1960s had not been matched by a comparable modernisation of the state.24 For Tronti, a genealogical approach to this question, that is, a reconstruction of the history of the modern state, would have shown that ‘there is a logic that is internal to the development of capitalist political institutions; a logic that needs to be grasped, in my view, independently of the history of capital’.25 Just as Marx uncovered the laws of movement of capital, for Tronti Marxists need ‘to engage in the future discovery of the laws of movement of the modern state’.26 Such an engagement would reveal the reality of ‘two parallel histories’, the history of capital and the history of the state, which often do not coincide and can be in contradiction. On this basis, Tronti’s hypothesis was that ‘the distinction or separation between state and civil society is not a purely formal distinction or separation. That is, it is neither to be conceived as an ideological trick of the bourgeoisie, nor is it a case of considering it simply as a function of class domination’.27

The autonomy of the political and the autonomy of the party from the class Descending directly from the conclusion that the history of capital is not in continuity with that of the state, the latter being separate from capital and possessing its own ‘autonomous’ logic, Tronti’s notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’ aimed to have not simply theoretical, but especially practical implications. Above all, on the practical level, Tronti aimed to put ‘politics in command’ by reconquering workers’ centrality on the institutional terrain, namely, on the level of the relation of the party with the state. As ‘this so-called state machine’, in Tronti’s words, was ‘above all, the centre of mediation of the various relations between classes’, the problem emerged ‘of seeing whether this centre of mediation has to be left completely in the hands of capital or whether, before the problem of breaking this machine, there is not instead first the problem of getting capital’s hands off this centre of mediation, entirely or in part’.28 The practical implications of the ‘autonomy of the political’ debate thus increasingly became the question of direct participation of the workers’ political organisation in the government of the state or, even more so, the direct management by the working class of the state machine in order to carry on the ‘capitalist reform of the state’.29 As Tronti would argue in the late 1970s, ‘political force’ meant demonstrating that the working class – or rather, the workers’ party – was ‘able to govern. The working class’s capacity to govern is what we are all committed to building’.30 This position was subject to numerous criticisms, especially from former workerists and from Antonio Negri in primis. Negri argued that the notion of the ‘autonomy of the political’ was nothing more than the ‘ideology of the historic compromise’,31 and thus ultimately a theoretical position that had the precise political function of supporting Eurocommunism. Although Negri himself seemed to concur regarding the absence of a Marxist theory of the state,32 he argued that the thesis of the ‘autonomy of the political’ was no solution to this problem, but merely the ‘technocratic reinvention’ and ‘new edition of the technology of the political’.33 As Tronti came to define the thesis of the autonomy of the political in concrete terms, it was increasingly apparent how such a thesis did not amount to a tactically updated analysis of the function of the state that could be integrated with the Marxist tradition’s strategic vision

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of the necessity of abolishing the bourgeois state. Rather, on the basis of the assertion of the absence of a theory of the state in Marx and on the basis of the supposed historical refutation of a deterministic continuity between the economic and the political, Tronti seemed to have abandoned Marx’s thesis of the need to ‘smash the state machine’.34 The problem the working class faced in the 1970s was, for Tronti, that of undertaking the historical task of managing the state, and more particularly of accomplishing its rationalisation. This aspect is very clear in the passage below. As Tronti argued, the 1960s in Italy were a form of even ‘pure’ class struggle, impolitical or pre-political, in the traditional sense of the word; even if it was politics in the profound sense of the same word . . . After that, what was there? There was a capitalist reaction of a particular type that blocked the growth of the movement and blocked it precisely because we weren’t able to comprehend and to use that shifting of terrain that the capitalist initiatives assumed in that determinate moment. That is, when the relation of forces at the level of the relations of production was modified in favour of the working class, we saw a precise and explicit use, by the capitalist side, of the political state level, in the terms we have been discussing here, that is, the use of the political delay of the institutions of the state apparatus with respect to the rest of society . . . [A]t this point, within capital, within the capitalist side, we see that there is a struggle between advanced parts and backward parts of capital, regarding the nature and the content of their state. And this is the crucial point that they need to resolve now. There really are moments in which capital finds itself having to resolve again, from the beginning, almost from the very beginning, the problem of its state. Now, at this point, I ask myself: does the workers’ side have to continue to ignore this problem that capital has within itself and continue to undertake its type of particular struggle, independently of what happens within the adversary side? Why worry about this and change the point of attack, why change your own position? I have always thought of a working class political struggle as one that is agile, ready to modify continually its own positions, to leap from one terrain to the other. Never, never let yourself be closed up on one single terrain and continue to make the struggle at the level of production, over wages, over working hours, conditions of work, in the moment in which capital is resolving – must resolve in some way, in one way or another – the problem of its state. To leave this problem to them because it is their problem: this is a political error!35 Deploying a representation of political antagonism with significant Schmittian reverberations, the passage above clearly shows how for Tronti the need for the working class to engage at the state level was the result of the shift from class struggle at the level of production to political struggle at the level of the institutions of formal politics, namely, the state. In other words, the working class needed to leap from the terrain of the struggle over the relations of production to the terrain of struggle over what could be called the political forces. Arguably, the problem for Tronti became that, if the working class is not ‘agile’, ‘ready to modify continually its own positions’, the task of engaging at the political level must be undertaken by its most conscious and prepared component, the party. As a consequence, Tronti’s thesis of the autonomy of the political and his reference to the working class as the main ‘political’ agent of capitalist rationality, in the 1970s also meant the ‘autonomy of the political from the class organisation’, or the autonomy of the party ‘from the class’.36 At that time, such a statement was intended to be provocative and ‘scandalous’.37

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However, as Tronti restated several times throughout his intervention, the autonomy of the political had to be extended right up to the forms of political organisation of the working class in relation to the working class itself. . . . The importance of workers’ spontaneity is reduced qualitatively when we speak of this project of a different type of conquest of political power. Thus, a further mediation is even more necessary, a mediation which is no longer that of the capitalist political elite, but is that, once again, of the workers’ party, even in relation to its own class . . . There is this mythical-ideological reference that sometimes becomes an obstacle; we need, instead, a freedom of movement that makes it possible to take all the initiatives that are necessary for putting a certain type of capitalist power into crisis, even without always making the ritual reference to a certain class reality.38 For an author who in the 1960s posed labour, that is, the working class, as the independent variable and the motor of history, before which capital was ‘reduced to a merely reactive reality’,39 the passage above might sound paradoxical.40 Yet, if the turn to the thesis of the autonomy of the political marks a certain ‘politicist-abstract’ departure from the more ‘politicalconjunctural’ focus of the militant interventions of the 1960s, it is not a coupure. Arguably, Tronti’s later politicism should be understood within the background of Tronti’s general tendency to treat ‘economics’ and ‘politics’, relations of production/productive forces and political institutions, as distinct moments of the struggle between classes, rather than as constitutive and necessarily interwoven practices.

Althusser: the crisis of Marxism The context in which Althusser addresses the issue concerning the status of the theory of politics and the state in Marx and Marxism is, in many respects, very similar to that of Tronti. Like all Western-European communist parties after the beginning of de-Stalinisation, and particularly after the events of 1968, in the 1970s the PCF faced the dilemmas opened up by Eurocommunism. Already in the 1960s, the French Communist Party began to reposition itself in the political-electoral arena under the assumption that the French road to socialism would have to pass through the conquest of the majority of the national vote: to be precise, the new party line was initiated in 1965 when the first steps were made for a pact with the Socialists in order to unseat De Gaulle. A Communist-Socialist agreement was reached in 1972 with the signing of the Programme commun between the PCF, the Socialists and the Radical Party of the Left, and thus the formation of the ‘Union of the Left’ coalition, within which the PCF was to be the main force. Contrary to their plans, however, the popular-frontist operation was particularly propitious for the Socialist Party, at the expense of the Communists. For this reason, on the eve of the 1978 general elections, which promised to be a victory for the Union of the Left, the PCF leadership decided to boycott the Programme commun, effectively handing the elections to the right. The defeat was a traumatic one, and the accusations of undemocratic practices and Machiavellian machinations cast a shadow on the PCF leadership, resulting in its inexorable decline. In this context, ‘Althusser was theoretically in favour of a Communist-Socialist alliance, and ferociously opposed to paying the price at which he thought it would come: a swift retreat

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from class culminating in Communist rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat’.41 It was particularly the latter rejection, which occurred during the 1976 Twenty-Second Congress of the PCF, that prompted Althusser’s reactions. They came in the form of a detailed consideration of the status of the theory of politics and the state in Marx and Marxism, to be found above all in four texts elaborated during 1977–8: 22ème congrès, the intervention that Althusser delivered at Sorbonne on 16 December 1976 and which was published with the same title in 1977;42 ‘Marx dans ses limits’ (‘Marx in his limits’), an unpublished 1978 text which appeared in French for the first time in 1994 in the Ècrits philosophiques et politiques edited by François Matheron (published in English in 2006);43 ‘La crisi del marxismo’ (‘The Crisis of Marxism’) based on a speech Althusser gave at a conference organised in Venice in November 1977 by the Italian communist newspaper Il Manifesto; and finally ‘Il Marxismo come teoria “finita”’ (‘Marxism as a “finite” theory’), an intervention published by Il Manifesto in April 1978. By taking a clear stance against both the Eurocommunist route undertaken by most Western-European communist parties in the 1970s and the PCF’s abandonment of the formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Althusser proposed an attentive analysis of the state under the capitalist régime. Furthermore, ‘Marx in his limits’ in particular also constitutes a polemical reply to both Foucault’s theory of disciplinary institutions,44 and Nicos Poulantzas’s45 and Étienne Balibar’s46 thesis that ‘the political apparatus of the bourgeois state should be the object, not the terrain, of working-class class struggle’.47 Opening with the declaration of the crisis of Marxism and based on the assumption that there is no such a thing as a Marxist theory of the state – arguably the same premises on which Tronti based his elaboration on the ‘autonomy of the political’ – Althusser nonetheless arrived at very different theoretical and political conclusions.

‘At last the crisis of Marxism has exploded!’ As Althusser unambiguously stated at the 1977 conference in Venice, sparking a lively debate amongst Marxist intellectuals both in Italy and France, one of the theoretical gaps in Marx’s and Lenin’s works lies precisely in the absence of a theory of the state. We have to be frank about it: there does not really exist any ‘Marxist theory of the State’. Not that Marx and Lenin tried to dodge the question – it lies at the heart of their political thought. But what you find in the classical authors is above all, in the form of the establishment of a relation between class struggle and class rule (decisive indications, but left unanalysed), only a repeated warning to avoid all the bourgeois conceptions of the State.48 As a matter of fact, according to Althusser, the questions of how the state ensures class rule and how the apparatus functions concretely are issues that remain unanswered within the Marxist canon. As a consequence, rather than talking ‘imprudently’ of a ‘Marxist theory of the state’, Althusser suggested the acknowledgement that what we are left with are ‘elements of a theory of the state’.49 The problem of the relation there should be between the communist parties and the state, and the specific issue of Marx’s indications on this matter, as we have noted, were at the centre of an animated international dispute. Thus in 1977 Althusser was entering into a debate with a

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relatively short but much-articulated history. In this scenario, the uncomfortable admission as to the absence of a Marxist theory of politics and the state must have appeared to Althusser as something of a fait accompli. However, he welcomed it as a liberation, commenting at the 1977 Venice conference: ‘At last the crisis of Marxism has exploded! At last it is in full view! At last something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis and in this crisis!’.50 In a quasiFreudian mood, Althusser regarded the recognition of the crisis of Marxism and of the absence of a theory of the state as the salutary emergence of a repressed element, which could open up a process of authentic political-theoretical elaboration. The fact that Marxism presents only ‘elements of a theory of the state’ and not an accomplished and systematic theory did not mean, for Althusser, that indications could not be found within that same cluster of ideas, for ‘although these were nothing more than the elements of a theory, they at least had a crucial political signification’.51 The very limits of Marx’s and Lenin’s reflection on the state were in fact to be taken as signs of the openness and of the non-deterministic nature of their thought. Althusser proposed this line of reasoning in an article that appeared in Il Manifesto on 4 April 1978 where he defined Marxism as a ‘finite’ theory. It is finite because it is embedded in the time that Marx was writing; therefore, it is a theory that, without assessing any eternal truth about historical developments, can nonetheless project onto the future the discovery of the tendency that is inscribed in capitalist social relations. The finitude of Marxist theory, therefore, does not mean that the theory is ‘closed’ [chiusa]; rather, precisely because it is finite, it means that it is ‘open to the contradictory tendencies that it discovers in capitalist society and it is open to their aleatory becoming, open to the unpredictable “surprises” that have not ceased to characterise the history of the workers’ movement; it is open, therefore, attentive and capable of taking seriously and of measuring in time the uncorrectable imagination of history’.52 For Althusser, the diagnosis of a dysfunction, as it were, within the body of Marxist thought did not amount to declaring that it was moribund, or to attempting to ensure its correct functioning by injecting alien concepts – the latter arguably being the path undertaken by Tronti. Rather, Althusser uses the opportunity of the emergence of the crisis of Marxism as a way to reflect more in depth on those elements of a theory of the state that Marx and Lenin left on the table.

The discontinuity between the economic and the political, or the knot of reproduction Particularly in ‘Marx in his limits’, Althusser endeavoured to find the key to understanding above all the ‘machinic’ metaphors of the state, metaphors on which Marx and especially Lenin insisted at length: what does it mean to say that the state is an apparatus, a ‘special’ machine? In what sense is the state an instrument and why is it separate from ‘civil society’? In the attempt to find an answer to these questions, Althusser focused mainly on two texts: Lenin’s 1919 lecture on the state at Sverdlov University and Marx’s section on the ‘Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent’ at the end of Capital Volume III. According to Althusser, by repeatedly calling the state a ‘special apparatus’, a machine, in the Sverdlov lecture, Lenin was not simply hinting at the complexity of the state’s structure, but was striving to think its precise functioning. As Althusser put it:

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The state is a machine in the full, precise sense of that term, as established in the nineteenth century after the discovery of the steam engine, the electro-magnetic machine, and so on: that is to say, in the sense of a man-made device [dispositif] comprising a motor driven by an energy 1, plus a transmission system, the purpose of the whole being to transform a specific kind of energy (A) into another specific kind of energy (B).53 But if the state is a machine in the ‘full’ sense of the term, what is the energy it transforms, and what is the final result, namely the type of energy that it produces at the end of the process? For Althusser, the energy that is transformed is that of the force or violence of class struggle, and the final product is power in the form of laws and right [droit]. Class struggle, where one class is powerful and violent only because it is the dominant class, in other words, exercises its force and violence upon another class (which is also a force) that it must, in a never-ending struggle, hold in check if it is to maintain the upper hand over it. The relatively stable resultant (reproduced in its stability by the state) of this confrontation of forces (balance of forces is an accountant’s notion, because it is static) is that what counts is the dynamic excess of force maintained by the dominant class in the class struggle. It is this excess of conflictual force, real or potential, which constitutes energy A, which is subsequently transformed into power by the state-machine: transformed into right, laws and norms.54 Although force and violence, namely the clash between classes, constitute the essential energy upon which the state is based and that it transforms, the ideological apparatuses of the state operate through the denial of class struggle. The idea that the monopoly of violence held by the state is a necessary measure to maintain a position of ‘neutrality’, above class struggle and class interests, is the main ideological device produced by its apparatuses. The separation of the state from civil society, in Althusser’s reading, needs to be understood in terms of ‘separation from class struggle’. Only if the state is separate from class struggle can it function as ‘an apparatus capable of taking measures against the will of a part or even a majority of the bourgeoisie in order to defend the bourgeoisie’s “general interests” as the dominant class. And that is why the state must be separate’.55 In other words, the separation of the state from class struggle serves the goal of better intervening in it. Further, by framing the problem of the separation of the state in this way, it is possible to grasp in what sense the state is an instrument. As Althusser put it, the state: is separate from class struggle, that is why it is an instrument. The state needs to be separate from class struggle in order to be able to intervene in the class struggle ‘on all fronts’ – not just to intervene in the struggle of the working class in order to maintain the system of exploitation and general oppression of the exploited classes by the bourgeois class, but also to intervene, should the need arise, in the class struggle within the dominant class, with a view to overcoming its divisions, which can seriously jeopardize this class if the struggle of the working class and the masses is powerful.56 The way in which the state is effective in guaranteeing the interests of the dominant classes even by opposing their own struggle – thereby saving them from themselves, as it were – is

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to be found in those ‘relations of a very particular kind imposed from on high by the system that obtains between hierarchical superiors and their subordinates. The principle governing these relations is that of a hierarchical centralization taken to the furthest possible extreme’.57 The important and concrete mechanisms deployed by means of hierarchy and discipline within the state, were, for Althusser, ‘“areas” that Marx and Lenin left unexplored’, though they had ‘already [been] quite clearly perceived by certain sociologists and, long ago, Max Weber’.58 However, for Althusser it was the whole state ideological and material infrastructure, established through the division of labour and the internalisation of bourgeois-authoritarian discipline – especially by the working classes whose members served in the armed forces – that prompted Lenin to say that the state is a ‘special apparatus’, a ‘special machine’. The ‘specialism’ of the state in fact lay in both the ‘mechanism of the hierarchical relations governing civil servants or state employees and the inevitable presence of a public, armed physical force which has its place at the heart of the state and makes itself felt in all state activities’.59 By analysing why the state is a special machine, an instrument in the hands of the dominant classes to ensure exploitation, Althusser was attempting to further the analysis he had previously initiated in his important text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.60 A number of important developments between that earlier text and Althusser’s position in the late 1970s should be noted. Firstly, whereas the focus in ‘Marx in his limits’ is on the metaphor of the state as a ‘machine’, in order to provide a more dynamic understanding of it, in the 1969 text Althusser employed almost exclusively the term ‘apparatus’. The latter was more statically understood as a complex structure, or system, fundamentally composed of two bodies: ‘the body of institutions which represent the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) on the one hand, and the body of institutions which represent the body of Ideological State Apparatuses on the other’.61 Secondly, whereas in that earlier text the RSA had a ‘public status’ while the ISAs (Ideological and State Apparatuses), had a private status, this perspective seems to be abandoned in the texts of the 1970s. Finally, whereas violence was previously treated as fundamentally the tool of the (repressive) state apparatus and ideology was the preferred tool of the ISAs, the later Althusser refers to violence as the constitutive element of, and energy upon which the state is based and which the state machine transforms to produce the ideological superstructure of law. Thus, violence is the condition of possibility of ideology; at the same time, the most important of the state’s ideologies is the denial of violence, namely, of class struggle, and the claim of neutrality before class interests. Althusser’s position in the 1970s thus seems to present a more complex understanding of the state in which some of the previous binary oppositions – ‘public’ versus ‘private’, ‘violence’ versus ‘ideology’ – seem to fade away into a more sophisticated elaboration. In particular, in ‘Marx in his limits’ Althusser is concerned to link more solidly his discussion regarding the state apparatuses as the loci in which ideologies have their material existence with a concrete understanding of the state machine and its relation to the sphere of production. In his attempt to grasp how ideology is rooted in the state and what role state ideology concretely plays in the maintenance of the capitalist relations of production, Althusser aimed to deepen the comprehension of the theme of reproduction. The failed explanation of the state’s function of reproduction was, for Althusser, ‘one of the “absolute limits” which the “Marxist theory of the state” comes up against, before coming to a dead stop’.62 When Marx discusses the state, even in a late text such as the section on ‘Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent’ in Capital Volume III, he – Althusser argues – continues speaking the language of production. In this language,

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the secret of the state, ‘the hidden basis of the entire social edifice’, is to be sought in the ‘direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers’, hence in the relation of production or exploitation. He insists: the state is the political form taken by every form of dependence and domination, and is itself merely a manifestation of the relation of production. He insists: this ‘secret’ is hidden beneath and in society.63 However, Althusser believed that it was only ‘by taking the path of reproduction’ that Marx’s and Lenin’s thought on the state could be pulled out of their ‘absolute limits’.64 The discussion regarding the reproduction of the social and material conditions of production was, for Althusser, not simply the means of avoiding a certain ‘economism’ in Marx’s discussion of the state or deepening his understanding of the concrete role of the state apparatuses’ ideologies. It was also vital in order to avoid falling into a ‘descriptive conception of the state that is content to affirm that the state is “separate” and “above classes”’,65 a conception that risked falling into the bourgeois theory of the state ‘as the objective arbiter of class conflict’.66 At this point, it could be noted that while the recognition of the special status of the state and of its discontinuous relation with the ‘economic level’ prompted Tronti to declare its autonomy and, as a consequence, the ‘autonomy of the political’ as the root of deciphering the ‘political cycle of capital’, Althusser positioned himself before such discontinuity by bringing to the fore the problem of reproduction. If the state is ‘separate’ and ‘above classes’, if the state is a ‘special machine’ made of a completely different metal, that is only ‘in order to ensure the reproduction of the conditions of domination by the dominant class. This reproduction does not consist solely in the reproduction of the conditions of “social relations” and, ultimately, the “productive relation”; it also includes the reproduction of the material conditions of the relations of production and exploitation’.67 Therefore, albeit stemming from similar premises, Althusser’s conclusion differs from Tronti’s in important ways. Not only is the state, the political form of class domination, to be understood in its reproductive functions; Althusser also strongly opposed any positions embracing the autonomy of politics, or the political, which he regarded as an ‘aberrant thesis’.68 As he put it: To begin with, the State is not autonomous. Did Marx and Lenin mean to say, when they described the state as a ‘machine’, that it works all by itself, as some machines do (for example, the steam engine)? But as anyone who lived in the age of the steam engine and Fourier’s or Carnot’s laws knew, no machine works all by itself. Anyone who said so was using a metaphor to insist on the ‘autonomous’ or ‘automotive’ nature of the state. We know enough about the state, however, to be able to say that the separation of the state has nothing to do with autonomy. Marx and Lenin never talk about the autonomy of the state.69

Primacy of politics, primacy of the masses A final element of difference between Althusser and Tronti should be noted. The texts by Althusser that have been analysed in this chapter also have to be read within the context of the phase of self-criticism that he began in the early 1970s. During this phase, Althusser subjected his work of the 1960s to severe criticism. Beginning with his famous reply to the British

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communist philosopher John Lewis, in the early 1970s Althusser endeavoured to revise some of the positions he held in For Marx and Reading Capital, including his articulation of Marx’s 1845 epistemological break and his idea of philosophy as ‘theory of theoretical praxis’.70 The result of this troubled reflection came in the form of his embracing a seemingly anti-theoreticist stance and the declaration of the primacy of politics over philosophy, the primacy of practice over theory and the primacy of class struggle.71 Arguably, the idea of the primacy of politics or primacy of class struggle aimed above all to establish the primacy of the masses over the political apparatuses of Western communist parties in general and over the bureaucratic and top-down practices of the PCF in particular. As Lahtinen argues, these ideas were translated in the form of a ‘new philosophical-ideological intervention against the leadership of the PCF’ particularly after its defeat in the French legislative elections of March 1978. In a series of articles published in Le Monde in that year, Althusser ‘strongly criticised the leadership of the party for “building fortifications” between the Party and the masses’.72 The theory that Communists should embrace is ‘a theory which will not dodge mass initiatives and social transformations, but which will, on the contrary, openly face them and impregnate and nourish itself with them’.73 In this context, the ‘primacy of the class struggle’ – as Lahtinen further argues – ‘also meant that the connection to the masses was the condition of life for Marxist theory’.74 As Althusser wrote in 22ème congrès, in what might be interpreted as a passionate appeal to the party to return to mass politics, Something can rise and develop in the union of the people of France, something that has been destroyed by Stalinist practices but which is at the heart of the Marxist and Leninist tradition: something that concerns the relation between the Party and the masses. Return the word to the masses that make history, be at the service not only of the masses (a slogan that could also sound reactionary), but listen to their voices, to study and comprehend their aspirations and contradictions, their aspirations in their contradictions, be able to pay attention to the imagination and creativity of the masses.75 Thus, unlike Tronti, Althusser’s emphasis upon the pre-eminent role of politics in the late 1970s aimed to assert the primary role of the masses.

Concluding remarks: primacy of class struggle versus primacy of political forces Written in the middle of the action-packed turning-point of the 1970s, the texts by Althusser and Tronti examined in this chapter can be regarded as offering alternative models for thinking the status of the political. Departing from similar premises, namely the crisis of Marxism and especially the absence of a Marxist theory of politics, Tronti and Althusser sought to fill this lacuna by rethinking the relationship between politics and economics in light of the role of the state. Following this path, both Tronti and Althusser ended up identifying the specificity of the state in its separation from ‘civil society’, a separation to be read in terms of discontinuity between the economic and the political moment. Yet it is here that the two positions are set apart. While Tronti reads the

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separation of the state from society and the discontinuity between what he saw in the Italian case as a modernised economic system and a backward political apparatus as symptomatic of an autonomy of the political, Althusser interprets the state as separate from the class struggle in order to be able better to intervene in it, and elaborates on the discontinuity between state politics and the sphere of economic relations in terms of social reproduction. However, their different readings of the perennial Marxist question regarding the relation between politics and economics were far from representing a theoreticist or purely academic dispute. On the one hand, Tronti’s thesis of the autonomy of the political resulted in the affirmation of the terrain of state mediation as the only possible level of political confrontation and in support for the historic compromise. On the other hand, Tronti conceived the autonomy of the political as independence of the party from the class itself. Unlike his own warning at the beginning of the 1960s – ‘never set about constructing perspective at a distance from the masses’76 – the turn to the ‘autonomy of the political’ in the 1970s also meant the ‘autonomy of the political from the class organisation’, or the autonomy of the party ‘from the class’.77 In this light, the thesis of the autonomy of the political could be regarded as an instantiation of ‘politicism’, understood as the mirror image of ‘economism’. Though it assigns a position of pre-eminence to the political forces (the party, the state, political skills) as the organising principle of economy and society (rather than to the productive forces, as in the case of ‘economism’), politicism functions through the same deterministic register. In other words, the autonomy of the political as the idea of the self-determining functioning of the state, or of the political moment as independent variable, can be read as an embracement of what I propose to call a notion of the primacy of the political forces. As for Althusser, his analysis of the reproduction of capitalist social relations as representing the main role of the state led him to exclude at the outset any considerations of the autonomy of the state. The latter, for Althusser, could only be a class state, a class apparatus: even on those occasions when it seemed to behave independently from the interests of the bourgeois class, in reality the state is safeguarding those same interests from the dangers represented by intra-class disagreements. On this basis, Althusser regarded as purely illusory those positions that claimed that the state could be traversed by class struggle or that it could be democratised. Further, he saw as particularly dangerous the PCF’s abandonment of the formula of the dictatorship of the proletariat, something that he regarded as a surrender to the fantasy of the state as a class-neutral, or neutralisable, machine. In this context, Althusser’s emphasis upon the primacy of politics, or class struggle, which marked what he considered his departure from the ‘theoreticist’ phase of the 1960s, should be seen in continuity with, rather than in opposition to, the critique of economism and the affirmation of the primacy of the relations of production over productive forces that he upheld already in the 1960s.78 As Althusser maintains in ‘Marx in his limits’, ‘the primacy of the relations of production means only one thing: it invites the conclusion that exploitation is class struggle, and that, in the capitalist mode of production, technical and technological questions are questions which form an integral part of, yet are subordinate to class struggle’.79 Against economic reductionism and philosophical hypostatisation, Althusser’s emphasis upon the primacy of politics as the primacy of class struggle represented his attempt to overcome the division between the economic and the political moment. In the end, the point at which the two thinkers’ paths bifurcate should not be regarded as merely the accidental result of different histories and national/political trajectories. Rather, it is

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rooted in the very different theoretical presuppositions by means of which Tronti and Althusser tried to handle the general question of the relation between politics and economics, and thus the very different nature of their understandings of Marxism as a theory of the state.

Notes 1 Bobbio 1975. 2 For instance, in these years Italian communist intellectuals like Cesare Luporini were engaged with Étienne Balibar and André Tosel in a debate concerning the place that politics and its critique had in Marx’s work (see Balibar, Tosel and Luporini 1979). We should also remember the work of Nicos Poulantzas during the decade of 1968–78, which provided a sophisticated analysis of the state and political power. 3 For an overview of Tronti’s intellectual and political development, see Farris 2011, particularly p. 31. 4 Norberto Bobbio named as ‘hetero-integrationism’ (Bobbio 1978, pp. 100 et sqq.) the tendency to resort to other theoretical traditions in order to find concepts and systematic theories that could not be found within one’s own theoretical paradigm. Specifically, Bobbio recommended that Marxists adopt such a strategy in his critique of those Marxists who, instead of conceding that Marx did not provide a full theory of the state and politics, persisted in trying to find one in Marx’s texts or in those of his followers, ‘between the lines’. 5 A comparison between the work of Althusser and Tronti in general is beyond the aim of this chapter, particularly in light of the numerous differences between the two contexts and authors. For instance, the difference of age – Althusser was thirteen years older than Tronti – and especially the difference between the greater intellectual production and international exposure of Althusser’s oeuvre compared to the more limited number of texts and to the largely Italian intellectual context of Tronti, are all elements that indicate the difficulties of a comparative work. However, there are also a number of similarities between the two that are worth highlighting. As members of the PCF and PCI respectively, both Althusser and Tronti were strongly marked by the events of 1956 in ways that led them critically to rethink the theoretical premises of their respective parties and to oppose their alleged humanism with scientific and anti-Hegelian Marxism. In the 1960s, both initiated a re-reading of Marx’s texts, particularly Capital, in order to produce new interpretations that could challenge party orthodoxy. Finally, and most importantly, in the 1970s both Althusser and Tronti declared the ‘crisis of Marxism’ and located it in the absence in Marx’s work of a ‘theory of politics and particularly of the state’. Their attempt to understand the political dilemma of the role and nature of the bourgeois state led both to concentrate on the relation between the economic and the political. 6 Gundle 1987, p. 31. 7 Gundle 1987, p. 31. 8 Gundle 1987, p. 31. 9 Tronti 1977, p. 10. 10 Tronti 1977, p. 10. 11 Tronti 1977, p. 15. Particularly in the 1970s, several Marxists argued about the lack of a theory of politics and the state in Marx. See for instance Anderson 1976; Horkheimer 1978; Hobsbawm 1982. 12 Tronti 1977, p. 15. 13 Tronti 1977, p. 17. 14 Tronti 1977, p. 17.

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15 Tronti 2006, p. 279. 16 Tronti 2006, p. 279. 17 Tronti 2006, p. 281. 18 Tronti 1977, p. 9. 19 Tronti 1977, p. 10. 20 Tronti 1977, p. 12. 21 Tronti 1977, p. 12. 22 Tronti, 1977, p. 16. 23 Tronti, 1977, p. 16. 24 Tronti 1977, p. 11. 25 Tronti 1977, p. 17. 26 Tronti 1977, p. 16. 27 Tronti 1977, p. 16. 28 Tronti 1977, p. 26. 29 Tronti 1977 p. 19. 30 Tronti 1978, p. 24. 31 In a 1976 essay Negri polemicised against the ‘autonomy of the political’ as ideology of the historic compromise: ‘the “compromise” has occurred, with characteristic funeral orations of “inevitability”, the struggle against the crisis and against the workers who have determined it is, in the autonomy of the political, unanimously conducted’ (Negri 1976, p. 5). Similarly, Ferrajoli and Zolo 1978, p. 8, defined the ‘autonomy of the political’ as a ‘form of intellectual apology for the historic compromise’. 32 While engaging with Bobbio’s perennial claim that there is not a theory of the state in Marx (see Bobbio 1975 and 1978), Negri defined it as mere ‘statement of fact’ [una registrazione], affirming that ‘the official workers’ movement (and the communist movement for instance) does not possess a doctrine of the state’ (Negri 1977, p. 273). 33 Negri 1979, p. 129. 34 See ‘Letter to Dr Kugelmann concerning the Paris Commune’, in Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 44; Lenin 1952. 35 Tronti 1977, p. 30. 36 Tronti 1977, pp. 34–5. 37 As Tronti put it: ‘Do we want to say that the party has to acquire autonomy from the class, that the class has to concede to its party the autonomy it needs in order to complete this operation of support for large-scale capital, in this particular moment? Let’s say – scandalising everybody – even this’ (Tronti 1977, p. 35). 38 Tronti 1977, p. 29. 39 Bellofiore and Tomba 2008. 40 For an overview of Tronti’s positions in the 1960s, see Wright 2002. 41 Goshgarian 2006, p. xix. 42 See Althusser 1977b. 43 ‘Marx in his limits’, in Althusser 2006a. 44 See Foucault 1995. 45 See Poulantzas 1978; 1980. 46 See Balibar 1977.

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47 Goshgarian 2006, p. xxvii. 48 Althusser 2006a, p. 21. 49 Althusser 2006a, p. 68. 50 Althusser 1978, p. 217. 51 Althusser 2006a, p. 68. 52 Althusser 1978. 53 Althusser 2006a, p. 104. 54 Althusser 2006a, p. 109. 55 Althusser 2006a, p. 77. 56 Althusser 2006a, p. 71. 57 Althusser 2006a, pp. 101–2. 58 Althusser 2006a, p. 101. Here, it is interesting to note that Althusser, too, regarded Max Weber as a crucial source for Marxists on the question of the functioning of the state. On the importance of Weber for an understanding of the bourgeois state in the work of Mario Tronti, see Farris 2011. 59 Althusser 2006a, p. 104. 60 Althusser 1971a. 61 Althusser 1971a, p. 140. 62 Althusser 2006a, pp. 98–9. 63 Althusser 2006a, p. 97. 64 Althusser 2006a, p. 99. 65 Althusser 2006a, p. 120. 66 Althusser 2006a, p. 120. 67 Althusser 2006a, p. 120. 68 Criticising Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, which Althusser took as reductive politicism and as an instantiation of the autonomy of politics, or the political, he writes: ‘There is a great deal to be said about this thesis of the autonomy of the political or of politics, particularly about the fact that it can be understood neither as the autonomy of the party from the masses in the class struggle, nor as that of political leaders in the life of the Party, and so on. Yet the fact is that this aberrant thesis brings us to the threshold of another “absolute limit” of Marxist thought: namely, its inability to think “politics”. It will be objected that this is to court paradox: the work of Marx and Lenin is full of “politics”. It is indeed full of politics, full of political analyses. But our authors have never given us, except in the form of lists or descriptions, even the rudiments of an analysis responding to the question: just what might politics be? Where is politics to be found? In what forms? What distinguishes it from non-political forms, and how then should we designate these other forms? Unless we broach these questions, we risk remaining, for a long time yet, “in the night in which all cows are grey”. And, colour for colour, our hands will most assuredly not be white. For to ask what politics might be implies that one state one’s views on the Party’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 150). 69 Althusser 2006a, p. 83. 70 Despite revising precisely some of those positions that arguably constituted his most original, albeit questionable, contributions, Althusser nonetheless maintained his anti-humanism. Particularly in Reply to John Lewis, his critique of bourgeois humanism – which he saw as the disease infecting the intelligentsia of the international communist movement – is linked to the insistence on the masses, and not man, as the faber of history and therefore as the only ‘subject’ of an authentic communist politics. For Althusser, humanism – which he considered,

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following Marx, as an expression of ‘reactionary socialism’ – was the line that ‘turns the workers away from the class struggle, prevents them from making use of the only power they possess: that of their organization as a class and their class organizations (the trade unions, the party), by which they wage their class struggle’ (Althusser 1976a, p. 64). 71 Althusser 1976a. 72 Lahtinen in this volume. 73 Althusser 1978, pp. 39, 45. 74 Lathinen in this volume. 75 Althusser, 1977, pp. 35–7. 76 Tronti 2006, p. 22. 77 Tronti 1977, pp. 34–5. 78 See Althusser 1969a. 79 Althusser 2006a, p. 59.

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13 Louis Althusser and the concept of economy Ceren Özselçuk

I

n Metapolitics Alain Badiou calls attention to a thesis initially advanced by Sylvain Lazarus, that there is a tension, an ambivalence in the manner in which the concept of class circulates within Louis Althusser’s ‘topographical framework’.1 On the one hand, class is related to the object of the science of historical materialism, ‘a materialist determination by the economy, which provides a principle of massive stability’.2 On the other hand, class belongs to the political, the field of the subjective and overdetermination that by definition rules out any determinate objects, laws or subjects. After incisively bringing into view this oscillation in the meanings of class found in Althusser’s writings, Badiou gestures towards the political name of class as the proper trajectory for registering the effects of overdetermination and locating ‘the possible’. Indeed, it is the idea of overdetermination as a political moment that Badiou affirms and argues for in order to encapsulate what is most fertile in Althusser’s unfinished project of thinking subjectivity and politics without a subject: Overdetermination puts the possible on the agenda, whereas the economic place (objectivity) is that of well-ordered stability, and the statist place (ideological subjectivity) makes individuals ‘function’. Overdetermination is in truth the political place. And it must indeed be said that overdetermination belongs to the subjective realm (choice, partisanship, militancy), even though it knows of no subject-effect (such effects are statist), nor does it verify, or construct, any object (such objects only exist in the field of science).3 I think it would not be too unwarranted to infer from Badiou’s remarks that he does not see in Althusser’s formulations of economy, which he recognises as the place of ‘well-ordered stability’, a genuine openness to overdetermination, or subjective intervention. Insofar as economy is taken as an object of scientific practice, and insofar as scientific practice entails a systematic construction of its object, its specification as well as the description of the methods of its exposition and verification, one can speak of a certain type of stability tied up with scientific investigation. However, Badiou’s descriptions entail something other – and more – than the conditions of generic scientific procedure. It seems that ‘stability’ refers, rather, to the

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ontology of economy and class in the manner in which Althusser reconstructed them from Marx’s Capital. Thus what I want to call into question in this chapter is the idea that Althusser’s writings ascribe stability and a purpose of social ordering to economy. Badiou’s specific reading of Althusser, and the tensions that characterise his writings, can be interpreted as to give support to a particular trend of reclaiming Althusser’s legacy, one which, through pitting structural cause (qua economy) against overdetermination, restricts the effective field of contingency to the political, and attributes to Althusser’s discussions of the mode of production a difficult-toreform economic necessity. In fact, even those scholars that do not see such a polarisation and tension between Althusser’s analysis of the mode of production and overdetermination, and include ‘relations of production’ as one of the contradictions overdetermining every conjuncture, go on to present the latter as a special, primary contradiction or some necessary limit, which contains and directs the effects of the interactions between diverse contradictions. In my opinion, a reading that deduces from Althusser’s analysis of the mode of production an orderly, and ordering, perception of economy – which, as if by necessity, holds together – runs directly counter to his enterprise. My thesis, along with a series of other scholars, is that Althusser’s epistemological project, especially in the systematic terms that it is expressed in Reading Capital, has allowed for a conceptualisation of the space upon which economic relations rest as ontologically contingent and unstable. I understand this project in terms of a rigorous confrontation with the ideological closures of political economy, in both its theoreticalhumanist version (and its variant, economism) and historicism. When I say ideological closures, I am referring to the ways in which political economy ‘privilege[s] the historical and the epistemological position of the Subject’s self-realization in terms of self knowledge’ – whether this self-realisation takes the humanist form, as in the case of the fulfilment of human needs or the actualisation of socialised labour, or if it expresses itself in structuralist form, as in the case of the law of value (and accumulation) or the historical consciousness of capitalist abstraction.4 Starting with the epistemological assurance of some transparent knowledge, and the postulate of an omniscient subject that this entails, theoretical humanism and historicism then proceed to locate this transparency in some essence that fixes the scope of economy as ‘the homogenous space of the given’.5 Diligently exposing such involvements of classical epistemology (what Althusser calls the ‘empiricist problematic’) in the deterministic constructions of economy, specifically in the ways in which classical epistemology privileges a notion of the subject as origin and goal, Althusser simultaneously opened up a ‘front’ separate from representations of economy as a uniform field that is tightly secured and consistently determined by logics of economic necessity. Following the path cleared up by Althusser’s reading of Marx, a series of evolving Marxian research-projects have produced a different thought of economy as a heterogeneous and overdetermined field, populated by a diversity of institutional forms of value, circulation of capital and economic subjectivity. In the rest of this chapter, as I elaborate the new concept of economy that I read in Althusser’s writings, I will at the same time draw extensively from the insights of these research-projects. As I will try to show, what these theoretical initiatives have taken from Althusser is not only that the constitution of economy is historically contingent and in perpetual need of reproduction, but, perhaps more importantly, that the condition of possibility for examining historical contingency itself rests on disidentifying with those sovereign attempts that try to pin economy down with a transparent, cohering identity (the most familiar,

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at least to Marxian ears, being the capitalist economy of abstraction and/or accumulation, to which we can easily add, the market-economy of efficient allocation, the communist economy of socialised labour, and so on).

Class struggle in ‘economic’ theory To begin to elucidate the concept of economy that Althusser’s works give rise to, I want to draw attention to a third and a philosophical meaning of class – or rather, class struggle – in Althusser’s writings, in addition to those that Badiou highlights. It is this philosophical sense of class that, in my view, constantly unsettles what is retained from the (‘last instance’) determinism that privileges economic contradiction as the mover of historical process. This philosophical notion is closely tied up with what various scholars have pointed to as a transformation in Althusser’s definition of philosophy in Essays in Self-Criticism, from the ‘theory of theoretical practice’ to the ‘practice of intervention’ in ideological and scientific theories with the aim of ‘tracing “lines of demarcation”’, ‘taking up a position’ and, in Althusser’s alternative formulation, ‘waging class struggle in theory’.6 So what does class designate in Althusser’s expression of ‘class struggle in theory’? And what kind of a practice of intervention does ‘class struggle in theory’ entail? At first glance, the idea of theoretical class struggle might conjure up the notion of a structural approach of deriving theoretical attitudes, social interests and political battles from the stratification of classes within relations of production. It might even bring to mind the doctrinaire call for purifying the political field through prescribing some pre-ordained (proletarian) position, such as to eradicate the bourgeois deviations in theoretical practices. One might add to this that Althusser’s utilisation of the science and ideology distinction – which, in the minds of an overwhelming number of critics, has served as the epitome of Althusser’s conformity to rationalism, if not the clear evidence of his Stalinist coercion in theory – has conveniently bolstered this interpretation. Nevertheless, the notion of ‘class struggle in theory’ could not be any further from the sociological/structural approach of attributing interests to class positions. It is true that Althusser subjected his earlier take on Marxian philosophy, as well as his prior use of the science and ideology distinction, to an unflinching criticism, characterising it as ‘a rationalist explanation . . . contrasting truth and error in the forms of the speculative distinction between science and ideology, in the singular and in general’. Nevertheless, I think that he carried out this criticism neither for the same reasons, nor with the same consequences, that his many presumptuous critics attributed to him. Althusser unreservedly advocated doing away with his prior definition of philosophy as the ‘theory of theoretical practice’, a formulation that appealed to the idea of philosophy as the meta-discourse that adjudicates theoretical practices. For Althusser, not only did this violate his very own preposition that truth was internal to theoretical practice and could not be located in a transcendental subject, but also led to the absence from his previous work of an overdeterminist analysis of Marx’s break: rather than explaining the historical conditions of existence and the determinate effects of class struggle in overdetermining ‘Marx’s epistemological break’, he had reduced the latter almost to a matter of choice, made on the terrain of rationalism, between error and truth. Still, at the same time that he launched this self-criticism, Althusser persisted in defending his science and ideology distinction, even to the point of defining the

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task of philosophy as one of tracing the effects of this distinction on the sciences. In his defence, he attempted to release this distinction from the vestiges of a rationalist judgment on truth and error, and instead denoted this distinction with the figure of a ‘battlefield’ of antagonistic tendencies between materialism and idealism, two contending positions that could never be found in some pure and complete form.7 In this revised formulation, the science and ideology distinction operated as a ‘line of demarcation’ between ‘a theoretical tendency that was both anti-subject and anti-teleological’ and an ideological tendency that proceeded from the transparency and unity of a subject.8 One can convincingly argue that with ‘theoretical class struggle’, Althusser was not really articulating a completely new idea, but rather bringing to the fore what he had already formulated quite forcefully in the context of his previous interrogations of classical epistemology. If these formulations remained somewhat at the sidelines, it is because they were, in some sense, forced onto the sidelines as a consequence of certain readings of his earlier works that emphasised their rationalism and structuralism. But already in Reading Capital, as Althusser was reconstructing the epistemology and ontology unique to Marx, he was distancing Marx from – while excavating – the unquestioned and implicit alliances between the essentialisms of seemingly different veins of Marxian and non-Marxian ‘theoretical ideologies’. Since some of these essentialist assumptions were implicitly held, and not self-acknowledged, Althusser’s effort was nothing short of a constitutive intervention to bring into existence a divide, a new front of struggle that persists within the field of social sciences till this day. Studying Reading Capital retrospectively through the aforementioned self-criticism, we can understand how Althusser’s painstakingly exact analysis in this text marks the struggle between materialism and idealism, or, put differently, between overdetermination and determinism. For Althusser, determinisms within Marxism involved not only the economism of the Second International, which mechanistically reduced historical change to the destiny-determining contradiction between the forces of production and relations of production;9 not only the theoretical humanism of early Marx and socialists of the times, who found in proletarian consciousness the recovery of the alienated origin and unifying core of human consciousness, namely, the labouring subject; but also, the historicism of those fellow Marxists, who, while advancing their own criticisms of the Second International socialism, were erecting their own version of essentialism by presuming a ‘contemporaneity of time’ that submits the diversity of scientific, philosophical, economic and political practices to what is thinkable in a certain historical period: indeed, periods that they ultimately deem to be isolatable. Simultaneously, Althusser produced a series of precise arguments to substantiate how Marx’s philosophy parted ways with the empiricism and theoretical humanism of classical political economy as well as of modern economic theory. Althusser was not a political economist; nonetheless, his interventions in this sphere can be interpreted in the figure of a class struggle in economic theory. A key error of classical political economists that Althusser pointed out was their confusion of surplus-value with so many of its observable forms (such as wages, rents and profits).10 This was not a simple matter of psychological oversight where, looking from the outside, one perceives the existing economic reality incorrectly or incompletely. It was the empiricist problematic in which classical political economists were embedded that was constitutive of the distribution of what was visible and invisible to them. Collapsing the gap between the object of knowledge and the real object, the empiricist problematic confined economic existence to the obviousness of the given.11

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To this, Althusser’s response was that the ‘economic is never clearly visible, does not coincide with the “given”’, thus ‘. . . all economic science depends on the construction of the concept of its object’.12 Accordingly, Marx’s break with the empiricist epistemology was simultaneous with his construction of a new concept of economy, which involved drawing a conceptual distinction between capitalist surplus-value and the forms that its manifold distributions could take, which, in turn, worked together with a series of other conceptual distinctions that he constructed, such as between labour and labour-power, necessary and surplus-labour/ value, abstract and concrete labour, and so on. This new conception of economy enabled Marx to explode the perception of social relations of production in classical political economy in terms of a harmonious division of labour (where each empirically-given class of labourers, capitalists and landlords contributed their share to the total value produced) and to instead conceive of these relations as antagonistic.13 Put in the language of the science versus ideology distinction, Marx, with his newly found concept(s), took a position against the imaginary of classical political economists.14 Marx’s concepts opened up a new field of visibility on class which exposed the misrecognition of social unity and transparency that the empiricist problematic effected. We can build on Althusser’s analysis to claim that Marx’s class struggle in theory makes possible a new understanding of economic class struggle conceived as a process without a subject. Althusser indicates such a new conception when he prescribes to ‘go beyond the football match idea’ of class struggle that invokes two antagonistic and already-formed classes, and to put class struggle before the division of classes into classes.15 So, for instance, he argues that exploitation is not the result of the confrontation of two preconstituted groups of classes, ‘exploitation is already class struggle’.16 Conceiving economic class struggle as a process in this way not only rules out any telos based on the intending subject, but also conveys the impossibility of any final closure to class relations. That is, with no ultimate foundation for a perfect arrangement of class, struggles over the division of what is necessary and what is surplus-labour/value, as well as over the distributions of surplus-labour/value, can never be settled for once and all, thus rendering class antagonism irresolvable.17 This offers a perspective on economic class struggle that disengages it from the imputation of stability to economy.

The critique of theoretical humanisms At this point, I might be running slightly ahead of my argument. For Althusser, Marx’s disruption of the notion of a harmonising economy put forwards by classical political economy involved not only the break with the empiricist problematic, but also casting away theoretical-humanist anthropology. As a matter of fact, it was this latent anthropology that set the ground for the empiricist problematic. What aided the homogenising endeavour of the empiricist mode of knowledge, by submitting what were in fact distinct economic practices to a uniform comparison and measurement, and obtaining from them a clearly recognisable knowledge, was the presumption that these practices were all founded and stamped by the same origin. They were the ‘obvious’ manifestations of a given human intentionality: the purposeful action that humans engage in order to satisfy their needs. . . . Classical Economics can only think economic facts as belonging to the homogenous space of their positivity and measurability on condition that it accepts a ‘naïve’ anthropology

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which founds all the acts involved in the production, distribution, reception and consumption of economic objects on the economic subjects and their needs . . . In the concept of the sphere of needs, economic facts are thought as based in their economic essence on human subjects who are prey to ‘need’: on the homo oeconomicus, who is a (visible, observable) given, too. The homogenous positivist field of measurable economic facts depends on a world of subjects whose activity as productive subjects in the division of labor has as its aim and effect the production of objects of consumption, destined to satisfy these same subjects of needs. The subjects, as subjects of needs, support the activity of the subjects as producers of use-values, exchangers of commodities and consumers of use-values. The field of economic phenomena is thus, in origin as in aim, founded on the ensemble of human subjects whose needs define them as economic subjects. The peculiar theoretical structure of Political Economy depends on immediately and directly relating together a homogenous space of given phenomena and an ideological anthropology which bases the economic character of the phenomena and its space on man as the subject of needs (the givenness of the homo oeconomicus).18 It is worth expanding on this paragraph in order to elucidate the significance of Althusser’s intervention for theorising contingency in economy. We can begin by underlining that what Althusser contested in the homogenisation of economy (through the anthropology of needs) was not that economic space was thus rendered measurable, or subjected to abstraction. Althusser’s disagreement was neither with the practice of measurement, nor with abstraction ‘in general’ (indeed, he regarded abstraction to be a constitutive part of scientific production, once he distinguished it from empiricist abstraction). He explicitly argued that Marx’s theoretical discourse ‘by no means excludes from economics the possibility of measurement or of the intervention of the instruments of mathematics’. What it did, however, was to subordinate measurement to ‘conceptual formalization’.19 The homogenisation of the economy as ‘an infinite plane’ in classical political economy was not the consequence of its property of being measurable per se. It stemmed both from a realist (empiricist) epistemology, which removed the distinction between conceptual objects and real objects and made ‘real objects’ the referent of a foundational knowledge, and a theoretical humanism that secured that foundation upon deliberate human intention. This contention is the same one behind Althusser’s equally strong objection to modern economists who attacked Marx for producing concepts, such as value and surplus-value, that they declared to be ‘non-operational’.20 This is because, their argument proceeded, these concepts were non-measurable and unquantifiable.21 Mired in the empiricist problematic, just like their classical predecessors, modern economists similarly conflated the conceptual structure that Marx produced (which provides Marx’s object) with the givenness of the real object.22 When modern economists claimed that value and surplus-value were not immediately visible and quantifiable, what they were unable to conceive was that these were not given things, directly measurable, but (conceptual) sites of overdetermined relationships, meaning that their quantification was contingent on the interactions within that relational structure. In Althusser’s words, surplus-value was not directly quantifiable, because it was a ‘concept of a relationship . . . of an existence visible and measurable only in its “effects”’.23 Althusser’s appraisal of the empiricist problematic of measurement in Reading Capital has terrain-shifting implications for the issue of the determination of value within Marxian political

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economy. What was and continues to be a major question in the debates on value is the scientific validity of Marx’s labour theory of value. Various Marxian economists have built upon Althusser’s intervention to challenge the positivist conception of science and the empiricist position assumed in these debates.24 For example, Bruce Roberts eloquently explains that the positions that critically disparage value-theory – for its analytical shortcomings, and specifically for the intractable analytical inconsistencies encountered when deriving capitalist prices (profits) from labour-time values (surplus-values) in production – and still others that attempt to salvage it, are misguided insofar as they force value and surplus-value to serve as ‘invariant labour essences’, only to then run into problems when they try to derive capitalist prices and profits from these essences in a linear relation of causality.25 However, Roberts argues that if, in line with what Althusser advanced, value and surplus-value were instead conceived as ‘concepts of relationships’, then there is no reason to treat them as referents for fixed quantities of labour-time embodied in production. In fact, in such a case, there will be no predetermined substance of value and surplus-value, independent of the specific social and historical conditions of consumption and distribution that overdetermine their changing forms. There will be no determination of surplus-value, for instance, prior to the specification of whether it is circulated subject to average profit, or monopoly profit, or of whether it is distributed through payments of merchant profit or groundrent.26 Distributions of ‘debt, rent, taxes, salaries of non-productive employees, and so on’ all bear a constitutive imprint on surplus-value, ‘even if actual payments in these forms occur only subsequent to the realization of revenue’.27 To put it differently, there is no pre-formed value and surplus-value prior to the value-form. Value-form, as distinguished from value in Marx, retroactively constructs value and renders it, not as some fully present essence of determination, but as an ‘absent cause existing only in its effects’. It opens a conceptual space for exploring the contingent constitution of the ‘magnitude’ of the ongoing redistributions of unpaid/surplus-value as an effect of changing economic institutions and struggles, both class and non-class.28 Althusser was right in claiming that ‘[i]f surplus value is not measurable, that is precisely because it is the concept of its forms, which are measurable’.29 Now, in order to tie the discussion so far developed back to where we started, I want to raise the question of whether Marx’s concept of value-form plays a role sufficient to displacing the unity and stability imposed on economy through theoretical-humanist anthropology. My answer to this is that one should simultaneously lay on the table the anthropology, this time, not of a satisfying subject, but of a labouring subject, which seems to underpin classical Marxism’s commitment to treating labour embodied in production as the origin of value-determination. In fact, even in classical political economy – and this is also implicit in Althusser’s discussions – the anthropology of needs coexisted with that of labour, which served as another centre, totalising production, consumption, exchange and distribution.30 Once labour is assigned an ontological status in classical Marxism, the reproduction of society is then grounded on the objective of economy as a well-structured allocation of labour. This type of reproductionism was crystallised, for instance, in the notion of the ‘law of value’, which presented capitalist economy as a self-regulating mechanism that had to solve the problem of distributing abstract social labour-time in such a way that would secure the existence and maintenance of society. Marx’s critical answer to the anthropology of labour, and to the ontological solidity that this anthropology ascribes to economy – and in fact, if we adhere to Althusser’s reading of Marx, to any possible form of theoretical humanism regarding needs, wants, labour, appropriation,

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and so on – is the concept of the mode of production. Althusser argued that in Grundrisse, and more prominently in Capital, Marx brought to maturity the concept of the mode of production in order to think a ‘complexly articulated’ whole and banish from his discourse the idea of a simple expressive unity applied by theoretical humanism: ‘To think the concept of production is to think the concept of the unity of its conditions: the mode of production. To think the mode of production is to think not only the material conditions but also the social conditions of production’.31 The complex unity of the mode of production referred to the combination of the particular material conditions (which we can read as ‘economic’ conditions in the above paragraph),32 namely, conditions of consumption, circulation, and distribution, with ‘social’ conditions, which we can interpret as introducing ‘non-economic’ elements, referring to the political and ideological conditions of existence. This formulation of the mode of production as the ‘unity of its conditions’ displaces the idea of unity as grounded on an anthropological foundation and makes unity, or rather the effect of unity, a problem to be explained. That is, it recasts the mode of production in terms of the problem of reproduction, which is indispensable for the reconceptualisation of capitalist economic relations as contingently constituted. Before I elaborate this point further, however, I want to make a detour and confront head-on Althusser’s reference to the ‘determination in the last instance’ by economic structure, an idea which he closely related to the concept of the complexly articulated whole.33 This diversion is called for since many critiques have seized on this reference to the ‘last instance’ as a clear indication of how the contingency of reproduction in Althusser’s analysis is very much compromised by the necessity of the economic regulation of the social.34

The status of the ‘last instance’ How shall we understand Althusser’s enigmatic insistence on the notion of the ‘last instance’, even when he immediately qualifies it with saying that its ‘lonely hour . . . never comes’?35 As already mentioned, quite a number of scholars have read this insistence as a clear sign of Althusser’s failure, despite his rigorous efforts, to extract himself from the rationalist grip of the base-superstructure model of Marxism. In this interpretation, the meaning of the last instance is irretrievably, and in my view improperly, stained with economic determinism. Certainly, this is not all that is said about the last instance. An equally vocal, contrary position lists the idea of the last instance among those things that should be reclaimed from Althusser, as an indispensable element that affirms Marx’s materialist method of privileging economy and class in explaining historical transformation, as the epitome of Althusser’s rebuttal of idealism. However, this interpretation is also untenable once we conceive of Althusser’s materialist philosophy not in the sense of prioritising the economy, but as persevering in the direction of a critique of any positivist conception of science and any deterministic understanding of causation. Borrowing an already existing notion of economy, this position fails to go through how the ‘structure’ of economy is thoroughly transformed by Althusser’s reading of Marx. It seems to me that what these opposing views collectively do is to channel the debate on the last instance in a particular way. Reacting to one another’s position, they drive the struggle over the meaning of last instance not so much in terms of the question of the role that this concept performs in relation to Althusser’s epistemological project, as through the desire to establish

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and regulate the proper border between Marxism and post-Marxism in the post-Althusserian context (thus ordering the various degrees of allegiances to Marxism according to who adheres to the last instance and who abandons it). I think, rather, that last instance should be thought as an emplacement in Althusser’s class struggle in economic theory, which admittedly fires out contradictory messages at times. A number of Althusser’s well-known remarks on the last instance appear in the text ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in the course of his close reading of Marx’s afterword to the second edition of Capital and Engels’s letter to Joseph Bloch. Althusser’s meticulous reading of these texts, in which he cites Marx and Engels quite extensively, aims at rendering visible the philosophical novelty of Marx’s dialectic in its break with the Hegelian structure. To Althusser, it is not only the case that ‘determination by the economic in the last instance’ must be sharply distinguished from the Hegelian expressive causality that reduces all phenomena back to an economic essence. It is precisely the term that differentiates Marx’s dialectic from the Hegelian one. Last instance embodies the metaphor of a structure, which, far from depicting a simple inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, establishes a ‘new relationship between new terms’.36 To probe into this statement, let us turn to Essays in Self-Criticism, where Althusser revisits the notion of the last instance and devotes a significant discussion to it.37 Here, unlike some of his previous arguments which he subjects to self-criticism, Althusser affirms the significance of this ‘little phrase’ once again in enacting a shift of ‘topography’ of the social: last instance names the abandonment of the metaphor of the Hegelian ‘circle’ for that of ‘edifice’.38 It signifies ‘a differentiated, therefore, complex and articulated whole’, separating Marx sharply off from the expressive unity that the Hegelian configuration represents in the image of ‘a circle within circles’.39 If last instance, ‘is the last one’, Althusser says, ‘it is because there are others. . .’ each with their different histories.40 Contrary to what the critics see the last instance as doing – that is, introducing a telos of structural determination – it is, as a key ingredient of Althusser’s conceptual reworking of Marx’s texts, foremost an attempt to remove any encroachment of telos on Marx’s dialectic. The last instance conveys the idea that ‘the differences are real, and they are not only differences in the spheres of activity, practices and objects: they are differences in efficacy. The last instance operates here in such a way that it explodes the peaceful fiction of the circle or the sphere’.41 Althusser emphasises more than once that last instance should be regarded as the metaphor of a radical topographical shift, a claim that, I think, detaches it from serving as some sort of concrete, ultimate cause of determination. Still, there is an element in Althusser’s use of the last instance that gives some justification to critics’ thesis that he deploys this notion as a regulator of a hierarchy of effects, as the index of structural causality whereby economy (class contradiction) ascribes different effectivities to different social instances and historical conditions. The status of the last instance, which I try to magnify and which departs from such a mediated determination by economy, might take on a more convincing meaning if we note how it is placed conceptually next to other related ideas that Althusser utilises, in particular, the determinant structure (and determinate) and the limit, both of which also circulate in the same texts. The combined effect of these concepts situated in a shared field of discourse communicates that when Althusser argues for the last instance as to dislocate the Hegelian totality, his objective is not the substitution of this totality by another one, this time with an assemblage of isolated elements that relate to one another arbitrarily and externally, with no specific and constitutive relation of articulation. That would be to fill the theoretical void

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left by the displacement of Hegelian totality with the spontaneous ideology of a mechanistic Cartesian totality, replacing the determinism of the whole with the determinism of the parts.42 There is, then, a certain strategic import to Althusser’s deployment of the determinate and the limit (and the last instance): to avoid the dual dangers of Hegelian and Cartesian preoccupations. Seen in this way, all these ideas are very much akin to the concept of overdetermination. Every mode of production is determinate in the sense that the constitutive effects of each element of the social totality play themselves out in and through the complex interactions with the effects of other particular elements.43 Determinate, interpreted this way, does not mean determinism; it does not suggest a system of relationships structured by a governing essence, but rather refers to the limited and differential effectivity of each and every element. ‘Limited’, because structure or its elements are not subjects, in that they do not control and dictate their own effects and secure their own conditions of existence; rather, they are overdetermined (and underdetermined44) by their specific conditions and histories. One can, then, interpret determinate structure as designating the limited-because-overdetermined structure, as announcing the impossibility of the self-sufficiency of structure or of particular elements. The last instance, rethought in this way, in conjunction with the notions of the determinate and the limit, symbolises a topography of articulated instances and implies a materialist orientation that rules out any explanation in terms of the consciousness of self or history: when he [Marx] inscribes the dialectic within the functioning of the instances of a topography, he effectively protects himself from the illusion of a dialectic capable of producing its own material content in the spontaneous movement of its self-development. In submitting the dialectic to the constraints of the topography, Marx is submitting it to the real conditions of its operation, he is protecting it from speculative folly, he is forcing it into a materialist mold, forcing it to recognize that its own figures are prescribed by the material character of its own conditions’.45 This is the sense in which I regard the concept of the last instance as a tool of separation, separating Marx’s ontological project from the ideologies of social harmony resolved through different types of theoretical humanisms. No longer standing for the cause that pulls the strings behind the scenes, last instance is thus situated as one of the concepts, along with the determinate and the limit, within Althusser’s theoretical movement that enables us to think the necessity of conjuncture, to count and distinguish between all other instances, to weigh up their different and distinct efficacies, and to ‘take full account of the way the conditions present themselves’.46

The contingency of reproduction I can now return to the significance of Althusser bringing reproduction to the fore as ‘an indispensable element of any theory of production’.47 Viewing the capitalist mode of production from the angle of reproduction detaches the analysis of the movement of capital from the regulative fiction of the ‘law of value’ (or, for that matter, from the ‘law of accumulation’, which adds yet another layer of necessity to the operation of the ‘law of value’ in the context of expanded reproduction). Creation of value can then be posed as a question in its historical and institutional becoming. For instance, Marx’s circuit of capital (M-C. . .P. . .C’-M’) can be conceived, not as the prescription of an invariant, unmediated, self-constituted logic, a ‘law of motion’, but

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as a framework for interrogating the historically changing social technologies that sustain the metamorphoses of capital as it is transformed from its money-form to commodity-form and then, once the new commodities are produced, back into money-form in order for the surplusvalue performed by the living labour to be realised.48 The historical constitution of labour-power as a commodity, as espoused in Marx’s analysis in the chapters on so-called primitive accumulation, has received the most attention in discussions on the social constitution of the circuit of capital. One might even claim that the overemphasis on the contingency of this particular moment of the circuit has unwittingly overshadowed the question of the reproduction of other moments. However, there is no reason why one cannot carry the logic of contingency over to the entirety of the process of capital. Althusser also returned to the theory of primitive accumulation in 1982, as part of a book-manuscript that was never published due to his death.49 Revisiting the arguments that he, together with Balibar, developed in Reading Capital, he reiterates the way in which the mode of production allows for a conceptualisation of the emergence of the historical phenomenon of capitalism relieved from the telos of any unifying cause, where each of its constitutive elements (for example, accumulation of money, accumulation of technical means of production, accumulation of the raw materials of production, accumulation of producers) can be treated as ‘the product of its own history, and none being the teleological product of the others or their history . . .’50 More importantly, for Althusser, the theory of primitive accumulation does not only expose the contingency of the origins of capitalism. As a steadily-recurring process, primitive accumulation also offers a conceptual framework for studying the ways in which the process of capital depends on the continuous reproduction of its conditions of existence (for instance, the maintenance of the flows of ‘new money capital’ and credit, new sources of labour-power, reproduction of the old labour-power, and so on), a process for which there is no guarantee. At least in part influenced by Althusser’s (as well as Balibar’s51) rethinking of the theory of primitive accumulation, a growing number of scholars today deny the past-ness of primitive accumulation and see its value for understanding the conditions of expropriation, violence and abstraction that contemporary capitalist relations continually depend on for their ongoing sustenance.52 Without downplaying the differences among the theoretical persuasions of these scholars, one can say that they also share a common interest in investigating the relationship between subjectivity and capitalist economic relations. They take subjectivity as the constitutive register for the forced creation of an economy whose principle of existence is based upon a negation of social heterogeneity, on a suppression of singular needs, identifications and desires. And they regard the peculiar subjectivity of capitalist economic relations to be a material consequence of subjection to abstraction, more specifically, to the abstract conceptions of labour. Often, this process of abstraction is traced to the practice and implications of the agents in commodity-exchange, through which their labouring activity is reduced to abstract quantities.53 These perspectives have not only forcefully demonstrated how the idea of a recurrent primitive accumulation goes against the teleological narrative of class transition from capitalism as the necessary stage on the way to socialism, but also introduced the essential support of a peculiar subjectivity for the reproduction of capital. Even when telos is cut from these accounts, however, I would argue that it does still seem to leave traces – if no longer as that which guarantees the transition to socialism, then as a historically specific capitalist dynamic that promotes a comprehensive and conclusive mentality, comprising the whole field of social relations. For instance, when primitive accumulation is related to the constitution of subjectivity,

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the type of subjectivity in mind is often a uniform one that is tied up with the consciousness and experience of being subjected to abstract labour. So even when abstraction is embedded in practice, even when it is taken to be an effect of social conditions and class struggle, and not deduced from the integrity of individual rationality, then to the extent that the experiential effect of abstraction is assumed to entail a cohering subjectivity, it becomes just another step to suspect some unifying source behind this uniform effect, namely some ‘historical reality’ of capital that is able to penetrate and grip on subjectivity such as to stamp on it its own homogenising self-consciousness. Thus, a certain intention and necessity is retained on the side of economy qua capitalism/commodification as a historical structure. I think that as a remedy to this residual anthropomorphisation of capital, another notion of contingency can be drawn from Althusser’s writings, one that disrupts the tight correspondence between a uniform cognitive effect and reproduction of capitalism. For this, we need to bring in Althusser’s particular critique of contemporaneity and historicism.

Non-contemporaneity and economic difference Let me begin by summarising what I take to be the salient aspects of Althusser’s critique of historicism. In the chapters ‘The Errors of Classical Economics’ and ‘Marxism is not a Historicism’, Althusser mounted a careful analysis in order to distinguish Marx’s novel theory of history in Capital, which, he claimed, was ‘indispensable for any understanding of the theory of the economy’.54 According to Althusser, even though Marx did not elaborate his new theory of history in readily identifiable ways, the fact that it remained buried out of sight was, rather, due to the fact that it was promptly folded under a ‘radical historicist’ position. For this widespread Marxian interpretation misconstrued Marx’s critique of classical political economy by way of diminishing it to a demonstration of the inability of classical political economists to historicise their concepts and see them as the specific theoretical products of the capitalist mode of production. Departing from this interpretation, Althusser maintained not only that Marx did not see concepts as the manifest expressions of what is thinkable (or possible to experience) in a historical period, but also that his contribution went beyond showing the historical specificity of concepts: Marx produced new concepts. Thus, for instance, abstract labour, as a scientific concept, did not exist in the form of a direct experience of commodityrelations that Marx was then simply able to read off from the state of empirical reality; it was a new concept that he actively produced.55 However, because the historicist position simply imported and borrowed ‘one particular’ and ‘obvious’ idea of history without interrogating ‘the content of history imposed by Marx’s theoretical problematic’, it obfuscated both Marx’s new conceptual structure as well as the new understanding of history simultaneously made possible by this new conceptual structure. So what did the historicist position consist of? When Althusser presented the intimate connection of historicism with Hegelian historical time, he disaggregated the latter into two inter-related aspects of homogeneous continuity of time and contemporaneity of time.56 If the homogeneous continuity of time made reference to a uniform unfolding of historical time towards a pre-established goal, then the contemporaneity of time is what, in effect, held this deterministic schema together. That is because contemporaneity, as ‘a category that defines historically and defines as historical the conditions for all knowledge concerning

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a historical object’, unifies ‘all’ that exists under historical consciousness. Contemporaneity fills up presence without any unevenness (all conditions and practices work in some way towards explaining historical existence) or void (historical is when nothing escapes the shared presence). Once the historicist position starts with an origin of historical consciousness mirrored in all aspects (scientific, philosophical, economic, political, and so on) of history, the positing of a self-directed goal, keeping a tight rein on the temporal correspondence of these aspects, conveniently follows. Refusing to reduce the meaning of history to a direct and immediately-experienced consciousness of a mode of production, Althusser’s critique of contemporaneity helps us to diversify subjectivity in relation to economy. That is, we can use this critique to posit a new way of thinking about subjectivity in relation to economy, where we can explore the conditions of the uneven co-existence of different subjectivities, without prejudging any one of them as retrograde, deficient, or simply the expression of a dominant (capitalist) form that is assumed to be self-present. This is the path that scholars such as Gayatri Spivak57 and Charusheela58 take in their exploration of economic difference under the sign of the subaltern. First, however, they provide a supplement to Althusser’s critique of contemporaneity by showing how the historicist attribution of a uniform subjectivity to a given mode is conditioned by an imaginary of capitalist progress that suspends subjective experience ‘in a modernist/ non-modernist binary’. More specifically, Charusheela stresses how the very construction of the self-imagination of abstract wage-labour (‘of equality and abstract individuation’) relies on an ‘internal ordering’ of this abstract modern subjectivity and the pre-capitalist/non-capitalist others. In this internal ordering, the self-sufficiency of abstract wage-labour is constituted through the relegation of its temporal-spatial outside to a cultural and traditional sameness under the place-holder categories such as the tribal, the traditional, the nonmodern, the feudal, the Asiatic, the primitive communist, and so on.59 This critique of the historicist telos of the capitalist dynamic, and the concomitant deconstruction of the dominant imaginary of abstract wagelabour, open up a space to engage with differentiation from bourgeois equality and abstract individuation and to study, for instance, the ethico-political logics of parity, reciprocity, interdependence and dignity that constitute economic relations.60 Rather than looking for some pre-formed capitalist or non-capitalist subjectivity within a given historical reality, the critique of historicism pushes us to interrogate difference in economic subjectivities as the constituent of historical reality.

Economy and the possible In this chapter, I have attempted to destabilise a particular reading of Althusser that sutures his discussions of the mode of production with a certain necessity, specifically one that charges the economy with an overarching function of ordering the social. In doing this, I have also tried to argue against a particular interpretation of the tensions in Althusser’s work within a binary frame, as an ongoing and irreconcilable conflict between economic necessity and political contingency. While there are tensions in Althusser’s writings, I have tried to argue that they do not play themselves out in an uncompromising divide between economic ordering and political overdetermination, or between economic and political notions of class. The tension is,

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rather, within Althusser’s theorisations of economy, at those peripheral moments where some remainder of economic ordering interrupts what is otherwise a consistent orientation that, put to the service of conceptualising the space of economy, renders the latter as contingent and unevenly structured. The direction received from Althusser’s analysis allows us to pose questions that are very different than those circumscribed by the presumption of a stable (capitalist) economy. It is true that this direction provides no clear prescription to link the contingency and unevenness in economy to a politics of subjective transformation. In any case, the positing of such a simple determination, running from a philosophical practice of de-centering economy to a political practice of subjectivation, would be diametrically opposed to Althusser’s materialism, which stresses the irreducibility of diverse practices. Nonetheless, Althusser’s particular philosophy of materialism, tied up with his notion of class struggle in theory, sheds some very significant insights on the relation between political possibility and the ways that we conceptualise the economy. First, it leads us to realise that any real chance of transformation has to overcome the fantasies that obfuscate the potential of politics by anthropomorphising the economy and imposing on it an intention (for social good, for social corruption, or simply for social ordering). Second, it provides us with some notion of the contingency, unevenness and void that is needed if we are to go beyond the reductionism of reading-off a uniform economic subjectivity from ‘historical’ relations.61

Notes 1 Badiou 2005a, p. 64. 2 Badiou 2005a, p. 65. 3 Badiou 2005a, p. 65. 4 Amariglio 1987, p. 162. 5 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 182. 6 See Althusser 1976a, pp. 142–50; Balibar 1994; Badiou 2005a, p. 61; Macherey 2009, p. 14. 7 Althusser 1976a, p. 142. 8 Montag 1998c, p. 5. See the perspicuous essay by Jack Amariglio on the significance of Althusser’s science and ideology distinction for the critique of classical epistemology as this critique pertains to the field of ‘economic science’ (Amariglio 1987). 9 For a penetrating critique of the discourse of the Second International, influenced by Althusser’s work, see Diskin 1990. 10 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 181. To which Althusser added their other error, similar in kind, of conflating labour with labour-power. 11 Althusser used empiricism in a wider sense of the term, including the meanings of both empiricism and rationalism as commonly understood. In this broader sense, empiricism includes all epistemologies that counterpose a preconstituted subject to an independently existing object with a presumed essence that gives expression to its different aspects. Empiricist knowledge is the abstraction of this essence by the subject (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 313). 12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 183. 13 Elsewhere Althusser argues ‘. . . Marxist science and the Marxist investigator are obliged to

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take a position in the conflict whose object is Marxist theory, are obliged to occupy (proletarian) class theoretical positions . . . They are materialist and dialectical philosophical positions allowing one to see what bourgeois ideology necessarily conceals: the class structure and class exploitation of a social formation’ (Althusser 1996b, pp. 110–11). 14 I borrow this idea from Étienne Balibar’s reformulation of class struggle in theory as a struggle between concept and imaginary in a lecture he delivered on ‘Structure’. See http:// backdoorbroadcasting.net/tag/balibar-etienne/page/2/. Accessed March 2012. 15 Althusser 1976a, pp. 49–51. 16 Althusser 1976a, p. 50. Resnick and Wolff 1987 resituated Althusser’s idea of class struggle, no longer attached to the subjects doing the struggle, to refer to the object of struggle, which they define as the production, appropriation and distribution of surplus-labour/value. From their perspective, whenever individuals or collectivities are mobilised around and act on the forms (exploitative or non-exploitative) and the magnitude of the performance, appropriation and distribution of surplus-labour/value, there is a place for the articulation of class struggle, quite independently of the forms of its ideological articulation. More properly, one should really talk about struggles over class, rather than class struggle. 17 Özselçuk and Madra 2005. 18 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 162. 19 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 183. 20 While Althusser does not mention any names, Paul Samuelson comes to mind. Samuelson’s ‘operationalist’ program demanded that the scientificity of an economic theory (or any theory) should be assessed on the basis of its intersubjectively observable, empirical consequences. Empirically invalid or untestable portions of a given theory should be discarded. Hence the strong desire to discard the introspective aspects of the theory of choice. For further discussion, see Mirowski and Hands 1998, p. 282. 21 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 161. 22 Maria Turchetto succinctly draws attention to how Althusser ‘almost never uses’ the term object ‘alone’ but ‘always speaks of the “object-discourse relation”’ (Turchetto 1993, p. 76). Object thus cannot be thought independent of a conceptual structure. For Turchetto, Althusser’s definition of philosophical investigation is ‘a research and a reconstruction of the conceptual structure that provides the object of a science’ (p. 74). 23 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180. 24 See Roberts 1996; Biewener 1998; Kristjansen-Gural 2005. 25 Roberts 1996, p. 206. 26 Roberts 1996, p. 207. 27 Roberts 1996, p. 208. 28 That is why, for Althusser, value-form was a fundamental conceptual discovery of Marx, distinguishing his value-theory from that which could be found in Adam Smith and that ‘sacrificed the analysis of the value-form to a consideration of the quantity of value only’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 161). 29 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 161. 30 See Amariglio and Ruccio 2002. They provide an argument parallel to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the neoliberal transformation of the status of homo oeconomicus within modern economics from a rational intention that seeks the satisfaction of individual needs to a machine-like behaviour that ‘responds systematically to modifications in economic environment’ (Foucault 2008, p. 270). For an incisive related study that builds on the works of Althusser and Foucault and demonstrates how the ostensibly different approaches of late neoclassical economics in fact converge around new forms of theoretical humanism, see Madra 2007.

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31 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180. 32 Juxtaposing the material to the social in this manner, Althusser in this instance appears to revoke the old idea of economy as the strictly materialist site of historical transformation. I insist on reading such instances in tension with Althusser’s philosophy of materiality that affirms diverse materialities, in the plural. One clear example where Althusser acknowledges different forms of materialities is his essay on ideological state-apparatuses: ‘Of course, the material existence of the ideology in an apparatus and its practice does not have the same modality as the material existence of a paving stone or a rifle’ (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. (Notes towards an Investigation)’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 166). The idea that there are different materialities is closely related to the concept of overdetermination. 33 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 99. 34 See, for instance, Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 98 for a challenging formulation of this critique. 35 ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 113. 36 Althusser 1969a, p. 111. 37 Althusser 1976a, particularly pp. 175–87. 38 Althusser 1976a, p. 182. 39 Althusser 1976a, p. 176. 40 Althusser 1976a, pp. 176–7. 41 Althusser 1976a. 42 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 186–7; Cullenberg 1996. 43 This claim is similar to what Morfino 2005 describes by way of Althusser’s phrase, ‘necessity of the positive facts’, which, as Morfino subtly argues, rather than being opposed to contingency, precisely conveys contingency, because ‘the necessity of the facts is not ordered by any overarching power, being instead nothing more than the play of referrals and interactions among facts themselves’. 44 There are different ways of approaching the meaning of underdetermination as Althusser used it. First is to approach it not as some opposite definition of overdetermination, but rather as a different perspective on it. Mikko Lahtinen’s work offers such an interpretation when he argues that if, in any conjuncture, say, contradiction y is overdetermined by contradictions x1-xn, then looked from the other angle, this is to say that any one of the contradictions x1-xn ‘is not sufficient on its own to produce contradiction y’, thus, ‘[c]ontradiction y is underdetermined in relation to any sub-group of x1-xn’ (Lahtinen 2009, p. 37). This is perhaps the sense Balibar conveys when he regards underdetermination as inseparable from overdetermination (Balibar 1996, p. 115). A second meaning of underdetermination seems to characterise the nature of a change in conjuctures. This appears to be the meaning, for instance, when Althusser compares the term to a ‘threshold of determination which, if it is not crossed, causes revolutions to miscarry, revolutionary movements to stagnate or disappear, and imperialism to rot while still developing, etc’. (Althusser 1976a, p. 187). If, in this usage, underdetermination is not to be gauged in reference to some objectively adequate determination, which is not Althusser’s aim, then can we think of underdetermination as saying something about the nature of the condensation of different contradictions in a specific conjuncture? Could Ernesto Laclau’s conceptual distinction between floating signifiers and empty signifiers prove useful, here? Laclau 2005 uses the term ‘floating signifier to designate the way in which the meaning of social demands in a particular conjuncture becomes indeterminate between alternative frontiers of equivalential articulations (p. 131), whereas empty signifier takes its symbolic force from incorporating the condensation of different social demands, embodying their unachievable fullness (p. 71). What I am suggesting is a path of inquiry between Althusser’s concept of underdetermination and floating signifiers. 45 Althusser 1976a, p. 177.

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46 Althusser 2006a, pp. 186–7. 47 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 171. 48 Norton 2001; Özselçuk and Madra 2007, p. 84. 49 Althusser 2006a. 50 Althusser 2006a, pp. 198–9. 51 In Reading Capital, Balibar worked out in detail the point that not only were the ‘elements’ of ‘free labor’ and money-capital independent and free of any premedidated effect and disposition, but also that each ‘element’ had an internal multiplicity, each of them constituted through a plurality of historical trajectories. A case in point was the three different and distinct histories of the emergence of ‘free labor’, the separation of the direct feudal producers from all means of production as discussed by Marx in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations. Another example was Marx’s discussion in Capital of the three distinct forms of the ‘pre-capitalist’ accumulation of money-capital, which in turn conditioned different paths of transition, and which Balibar stressed ‘[had] no one-to-one correspondence with the three forms of the constitution of the “free-laborer”’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 283). 52 Callari and Ruccio 1996; Read 2003; Harvey 2003; Mezzadra 2011. 53 To note, there are other accounts that, critical of reducing the emergence of market-subjectivity to an effect of the economic practice of exchange, attempt to explain the reification of subjectivity in capitalism as an overdetermined outcome of the interactions of the economic practice of exchange with cultural, legal and political practices. Amariglio and Callari 1993, for instance, discusses the effects of a historical condensation of the processes of economic rationality, equality and private ownership in the social practice of individuals that constitute capitalist market-relations. Althusser himself makes a similar argument when he says that it is ‘the law, the state and the ideologies’ that reproduce commodity-relations. That is, he says, ‘unless we are to endorse the notion of a providential self-regulation of these commodity relations, we cannot understand how they could function without money minted by the state, transactions registered by state agencies, and courts capable of settling possible disputes’ (Althusser 2006a, p. 132). 54 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 118. 55 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 124–5. 56 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 94. 57 Spivak 1999. 58 Charusheela 2011. 59 Charusheela 2011, p. 325. 60 Recent work regarding ‘community-economies’ (Gibson-Graham 2006) and ‘feudal subjectivity’ (Kayatekin and Charusheela 2004) explores such ethico-political dimensions of difference in economic subjectivity. 61 I want to express my gratitude to Sara Farris for inviting me to contribute to this volume. I thank her and Peter Thomas for their patience and encouragement all through the long duration of writing this chapter. I also thank Yahya Madra for his helpful feedback on a previous draft and the editors for their careful reading, editing and guiding comments.

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14 Althusser and the critique of political economy Michele Cangiani

Introduction

L

ouis Althusser builds his own critique of Political Economy on a reading of Marx. His position remains contemporary and penetrating even today: unfortunately, it might be said, since this means that the dominant ideology – the expression of current social organisation – has managed for almost fifty years (one hundred and fifty, with regard to Marx) to keep the alternative paradigm out, marginalising the sceptical view that fixes its gaze on what the dominant ideology cannot see. Pointing out that the stakes are political, Althusser reminds us that ‘[t]he sciences of society do not have the serenity of the mathematical sciences’.1 What is it, then, that we cannot see, that we cannot say about our society, one that has always made so much of its own self-examination? In his essay ‘The Object of Capital’ Althusser seeks among other things to answer this question. What does Political Economy have to say and what does its critique say in return? ‘“To criticize Political Economy”,’ Althusser writes, ‘means to confront it with a new problematic and a new object’, which must therefore be constructed.2 At the highest level of abstraction, Althusser’s analysis and criticism concern not only the entire history of the science of economics, but also the historical and social sciences as a whole. At that level it may not be reductive to say that ‘the same basic theoretical categories’ have characterised economics from ‘classical’ times down to our own.3 The theory of economics, Althusser goes on to say, presents itself as ‘a subordinate region of the theory of history’.4 This is implicit in the fact that the ‘new object’ involves the theoretical reconstruction of the fundamental characteristics of capitalist society and therefore the definition of its historical particularity as distinct from that of other societies. The neoliberal restructuring of capitalism that began at the end of the 1970s has resulted in a serious crisis. Naturally enough, the crisis on one hand increases the need to question our most basic social structures and dynamics in order substantially to change them, and on the other fuels the political and ideological reaction to this need. This opposition is a fundamental theme in Althusser’s writings and represents the meaning of his investigation of the ‘opening of the Continent of History to scientific knowledge’ undertaken by Marx.5

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Since I consider this investigation to be the most original, fruitful and lasting of Althusser’s works, I intend to concentrate on the essay ‘The object of Capital’, published in 1965 in Lire le Capital. In the sections that follow (§II-IV), I will consider some of the aspects of the new horizon opened up by Althusser that are relevant in different areas of the social sciences. Starting with a criticism (theoretical and philosophical, but rooted in politics) of economic ideology, and including the Marxist tradition as well, he suggests a change in the actual ‘problematic’ itself of historicalsocial science. I will also try to indicate the limits of Althusser’s thought. What he understands or doesn’t understand about the theory of value, for example, continues to be discussed. In Capital, it is with this theory that Marx begins both his analysis of the capitalist mode of production as a specific social form and his ‘critique of Political Economy’ itself (infra §VII). Thus it is precisely here – contrary to Althusser’s ‘reading’ – that we find the kernel of the new ‘science of history’, and therefore also the ‘break’ [la coupure épistémologique] with previous thinking. The first period of Althusser’s work, concluding with Lire le Capital, led to interesting developments in the historical-social sciences, of course not without some dissension.6 The following phase, however, in which he was ‘self-critical’ of his own ‘théoricisme’, seemed to many to be in contrast with what had gone before – in any case, this phase has had less theoretical and political impact, perhaps due to the altered historical situation, but perhaps also, in my view, because it is simply less stimulating. But I do not want to dwell on that question here.7

The object of Political Economy and Marxian critique The structure of the object of Political Economy, according to Althusser, ‘first of all, . . . implies the existence of “economic” facts and phenomena’, that make up a ‘homogeneous field’ and are a given – that is, observable and quantifiable. Like these facts, people, who generically ‘produce, distribute, receive and consume’ are a given as well.8 They are given along with their needs, which in fact give rise to the economy. The result is what Althusser calls ‘naïve anthropology’: The peculiar theoretical structure of Political Economy depends on immediately and directly relating together a homogeneous space of given phenomena and an ideological anthropology which bases the economic character of the phenomena and its space on man as the subject of needs (the givenness of homo œconomicus). . . . As all the subjects are equally subjects of needs . . . their universality is then reflected in the universality of the laws of the effects of their needs.9 This is the origin of the pretension of Political Economy to ‘deal with economic phenomena in the absolute, in all forms of society, past, present and future’. Althusser perceives in this claim, beyond a ‘wish to make the bourgeois mode of production everlasting’, a more remote cause which is ‘not political but theoretical’: ‘the silent anthropology that ratifies the structure of the object of Political Economy’.10 Moving on to Marx’s critique, Althusser first of all observes, concerning consumption, that needs are defined by Marx as historical; in our society their economic function depends on the

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ability to pay ‘and on the nature of the products available, which are, at a given moment, the result of the technical capacities of production’.11 Consumption is only apparently an immediate relation between use-value and needs; in reality, ‘it refers us to the technical capacities of production (the level of the forces of production) on the one hand, and on the other to the social relations of production, which fix the distribution of income’.12 According to Althusser, ‘needs are subject to a double structural, i.e., no longer anthropological, determination’: the division of the products between Departments I and II (means of production and consumer goods), and ‘the structure of the relation between the productive forces and the relations of production’. Behind the distribution of use-values, what is crucial for Marx is the distribution of people into classes, which is related to their ‘function in the process of production’. Consumption and distribution thus lead back, continues Althusser, ‘to the site of the true determination of the economic: production’. The ‘field of economic phenomena’ is thus transformed: the ‘homogeneous “planar space” has been replaced by a new pattern in which economic “phenomena” are thought of as under the domination of the “relations of production”’ which define them.13 It might appear that the Physiocrats and Ricardo were moving in this direction; Ricardo speaks of product distribution in relation to income, broken down into categories. But the problem, according to Marx, is precisely that economists like Ricardo have ‘regarded distribution as the exclusive subject of economics’.14 Marx, on the other hand, writes Althusser,15 not only affirms and demonstrates the primacy of production, but transforms ‘the concept of production by assigning to it a radically different object’: he produces the concept of surplus-value which entails the idea of relations of production, and in the process revolutionises the object of classical economics. Thus we approach the nub of the question. According to Althusser, the two inseparable elements that, for Marx, always characterise production are the labour process and the social relations of production. The two essential aspects of the labour process are the material nature of its conditions and the dominant role of the means of production, which ‘determine the mode of production, the basic category of Marxist analysis (in economics and history); at the same time, they establish the level of productivity of productive labour’.16 Althusser considers the concept of mode of production to be fundamental: with its peculiar aspects and dynamics, which are to be defined, it substantially coincides with Marx’s ‘theoretical object’. Considered from the point of view of labour process, the concept of mode of production ‘makes possible not only the “periodization” of history, but above all the construction of the concept of history’, basing it ‘in the qualitative differences between different means of labour, i.e., in their productivities’. But this is not all. Concerning the ‘differential degree of material attack on nature’, and the ‘differential mode of unity existing between “man and nature”’,17 there is another ‘determining reality’: the relations of production – that is, the ‘social conditions of the production process’. The relations of production must in any case be considered in relation to the means of production; they unquestionably consist of the relations, sometimes specific, between the agents of production, but always ‘as a function of the relations between these agents on the one hand and the material means of production on the other’. In this sense, Althusser states, they ‘are on no account reducible to mere relations between men, to relations which only involve men’.18 We are now in a better position to understand what is meant by mode of production; it has a double aspect that stems from the interconnection between the material and technical conditions of the labour process and its attendant social conditions. Not only that, but we have

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a criterion for the theory of history; as Marx says, what ‘distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another’ is the manner in which the union between workers and means of production is accomplished.19

Structural causality The epistemology representing the basic core of Althusser’s thought – the standard it seeks – is not, as such, the subject of this contribution. On the other hand it is impossible to avoid mentioning it; as Althusser himself would say, the new ‘object’, to which the critique of Political Economy gives rise, entails a new epistemology. In the first place, it should be emphasised that ‘the economic cannot have the qualities of a given (of the immediately visible and observable, etc.)’: the ‘concept of the economic must be constructed for each mode of production’.20 Thus not only must the economic be conceptually defined, but this can only happen through the determination of the ‘(global) structure of the mode of production, insofar as it determines the (regional) structure which constitutes and determines as economic objects the phenomena of this defined region’.21 We do not have, that is, an ‘empiricist average’ of ‘data’ and ‘measurable’ facts, or a model (of ‘general equilibrium’, for example), to which single phenomena can be compared and the resulting ‘gap’ measured. The criticism of ‘ideological anthropology’ implies moreover that neither is there an essence (human, natural or divine) of economics that might explain empirical phenomena. The concept that we need to reach is in short that ‘of the specific difference of the mode of production concerned’,22 of capitalism itself. This new definition of the object of economic theory involves a ‘new form of causality’, definable as ‘the determination by a structure’.23 In this regard I will mention only a few issues. 1 For Althusser, the concept of structural causality clearly and completely marks the

defeat of ideological anthropology. The structure, to be determined for each mode of production, takes the place of a generally definable ‘economic’ as such. At the same time, the structure as ‘theoretical object’ excludes the possibility of analysing economic activity in inter-subjective terms – that is, starting from rational and interactive human individuals. In Althusser’s terms, the relations of production ‘are irreducible to any anthropological inter-subjectivity’.24 2 The determinant is not visible as such, but only in its effects. Surplus-value, for

example, which, as an essential concept of the social structure, determines ‘the entire economic reality, down to the visible detail of the empirical phenomena’,25 is constructed as a concept beginning with the forms and phenomena in which it manifests itself. This does not mean that because the determining factor cannot be seen, importance is taken away from phenomenal reality. On the contrary, phenomena acquire importance in their own right as the effects of the structure, its form of existence, its way of (re)presenting itself, of appearing on the scene – its Darstellung. 3 The distinction between the object of knowledge and the real object, which Marx

speaks of and Althusser strongly reiterates, means that the structure is a theoretical

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product, a concept – ‘the interiority [of the phenomenon] is nothing but the “concept”’ – and that it indeed ‘exists’ in its effects, but only to the extent that these are ‘the specification of the concept’.26 Our knowledge does not move from the abstract to the real-concrete; there is no escape from the concept. ‘We simply pass from the concept of the structure and of its most general effects, to the concepts of the structure’s particular effects’.27 This is evident in the way Marx constructs Capital, in line with the considerations on the ‘method of political economy’ set out in the Introduction of 1857. ‘The real and the concrete’ – in other words, the ‘precondition’ of the learning process, Marx writes – appears at first as a ‘chaotic conception’, a generic ‘abstraction’, an ‘imagined concrete’. But after having moved toward ‘ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations’, it is possible to return to the concrete, but this time not as ‘the chaotic idea of a whole’, but rather as ‘a rich totality with many determinations and relations’.28 The point of arrival is the ‘concret de pensée’, writes Althusser, citing Marx in confirmation of his own radical anti-empiricism. In Capital, Marx moves from the abstract analysis of value to that of money and capital; it is having thus defined the general characteristics of the mode of production that allows him to analyse concretely – that is, more closely – the concrete-historical developments of production and of society as a whole. Abstracting, for example, from the work process – that is, from the use-value of means of production, labour and products – allows the formulation of the concepts necessary (from value to surplusvalue, and so on) to then determine the transformations of use-value, to make them meaningful – beginning with those of the labour process. 4 If the economic pertains to the structure, to the mode of production, and therefore

to the system of relations that make up the social system as a whole, and if the concept of the economic is constructed for every mode of production, this means, among other things, that ‘the theory of economics is a subordinate region of the theory of history’.29 The object of the theory is the specific modes of production and the particular complexity that characterises them. The economy is thus a ‘regional structure’, whose organisation is determined, and determining, at the ‘global’ level of organisation.

Homo œconomicus Althusser’s critique captures a basic and common feature of economic science. In the Introduction of 1857, Marx speaks about the ‘wisdom of . . . modern economists’, who submerge ‘the essential dissimilarity [die vesentliche Verschiedenheit]’, the distinctive characteristics of different modes of production, in the fact that ‘the subject, mankind, and the object, nature, are the same’.30 Closer to our own time, in neoclassical theories, the issue remains the same. A landmark was the ‘formalism’ of Lionel Robbins,31 who makes no bones about referring to the ‘Crusoe economy’ – ‘Robinsonades’, Marx would have said. The virtue of Robbins is to make clear that economic science tends simply to get rid of the problem of the social and historical organisation of the economy. This result is achieved by defining the economy in general as the economising behaviour of individuals in consumption and

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production. In this regard, Althusser’s critique – his reading of Marx – hits the mark, contrasting the need to determine the quality of social organisation – the historically specific structure of modes of production – with ‘ideological anthropology’, which avoids that issue. It may be added that the criticism is not only directed at the formalism codified by Robbins or the mathematical games of mainstream economists, but also at spurious economic institutionalism. An indicative example is the economic history of Douglass North,32 for whom the object is not the different social forms of economic organisation as such, but rather the different institutional contexts of economic activity and rationality in general. These are assumed to be constants of human nature when in reality they have been uncritically taken from a particular society, the market-capitalist one. Althusser thus poses the essential problem. The terms of his critique, however, require further examination, especially including a detailed look at the history of economic theories with a view of explaining economic ideology on the basis of historical reality. It is true, as Althusser maintains, that ‘ideological anthropology’ has both as basis and output the ideology of homo œconomicus – but this is precisely why it is important to understand how and why the ideology of homo œconomicus is a cultural trait historically produced by the capitalist system. In fact, the operation of this system implies, as Max Weber says, that hunger and profit become the motivations for economic activity,33 that scarcity therefore becomes systematic and systemic – that is, inherent in the social organisation itself, and that along with this the ‘economising’ mentality becomes normal. The behaviour of individuals is no longer regulated by a traditional system of rights and obligations within which their economic activity and subsistence are preordained. Everyone now has to economise – to maximise profits or provide for their own needs, which are no longer consistently defined and satisfied within a given socio-cultural order. In addition, the problem of the origin (needs) and the purpose of the economy in general is not in itself ‘ideological anthropology’. Marx writes, for example, that ‘all production is appropriation of nature by an individual within and through a specific form of society’.34 And we have seen how Althusser himself defines the general concept of mode of production. It is precisely the new ‘object’ that he delineates, basing it on the mode of production concept and thus on the determination of modes of production in their particularity, that implies a definition of the economy that is truly general and that serves as a definition of the set whose elements are the diverse modes of production. The mechanism of ideology instead involves squashing together two different levels of abstraction: the economy in general and some specific institutional connotations of a given mode of production. As a consequence, on one hand, the ‘essential dissimilarity’ of the latter is done away with. Capitalism is not understood as a particular social organisation, as a complex historical whole, and thus basic traits of its dynamics are inevitably overlooked. On the other hand, its specific features, acquiring a reductive-generic meaning, can be attributed to the economy in general and projected onto other modes of production. Such ideological construction then branches into various manifestations; in this sense Althusser himself complains of the current use of ‘concepts as ambiguous as economic “rationality”, “optimum”, “full employment” or welfare economics, “humane” economics, etc.’35 Besides, the very theoretical revolution wrought by Marx and highlighted by Althusser poses an additional problem. The discovery of society as an organisation that is always specific and therefore historical – as a mode of production – throws us into a ‘disenchanted’ world. It

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prevents us from continuing to ‘interpret’ – that is, to attribute to immutable, eternal principles a world that we now know to be produced and ‘transformed’ by ourselves.36 The concept of mode of production implies the mode in which the economic system is socially organised and controlled. This question is posed in a new way in modern society. Max Weber touched on something of the kind when he referred to the desperate need to give meaning to the world after its ‘disenchantment’ [Entzauberung]. And it is not just giving new meaning, but giving it in a new way, not falling back on more or less mythological ‘interpretations’. In the modern situation, Weber writes, it becomes evident that every problem has a ‘politico-social character’: the solution is never already given nor merely technical, and therefore ‘we can and must argue over the regulatory criteria of value themselves’.37 Even from this very general point of view economic ideology appears inadequate or even maladaptive with respect to the survival of the human species. This ideology considers the economy to be a closed system with respect to relevant information from its environment, even from its socio-political environment, since it is assumed that in general it functions according to economic rules per se. There is then very little left to argue about, as we are daily invited to believe by the proponents of the logic of the ‘market’, correct by definition. All this points to the need to maximise our scrutiny of historical features specific to our society, not shrinking away from issues that Althusser tends to see as in themselves smacking of ‘humanism’, anthropological ideology or idealistic historicism. One question is the peculiar ‘modern’ social relation between individuals and social production determined by the correlated development of capitalism and the market. ‘In this society of free competition,’ writes Marx, ‘the individual seems detached from natural ties,’ seeing himself as ‘autonomous’ and society as the ‘means for his private ends, as an external necessity’.38 Another question is the relation not only between ideology and reality, but also between reality and theory – between the historical situation and the conceptual processing that produces, as Althusser says, the new ‘theoretical object’. Exemplary in this regard is Marx’s reflection on the general-abstract concept of labour. The theoretical definition of the possibility, the necessity, of this concept in a society in which work has really become ‘a means to create wealth in general39 enlarges our knowledge without infringing the distinction between the ‘real-concrete’ and the ‘thought-concrete’. These questions have to do with the objective features of the capitalist mode of production, and determining them is in effect the true antidote against ‘ideological anthropology’. Althusser, however, in his reading of Marx, neglects or distorts the first chapter of Capital, which is indispensable concerning the first question.40 As for the second, the relationship between theory and history, he is at pains to distance himself from Marx in the fifth section of the essay ‘The Object of Capital’, but instead of raising considerations as analytical and refutable as those produced by Marx, chiefly in the Einleitung of 1857, he limits himself to accusing Marx of idealistic deviation in a manner as insistent as it is vacuous.41

Economic theories As I mentioned at the outset, the merit of Althusser’s critique is to get to the essentials, so that he can address Political Economy as a whole. This does not mean, however, that it is acceptable to avoid distinguishing periods and tendencies in the history of economic theory, including their relationship to different phases of capitalist development. It is not only his

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adherence to the most abstract levels of theory and epistemology, but also the absoluteness of the ‘break’ that Althusser sees, which distance him from the historical reconstruction of economic science as an ‘ideological apparatus’. Furthermore, can we continue to ignore large areas of Marxism – for example, diverse socialist and communist tendencies that flourished in the revolutionary period of the first decades of the twentieth century, only to be condemned to civil death and more by the prevailing forces of the Third International and the reaction of the bourgeoisie? Finally, why neglect the existing traces of ‘critique’ in some tendencies of economic thought which, though not overtly Marxist, are not conformist either? On this last point, in fact, it is clear that the classical ‘institutionalist’ tendency, whose fundamental reference point is Thorstein Veblen, goes even beyond Althusser’s allusion to the influence on consumption of income distribution, itself determined by the relations of production. For these authors, but also for Max Weber or even for Friedrich Wieser,42 one of the founders of the Austrian School of economics, the system of prices and resource allocation depends not only on the unequal distribution of buying power, but on the profit motive in general, which orients the choices of producers. According to Weber, the entire system of use-values – of the products as much as of the means of production and the labour force – is conditioned by the goal of ‘profitability’: needs are oriented and stimulated by businesses. All that is left of the utopia of competition as a method of optimising resource allocation is the ‘struggle of man against man on the market’.43 Since Weber’s time, past and present experience has more than borne out his intuition that the purpose of ‘profitability’ does imply rational calculation, but the power wielded by the entrepreneur – not only inside the firm, but also in the marketplace – stands as the principal factor: a paradox for normal economists. The general tendency of capitalism to address production decisions on the basis of what Weber calls ‘the calculation of capital’ in a ‘market situation’ is theorised by Veblen as a growing divergence between ‘serviceability for society at large’ (utility; capacity to satisfy social needs) and ‘vendibility’. This tendency, according to Veblen, becomes critical with the transformation of capitalism – something he considers inevitable and linked to the development of productive forces – in the direction of the dominance of large industrial-financial business interests. Here we find what is undoubtedly a reference to the structural characteristics of capitalism along with an ability to analyse and predict historical developments, particularly those that lead from individual enterprise to diverse forms of capital concentration.44 To be sure, Veblen belongs to the meagre ranks of the non-conformists. But even at the origins of neoclassical economics, in Wieser or even in Carl Menger, there is an attempt, denied and made unthinkable by subsequent developments in the Austrian School, to distinguish the theory of economy in general from the analysis of the objective, structural characteristics of capitalist society. The existence of such an attempt – like many others, rare, partial and ambiguous though they may be – is a symptom worthy of note in the pursuit of a critical reconstruction of the history of economic thought. It is true, as Althusser says, that every theoretical system is different from every other, and that the meaning of each element depends on the system it belongs to. But this does not exempt us from the task of reconstructing the history of economic science without limiting ourselves to contrasting ‘anthropological ideology’ with Marx’s great ‘epistemological break’, finally discovered by Althusser. The point is rather to understand the history of economic thought, with its twists and alternatives, its irreversibility and its regressions; a story that obviously is meaningful in its relationship with the history of capitalist society as a whole. But do we exit at this point from the Althusserian problematic;

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do we call it into question? Is it falling into historicism, for example, to connect the new ‘battle over method’ between institutionalists and neoclassicists with the historical crisis of Victorian liberal capitalism and the turning point marked in the first decades of the twentieth century by the transformations in work processes, the structure of the market, and capitalist governance, not to mention the tremendous political clout won by the working class? An Althusserian school of economic historians and critics could and should come to the fore, perhaps sacrificing certain of the master’s dogmatic attitudes. There is a great need for them today, in a situation quite different from that of the 1960s, when the power acquired by the world labour movement threatened the established order both in the East and the West. It was then that the first phase of Althusser’s thought came to maturity. Beginning in the following decade, the reaction of the dominant class led, in the field of ideology, to the spread of the ‘pensée unique’45 – that is, conformity with the neoliberal, imperial ‘consensus’. Even hints at general questions concerning capitalism as such – as a whole and as a specific historical mode of production – tended to disappear from social and economic thinking. Institutionalism of the ‘classic’ or radical sort – to return to the same example – did not turn away from such questions, but doubt had by then been cast on its theoretical consistency, and the very existence of a theoretical approach of its own tended to be denied.46 Is it not Althusser who says that ‘“economic science” is the arena and the prize of history’s great political battles’?47 Let us take, for example, his methodological considerations, cited above (§III, point 3), concerning the fact that ‘within the abstraction of knowledge’ the point is to determine the structure of the mode of production and then move ‘from the concept of the structure and of its most general effects, to the concepts of the structure’s particular effects’.48 These considerations allow us to understand the method of neoclassical economics as well as to criticise it. In effect, it has an abstract model in the place of the missing structure, and this model is supposed to reflect the ‘pure’ laws of economics in the same way that mechanics represents the laws of the motion of bodies. Such a model, however, is no more than the ‘anthropological’ representation, as Althusser has it, that emanates directly from reality in the absence of the concept of the structure. Neoclassical economics tries then to explain the lack of correspondence between the model and empirical economic facts, behaviour and relations in terms of imperfection of the market, bounded rationality, the inadequacy and asymmetry of information, opportunism and so on. In other words – Althusser observes – the lack of correspondence is supposedly explained by what is deemed to be the ‘subjective’, ‘impure’ and ‘inessential’ with respect to the hypothetical ‘essence’.49 Even so-called neo-institutionalist economics limits itself to worrying about such ‘deviations’, implicitly accepting the model and its ‘laws’. In fact, this tendency of contemporary socio-economic thought does not abandon methodological individualism, but rather continues to adopt the logic of business, possibly extending it to ‘public choice’, and in the end proposing market remedies for ‘market failures’.

Historical materialism ‘By combining or interrelating these different elements – labour power, direct labourers, masters who are not direct labourers, object of production, instruments of production, etc.’, we come to define, Althusser writes, the different modes of production that have existed and can

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exist in human history. We are therefore talking about ‘modes of combination’, about ‘specific “Verbindungen”’. This is precisely why ‘Marxism is not a historicism: since the Marxist concept of history depends on the principle of the variation of the forms of this “combination”’. 50 Evidently, what is meaningful and distinguishes the different combinations is their social form. We have seen (above, §III) how Althusser poses and resolves the question of the concept of the economic: it must be constructed for every mode of production and it depends on the (historical, specific) social organisation of economic activity. In this way, Althusserian structuralism constitutes a radical critique not only of current economic theory, but also of evolutionary and economicist historical materialism. It is necessary to verify, however, whether the generalisation of this structuralism carries the risk of remaining generic and of little meaning when the goal is to understand the specific organisation of given societies. There also exists the danger that in the definition itself of some of the elements of the ‘combination’ specific connotations of capitalist society should creep in and be unduly generalised: as indicated, for example, by the use of the term ‘labour power’ in Althusser’s definition cited at the beginning of this section. Undoubtedly, moreover, the relations between the agents of production are then the result of the typical relations they maintain with the means of production (object, instruments) and of their distribution into groups defined and localized functionally in their relations with the means of production by the structure of production.51 It is essential, however, to understand the meaning of the expression ‘are then the result of’ and of Althusser’s insistence with respect to the means and structure of production: even while emphasising that the key is the organisation, the complex articulation of the social system as a whole and in its specificity, he then insists more on the ‘determination in the last instance of the non-economic structures by the economy’ than on the inevitably social, cultural and historical nature of the organisation of the system. Given the specificity in every system and mode of production of both the meaning of the elements of the ‘combination’ and their reciprocal relationship, a general combining cannot be anything but trivial and ideological, and the same goes for the ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’. One possible way out is indicated by the reformulation of historical materialism proposed by Maurice Godelier, who takes into account both Althusser’s criticism and the debate that developed in the field of economic anthropology following the publication of the book Trade and Market in the Early Empires.52 For Godelier, Marx is still an essential point of reference – Capital above all, and the section of the Grundrisse on ‘Forms which precede capitalist production’; but he was also influenced by Karl Polanyi. To sum up very briefly: only in capitalist society, according to Godelier, is social organisation essentially and typically economic. The economic function was instead organised through relations of kinship or politics or religion in societies in which these institutions or structures were dominant, though they could not in any case be dominant if they didn’t also perform the economic function, since, ‘as every child knows’ (as Marx puts it in a letter to Kuglemann in 1868), this function is primary and inescapable.53 Godelier helps us understand how the new object and the new problematic that Althusser perceives in Marx are in contrast with Political Economy as much as with evolutionary historical materialism. Here is Althusser’s strength, his ‘epistemological break’, and his interest for us. But then he seems to go back to imposing a general model onto history, backing away from

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the concept of social form, which he himself helps us to see as Marx’s momentous discovery – the ever controversial, eternal scandal. Marx has a conception of the difference between various organisations of production and above all of the peculiarity of capitalist society which goes beyond Althusser’s ‘combinations’. ‘The weakness of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process’, is denounced by Marx, who proposes that historical organisations of social life should be considered in their specificity and as wholes (‘the actual, given relations of life’ in each particular historical moment [‘jedesmaligen’]).54 Certainly – Marx says in the same note – the ‘material basis’, technology itself, constitutes a fundamental constraint and a necessary starting point for analysis, but what matters is to be able to define the meaning of every social organisation, in its specific articulation (as Althusser recommends), ‘misty creations of religion’ included. Looking more closely at the question, it is true, as Althusser writes, that what we have are ‘Verbindungen which constitute the modes of liaison between the agents of production and the means of production, at the level of the relations of property, possession, disposition, etc.’: it is not possible, however, to reduce the problem to the relations between ‘wage-workers and owners’, and to the distinction between ‘class societies’ and ‘classless societies’ in which political organisation would be ‘superfluous’.55 In reality there is political organisation in classless societies. According to Pierre Clastres – critical, at the time, of the aspects of traditional Marxism he saw in ethnographic studies of Althusserian inspiration – such societies, far from being stateless, are politically organised ‘against the state’ for the purpose of keeping the society unstratified.56 Sometimes, in societies in which divisions exist, the social hierarchy remains independent of both the economic powers and the dynamics of local political power.57 Both Weber58 and the evolutionist anthropologist Leslie White suggest reserving the concept of ‘class’ exclusively for capitalist societies, where social division is directly determined by the respective positions of the subjects in productive activities. The meaning of Althusser’s statement that the relations of production also establish ‘the degree of effectivity delegated to a certain level of the social totality’59 is not entirely clear. So as not to risk projecting onto very different societies what may be inferred from observing our own, it is perhaps advisable to concentrate on what he says immediately following: if the structure of the relations of production defines the economic as such, a definition of the concept of the relations of production in a determinate mode of production is necessarily reached via the definition of the concept of the totality of the distinct levels of society and their peculiar type of articulation (i.e. effectivity).60 This is precisely why we need to go a bit further than Althusser and doubt that it is possible to talk about ‘superstructure’ and ‘distinct levels’ with respect to societies different from our own, instead of functions and features that are distinguishable only for the purposes of the investigation and exposition. Althusser himself also writes that in earlier societies, ‘the economic is not directly and clearly visible’, and nor is ‘the degree of effectivity of the different levels of the social structure’.61 The economic must be tracked down; sought after in kinship relations, politics and religion. In effect we cannot know what is economic in the facts and practices of primitive societies without first having constructed the concept of the differentiation of the structure of the social whole into these different practices or levels, without having discovered their peculiar

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meaning in the structure of the whole, without having identified in the disconcerting diversity of these practices the region of economic practice, its configuration and its modalities.62 In short: ‘To construct the concept of the economic is to define it rigorously as a level, instance or region of the structure of a mode of production’, defining ‘its peculiar site, its extension, and its limits within that structure.63 Beyond the spatial metaphor of the economy as a regional structure etc., the problem is therefore the nature of the complexity: it is through this concept that economic phenomena must be defined. Althusser teaches us that the point is to reconstruct the structures and relations conceptually, and the ethnologists teach us that the different aspects of social life may not be differentiated in reality and may therefore be distinguishable only theoretically. Gregory Bateson sees ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ in the ethnologists’ claim to find distinctions in the reality of the societies they study between economy, politics, religion etc., which only exist in their own theoretical reconstruction.64 In this regard, two issues need to be identified. Althusser captures the first of these perfectly: anthropologists should not approach ‘the “facts”, the “givens” of (descriptive) ethnography, without taking the theoretical precaution of constructing the concept of their object’.65 As a consequence of this ‘omission’, they find themselves projecting on to reality the categories which define the economic for them in practice, i.e., the categories of the economics of contemporary society, which to make matters worse, are often themselves empiricist . . . [In effect,] the economic is never clearly visible, does not coincide with the ‘given’ in [primitive societies] any more than in any other reality (political, ideological, etc.).66 This is true in general, even with respect to the capitalist mode of production; indeed, Marx considers fetishism inherent in it, precisely because of the way it is organised. Althusser in fact observes: Despite the massive ‘obviousness’ of the economic ‘given’ in the capitalist mode of production, and precisely because of the ‘massive’ character of this fetishised ‘obviousness’, the only way to the essence of the economic is to construct its concept, i.e. to reveal the site occupied in the structure of the whole by the region of the economic, therefore to reveal the articulation of this region with other regions (legal-political and ideological superstructure), and the degree of presence (or effectivity) of the other regions in the economic region itself.67 So Althusser does get the point, even though he persists with the spatial metaphor and a distinction in general between structure and superstructure, which incongruously refers back to the old materialism. In this way he risks slipping into the ‘omission’ that he takes the anthropologists to task for. So we come to the second question, which Althusser does not deal with. It is always true, as he maintains, that the concept of the economic and of the ‘place’ it occupies ‘in the structure of the whole’ must be constructed. But this method leads to the identification of a

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characteristic that distinguishes capitalist society from all others – the real differentiation of diverse aspects or instances in society. Differentiation, analysed by Weber as ‘rationalisation’, had its primary impact on the economy, and this was crucial for the overall evolution of the social system and particularly of the type of ‘combination’ or ‘articulation’ of elements and functions that characterise it. In Godelier’s terms, the economic structure under capitalism is not only ‘determining in the last instance’, but dominant as well; it contains in itself its own rules and constitutes the constraint that social articulation as a dynamic whole is subjected to. The economy has become autonomous – here, and only here, do we find the concepts that allow us to define the most general and permanent features of this mode of production, beginning with the concept of surplus value. The question raised by Polanyi of the ‘place of the economy’ in society also influenced Godelier and his reinterpretation of historical materialism. Not only, as Althusser says, must ‘the concept of the economic’ be constructed; not only, as Godelier says, can different structures be dominant in different societies and serve the function of organising economic activity. But the fact of the economic structure’s becoming dominant tends to make it autonomous, a law and an end in itself – an economy, as Polanyi says, no longer ‘embedded’ in society. This has a series of consequences that concern the specificity of capitalist society and its radical discontinuity – ‘a violent break’68 – with pre-modern societies. Althusser, as evident in the passage cited above, notes the problem of the ‘site occupied in the structure of the whole by the region of the economic’, but he tends not to see the additional problems this implies. First of all, the ‘levels’ and ‘regions’ of the ‘social whole’ are theoretically distinguishable, but how and in what measure they are distinguished in reality is another theoretical problem which in the end leads us back to the question of the specificity of capitalism. A fundamental theme of Polanyi’s reflection is that, in the capitalist mode of production, unlike those that preceded it, the economy is ‘dis-embedded’, autonomous and self-reflexively oriented to valorisation. Thus the economy inevitably becomes the dominant social structure. Society as a whole tends to be, so to speak, ‘economically’ organised. In their turn, the other social ‘instances’, rationalised and differentiated as well, undergo relatively autonomous developments, which are nevertheless constrained (generally not determined) by the economic structure. For this reason, the structural articulation is in our society always to be considered and reconsidered in the various conjunctures, as Althusser advises: ‘instances’ can evolve at different speeds and the reciprocal relation of determination can vary (within the limits allowed by the economic structure, which constitutes the basic constraint and dynamic). Clearly, then, the Althusserian concepts of ‘structural causality’ and ‘overdetermination’ take on a particular relevance in the capitalist mode of production. Previous societies were characterised by a much closer and more stable correspondence between various instances, structures and institutions. In this sense we can speak properly of ‘totality’ (Marcel Mauss) or of a ‘symbolic whole’ in which every element is integrated and meaningful.69 It is not possible here to go beyond this brief reference except to mention Marx, who poses problems such as the social subject becoming an individual, the breaking of traditional bonds and the continual crossing of limits inherent in the dynamic of capitalist production. But even Claude Lévi-Strauss distinguishes between our ‘hot’ society, bound to change, and the ‘cold’ societies of the past. It seems somewhat paradoxical that Althusser should fail to accept this distinction, since he criticises Lévi-Strauss’s theory as a ‘structuralist combinatory’ unable to account for the specificity and complexity of modes of production.70

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As Althusser explains, historicism means confusing reality with theory and not knowing how to escape from seeing all history from the perspective of one’s own historical situation. To avoid this requires defining the specific historical shape of our society as thoroughly as possible, so as then to be able to define that of other societies. It should not be overlooked that in capitalist society the economy is organised economically, so to speak, and therefore constrains the development of society as a whole, the different ‘instances’ of which may remain relatively free as regards their nature and rate of change. This is essential, in short, to an understanding of the specificity of capitalist society, even from the standpoint of the type of articulation among the various structures, instances and dynamics.

The first chapter Why does Althusser tend to leave aside or misunderstand the first chapter of Capital even though, as I will try to show, it can be interpreted in a way that does not conflict with his methodological requirements? If knowledge is conceived as a structure, how is it possible to amputate Marxian theoretical structure from its starting point, its basis, its ‘most abstract determinations’? More generally, what does this position of Althusser’s indicate about the limits of his critique? In the first chapter, the ‘critique of Political Economy’ is put in place and explicitly defined. Political Economy, Marx observes, has analysed, ‘albeit incompletely, value and its magnitude’ as forms whose content is labour, but ‘has never once asked the question why this content has assumed that particular form, that is to say, why labour is expressed in value’.71 In fact, ‘[t]he value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most general form of the bourgeois mode of production. It characterises this mode of production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character’.72 After setting out the law of value, Marx undertakes in the third section to analyse ‘the form of value or exchange value’. In this way he builds his understanding of social organisation and thus the new science of society and history. This is his objective – his ‘theoretical object’, if you will: not merely a demonstration of the law of value or a formulation of the concept of money as a general form of the manifestation of value.73 We need, Marx says, to arrive at ‘the abstraction value’.74 Certainly this abstraction is a concept; it is not, however, an extrinsically developed model intended as an approximate reproduction of reality that smoothes over deviations: it is instead the meaning of the phenomenal reality – its organisation, we might say – that the theory reconstructs. This is why Marx lingers in his analysis of value-form and especially the polarity between relative and equivalent forms. And – we might add – this reconstruction of the meaning of phenomenal reality coincides with the epistemology of Althusser, who then helps us to understand it in these terms. Exchange value and abstract labour are represented in the equivalent form, and in this form they can be displayed, beginning from the ‘simple’ form of exchange involving two commodities, right up to the ‘expanded relative form of value’ in which value is truly shown for the first time as ‘a congealed quantity of undifferentiated human labour’ – ‘labour which counts as the equal of every other sort of human labour’.75 The analysis of the value-form, of exchange as a ‘form of manifestation’ of value, is therefore necessary to an explanation of value: but what needs examining is this form itself, the relation that occurs in the exchange,

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since ‘the natural form of the commodity becomes the value-form . . . only within the valuerelation to it’.76 When exchange takes place, the ‘polarity’ between relative and equivalent forms exposes the ‘twofold character of labour’: concrete and abstract. Abstract labour is revealed as the origin of value; values of different commodities ‘become comparable in quantitative terms when they have been reduced to the same unit’.77 But this is not the end of the matter. Abstract labour is a measure of value only in a society in which the generalised exchange of the products of individual labour is the sole foundation of social organisation, or at least the only essential, general and permanent foundation. This shows quite clearly that the object of knowledge is not only the value of the commodity – the explanation of its exchangeability and value on the basis of the abstract labour it incorporates – but also the historical possibility of value – the social organisation in which it is meaningful. The same theoretical and conceptual work that leads to the explanation of the comparability of commodities and the possibility of measuring their value reveals the structure as the meaning of the phenomena: the world of commodities is thus deciphered as social organisation. The value-form of commodities appears as the expression of a social form (structure, organisation) (‘Gessellschaftsform’, Marx says), and the exchange value and abstract labour serve as concepts essential to the definition of a given system of social relations, ‘a state of society’, a mode of production. In his Letter to Kugelmann of 11 July 1868, Marx writes: ‘the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products’.78 Marx explicitly presents this result of his work as the theoretical heart of the critique of Political Economy. The commodity that plays the role of equivalent ‘figures as the embodiment of value’ relative to other commodities; even the concrete labour contained in it, then, counts as labour considered abstractly – equal in this form to any other labour, and thus as social labour.79 With this explanation of the exchangeability of commodities, we realise that it is in this way that the ‘social nexus’ of private labour and its social organisation comes about: through exchange, as the exchange of commodities. This is Marx’s discovery – the science he inaugurated – of the historically determined social organisation: of the mode of production. The road that leads there is the analysis of ‘valueform’, the first step in the analysis of a historically given social organisation. The next step leads to the theory of capital, by way of the theory of money. Only at this point is the capitalist mode of production fully defined – the first level, the first chapter, being in any case indispensable. This is where we find the break with ‘bourgeois economics’, which, as Marx states, never even attempted an analysis of value-form – exchange value – from the ‘simplest’ expression of the value relation between two commodities to the general form and the ‘money-form’.80 This is thus not a mere expedient meant to demonstrate the theory of value; it is rather the construction of the true ‘theoretical object’ of Marx, social organisation. Let us note once again that the theory of Althusser is not in conflict with this understanding of the theory of value – that on the contrary it makes it plausible. At the beginning of the third and fundamental section of the first chapter, Marx in effect writes that ‘[w]e must now return to this form of appearance of value’ – that is, to an analysis of exchange-value. Commodities, in fact, ‘possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expression of an identical social substance’. From the fact that they possess a

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‘purely social’ objective character ‘it follows self-evidently that [this character] can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodity’.81 And this must be analysed. The product of private labour hence only has social form insofar as it has value-form and hence the form of exchangeability with other products of labour. . . . But that is only possible in a society in which the commodity-form is the general form of the product of labour and thus also the relation of people to one another as possessors of commodities is the ruling social relation. . . . It is a definite social relation of producers in which they equate (gleichsetzen) their different types of labour. It is no less a definite social relation of producers in which they measure the magnitude of their labours by the duration of expenditure of human labour-power.82 Commodities are thus ‘social things’. A single commodity becomes a ‘citizen’ of the ‘world of commodities’, standing in a ‘social relation’ with it.83 The ‘value-relation to another thing can only be the form of appearance of a social relation’,84 of a historically specific way of dividing and coordinating social labour, of classifying as social the labour of individuals. In the ‘general value-form’, from which the next step is to the money form, all commodities present their values in the same commodity. As Marx comments: ‘[i]t thus becomes evident that because the objectivity of commodities as values is the purely ‘social existence’ of these things, it can only be expressed through the whole range of their social relations; consequently the form of their value must possess social validity’.85 The concrete labour that produces the commodity that serves as the general equivalent ‘acquires as a result a general social form, the form of equality with all other kinds of labour.86 The answer to the riddle has emerged from the analysis of the way value presents itself in reality – of how reality actually functions. Marx reiterates what he has discovered: The general value form, in which all the products of labour are presented as mere congealed quantities of undifferentiated human labour, shows by its very structure that it is the social expression of the world of commodities. In this way it is made plain that within this world the general human character of labour forms its specific social character.87 Marx would not have persisted for decades with his analysis of the value-form, leaving behind different versions of it, if this hadn’t been for him the first, essential step of a theory of the capitalist mode of production, in its differentia specifica. In earlier societies as well, different occupations obviously had the general quality of being human labour, manifestations of the human capacity to work. It was not this abstract quality, however, that made them social and determined their social value, but rather the fact of being variously determined, in their concreteness, within different cultures. Instead in capitalist society, as the ‘equivalent form’ particularly makes clear, the social quality of a commodity – what makes it a part of social production through exchange – is precisely its general quality of being human labour, its exchange value. Its use value counts only in support of exchange value and therefore of the abstract labour embodied in it. This is the idea behind Marx’s assertion that ‘the expression of value’ is characterised by the ‘inversion [Verkehrung] by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete’.88

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The first term in this opposition concerns capitalist-market society; the second, as we have just seen, concerns earlier societies in which the social quality of labour – the way it was integrated socially – did not consist of the abstract quality of its being human labour. The ‘inversion’ characterising capitalist society with respect to previous societies is a fundamental concept in the comparative analysis of forms of economic and social organisation. If this significance is not taken into account, there is a tendency to give the ‘inversion’ the meaning of a contrast between a situation of ‘alienation’ and what would be considered ‘human’ or natural for man. Following in Althusser’s footsteps, Jacques Rancière adopts this meaning; thus he includes the ‘inversion’ in the youthful sins of Marx to be amended, be they ‘anthropological’ or Hegelian.89 The first level of analysis is obviously not enough. Having proved incomplete and posing further problems, it requires a transition to the next levels, but without the loss of the general concepts thus far produced. The fertility of the analysis in the first chapter of Capital, as indicated above, lies not only in the groundwork it sets out for the following analysis of capitalist relations of production, but also in the issues it raises and the wealth of distinctions it allows with respect to capitalism in general and the concrete reality of its development. In the first place, capitalist production and a market system are interdependent. Capital does not exist except as a multiplicity of capitals in what Weber calls a ‘market situation’. ‘Capital produces only surplus-value and reproduces itself only in its capacity as the producer of commodities’.90 Beginning with this statement, Marx shortly raises the possibility, typically spotted by the institutionalist economists mentioned above (§V), that producing exchange-value for the market and for profit is not what is most useful for society and for individuals. The commodity, he writes, is necessarily the form a product takes in capitalist society. The product becomes increasingly one-sided and massive in nature. This imposes upon it a social character, one which is closely bound up with existing social relations, while its immediate use-value for the gratification of the needs of its producer appears wholly adventitious, immaterial and inessential.91 Weber also speaks about limits ‘in principle’ due to the ‘formal rationality’ of ‘capital accounting’ in a ‘market situation: this ‘rationality’ tends to be ‘indifferent’ toward ‘all substantive postulates’92 – that is, toward the use-values that should in fact always be the purpose of production. With respect to the definition of capitalism in general, the first chapter of course tells us more than I have set out to summarise here. There is for example the problem mentioned above (at the end of §IV), of the modern relation between individuals and social production. Then there is the issue of capitalist society’s particular kind of complexity. As we have seen above (§VI), Althusser on one hand affirms that ‘a definition of the concept of the totality of the distinct levels of society and their peculiar type of articulation (i.e. effectivity)’93 is needed to reach the concept of a given mode of production. On the other hand, he neglects the specific characteristic of the structural articulation of the capitalist mode of production. The differentiation and the relative freedom – limited, that is – that characterise the dynamics and the interaction of the different ‘instances’ of the capitalist mode of production can be traced, certainly, to the concept of surplus value, but also to the fact that the economy has become autonomous and the social structure ‘economic’, and to the abstraction of the ‘social nexus’, whose detection the analysis of the ‘value-form’ has made possible.

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To conclude, what we might call Althusser’s disdain for the first chapter of Capital94 appears unjustified, in the first place because the chapter can be interpreted as the basis of the ‘critique of Political Economy’ in a way that actually fits with Althusser’s theoretical and epistemological intent: the historically specific social organisation of production becomes the new ‘object’ of the theory. A correspondence may be found even regarding the theory of fetishism, to which Marx dedicates the last paragraph of the first chapter. Althusser writes that capitalism ‘is the mode of production in which fetishism affects the economic region par excellence’: the ‘massive “obviousness” of the economic “given”’ in this mode of production tends to impede the ‘construction of the concept’ of the economic, which should take place through a definition of the place it occupies ‘in the structure of the whole’.95 Even though this is precisely what Marx’s concept of fetishism substantially consists of, we know how little Althusser nonetheless normally thinks of it, since fetishism seems to him to be a concentration of everything his theory is meant to oppose (humanism, anthropology, ideology, Hegelian idealism, the youthful Marx. . .).96 Moreover, as I have tried little by little to bring out, it is possible to extend the horizon of the visible, to use Althusser’s expression, beyond what his discoveries and idiosyncrasies would allow. It is possible, that is, to pose additional problems concerning capitalist society and its specificity, leading to the comparative historical analysis of modes of production, on the basis of Marxian thought and of course beginning with the first chapter. To the extent that this will lead us to concepts that broaden our knowledge of capitalism and, more generally, our ‘theory of history’, it is not in the least anthropological ideology or humanistic nonsense, but rather their antidote.

Notes 1 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 185. 2 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 158. 3 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 160. 4 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 183. 5 Althusser 1976a, p. 56. 6 In addition to the other authors of Lire le Capital (Balibar, Establet, Macherey and Rancière) – and limited to the literature in French – see for example Poulantzas 1968; Bettleheim 1970; and Terray 1969. Maurice Godelier is mentioned below, §VI. For Althusser’s influence on the École de la régulation, see Lipietz 1988. 7 About this, see for example Balibar 1991a; Callari and Ruccio (eds) 1996; Ichida 1997; Levine 2003; Ichida and Matheron 2005; Matheron 2008. 8 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 161. 9 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 162. 10 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 163–4. 11 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 166. 12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 166. 13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 168. 14 Marx 1976, p. 25.

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15 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 170. 16 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 173. 17 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 173–4. 18 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 174. 19 Marx 1956, pp. 36–7. 20 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 183. 21 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 182. 22 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 196. 23 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 184. 24 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180. 25 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 181. 26 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 190. 27 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 190. 28 Marx, 1976, p. 31. 29 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 183. 30 Marx, 1976, p. 11. 31 Robbins 1935. 32 See, for example, North 1990. 33 See Weber 1978a, p. 110. 34 Marx 1976, p. 14. 35 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 163. 36 See Marx, the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach. 37 Weber 1968, p. 153. 38 Marx 1976, p. 9. 39 Marx 1976, p. 36. 40 See below, §VII. 41 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 121–6. 42 See for example Wieser 1889. 43 Weber 1978a, pp. 91–2, 108. 44 See in particular Veblen 1904. 45 See Ramonet 1995. 46 See for example, Coase 1984, Yuvay 1998. 47 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 185. 48 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 190. 49 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 191. 50 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 176. 51 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 176–7. 52 Polanyi et al. (eds) 1957. 53 See, for example, Godelier 1978 and also 1965 (an article cited twice by Althusser in ‘The Object of Capital’ in Althusser and Balibar 1970). 54 Marx 1977, p. 494 note 4. 55 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 177.

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56 See Clastres 1974. 57 See Geertz 1980. 58 Weber 1978a Volume 2, Chapter 8, §6. 59 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 177. 60 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178. 61 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178. 62 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178. 63 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178. 64 Bateson 1958. 65 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 179. 66 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 179. 67 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 179. 68 Polanyi 1977, p. 10. 69 See Marc Guillaume 1975. 70 See Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2. 71 Marx 1977, p. 174. 72 Marx 1977, p. 174n. 34, modified translation. 73 A reductive interpretation of this type appears in the work of authors who on this point follow in the footsteps of Althusser; see for instance Milios 2007. Bidet 2004 and Balibar 2007b deal with the question by collocating it within a more complex set of problems. See Cesarale 2003 for a critique of the vast opus of Bidet – who helped (see also Bidet 1997) redirect attention back to the first three chapters of Capital and to the problem of their relationship to the subsequent development of Marx’s analysis, but tends to get lost in a maze, partly due to the influence of Althusser. 74 Marx 1978, p. 138. 75 Marx 1977, p. 155. 76 Marx 1978, p. 138. 77 Marx 1977, p. 141. 78 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 43, p. 67. 79 Marx 1977, p. 147. 80 Marx 1977, p. 139. 81 Marx 1977, pp. 138–9. 82 Marx 1978, p. 140 and p. 142. 83 Marx 1978, p. 145. 84 Marx 1978, p. 143. 85 Marx 1977, p. 159. 86 Marx 1977, p. 159. 87 Marx 1977, p. 160. 88 Marx 1978, p. 140. 89 Rancière 1976, pp. 360 et seqq. 90 ‘Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ in Marx 1977, p. 1059. 91 ‘Appendix: Results of the Immediate Process of Production’ in Marx 1977, p. 953. 92 Weber 1978a, p. 108.

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93 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 178. 94 Notoriously expressed, for example, in his ‘Avertissement’ (Althusser 1969b), on which, see the effective criticism of Mandel 1970. 95 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 179. 96 As I mentioned at the outset, the positions later expressed by Althusser on all this seem to me less interesting, to say the least. In my view they lose sight of the reasons for which the writings of his ‘first phase’ were significant and remain important, as I have tried to show. I will only mention an essay of 1978 (Althusser 1994–5 Volume 1), published posthumously and perhaps unfinished; its Chapter 6 is concerned with ‘Marx still caught up in idealism’. Marx, according to Althusser, wants at all costs to deduce money, capitalist exploitation, etc. from the unfortunate beginning of Capital – the theory of value. Luckily, according to Althusser, there are chapters, such as the one on ‘the working day’, that save themselves from the ‘order of exposition’ and its abstractions, from a surplus-value theory in the ‘style of an accountant’ and in general from incurable Hegelian obsessions. Althusser’s argumentation here is more intractable than ever towards the Popperian principle of falsifiability. Chapter 18 – ‘On Fetishism’ – of the same essay particularly concerns the first chapter of Capital. The usual spectre of alienation lurks and there are numerous misunderstandings; for example, the idea that Marx’s theory of fetishism rests on juridical ideology, that in it material reality is nothing but appearance, and so on. A good demonstration of the meaning and the theoretical relevance of the concept of fetishism is to be found in Bihr 2007. Lindner 2007 rightly misses the first phase of Althusser’s work and points to Sève 2004 Volume 1 for a more acceptable interpretation of Marx.

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15 The problem of reproduction: probing the lacunae of Althusser’s theoretical investigations of ideology and ideological state apparatuses1 Frieder Otto Wolf

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he following analysis focuses on the lacunae of the text ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.2 It seeks to decipher Louis Althusser’s theoretical advances in all their open-endedness and questionability, but with an eye to rendering apparent their strengths – strengths that persist even after the gradual fading away of the ‘new truths’ of the 1990s. What is at stake in this is an understanding of these lacunae as determined and further determinable problematics in the Althusserian sense: as philosophical hypotheses that have opened up new horizons of inquiry both for political practice and for scientific analysis. Even more importantly, these lacunae have rendered the requisite debates possible in the first place, instead of closing them once and for all by providing experimental answers. To the extent that we wish to renew the radical impulses of the 1960s, we will inevitably also have to confront the question of what Althusser’s pointed formulations have entailed and entail today for the practice of scientific analysis, in particular Marxist analysis of the structures and processes of modern societies, ‘in which the capitalist mode of production prevails’.3 And finally, this will lead us to the question of what lessons these formulations hold for a political practice that aims to overcome domination after the historical demise of the international communist movement, within which Althusser situated himself. With its lacunae (indicated by ellipses), the 1970 article ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ provides a privileged starting point for addressing the issue of how the reproduction of capitalist relations of production can be grasped through a perspective that brings the issue up to date by problematising it. The opportunities for a productive reading of this text, which Althusser deliberately published in a fragmented form, have been highlighted convincingly by Étienne Balibar.4 Between the text’s thematic focal points, a series of lacunae open up. The first can be found at the very beginning of the text; the next one is situated between the section ‘On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production’ and the passage which

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introduces the notion of ideological state apparatuses into Marxist state theory. A third lacuna presents itself prior to Althusser’s elaborations on the role of ideological state apparatuses, as opposed to repressive state apparatuses. Further ellipses follow before the section ‘On Ideology’, which investigates the problem of interpellation and the example of Christian religion. Althusser has placed a final ellipsis at the end of the text, before the words ‘January–April 1969’. Thus he not only indicates that the fragment’s introduction and conclusion are missing (lacunae I and V); he also emphasises that the link between the ‘standpoint of reproduction’ and the significance of ideological state apparatuses has yet to be fleshed out theoretically (lacuna II). He also makes it clear that the relationship between reproduction through state apparatuses and the specific ways in which the various ideological state apparatuses function has yet to be analysed (lacuna III). And he notes that the relationship between these various aspects of the theory of the ISAs (Ideological State Apparatuses) and a theory of ‘ideology in general’, of ideology qua interpellation, has yet to be elaborated on (lacuna IV).

Towards a ‘comprehensive theory of ideology’? In her theoretical reconstruction, Der Althusser-Effekt, which can be read with profit, Isolde Charim has presented ‘an entirely new reading of the Althusserian hypothesis on the “materiality of ideology”’.5 To this end, she reads Althusser’s ISA text both as a fragment and as the primary text of a ‘comprehensive theory of ideology’.6 She does so by explicitly integrating positions that Althusser merely engages with implicitly – those of Antonio Gramsci, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Yet what Charim quite obviously ignores is the fact that the text discussed by her is an excerpt from a larger intellectual effort, deliberately published as a fragment, an effort whose ‘original unity’ is now available to us in the form of the two manuscripts of Sur la reproduction.7 In my opinion, supplementing Althusser’s forays in this way, in order to construct a ‘comprehensive theory of ideology’, is not a sensible undertaking, but rather an overhasty venture that risks stalling the debate. This is because it glosses over a number of pivotal questions that need to be addressed critically before a new synthesis can be attempted – such as the question of the distinction between the primary and the secondary reproduction of ideology. This distinction concerns the difference between ideologies that arise from relations of domination as such and ideologies that are (re-)produced by state apparatuses. The distinction would be worth re-articulating by means of an engagement with Foucault’s emphasis on techniques of domination and governmentality. Another equally incisive question concerns the basic relationship between ‘ideologies in the plural’ and ‘ideology in the singular’, where the latter denotes the imaginary relationship of the oppressed to their conditions of existence. This is related to the question of the relationship between ideology/ ideologies and relations of domination; any unverified identification of ideological processes with the reproduction of domination would seem to be questionable. To the extent that we wish to allow for discussion of these issues, it would seem to make more sense to consider Althusser’s writings, whose intellectual contexts are now available to us, in their concrete open-endedness.

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Ideological state apparatuses? To start with, there is the concept of ideological state apparatuses. Let us begin with the concept of apparatuses itself: Étienne Balibar has pointed out that the French ‘appareil’ also means ‘official attire’ (as in early-modern High German), thus indicating the visible symbolism of authority associated with high offices in early modern states. Such ‘official attire’ is a material interpellation: much as with the lictors of the Roman consuls, who were still actual people, or the insignia of kings and emperors, which had congealed into objects, those interpellated by the sight of such symbols of authority are required, as citizens and/or subjects, to show ‘due deference’ and ‘clear the way’. Although Althusser uses only technical metaphors in his text (the machine-tool, the mechanism, being ‘in the grip’ of something, etc.), we can assume he was implicitly operating with such notions in order to make the link between the ideological state apparatus and interpellation appear self-evident. Let us now ask what Althusser’s choice to bring in the state – a choice he defended rather emphatically, in spite of plausible objections – means today. In raising this question, it is important to clarify that the underlying notion is that of the modern state (following Machiavelli’s ‘Io stato’), not the notion of polity that was given its classical formulation by Aristotle, nor that of government, which continues to be shaped by John Locke to this day. In other words, we are dealing with a form of political state power that has taken on a life of its own, acting as a superior power potential vis-à-vis modern civil society, and therefore also as a totalising capacity both for sovereign surveillance of each and every area of society and for intervention in those areas. In light of this, it is not enough to invoke the problematic of how resistance can become possible within the sovereign state, a problematic that has informed debates within modern political philosophy since Hobbes. One needs rather to inquire into the primary relations of domination that the state reproduces in a secondary manner, relations that are retroactively shaped by the state in far-reaching ways, as demonstrated by Marx in his discussion of the struggle over the normal working day.8 For it is unquestionably true that even the capitalist factory (and the fabbrica diffusa addressed by autonomia operaia) is an ideological state apparatus in Althusser’s sense. It was already put to use by the pioneer of social liberalism Ernst Abbe in his construction of Carl Zeiss’s entrepreneurial community,9 and it has been analysed by Georges Labica with reference to the still older ‘paradigm of the Grand Hornu’.10 But as we can gather from Marx’ analyses in Capital,11 what is at work in this is merely the state’s resumption of a primary structure of domination – the ‘despotism of capital’ within the immediate production process. This domination persists even if the capitalist qua personal despot is replaced by the manager as bearer of the domination function – differently from what James Burnham, Frederick Pollock and the Frankfurt School mistakenly believed during the 1940s, their view having been articulated especially clearly by Max Horkheimer in his texts ‘Authoritarian State’ and ‘Rackets’.12 Althusser is unmistakably right when he points out, in his ‘Note on the ISA’ (a text long neglected within the international debate, due to the relative difficulty of obtaining it), that ‘proletarian ideology anticipates’ not just ‘elements of what the ideological state apparatuses of socialist transition will be’, but also elements ‘of the abolition of the state and of ideological state apparatuses under communism’.13 In making this point, he explicates once again the extent to which ‘the working class’ great strategic demand for autonomy’ is directed against ‘the rule of the bourgeois state’.14 This strategic focus on the

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task of political revolution, which allows one to account for why Althusser sees state apparatuses at work not just in social (non-state), but also in formally private (non-public) domains, should not lead one to equate, without further verification, the primary reproduction processes proper to the ideological aspects of relations of domination with their secondary reproduction through ideological state apparatuses – an equation one encounters occasionally in Althusser. Marx addressed the primary aspect of reproduction in a twofold way: first, in his remarks on the fetish character of the commodity (and later also of money, capital and land), and second, in his concept of the despotism of capital within the production process, once the latter has been organised by capital, or once it has become subject to ‘real subsumption’. Questioning Althusser’s dismissal of the Marxian theory of fetishism (and, by implication, the pride of place accorded the theory of fetishism by Lukács and the Frankfurt School) entails a return to the Hegelian tradition of an independently conducted analysis of form. Yet those readings of Marx that focus on the analysis of form stop short of answering the question of primary ideological mechanisms, because they assume that to have defined form is already to have answered this question. One should rather follow Althusser’s lead and inquire into the mechanisms by which the reversals implicit in form unfold and reproduce themselves. The mere suggestion that they do so ‘by themselves’ cannot be an answer. This is of particular importance with regard to the task of grasping the constitutive and learning processes of subjects that are radically capable of action, thereby significantly going beyond both Marx’s mechanic metaphor of ‘putting one’s heads together’ and the metaphor of ‘bringing class consciousness’ to the working classes, which was introduced by Kautsky and adopted by Lenin, and which combined the philosophy of consciousness with a pedagogical approach.15 This brings us, finally, to the ‘ideological’ as such, as it is reproduced by the ideological state apparatuses. Here, the first question to be addressed is that of what talk of the ISA’s reproductive function actually refers to. There is much to suggest that Althusser assumed the many concrete ideologies to always already have been reproduced by state apparatuses. As for the problematic of the primary production of ideology, he meant to situate it on the level of ‘ideology in the singular’, or of ‘ideology in general’, in order to account for it by means of the mechanism of interpellation. But how plausible is it to assume that there is no specific primary production of ideologies in the plural? The call for exposing the ideological dimension of the primary reproduction of modern forms of domination16 refers first and foremost to the elementary relations of capitalist forms of production: the world of commodities, the money economy, the relationship between labour and capital or the relationship between capital and natural conditions (land). But if it is true – and the historical experiences of the revolutions that have occurred since the Second World War and of the new, post-1960s social movements suggest it is – that the domination exercised by capital within production does not represent the only primary relation of domination at work within modern societies, then we need to ask to what extent, say, the family and the gender and generational relations associated with it are not simply reproduced secondarily, qua ideological state apparatus,17 but are rather ‘always already’ constituted as a complex of primary relations of domination. Similar questions should, in my view, be raised and addressed with regard to imperial relations of dependence between peoples and states and the ways in which such relations are reflected in various forms of racism,18 or with regard to the ways in which domination features within ‘human ecologies’ and the anti-ecological attitudes that reflect them. Taking Althusser’s analysis of the ‘spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’ as

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an analogy, we should verify whether a ‘spontaneous ideology’ of, for instance, children and sexual partners – or of students and factory workers – relates to the ideologies reproduced by the ISA in the same way that the ‘spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’ relates to the philosophy of professional philosophers. This would entail, for example, that social workers employed within the youth welfare system or psychologists working as marriage counsellors perform the same stabilising function that philosophers perform by means of discursive articulation within science and the educational system. The call for analysing the primary ideological reproduction of capitalist relations is supported by a distinction drawn by Balibar in his reconstruction of Marx’s philosophy: that between the mystification that results from the structure of social relations and the mystification that results from the ideologies reproduced by the ISA and/or their concrete and substantive forms of elaboration and mediation. Balibar distinguishes between the theory of fetishism’s concept of the ‘enchantment of the world by the commodity form’ as a ‘mechanism of subjection’ and the theory of ideology’s concept of the ‘separation of physical and mental labour’ qua ‘mechanism by which an ideological class hegemony reproduces and legitimates itself’. By no means must the drawing of such a distinction amount to abandoning the question of the specific mechanisms by which ideology reproduces itself to the extent that it ‘inheres in social relations themselves’ or is inscribed within structure. Thus Guibert, while rejecting Althusser’s scepticism about the theory of fetishism, has set out to critically follow his lead by engaging in a preliminary reconstruction of the capital relation’s primary ideological mechanisms.19 Balibar and Guibert have corrected Althusser’s sweeping dismissal of the problem of fetishism as entirely Hegelian, and they have established the preconditions for developing a historical and materialist concept of the determination of form. On the basis of this notion, a critical reception of the recent German debate becomes possible, even if prominent protagonists of that debate, such as Hans-Georg Backhaus and Dieter Wolf, remain fascinated by the Hegelian notion of form in a way that creates persistent difficulties for their reception within the international philosophical discussion.20 The hypothesis of the primary reproduction of ideologies within social relations, as distinct from their secondary reproduction within and through the ISA, undoubtedly constitutes a decisive modification of the problem of ideology/ideologies as construed by Althusser. It seems to me to be inevitable, however, if the two analytic goals that Althusser formulates explicitly are to be pursued seriously: working out the preconditions of genuine scientific practice,21 something Althusser always considered an important precondition of revolutionary politics, and defining social relations and the organisation of processes in such a way as to allow workers and intellectuals to engage in politics from within a revolutionary organisation, in a manner that breaks consistently with the precepts of ideological state apparatus ‘politics’ and opens up the prospect of overcoming those precepts in the long run. In this context, we need to also raise the question of philosophy’s place, a question that Althusser surprisingly fails to address in his fragmentary text on ideological state apparatuses.22 Althusser does attribute a place to philosophy in a macro-historical sense, by relating it to major scientific breakthroughs such as proof-based mathematics and modern experimental physics. But the micro-historical or epistemo-sociological question concerning philosophy’s ‘place in life’, which has busied philosophers at least since the anecdote about Thales, is scarcely addressed; Althusser merely insists that ‘Marxist-Leninist philosophy’23 needs to be based upon the labour movement’s class struggle and the revolutionary struggle of the communist parties. When we

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consider the general question of what the activity proper to philosophers actually consists in,24 we are confronted with a problem whose relevance to the theory of ideology is obvious: what does it mean for professors of philosophy to accept employment in ISAs such as schools or universities? In raising this problem, we do not wish to over-hastily adopt Nietzsche’s general rejection of academic philosophy (perhaps even overlooking that the non-academic philosopher is merely exchanging the ISA ‘university’ for the ISA ‘publishing and media’), but rather to analyse the conditions under which antagonistic content can be wrested from this particular ISA, in the same way that radical trade unions wrest such content from the ISA of corporatism, and communist parties from the ISA of the political system. One consequence of such an approach would be a scaling down of the genuinely hypertrophic role attributed to philosophy in the unpublished passages of Althusser’s manuscript ‘On the Reproduction of the Relations of Production’: philosophical activity would no longer be about everything, or about ideology in its entirety, but ‘only’ about the examination, critique and reorganisation of the secondary reproduction of ideologies within ideological state apparatuses.

Interpellation No one who is not wearing blinkers or allowing themselves to be carried away by the ‘flow’ of Althusser’s arguments can fail to notice that interpellation comes in a variety of forms and types: from ‘Hey, you there!’, ‘File into the workers’ unity front, because you are a worker, too!’ and ‘Oh, my love!’ to ‘Heave-ho!’ and ‘To-gether!’, we are confronted with a broad spectrum of performative utterances, by which subjects are addressed as subjects and called upon to respond not so much verbally than as materially active agents. Althusser’s focus on the example of the ‘interpellation of the passer-by’ does not mean that there exist no other forms and types. It is rather a matter of Althusser claiming implicitly that this particular example allows us to recognise something that is especially revealing of the act of interpellation’s internal structure, and/or of the structural preconditions that allow it to function. But what exactly is such an interpellation? We may begin by noting that Jacques Bidet is right to point out that Althusser’s example is about a public interpellation, not a private one.25 But acknowledging this distinction is not to put paid to the question of the possible internal relationship between public and private interpellations. Nor does it eliminate the question raised by the feminist and queer movements with regard to gender relations and sexuality: at what point does declaring something a private matter become a publicly relevant ideological act in itself? This means that, pace Bidet, the question concerning the common mechanisms of public and private interpellations needs to be raised in such a way as to cut across the distinction between public and private – something explicitly advocated by Althusser in his text. This, however, renders the focus on interpellation by the Catholic religion,26 which Althusser opts for at this very point, fundamentally questionable: differently from the other Subjects cited by Althusser (such as duty, justice or revolution), we are obviously dealing here with God as a person – just as he was conceived of by the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages and early modernity. The dialectics of the Trinity elaborated by the Protestant Hegel, in which God’s personality dissolves but is nevertheless reproduced in a sublated way, is nowhere in sight. This also explains the prevalence of the Mosaic Old Testament in Althusser’s examples. Thus the model of ideologisation that is foregrounded is, according to Althusser’s own account, a

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pre-modern one that persists into modernity only in a downgraded, subaltern form. Althusser neither addresses nor elaborates on the question of how subjection under non-personal Subjects functions, even though such forms of subjection are the only ones that correspond to modern, objectively mediated relations of domination. Here too, Althusser was presumably misled by the notion that the successful functioning of ideologies and ISAs could be accounted for only on the level of ideology in general, a level we would seem to be able to access, from our concrete present, via the millenary apparatus of the Catholic (= universal) Church. If ideology generally functioned according to the model of authoritative and inculpating interpellation, as Fischbach assumes (wrongly, in my opinion),27 then the Catholic Church would indeed provide us with a better model than the Protestant struggle for the freedom of Christians or the public promise of citizens to recognise each other as ‘free and equal’, which Bidet brings up, following Rousseau.28 But is it really the case, as Althusser operatively assumes, that the Catholic Church, with its pre-modern structure grounded in personal authority, still offers decisive insights about the ISA? And why should this be the case? Since Althusser does not discuss these questions, they become mere matters of ideological evidence – be it the spontaneous evidence of so-called common sense or the elaborated evidence of the professors of philosophy employed by the ISA that is university. Yet critical thought cannot stop at such ideological evidence. We have to assume that behind this lacuna lies Althusser’s heuristic assumption that the tertium comparationis of the modern ISA and the Catholic Church consists in the nature of all institutionalised ideological relations as relations of domination. This standard of comparison made the risk of confusing modern with pre-modern relations of domination seem negligible to Althusser. Thus, in his analysis of the ideological function of the Catholic Church, we see him generously disregarding the differences between modern states and pre-modern communities. In discussing the concept of interpellation, we can hardly avoid critically addressing Althusser’s structural analogy between ideology and the unconscious. To begin with, it needs to be noted that Althusser is at pains to avoid an unmediated coupling of psychoanalysis and Marxism; he deliberately resorts to the concept of ‘ideology in general’, whose origins lie outside the Marxist tradition.29 It is therefore important to consider more precisely how Althusser grounds the analogy between the ideological and the unconscious in his generalisation of the problem of ideology (qua problem of ‘ideology in general’):30 Althusser speaks only of the subject and its subjection; by contrast, desire, men and women, fathers and mothers and the law itself (hence also talk of the forbidden object and of the subject’s subjecting identification with the prohibition) have disappeared entirely from his abstract analogy. It is only when this modification is taken into account that one can see clearly what Althusser considers the tertium comparationis of ideology and the unconscious to be, thus recognising the point of the analogy: relations of domination and the psychic mechanisms (or, as Spinoza would say, the human affects) engendered within them necessarily entail non-transparency, thereby rendering (comprehensive) self-reflection and self-transparency impossible. It is precisely at this point, which concerns the difference between naïve ideology and ideology that has been aggravated by domination (including ideology in the singular), that one would need to pursue more thoroughly the fact that Althusser is critically refashioning the conceptual precepts of Lacan’s theory of subjectivation, within which the trinity of the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary is declared fundamental.31 Generally speaking, Althusser

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avoids all reference to the Symbolic in his theory of ideology. While his God also has ‘a law that has become love’, he never appears under the name of ‘father’, not even where he is mentioned as sending ‘his son onto earth’ (not to speak of the reference to the ‘law of the father’).32 While Lacan’s theorem of the ‘law of the father’ qua foundation of the Symbolic affirms domination, Althusser’s refusal to speak of the Symbolic33 would seem to amount to a subversion of Lacan’s hypothesis that every identity-producing discourse is fundamentally informed by domination. Althusser’s broadening of the notion of the Imaginary, which is almost voluntaristically speculative, but perhaps heuristically creative as well, ventures in the same direction, as do his refashioning of the concept of representation and his insistence on the accessibility of the Real within a (de-centred) science or an ideology that (following Lenin) has been ‘scientifically educated’. The latter concept would of course need to be determined more precisely. Another complex of problematisations that presents itself within the lacunae of Althusser’s text can be summarised in the question of whether ‘inculpating interpellations’ tell the actual truth about subjectivation by interpellation. Bidet denies this. He is doubtless right to emphasise that not all interpellations involve inculpation by an ISA (as can be plausibly claimed, at least prima facie, for the cases of the police, the tax service, the customs service or university administration).34 And his scepticism might be radicalised considerably. Not all interpellations originate from some authority. (For example, the appeal for help that was still transmitted in Morse code in Althusser’s day, ‘SOS’, simply originates from a ship in distress, although maritime law does of course require one to come to that ship’s assistance.) It might be objected that Althusser was concerned only with interpellation as it presents itself in the context of structures of domination. But this is obviously not the case. In his hypotheses on the transhistorical nature of ideology, he explicitly refers to a classless, and thus emancipated society. Moreover, the objection does not help us make any headway: the question concerning the production of a type of subjectivation adequate to a society of freely associated producers cannot be answered by reference to a domination supposed to inhere in all subjectivation. The interpellations of free subjectivity that were the basis of hobbies or sports in modernity (in England’s advanced capitalism) were undeniably linked to an elite that distinguished itself by having time not just to learn the art of doing nothing, but also to make a habit of it.35 Given the way that domination has informed all history, one can follow Althusser in demanding that even striking cases of free subjectivation, such as the dandy, be recognised as linked to domination. This implies not effacing the task of producing a liberated subjectivity by assuming some form of free subjectivity to be simply given, and/or by perceiving subjectivity from an anti-authoritarian perspective, as having always already been released from its embeddedness in relations of domination – as occurs in most theories of democracy. One ought rather to work out how liberated forms of subjectivation might be produced starting from subjectivations that are still shaped by domination. This is implicit in Althusser’s study of the trade union struggle within the corporatist ISA, and it was explicitly noted by him both in his analysis of the internal dynamics of the French Communist Party and in his ‘Note on the ISA’. Althusser’s broadening of the notion of the Imaginary has the important side-effect of allowing for a concept of misrecognition that does not reduce itself to an effect of power.36 Consequently, he frees both the investigative practice of science and political activity from the burden represented by the after-effects of the Hegelian postulate of ‘absolute knowledge’: errors and misrecognitions occur inevitably (as Hegel already knew), and they are by no

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means always already ‘sublated’ in advance; rather, they continuously call for new learning processes, in which adequate forms of problem-solving are not already given, but need first to be discovered or invented. Differently from more recent attempts at addressing subjectivation, which attempt to take the ‘bad subject’, that is, the result of subjectivation’s partial or complete failure, as the starting point of their search for forms of subjectivation that are free of domination, without even being able to account for why subjectivations that are informed by domination function quite well ninety percent of the time, one ought to search for moments of resistance within accomplished subjectivations, moments that allow for oppositional and revolutionary agency.

Why Althusser’s pointed formulations appear to make sense philosophically but need to be overcome scientifically and politically In spite of the haste evident in the ‘long manuscript’ of Sur la reproduction, it is worth enquiring into how Althusser linked the three sections of his article ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ there. As noted, each of the sections is set off, but also linked to the others by an ellipsis. My proposed inquiry does not aim to eliminate the ellipses and create an imaginary ‘new handbook’ of historical materialism;37 it aims, rather, to bring to mind the horizon of problems and questions within which Althusser’s analyses took shape, in order to identify first steps that can lead on from there. The question concerning the role of philosophy – its relationship to critical science and revolutionary politics – which Althusser did not address in his ISA text, was indeed pivotal. Even then, it could not be seriously raised in the literary-philosophical form of a ‘short course’, something that has become altogether unthinkable today. Marx’s breakthrough into science and the beginnings of revolutionary proletarian politics, which cannot be separated from one another, could be traced back neither to the foundation of historical materialism (Antonio Labriola), nor to the unfolding of a materialist dialectics (Georgi Plekhanov): the entire setup of science, politics and political activity needed to be analysed anew, in order to understand what a true scientific practice and a practice of liberation might look like, if they were to accord with Marx and be adequate to the new situation that had emerged after the night of the twentieth century. In the ‘long manuscript’, Althusser assumes that a more in-depth understanding of the relationship between the law, the state and class domination will be vital to the formulation of a critique of politics as normally organised by ideological state apparatuses. Yet discussion of this relationship was precisely what he replaced by ellipses in his text on the ISAs. Althusser’s general hypotheses provide us only with preliminary and uncertain heuristic starting-points. Since the decided failure38 of Lenin’s ‘revolution against Capital’,39 ‘never to forget the class struggle’, as Althusser phrased it, must be understood in a broader sense than before. The imperative now also entails never losing sight of those emancipatory struggles that refer to other structures of domination, such as gender relations, racist or ethnically articulated relations of discrimination and international imperial relations. It is certainly difficult to break away from familiar, well elaborated positions when operating within the trajectory of theoretical, scientific and philosophical development that goes back to Marx and Engels;

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prima facie, such positions are cognitively more satisfying than forays onto new terrain, which have remained sketchier and in some cases incomplete. But one cannot explain all relations of domination present in our modern societies when operating solely upon the relatively familiar terrain of class struggles. And there is sufficient reason to assume that the class struggle against capitalist domination can itself not be conducted in a lastingly successful manner without identifying and elaborating sustainable links to other emancipatory struggles. In this respect, and from the perspective of the critique of domination, the question concerning the reproduction of existing relations of domination is of central importance. By virtue of its level of abstraction, the question is situated, as it were, between the reproduction of the relations of production discussed by Althusser and ‘social reproduction in general’ as analysed by Bourdieu (and Passeron).40 Of course, society’s vital process does not consist exclusively of processes of reproduction – in modern societies, it probably does not even consist mainly of such processes. New beginnings, one-time productions and simple persistence are probably equally widespread. Once it has been imposed, domination cannot simply endure, but nor can it constantly re-invent itself: as domination, it needs to reproduce itself in the specific sense of the term, even if it needs to repeatedly undergo thorough transformations in order to achieve this. For this reason, examination of the reproduction of capitalist domination is indeed the pivotal theme of Marxist theory. Differently from what Althusser insinuated in the ‘long manuscript’, the question of the reproduction of capitalist domination is already the pivotal theme of Marx’s critique of political economy. At heart, the critique is concerned with understanding how the capitalist mode of production succeeds again and again in finding successful movement patterns for its contradictions. With regard to the present theoretical discussion, it is unfortunate that the Marx of the second volume of Capital concerns himself exclusively with the reproduction of the means of production, leaving the reproduction of labour-power for later. Not only does this lead to elision of the relationship between reproduction through the purchase of commodities and reproduction through non-commodified domestic and self-directed labour; it also places the family, qua institution in which historically constituted gender and generational relations are enshrined, outside the field of inquiry. The question of which structures of domination that cannot be reduced to the capital relation shape the vital process of concrete individuals in concrete social formations is even further beyond the scope of Marx’s inquiry. Althusser’s criticism that the instruments of exposition Marx borrowed from Hegel did not allow for a concrete and comprehensive investigation of the reproductive mechanisms of capitalist domination remains apposite, as does his call for not contenting oneself with general dialectical formulas about essence and appearance – even though we now dispose of readings of Hegel that have exposed significant critical and open-ended aspects of Hegel’s philosophical practice.41 Marx’s exposition of the movement patterns through which the reproduction of the capital relation occurs has failed to satisfactorily resolve pivotal theoretical issues such as the relation between the money commodity and the money-form42 and the question concerning the developmental possibilities of the wage-form,43 not to mention the issues associated with the architectonics of the Marxian system and the implications of the replacement of personally active capitalists by firms in which persons who behave purely as capital owners cooperate with a purely managerial staff, a development that was only beginning in Marx’s day. It needs to be added that Marx’s discussion of issues concerning the analysis of form has not resolved (en passant, as it were) the issues associated with the critique of politics44 and ideology.45

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In light of these desiderata left by Marx’s elaborations, we need to take seriously the selfcriticism implicit in Althusser’s decision to publish only those parts of his manuscript which make up the ISA article. Althusser omitted the historical passages of his manuscript, as well as the elaborated sketches on the larger relationship between philosophy and revolution, producing a text that is open by virtue of its lacunae. Its status is that of a complex of arguments that is essentially presented for heuristic purposes. This means that the text can do no more than provide an orienting framework for concrete scientific inquiries and political action; it cannot establish any scientific findings or political initiatives on its own. For a revolutionary politics, viz. a practice and politics of emancipation, cannot be developed on the level of general theory. One can speak seriously of critical science and revolutionary politics only when theoretical approaches lead to concrete inquiries into a historical reality that is always overdetermined and complex, and when such inquiries shed light on the singular contexts within which political practice is situated. Yet beyond this complex of issues concerning the relationship between philosophy, science and revolutionary politics, there lies another: in the ‘long manuscript’, which was not published in Althusser’s lifetime, there is an obvious bias. The manuscript contains a number of illuminating retrospective historical considerations, but it does not really have anything to offer by way of political orientation in the present.46 This is related to two issues that Althusser believed he was unable to raise within the international communist movement he strove to operate in. The first of these questions imposes itself when one reads Althusser’s summary of the drama that was the assertion, by workers, of the right to independent association in trade unions: it is clear that struggles have been fought, and it is also clear, after numerous setbacks, what these struggles have achieved. But it remains unclear what exactly they consisted in; to cite the brilliant title of a text by Göran Therborn: What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?47 This is even more true of a second, related question: ‘What and who is the working class?’48 The postulate that the international communist movement represents the vanguard of the labour movement, while the labour movement represents the historic subject of humanity’s struggle for emancipation, which will determine the future of revolutionary movements, is never questioned. And the problem of how the labour movement has related and will relate, in terms of its politics of alliance, to other movements that are critical of domination is never even raised. Last but not least, we need to consider the openings that Althusser created by omission, openings he has bequeathed to us in the form of the article ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’: how modern ideological state apparatuses relate to the transhistoricity of ideology is never really discussed, no more than how they relate to the concrete mechanisms of subjectivation and interpellation. We need to start from the incomplete character of Althusser’s theory of ideology. In assessing and setting to work on it, we need to treat it as a constellation of unsolved problems associated with a science and a philosophy that is conducive to struggles for emancipation. Translated from the German by Andrea von Kameke and Max Henninger.

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Notes 1 The following text is a revised version of the second part of my afterword to the German edition of Sur la reproduction, published by VSA, Hamburg (Althusser 2012b). 2 Althusser 1971a, pp. 127–88. 3 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 35, p. 45. 4 Balibar 2011a. 5 Mouffe 2002, p. 12. But see the earlier works Rancière 1974a, Kammler et al. 1978, Projekt Ideologietheorie 1979, Therborn 1980 and the retrospective considerations in Labica 1982, Mocnik 1993, Rehmann 2004 and Reitz 2004. 6 Charim 2002, back cover. 7 Althusser 1995 [SR]. It emerges from Charim’s bibliography that she did not take into account any works by Althusser published after 1993; these works include Sur la reproduction (published in 1995) and Machiavel et nous. She also obviously did not make use of Elliott 1987’s report on the ‘short manuscript’ of Sur la reproduction. 8 See Wolf 2001. 9 See Knoepffler and Klemm 2007. 10 See Labica 1987a. 11 See Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 34, p. 336. 12 See Demirović 1999. 13 Althusser 2010b, p. 123. 14 Althusser 2010b, p. 122. 15 See Kautsky 1901/2; Lenin 1963–70, Volume 5, pp. 374–5; see also Galceran 2008, column 547. 16 Modern forms of domination differ from the older ones that shaped slavery or serfdom; such older forms of domination were based on the personification of official authority (Zeus), physical strength (Hercules), cleverness (Odysseus) or a mystical ‘mana’ (Dionysos). 17 See Donzelot 1977. 18 See for instance Chaturvedi 2000. 19 See Balibar 1993a, pp. 57–8, 73–4; Guibert 1986. 20 See Backhaus 1997 and Wolf 1985. 21 See Althusser 1990a. 22 In the long version of Sur la reproduction, Althusser still dedicated the whole first section to this question. 23 The term is appropriated in an obviously antagonistic way; Althusser does not adopt the self-understanding of theoretical Stalinism (see Labica 1984). 24 See Heinrichs 2003 and Wolf 2002. 25 See Bidet 1995, p. 13. 26 In the ISA article, some of the all too obvious characteristics of Catholicism have been eliminated, differently from the long manuscript. 27 See Fischbach 2008, pp. 125–6. 28 Bidet 1995, pp. 13–14 responds to Althusser’s 1966 critique of the infinite regress in Rousseau’s argument for the sovereign autonomy of citizens within the volonté générale by speaking of an ‘infinite task’, but this is hardly convincing. 29 See Balibar 1991a, p. 104 and Balibar 2011a, p. 16.

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30 It was Michel Pêcheux – who had already provided important contributions to the earlier debate on ideology, writing under the pseudonym Thomas Herbert – who went furthest in working to ground Althusser’s general theory of ideology in a critique of linguistics (see Pêcheux 1982; Gadet and Pêcheux 1981) while elaborating on the problematic of interpellation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Pêcheux linked the question of an alternative subjectivity, one that liberates itself, with that of a ‘successful’ interpellation: what needs to actually be achieved, and what needs to be changed, in order to produce the subjects of an emancipatory practice? His response – the concept of a ‘disidentification’ by which subjects redirect their impulse to identify with the Subject in such a way as to develop a different kind of agency – is open to further elaboration, e.g. by linking it to Brecht’s notion of the ‘third thing’ (‘dritte Sache’) and Bidet’s distinction between public and private interpellations. 31 Althusser’s relationship to Jacques Lacan was a complicated one (see Ogilvie 1993; on the claims made by Lacan for his theory, see Weber 1978b). This emerges not only from Althusser’s work on ‘Freud and Lacan’ (Althusser 1965); it has also become clear thanks to the sharp polemic in Lecourt 1981. See Althusser’s posthumously published writings on psychoanalysis (Althusser 1996b), especially pp. 125–43 and 147–73. 32 ‘GODFATHER’ is mentioned only once, in an almost ritualistic quotation from the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. 33 The theoretician Mladen Dolar, an exponent of the Lacanian Ljubljana School, has criticised Althusser for eschewing the Symbolic (Dolar 1991). His colleague Slavoj Žižek attempts to re-introduce Lacanian concepts and the Hegelian discourse of mind wherever Althusser extracts himself from the Lacanian theorem of the symbolic order and begins to engage in a materialist reflection on subjectivation – ones that makes do, for example, without the ‘Other’; Žižek is constantly working to force thought back into the shell that Althusser attempted to break out of (see Žižek 1989; 1997; 2007). 34 It would be of little use to metaphysically broaden the concept of guilt – as was done, for instance, by Ricoeur (1965), following Nietzsche. For there remains the question of what exactly it means to say that subjection is somehow ‘owed’ or due to a ‘guilt’ that might serve as the basis for an accusation. By contrast, Foucault’s category of discipline, which is geared to how people effectively behave, and Althusser’s version of the concept of ideology, which takes into account the internal perspective of the subjected, both make do without such a presupposition of guilt. 35 Dorothy Sayers’ character Lord Peter Wimsey provides a rather vivid, if caricatural embodiment of this attitude. 36 In this sense, Rancière 1999’s analysis of ‘disagreement’ can be said to pick up on one of Althusser’s key themes. 37 This was attempted, in Stalin’s day, by Lefebvre 1968, among others. Since 1969, Marta Harnecker has been able to propagate such efforts very successfully in Latin America, having been given Althusser’s blessing. 38 This does not mean that class issues can now be forgotten. It would be a poor dialectic to propagate, as against the postmodern forgetting and repression of all class issues, the forgetting and repression of all structures not based on class. This is what Böke 2011 seems to be proposing. 39 Gramsci 1999. 40 What Bourdieu and Passeron 1979 and 1990 analysed, are, however, only the processes by which a new generation is made to adopt the essential roles of the preceding generation. Even a superficial glance at the Marxist reconstruction of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production teaches us that the reproduction of modern societies is a significantly more complex process, whose structures are more autonomous with regard to their human bearers than can be shown by an analysis of generational transitions. Henri Lefebvre has drawn

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attention to this Marxist problematic in an indirect reaction to Althusser’s ISA article (Lefebvre 1976). Lefebvre’s main concern was, however, to identify the structuring of spaces and daily life by the state as problems in need of renewed analysis. 41 See for instance Arndt 2003 or Jaeschke 2003. 42 See Heinrich 1999. 43 See Schmiede and Schudlich 1977. 44 Tosel 1979. 45 Projekt Ideologietheorie 1979. 46 Many students who believed the time for the building of a Maoist party had come interpreted this hesitation as cowardliness on Althusser’s part. Later, it contributed to a situation in which, while Althusser and his closest associates were able to engage in significant political action, their initiatives always remained oddly ‘paradoxical’: while they supported the ‘Union de la Gauche’, the united effort of left socialists and communists, they did so in the ‘basist’ form of a ‘Union dans la lutte’. 47 Therborn 1978. That this was a hotly contested issue can be seen from the schisms of the French trade union movement, which were ultimately motivated by trade union practice, not by party politics. 48 Althusser merely offers us an argument that reflects his loyalty to party politics, namely that he distinguishes between the student May and the workers’ May. He never provides us with a real class analysis (what was the position of the insurrectionary students, in terms of class structure?) or an analysis of class subjectivity (who were the bearers of the May revolt?).

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16 To think the new in the absence of its conditions: Althusser and Negri and the philosophy of primitive accumulation Jason Read

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ouis Althusser and Antonio Negri are two of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the (late) twentieth century. Despite their influence, influence that extends into the same spheres of theoretical and philosophical discussion, there has been little discussion and debate of their relation, at least in the Anglo-American world. This is perhaps because the lines of demarcation would seem to be drawn up in advance: Althusser is the philosopher of history as a process without subjects or goals, while Negri is the philosopher of living labour as subjectivity. They even draw from different texts: for Althusser, at least initially, Marx’s philosophy of structural causality must be read between the lines of Capital; while, Negri turns to the Grundrisse, a series of notebooks written in a time of crisis, to find the force of antagonism. The combined effect of their seemingly opposed positions with respect to subjectivity, and their emphasis on different texts, has set up a relation of either absolute opposition or indifference. This despite the fact that in later years, the final years of Althusser’s life and some of Negri’s more recent texts, the two writers began to construct and draw on the same lineage of Machiavelli and Spinoza, as well as Marx, in order to construct their philosophy. For both Althusser and Negri, Machiavelli, Spinoza, and Marx constitute part of an alternative tradition within the history of philosophy, a materialist tradition. Beneath the crude oppositions between structuralism and autonomism, there emerges the overlapping, but not necessarily shared project of reconstructing a materialist philosophy. In order to relate Althusser and Negri I would like to begin not with their stated points of opposition, nor with their respective readings of Machiavelli or Spinoza, but with their engagement with Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation. Althusser turns to primitive accumulation in the final pages of his influential, albeit posthumously published essay, remarking that everything that comes before, the fragmentary notes on Machiavelli, Spinoza

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and Rousseau, is a prelude to his engagement with the problem of materialism in Marx. Negri’s reflections on primitive accumulation appear in the penultimate chapter of the book on constitutive power (Insurgencies in the English translation), in which Marx’s concept of living labour is considered to be the fullest development of a constitutive ontology. In each case, primitive accumulation, Marx’s account of the violent and contingent formation of capitalism, is understood to be a philosophical problem, a problem of ontology, and not simply a political or economic problem. This differentiates Althusser and Negri from much of the current revival of interest in primitive accumulation, most of which is orientated towards understanding the violence intrinsic to new strategies of accumulation associated with the privatisation of public sectors and the breakdown of commons. What Althusser and Negri seek, in different ways, can be considered an attempt to reconstruct if not Marx’s philosophy, than a materialist philosophy from these writings on the violent foundation of the capitalist mode of production. Which is to say that the reading of primitive accumulation will have effects on philosophy, not only in terms of creating a lineage that incorporates Machiavelli and Spinoza, but, more importantly, in terms of what constitutes the relevant problems and concepts of philosophy. Such a philosophy will necessarily be different from much familiar attempts to ground a Marxist philosophy on reification, alienation, or the historical process in general, but such comparisons remain outside of the purview of this essay. First, a provisional definition of primitive accumulation: in the final pages of Capital Marx does two things, counters the dominant conception of capitalist accumulation and provides an alternate account. The dominant conception of the accumulation of capital, the story of so-called primitive accumulation, is a morality tale in which one group, future capitalists, saves, while another, future workers, squanders. In this ‘ant and grasshopper’ tale, moral differences are sufficient to make history. Against this, Marx stresses the fundamental complexity of the formation of capital. In order for capitalism to constitute itself as a mode of production it is not enough for some to save and others to squander, there must be the accumulation of wealth, made possible by the breakdown of laws regarding usury and the reign of mercantile capitalism, and, more importantly there must be the disappropriation of peasants from the land. They must be separated from the means of production in order to become workers. This is made possible by violence, by the laws of bloody legislation that separate individuals from the land. In place of the simplicity of moral intent, Marx places the complexity of conditions and the transformative force of violence. In his narrative, primitive accumulation cannot be the simple effect of a moral intention but must be the encounter of radically heterogeneous strategies. In order to understand how there could be an encounter between wealth on one hand and a group of people with nothing but there labour-power to sell on the other it is necessary to take into consideration a whole series of disparate and disconnected events, from the rise of usury, the destruction of the commons, and the wealth generated from colonialism and the slave trade. As Marx writes, ‘The knights of industry, however, only succeeded in supplanting the knights of the sword by making use of events in which they had played no part in whatsoever’.1 Whereas ‘so-called primitive accumulation’, the tale told by capitalists, presents a straight line in which the morality of intentions are rewarded, Marx’s account presents a history of multiple encounters and violent transformations in which effects are never reducible to intentions.

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Becoming necessary Althusser’s essay, even though it is presented as developing a new thought of materialism, and thus a new ontology, does not begin with a consideration of Marx at all, but with a long survey of the history of philosophy. It is a survey to recover the ‘subterranean current of aleatory materialism’. This materialism, as much as it makes reference to the philosophies of Epicurus and even Heidegger, is primarily developed through political texts; its primary metaphors or concepts are the figure of Machiavelli’s prince and Rousseau’s forest primeval. This follows, or radicalises Althusser’s earlier claim that it is, ‘necessary to get rid of the suspect division between philosophy and politics which at one and the same time treats the political figures as inferior – that is, as non-philosophers or Sunday afternoon philosophers – and also implies that the political positions of philosophers must be sought exclusively in the texts in which they talk about philosophy’.2 This is perhaps one of the most persistent tenets of Althusser’s philosophy, from the early investigations which more or less reconstructed the philosophy Marx neglected to write from the pages of Capital, to the remarks on class struggle in theory, Althusser disrupts the separations and hierarchies that distinguish political philosophy from philosophy, knowledge from action. Althusser’s overcoming of such reified and established categorisations is undertaken in the name of another demarcation, one that is produced rather than assumed. This is what Althusser refers to as a transformation of the practice of philosophy.3 This division goes by different names in Althusser’s writing, sometimes it is the division between idealism and materialism, while in other periods it is the conflict between ideology and science, before developing into the thesis of philosophy as class struggle. All of this is prior to the material on aleatory materialism, which produces yet another division. What remains constant, however, is that in each case the division refers to a fundamental conflict at the heart of philosophy itself, the stakes of which are practical as much as they are conceptual. These divisions are simultaneously inside and outside of philosophy: they are internal to its concepts and categories, cutting through the facile categorisations that separate politics from epistemology, but these internal divisions are ultimately the effects of external divisions, the situation of philosophy in a field of forces. It is through this break with the dominant categories of philosophy that we can understand Althusser’s turn to political philosophy in order to articulate a philosophy of the encounter. If the dominant tradition of philosophy has been to posit reason and necessity underneath apparently disparate and heterogeneous phenomena, then it is only through politics that the aleatory dimension, that contingency, can come into full light. Althusser’s position here is profoundly Machiavellian, not just in the sense that the latter’s idea of the encounter between virtú and fortune provides the basis for the meditation of the encounter at the heart of aleatory materialism, but that, like Machiavelli, such a philosophy can only be developed through an active refusal of all hitherto existing philosophy. As Althusser writes, Machiavelli must repudiate all classical conceptions of politics, conceptions that in various ways posit a principle, a morality, existing behind the world in order to explain it.4 Machiavelli’s refusal of such political utopias is also a refusal of the dominant schema of metaphysics, which explains the apparent contingency of the world by some underlying necessity, positing the cycles of political régimes beyond the apparent contingencies of political fortunes. What defines politics is not the essence of the various régimes or their passage into each other, but the encounter

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between the skill of the prince (virtú) and its conditions. As Machiavelli defines this encounter, ‘Without that first opportunity their strength [virtù] of purpose would never have been revealed. Without their strength [virtù] of purpose, the opportunity they were offered would not have amounted to anything’.5 The focus on the singular conditions of the encounter does not mean that Machiavelli is an empiricist for whom the facts of history make it possible to dispense with the concept altogether: Althusser insists that Machiavelli produces the concepts of the event. It is not a matter of opposing philosophy to history, but of a new practice of philosophy, new protocols for the production of concepts.6 Just as Machiavelli turns towards history in order to recognise the reality of contingency for politics, Althusser turns to political philosophy to construct a philosophy of the event. Althusser overshoots Machiavelli’s target: the task is not just to turn to political history to clear the dead weight of utopian metaphysics underlying political philosophy, but to turn to political philosophy in order to produce an ontology of the event, a new materialism.7 Althusser’s aleatory materialism has as its defining characteristic the primacy of the event, the contingent encounter, over the constituted forms that it produces. The central ontological claim of the text, however, or at least the line of demarcation that has the greatest effect, is Althusser’s reversal of the relationship between necessity and contingency. ‘Instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming necessary of the encounter of contingencies’.8 Contingency is not just some exception to the general rule, but as Althusser wrote earlier with respect to the conjuncture, the exception is the general rule.9 Events do not rupture the continuity and necessity that is the norm of history and of being, but are themselves the exceptional norm. ‘Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins, but also in its effects’.10 Everything would seem to rest then on how we understand this becoming necessary, how necessity or at least the appearance of necessity emerges in a world of contingency. It is also with respect to this point that tension opens up between the political texts, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Marx, and the metaphysical problem. This can be seen by asking the question, how are we to understand this becoming necessary? Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Marx all offer different answers, and these different answers constitute the bulk of their political philosophy. For Machiavelli this necessity is identified with the figure of the prince: the contingent event, the prince seizing power, can sustain itself or maintain itself if the prince possesses sufficient virtú, is skilful enough to manage his appearance amongst the people, the affects of hatred and fear, then his power will last. For Rousseau, whose Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, puts forward the audacious thesis of the ‘radical absence of society as the essence of society,’ the becoming necessary of society is constituted by the increased specialisation and hierarchy constituted by society itself. Once instituted society becomes its own rationale: ‘[A]s soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man realised that it was useful for a single man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property came into existence, labour became necessary’.11 For Marx the becoming necessary of the contingent encounter of workers and capitalist is the transition from the force of the state to the compulsion of the economy. As Marx writes, ‘The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases’.12 Becoming necessary, the transformation of the encounter into something necessary, is considered in terms of political strategy, social dependency and economic compulsion.

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Politics, society and economics, three figures of becoming necessary that in most accounts would be differentiated, distinguished by their relative degrees of necessity, are considered to be simply different versions of the same general problem, of the becoming necessary of the contingent encounter. Althusser’s refusal of the existing categories of politics, sociology and economics, categories that have often contained an implicit hierarchy between the contingent and shifting terrains of politics and the necessity of economic laws, is quite strong. This becomes focused in the final polemic on Marx, which draws a line between two concepts of the mode of production in Marx’s writing: the first, which stresses the aleatory nature of capitalism’s origin, is found in the writings on primitive accumulation and the Asiatic mode of production; while the second is found in the ‘great pages in Capital on the essence of capitalism’.13 The second concept, which Althusser acknowledges dominates much of the Marxist tradition, understands capital, or any mode of production, to have a necessary logic and development. Althusser is particularly critical of the role that the concept of the bourgeoisie plays in Marx’s theory, specifically the way in which the term is used to name both the destructive force in the old order and the dominant class in the new order. The bourgeoisie is a unity, an imagined unity made up primarily of adjectives that would seem to pre-exist its conditions, they would be capitalists before capitalism, effacing the aleatory foundation beneath the unified intention of a subject.14 Althusser makes similar remarks with respect to the proletariat, which Marx often presents as a simple effect of the capitalist mode of production. The final remarks, at in least in terms of the edition of the manuscript, clarify and justify Althusser’s flattening of the economic, social and political dimension of becoming necessary onto one plane. There is only meaningful distinction to be made, between a philosophy that treats the established order as an accomplished fact, and one that treats it as ‘a fact to be accomplished’. In the first case, order and unity are assumed as given, the problem is in understanding destruction and change. While in the second, aleatory dispersion is seen as primary, and unity becomes a problem. It is only from the perspective of the contingency of the social order that it is possible to pose the question of its reproduction, its specific becoming necessary. The line of demarcation that Althusser draws between the necessary and contingent concepts of the mode of production, which is a reflection of the idealist and aleatory materialist forces within the history of philosophy itself, cuts right through the centre of Althusser’s work, returning to the fundamental problems of reproduction, ideology, subjectivity, and the causality of the structure. Years earlier, in Reading Capital, Althusser had named the particular way in which a society coheres ‘the society effect’. As Althusser argues: The mechanism of the production of this ‘society effect’ is only complete when all the effects of the mechanism have been expounded, down to the point where they are produced in the form of the very effects that constitute the concrete, conscious or unconscious relation of the individuals to the society as a society, i.e., down to the effects of the fetishism of ideology (or ‘forms of social consciousness’ – Preface to A Contribution. . .), in which men consciously or unconsciously live their lives, their projects, their actions, their attitudes and their functions as social.15 This is the classic problem of ideology, which Althusser has often identified with reproduction, a kind of becoming necessary of a specific mode of production. As Althusser’s argument

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regarding the two modes of production suggests, this reproduction has often been understood as a kind of supplement to an already given economic necessity, what Marx referred to as the ‘silent compulsion of economic relations’. The turn to primitive accumulation and the economy itself as one instance of a general becoming necessary subverts this tendency. The economic order itself is not somehow more necessary than politics, but must itself be seen as contingent. The economy is not a cause existing outside or beyond the various dimensions of becoming necessary; it is another modality, or, to recall Althusser’s reference to Aristotle in the essay on ideology, another sense of becoming necessary. To draw these two lines together, that of the economy as contingent and yet part of the general becoming necessary, we could say that the becoming necessary in its different aspects, political, social, and economic, converges around a representation of the world, a kind of necessity effect. Ultimately we can then see the role that Spinoza plays in the construction of aleatory materialism. While Spinoza’s thought of a universe of absolute necessary immanent causality would seem to be out of place in a philosophy of contingency, he provides a necessary component in thinking the given world, the world perceived in its necessity as an effect of the imagination: as Althusser writes, ‘the imagination is not by any means a faculty, but fundamentally only the only world itself in its “givenness”’.16 While Althusser initially frames his idea of the ‘becoming necessary’ of contingent encounters as an ontological proposition that inverts the relation between contingency and necessity, the examples of Machiavelli, Spinoza, Rousseau and Marx would seem to indicate that it is as much about the constitution of the world through the practices of politics and ideology as it is about the world as such. Spinoza is inscribed twice in this ontology: once as a critic of the imaginary fullness that constitutes the world as it is perceived and lived, and a second time, as a general thought of the primacy of relations that subtends such a world. One of the central premises of aleatory materialism is the primacy of the encounter, of the relations to being. These encounters always start with two, fortune and virtú or labour-power and money, but proliferate beyond that to encompass other relations, other series. Althusser’s reference to Spinoza’s within the essay on aleatory materialism is primarily to the parallelism of attributes as a kind of non-relation of encounter. It would seem, however, that the true point of reference would seem to be structural causality, the idea of a cause that exists only in its effects. In this case the cause is not some stable or timeless structure, an idea that burdened Althusser’s early writings on the concept, but is nothing other than the encounter. This undoes the opposition between the two terms that defined Althusser’s early career, conjuncture and structure: ‘because the reality of the structure is nothing but the unpredictable succession of conjunctures’ and ‘the conjuncture is nothing but a disposition of the structure’.17 The encounter exists only in its effects, and the effects are nothing other than a becoming necessary of the contingent encounter. Ultimately, Althusser does not just turn to politics to construct a new ontology, one that places the event and change over stability and order, but returns this ontology to the field of politics itself. It is only through aleatory materialism that the central political question of reproduction, the political, social and economic becoming necessary of a given social order comes to light. As Althusser writes the task of the aleatory materialism is to the think the ‘reality of politics’ and the ‘essence of practice’ and most importantly the encounter of these two realities in struggle.18

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Becoming constituent It is at this point that we can see the proximity and distance that relates Althusser’s thought to some of the latter work of Antonio Negri. This proximity is not simply a matter of the shared lineage of Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx, but of a shared problem, a rigorous thought of a materialist constitution of this world, which is to say a world constituted through practical activity without preconditions or end. As Negri says it ‘is a matter of thinking the new in the absence of its conditions’.19 This distance and proximity can be charted by the way that they interpret primitive accumulation. Like Althusser, Negri sees primitive accumulation as foundational for not only a new understanding of capitalism, one that eschews the necessity and teleology underlying the history as the history of different modes production, but a new ontology as well. Like Althusser, Negri’s turn to primitive accumulation, to a reading of Marx, is situated at the end of a text that undertakes a long survey of the history of philosophy that encompasses Machiavelli, Rousseau and Spinoza. Negri’s interpretation reads these philosophers in the light of the revolutionary sequence that runs through the American, French and Russian Revolution. Negri’s study of constituent power, published in English as Insurgencies, begins from a simple assertion: democracy is founded on constituent power, the will or consent of the people.20 This fundamental axiom conceals a problem. As much as constituent power appears in the history of political thought, it is immediately concealed or effaced. Constituent power is transformed into an exceptional event, as in the case of the founding moments (or ‘founding fathers’) or it is assumed to express itself fully and adequately in a constitution, a series of formal structures that realise and tame it. Negri’s central political question is how can there be a constituent power that will not alienate itself in a constituted order, in a structure. This is nothing less than the question of revolution, of revolution not simply as the foundation of a new order but of a transformation of the very idea of political order, of the state, what used to be called ‘permanent revolution’. This question frames Negri’s reading of the history of revolutionary thought, which runs from Machiavelli through the American, French and Russian revolutions. At first glance Negri’s examination would appear to belong more properly in the realm of political philosophy, but as with Althusser’s aleatory materialism, this political thought cannot be separated from an ontological dimension. Ontology asserts itself first in terms of a limit, a barrier, of what it makes it possible to think. If, as we have seen, the barrier that aleatory materialism comes up against is necessity, the assumed necessity of the social order, the barrier that constituent power comes up against is also that of order, but it is not just order as necessity, but order as a pregiven structure that production and practice would only actualise. Order is teleology, the prefiguration of what is possible and can be done. As Negri writes of constitutive power, ‘The political is here production, production “par excellence”, collective and non-teleological’.21 Althusser and Negri are both trying to think the reality of politics, of practice, and this can only be done if one dispenses with the idea of anything that politics would be a realisation of, any order or necessity existing beyond or beneath the play of forces. Negri’s genealogy of constituent power begins with Machiavelli’s Prince, with the encounter of virtú and fortune. For Negri, however, virtú and fortune are not simply the terms of an aleatory encounter, but are fundamentally asymmetrical. Fortune is the dead weight of history, the given situation, within which virtú intervenes. As much as Machiavelli poses the radical

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figure of this eruption, of a practice that constitutes a new order in an interruption in what already exists, he does so in a fundamentally limited manner. Constituent thought is radically atheistic not just in that it dispenses with god, but it dispenses with any pregiven structure, any unity or reality that practice is said to realise. Thus, for Negri Machiavelli is a fundamentally stalled figure of constitutive practice in that the multiplicity of practice is subordinated to the unified figure of the Prince. The task then is a matter of reading the revolutionary process through a sequence that begins with Machiavelli and extends through Spinoza and Marx, each of which will be seen as an increasingly adequate figure. Negri’s genealogy is almost the reverse of Althusser’s: while Althusser turned to political philosophy to produce an ontology that would assert the priority of contingency over necessity, Negri turns to the history of metaphysics to find a figure of constitutive practice. For Negri ‘the real political science of modernity lies in metaphysics’.22 The strong opposition is only apparent, however, Negri’s conception of metaphysics is eccentric to say the least, determined by figures outside of the dominant tradition and turning to texts not understood to be properly philosophical. Of the three philosophers that make up this genealogy – Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx – only the second, Spinoza is generally understood to be a metaphysical thinker, but for Negri even Spinoza’s metaphysics necessarily passes through politics, through the constitutive role of the imagination.23 Negri’s particular understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and politics comes to light in his interpretation of Marx on primitive accumulation. As with Althusser, Negri first locates in the violence of primitive accumulation the absence of any pre-existing foundation; there is only the encounter in the here and now, drawing together the constitutive elements. Negri adds that this violent foundation is immediately constitutive of not only a new order, a new régime of accumulation, but also a new form of right. Primitive accumulation is also always, and immediately, ‘primitive political accumulation,’ the constitution of a new form of authority.24 It is possible to see this accumulation of right as part of the ‘becoming necessary’ of the contingency, the legitimation that transforms a contingent fact into a legitimate result. What interests Negri is the manner in which capital constitutes a social order that constitutes its own ever shifting foundation, actively destroying, through the violence of primitive accumulation, the traditions that constituted the social. However, according to Negri, taken by itself primitive accumulation is inadequate to account for the constitution of the capitalist order. The account of primitive accumulation needs to be coupled with the chapter from Capital on cooperation in order to adequately comprehend the antagonistic constitution of capital. As Negri writes: ‘Cooperation is, in fact, in itself an essentially productive force’.25 As with Althusser’s reading of primitive accumulation, the reading extracts an ontology from what is otherwise a historical examination. Cooperative labour, like the violence of accumulation, constitutes a world but it does so according to a fundamentally different account of right. Capitalist accumulation and cooperation each constitute a form of right, and ‘between equal rights, force decides’.26 History is the relation between these two different ‘rights’, two different modes of association: capitalist violence, which imposes its form of labour and socialisation, and the socialisation produced in the networks of cooperative labour.27 Negri considers this relation to be more antagonistic than dialectical: there is no mediation or synthesis of one by the other. Nonetheless, there is a gradual transformation, and development, a telos even, as the constitutive process encompasses more and more aspects of reality. This telos culminates in a reversal of the relation between force and constitution: primitive accumulation begins with

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capitalism imposing a form of cooperation on disparate bodies, but in the end cooperation is external and prior to capital. Capital is no longer necessary to constitute the cooperative powers of labour, but becomes an extrinsic parasitic force, expropriating a cooperative force that exceeds it. Negri’s thought, like Althusser’s, crosses the terrain from the political, to the social, and the economic, which are not just different figures of the becoming necessary, of the inscription of the event in a structure and a rule, but are increasingly adequate figures of this constituent process. Against the tendency of bourgeois political philosophy to subordinate the constituent process to a distant event, or to contain it in a formal structure, ironically, it is Marx’s critique of political economy that provides the adequate conceptualisation of constituent power. Living labour, the productive force of cooperation beset by the constituted authority of accumulation, constantly recreates the world again. As Negri writes, ‘Living labour constitutes the world, by creatively modeling ex novo, the materials that it touches . . . its constructions are constructions of new being’.28 Marx resolves the problem of constituent power by removing the division between the political, social, and economic dimensions of existence, by flattening them onto the terrain of cooperation and accumulation where existence is created and recreated through the quotidian experience of labour. Thus, the political problem can only be solved through the metaphysics, a metaphysics that is in some sense the absence of metaphysics, or a metaphysics that finds its only possible expression in the multiple relations of constituent power. It is metaphysics of production, not the instrumental action of an individual on an object, but production as the multiple relations of affecting and being affected – or, to put it in Spinoza’s terms – production is nothing other than finite modal existence. As with Althusser’s reading what is at stake in this interpretation is nothing less than the fundamental problem of a materialist philosophy, and as with Althusser this involves a reinterpretation of the fundamental problem of a mode of production. One could say that Negri’s analysis also draws a line of demarcation, not between necessity and contingency in the mode or production, but between a restricted and expansive definition of the mode of production. For Negri the mode of production must be understood not simply as an economic base underlying the superstructure of society, but as the general relation of cooperation and command in society. This expansive sense of the term is made possible by focusing on labour, on living labour, which is always something more than an element in a combinatory that combines ‘forces’ and ‘relations’. For Negri the purely economic understanding of the mode of production mirrors the purely formal and political understanding of the constitution. In each case the actual dynamic of the economics, politics and ontology are overlooked. This dynamic dimension is labour itself, labour understood in its antagonistic materiality. ‘Marx brought to light a commonality of the social, the political, and being that is traversed and always newly defined by living labour its subsidiary associations, and the subjectivities that emerge within it – in short, by constituent power’.29 It is through living labour, through its encounter and struggle with the constituted force of capital that the political and economic structure is transformed, a struggle which can only be understood if it is examined ontologically, as a struggle of being itself. The encounter between the virtú of the prince and the accumulated force of fortune is the first figure of this conflict. Machiavelli’s prince refers this encounter back to an almost transcendental figure. The task for Negri is to retain this eruption of the new, the transformative force without mythologising it, to make it absolutely immanent and quotidian. The transformative force of Machiavelli’s prince must be democratised by Spinoza’s multitude, by the multiple

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productive relations of affecting and being affected. Marx’s ‘living labour’ is the culmination of this series, a culmination that is only possible if the three philosophers are read together, through the intersection of politics and metaphysics.

Philosophy’s outside From this provisional sketch of the differences between Negri and Althusser it is possible to see the way in which their different attempts to extract an ontology from the dense critical historical narrative of primitive accumulation oppose each other. In Althusser the emphasis is on the contingency of the event, an event that underlies the constitution of any world, undermining its rationality and necessity, but the process of becoming necessary is less clear. The multiple figures of this becoming necessary from Machiavelli to Marx develop its expansive sense, but these senses converge on the imaginary constitution of world, which is considered more as a given fact than a constitutive process. In sharp contrast to this, Negri underscores the way in which the opening of primitive accumulation lends itself to an understanding of the way in which the world is created, or constituted, anew from the practical contestation of accumulation and cooperation. From primitive accumulation Althusser constructs an ontology of the event, making the event less a historical exception than a general category of being; Negri, on the other hand turns less towards the event itself than to the constitutive dimension of practice that it makes possible. These differences become all the more extreme when viewed in light of the other thinker’s limitations: Althusser’s ‘becoming necessary’ is broadened to encompass politics, society and economics, but the practical dimension of this process is never revealed, leaving it somewhat mystified; Negri, on the other hand, provides an ontology of the constitution of a social order, focusing on living labour as the nexus by which political and social structures are constituted and contested, but does so by returning linearity and teleology to the process. Telos is a word that runs through Negri’s thought: sometimes it is limited to the desire and intentionality underlying human action, but at others it is extended to the political process. However, Negri’s history of constitutive power, a history in which the various figurations, from Machiavelli’s prince to Marx’s labour-power, become more and more adequate to the constitutive process, indicates a much deeper sense of linearity. Thus, despite my initial words of caution, it is possible to view each as the other’s antithesis. However, it is also possible to see each of their respective process as an attempt to renew and deepen the relation between conditions and activity, conjuncture and practice. Althusser and Negri offer a renewal of Marxist philosophy. They do so not just by inventing a trajectory that passes through Machiavelli and Spinoza, thus uprooting Marx from a limited (and endlessly debated) relation with Hegel, but by determining its specific practice. Materialist philosophy is hostile to the divisions that would not only separate politics and economics, but more importantly from the division that would separate the eternal questions of ontology from the transformations and changes of politics and economics, or, in a word, history. Which is not to say that everything collapses into a mechanistic assertion of the identity of matter. Overcoming the separation between politics, economics and ontology makes it possible to frame new lines of demarcation, lines that are drawn from the reality of political and ideological struggle rather than the textbooks of philosophy.

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In Althusser and Negri’s view, the limitations of confronting this problem are as much conceptual as they are conjunctural, thinking revolution, change and the event, means breaking with a tradition that places necessity over contingency, constituted things over the constitutive process. As much as primitive accumulation makes possible a philosophical rather than just an economic or political investigation, it is an investigation provoked by the event itself, by the vicissitude of history. History means something different in each case. For Althusser, at least during the period of ‘aleatory materialism’ history is defined by the collapse of the determinations that were to function as the fundamental guarantee and justification of the Marxist project – the inevitable collapse of capitalism. It was Althusser’s profound insight to see these determinations as fetters rather than guarantees: the promise of an ultimate direction of history fundamentally obscures the reality of history itself, the reproduction and transformation of the mode of production. For Negri, history is defined by a profound mutation of the relationship between subjectivity, labour and capital. In each case ‘something has snapped,’ but in Althusser’s case it is the project of finding an ultimate guarantee of the Marxist project, while for Negri it is the relation between command and labour that has characterised the capital-worker relationship.30 It is possible to see Negri’s project as more ‘historicist’ in orientation, as more dependent on a particular understanding of the current moment as defined by the hegemony of immaterial labour, and thus having missed Althusser’s fundamental insight regarding the absence of telos of history.31 It is possible, even easy, to interpret the relationship this way, however, it is also possible to see a historical dimension to Althusser’s text as well, not just in the aleatory turn to a contingent history, but in the increased attention to the ‘becoming necessary’ as a fundamental transformation of the imagination and subjectivity. Between the lines of Althusser’s articulation of an aleatory materialism, and definitely in the closing lines on the two concepts of the mode of production, there is a focus on the materialist dimension of the imagination as part of the becoming necessary of the event. This becomes abundantly clear if read in light of Althusser’s earlier texts on ideology and ideological state apparatuses, texts which emerged from the historical moment of 1968 and the struggle over education as reproduction, as becoming necessary.32 Althusser’s later statements on Spinoza and the imaginary are radicalisations of this, in each case the reproduction of subjectivity is viewed as a fundamental component of the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, as crucial to its ‘becoming necessary’ as economic relations. Althusser and Negri’s rupture of the divisions between politics, economics and society reflects an awareness that the separation of these different aspects is becoming increasingly untenable: it is no longer possible to maintain a political or social reproduction that would be propped on the base of production, or alternately to restrict labour to the production of things without including the reproduction of social and political relations. Althusser and Negri’s renewal of materialism is also a response to the increasing incorporation of subjectivity into the productive process. On this point Althusser and Negri are opposed as well, but it is not the static opposition between structure and subject, conjuncture and historicism, but a dynamic opposition that foregrounds the political problem, the forces of labour and subjection that determine the terrain for communist struggle. Thus, the ultimate merit of Althusser and Negri’s projects is to turn our attention towards the core of a materialist philosophy, the point where the power of thought, its ability to construct new concepts and break through ossified structures, is determined by the event, by a history that constitutes its necessary outside.

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Notes 1 Marx 1977, p. 875. 2 Althusser 1990a, p. 206. 3 Althusser 1990a, p. 249. 4 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 174. 5 Machiavelli 1994, p.18. 6 Althusser 2006b, p. 198. 7 Althusser 1999, p. 73. 8 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 193. 9 Althusser 1969a, p. 104. 10 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 193. 11 Rousseau 1992, p. 51. 12 Marx 1977, p. 899. 13 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 197. 14 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 202. 15 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 66. 16 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 179. 17 Balibar 1996, p. 115. 18 ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’, in Althusser 2006a, p. 188. 19 Negri 1996a, p. 54. 20 Negri 1999, p. 1. 21 Negri 1999, p. 28. 22 Negri 1999, p. 305. 23 Negri 1991, p. 122. 24 Althusser 1999, p. 125. 25 Negri 1999, p. 259. 26 Marx 1977, p. 344. 27 Negri 1996b, p. 165. 28 Negri 1999, p. 326. 29 Negri 1999, p. 327. 30 Althusser 1979, p. 226. 31 Hardt and Negri 2004, p. 109. 32 Read 2003, p. 137.

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17 The impossible break: ideology in movement between philosophy and politics1 Isabelle Garo

A

lthusser figures among those French philosophers, active between 1960 and 1980, whose work continues to be read today or, more precisely, whose work started to be read again following the posthumous publication of his autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever, in 1992. But Althusser, in contrast to some of his contemporaries, such as Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, presents the following distinguishing singularity: he was a Marxist, and remained so to the end. Moreover, his theoretical commitment to Marxism was indissociable from a political commitment – critical but constant – to the French Communist Party. This explains why his reading of Marx echoed so loudly, provoking intense debate well beyond the restricted circle of philosophy readers. We must be careful, then, not to reduce Althusser’s singular contribution to a now vanished conjuncture, or to a purely academic philosophical work, for what distinguishes his intervention is its theoretical as well as political dimension – in that, it remains faithful to a Marxist tradition that is situated, by definition, on the very hinges of the articulation of theory and politics. Contemporary politics, although it is invariably the horizon of Althusser’s reflections, is almost never its direct object; the same is true of the social and economic reality of the moment. It is as ‘class struggle in theory’, and only in theory, that philosophy is redefined, with the autobiographical texts stressing, on their side, the strategic, and eminently political, dimension supposedly motivating this displacement. In that respect, Althusserian Marxism turns out to be profoundly paradoxical vis-à-vis the tradition it claims as its own. The problem, then, is to understand why Althusser’s theoretical elaboration manages at once to produce, and partly to miss, the political consequences it puts in its sights, even though it never fully states them or elaborates them as such. Indeed, he who made Marxism ‘the theory which makes possible an understanding of its own genesis’2 was likewise the person who never committed to theorising to the end his own intervention in a specific conjuncture – and this despite the fact that he was always careful to point out that it is precisely there, at the point of insertion of a theory in its time, that the full scope of a theory could play itself out.3 In

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the Althusserian oeuvre, it is the notion of ideology that propagates, across its successive redefinitions, this paradox while obscuring it. If ideology, as Althusser defines it, is by no means a stable concept, established once and for all, it is precisely because he concentrates the entire strategic force of the approach in the course of a movement that encompasses the reorientations and gradual increase of that approach. This movement gives Althusser’s work its problematic unity, composed as it is of the open series of its successive rectifications, including the key moment of self-criticism properly so-called. In this respect, the question of the relationship between ideology and science, as well as of the (kindred but different) relationship between ideology and politics, allows us to follow closely this complex and fruitful trajectory, a trajectory that opens with a rigorous partisanship, only to end on the confession of an ‘imaginary Marxism’: I would say that, in a certain sense, Aron was not altogether wrong. We fabricated an ‘imaginary’ philosophy for Marx, a philosophy that did not exist in his work – if one adheres scrupulously to the letter of his texts.4 It would be a mistake to read this formulation as a condemnation, for in this passage Althusser is really claiming, not condemning, imagination. Far from aligning himself with Raymond Aron’s pejorative gloss, Althusser uses one of the keywords retrospectively associated with May ‘685 to proclaim anew the need to go beyond the literality of Marxian texts and to write what was not written, instead of just exhuming what has so far remained buried.6 In speaking about a ‘philosophy for Marx’, Althusser is essentially returning to the initial thesis of a philosophy that Marx himself did not elaborate, but is nevertheless summoned and demanded by his work. Philosophy is, certainly, the heart of such a project: while Althusser at first defines it as Marx’s philosophy in a latent state, giving himself the modest task of rendering it manifest, in a second moment he claims that this philosophy will not be a ‘Marxist philosophy’ as such, but ‘will simply be a philosophy that takes its place in the history of philosophy’, a philosophy ‘for Marxism’.7 This problematic grounding in philosophy, and this (euphemistically voiced) political will, form the living contradiction that crystallises a notion of ideology as a perpetual construction site, one whose main stages we must now analyse.

An epistemological break The first stage corresponds to the publication of For Marx, that major work from 1965 where Althusser, in the context of his treatment of Marx’s intellectual development, devotes several pages to the question of ideology. There, he announces the ‘Marxist principles of a theory of ideological development’, one that affirms the overall coherence of an ideological field, ‘internally unified by its own problematic’,8 within which singular ideologies develop. The notion of ideology serves to designate what Marx’s thought frees itself from and against which it is built: ‘The contingency of Marx’s beginnings was this enormous layer of ideology beneath which he was born, this crushing layer which he succeeded in breaking through’.9 Here is the first mention of the contingency that alone can account for the possibility of the rupture with the world that Althusser designates as ‘the world of the German ideology’, a world he describes

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as asphyxiated by the decomposition and fragmentation of Hegelian idealism. The thesis of an ‘epistemological break’, which opens the book and which Althusser never rescinded, makes the drafting of The German Ideology in 1845 a key moment in the joint foundation of a new science and a new philosophy. From the outset, in other words, Marxism is identified with a theoretical event, the foundation of a science, one whose lucid consciousness regarding the conditions of its own scientificity ensures the definitive split with the ideological unconscious. The figure of science is set up and against the perennial image of ideology as a homogenous place, as a circle that nourishes its presuppositions with its conclusions. Science, too, is selfreferential, but in a different way: it posits, in full knowledge of its cause, its conditions as its point of departure. From this position of rupture, it constitutes its proper field and its distinct world, its truth as well as its reality. On this occasion, Althusser’s much discussed intervention in the debate concerning the works of the young Marx provides the philological axe for an assault on the political Marxism of those who claim to value his early texts. We must not forget that these texts – particularly the Manuscripts of 1844, which were first published in Moscow in 1932 – have enjoyed considerable acclaim in the wake of the Liberation, as they seem to dovetail perfectly with the theoretical and strategic need for a non-Stalinist Marx while avoiding the economism of the Second International. It was through these texts that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty discovered Marxism,10 and a good many leading Marxists – György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Herbert Marcuse and Henri Lefebvre – will draw from them, albeit in different ways, the means to redirect Marxist reflection towards a consideration of human subjectivity and the affirmation of the centrality of the struggle against alienation. That is how, in the course of the history of Western Marxism, and in a complex context marked by the victory over Nazism, by the absence of a revolutionary dynamic after the 1920s, and – we should not forget – by the growing disenchantment with the USSR, the question of Marx’s relationship to Hegel resurfaces and finds itself once more at centre stage. As Perry Anderson points out, this development is an inverted mirror of Marx’s own historical trajectory.11 If we add to this situation the chronology, as well as the conditions of the reception in Europe and France of Marx’s and Engels’s works, then we see that everything agrees in pushing the Marxist debate onto philosophical ground, where the relationship to Hegel becomes a central problem.12 Althusser inscribes his first intervention in this framework. And if he pauses for a moment on the historical conditions of the reception of Marx’s work within the international Communist movement, the real focus of his analysis is on how German social-democrats in the 1930s used the works of the young Marx against Lenin in the hope of promoting an ethical version of Marxism.13 As a result, the Althusserian rupture, which sees itself as political, is not directly related to the more recent French conjuncture that effectively renders it such, and that sees Henri Lefebvre and Roger Garaudy, but also Auguste Cornu, Emile Bottigelli and Jean-Toussaint Desanti, intervene on the question of Marx’s relationship to Hegel.14 Sidestepping the terms of the contemporary debate while inscribing itself in it, and starting from the astounding assertion of the total absence of an ‘authentic theoretical tradition’ in the French workers’ movement,15 Althusser’s first intervention is to tackle the more general theoretical question of the relationship between science and ideology. Althusser begins by defining ideology as a discourse, a discourse unaware of its own presuppositions, and the point is to lead it back to its own ideological field, to its birthplace, so as to define a true knowledge that stands both outside and against it. He is, first and foremost, situating himself in relation to Marx: for

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Althusser, ideology no longer designates the relationship to the world of men who forge their consciousness as the consciousness of their social being, as Marx argues in The German Ideology, but the contrary of a science whose tell-tale sign is the brutal change of ‘fields’ that constitutes it as such. In sum, Althusser wants to make Hegelian philosophy the ground of this ideology, while Marx uses the term to attack a Young-Hegelian movement inapt at playing the critical and politically transformative role it supposedly endorsed. Under the term ideology, Marx and Engels actually designate the set of representations that occupy a complex and contradictory function within the social totality, a totality inverted in the capitalist mode of production; that explains the relative power of these representations, but does not allow one to assert their primacy, as the Young Hegelians do: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of man, the language of real life.16 For Althusser, ideology is first and foremost Hegelian philosophy, which Marx confronted with reality itself, a reality that presents itself not as that which is external to thought, but as that which stands over and against this very ideology. Reality is a true knowledge: Marx never disavowed this his decisive experience of the direct discovery of reality via those who had lived it directly and thought it with the least possible deformation: the English economists . . . and the French philosophers and politicians . . . of the eighteenth century.17 Reality, in the end, is thought, albeit thought that shows the least possible ‘deformation’: ideology and science are two orders of discourse, and the rupture between them is here enigmatically attenuated to being a simple deformation, susceptible of degrees. Ideology, as Althusser defines it, is a new concept, one that has little to do with the Marxian theses on the subject, even though it is introduced in the midst of Althusser’s efforts to present Marxism as the arrival of science.18 The distance Althusser takes from the Marxian legacy – under the break attributed to Marx himself – turns out to be as decisive as it is invisible. Althusser presents Marx’s ‘discoveries’ as stemming from a science, one all the more adept at understanding its own genesis for being pure theoretical irruption, as an event that speaks itself, for it is at bottom nothing other than its own utterance. Althusser describes the task of Marx’s elaboration as an epistemological enterprise: the critical purification of the immediately given, of the first, and biased, representation. Once bound to this conception of science, Marxism’s theoretical approach finds itself placed in a discursive universe, and the relevance of Marx’s work comes to depend primarily on the conditions under which it is read. Announcing, in Marx’s name, a number of theses whose paternity is not easily determined, For Marx is a profoundly disconcerting book in which Althusser presents his most audacious inventions as the regeneration of truths that had lain dormant for much too long. Powerful and iconoclastic in the way it ignores the Marxist traditions he dismisses or denounces, oftentimes summarily, the Althusserian gesture reconciles its overt (ostentatious, even) fidelity and its reclaimed heresy, thereby precipitating a radical overhaul that inscribes its destabilising philosophical turn in the very heart of the theoretical edifice built by Marx’s work.

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A practice of reading We might see the Preface to Reading Capital, published in 1965, as constituting the second stage in the definition of the notion of ideology: Althusser undertakes to specify his reading now that its project is quite well defined. Most importantly, though, from the Preface onwards, the very operation of reading, together with an implicit hermeneutic, is put at the centre of the Marxian approach: Marx started from the illusion of being able to read the world ‘at sight’,19 only to come to recognise the distance to the world constitutive of the activity of knowledge (connaissance). In other words, it is no longer things that offer themselves up for reading, but texts, all of them written by an author who is himself a ‘prodigious reader’,20 and who himself went from a first to a second ‘practice of reading’. We can appreciate here the extent to which the recasting of the notion of ideology – which Althusser puts in relation to science instead of to a social reality21 – brings in its wake not only a new approach to Marx but, more importantly, an extreme valuing of the interpretative moment. The latter has become a specific practice, one that, incidentally, brings with it the notion that only an extraordinary effort of analysis and understanding, the exclusive task of philosophers, allows access to Marxism. From this point of view, if it is evident that the term ‘Marxism’ has always designated a theoretical tradition riddled by internal debates, some as lively as they are complex (indeed, technical), it is likewise evident that it had till then defined itself through its link – direct and reciprocal – with political practice. To Althusser, however, it is above all in the ‘order of discourse’ and within the theoretical field that the relations between theories and among theoreticians, who are tasked not only with providing the key to subsequent Marxisms but above all to the letter of Marx’s texts, are constructed and stratified. Thus, Althusser argues that Marx developed two successive reading operations in his analysis of Smith’s political economy: In the first reading, Marx reads his predecessor’s discourse (Smith’s for instance) through his own discourse. . . . But there is in Marx a second quite different reading, with nothing in common with the first. . . . [W]hat classical political economy does not see, is not what it does not see, it is what it sees; it is not what it lacks, on the contrary, it is what it does not lack; it is not what it misses, on the contrary, it is what it does not miss. The oversight, then, is not to see what one sees, the oversight no longer concerns the object, but the sight itself. The oversight is an oversight that concerns vision: non-vision is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence has a necessary relationship with vision.22 In some twenty pages at the start of the book, Althusser thematises the metaphor of sight and oversight, thus casting his approach to Capital at the outset as a vertiginous meta-discourse. The visual metaphor is of course drawn from Marx: it is well known that Marx, in The German Ideology, describes ideology using the optical model of a dark room. Marx, however, does not tie the inversion of images produced by the dark room to the strictly ideological inversion of representations, which allows one to denounce their illusory character, but, rather and foremost, to the real causes of the formation of such representations – causes, which shed light on the social impact of such representations and have to be sought in the inversion of the capitalist world itself, where the producers of wealth are radically dispossessed of it. In

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Reading Capital, Althusser does not use the inversion model, but the discourse of the infinite intertwining of sights and oversights, the Foucauldian thematic of the visible and the invisible,23 which strips ideology of any representative function by making the real an object, always already theoretically constructed, that allows only for an infinite gloss. The very definition of the critique of political economy is fundamentally altered. When Althusser eventually launches into his reading of Capital, he cites a long passage (from Chapter 19 of Volume I) about the relationship between the price and the value of labour, and about the limits of classical political economy on the issue. It is striking that Althusser’s commentary should deal with this text only through the lens of a relationship between question and answer, as a ‘concept present in an unuttered form in the emptinesses in the answer’,24 as that makes the passage ‘a protocol of Marx’s reading of classical economics’25 – while evading both the economic heart of Marx’s complex critique of classical political economy, and the conditions for the elaboration of his concept of surplus-value. But if we look at Marx’s critique, particularly as he develops it in Theories of Surplus-Value,26 we shall see that his position, in or around 1860, is that classical political economy answers to the need expressed by capitalism and its dominant class for a reliable understanding of its own functioning. This dominant class, however, cannot develop the historical knowledge of economic and social formation to the end, to the point where it would recognise exploitation and identify its internal contradictions. According to Marx, this mixture of scientific clairvoyance and class partisanship leads Smith to confuse profit and surplus-value, and thus to obscure the true origins of the latter, namely: unpaid surplus-labour. This analysis not only keeps Marx from presenting the relationship between ideology and science as a break, but also to preferring the adjective, ‘ideological’, to the substantive, ‘ideology’, as the former is more susceptible to being inscribed in a complex analysis.27 In Althusser, the very notion of a ‘break’ displaces the complex problem of ideological struggles onto the field of a philosophical tradition: that of the age-old struggle against superstition and prejudice. The epistemological filiation and the reference – indirect but constant – to Bachelard goes hand in hand with the recourse to Spinoza and entails the rejection of every effort to evaluate the real in terms of an adequation to the external world.28 Althusser’s Spinoza, however, is also the foremost thinker of the distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge, someone he can pit head on against Hegel, that promoter of the ‘innocent but sly concept of “supersession” (Aufhebung)’.29 There is no doubt that the success that Althusser’s major works enjoyed at the time of their publication stemmed at least in part from a theoretical creativity that broke both with the orthodoxy of the diamat and with the vague ecumenism of the humanist slogan as the only path to de-Stalinisation in the midst of the Cold War. Equally important elements in this theoretical creativity are its ability to invoke a variety of theories, to open itself up to classical and contemporary authors, to make room for psychoanalysis and the French epistemology of Cavaillès, Canguilhem and Bachelard, and to embrace the then-widespread hatred of Hegel. It seduced an ever-growing number of cultivated readers, all of whom anticipated eagerly the appearance of each new text during these prolific years, as well as a small coterie of brilliant students, who suddenly found Marxism transformed into an interpretative discipline, one that made political engagement possible without ever leaving theory, one that was antiestablishment while still firmly rooted in the university establishment. In these years of political contradictions, with their interrelated mobilisations and transformations, the perspective

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opened up by Althusserianism was ultimately coherent and gratifying. Althusserianism, after all, defined itself as productive ‘labour’, as a particular scientific ‘practice’, indeed as a fullblown politics – a subversive one, no less – that denounced not only the state of the world, but also a Marxist tradition locked in battle with a Communist history precisely because of the absence of conceptualisation. Claiming, nevertheless, this same Marxist tradition, still alive but at pains to analyse its own historical situation or the ongoing social, economic and political transformations, Althusser aligns himself fully with this current, which was still powerful, but was also already on the way to marginalisation, both ideologically and politically.

Ideological state apparatuses Following the publication of Reading Capital, Althusser, emboldened by its ripple-effects but also driven by his own theoretical needs, radicalises the self-critical turn away from his past ‘theoreticism’.30 More importantly, though, is the fact that the continued pursuit of his reflections, which from this point forward are more clearly centred around the question of ideology, leads eventually to the introduction of the concept of ‘ideological state apparatuses’ (ISA). The notion of ideology, thus regrounded and reinscribed in social history, now becomes the driving force for a critical and polemical elaboration, though one that sees itself as constructive and heuristic, and also as politically sharper. While Althusser may deem it imperative to counter a determinism of the economicist type by affirming the active role of ideology, it still remains to be specified how the ‘backlash effects’ of the superstructure on the base is organised and produced. The notion of ideological state apparatuses is introduced to consolidate and relaunch the analysis. Althusser returns to the thesis of the ‘complex whole structured in dominance’, which he had already announced in For Marx, and which had allowed him to appropriate the Maoist notion of ‘overdetermined contradiction’. But it is from Sur la reproduction (On Reproduction),31 written in 1969 but only published in 1995, that Althusser extracts, in 1970, the famous article first published in La Pensée, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’. In this important text, Althusser spells out, and connects, two major theses on ideology: the first is that ideology exists materially, in an instituted apparatus; the second is that the function that defines it is to constitute individuals as subjects.32 These are, undoubtedly, the text’s two most theoretically fecund theses, and they remain the most lasting. The manuscript from 1969 opens on the question of the reproduction of productive forces and of existing relations of production,33 which Althusser accuses both Marx and Lenin of having misunderstood.34 This process of global reproduction, which bears upon an articulation of instances, happens at all levels at once, and puts into play what Althusser calls ‘the “floors” of the superstructure’ at the heart of the Marxian ‘topography’.35 But, he hastens to add, the reciprocal action of these same floors imposes the recognition of the limits of the building metaphor, its purely descriptive nature. Thus, the notion of the ISA is aimed at dynamising the structure and thinking its transformations. It also flies in the face of every mechanistic understanding of the relationship between the infrastructure and the superstructure. The effect produced by this theoretical innovation is considerable: it delocalises ‘power’ by wrenching it away from the state level and dispersing it through all the instances that take charge, on their ‘floor’, of the function of reproduction: law, religion, school, the family, and so on. Here,

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once again, we see that Althusser has learned the lesson from Foucault:36 he politicises every structure, all the while decentring politics and redefining it, at least tendentially, as a splintered and fragmented struggle, as the non-totalisable whole of specific struggles. As a result, ideology, thus redefined as the occasion of major confrontations, tends paradoxically to be resituated to a distinct social level, in which the class struggle is fought in a manner that is at once specific and decisive. Thus, starting with an examination of the level of the law, Althusser denounces the illusory nature of a formalism that eludes the relations of production that are its very content: ‘The Law only attains the form of Law, that is to say, its formal systematicity, on the condition that the relations of production as a function of which it exists be completely absent from the Law itself’.37 This strong thesis, which runs quite bluntly counter to the current of a specific struggle for a law or laws, which struggle would emerge as crucial, allows for a first theoretical operation, namely: the valuing of relations of production over productive forces. In the context of the time, it was a strategic thesis that confronted a Stalinism of planification with the Maoist conception of the primacy of relations of production.38 Similarly, in addressing the question of the state and its specialised apparatuses, Althusser relies on the contemporaneous work of Nico Poulantzas39 to distinguish ‘state power’ from a relatively autonomous ‘state apparatus’ capable of surviving the transformations undergone by this same state power. Next to, and in tandem with, ‘state power’, there are ‘ideological state apparatuses’, each of which is composed of its own institutions and organisations, that form separate systems. It is here, precisely, that ideology is redefined once more as that which cements an ISA by being realised in it: ‘The ideology realised in an ISA guarantees its systematic unity by “anchoring” itself to the material functions specific to each ISA; these functions are not reducible to this ideology, but serve as its “support”’.40 Ideology gains its relative autonomy, or rather its relative autonomies, via the multiplicity of ISAs it associates itself with.41 Most importantly, however, ideology becomes a structural element whose subjects are illusory artefacts, and whose purpose is to ‘make things and people “walk on their own”’.42 The polemic immediately raised by this affirmation turns on this anonymity, this way of subjectively evading social struggles by tying them to structural effects of which people are only the functional support.43 Similarly, in the context of May ‘68, Althusser’s analyses echo the critiques of the PCF and the ‘respectful left’44 formulated by the extreme left in the context of that exceptional social re-politisation and mobilisation, one that went far beyond that single month of May. We can see why so many actors at the time saw right away in Althusser an innovative Marxism that managed better than any other to tear asunder the yoke of orthodoxy. Thus, and overall, the major thesis of the manuscript – which announces that ‘the function of the Superstructure is to ensure the reproduction of conditions of production through a system of different forms of repression and ideologisation, all of which link back to the capitalist State’45 – is to give to reproduction a consolidating function that underlines the building’s structural stability, even if Althusser is careful to make room for the contradictions that ‘grate the gears’.46 The absence of every ‘subjective moment’, of the individuals who on every side were becoming conscious actors in this struggle, leads Althusser to spell out the characteristics of a ‘proletarian ideology’ in terms that sound strangely dogmatic, and this in spite of the fact that the coherence of such a claim in light of the set of preceding theses on ideology was by no means self-evident:47

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Proletarian organisations also ‘march’ to the tune of ideology. But, when it is a matter of revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist organisations, they march to the tune of a (primarily political but also moral) proletarian ideology that has been transformed by the tireless educational action of the Marxist-Leninist science of the capitalist mode of production, which is hence the science of capitalist social formations, and hence also the science of revolutionary class struggles and of the socialist revolution.48 The notion of a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ education is certainly surprising. Still, and despite the formula’s passéiste inflexibility, the thesis poses no problem for our foregoing analyses, as it, too, underscores the persistent gap between Althusserianism’s critical theorisation and the conceptualisation of political practice that struggles to define the conditions for a real – strategic and not merely organisational – renewal. This gap persists even in the face of the spectacular interventions at that level at the end of the 1970s and of the denunciation of the PCF’s hierarchical rigidity.49 There, too, ideology is established as the principal terrain of political struggle, offering only the perspective of a struggle without subject or goals, without author or end, one that for that very reason lacks a clearly defined perspective of the radical transformation of economic and social formation. But that is precisely the difficulty simultaneously confronting the left and the far left after the failures of May and of the programme commun of the Union de la gauche. If we follow Althusserianism in displacing political intervention into philosophy, then everything is played out essentially in one sector of reality, that of ideas, which in one fell swoop lose their representative status so as to have only a reproductive function. There lies the major gap separating Althusser from Marx. For Marx, ideology, understood as an inverted and partial representation, could still be examined in terms of relative adequation, of a partial grasping of its object. Marx could consequently conceive ideological struggle as the dialectical moment of the formation of consciousness, individual as well as collective, through which individuals fought out their struggles to the end.50 From this point of view, individuals as such retain a decisive role in Marx, whether he is talking about those concerned directly by the reappropriation of their productive forces, as the condition for the emergence from alienation,51 or whether he is trying to understand the rise of ‘a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole’.52 Theoretical anti-humanism, the arbitrary dismissal of the notion of alienation, and the eschewing of the negation of the negation make up a system,53 and this explains why it is so difficult to reinsert the battles of ideas into the socio-economic totality, understood, not as a proper instance, but as a set of complex and contradictory functions that are always linked to a conjuncture wherein the nature of knowledge (or illusion), an apologetic (or subversive) function, and direct (or indirect) political impact are singularly combined. The Althusserian notion of ideology, conversely, carves out its own space: once it is displaced and redoubled in the very fabric of the real, the epistemological break divides the social totality itself by infinitely leafing through its layers and separating their concrete contradictions from one another. Tendentially, then, there are only ideologies, all of which have a proper history, which ideology in general lacks:54 this singular remark upholds the eternal and ineluctable social presence of ideology while it also postulates the heterogeneity, the singular identities, recalcitrant to every analysis of the whole, of ideologies. If ‘ideology is eternal, like the unconscious’,55 its manifestations are singular, like dreams, and accessible only to

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a nominalism that itemises its forms only because it has no hopes of formulating its laws. Althusser will advocate this nominalism in his late work, but we can see traces of it already in his earliest texts.

‘Ideological forms’ The final developments of the analysis are surprising: on the one hand, Althusser affirms the material dissemination of ideology, but on the other he minimises its role and rehabilitates the old notion of imagination, thereby delimiting anew ideology as a sphere separate from the real: ‘Ideology is an imaginary “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.56 The paragraph following this statement sees Althusser waging a fierce battle against the thesis that ideology is the reflection of the ‘conditions of existence of men, i.e., their real world’.57 In defining ideology as the representation of individuals ‘to their real conditions of existence’, and not as the representation of these conditions themselves, Althusser may seem to be indulging in a Byzantine taste for nuance. But the remark is in fact crucial, for it disconnects, once again, representation from its object, it stretches to the breaking point the relationship between ideology and the real contradictions that constitute its stakes, it imposes its limits upon it while also granting it its relative validity and its determined social function. Instead of being shot through by the real contradictions of the real, ideology is situated entirely on the side of the functions of preservation and reproduction, thus authorising the splendid autonomy of class struggle in theory, but also automatically depriving itself of social and political effects beyond it. When the Althusserian notion of ideology at last reaches the end of its successive redefinitions, it closes in on itself, encompassing Marxism itself in the process: ideas are active, though not under their properly theoretical forms, but only ‘in and through their ideological forms’.58 That holds for Marx’s thought as well. Indeed, it is to Marx that Althusser attributes this operation of theoretical encompassment, an operation that is in line with the intuitions developed since For Marx: ‘The important thing to grasp here is that this operation of critical rectification is not imposed from without on the works of Marx and his successors, but results from the application of these works to themselves’.59 However, by a ‘stupefying historical irony’, Marx was unable to foresee that his own thought might be perverted, that it, too, would become a ‘doctrine’: this ominous diagnosis forecloses the possibility of preserving the cleavage between ideology and science, but also of abandoning it! The paradox has now reached its apex: ideology remains the other of science while also being a deformed version of science and its sole social medium. Althusser’s first delineation of the notion has at this point become quite blurred, but the affirmation of a specific ideological instance remains valid; indeed, it sums up, without stabilising it into a system, Althusser’s philosophical trajectory, its central axis, if not its foundation wall. Ideology is revealed to be a limit-concept, one that, by dint of wanting to be autonomous and self-descriptive, leads to the aporia of an ‘imaginary philosophy’, one that ends up producing the conditions of its own disappearance and turning against itself the weapons of critique. Thus, the analysis of the successive revisions of the notion of ideology brings into focus the coherence, always sought after but never achieved, that is, indeed, the coherence of the entire Althusserian oeuvre. If that oeuvre does not yield the general theory of ideology that Althusser

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was calling for in 1969,60 it still provides a substantial body of material and, more importantly, an original overall approach that had a profound impact on the times. Similarly, what is outlined beyond the epistemological break between science and ideology – a break that cannot be located and a rupture that is never achieved, as Althusser himself admitted when he replaced the break with the figure of a ‘perpetual’ infighting61 – is the reality of another break: the break between Althusser and a (notably French) Marxist tradition, the endless rupture and impossible divorce with the Party that was then the main political agent. That rupture, as inaugural as it is interminable, is what accompanies the unfailing political commitment that runs through Althusser’s texts. Saying so does not amount to ignoring the internal fractures and self-critical scansions of the Althusserian oeuvre. But it does allow us, beyond the Althusser ‘case’ and the pathology it tends sometimes to be reduced to, to link those fractures and scansions to an authentic concern for coherence that went hand in hand with a critical political will; their impossible alliance was a spur to the writing of an oeuvre composed not only of returns, retreats and incessant rectifications, but also of positions maintained all the way through. Translated from the French by Emiliano Battista.

Notes 1 The original version of this text appeared in Louis Althusser, une lecture de Marx edited by Jean-Claude Bourdin (PUF 2008) under the title ‘La coupure impossible: L‘idéologie en mouvement, entre philosophie et politique, dans la pensée de Louis Althusser‘. 2 ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 63. 3 See Althusser 1995b, p. 196. ‘Objectively, no other form of political intervention was possible within the party other than a purely theoretical one, it was even necessary to take the existing accepted theory and direct it against the Party’s own use’. 4 ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 258. 5 In what concerns this retrospective reading and its critique, we should refer to Kristin Ross’s essential book, May 68 and its Afterlives (Ross 1992). 6 See ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 174. 7 ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 258. 8 ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 62. 9 ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 74. 10 Christofferson 2004, p. 28. 11 Anderson 1976, p. 52. 12 On the complex relationship the French Socialist and Communist movements have to Hegel, see Kelly 1982. 13 See ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, pp. 51eeqq. 14 This debate, which peaked in the years between 1950 and 1956 in Nouvelle Critique, also served as the opportunity for the PCF and its many theoretical journals to organise, during that same period, a number of very well-attended workshops and conferences. 15 See ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, pp. 25–7. 16 Marx and Engels 1998, p. 47. 17 ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 78.

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18 Speaking of the Althusserian notion of ideology, Étienne Balibar talks about a ‘fundamentally non-Marxist concept’; see Balibar 1991a, p. 104. 19 Althusser 1970, p. 16. 20 Althusser, 1970, p. 18. 21 See Ricoeur 1986, p. 102. 22 Althusser, 1970, pp. 18, 20, 21. 23 Althusser refers explicitly to The History of Madness, by his former student Michel Foucault (see 1970, p. 45). Prior to Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty had thematised the issue; see Merleau-Ponty 1964, pp. 162–3. 24 Althusser, 1970, p. 23. 25 Althusser, 1970, p. 21. 26 The discussion of Smith’s political economy is to be found in the third chapter of Theories of Surplus-Value, Volume 1. 27 See Garo 2004. 28 See Althusser 1997a, p. 9. ‘What also fascinated me about Spinoza was his philosophical strategy. Jacques Derrida has spoken a lot about strategy in philosophy, and he is perfectly right, since every philosophy is a dispositif of theoretical combat that disposes of theses as so many strongholds or prominent places so as to be able, in its aim and strategic attacks, to take over the theoretical places fortified and occupied by the adversary’. 29 ‘On the Young Marx’ in Althusser 1969a, p. 82. In a striking passage from Althusser’s self-criticism, he states that ‘whatever you do, you cannot find in Spinoza what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction’; see ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ in Althusser 1976a, p. 141. 30 This turn starts in 1967, as Althusser himself states; see ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ in Althusser 1976a, pp. 165–7. It is fully heralded by ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, in 1972. 31 See Jacques Bidet’s introduction, ‘Une invitation à relire Althusser’, Bidet 1995. 32 Bidet 1995, p. 12; for Althusser’s two theses, see Althusser 1995a, pp. 219 and 223. 33 Althusser 1995a, p. 74. 34 ‘Marx in his Limits’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 98–9: ‘I believe that this may be called one of the “absolute limits” which the “Marxist theory of the state” comes up against, before coming to a dead stop. Neither in Marx nor in Lenin do we find, to my knowledge – at least not in their explicit discussion of the state – any mention of the state’s function in reproduction’. 35 Althusser 1995a, p. 82. 36 As Toni Negri notes, adding that this is, as he sees it, about ‘a postmodern expansion of the power of ISA’; see Negri 1996a, p. 57. 37 Althusser 1995a, p. 90. 38 Althusser 1995a, p. 48n. 90. 39 See Poulantzas 1995. 40 Althusser 1995a, p. 102. 41 Althusser names eight: School, Family, Religious, political, union, Information, EditingBroadcasting and Cultural apparatuses (upper- and lower-cases are Althusser’s); see Althusser 1995a, p. 107. 42 Althusser 1995a, p. 124. 43 See Thompson 1978, p. 377; Brohm 1999, p. 51; Berger 1993, pp. 62–5; Rancière 2011, pp. 133–4; Vincent 1999, p. 150.

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44 As Jean-Paul Sartre defined it: ‘a “respectful left” is one which respects the values of the right even though it does not share them’; see Sartre 1983, p. 261 (translation modified). 45 Althusser 1995a, p. 156. 46 Althusser 1995a, p. 119. 47 The fact that Althusser, aware of the problem, points out in a footnote that we are passing from a ‘spontaneous proletarian ideology’ to a ‘proletarian ideology whose Marxist-Leninist scientific content is becoming increasingly sharper does not change this fact; see Althusser 1995a, p. 215n. 110. 48 Althusser 1995a, p. 215. 49 See, notably, Althusser 1977b and 1978c. 50 Althusser 1995a, p. 185. 51 See Marx and Engels 1998, p. 96. ‘The appropriation of these forces is itself nothing more than the development of the individual capacities corresponding to the material instruments of production. The appropriation of a totality of instruments is, for this very reason, the development of a totality of capacities in the individual themselves’. 52 Marx and Engels 2005, p. 54. 53 Lucien Sève has shown that these notions remain present in the late Marx. Although he first formulated his objections in the early 1970s, and repeatedly reiterated them, they never received a reply from Althusser; see Sève 2004 Volume 2, pp. 23–32. 54 Althusser 1995a, pp. 209–10. 55 Althusser 1995a, p. 210. 56 Althusser 1995a, p. 216; see also Althusser 1971a, p. 162. 57 Althusser 1995a, p. 217; see also Althusser 1971a, p. 164. 58 ‘Marx in his Limits’ in Althusser 2006a, p. 48. 59 Althusser 1990a, p. 61. 60 Althusser then announced the project to produce ‘a general theory of ideology’; see Althusser 1995a, p. 209. (Anglophone readers can find this in Althusser 2003, p. 14). 61 ‘Reply to John Lewis’ in Althusser 1976a, pp. 121–2.

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18 The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious Pascale Gillot

I

n ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Althusser claims that he intends to propound a theory of Ideology in general, in the same sense that Freud propounded, at the turn of the twentieth century, a theory of the Unconscious.1 Such a theory of Ideology is said to be a general theory, in contradistinction with what would be a theory of ideologies, depending on the particular imaginary formations belonging to the various societies in the course of history. It means that Ideology ‘in general’ is considered through its ‘omnihistoric’ reality, what Althusser calls its eternity, that it is endowed as such with a specific reality and universal laws, representing its own causal effectivity. It also entails an important renewal of the traditional topographical representation, in Marx, of the relation between infrastructure and superstructure: the latter being composed, according to the Preface to the Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy,2 of two elements: the political-legal sphere (the state’s institutions) and the ideology itself, identified with the realm of conscious representations (ideas, beliefs, moral norms, philosophy, religion, and so on). In particular, the Althusserian insistence upon the limits of the Marxian metaphor of the edifice (the ‘topography’, or topique) leads to a specific and new reading of traditional notions such as ‘the determination in the last instance’ (of superstructure by infrastructure), defined as a determination in the last instance alone, or the relative autonomy of superstructure.3 The omni-historical reality, or necessity, of ideology, its fundamental irreducibility, is due to the fact that each form of society, whatever it may be – even a communist society, that would have got rid of the mechanisms of exploitation – generates or ‘secrets away’ its system of representations, ideas, beliefs: an imaginary (complex, doubly speculary) relation to ‘reality’. For, as already established in For Marx, ideology is the necessary ‘element’ in which the life of human societies takes place, and therefore constitutes an ‘essential structure’ in the historical life of societies in general.4 According to Althusser, this structural necessity, neglected in traditional Marxist studies, must on the contrary be recognised and understood. Thus he is led to a ‘materialism of the imaginary’. Following a Spinozistic path (the theory of the ‘First Level of Knowledge’ in Ethica), such a materialism rejects the assimilation of ideology to a simple kind of error or ignorance5, that is, to a mere ‘reflection’ or ‘echo’ of the ‘real life’ identified

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with the sphere of production, infrastructure. It claims that its specific or ‘material’ reality, far from being identical to the illusory realm of conscious representations, is expressed by the unconscious structures that found, in every human society, the ideas, beliefs and states of mind of the individuals. Indeed, the Althusserian definition of Ideology, as expounded in early works like For Marx, insists on its systematicity, which appears to be linked to its own causal effectivity: to its own logique, in Althusserian terminology, ‘. . . an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society’.6 Such a characterisation of the systematicity of the imaginary obviously means an important inflection in the conceptualisation of ideology: it is no longer the arbitrary and fantastic realm of consciousness. Particularly significant, in this respect, is Althusser’s reactivation and philosophical reworking of the original Marxian statement, ‘ideology has no history’. In the ‘plainly positivist context’ in which The German Ideology is inserted, this expression would simply mean that ideology, just like metaphysics, has no reality of its own, and lacks internal causality.7 In a word, ideology is defined as an ‘imaginary construction’, just like dream was by the authors before Freud: that is, as a nonsensical phenomenon arbitrarily built up from diurnal practices. The very comparison between ideology and dream is undoubtedly strategic, at this point, since it authorises Althusser to renew the Copernican Revolution of the Traumdeutung. Just as the Freudian perspective considers dreams to be endowed with a specific logic and causality, the very causality inherent to the Unconscious as system, so too must ideology, far from constituting a ghostly universe, or even the ‘real world’ upside-down, be understood through its own causality and systematicity. That is why the Marxian assertion, ‘ideology has no history’, becomes a positive thesis in the Althusserian shift: in such a specific causality and autonomous reality consists the non-historicity, namely the ‘eternity’ of ideology, grasped in its new, non-mechanistic definition: If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud’s expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. And I add that I find this comparison theoretically justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general.8 Its conceptual relation to the dream in the Freudian understanding, and to the Unconscious, implies that ideology is endowed with an effectivity, as might be conceived through a comparison with the ‘dream-work’ first theorised in the Traumdeutung. In Chapters Six and Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gives a systematic account for the particular intelligibility of the dream. It involves the conceptualisation of the process leading from the latent thoughts to the manifest content, namely the ‘primary process’, which is said to be specific to the Unconscious system (Ucs), and consists of two main devices: condensation and displacement.9 Besides condensation and displacement, which play a fundamental role in the dream-work, Freud lists other characteristics linked to the primary process: absence of negation or doubt, indifference to the laws of conscious thought (the principle of non-contradiction), and timelessness.10 But these characteristics do not imply that unconscious phenomena, such as the dream, are deprived of any logic. On the contrary, this Unconscious (Ucs) logic is quite specific and autonomous, and forms a system. Besides, the characteristic

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timelessness at work in the Ucs system, closely related to the indestructibility of desire (in particular the infantile desire at the very source of dream-activity), is irreducible to the linear temporality inherent to the Preconscious (Pcs) and Conscious (Cs) systems. This conceptualisation of Unconscious causality may therefore throw a new light on the ‘eternity’ of ideology. Eternity means, of course, necessity, but also refers to a specific sort of causality, a ‘structural causality’, as stated at the time of Reading Capital.11 This structural causality implies the effectivity of a structure (Ideology/Unconscious) upon its elements, the structure being nothing outside its effects, but also, according Althusser’s vocabulary, the effectivity of an ‘absent cause’: such an absence being due not to the supposed exteriority of the structure-cause with respect to its elements-effects, but rather, on the contrary, to its very interiority, or immanence, to its own effects. The structural causality implicitly at work in Marx’s texts has two sources: Spinoza (the concept of immanent causality in the first part of the Ethics), and, quite remarkably, Lacan himself (as read by Jacques-Alain Miller), having developed the concept of a ‘metonymic causality’, a term which refers to Lacan’s understanding of the Freudian dream-work and primary process through the categories of metaphor and metonymy.12 One may then postulate, as Michel Pêcheux did, that the articulation between Ideology and Unconscious, although incomplete in Althusser’s original perspective, nevertheless lies in a crucial homology between the structural causality implied in the formations of the Unconscious (dream, lapsus, neurotic symptoms. . .) and the structural causality involved in ideological effects (the ‘obviousness’ of being a subject, or the ‘subject-effect’) characteristic of any social formation. According to Pêcheux, what these two structures, Unconscious and Ideology, have in common is precisely their own dissimulation (as absent causes) within their very functioning, such a dissimulation being the condition of the so-called ‘“subjective” obviousnesses’ by which the subject is constituted.13 This renewed, anti-positivist conceptualisation of ideology, as the crucial ‘detour’ by psychoanalysis and the Freudian theory of the Unconscious demonstrates, furthermore involves an obvious but nevertheless strategic consequence. Indeed, it leads to a radical break with the traditional Marxian equivalence between Ideology and Consciousness or Conscious Representation. In Marx, particularly in The German Ideology, the ‘nothingness’ of ideology, its non-effectivity, seemed to be directly proportional to its identification with Consciousness. Thus the Marxian critique of the constitutive illusions of consciousness, implied by the rejection of idealist theories of history, meant ipso facto a disqualification of ideology itself, as part of a superstructure determined by the infrastructure – ‘real life’ – as a certain (mechanistic) reading of the Marxian topique shows. However, the Althusserian rupture with this traditional conceptual equivalence between ideology and consciousness (or conscious representations), entails a remarkable re-evaluation of the powers of ideology; just as, in the Freudian field, the refusal of the classic identification of psychism with the sphere of conscious thinking entailed the epistemological re-evaluation of the dream, thus reassigned to the logic of the Unconscious system. Such a theoretical rupture, one must add, is already obvious in For Marx, when Althusser affirms, against the traditional inscription of ideology within the ‘region of “consciousness”’, that In truth, ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’, even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a

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reflected form (as in pre-Marxist ‘philosophy’) . . . [I]deology is a matter of the lived relation between men and their world. This relation, that only appears as ‘conscious’ on condition that it is unconscious, in the same way only seems to be simple on condition that it is complex, that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations, a second degree relation.14 Such a conceptual disqualification of the category of Consciousness entails another decisive consequence: namely, the complete rethinking of what the I and the Subject are, against the mythology of an hegemonic, transparent and self-knowing subjectivity.

Interpellation, subjectivation and subjection Althusser’s original theory of ideology appears to be constitutively linked to the topic of subject and subjective identity, since the very notion of ‘interpellation’, namely interpellation-as-subject [interpellation en sujet] stands at its core.15 The axiom, ‘Ideology Interpellates Individuals as Subjects’16, underlines the main function of ideology considered in its Althusserian definition: that is, the constitution of individuals as subjects, the subjectivation-process, through the mechanism of interpellation. Indeed, if ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’, one must admit a particularly intricate relation between subject and ideology. It is necessary to admit some kind of double implication at this level: thus the problematic of subjectivity and subjective identity is now reassigned to the new theoretical framework represented by the ‘materialism of the imaginary’, and the claim about the materiality of ideology, entailed by the famous Althusserian concept of the ideological state-apparatus.17 The very materiality of ideology, the materiality of the imaginary, implied in the formula ‘Ideology has a material existence’ implies that ideology, conscious representations, beliefs, and so on, do not exist outside ‘an apparatus and its practices’, as against the ‘ideological notion of ideology’, which asserts the prior spiritual existence of such representations in the subject’s mind, as a cause of his actions. On the contrary, the ‘ideas’ of an individual ‘are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological state-apparatus from which the ideas of that subject derive’.18 Hence the crucial reference, in Althusser’s text, to Pascal’s famous analysis of the social ritual of prayer. In Fragment 233 of the Pensées, in the context of the demonstration of the pari (‘wager’), Pascal seems to propound an extraordinary inversion of the ideological explanation of the order of things, namely, of the causal link between social material practices and conscious representations. Faith, religious belief, appears to be derived from the subject’s gestures and bodily inscription within a social code, namely the prayer, the act of kneeling down, taking the holy water, attending the Mass, and so on, such that the ‘spiritual’ account for the link between mental inner life and bodily action within social institutions is invalidated. However, the Althusserian claim regarding the materiality of ideology should not be conceived (no more than the Pascalian analysis just mentioned) in a positivist or mechanistic way, which would imply some automatic cause-to-effect relationship between bodily action and mental activity. First of all, this bodily action, or gesture, is socially inscribed, such that the material practice at issue cannot be reduced to an individual, purely physical action, only explicable through the mechanical laws of motion and rest. The materiality at issue, here, is not that of ‘a paving stone or a rifle’.19

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Second, as the statement regarding an identity between the individual’s ideas and his actions demonstrates, the epistemological model at stake here is not causal consequentiality – between body and mind – but rather the Spinozistic model of a strict simultaneity between mental events and bodily events.20 Thus the materialism of the imaginary, which Althusser borrows from Spinoza, does not seem to imply the secondary or epiphenomenal character of mental states, ‘representations’ and subjective life. Rather – and the claim seems to be already at work in the Pascalian text, through the importance afforded to the concept of social practice –21 this non-mechanistic materialism, far from being reductionist or even ‘behaviourist’, admits the effectivity of mental activity and subjectivity, while asserting its always-already social and public existence. What this habitus model refutes, rather, is the traditional mentalist framework according to which representations, ideas, beliefs, and so on first exist in the individual mind, in an inner and private realm, and are then expressed and ‘externalised’ in the social-public world. In this respect, the habitus model would imply the disqualification of what Gilbert Ryle called ‘the antithesis of inner and outer’, an antithesis that would, indeed, represent the core of the ‘Cartesian doctrine’ as to the relationship between mind and world.22 Generally speaking, the Spinozistic-Althusserian epistemological invalidation of the interiority/exteriority model of understanding the connection between representations and (socially-determined) actions is of strategic importance. It undermines the alleged necessity of explaining – to put it in the terms of Althusserian theory – the ‘transition’ from ideological state-apparatuses to the psychic life of the interpellated subject. Indeed, the reality of the ideological state-apparatuses is no more external than the subjectivity of the interpellated subject is internal, and the problem of knowing how ideological state-apparatuses might be ‘internalised’ by the ideological subject; that is, following Slavoj Žižek’s criticism, the problem that accounting, in the Althusserian theory of interpellation, for the ‘subjectivation-’ or ‘subjectivisation-’ process, might be founded upon some misleading premisses.23 Be that as it may, the subject, in its Althusserian definition, is explicitly defined as the ‘constitutive category of all ideology’. Since ideology is eternal, so too should be the category of subject, despite, one must add, its privileged link to ‘bourgeois ideology’ and early-modern philosophy. It is, therefore, no longer, or at least not only, an historically-determined category, that could only have emerged in the seventeenth century; rather, it is now endowed with some kind of eternity, the very eternity of ideology itself. ‘Eternity’, here, means some sort of conceptual necessity, which seems to imply the impossibility of getting rid of the category of subject. As far as this conceptual necessity is concerned, the latter category appears to be quite different from other ideological categories, such as, for example, the category of ‘man’. Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism and anti-psychologism, consequently, do not imply the rejection of the very notion of subject or subjectivity. Here lies the particular character of the Althusserian critique regarding the ‘philosophy of consciousness and of subject’, which does not lead to the complete abandon of the concept of subject, but rather to its radical re-elaboration: in this case it implies, in appearance at least, a complete inversion of the classical, Cartesian understanding of the thinking I and of its main characteristics. In ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (IISA), we may read the well-known formulas that establish the Althusserian theory of interpellation, such as ‘ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects’, or ‘individuals are always-already subjects’.24 These statements suggest a few remarks for the purpose of our analysis.

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First of all, the constitution-as-subject is essentially founded on the – universal – interpellation-mechanism, which is defined as the fundamental mechanism of ideology. To ‘become’ a subject means, in this respect, to be hailed or ‘interpellated’ as such. The Althusserian ‘theoretical theatre’ of being hailed by the police (‘Hey, you there!’), enforces the unorthodox view – as regards the tradition of early-modern philosophy – according to which the constitution-as-subject cannot be conceived other than as a fundamental subjection-process. Subjects are always-already hailed (in the ideological sphere) – namely, subjected – insofar as such an interpellation-mechanism does not take place within a temporal frame, but is alwaysalready at work; just as individuals, strictly speaking, are always-already summoned to be subjects, and do not ‘become’ subjects in that sense.25 The absence of temporal succession is presented as a consequence of the very necessity of the subjection-subjectivation process, since the human, historical world is by definition an ideological one, since ideology, whatever forms it might take, constitutes the element in which every human individual, even before being born, lives and acts. Indeed, Althusser specifies: ‘Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects . . .’26 It seems, then, that at this point we encounter the famous ‘circularity’ problem supposedly at work within the Althusserian theory of interpellation, as emphasised by many authors.27 If interpellation (being hailed by the police, or the divine performative call that the Subject-God exerts upon the subject in the ‘example of religious ideology’ in IISA) constitutes the subject as subject, then on the other hand it appears that the addressee of such an interpellation, the individual who turns round and responds to the call, recognises himself as its destinataire (‘addressee’), as though the subject had always-already existed, even before being hailed. Yet, the widespread hypothesis of a ‘Münchhausen effect’ in the Althusserian theory of subjectivation appears to leave aside two significant theses involved in such a theory. First, as Michel Pêcheux clarifies, such a Münchhausen effect regards the subject only in its idealist definition as primary subject: it defines the subjective illusion of being a constituting subject. In the Althusserian theory, on the contrary, the subject is understood as a necessary ‘effect of the preconstructed’ [un effet de préconstruit], that is, as a paradoxical causa sui, produced as a result. This contradiction is, indeed, fundamental in the constitution of the subject as other than himself, namely as a speaking subject necessarily divided between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, in reference to the Lacanian theory – explicitly mentioned by Pêcheux – that claims that the subject is by definition grasped into the symbolic network of ‘shifting effects’, and into the ‘signifier process’.28 The paradox of constitution-into-subject seems to affect the ‘imaginary ego’ more than it does the subject inscribed into the Symbolic order in its Lacanian acceptance. Second, the circularity problem emerges only in the field of a problematic of the origin: when was the subject constituted?; what is prior to what; subject, or interpellation?; and so on. Yet this problematic of the origin is rejected by Althusser, precisely through the proposed ‘shortcircuit’ between subjective identity and interpellation. It may be that Althusser aims, through such a ‘short-circuit device’, to show that the question of the origin of the subject has no sense, for the subject cannot stand for its own origin [causa sui] independently of the ideologicalsymbolic interpellation, for it has always-already existed as inscribed into the Symbolic order, as a constituted subject. In the last instance, the circularity of the subjectivation-process draws

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back to the circularity of the Symbolic order itself, or the ‘Law of Culture’ described in the article ‘Freud and Lacan’.29 The ‘Law of Culture’, according to Althusser, who refers to Lacan, necessarily precedes itself, according to a ‘retroactiveness’ structure which indicates that it is the very condition for humanisation-subjectivation, and that it has ‘no outside’, no origin and no end, just like ideology itself. Thus, ultimately, it is senseless to ask ourselves when human society began to exist, or to search for an origin of society, since society, or culture, does not emerge from any prior ‘state of nature’. This absence of transition or continuity between culture and nature, human order and non-human order, was already demonstrated by Rousseau in the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes: a reference that constitutes, together with the writings of Lacan in the 1950s, an important source for the Althusserian understanding of ideology and the ‘Law of Culture’. Such a Rousseauist, anti-contractualist theory is particularly important as regards the Althusserian claim that the fundamental problem lies not in knowing how the ‘little human being’ will transform itself as a subject, for, ‘in reality, it is Culture itself that constantly precedes itself, absorbing what will become a human subject’.30 The subjective recognition, the ‘obviousness’ of being a free, unique, irreplaceable subject, thus presupposes some fundamental misrecognition, which is the other name for this (unknowing) submission to ideology.31 This recognition of one’s subjective identity may be seen, indeed, as the ‘elementary ideological effect’: it occurs only on the terrain of this misrecognition, which is its necessary corollary: that is, the very ignorance of the fact that it is, precisely, an ideological effect; not the effect of a free, transparent will, but rather the effect of determined interpellation and subjection mechanism that always operates inside ideology. In this respect, the limits of this ‘recognition’ of oneself-as-subject could be identified with the very limits of consciousness itself. The misrecognition seems to concern, first and foremost, the very ideological nature of this ‘self-recognition’ as subject. It also concerns, simultaneously, the necessity of such a recognition, disguised by a misleading belief in a free or ‘voluntary’ acceptance, since (almost) all of us are always-already subjects. The recognition/misrecognition structure, then, insofar as it reveals the very limits and insufficiencies of Consciousness in the subjective life and existence of individuals, may ultimately be related to the notion of a decentred subject, a subject that recognises itself-as-subject through its subjection to the ‘Absolute Subject’, God, at the centre. This is shown through the privileged ‘example’ of religious ideology in IISA, and particularly the ‘interpellation’ of Moses by God in the Exodus. Hence the apparently anti-Cartesian formula: ‘There are no subjects except by and for their subjection’.32 In that – double – respect, the Althusserian approach to subjectivity appears to be strongly indebted to the Lacanian understanding of the Subject (as the Subject of the Unconscious), which entails its distinction from the imaginary dimension of the ego [moi]. The recognition/misrecognition structure, and the notion of a decentred subject, indeed stand at the core of Lacan’s perspective. They serve as the basis for the author of the Écrits in his reactivation and extension of the Freudian Ichspaltung. From the early 1960s, Althusser considered Lacan’s work to be of very great importance, and the author of For Marx, who helped Lacan to hold his seminar at the École Normale Supérieure from 1964 onwards, repeatedly acknowledged his debt to the latter.33 He thus wrote a decisive paper, ‘Freud and Lacan’ which in several crucial aspects anticipates the claims about ideology and interpellationas-subject developed in IISA. Most of the analyses in IISA regarding the subjectivation-process, and the relationship between subjectivation and subjection presupposed by the concept of

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interpellation, were prepared in 1964. Rather significantly, in the French edition of 1976, the text of IISA is preceded by ‘Freud and Lacan’;34 and the final lines of ‘Freud and Lacan’ are dedicated to the topic of ideology, insofar as it deals with the structure de la méconnaissance, the structure of misrecognition.

The ‘Law of Culture’ and the Symbolic order: Althusser and Lacan In the 1970 text IISA, the very ideological necessity for the individual to be a subject, at stake in the claim that individuals are always-already subjects, is given a vitally-important illustration, namely the social rituals that surround the expectation of a birth. Even before being born, the child is ‘pre-appointed’ to become a subject, submitted to the primacy of this fundamental ideological constraint, embedded, for example, in the familial ideological state-apparatus. The explicit reference to Freud, who would have shown, in the study of such birth-rituals, that ‘individuals are always “abstract” with respect to the subjects they always-already are’, here plays a strategic role. Thus, following Althusser, ‘it is certain in advance that [the unborn child] will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it has been conceived’.35 This analysis of the forced subjectivation of the child is remarkably indebted to psychoanalytical theory. It is linked, indeed, to the Freudian theory of the child’s development, which addresses the ‘pre-genital and genital “stages” of sexuality’ under the ‘grip’ of the Unconscious. It marks, then, the causal effectivity of the Unconscious or Symbolic order in the subjectivation-process, contrary to any kind of biological reading of the Freudian theory of the stages in the child’s development. Thus, one might say, the grip of the Unconscious and the grip of Ideology (the ‘ideological constraint’) could be seen as theoretically equivalent at this level (being appointed as a subject). Once again, what seems to be at work, here, is psychoanalytical theory considered as radically distinct from any sort of psychologism or biologism, that is, principally, through its understanding as propounded by Lacan in the 1950s and 1960s. Such a hypothesis, moreover, may be confirmed by the Althusserian reference to the ‘Father’s name’, the Lacanian concept related to the topic of the Symbolic order. As a matter of fact, this same question of the child’s development and of its ‘humanisation’ under the grip of the ‘Law of Culture’, insofar as it involves the question of subjectivation as addressed through a psychoanalytical framework, represents the theoretical object of a previous text published by Althusser in 1964–5, under the title ‘Freud et Lacan’.36 The main question discussed in this article is that related to the specific object of psychoanalysis, the epistemological issue at stake being the scientific status of psychoanalysis and its differentiation from other disciplines, such as biology or psychology of course, but also from ‘human sciences’ such as history, sociology, anthropology, and even philosophy. The recourse to the Lacanian return to Freud appears, then, to be necessary and strategic in this regard, for it represents the most systematic attempt to ‘depsychologise’ psychoanalysis (as demonstrated, among other things, by the fight against the theoreticians of ego psychology), and to define in a new and adequate framework, as represented in particular by modern linguistics, the

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specific scientificity of psychoanalysis, opened up by Freud’s revolutionary discovery of the Unconscious. The very object of psychoanalysis, then, Althusser claims, is nothing but the Unconscious itself, studied more particularly through its effects on the coercive process of humanisationsubjectivation exerted on the small child, namely the ‘extraordinary adventure which from birth to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child’.37 This ‘process’ of humanisation, by which the new-born infant, the small animal, is (alwaysalready) transformed into a human child, under the necessary grip of ‘human culture’, is synonymous with a process of subjectivation. At the same time, it is characterised as a ‘war’, the implacable war fought by human culture to force the newborn child to submit to the ‘Law of Culture’. Such a war is evoked in a striking passage from ‘Freud and Lacan’: this war consists, for humanity, of ‘bearing children as culture in human culture: a war which is continually declared in each of its sons’.38 To become human, therefore, means to become a subject, subjected to human culture, a thesis that is later entailed in the assertion in IISA that ‘man is an ideological animal by nature’.39 Psychoanalysis, then, deals with the effects of this constrained process, since this constitutive subjection and coercion are exerted by what Althusser calls the ‘Law of Culture’: this is an explicit adoption of the Lacanian concept of Symbolic order, designating the effects of the Unconscious itself on human subjects. The necessary antecedence of Law in the constitution of human subjectivity, defined as an effect of subjection, is a claim already developed by Lacan. According to the Althusserian reading, Lacan ‘demonstrates the effectiveness of the Order, the Law, that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his birth, and seizes him before his first cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence his fixed destination . . . This is the beginning, and has always been the beginning, even where there is no living father, of the official presence of the Father (who is Law), hence of the Order of the human signifier, i.e. of the Law of Culture . . .’40 The overwhelming presence of the Father, here, refers to the same Lacanian concept of the ‘Father’s name’ – that is, the support of the symbolic function – a concept to which the 1970 text IISA directly alluded. The primacy of the Unconscious itself in human existence, the Unconscious redefined by Lacan through its necessary relationship to Language (‘the Other’s discourse’, the discourse of the Unconscious), can then be understood as the primacy of the Symbolic order; the Law being, for the author of ‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis’, identical to a Language order.41 The Symbolic order – and its effects – omnipresent in ‘Freud and Lacan’, reactivated by Althusser under the name of the ‘Law of Culture’, and thus exported and used to understand the very functioning of ideology, was already at the core of Lacan’s writings in the 1950s. It plays a strategic function, of course, in the Lacanian linguistic and ‘structuralist’ approach to the Unconscious, as shown for example by the use and extension of the Jakobsonian definitions of metaphor and metonymy to the study of condensation and displacement in the Freudian theory of dream-work.42 Symbolic order, in Lacan’s perspective, is clearly the mark of the necessary grip of language on man; thus the human individual is constitutively submitted or subjected, before his birth and after his death, to the Symbolic order, to the Unconscious ‘structured like a language’,43 and to its effectivity as far as subjectivity and subjective condition are concerned. The return to Freud, in this sense, aims at underlining the radicality of ‘Freud’s

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discovery’, which ‘was that of the field of the effects, in man’s nature, of his relations to the symbolic order and the fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical instances of symbolization in being’. The taking-into-account of such a discovery implies then the recognition of man as a paradoxical symbolic animal: ‘Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him “by bone and flesh” before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if not the gift of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death’.44 The transliteration of the Lacanian text by Althusser in his 1964–5 article is remarkable. The reference to psychoanalytical theory appears to be crucial for the linking between the three processes characteristic of ‘human culture’ (that is, ideology itself): humanisation, subjectivation and subjection. The ‘Law of Culture’ defines the power of the Symbolic order in the human field, which is the specific realm of ideology in its Althusserian conceptualisation.

The elusive subject: between Symbolic and Imaginary orders The Althusserian return to Marx is nourished, according to Althusser’s own numerous statements, by the Lacanian return to Freud. More precisely, insofar as our topic is concerned, the Lacanian influence upon the Althusserian approach to ideology and subjectivity can be particularly found and analysed through two strategic claims about the nature of the ‘I’, the Subject of the Unconscious, namely the recognition/misrecognition structure, and the concept of a decentred subject. For Althusser, as we have seen, the constitution of the subject takes place within the general framework of a recognition/misrecognition structure, which he has actually borrowed, as he himself acknowledges, from Lacan.45 The recognition/misrecognition structure plays a fundamental role in the Lacanian explanation of the constitution of subjective identity, from ‘The Mirror Stage’ of 1949, a text that introduces the ‘function of misrecognition’, to later texts written in the 1960s, asserting the ambiguity of ‘un méconnaître essentiel au me connaître’.46 With such a claim, Lacan underlines, of course, the impossibility of immediate selfknowledge and transparency to oneself in the frame of subjective life. He is thus led to draw a conceptual distinction between the imaginary ‘ego’ [moi], whose reconnaissance (‘recognition’) in the mirror is marked by the seal of alienation, and the ‘subject’ [le sujet, Je], whose identification with the specular image is misleading from beginning to end, and condemned to failure.47 The Lacanian reactivation and extension of the Freudian Ichspaltung gives birth to the original view of a split, decentred and empty subject. The always-unaccomplished identifications of the subject, which deal with the fundamental differentiation between symbolic and imaginary orders, suggest that the subject, in the last instance, cannot be reduced to the ‘mirages’ and illusions of conscious life, just as the ‘I’ [Ich] cannot be reduced to the ego in its imaginary dimension. The Lacanian definition of the subject as being the Subject of the Unconscious, namely as a non-egological ‘I’, thus seems to take place within an anti-Cartesian

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shift already at work in ‘The Mirror Stage’. Particularly eloquent is the beginning of the article, regarding ‘the I function in the experience psychoanalysis provides us of it’: such an experience, Lacan declares, ‘sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito’.48 Althusser’s anti-Cartesianism, of course, could only be comforted by such a statement, and the radical break it implies with the classical metaphysics of the subject. The critique regarding the philosophical notion of ‘a self-sufficiency of consciousness’,49 the rejection of the notion of an ‘autonomous ego’50 such as it was used, for example, in the ego psychology perspective, especially in Anna Freud’s writings, would even seem to authorise the classification of Lacan’s perspective within the field of the philosophies of concept that aim at the complete rejection of the Cartesian conceptualisation of the thinking ‘I’. Lacan’s insistence upon the dead ends and mirages of egological autonomy and consciousness entails the theoretical necessity of conceiving the Unconscious as irreducible to any form of non-consciousness: hence, the reading of the second ‘topography’ [topique] in Freud as an attempt to get rid of the very notion of consciousness, even under the form of its negation.51 The constitutive self-opacity of the ‘I’, as a result, draws the lines of a constituted subject, a subject subjected to the Other (The Symbolic order, the discourse of the Unconscious as discourse of the Other). The Freudian shift, in that respect, lays the basis for the non-egological notion of a divided, decentred subject,52 in antagonism, on a first reading, with the Cartesian res cogitans. This very topic, the ‘eccentricity’ of the Subject to himself, as a synonym for his subjection, is also at the core, of course, of the Althusserian perspective. In IISA, especially in the ‘example’ of religious ideology (God interpellating Moses in the Exodus), the distinction asserted between the subject and the Subject plays a crucial role in the Althusserian view of ideology as being doubly speculary – as against the Feuerbachian perspective about the simple specularity of religious alienation, in which the subject is situated ‘at the centre’.53 The claim about the double specularity of ideology, correlating to interpellation and subjection, entails the representation of a subject necessarily subjected to a Subject occupying the centre, an ‘Absolute’ subject.54 As a consequence, the ‘traditional’ ego, defined in early-modern philosophy through the categories of transparent reflexivity, interiority and immediate selfknowledge, an ego that would represent the very centre of psychic activity, no longer appears to have any theoretical relevance. Althusser’s oft-asserted Spinozism cannot but reject entirely the Cartesian definition of the thought-process (namely, subjectivity in general) as a process that would take place ‘in ourselves’ – ‘in nobis’, as Descartes writes in the Second Set of Replies to the Objections – that is, in some kind of inner scene or inner theatre, indeed the mind-ego, also defined through its opposition and irreducibility to the constitutive exteriority of the res extensa. Subjective condition, in that regard, can no longer be conceived following the model of a sovereign consciousness, and the Althusserian claim as to ‘the duplication of the Subject into subjects and of the Subject itself into a subject-Subject’ is situated within a theoretical line beginning with the Lacanian analysis of the Freudian Ichspaltung. The critique regarding the traditional philosophical notion of an omnipotent, autonomous ego – that is, of a constituting subject – undoubtedly draws a strong convergence between the Althusserian and the Lacanian perspectives. Nevertheless, it seems that, generally speaking, the Althusserian approach to subjectivity reveals itself to be much more intricate, and includes some significant reworking of the psychoanalytical (Lacanian) treatment of the question of the subject.

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First of all, Althusser’s remarkable fidelity to the Spinozistic heritage,55 and his constant diffidence towards the metaphysical, teleological categories to which he counterposes the concept of ‘process without a subject’, entail an ambivalence towards the philosophical use of the Subject category. On the one hand, of course, this category stands at the core of his theory of ideology, and the analysis of the subjectivation-process represents one of its salient points. However, on the other hand, the philosophical category of Subject, together with the correlative categories of Origin and End, appears to him as possibly confusing and still dangerously close to the classical notions of consciousness or ego, regarding which he produces a frontal criticism. Symptomatic, in that sense, is his – almost – constant reluctance to make recourse to the notion of the Subject of the Unconscious56, which, on the contrary, has a decisive function in the Lacanian battle against psychologism and the postulates of ego-psychology. Upon a more precise reading of IISA, one is struck by an ambivalence of a similar type. In this text, the characterisation of subjective constitution or identity seems to oscillate between the necessity of the split subject, and the illusions of consciousness: that is, using Lacanian concepts, between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. We reach here a nodal difficulty at work in the Althusserian conception of subjective identity, and of ideology itself. Under a first aspect, as we have already analysed, the primacy of the ‘Law of Culture’, in the constitutioninterpellation-as-subject process, places ideology, and the category of subject itself, on the side of Symbolic order. Such a claim was already at work, as we have mentioned, in For Marx, with the view that ideology did not deal with conscious representations, but rather with Unconscious structures and socially pre-determined fictional supports. The critique regarding the insufficiencies of traditional Marxist theory of ideology (identified with the mirages of consciousness, a camera obscura, a mere inversion of ‘real life’) was based precisely upon this conceptual differentiation between consciousness (and its illusions) and ideology; thus the psychoanalytical category of Unconscious could be considered relevant for the understanding of the necessity of ideological existence, that is of the existence of men as – interpellated – subjects. Yet under a second aspect, the Althusserian view on subjectivity-as-subjection, especially in IISA, makes important use of the concept of consciousness, analysed in a critical framework through its constitutive limits, alienations and illusions. Therefore, one may conclude, the eccentricity of subjectivity is often (but not always) reduced, in Althusser’s approach, to the eccentricity and false powers of consciousness itself, which is not at all the case in Lacan’s perspective. This point is particularly important as far as the decisive example of religious ideology is concerned. This passage in IISA is of great importance, as we have seen, in the definition of a divided, constituted and subjected subjectivity (through the very distinction between subject and Subject). But it is also remarkable that the Althusserian understanding of the recognition/misrecognition function in this precise context, quite unlike the theoretical line of Lacan’s Écrits, seems to proceed from the general rejection of the tradition of the ‘philosophies of consciousness’. It is deeply influenced by the philosophical legacy of Jean Cavaillès (developed by Georges Canguilhem), who had explicitly counterposed a ‘philosophy of concept’ [philosophie du concept] to the epistemological dead ends of a ‘philosophy of consciousness’ [philosophie de la conscience].57 Thus, in the case of ‘religious ideology’, the typical ideological recognition/misrecognition function concerns the individual insofar as he ‘is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e.

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in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection “all by himself”. There are no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they “work all by themselves”’.58 Significantly, the subjection-mechanism is here described in accordance with the problematic of free will, grasped in a Spinozistic sense. The subjected subject misrecognises his own subjection, his subjection to the law, or God’s commandments; and this subjection is disguised by the mask of free will, the illusions of which are precisely identical to the illusions of the autonomous ego. The interpellated subject, then, is very often understood as an ego, a decentred and divided ego of course, essentially opaque to itself: these opacities, however, are nothing but the false obviousnesses of consciousness (immediate and transparent selfknowledge, free will), described by Althusser as the ‘elementary ideological effect’. It appears, then, that Althusser, much unlike Lacan, does not always maintain a strict conceptual distinction between subject and ego, just as he does not seem to attribute to the category of subject a complete theoretical value. From this conceptual fluctuation between the concepts of subject and ego also follows a sort of hesitation in the very characterisation of ideology itself. Ideology is on certain occasions defined as a Symbolic order, in relation to an Unconscious structure, and on other occasions it is conceived as an Imaginary one: the interpellated subject seen as prisoner of the illusions of egological autonomy and consciousness. This crucial divergence from the Lacanian return to Freud’s discovery may be symptomatic of Althusser’s persistent theoretical unease with the very category of subject. In the last instance, however, such a diffidence or unease may be enlightened by the explicit opposition Althusser displays towards Cartesian philosophy, and by his – symmetrical – consistent attachment to the Spinozistic legacy. Such an anti-Cartesianism may also explain, under many aspects, his reluctance to adopt the Lacanian concept of a Subject of the Unconscious. There is, in other words, a strong disagreement between Lacan and Althusser concerning the reception of Descartes’s philosophy, especially the Cartesian conceptualisation of the thinking ‘I’, or Cogito. For the author of the Écrits, the traditional reading of the Cartesian subject as a psychological ego, or as a subject defined by the function of consciousness, is totally misleading. The Cartesian ‘I’, on the contrary, reveals itself, and to itself, in the very vertigo of radical doubt, maximal uncertainty; far from being a sujet des profondeurs, the Cogito must be understood as the pure ‘subject of science’. It stands for this empty subject, the necessary, antagonistic correlate of science, a subject – rather than a moi – defined through its ‘punctual’ and ‘vanishing’ relationship to knowledge. Such a renewed, non-egological reading of the Cogito leads Lacan to draw a conceptual continuity between the Cartesian subject, the subject of science, and the Subject of the Unconscious, namely the Ich, the ‘subject caught up in a constituting division’.59 The split subject, the Subject of the Unconscious that psychoanalysis deals with, is nothing but the Subject of science. Thus the Cartesian subject, far from being reducible to a circumscribed moment in the history of philosophy, still constitutes the relevant paradigm for contemporaneous subjectivity. This extraordinary linking, in ‘Science and Truth’, already at work in his 1964 ‘The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis’, between the Freudian Ichspaltung, the Subject of the Unconscious, and the Cartesian subject, leads to a remarkable distinction between the concept of Subject and the concept of ego-moi. For Althusser, on the contrary, the Cartesian subject, identified with the ‘Subject of truth and objectivity’ – that is, the subject of knowledge – remains a fallacious concept, insofar as it is taken up within a contestable understanding of what the ‘cut’ between truth and error is – a crucial misunderstanding of the epistemological break. Descartes, according to Althusser,

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simply counterposes error to truth, as though the former were the mere negation of the latter and remained ‘outside’ of truth; he does not thematise the relation of error to this ‘outside’. The effective cut between truth and error is not adequately comprehended, but is reduced to an exclusion, a ‘partition’ [partage], and this partition is then seen as the ‘result of a judgement’, the judgement made by a Subject, a thinking Ego, the Subject of Truth.60 According to this genealogy, the Subject of knowledge, the Subject of science, should not be reduced to the psychological ego, that is, to the ‘Subject of error’; yet its very transparency to its own epistemic procedures and operations is a mistaken claim, inherent to this ‘philosophy of consciousness’ founded upon a misconception of what the knowledge-process is. To the Cartesian Cogito, then, Althusser counterposes the Spinozistic model of thinking and knowledge as production, that is, according to the famous formula of the ‘veritas norma sui, et falsi’,61 as a process in which the ‘Subject of objectivity’, the Subject of knowledge, is suppressed: a process which will become, in the Althusserian terminology, the well-known process without a subject.62 To conclude, we may go back to Althusser’s continuous attempt, from his earlier texts to his last writings about aleatory materialism, to rediscover and give new life to Spinoza’s understanding of what thought and knowledge are: an extraordinary, non-Cartesian theory of the mind, a unique refutation of the ‘subject of truth’ [sujet de vérité] and of the modern problematic of the theory of knowledge as representation – representation for a subject – a theory that would have been hidden and buried for centuries in the history of philosophy.63 Althusser thus seems to be led ‘in the last instance’ to some kind of reduction of the modern Subject to the aporiai of egology and even psychology. The category of Subject, as a result, could not legitimately survive the historical moment of ‘bourgeois philosophy’: it even represents, as we have seen, the ‘central category of imaginary illusion’ in such a philosophy, built as it is upon ‘the foundation of the legal ideology of the Subject’.64 Consequently, the Lacanian Subject of the Unconscious could not constitute, any more than the Cartesian Subject of science, an admissible category within this theoretical framework. Yet at the same time – and this is the central topic of our analysis – the category of subject is necessary and indispensable to any effective theory of what ideology is, considered through its fundamental omnihistoricity. This inner tension, in Althusser’s work, between these two views regarding the question of the subject should not be artificially reduced. It demonstrates, on the contrary, that the attempt to conceive a constituted subject, a non-egological and non-psychological subjectivity, also represents a still-vivid and stimulating path in philosophy and social sciences. This programme of constituting a ‘non-subjectivist theory of subjectivity’ in the fields of history, philosophy and linguistics was first followed, for example, by Michel Pêcheux in the 1970s with the analysis of discourse, opening a stimulating exchange between the Althusserian insights about ideology and interpellation as the production of a ‘subjecteffect’ [effet-sujet], and the linguistic interrogation regarding the production of meaning within discursivity. This programme remains a contemporary one for those who are concerned with the materialist claim according to which subject and meaning, for instance, are not prior to their inscription in the effectiveness of social devices, the symbolic, human order represented by ‘the Law of Culture’.65 In the last instance, the fluctuation of the Althusserian theory of ideology between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, can be understood other than as the symptom of its failure or aporia. It could be seen, rather, as the objective acknowledgement that, in the very process of interpellation-subjectivisation, something resists the symbolisation, a ‘leftover’ that marks the

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traumatic and constitutive inadequacy of the ‘individual’ with its symbolic identity. This could be the meaning of the extraordinary pages from ‘Freud and Lacan’ devoted to the war represented by the constitution of humanity in and through the Symbolic order.66 This war is the other name for the ‘traumatic kernel’ and lack at the very heart of subjective identity that Althusser, reading Lacan, had precisely identified, regarding the forced humanisation-subjectivation of the human child.67

Notes 1 See ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 161: ‘I believe I am justified, hypothetically at least, in proposing a theory of ideology in general, in the sense that Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general’. For a recent study of this analogy between the Althusserian theory of ideology and the Freudian theory of the unconscious, see Gillot 2009. 2 See Marx 1989. 3 On the general issue of ideology in Althusser’s reading of Marxian philosophy, see Bourdin 2008. 4 See Althusser 1969a, p. 232. 5 See Althusser 1976a, p. 136. 6 Althusser 1969a, p. 231. 7 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 159. 8 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 161. 9 See Freud 1953–74, (The Interpretation of Dreams [1900]) Volume IV, p. 277–309. See also Freud 1953–74 (Papers on Metapsychology [1915], ‘The Unconscious’, V) Volume XIV, p. 186. 10 See Freud 1953–74 (Papers on Metapsychology, “The Unconscious”, V) Volume XIV, p. 187. 11 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 188–94. 12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188, n. 45. 13 See Pêcheux 1982, in particular pp. 83–129. In the 1970s Michel Pêcheux developed Althusserian insights regarding ideology and subjective interpellation within the anti-idealist framework of an ‘analysis of discourse’, at the intersection between philosophy and linguistics. 14 Althusser 1969a, p. 231–3. 15 The constitutive ambiguity of the French formula, ‘interpellation en sujet’, is at the root of two possible English translations, ‘interpellation as subject’, or ‘interpellation into subject’. This ambiguity, which manifests an apparent circularity in the conceptualisation of a constitutedinterpellated subject – which would, however, always-already exist as the addressee of the interpellation – is stressed by Rastko Močnik (Močnik 1993, p. 139–56). Močnik understands this as the sign of a theoretical tension, in Althusser’s theory of interpellation, between the (symbolic) subjectivation-process, and the (imaginary) identification-process. Močnik proposes to solve such a tension – which would also refer to a tension, within the subjectivation-process, between the universal and the singular, the social and the individual – through the Lacanian concept of a point de capiton (‘quilting-point’), in relation to the Freudian concept of fantasy. 16 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 170. 17 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, pp. 166–70. 18 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 169. 19 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 166.

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20 See the Ethica by Spinoza, Part III, Proposition II, Demonstration and Scholium. 21 See the concept of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, in explicit relationship to these Pascalian insights, in Bourdieu 1980. 22 See Ryle 1949. 23 Concerning the critiques addressed to the Althusserian theory of ideology and subjectivisation, see Žižek 2008, pp. 43-4, and Dolar 1993, p. 2. On this interiority/exteriority issue, see also the criticism of Mladen Dolar’s analysis by Judith Butler, in Butler 1997, pp. 120–24. 24 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, pp. 175–6. 25 ‘. . . in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’ (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, pp. 174–5). 26 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 175. 27 See, in particular, Žižek 2008, Introduction, p. xxv, and, with a different approach, insisting on the paradigmatic importance of the ‘religious’ example in the Althusserian theory of interpellation, Butler 1997, pp. 110–15. 28 Pêcheux 1982, pp. 103–9. 29 ‘Freud and Lacan’ Althusser 1971a, originally published in 1964–5. 30 Althusser 1996c, p. 91: ‘By the action of culture alone can the little human child be inserted within culture as such. What we are confronted with, therefore, is not the process of humanisation of the little child, but, rather, the constant action of culture upon a little being extraneous to culture, and transformed by culture into a human being. [. . .] As a matter of fact, culture constantly precedes itself, absorbing in this way what will become a human subject’. 31 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 172. The ambivalent structure if ideology, reconnaissance/méconnaissance, also operates in the mechanism of the ‘mirror recognition of the Subject and of the individuals interpellated as subjects’, at work in ‘religious ideology’. Moses is interpellated by his name (‘Moses!’), and thus constituted in his subjective, unique identity, and at the same time subjected to the ‘Absolute Subject’, God, in the Exodus (pp. 179–82). 32 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 182. 33 In 1963 Althusser had already written: ‘Marx based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo oeconomicus”, Freud based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the “homo psychologicus”. Lacan has seen and understood Freud’s liberating rupture. He has understood it in the fullest sense of the term, taking it rigorously at its word and forcing it to produce its own consequences, without concessions or quarter. It may be that, like everyone else, he errs in the detail or even the choice of his philosophical bearings; but we owe him the essential’ (‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 195). At the beginning of Reading Capital, Althusser relates his ‘symptomatic reading’ of Marx to the Lacanian return to Freud as its source (‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’, in Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 16). 34 Althusser 1976b. 35 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 176. 36 ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a. 37 ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 205. 38 ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 206. 39 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 171. 40 ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a, pp. 211–12. 41 Lacan 2006, p. 229. 42 Lacan 2006, pp. 424–6.

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43 Lacan 1977, p. 20. 44 Lacan 2006, pp. 227–31. 45 See in particular Althusser 1995a, p. 107n. 3. This text by Althusser, entitled ‘Sur la reproduction’, was not published during his lifetime, and constitutes a kind of preparation or longer version (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a). 46 ‘Here arises the ambiguity of a misrecognizing that is essential to knowing myself [un méconnaître essentiel au me connaître]’ (Lacan 2006, p. 684). 47 That is why, for instance, Lacan underlines the ambiguity and inadequacy of the English translation of Ich with ‘Ego’ as far as the Freudian second topography is concerned. He thus proclaims that Freud ‘in fact wrote Das Ich und das Es [The Ego and the Id] in order to maintain the fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications’ (Lacan 2006, p. 347). 48 Lacan 2006, p. 75. 49 Lacan 2006, p. 80. 50 Lacan 2006, pp. 684–5. 51 Thus, Lacan claims that ‘in the Freudian field, the words notwithstanding, consciousness is a characteristic that is . . . obsolete to us in grounding the unconscious – for we cannot ground it on the negation of consciousness’ (Lacan 2006, p. 676). 52 For Lacan, ‘the very truth Freud discovered’ deals with ‘the self’s radical eccentricity with respect to itself that man is faced with’. (‘The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’ [1957], Lacan 2006, p. 435). 53 See Althusser 1994–5 Volume 2, pp. 172–244. 54 See ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 180: ‘We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary . . .’ Such a characterisation of ideology as being doubly specular invalidates the hypothesis according to which ideology, as defined in IISA, would merely operate within the imaginary register, and not within the symbolic. It also entails the impossibility of counterposing the ‘Freud and Lacan’ text and the IISA text, as though this supposed duality implied the very duality between the symbolic and the imaginary orders. On the subject-Subject structure, and its inscription in the symbolic order, see Pêcheux 1982, pp. 113–14. 55 See for example Althusser 1976a, pp. 132–41. 56 One exception may lie in the first of the Trois notes sur la théorie des discours, which seems to recognise the theoretical value of notions such as ‘the subject-of-science effect’, and ‘the subject-of-unconscious effect’. But these notions are quickly abandoned by Althusser, who registers his disagreement with Lacan on these topics, as demonstrated by his ‘Lettre d’envoi’ to the Trois Notes (28 October 1966). See Althusser 1993c, pp. 117–54. 57 Cavaillès 2008, p. 90. Foucault follows this insight by Cavaillès when he asserts the famous ‘dividing line’ between ‘a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of concept’ (See Foucault’s ‘Foreword’ in Canguilhem 1978, p. i). 58 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 182. 59 ‘Science and Truth’ [1965–6], Lacan 2006, pp. 726–8. 60 Concerning the Althusserian analysis of the Cartesian subject as subject of knowledge, see Althusser 1996c, pp. 115–18. 61 Spinoza, Ethica, Part II, Propositio 43, Scholium. 62 See in particular, on that matter, the Althusserian reading concerning the Spinozistic understanding of the idea vera, of its non-assignable origin, and of the concatenation of true

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ideas, in the De Intellectus Emendatione: ‘In affirming that “what is true is the sign of itself and of what is false”, Spinoza avoided any problematic which depended on a “criterion of truth” . . . Once he has set aside the (idealist) temptations of a theory of knowledge, Spinoza then says that “what is true” identifies itself, not as a Presence, but as a Product, in the double sense of the term “product” (result of the work of a process which “discovers” it), as it emerges in its own production’ (Althusser 1976a, p. 137). 63 Althusser 1996c, p. 115. 64 Althusser 1976a, p. 136. 65 For a defence of the Althusserian concept of the ideological ‘subject-effect’, based upon a critique towards Žižek’s claim about a ‘subjectivity prior to interpellation’, see Robert Pfaller 1998, pp. 225–46. 66 It is specifically this crucial text, ‘Freud and Lacan’ that seems to be left aside by the authors who maintain, on the contrary, that Althusser, in his theory of interpellation and subjectivity, ignored this ‘traumatic kernel’ related to the death-drive. See Žižek 2008, pp. 42–5, and Dolar 1993, pp. 2, 6. 67 ‘Freud and Lacan’ in Althusser 1971a, pp. 205–6.

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19 Ideological interpellation: identification and subjectivation Rastko Močnik

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lthusser’s term ‘ideological interpellation’ has a powerful intuitive appeal, and has long enjoyed a special place in academic jargon.1 It may be the very intuitive force of the term that has favoured its extensive use despite the relative rarity of closer theoretical elaboration.2 To start the present attempt at its conceptualisation, we may first examine the theoretical necessity of its introduction: why, if at all, do we need the concept of ideological interpellation? As it turns out, the ‘necessity’ of such a concept is entirely negative: usually, it is the tension within a field of theoretical problematic that necessitates the production of a new concept,3 but here there is no problematic within which to situate the concept. In Althusser’s original formulation, it is an ingenious tenant-lieu designed to bridge the gap between his materialist description of the way that ideology operates within social processes (it reproduces relations of production) and his ‘Lacanian’ indication of the way in which the reproduction of relations of production is mediated by ‘the form which [social processes] assume on the surface of society . . . in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves’.4 In Althusser, the notion of interpellation supplements the absence of this ‘second’ (‘subjective’) dimension of the theory of ideology: it is an indication of the absence of a theoretical problematic, rather than a concept. Having established that ideology has material existence and that it is a constitutive component of any practice, Althusser has to theorise the articulation between the ‘subject of practice-cum-ideology’5 and the material existence of ideology. He does so by what he calls ‘our central thesis: Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’.6 In the sequel, Althusser examines ideological interpellation as an individual’s recognition of ‘evidence’.7 Here, Althusser places ideological mechanisms and their operations explicitly within the register of the imaginary and implicitly assigns to ideology a ‘cognitive’ efficacy.8 Although Althusser does not refer his use of the term ‘imaginary’ to Lacanian theory, the Lacanian understanding of the term seems the best way to avoid this part of Althusserian theory being engulfed by a trivial notion of ideology as ‘false consciousness’.9 But if the imaginary register within which ideology operates is to be conceived in the Lacanian sense, then the ‘recognition’ of ‘evidence’ should not be taken as the recognition of some sort of

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(false) representation of ‘reality’ as evident, but rather as the self-recognition of an individual’s Ego resulting from an Ego-identification.10 The initial ideological ‘recognition’ would then consist in the Ego’s recognising her/himself in an instance for which the state of affairs presented or entailed by ideological discourse is ‘evident’. ‘Cognitive’ recognition of evidence (Althusser’s ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!’)11 would, then, only be an effect of the Ego’s selfrecognition in, or identification with, an instance that is a structural component of ideology in its material existence. The notion that ideology ‘represents’ a state of affairs (or, in Althusser’s more sophisticated version, a relationship) is thus the result of the misrecognition of the condition of ideological representation, namely of the identification with the instance that dictates the point of view from which this state of affairs or relationship is being ‘represented’ and appears ‘obvious’. As a consequence, an ideology appears to propose a certain opinion precisely because it does not impose an opinion, ‘view’ or belief: more radically, it determines the horizon within which opinions, views, beliefs can be discussed, opposed and combined.12 Ideological misrecognition is productive: it presents ideological processes as projecting a representation, an image of the world, of its relationships, and so on. By occulting the point of view from which this landscape is observed, it traps the individual into the ‘recognition’ of this point of view: it induces the individual into identification with the structural instance of the ‘beholder’ of this representation and makes the individual assume the particular perspective that defines the ideological horizon. Spontaneous self-representation of linguistic practices generates precisely this notion of speech as conveying a representation of reality. This self-understanding of discursive practices has become the usual semantic component of the terms used by language to refer to itself and to its practice: it is the common meaning of expressions such as ‘to mean’, ‘meaning’, ‘to signify’, and so on.13 As we contend that presumed ‘semantic features’ of linguistic expressions are sedimentations of ideological practices, this phenomenon actually confirms our theory: the spontaneous ideology of everyday discursive practices is a representational ideology, since representationalism is the everyday ideology of everyday ideological practices, or, sit venia verbo, it is the ideology of ideology. While Althusser insists that ‘there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’, the subject, as an effect pertaining to the Lacanian symbolic register, is actually not affected, or is at least not directly affected, in the cases of interpellation that he offers to illustrate his thesis. In Althusser’s illustrative examples, the mechanism instead seems to operate within the dimension of imaginary Ego-identifications. Althusser himself confirms the impression that he situates ideological mechanisms within the register of the imaginary when, introducing the notion of a Subject with a capital S, he insists that the relation between the Subject and the interpellated subjects is ‘speculary’.14 We are confronted with the following alternative: either ideology operates within the imaginary, ‘speculary’ register, as Althusser explicitly claims – but then it does not affect the symbolic instance of the subject; or else ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, constitutes them into subjects, as Althusser also claims – but then his text only offers an incomplete presentation of the ideological process, and omits its essential dimension where ideology operates as symbolic mechanism. We consider that it is the second possibility which does justice to Althusser’s text. The difficulties seem to proceed from two features that delimit the horizon of Althusser’s treatment of the problem:

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1 Althusser only considers a certain type of ideological interpellation where identification-

mechanisms are actually paramount. 2 Insisting on using the term ‘subject’, he only indicates that ideology also operates

within the symbolic register, but does not elaborate on it. This omission makes that his treatment of the type of interpellation where identification dominates is left incomplete, and altogether prevents his theory from being able grasp another type of interpellation that, by blocking identification, proceeds directly by subjectivation. Developing the identification side of interpellation, Althusser adequately describes reproductive practices where the interpellated individual routinely and unknowingly submits to ideology. However, this approach cannot grasp practices of resistance, moments of radical rupture, and the like. It also leaves unelaborated the question of the instance of identification: what instance does the interpellated individual identify with? To make amends for these insufficiencies, we will present, if not yet actually justify, the following hypothesis. An individual interpreting a discursive sequence is, in principle (but not in his or her own notion of the situation) first confronted with meaningless signifiers. However, due to what everyday interpreters consider the ‘meaning of expressions’, they ‘understand’ each other. We assume that the access to the meaning of an expression is mediated by knowledge of how the expression, the signifier ‘is to be taken’, and that this knowledge is acquired through identification with the subject-supposed-to-know,15 Althusser’s Subject with a capital S. The initially ‘meaningless’ signifier accordingly ‘represents the subject for another signifier’, the other signifier being the support of the ‘knowledge’ needed to endow the initially meaningless signifier with a meaning. The signifier representing the subject (let us name it S1) works in a double and paradoxical way: it assumes meaning by virtue of the knowledge supported by subsequent signifiers signifying ‘how it is to be taken’ (let us name them S2); inversely, S2 only signify by virtue of the meaning of S1 that gives the ‘clue’ to their meaning. This is Althusser’s ‘double mirror-connection [double relation spéculaire]’ ‘that subjects the subjects to the Subject’, identification that leads to the subject-supposed-to-know. This identification ordinarily goes unnoticed, occulted by the interpreter’s spontaneous understanding of the ‘meaning of expressions’, their ‘lexical meaning’ or their ‘semantic features’.16 The other type of interpellation occurs when discursive sequence violates the spontaneous interpretation of its expressions. Routine identification with the subject-supposed-to-know is then blocked, and the intuitively non-sensical concatenation of signifiers has to be interpreted without the guarantee of the centre provided by the instance of the Subject.17 In the structure of this type of interpellation, subject does not figure as an instance (‘guarantee, centre’), but as a function: it emerges as a necessary moment or phase within the process of meaningproduction, the process of subjectivation. Signifiers S1 and S2 operate in the same way as in the first type of interpellation-by-identification; however, the subject is not supposed as the guaranteeing instance represented by S1: it is, rather, what emerges between S1 as meaningless and S1 as endowed with a meaning by its connection to S2, to which it gives sense. The subject is, then, the moment, the phase relating S1 as meaningless and S1 as meaningful. Following this, I will develop a sort of descriptive toolkit with the help of which, I hope, we will be able to isolate hypothesised ideological mechanisms and then eventually to determine the epistemic locus where the concept of interpellation may be produced.

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I propose to adapt for our purpose Oswald Ducrot’s theory of argumentation in language.18 We will start our adaptation upon one of Ducrot’s favourite examples: ‘The weather is fine, let’s go for a walk!’ According to Ducrot’s ‘standard’19 theory, there are two voices, belonging to two enunciators, in this utterance. What Ducrot terms the ‘enunciator’ is the structural support of the perspective under which fragments of discourse present themselves and, accordingly, under which they are to be ‘taken’ by the interpreter.20 Enunciator E1 enunciates that the weather is fine, and presents this consideration as an argument for the conclusion that is drawn by enunciator E2 ‘Let’s go for a walk!’ According to Ducrot, the argument and the conclusion are linked together by a topos to which both enunciations implicitly refer. This topos says: whenever the weather is fine, the walk is pleasant. We will keep the idea of the two enunciators. The notion of the topos, on the other side, entraps us in the awkward situation where we cannot reach from the actualisation of the topos ‘the weather is nice here and now’ to the conclusion ‘let us go for a walk’. The actualisation of the topos certainly does introduce subjective markers or ‘shifters’ that refer to the enunciation-situation (here, now, us. . .), but this conceptual inventory hardly provides a basis for a conceptualisation of the effect of the subject.21 Another difficulty with Ducrot’s theory is that he rightly, albeit reductively,22 conceives the signification of an expression as the function of its occurrence in an argumentative sequence.23 Assignation of meaning usually works retroactively, as the conclusion specifies how the expressions in the argument should be taken.24 Signification may also result from ‘protention’, as when the argument determines how the expressions in the conclusion are to be taken.25 In both cases, however, interpretation relies upon a point within the sequence that is relatively ‘fixed’, in the sense that its meaning does not seem questionable or that it appears evident. We may suppose that ideological interpellation should be situated at this place of ‘evidence’, which is at the same time the locus of subjectivity. Intuitively, it is interpellation that provides the clue to the meaning of the sequence, and establishes the place where the subjective element is to be situated. As this intuition cannot be further elaborated within Ducrot’s apparatus, we will at this point borrow from Deyan Deyanov the category of ‘prepredicative evidence’.26 We will say that enunciator E1 presents the fine weather as an opportunity. As it is an opportunity, enunciator E2 continues, we should take it by going for a walk. What is not said, but is the condition of this discursive string, is the prepredicative evidence that functions as a link, as an articulation, that brings the two enunciations together. It operates both ways: it operates in a prepredicative sense, not explicated in either of the two enunciations, and it links them together. We will consider what phenomenological description treats ‘prepredicative evidence’ as a signifier whose meaning-effect emerges from its being related to another signifier: to the signifier which does not make sense until it is completed by the ‘prepredicative evidence’. ‘Fine weather’ in itself does not mean much, although it is the signifier that determines the discursive situation. Its meaning of an ‘opportunity’ is defined retroactively by the sequel; however, the sequel only means what it means and only possesses the capacity of retroactively determinining meaning because it itself hinges upon the ‘prepredicative evidence’ of an ‘opportunity to be taken’. We suggest that this ‘prepredicative evidence’ is the knowledge accessible via the identification with the subject-supposed-to-know, Althusser’s Subject that interpellates individuals as subjects (and eventually into subjects). However, the identification

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as the other side of interpellation is, as soon as it is consummated, instantly occulted by its effect – the ascription of ‘opportunity’ as the meaning of ‘fine weather’. In standard approaches, this ‘evidence’ would be treated as an element of the ‘utterer’s meaning’ emerging from an utterer’s proffering a ‘sentence’ in a concrete communicational situation. By treating it as a signifier, we hope to be able to account for the retroactive effect that makes it appear as if it has ‘always already’ been there. This retroactive effect that produces the presumed ‘lexical meaning’, the meaning that appears as if residing within the unit independently of any utterance, is the effect of ideological interpellation. It is the outcome of the struggle for meaning that, while presenting its outcomes as ‘obvious, evident and normal’, conceals the struggle itself. The signifier ‘nice weather as an opportunity’, which articulates the argument to the conclusion, also gives sense to the concatenation of these two discursive fragments. We can say that it functions as a point of identification. Since the two enunciations have the same direction,27 it suffices that the interpreter identifies this evidence, that he or she recognises it, admits it, in order for the sequence to make sense. And when it makes sense to the interpreter, the interpreter has already assumed its binding element as self-evident. The interpreter has assumed it precisely in the manner that phenomenology describes as ‘prepredicative evidence’. By assuming this evidence as her or his own, the interpreter has undergone ideological interpellation. We may describe interpretation either as the consequence of the interpreter’s ‘taking’ the first part of the sequence (the argument) in the way that it is presented by E1; or as the interpreter’s ‘taking’ the second part (the conclusion) as it is presented by E2: in both cases, the interpreter ‘catches’ the mediating signifier28. What we describe as the interpreter’s ‘catching’ the mediating signifier (and thus ‘catching’ the sense of the sequence) is what Althusser calls ‘interpellation’. The point of our description is to show that we should not conceive the interpellated individual as passively undergoing the interpellation. The individual yields to interpellation by understanding ideological discourse. The addressee may, certainly, say ‘No, I am not going for a walk, I have an exam tomorrow’. However, saying this, she or he has not challenged the binding element; he or she has introduced a new argumentation where the binding element is a different one: the addressee has presented the exam as an obstacle against drawing the conclusion that would ‘normally’ or ‘evidently’ follow from the argument stating that the weather is fine. By negating the conclusion of the first argumentation, the addressee has demonstrated that he or she recognises it as ‘obviously’ following from the argument presented, and has, in this way, ratified the interpellative evidence according to which the fine weather is an opportunity to be seized. The binding signifier has a considerable sense-generating power. Consider the utterance: ‘The weather is fine but I have an exam tomorrow’. The locutor29 has not drawn any conclusion, but the audience knows that the speaker is not going for a walk. With ‘but’, a new argumentation-string has been introduced. A new enunciator introduces a new element: this E1’ presents the exam as an obstacle. To reject the first argumentation and its conclusion, one does not have to go through the whole procedure of the two argumentative sequences: it is enough to explicate the arguments, proffered respectively by E1 and E1’: ‘The weather is fine but I have an exam tomorrow’ – it is enough to explicate this level, the level of the arguments, to make the audience know that the locutor’s conclusion will be the negation of the normal conclusion that would follow from ‘The weather is fine’. One could say that this proves the

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existence of the signifier that connects the enunciations uttered by E1 and E2: in our example, the two ‘evidences’ suffice to know what the conclusion will be, even though it has not been explicated, and to know that the conclusion will be the negation of a conclusion that has not been explicated either. Let us take another example. During demonstrations in Greece, a Ljubljana daily newspaper30 published a photo of demonstrators who had displayed a large sign on the Acropolis in the Athens; the inscription read: ‘Peoples of Europe, rise up!’ The legend under the photo said: ‘Protesters displayed slogans on the Acropolis; however, police did not intervene’. On a superficial reading, the sequence informs us about two facts: that protesters displayed slogans on the Acropolis; and that police did not intervene. The second ‘fact’ is negative, which is in itself worthy of consideration. Ideological mechanism resides in how the two ‘pieces of information’ are linked together: the decisive element is the operator ‘however’. ‘However’ is one of those operators (like ‘but’, ‘nevertheless’, and so on) that invert the argumentative direction of the preceding discursive fragment. Saying ‘however, police did not intervene’ suggests that, in the normal course of affairs, police should have intervened. The enunciation ‘however, police did not intervene’ retroactively presents the display of the sign upon the Acropolis as the type of act that would normally be followed by a police intervention. It presents the display of a sign, or maybe the display of a sign with this inscription, as an act demanding police intervention. Linking the two enunciations by the operator ‘however’ presents the first utterance ‘Protesters had displayed signs on the Acropolis’ as one that should ‘normally’, ‘obviously’ be followed by ‘and police intervened’. The occurrence of ‘however’ in the second enunciation situates the signifiers of the first enunciation into a network of signifying relations that presents the demonstration and the display of the sign as some sort of violation. Understanding the sequence does not necessarily mean assuming this evidence as one’s own; but it certainly entails admitting its presence in the discursive sequence. One would admit the evidence, for instance, by challenging it: ‘But why should police have intervened?’. The mere presence of the binding signifier that provides for the ‘evidence’ does not suffice for the interpellation to be successful. Two consequences follow: 1 Ideology works as a social link (produces ‘sense’, makes people understand each

other) even when its interpellation fails. 2 We should determine stronger conditions for a successful interpellation.

Although the first point has important consequences, it is in itself rather trivial. It can be illustrated by utterances like: ‘The Count of Paris is the heir to the French throne’. One does not have to be a monarchist to understand it. We will approach the second point, the conditions for a successful interpellation, with another historical example. In April and May 2009, Croatian students occupied faculties all across Croatia. At the origin of their protest was their refusal to pay tuition fees. Their first position was: ‘We are not going to pay tuition fees!’ Later, in order to justify themselves in front of the public opinion, they produced another slogan that had a real mobilising effect: ‘Free education for all!’ We are interested in the ideological development from a position defending a particular interest to a general slogan that really effectively mobilises people. I propose to analyse this development in terms of referring to one’s own past discourse as another’s discourse.31

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The first position ‘We are not going to pay the fees’ was vulnerable because it could be rebuked by saying ‘While you are defending your own partial interests, you want the taxpayers of Croatia to pay for your studies’. The art of politics is to be able to present one’s struggle as a justified one because it is in the general interest. In the case of Croatian students, this pretension is true, but very frequently speakers falsely present their partial interest as a general one. However, the mechanism will be the same in both cases. We will consider the two consecutive positions of Croatian students as two discourses that run in the same direction. They create the situation of double-voiced discourse, as Bakhtin would say, where both of the two articulated discourses have the same direction. The articulation of the two discourses yields a unidirectional but two-voiced discourse. The first discourse D displays two enunciators: enunciator E1 presents fees as unjust, and enunciator E2 says: as they are unjust, we will not pay them. And the way in which fees are presented articulates the two enunciations together.

{

E1

Tuition fees

D

presented as unjust

E2

we are not going to pay them!

The two enunciations of the second part form the discourse D’. Enunciator E1’ of the second discourse D’ presents education as a public good, and as a public good it should be free for all, which is the conclusion drawn by enunciator E2’.

{

E1’ Education

D’

presented as a public good

E2’

should be free for all!

We will name the first position of Croatian students as discourse D, and their second position, the final one, as D’. Both are polyphonic, composed of discourses proffered by two enunciators. Within discourse D, the enunciator E1 presents fees as unjust – a kind of automatic first reaction; and enunciator E2 draws the conclusion that as the fees are unjust, we are not going to pay them. Another discourse, D’, refers to discourse D at the level of the binding signifier, the signifier of the ‘evidence’: its E1’ presents education as a public good; and enunciator E2’ says: ‘as a public good, education should be free for all’. Everything that is happening relies on the way in which the elements of the sequence are being presented. The binding ‘evidence’ of D’ is an extension or generalisation, a development or a clarification of the ‘evidence’ that holds together discourse D. So there is continuity between the two: the relation between the two is metonymic. That is why the two discourses D and D’ are running in the same direction; there is no clash between them, as D’ only generalises what was already present, but not explicated, in the discourse D. The metonymic continuity is, certainly, a retroactive effect. However, in order to submit to interpellation, it is enough for the interpreter to identify herself or himself at the point offered as the one at which one

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should identify oneself: that is, at the level of the binding ‘evidence’. In this case, ideological interpellation proceeds by identification. We should note that metonymic concatenation has important retroactive effects. The signifier ‘tuition fees’ defines the discursive situation, in this particular case in an almost traumatic way that has to be ‘made sense of’. It is around this signifier that ideological struggle is being fought. Taking ‘tuition fees’ as S1, we see that it is first stabilised by the signifier S2, ‘unjust’ pertaining to the knowledge supposed by the ideological Subject. However, when ‘education’ is specified as a ‘public good’, the string of signifiers S2 stabilising the meaning of S1, ‘tuition fees’, is significantly transformed, such that the whole sequence reads: (S1) ‘tuition fees’ as (S2) ‘obstacle to education being a public good’. The next example is a variation on Jacques Rancière’s hypothetical example ‘We could have said that we are all Algerians’.32 This hypothetical example of Rancière’s is meant to introduce the real historical example, on which he comments at length: ‘We are all German Jews’. We will analyse this second utterance later: it is a complicated case, a case of conflicting discourses and a case of subjectivation as opposed to identification. Accordingly, we first need to examine a mediating example, an invented one: ‘We are all workers at Mirafiori’.33 This is, again, a case of two discourses that run in the same direction. We will break D into two enunciations uttered by E1 and E2. E1 presents the struggle as just and defines it as the struggle of the workers at Mirafiori. Then the discourse D’ displays two enunciators as well: E1’ presents the locutor, ‘us’, as joining this struggle, and in joining it, we are workers at Mirafiori, which is the conclusion drawn by E2’. If we consider the two linking elements that bind together the first and the second discourse, we see that they are again metonymic and running in the same direction: again, this is interpellation by identification.

{ {

E1

This struggle

D



presented as just

E2

is fought by the workers at Mirafiori

E1’ We

D’ as the ones who are joining this just struggle

E2’

are all workers at Mirafiori

However, there is a difference between the Croatian students’ case and this one. In the case of Croatian students, the political problem was to present one’s own struggle as generally valid: the interpellative mechanism proceeded by self-objectivation, by objectification of one’s own discourse. In the Mirafiori case, the locutor, the agent of ideological development, identifies with another’s discourse. The agent of ideological process, the interpellated subject of ideological process assumes the binding ‘evidence’ as his or her own. The final and the most complicated case is Rancière’s example ‘We are all German Jews’.34 Discourses implicated in this utterance run in opposite directions: the ideological process operates an inversion of the other’s discourse. The elegance of the manoeuvre consists in

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that the two discourses meet only at the point where they disagree. The locutors connect the discourse they oppose at the very point where they want to rebuke it, so ‘German Jew’ is simultaneously in quotation-marks and is not in quotation-marks; this is precisely the type of polyphonic discourse in Bakhtinian terms. The discourse D consists of two enunciations by E1 and E2. Enunciator E1 presents these acts as objectionable; E2 ties to this the idea that, being objectionable, they were instigated by a German Jew. (This is the logic of ‘like father, like son’, ‘like act, like agent’; it is a rhetorically powerful utterance.) And then there is the second discourse D’, opposing the first one, where E1’ presents the locutors, ‘us’, as the agents of those acts, and E2’ draws the conclusion: if we are the agents who conceived and performed these acts, we are all German Jews, according to your definition.

{ {

E1

These acts

D



presented as objectionable

E2

were instigated by a German Jew

E1’ We

D’ presented as the agents of these acts

E2’

are all German Jews

Here, interpellation does not proceed by identification: it is subjectivation.35 We consider ‘German Jews’ as S1: it defines the situation, while receiving its meaning only when supplemented by S2, the concatenation of evidences D’ and D ‘as the agents of these acts . . . presented as objectionable’. There is no ‘inherent meaning’ to the expression ‘German Jews’ in this sequence: despite its being stabilised by the supplementation provided by S2, it only possesses ‘contextual meaning’. The meaning of the expression ‘German Jews’ accordingly refuses to be guaranteed by some Subject, and escapes any fixation by a supposed ‘centre’ in the background. The subject emerges within the distance between S1 as meaningless and S1 as meaningful: however, this distance only signifies the cleavage between the subject of énonciation (‘we’) and the subject of énoncé (‘German Jews’): the cleavage between the two is irreducible, and the momentarily emerging subject is irremediably split. The cleavage is inscribed within the utterance as the incongruity of predication: there is no chance of identifying the subject with the predicate. In this case, the subject cannot be supposed: it is not an instance guaranteeing the sense of the utterance from its inaccessible hidden centre obfuscated by the mechanism of identification. The subject is only a moment in the puttingtogether of the utterance, a function of its construction. Subjectivation remains open – hence the mobilising effect of the slogan.36 We have described two types of interpellation: interpellation by identification and interpellation as subjectivation. The distinction between the two types does not judge in advance their practical effects. Interpellation by identification has established Croatian students as representatives of the general interest. Interpellation by subjectivation has, for a short moment,

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established French students as a political group apart. Croatian students may have triggered a political process that will last in the future. French students have sunk into historical myth. We can, nevertheless, determine the general ways in which the two interpellation-mechanisms affect social relations. Interpellation by identification is reproductive; the discourses that are in play run in the same direction. Reproductive interpellation reproduces the same ideological horizon across subsequent discourses. This is the ideology that Althusser speaks of when he says that ideology reproduces relations of production. Interpellation by identification occurs whenever it appears that a locutor has used an expression in its ‘normal’, ‘evident’, ‘lexical’ sense. It is a trivial phenomenon that secures the everyday reproduction of social relations. Banal as it is, it opens onto a challenging question: as the ‘evidences’ upon which reproductive identification depends belong to different ideologies,37 how, if at all, are these regional ideologemes integrated? Althusser states that the ‘unity’ of various ideological state-apparatuses is secured by the dominant ideology.38 As not all ideologies have their material existence in ideological stateapparatuses – themselves not only the stakes of the ideological class-struggle, but also the field where this struggle is being waged39 – the ideologies that exist at in a society a certain moment are never all and altogether integrated under the dominant ideology. One would almost contend that it is only the minimally sufficient ‘cohesion’ that is produced and reproduced by the dominant ideology. We should add that dominant ideology operates in different ways in different historical epochs. We have analysed in some detail the nationalist ideology that materially exists as the nation. Our hypothesis is that the nation functions as a zero-institution.40 Nation as a zero-institution organises the ‘social field’ so as to make it accessible to, and manipulable by, the operations of the capitalist state.41 It enables apparatuses of class domination to perform the tasks of overall social reproduction. One of the basic mechanisms of social totalisation, as performed by the nation, is the ideological recognition of atomised individuals as members of a particular national set. From the point of view of overall social integration, a zero-institution is based upon a distinctive feature that is non-pertinent for any of the particular ideologies ‘integrated’ in this way: the integration it performs operates from the point of view of the national individual, and is based upon a particular kind of ‘non-pertinent’ feature – the redundant feature. National belonging is an abstraction of an individual’s belonging to a ‘society’, an abstraction of the feature that is specifically, contradictorily, concretely always-already entailed in every particular individual’s other determinations. It is the projection of the individualist principle, later ‘monopolised’ by the liberal-democratic state, upon the contradictory structure of concrete social relations. The historically prevalent mode of ‘national belonging’ is the identification with the competent subject of the national language, inculcated to national subjects by the schoolapparatus. This is not yet the ideological interpellation: it is the institutional support for any possible ideological interpellation. As such, it creates for the addressee the necessity to submit to an ideological interpellation: whether she or he accepts or refuses the ideological operations of a particular discourse that he or she is interpreting, he or she does so as interpellated into some ideology or other. The nation is thus a liberal institution: it operates as the material support for any interpellation eventually achieved by the ideologies that are historically present; however, the nation is also a constraining institution: it forces the individual to submit to some ideology.

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Although national language presents itself as a neutral medium, it necessarily gives some ideologies the advantage over others. Being a projection of a community (anticipated or really existing, but always ‘imagined’) into the eternal and sublime realm of the symbolic, it sanctifies certain class relations (anticipated or really existing, but always oppressive). In complex societies of individualistic constitution, national language as the mode of operation of the national zero-institution is historically the most common form of social integration-totalisation. The way in which national zero-institution secures the ‘effect of society’42 can be summarised as follows: 1 The national zero-institution is a formal and pseudo-neutral mechanism of social

integration that can only function if it is overdetermined by some specific ideology from amongst the ideologies that it is designed to ‘integrate’. 2 Therefore, a permanent ideological struggle is being fought in nationally constituted

societies as to which particular ideology is to overdetermine the formal mechanism of national integration. The ideology that (temporarily) succeeds in promoting itself to the position of overdetermination, becomes the dominant ideology of the particular nationally constituted society. 3 ‘National belonging’ is the way in which an individual defines her/himself in terms of

the national zero-institution. It is also the institutional ground for the mutual recognition of individual communicators. We have also discovered a different type of ideological interpellation, namely subjectivation, where discourses clash and where there is struggle for signifiers. This corresponds to an old idea presented by Vološinov in 1929 in his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, where he says at a certain point that the ‘sign becomes an arena of the class struggle’.43 This is a nice formula, since it draws attention to the fact that not only do ideologies reproduce what exists, but that there is also – and maybe even more frequently, and definitely more interestingly – the clash of various ideologies. The conflict occurs in what we should call the political process, which results, if it succeeds, in political subjectivation. This is the other type of ideological interpellation – interpellation as subjectivation within the clash of variously directed discourses.44

Notes 1 Althusser first proposed the notion of interpellation in his essay ‘Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État’, published in June 1970. The text was later published in Althusser 1976b. A short history of this text is provided in the editorial note by Jacques Bidet (Bidet 1995), the posthumous publication of the manuscript ‘La reproduction des rapports de production’, from which the 1970 article had been drawn. 2 Among the relatively few attempts at elaboration of the concept of interpellation, the work of Michel Pêcheux offers a very productive contribution. There is an interesting oscillation in this work, itself worthy of closer analysis. While Pêcheux 1975 develops a theory of ideology in the context of discourse analysis (see Gadet 1981), the authors suggest a theory of ideology developed against the background of linguistics, namely the science of language, pointing in particular to the achievements of the Soviet theory during the 1920s. The present

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text modestly situates itself within an analogous trajectory. In the past, I tried to approach interpellation in terms of a theory of discourse that schematised interpellation as an inversion of the psychoanalytic process in Lacan’s conceptualisation (see Močnik 1992; for a more developed version see Močnik 1994). This former concept imposed too strong conditions for interpellation to occur. Accordingly, the present attempt aims at de-dramatising the concept of interpellation and wants to grasp it in its everyday banality. For theoretical background, we will rely upon Oswald Ducrot’s theory of ‘argumentation in language’: its central theoretical tenet that polyphony operates already on the level of language opens the problematic field where we hope to justify our thesis that the so-called ‘semantic features’ of lexical items are sediments of discursive practices, in other words, that they result from ideological struggle. In this, we are reactivating the position developed in Vološinov 1986. 3 For example, Marx’s conceptual oppositions ‘absolute surplus-value/relative surplus-value’ and ‘formal subsumption of labour under capital/real subsumption of labour under capital’: without these distinctions, Marx could not analyse the production-process as production of surplusvalue, namely as a process of exploitation and subsequently as the basic form of class struggle; he would not be able to show that the development of productive forces in the capitalist mode of production is itself the basic register of the reproduction of the capitalist mode – and subsequently the basic form of the class struggle as it is waged by the capitalist class. Without these conceptual distinctions, Marx’s critique would have remained a critique of unequal distribution of the newly-produced value – it would have remained within the horizon of David Ricardo and could not deploy the analysis of production as a process of exploitation. 4 This is how Marx, after having abandoned the term ‘ideology’, writes about ‘the false appearances’, the ‘mystified form that is nonetheless a necessary outgrowth of the capitalist mode of production’ which he subsumes under the concept of ‘die verwandelte Form’, the ‘converted’ or the ‘transmuted’ form: ‘Because at one pole the price of labour-power assumes the transmuted form of wages, surplus-value appears at the opposite pole in the transmuted form of profit’. See Marx 1964, pp. 33, 46. For a philosophical elaboration of ‘die verwandelte Form’ see Mamardashvili 1970. 5 ‘. . . two conjoined theses: 1. there is no practice except by and in an ideology; 2. there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects’ (Althusser 1995a, pp. 223, 302). 6 Althusser 1995a, pp. 223, 302. 7 ‘It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are “obviousnesses”) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognise and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out . . . “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!” At work in this reaction is the ideological recognition function which is one of the two functions of ideology as such (its inverse being the function of misrecognition [méconnaissance]). French text: Althusser 1995a, pp. 224, 303–4. 8 The thesis ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence’ explicitly situates ideology within the imaginary register; the term ‘represents’, however, entails a representationist notion of ideology (curiously regressive with respect to Althusser’s theoretical effort) and implicitly conceives ideology as some sort of (false) knowledge; the ‘recognition/misrecognition’ opposition suggests that ideological recognition is a recognition of evidence about ‘reality’, and that it leads to a false, or at least deficient, cognition of this reality. 9 It may be appropriate to recall that Engels's unfortunate term ‘false consciousness’ does not describe the relation between ideological statements and some ‘extra-linguistic reality’, but the relation between ideological utterances and their historical conditions of production, the relation between an ideological énoncé and the conditions of its énonciation. See Engels’s text in the letter to Mehring of 14 July 1893: ‘Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines

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false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought’ (Engels 1893). 10 In the sense developed in ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the Ego’ in Freud 1953–74, Volume XVIII. 11 See Althusser 1971a. 12 European debates as to ‘how to solve Greece’s debt’ present a great variety of ‘solutions’; however, the common feature of the debates is that they do not question the question itself: they do not doubt that the solution to the crisis should be the liquidation of the sovereign debts of the member-states. 13 Linguists such as Ducrot explicitly denounce the spontaneous ideology of linguistic practices as an epistemological obstacle: ‘. . . I will quickly try to describe that conception of meaning through which language represents itself and which, according to me, if accepted, should indeed lead semanticians to commit suicide. That conception of meaning inherent in the word mean and inherent in the usual representation of the standard use of language, I will call the informative or descriptive conception of meaning . . . It consists in saying that the first function of speech or discourse is to convey an image of reality, to provide information on whatever happens to be the case’ (Ducrot 1996, pp. 16, 18). 14 ‘We observe that the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject is speculary, a mirror-structure [spéculaire, c’est-à-dire en miroir], and doubly speculary: this mirror-duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its functioning’ (Althusser 1995a, pp. 310, 232). 15 The concept is proposed by reference to Lacan's ‘subject supposed to know [sujet-supposé-savoir]’. 16 In traditional linguistics, the subject-supposed-to-know is reified in the ‘native speaker-hearer’; in more popular ideologies of language, the knowledge transmitted by this instance is styled as ‘the spirit of the language’; contemporary ideas of ‘cultural identity’ are a late echo of this ideology. 17 ‘Which means that all ideology is centred, that the Absolute Subject occupies the unique place of the Centre and interpellates around it the infinity of individuals into subjects in a double mirror-connection such that it subjects the subjects to the Subject, while giving them in the Subject in which each subject can contemplate its own image (present and future) the guarantee that this really concerns them and Him, and that since everything takes place in the Family (the Holy Family: the Family is in essence Holy), “God will recognise his own in it”, namely those who have recognised God, and have recognised themselves in Him, will be saved’ (Althusser 1995a, pp. 310, 232). 18 For a bibliography of Oswald Ducrot, see Carel 2002, p. 12 et sqq. We need to rearticulate Ducrot’s theory since we intend to activate it on the level of discourse, while Ducrot’s theory conceptualises argumentative resources and procedures within the language as the Saussurean langue. Our own position on this point, more or less implicit in what follows, is ‘Vološinovian’: ‘language’ is an abstraction made by the linguists, an epistemic obstacle. 19 Anscombre 1995, p. 38 et sqq. 20 Oswald Ducrot defines enunciator in the following way: ‘What do I mean by enunciator? For me, all utterances represent one or several points of view: by enunciators, I mean the sources of those various points of view which are represented within an utterance. In an utterance, one represents the state of affairs one is speaking about as seen from the point of view of one or several persons: the enunciators are those persons from whose point of view the state of affairs is viewed’ (Ducrot, 1996, p. 68).

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21 By introducing the notion of the topos, Ducrot evacuates the problem of the meaning of the sequence and of its elements: the topos represents a sort of general and impersonal knowledge to which the interpreter is supposed to have immediate access. The notion of the topos thus precludes the question of identification that generates meaning. 22 Marion Carel in Anscombre 1995, p. 180 et sqq. 23 ‘. . . in argumentative strings of discourse, the argument and the conclusion have no semantic value independently from one another . . . words change their value according to their argumentative orientation’ (Ducrot, 1996, pp. 48–50). 24 Compare: ‘The weather is fine, let’s go for a walk!’ to ‘The weather is fine, the air strikes may resume’; ‘It’s late; the train must have already arrived’; ‘It’s late; the train must have already departed’. 25 ‘The weather is fine, let’s go for a walk!’; ‘This meeting is getting boring, let’s go for a walk!’; ‘I don’t want them to listen to us, let’s go for a walk!’. 26 Deyan Deyanov 2001, p. 140 et sqq. Deyanov takes Husserl's prepredicative self-evidence as form of receptivity (Husserl 1973, p. 61) in the sense elaborated by Schutz (Schutz 1970, p. 64) and Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch 1974, p. 262), but proposes an enlarged interpretation ‘so as to include all possibility conditions of understanding’. In this way, Deyanov intends to grasp ‘the prepredicative self-evidences of thought itself’: ‘[T]his prepredicative self-evidence is a self-evidence of the thinking itself and as such, it is a possibility-condition of all predicative thoughts that I express on Socrates and, as such, it cannot be expressed. We do not think of the chair in front of me . . . as of a human and thus we cannot ponder whether it has deprived Athenian youth or not (this is why, besides being possibility-conditions, prepredicative self-evidences are also conditions of impossibility). These (im)possibility-conditions set the limits to the freedom in the free variation of the subject and the predicate, they determine up to which point the variation is possible and from which point on it is not possible . . . It is by such a free variation of matter that we, leaving aside anything factual, extract the eidetic form as an invariant’. For our purposes, we may stop at the ‘eidetic form’ (which is still particular) and do not need to proceed as far as the ‘logical form’ (which is universal and, for this reason, the only interesting object for the transcendental logician). In a theory of ideology, the ‘eidetic form’/‘logical form’ distinction functions in a specific way, since the ideological mechanism consists in presenting what the transcendental logician would call the (particular) ‘eidetic form’ as a (universal) ‘logical form’. It is the idea of a non-explicit ‘evidence’, the condition of possibility-impossibility of the future discursive sequence, that is valuable for us. In our further elaboration, we will treat it as the signifier that, in its specific relationship with the initially ‘meaningless’ signifier, determines the discursive horizon: it determines what is possible to say and what is not – that is, it determines what makes sense (and what does not make sense) and how what is said makes sense. The ‘non-explicit evidence’ is the ‘knowledge’ lacking in the initially ‘meaningless’ signifier whose meaning it provides by indicating ‘how it is to be taken’. Once supplemented with the ‘evident, although non-explicit knowledge’, the initially meaningless signifier stabilises and totalises the meaning of the sequence as discourse that ‘makes sense’ in a given situation. 27 In Bakhtin's sense: when a discourse is ‘oriented toward another’s discourse [ustanovka na čužoe slovo]’, the two discourses may have the same direction (as in the case of skaz’) or they may have different directions (irony, parody and so on). In 1963, Bakhtin gives a classification of discourses that distinguishes ‘single-voiced discourse [odnogolosoe slovo]’ from ‘double-voiced discourse [dvugolosoe slovo] (Bakhtin 1984, pp. 181–204) 28 We should understand the expression ‘catch’ in both its meanings: ‘to capture, to seize’ and ‘to contract by infection’. An interesting project of a theory of ideology as ‘epidemiology of beliefs’ is presented in Sperber 1996. 29 In Ducrot’s terminology ‘locutor [locuteur]’, is the instance that is given, within the utterance, as the source of the utterance (Ducrot and Schaeffer 1995, p. 604). ‘[By locutor] I mean the

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person who, according to the very meaning of an utterance, is the person responsible for that utterance . . . [The locutor] is the person who is designated, in the utterance itself, as being the person responsible for that utterance’ (Ducrot 1996, p. 62). 30 Dnevnik, 5 May 2010. 31 In Bakhtin’s sense; see note 27 above. 32 Rancière 2004. 33 Mirafiori was a FIAT factory in Turin where there was a major strike in 1967, and the strike spread to other FIAT factories. Our example is hypothetical, but the activists who worked to spread the strike, because Mirafiori alone had no chance of success, were using the mechanism that we will try to analyse. 34 According to the official site of the National Assembly of the French Republic (http://www. assemblee-nationale.fr/histoire/mai_68/chronologie.asp, [accessed 14 January 2012]), the slogan ‘We are all Jews and Germans [Nous sommes tous des Juifs et des Allemands]’ appeared for the first time on 22 May 1968 on a poster for the demonstration against the exile imposed on Daniel Cohn-Bendit a day before; the same source states that demonstrators who gathered that evening in front of the National Assembly shouted the slogan ‘We are all German Jews’. Already on 3 May, L’Humanité, the official daily of the Parti Communise Français, published a text by Georges Marchais, the organisational secretary of the PCF, condemning ‘the agitation that goes against the interests of the mass of students and favours fascist provocations’, led by the Mouvement du 22 March ‘under the direction of the German anarchist Cohn-Bendit’. The slogan ‘We are all German Jews [Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands]’ acquired notoriety at the demonstration in Paris’s Latin Quarter on 31 May. (I thank Todor Petkov for his little historical investigation into the background of the students’ slogan.) 35 I am thankful to Jernej Habjan for his suggestion how to treat this case. 36 It performs the subjectivation in the orthodox Lacanian sense: ‘A signifier is what represents the subject for another signifier . . . The subject is what the signifier represents for another signifier [Un signifiant, c’est ce qui représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant . . . Le sujet, c’est ce que le signifiant représente pour un autre signifiant]’ (Lacan 1966, pp. 819, 835). 37 Analysing reproductive interpellation, we have encountered ideologies of ‘outing’, of ‘law and order’, of social solidarity, of workers’ solidarity. 38 Althusser 1995a, p. 286. 39 Althusser 1995a, p. 284. 40 Močnik 1994. We borrowed the concept of the zero-institution from Claude Lévi-Strauss (Les organisations dualistes existent-elles?, in Lévi-Strauss 1956). Lévi-Strauss suggests that in every society, there exists an apparently non-functional zero-institution, whose only function is to make it possible for the society to exist. 41 In ‘Marx in his limits’, Althusser analyses at length the ‘separation’ of the bourgeois state from the class-struggle: the state is ‘separated’ from the class-struggle in order to be able to intervene ‘tous azimuts’ in the interest of the dominant class; and especially in order to secure the material conditions of the relation of production and exploitation. The ‘separation’ of the bourgeois state from the class struggle is a form of the class struggle waged by the capitalist class. (Althusser 1994–5, Volume 1, pp. 427, 435, 478, 480). 42 ‘In this perspective, Capital must be regarded as the theory of the mechanism of production of the society effect in the capitalist mode of production. We are beginning to suspect, even if it is only because of the works of contemporary ethnology and history, that this society effect differs with different modes of production’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 66). 43 Vološinov 1986, p.23.

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44 An initial shorter version of this paper was delivered as a lecture at the St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, on 22 December 2010: hence its occasional cursive timbre. I want to thank Todor Petkov who not only subsequently translated the lecture into Bulgarian, but also later transcribed it into English: having performed the delicate transposition of the oral into the written, he has participated in the production-process of the present text.

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20 ‘Es kömmt drauf an’: notes on Althusser’s critique of the subject Ozren Pupovac

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here are in Althusser at least four theses concerning the subject. They can be put in the following order: 1) ideology interpellates individuals as subjects, 2) science has no subject (although it has an object), 3) history is a process without a subject, and, 4) the masses make history. The theses – this, in fact, being their specificity – do not propose a revisiting or a new resolution of the classical philosophical problem of the subject; rather, they are here to dissipate the problem itself. Althusser confronts philosophy with nothing less than the necessity of a thorough conceptual refoundation: if it is to respond to the injunctions of its time, philosophy needs to dispense with the concept of the subject – whether as the site of the reflexive transparency of consciousness, or as the locus of the self-determination of action. Only in such a way will it be able to attain historical actuality proper: to seize the movement of history in its real process – and in seizing it, to contribute to its revolutionary unfolding. This is the sense of the lapidary pronouncement that we find in Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel: ‘the concept process is scientific, the notion subject is ideological’.1 And yet, things do not appear that simple. Articulating the critique of the concept of the subject through reflections on ideology and consciousness, on the nature of scientific knowledge, as well as on the movement of history and the role therein of the political irruption of the masses, Althusser creates a series of aporiae, which complicate and trouble the entire effort of critique. Ultimately, the attempt to dislodge the notion of the subject backfires. But it also misfires, affecting the concept of the object, the concept of scientific objectivity, which Althusser would proclaim central both to the intelligibility of history and to the possibility of any active involvement in its unfolding. The analysis here presented is an attempt to follow these conceptual ricochets. Its orienting question can be framed in a rather simple manner: how does Althusser’s critique of the subject – and thus his attempt to assert the primacy of the object – measure against Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach? Having done away with the subject, and with the object as the principal problem facing us, how do we stand in relation to Marx’s injunction to move from interpreting towards changing the world?

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What it is necessary to demonstrate, here, is that rather than completely reversing the question and thus affirming the prevalence of theory, of scientific and philosophical practice, over politics, Althusser, throughout his conceptual trajectory – and, to a certain degree, against it – offers a complex articulation of the two, an articulation of interpretation and change, ultimately rooted in the primacy of change, that is, in the primacy of politics. Everything, as we will see, seems to hinge on an enigma that Marx bequeaths to us in the famous eleventh thesis, the enigma of the impersonal pronoun ‘es’. Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert, es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern. What is this ‘es’, this ‘it’ that we find in the statement that ‘it is necessary to change it’? Or better, who is this ‘it’ that comes in place of interpretation? Let us start with Althusser’s central proposition on ideology: ‘Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects’.2 At the very outset, the thing to note, here, is that the famous ‘central thesis on ideology’ implies a troublesome tension: a tension growing from the duality of the foundations out of which it was composed. There are two fundamental conceptual sources from which Althusser would draw the concept of interpellation. The first is explicit and openly stated – it appears in person in the essay on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ and is identified in Althusser’s subsequent publications, such as Éléments d’autocritique: namely, Spinoza and his theory of knowledge. Ideological interpellation, as Althusser would explicitly argue, corresponds to Spinoza’s ‘First Level of Knowledge’: the level of inadequate knowledge, knowledge limited by the perceptive attachment to the body and by the illusions of subjectivity, which Spinoza terms the imaginary. In June 1972, for instance, we can find Althusser writing: ‘In the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics, and in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, we find in fact what is undoubtedly the first theory of ideology ever thought out, with its three characteristics: (1) its imaginary “reality”, (2) its internal inversion, (3) its “centre”: the illusion of the subject’.3 The second conceptual source, by contrast, is more covert. It does not appear in person, although we can find it between the lines – for instance, in the two examples that Althusser evokes when describing his concept: those of the policeman hailing individuals on the street, and of the Christian ritual of prayer. The two examples are anything but arbitrary. In fact, they point towards a definite, if unexpected, precursor to Althusser’s concept of interpellation: the young Marx and his critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the State. For, as we know, the policeman and the prayer are also motifs that preoccupy the young Marx, motifs that inspire the entire prodigious venture of philosophical and political critique, in which religion and the State, simultaneously, and through a remarkable analogy, are identified as the fundamental instantiations of ideology – more precisely, of that which Marx placed under the rubric of false universality.4 False universality, as Marx tells us in Zur Judenfrage, is what religion and the State both seek to impose upon the realm of the actually existing: a fictitious sense of wholeness, a simulacrum of unity and equilibrium hovering above the world of ‘worldly’ torments, that is, over the disarray of economic particularities, tensions and inequalities. Thus Marx’s general diagnosis of ideological domination: in order to perpetuate societal tensions and contradictions, the most adequate ‘resolution’ is their obscuration.5 Indeed, if we read Althusser’s concept of interpellation as part of the broader research that he was conducting around 1969 and 1970 – subsequently unearthed in manuscript form under the title Sur la reproduction – it is this Marxian source of the concept that comes to the fore with full force. Marx’s identification of ideology as false universality seems precisely central for the entire problem of reproduction that Althusser is developing, here. The question being, what

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is it that enables the permanence and the continuity of the capitalist relations of production – and thus also the permanence and the continuity of the contradiction implied in them, that of exploitation and domination? How can the domination of capital over labour persist over and over again in the myriad practices of everyday life, in the light of the drastic contradiction that it implies? Like the young Marx, Althusser’s answer is to articulate the State and its functioning within the very core of the process of capitalist production: it is the ‘false universality’ that is produced in and through the functioning of the ideological state apparatuses that assures the reproduction of the conditions of the relations of production in their contradiction: that is, what assures that the unequal positions in the process of production are taken up and continuously performed. Ideology and the State are, in this sense, the effective grounds for the stillness of historical movement – they are responsible for assuring that the asymmetry of the contradiction in capitalism, the asymmetry between the owners of the means of production and the owners of mere labour-power, is reproduced in its identity. Ideology and the State ensure that history is nothing but a constant set of repetitions and variations on the themes of exploitation and oppression, and not the history of breaks and overturnings, of revolts and revolutions. Thus the assertion: ‘When nothing happens, the Ideological State Apparatuses have functioned perfectly’.6 The important thing to note is that what takes centre-stage here for Althusser, as it does for Marx, is the critique of the liberal notion of freedom and of the formal universality of the juridicopolitical sphere. Herein lies, in fact, the key to the entire enigma of the thesis on the ideological interpellation of the subject. In this sense, we need to remind ourselves of the extended formulation of the ‘central thesis’ itself: ‘Ideology interpellates the individuals as subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject’. The wording is very precise: what Althusser means by the phrase ‘functioning of the category of the subject’ is nothing other than the ideological domination of the figure of subjective rights in capitalism, that is, the mystificatory role that the latter play vis-à-vis class struggle. That ideology ‘functions by the category of the subject’ implies that the subject, not simply as a philosophical notion, but, more widely, as an ideological form, is the culprit for the perversion of freedom in capitalism – for the simultaneous existence of freedom and unfreedom. There is an unmistakable effectivity of freedom in capitalism: the individual qua individual is free – in the marketplace, in front of the law, in the voting-booth, while expressing his or her opinions, and so on. And yet such a display of freedom is only possible through the tacit acceptance of the conditions of unfreedom and inequality: the free exchange in the labour-market implies free submission to the rules of capitalist exploitation; the freedom of the vote implies the free acceptance of the limited sphere of ‘political possibilities’ prescribed by the bourgeois State; the formal freedom of the legal subject implies the abstraction of the concrete content of class inequalities; the freedom of the knowing subject implies a conformity with the ideological limits imposed on scientific and philosophical inquiry; and so on. In short, a specific form of freedom (juridical, moral, ethical, political, philosophical) mediates the contradiction inscribed in the process of capitalist exploitation, while masking this contradiction and displacing it. This means that for Althusser (and he is, indeed, close to Evgeny Pashukanis, here),7 capitalist relations of production are reproduced by a specific form of fetishisation of the subject: that is, they are reproduced by the internalisation, in each individual consciousness, of the idea of the putatively universal and non-contradictory nature of individual freedom – which the individual then projects directly upon his or her own practice and social being. Such a particular practice, in turn, is not simply recognised as having been performed

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freely; it is also recognised in its own ‘dignity’ in the Hegelian sense: that of being an essential part of the substantive totality of the division of labour. A formal false universality (the formal idea: all men are free and equal) is also complemented by a substantive false universality: each individual practice is accorded with a specific function and thus also a necessary place in the social whole. The multiplicity of Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses (political parties, the family, schools, the media, religious organisations, trade unions, different leisure-associations, and so on) thus play the same role as Hegel’s Corporations in the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts: they naturalise, for every individual, the ‘obviousness’ that his or her own individual practice is an organic part of the system of the division of labour, or of any general type of societal structuration – with this particular determination accomplishing the subjection of the individual to the constraints of such a system.8 Such a critique of the supposed universality of the bourgeois conception of freedom in capitalism constitutes the critical moment of Althusser’s concept. But there is also the other side to interpellation. For when Althusser tries to equip his concept of ideology with an element of generality, it is Spinoza who he evokes. The second side of the concept, the theory of ideology as a ‘general theory’, takes cue from Spinoza’s separation of the First and the Second Levels of Knowledge. Althusser’s interpellated subject, as we have already seen, corresponds to the former: an inadequate realm of knowledge, derived from the arbitrariness of individual experience, a realm of imaginary syntheses, of experientia vaga. Spinoza dixit: ‘[T]he mind has not an adequate but only a confused knowledge of itself, its own body, and of external bodies, whenever it perceives things after the common order of nature; that is, whenever it is determined from without, namely, by the fortuitous play of circumstance, to regard this or that’.9 Likewise, Althusser’s interpellated subject lives his own world in inadequacy and confusion. And he does so precisely because his conscious world is nothing but his unreflected perception and his immediate, lived experience: le vécu. Such experience can never attain true knowledge of the real causal determinations in which it is implicated; such experience is always blind with regard to the causes and forms of mediation that determine its own existence. Moreover, given its bent towards all sorts of ‘obviousness’, such experience is particularly prone to exploitation by various ideological distortions. Whether due to its own inherent perceptive limitations, or to its infusion by ideological forms, lived experience is, in short, always a misrecognition [méconnaisance] of real determinations, of the ensemble of causes and relations that make up the determinate social whole in a specific moment in history. Thus Althusser’s ‘First thesis on ideology’: ‘Ideology represents the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence’.10 The critique of the notion of the subject, here, ultimately takes the form of the critique of phenomenal experience, and of consciousness as such as grounds for knowledge.11 As Althusser would uphold, between Spinoza’s First and the Second Level, between subjective experience and rational knowledge, there can never be anything other than a coupure, a violent break, a radical discontinuity. Spinoza’s order of adequate ideas, the true knowledge of causal determinations, produced at a distance from the contingency of individual perception or cognition, is translated in Althusser’s vocabulary by the thesis: science is a process without a subject. Only a non-experiential, non-empirical scientific practice (a practice devoid of the subject) can proceed towards the knowledge of the multiplicity of social and historical determinations. It is only through scientific abstraction, which produces its own specific object at a distance from anything merely given, from anything entangled in the immediacy of practical existence, that we can know the whole.

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Besides being one of the building-blocks for a theory of knowledge, interpellation at this point also becomes a proto-anthropological concept: the concept of the homo ideologicus. In its general opposition to science, ideology, for Althusser, would also come to represent the socially necessary illusion that persists throughout the course of history, whatever the differences between social and political situations implied, and regardless of the existence or inexistence of class relations. Such an illusion persists because individual experience can never fully master the totality of determinations in which it is implicated, because it can never grasp the ‘abstract’ dimension of social and historical forms – even if, or precisely because, this mystification is necessary for social relations to hold in the first place, as it enables individuals to be integrated into the general structure of social relations. In Althusser’s own words: ‘Human societies secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life’.12 There is, of course, an obvious difficulty in reconciling the two sources of Althusser’s concept. The Marxian critical notion of ideology (ideology as false universality) and the Spinozist general one (ideology as the limitation and falsity of experience) make an uneasy fit. What is difficult to bring together is, on the one hand, the idea that there is a determinate historical source and destination of ideology – that the ideological forms that emerge in capitalism function precisely as determinate masks of its mechanisms of domination and exploitation – and, on the other hand, the idea that ideology is omnihistorical, as it resides in human nature as such, in the constitutive incapacity of our experience. For either we consider ideology a specific problem, and, moreover, a decisive problem in the contradiction internal to capitalism – ideology being the very element that assures that this contradiction is reproduced in its dissymmetry – or else we obscure the problem of the contradiction by absorbing it into the anthropological question of ideological alienation, which has no necessary relation to determinate contradictions or forms in history. The Spinozist trajectory, in other words, makes it impossible to think both the specificity of the ideological distortion proper to capitalism and the specificity of the struggle against this distortion. If all subjectivity qua experience is constitutively illusory, then the struggle against capitalist exploitation, starting from the very consciousness of being exploited and oppressed, has the same structure as the dominant ideology itself: the structure of illusory experience.13 Following from this, the breakdown of the order of representations that allocate individuals in their positions in the relations of production is thus not immanent to a confrontation with these representations, to a direct experience of the struggle within and over the ideological state-apparatuses. It can only come from the outside: from science. As a corollary to his thesis on the generality of ideology, Althusser seems to be establishing the primacy of science and its objectivity for all politics worthy of the name: it is only a scientific break with ideology that enables us to exit the field of domination imposed by the State and its ideological apparatuses. In the light of Marx’s eleventh thesis, this is a stark reversal of the order of things: it is interpretation that changes the world, and not the bitter and protracted experience of class struggle, not revolutionary political practice as such. In the concreteness of the consciousness that revolts against oppression and domination, history appears to be at a standstill. Science as a process without a subject seems to be the key to the idea of history as a process without a subject. But does this ultimately mean that history is a process without class struggle as well? However, Althusser is aware of the problem, not only when he affirms that ‘class struggle infinitely surpasses its effects inscribed in the forms of the Ideological State Apparatuses’,14

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but also when he makes a self-critical assessment of his reliance on Spinoza. ‘You cannot find in Spinoza’, he writes, ‘what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction’. Thus also the affirmation: ‘The absence of “contradiction” was taking its toll: the question of the class struggle in ideology did not appear. Through the gap created by this “theory” of ideology slipped theoreticism: science/ ideology’.15 What Althusser wrestled with from the very moment of his self-critical designation of ‘theoreticism’ was precisely how to avoid a strict surgical separation between knowledge and politics, between science and subjective experience – even when attempting to affirm and maintain the irreducibility and irreversibility of theoretical discoveries, such as Marx’s ‘opening of the continent of history’. Nevertheless, such a vacillation between interpretation and change had already been anticipated, in a concept that Althusser never developed properly, but that indicates the whole difficulty that he has in attempting to determine what revolutionary politics would actually consist of. For example, when referring in 1967 to the notorious problem of the ‘fusion of theory and practice’, Althusser would state the following: ‘we can legitimately talk about an ideology of a scientific character or, for the sake of brevity, a scientific ideology’.16 A scientific ideology? How are we to get a grip on this paradoxical notion? We can unravel this question by looking at how Althusser treats what the Marxist tradition determined as the problem of spontaneity. Althusser’s approach to politics on this point is decisively Leninist: ‘without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement’ – or, in his own words: ‘Theory is essential to practice, to the forms of practice that it helps bring to birth or to grow, as well as to the practice it is the theory of’.17 Thus political practice cannot do without a theoretical moment, a moment of the knowledge of the conditions of the struggle in which it is implicated, of the configuration of forces that dominate the ‘current situation’. And yet such an affirmation of the decisive role of knowledge in politics does not in any way amount to an espousal of dogmatism; quite the reverse. Althusser here seeks to revert the order of the usual accusations – true dogmatism is not marked by the determinate presence of theory in the practice of politics, but precisely in the opposite: in the blind attachment to the givens of practice, in ‘practical solutions’ plagued by unreflected presuppositions or by an inflexible attachment to the immediate coordinates of the existing. It is on this basis that we get the surprising equation: spontaneism=technocratism. Spontaneous practice, as we learn, is akin to techné, a technical practice with predetermined ends and with predetermined means for producing these ends. A technical practice always dictates: ‘such and such effects to be produced in such and such an object in such and such a situation’.18 This is a practice that is certain of where it is heading and is blindly subservient to this direction (and to the presuppositions that guide it). The moment of reflexivity escapes it: it is unable to properly achieve its own self-determination, since its own development – and any possible intervention of knowledge into it – is only ever the realisation of ends that were given to it in advance. Spontaneity, in short, remains trapped in a circle. A circle of teleology, which, as such, is incapable of producing novelty. ‘Left to itself’, as Althusser would write, ‘a spontaneous (technical) practice produces only the “theory” it needs as a means to produce the ends assigned to it: this “theory” is never more than the reflection of this end, uncriticised, unknown, in its means of realization, that is, it is a by-product of the reflection of the technical practice’s end on its means . . . [and ultimately] a prisoner of this end and of the “realities” which have imposed it as an end’.19 What is important to note, here, is that this spontaneity=techné identification implies a double addressee. On the one hand, Althusser seems to be explicitly arguing against the idea of the political spontaneity of revolt. The Sartrean ‘Subject of History’, the rebellious subjectivity

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that rises against the determinate conditions of inequality, is not yet the political subject proper. Revolt does not by itself lead to a revolutionary transformation of the situation.20 This is because its actions exhaust themselves in the simple negation from which they proceed: their finality is already given by the objectivity of the situation that they negate. Moreover, the practice of revolt can ultimately produce only a momentaneous exception, a punctual interruption – but it cannot conceive of such an exception as a process; it cannot perceive of transformation as something that demands a constant eye on possible innovations and novelties; and it cannot undertake transformation as the actual production of new conditions of the situation. On the other hand, however, this same address applies to the technocratism of the Party, it applies to the dogmatism of the ‘party line’, which, having been set in advance on the basis of a presupposed certainty about the course of history (the theory of stages, for example) becomes unable to respond to the exigencies of constantly shifting situations. There is a debilitating impotence inscribed in the dogmatism of rigid analyses, in concepts not submitted to self-criticism, in notions that approach history in abstracto, at a distance from the ever-changing conditions of practical struggle. Thus the warning: ‘Marxist theory can fall behind history, and even behind itself, if ever it believes that it has arrived’.21 Already, here, we have an indication of the impossibility of drawing a strict divide between knowledge and political experience – even when theorising the consequences of the coupure. Althusser would only strengthen further this conviction in his account of the historical dialectic, where he proposes a conception of the political process as something founded on reflexivity and self-determination. In short, the relationship between knowledge and politics becomes one of mutual conditioning, but also one of a continuous mutual subversion. Political practice cannot be the simple application of theoretical knowledge generated from the outside. But, at the same time, knowledge cannot be wholly subservient to the givenness of the political experience of revolt. A critique of spontaneism – and, more generally, a critique of any teleology – implies an articulation of knowledge and experience that twists both from within. Knowledge is only an open process if it is posited as the reflexivity of practice itself, if it proceeds from the exigencies of practical interventions in the given situation. Only in such a way can theory respond to the surprises that history bequeaths us. But at the same time, political practice – in order to be able to properly achieve its moment of self-determination – has to rely on the systematisation and concentration of its multiple experiences. In order to be able to maintain a continuous course in its constant diversification, in order to be able to actively pursue a transformative path, politics has to be able to project a moment of strategic consistency and concentration beyond its immediate tactical consciousness. The main question, in other words, is how to maintain the continuity of struggle in ever-changing conditions: how to articulate the generality of the revolutionary trajectory (of the struggle against capitalism) with the singularity of the political situations from which we act. This is exactly what Althusser’s thesis that ‘history is a process without a subject’ means. History is a process without a subject because it is composed of singular situations that demand an incessant recasting of both the elements of their intelligibility, and of our strategies of acting upon them. However, history is also a process without a ‘subject’ in the strict sense, a process devoid of a subjectivity fully identical to itself lying at its origin. The idea that the ‘masses make history’ means precisely that the masses are not a subject subsumable under the identity of its consciousness. The subjectivity of the masses, rather, represents the heterogeneity of the process itself: a point of unity in complexity, a strategic synthesis of constant internal transformations, a conjunctural constellation of forces.22

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This is the backdrop against which we need to read Althusser’s attempt to give Lenin’s idea of the concrete situation a dialectical formalisation. A dialectic of the ‘structure in dominance’, the dialectic of overdetermined contradictions implies, in essence, the impossibility of separating a priori essences from phenomena: the multiplicity of determinations encountered in concrete situations should not be discarded as accidents, as exceptions to the general determinations by which we render these situations intelligible. Rather, this multiplicity expresses the specificity of the general determinations when confronted with unique situations. This means that, for Althusser, there is in history, properly speaking, nothing but accidents, nothing but singular situations, which force us constantly to reinvest and reorganise our elements of intelligibility. The dialectic is nothing but the movement back and forth between the contradiction and the multiplicity of its specific conditions of existence; or, better, it is nothing but the constant interpenetration between what is seen as primary and what is seen as secondary. In Althusser’s words: ‘the real contradiction [is] so much one with its “circumstances” that it [is] only discernible, identifiable and manipulable through them and in them’.23 But this also means that knowledge can only ever be knowledge of singular situations – of conjunctures. The ‘object’ of history that knowledge treats is contingency as such. The main problem, however, is how to accord this singularity a dimension of intelligibility, and thus also a dimension of necessity, how to treat historical situations as necessary in their contingency and not as pure arbitrary occurrences. In practical terms, this would translate into the question: how can the determinant contradiction in capitalism (the economic contradiction) be recognised in the singularity of historical surprises where it does not appear ‘in person’? For Althusser, it can indeed never appear in person, as ‘the lonely hour of the last instance never comes’. There are only exceptional situations, condensed multiplicities, never the purity of a simple contradiction.24 It is for this reason that the movement of knowledge, as the formal guarantee of the intelligibility of contingencies, has to constantly reconfigure its own terrain. As Althusser wrote: ‘The exception thus discovers in itself the rule, the rule of the rule, and the old “exceptions” must be regarded as methodologically simple examples of the new rule’.25 Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis is here effectively twisted against itself: the eternity of the laws of nature or the laws of history is there precisely in order to be constantly suspended. It is only ever reinstated as to then disappear and reinvent itself in the urgencies of the transformation of the real – which means, consequently, that the trajectory of knowledge constantly demands its own periodisation: its own reflection upon itself, with regard to the novelty of the political situation that it echoes. Lenin’s treatment of imperialism, as Althusser would insist, can only be rendered intelligible as an inscription of an immanent break with regard to the logic of Marx’s Capital. For, in the end: ‘No science is ever anything more than a continuing Break, punctuated by further, internal breaks’.26 In the end, Althusser effectively arrives at a conception of a dialectical interrelation between knowledge and politics, between interpretation and change. Change is predicated upon a moment of interpretation, upon a moment of self-reflexivity that strips consciousness away from the immediacy in which it is entangled. But, in turn, interpretation can only be interpretation if it is conditioned by the permanent injunction to act in the present, and thus also by the excess of such practical interventions. It is impossible to simply deduce political actions from the objectivity of the laws of Capital. Being rooted in singular situations, each possessing a typicality of its own, political actions, and the decisions upon which they are founded, are always in excess of such laws, even if they necessitate a form of general intelligibility in order

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to be able to maintain the continuity of their trajectory. Additionally, precisely because of such a constant conditioning by concrete action, the domain of knowledge necessitates a permanent retrospection on itself, a constant struggle against its own ossification, a permanent redrawing of its conceptual trajectories: in short, its constant ‘purification’.27 The entire problem, however, is the question of what is actually active in this process of reflexivity. If our practical treatment of situations constantly demands a specific revisiting of the elements of their intelligibility, is it possible to draw the formal conditions of the possibility of the latter? This is the fault-line of Althusser’s ‘theoreticism’. According to the logic of the ‘Theory of theoretical practice’, as already presented in For Marx, the seat of philosophy is precisely the seat of these formal conditions: it is possible, in other words, a priori and from within philosophy, to think and anticipate the singular dialectical unfolding of novelty. If the object of knowledge is always singularity as such, this singular objectivity is itself a general and formal object for philosophy. Philosophy, by thinking the problem of scientificity in general, has the formal capacity to arbitrate the reflexivity of the entire process. As knowledge of knowledge, philosophy can anticipate in advance the singular conjunctions of knowledge and practice, ‘by drawing up its formal conditions’.28 With this redoubling of the concept of the object (scientific object of knowledge + philosophical object of the object), Althusser lapses into reversal of the eleventh thesis: it is interpretation that changes the world, it is the philosophical grasp of the question of scientificity in singular situations that provides the ‘decisive link’ – politics is only an extension of science, and in that sense, of philosophy. The subversion of ‘theoreticism’, in its turn, is the subversion of the purity of the object, the subversion of the immanence of the process of knowledge. When the seat of philosophy as a transcendental arbiter between science and ideology is displaced, we also see the removal of the strict boundaries between these two categories. Without its redoubling into the ‘object of science’ and the ‘object of the object’, the concept of the object is internally subverted. Ultimately, Althusser would go as far as to propose the impossibility of a strict delineation between objectivity and subjectivity, by affirming the need to conceive the conditioning of science by experience, that is, by ideology. Capital, as he would insist in 1972, could only have been written from within militant engagement in the labour movement. Knowledge is not imported from without into political experience as the Kautskian formulation would have it; it comes from within. ‘Marx’, Althusser writes, ‘was only able to break with bourgeois ideology in its totality because he took inspiration from the basic ideas of the proletarian ideology, and from the first class struggles of the proletariat, in which this ideology became flesh and blood’.29 Rather than being strictly opposed to experience, knowledge depends on experience. More precisely, it depends on a qualitative rupture within experience: on the singular experience of revolt against oppression, on the experience of those political actions that seek to break the logic of the present apart. Knowledge, in other words, is only possible under the injunction of politics, under the condition of the political struggle and the concrete objectives that it poses. As a result, what we face is precisely the whole conundrum of the notion of a ‘scientific ideology’ – of the conjunction of, and mutual determination between, the scientific and the ideological. However, the paradox seems to have been resolved, here: the separation between science and ideology – but at the same time their unity – can be thought, and can only be thought, on condition that we think them as interconnected in a dialectical movement: an incessant interrelation of interpretation and change.

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One thing, however, remains unresolved. If knowledge proceeds from political experience, from the immanent break that political practice produces when acting upon the contradictions of the present, it also needs to return to this practice in a specific way. If subjectivity stands before the object as its condition, one has to be able also to find it after the object, irreducible to it, but also as irreducible to the ideological mechanisms of domination (the speculary interpellation of the subject by ideology, brought about in and through the ideological state apparatuses) from which it has already broken, with this break being enhanced by the intervention of knowledge itself. The entire issue, in other words, is how exactly to conceive of this return-process, the passing of objectivity qua reflexivity back into practical existence and the action of the subject of politics. Althusser’s response is, first and foremost, to note an ever-present lag between objectivity and subjectivity: the unfolding of politics always exceeds the objectivity of knowledge. This is so because all knowledge is always knowledge limited to the actual situation, to the intelligibility of the present in its contravening and contradictory tendencies. If all knowledge stands under the injunction of the current situation, it is impossible to deduce things beyond that which is current. There is no question of formally anticipating problems that are not ‘on the order of the day’. Rather, as Althusser would insist: ‘All that [theory] can say about the future is the extension in dots, and in the negative of the possibilities of an actual tendency’.30 Two points should be made, here. First, that the present is intelligible as a tendency means that knowledge plays the role of systematising and concentrating the political process, that it is able to retrospectively include within the general determination of the process as a whole the complex novelty, and thus also the discontinuity, of the present. But second, that the present tendency is undefined and open means, at the same time, that its future developments are unassignable and unpredictable from within theory itself, and can only come about as a result of practical inventions. In Althusser’s words: ‘It is only within the unfolding of the struggle that the possible forms can see their light of the day and come on the order of the day, can be discovered and become reality’.31 Each tendency can always be jeopardised while on its path, it can be counteracted, it can falter, and might not realise itself as a continuous process, especially when devoid of the innovative subjective forms that maintain it. Faced with this openness of the process, the end-point of knowledge is to produce its own blind spot: a blind spot of intelligibility, whose resolution can only be practical. The point being, however, that such a blind spot is not passive, but active. The dots that Althusser places alongside a critical retrospection on the present imply an active stance that knowledge assumes towards the future, concentrated in the idea of projection. If the future forms of development cannot be anticipated and determined as such, they can nevertheless still be rendered necessary, precisely in terms of an evental emergence of something that is beyond our current parameters of intelligibility: beyond the objectivity of the situation. They can be rendered necessary as the necessity of the emergence of something that is heterogeneous to the present and to our intelligibility of it. In short, the projection of knowledge does not name the subject to come, it does not name the subjective conditions necessary for a qualitative reversal of the situation, but it does name its necessity, while also making room for its aleatory practical emergence. Knowledge ultimately creates a void in and with the present, an empty place, or, as Althusser would remark in his intriguing reading of Machiavelli, ‘a place

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empty for the future’. A place that is ‘empty so as to have inserted in it the action of the individual or the group who will come and take a stand there, so as to rally, to constitute the forces capable of accomplishing the political task assigned by history’.32 This empty place is a place of a necessary but unforeseeable and unassignable dialectical leap, a place to be taken by an unknowable subjectivity capable of engendering a qualitative rupture with the existing situation, although it cannot be read from the parameters of the current situation. A place of an impossible necessity, or a necessary impossibility, which is the only way forwards to creating new possibilities. This is why we can say, in conclusion, that what comes after interpretation, as the motor of change, is ultimately always an impersonal ‘es’ – an excessive movement of practice, a subjective invention that cannot as such be determined within the objectivity of knowledge, even if theory incessantly proclaims its necessity. Between the maintenance of the continuity and systematicity of the process and, at the same time, the projection of its aleatory nature, between critical reflexivity and the dots, interpretation can only ever seize upon change in the guise of an impersonal ‘it’. And it is this ‘it’, as the guarantee of both the concentration and the openness of the process, that is always necessary in order to change the world.

Notes 1 Althusser 1972, p. 185. 2 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 160. 3 Quoted from the English translation of Éléments d’autocritique in Althusser, 1976, p. 135. 4 A contemporary echo of Marx’s detection of the false forms of universality can be found in Étienne Balibar’s essay ‘Ambiguous Universality’ which appeared in English in a collection entitled Politics and the Other Scene: see Balibar 2002. 5 Quoting Marx: ‘The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e., it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it’ (Marx 1975, p. 220). 6 Althusser 1995a, p. 242 (all translations here are mine unless indicated). 7 The reference here is Evgeny Pashukanis’s analysis of the relationship between structures of commodity-exchange and juridical, political and philosophical concepts, as presented in his study Law and Marxism: A General Theory (see Pashukanis 1989). 8 Hegel discusses the role of the ‘Corporations’ at the very point of the transition between Civil Society and the State, the second and the third moments of ‘Ethical Life’ [Sittlichkeit], itself the Third Part of his Philosophy of Right. 9 Spinoza, Ethics: Book II, Proposition 29, Scholium (cited from Spinoza 2002, p. 262). 10 ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’ in Althusser 1971a, p. 173. 11 Althusser, here, seems to refer directly to the famous lines from the Appendix to Part I of Spinoza’s Ethics: ‘men believe that they are free, precisely because they are conscious of their volitions and desires; yet concerning the causes that have determined them to desire and will they do not think, not even dream about, because they are ignorant of them’ (quoted from Spinoza 2002, p. 239). 12 Althusser 1969a, p. 232.

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13 It is along these lines that Jacques Rancière articulated his theoretical and political denunciation of Althusser in his youthful vitriol in La leçon d’Althusser (Rancière 1974b). A similar reproach was later advanced by Alain Badiou in a polemical work co-authored with François Balmès under the title De l’idéologie. 14 Althusser 1995a, p. 137. 15 Althusser 1976a, p. 141. 16 Quoted in Althusser 2003, p. 191. 17 Althusser 1969a, p. 166. 18 Althusser 1969a, p. 171. 19 Althusser 1969a, p. 171. 20 See the celebrated discussion of the ‘fused group’ in Book II of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (Sartre 2004). 21 Althusser 1976a, p. 195. 22 In ‘Réponse à John Lewis’, Althusser stated: ‘The masses are actually several social classes, social strata and social categories, grouped together in a way which is both complex and changing’ (quoted from Althusser 1976a, p. 48). 23 Althusser 1976a, p. 98. 24 For example: ‘The whole Marxist revolutionary experience shows that if the general contradiction (it has already been specified: the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the contradiction between two antagonistic classes) is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is the ‘task of the day’, it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a “revolutionary situation”, nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ so that whatever their origin and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its “direct opponents”), they “fuse” into a ruptural unity’ (Althusser 1969a, p. 99). 25 Althusser 1969a, p. 106. 26 Althusser 2003, p. 250. 27 In the words of For Marx: ‘The inevitable price of this purification and liberation is a continuous struggle against ideology itself, that is, against idealism . . .’ (Althusser 1969a, p. 170). 28 Althusser 1969a, p. 170. 29 Althusser 1976a, p. 121. 30 Althusser 1998a, p. 285. 31 Althusser 1998a, p. 285. 32 Althusser 1999, p. 20.

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21 Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach: Althusser’s return to new materialism Gal Kirn

Introductory note: from ‘aleatory materialism’ back to. . .

T

he current revival of interest in Althusser has often taken shape through the re-appropriation of his late thought, or what Gregory Elliott has called, a phase of ‘aleatory materialism’. There have been many heterogeneous approaches and interpretations that have struggled to determine the status of this ‘aleatory move’, and to demonstrate how Althusser’s thought is still very contemporary in large part due to this final ‘rupture’ in his development. Undoubtedly, Althusser himself facilitated this reading with the use of new metaphors, which effectively erased the traces of previous dogmatic concepts. It is then pertinent to ask whether this was a sign of his final delirium, or a real theoretical transformation that needs to be taken seriously?1 Can, then, his last phase be read as a testament to the crisis of Marxism and recognition of the final defeat of socialism?2 This is a symptomatic turn, where the monstrous term of dialectical materialism disappears, while a brand new aleatory materialism spreads wings, fuelled by the post-Marxist turn that started taking shape during the 1980s and has continued ever since. There are, however, ironical conclusions that might be argued to follow logically from pressing this aleatory reading to an extreme: namely, does this narrative not suppose that Althusser encountered truth at the end of his path? In this case, would his late phase not constitute a specific revenge of what he suppressed in his early thought, a certain ‘return of the repressed’? If he had so dramatically insisted on the demarcation of the Marxist legacy from the early Marx,3 does he not finally pay the price for this primary repression? However, there is an important path, or red thread, that leads from this aleatory move to earlier ruptures in Althusser’s thought. I would like to suggest that instead of suturing Althusser to this aleatory phase alone, we should instead read different ruptures in his thought together. Without the inherent tension and ‘parallax view’4 of different phases of Althusser’s thought it remains difficult to comprehend his incessant call for ‘new materialism’. The true kernel of his

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intellectual trajectory is to be found in the repeated attempt, to which he (re)turns again and again, to think both reproduction (causality) and revolutionary politics (contingency) at the same time, which is perhaps most explicit in his grappling with Machiavelli.5 The textual context of the red thread of these ruptures-in-thought is constituted by Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. It is also by reference to this text that I want to defend the most valuable contribution of Althusser’s late phase, namely, his emphasis on theorising a perspective that is able to grasp novelty. Not merely in the sense of a ‘symptomatic’ strategy that would make certain elements and blind spots visible, Althusser tried to rethink the question from the perspective of the fait à accomplir [the fact to be accomplished]. This points to the temporal paradox of every novelty (politics), but also to a theoretical paradox of the object of every new science: something that is not yet there, but can be only asserted retroactively. This paradoxical alignment seems to be internal already to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, the text that changes the course of Marx’s trajectory. Balibar has recently argued that Marx’s Theses have to be read as a set of contradictory but complimentary utterances on materialism and the temporality of revolution. To return to Althusser today cannot be understood without his return to Marx and their shared advocacy of ‘new materialism’. In Balibar’s words, ‘if we are to still work with Marx today, then we need to ‘identify with Marx at the distance’. This identification does not allow for embracing either side of the initial alternative of simple fixation on contingency (aleatory materialism) or else a return to some vulgar sort of dialectical materialism.6 The combative spirit, the rupture and the return to dialectics with and against Hegel is the only path that insists on and continues the call for a new materialism, which Althusser already forty years ago termed the ‘materialist dialectic’.7

. . . the Theses on Feuerbach: announcement of rupture The Theses on Feuerbach is perhaps the most visionary text that Marx ever wrote. Admittedly, they pose more problems than they manage to solve, but we should not forget that Marx never intended to publish them. Though they were written at the same time as the similarly unpublished German Ideology of 1845, they only served as a sketch, perhaps a draft, for further research. Their eventual publication constituted a genuine theoretical event, with the eleventh thesis becoming one of the most quoted and discussed theoretical sentences of all time. The sentence that was supposed to finish with all interpretation, with all previous philosophies, ironically triggered a flood of new interpretations, because it opened the strategic question for any emancipatory thought or materialism: how to think and invent the new link between theory and practice? Althusser was no alien to the history of interpretations and interventions on the Theses. For him, they signal the break, or more precisely, they lay at the ‘anterior edge of the rupture’ that is fully developed in Marx’s German Ideology.8 We could paraphrase him by saying that the Theses ‘interpellate’ us, because they function with a performative call to a new materialism that does not yet exist. In the following section I will explore Althusser’s diagonal reading of the Tenth and Eleventh theses, to which Ernst Bloch ascribed central importance for understanding the place and task of dialectical materialism. The theoretical triangle philosophy-politics-science specific to Althusser’s own project is condensed and located precisely between these two theses.

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The tenth thesis: the struggle of materialisms, or One divides into two standpoints The standpoint of the old materialism is ‘civil’ society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or associated humanity.9 Let us begin with the most obvious question: what, according to Marx, should be the kernel of a new materialism that breaks with both German idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism? Marx’s answers lie in a displacement of perspectives, overcoming the contradictions between bürgerliche Gesellschaft and menschliche Gesellschaft. Hegelian interpretations of this passage usually stress the temporal dimension, which is crucial for the formation of a new materialism. As Ernst Bloch says, ‘only the horizon of the future, which Marxism occupies, with that of the past as the ante-room, gives reality its real dimension’.10 In a similar vein, the noted Slovenian Marxologist Božidar Debenjak reads this thesis as arguing that ‘the standpoint of isolated individuals and bourgeois society should be overcome with new materialism’.11 Undoubtedly the temporality of what some authors have named the futur antérieur, of ‘not-yet-existing’ materialism, is deservedly emphasised when reading this thesis. There is a certain contradictory coexistence, or rather productive tension, between temporalities that informs and marks any new materialist analysis. However, there is another possible path, which emphasises another, more Althusserian dimension and focuses on the term Standpunkt. As the term implies, it has to do with a spatial dimension, or more precisely with the search for a new theoretical topography, which later became a very heated discussion among Marxists.12 The question of the theoretical space, of which discipline and the perspective from which we can see the ‘object’ is linked back to the question of temporality. The new materialist analysis addresses both: the temporality of the future, the theoretical and political space in the making, but also of material analysis of the past and present that needs to be grasped in a new way. Pierre Macherey argues that new materialism has to include both standpoints; not only is there a need for a historical analysis that enriches our understanding of the world, but also the horizon of the future already entailed in the transformation of the present: ‘new materialism will have to include the standpoint of historical and social praxis and also be capable of rethinking the process of Selbstveränderung which relates to the real future of things and men’.13 This is Marx’s real contribution, naming and understanding what Althusser would call the ‘fait à accomplir’, or change in progress. First, Marx evokes the standpoint of bürgerliche Gessellschaft in order to conduct a specific historical analysis of bourgeois society and its ideology (free individual, autonomy of social spheres, production, bourgeois law), and then focuses upon the standpoint of human society. Marx makes a contradictory move that destabilises the very point of departure of historical analysis. The standpoint of ‘human society’ is speaking from the point of view of the future, from the ‘not yet existing’ community, or what will later be called communism. If one can easily dismiss this Marx as an evolutionary, linear thinker, even a romantic, the more important point is to retrieve the productive tension that is inscribed in the new materialism. The standpoint of bürgerliche Gessellschaft was already at the time of the Theses a matter of the future, since Marx and his theoretical position had hitherto remained within the horizons of Feuerbachian philosophy. The Theses announced the break and detected the kernel of

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Feuerbach’s idealism in abstract Man. The latter possesses a generic essence, which according to Marx should not be posed as isolated, in itself, but as the ‘ensemble of social relations’.14 Even if this move is clear or, à la Althusser, ‘irreversible’, Marx himself is not completely immune to the same criticism that he launched against Feuerbach. Can it be objected that he only substituted Feuerbach’s humanism of Man with the humanism of society, with the abstract ideal of humanity, or in contemporary jargon, the coming community? Does Marx not fall behind his own critique and departure point? There have been different attempts to read in Marx merely an eschatologisation of humanity. As Macherey lucidly asks, ‘is humanity proper not alwaysalready existing no matter what the conditions?’15 In opposition to the liberal theoreticians of the social contract who projected their own ideal onto the past, in the ‘state of nature’, Marx projected the ‘ideal of society’ forwards to the future of communism. Nevertheless, there is one major difference. The theorists of the social contract referred to the ‘state of nature’ and to the contract as theoretical fictions, which remained necessary structural fictions that establish and support the existing state of affairs, the state founded upon bourgeois law. In Althusser’s words, they theorised the political from the perspective of the ‘accomplished fact’ [fait accompli], positing the results before their analysis. In opposition to this, Marx’s vision of the future society demanded a radical negation of the existing state of affairs, including the state, which should eventually be dissolved. Marx spoke from the perspective of a fact yet to be accomplished, from a temporality of the ‘not-yet-existing’. But is this type of gesture, this utopian construction, not simply a continuation of the long tradition in philosophy from Plato and Thomas More to Marx’s contemporaries Owen and Saint-Simon, who famously paved the way for the future, not-yet-existing, communist society? Or worse, could we not say that today, this futurist projection, which some authors have called an ‘obsession with future’,16 has become the normalising discourse of the self-realisation of individual desires, of the post-Fordist reorganisation of capitalist relations?17 However, for Marx the communist future was never either a capitalist or socialist utopian dream. His direct attack on a merely utopian construction of an ‘ideal society’ applied to the present comes to play an important role in the Communist Manifesto; but is already explicit in the third and fourth Theses on Feuerbach.18 Here, Marx argues that contradictions have to be destroyed theoretically and practically. This theoretical slogan is also a political maxim: communism is necessarily informed by the horizon of the future, but that implies real politics in the present, not endlessly waiting for a miraculous event. The young Marx equated communist politics with the abolition of private property, but in the German Ideology he defined communism as ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.19 The ideal of human society is not constructed on the abstract ideal of humanity, but on the destruction of the existing state of affairs. Against a ‘politics of philosophers’ and utopian thinkers that posit and prescribe philosophical or moral norms to be applied in politics, he opens a path for an encounter between revolutionary theory and practice.

From a temporal standpoint to a theoretical standpoint Perhaps even more than the other theses, the tenth thesis explores precisely this revolutionary encounter from a theoretical perspective. The fundamental theoretical problem of new materialism needs to be answered in terms of rethinking a relationship between philosophy and the science of history. In this respect, we can partially agree with Macherey’s conclusion that ‘it

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is necessary to elaborate a concept which allows thinking together the determined (historicalsocial) and universal (the global, which prioritises the whole over parts)’.20 According to Macherey, we can find the key for new materialism in a concept that speaks from the position of universal (communist society) and includes historical analysis. This thesis should be understood against the contemporary disjuncture between these two fields and perspectives, where historical analysis is excluded from political philosophy,21 or alternatively, where historical analysis simply speaks from the perspective of ‘the accomplished fact’, from the management of the possible state of affairs (affirming the dominant ideology). No matter how much we support this theoretical proposal of achieving a new materialism, it is difficult to imagine how this extremely complicated operation could be undertaken by one concept alone.22 Even if the concept of Standpunkt pushes in the right direction, it does not yet allow Marx to step out of the theoretical deadlock that he detected and to a degree maintained. It pertains to the tension and difference between science and philosophy. The whole history of Marxism could be read through focus on this question: from more traditional Marxist responses that argued for objectivism and the ‘eternal’ contradiction of the productive forces and relations of production (for example, Kautsky, economistic readings, Lukács) to a more subjectivist-messianic hope for the coming society (such as in Benjamin and Bloch). It is clear that Althusser himself did not supply a satisfactory answer, as many of his unpublished manuscripts on the topic of theory and practice testify. What is clearer is that Althusser’s solution does not stake its fortunes on any single concept providing a universal solution, a formula that could be applied to all historical situations. New materialism, then, will contain both the reflection of the future society, the horizon of the universal, but also the historical analysis of the past and present situation. The ‘parallax view’, in this thesis, constantly moves between the standpoints of philosophy and historical analysis, which includes a certain risk, or rather a constant rethrowing of a dice for any new materialist enterprise. As against a priori knowledge or the external guarantee of teleology or the empiricism of facts, new materialism demands a theoretical apparatus that does not already know the results in advance. Marx deployed the concept of Standpunkt to criticise the then-existing materialism, which, at its best, interpreted circumstances from a fixed standpoint of bourgeois society operating within the existing ideological horizons. Feuerbach’s materialism conveys a critique of religion, which politically resulted in a separation of church from state and in the struggle for recognition of the political rights of man. In opposition to the old materialism, Marx assumes a different position that does not fall into the false dilemma of choosing between theory and practice, thought and reality, object and subject. The new perspective enables him to think together, or in the parallax way,23 two different standpoints: the standpoint of the present analysis, what he will develop as the critique of political economy (the capitalist mode of production) and the standpoint of the future society, of the communist horizon. This is the point where my thesis runs close to the argument advanced by Lukács, who correctly observes that the capital is not a simple object. If capital were a simple object, then it would not be Marx’s discovery, but could be simply ascribed to Adam Smith or David Ricardo. If we are to understand the militant Marx, then we need to understand how the universal dimension is inscribed in the very understanding of capitalist production. For Lukács, this is condensed in the point of negation of civil society, that is, in the proletariat as the real discovery of Marx.24 It is the figure of the proletariat that provides an adequate response to Macherey’s demand for a standpoint with a precise universalist concept. This is the place where old materialism splits into ‘two’ and

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where, perhaps, the infamous history of historical and dialectical materialism begins. Althusser understands this theoretical shift as crucial for his return to Marx and for establishing the ‘break’ in which the Theses play an avant-garde role.25

Althusser’s conceptualisation of the break in the Theses If we follow Althusser’s reading closely, Marx’s science of history does not yet exist in the Theses, because he only raises the topic of social relations and mode of production in the German Ideology. 26 The Theses are the point where Marx breaks with his own humanism; from this point on, there is no way back to his old materialist positions. The second rupture, the anticipation of a new philosophical practice, remained less important for the mature Marx, though still extremely relevant. The new philosophical practice was not only present in the standpoint of communism and the proletariat; it was also – and here, I argue against Althusser – constitutive for the analysis of the commodity and the value-form.27 The necessity of a new philosophical practice was taken seriously by some Marxists, perhaps most notably (and often on opposing sides) by Georg Lukács and Louis Althusser.28 Althusser’s intervention, however schematic, has to be understood as a criticism of humanist Marxism and its appropriation of the young Marx.29 To return to Marx’s new materialism in the era of actually-existing materialisms, when materialism had become the dominant philosophical orientation, brought new challenges. In For Marx, Althusser detects two key ideological enemies, which he problematically labelled as ‘Stalinism’: the economistic deviation and the philosophical deviation (‘humanism’).30 The first deviation was ascribed to vulgar Marxism (or liberal economics), which begins and ends its theoretical journey in terms of the primacy of the productive forces. The hidden kernel of ‘economism’ is embodied in a teleology of progress; its practical-political effects were crystallised in the rise of technocracy and the insistence on development of the industrial model and technology. The second deviation – Althusser’s philosophical arch-enemy – is humanism, which functions along the dual lines of a ‘dissident’ critique of Stalinism, on the one hand, and a critique of consumerist capitalism, on the other. An unlikely alliance of ethical philosophers, humanists and phenomenologists tried to realise the essence of the human in socialism or capitalism with a human face. 31 Instead of the primacy of the productive forces, we find the creativity of generic humanity and the alienation of modern society, which Althusser directly attacks in Reply to John Lewis. Finally, Althusser would argue that these deviations do not oppose each other, but constitute a scientific-philosophical duality that forms the One, which we could name the One of the actually-existing materialism. Again, despite the schematic criticism expounded by Althusser, the call for a renewal of materialism is clear: to be a Marxist does not mean scholastically repeating Marx’s quotes, but entails locating the limitations inherent to Marx himself.32 Althusser challenged the dominant Marxist standpoint of production. Due to the underdevelopment of Marxist theory of the state and ideology, and in light of the crisis of the communist project and theoretical tendencies, Althusser waged a battle for a new return, seeking to assume a new standpoint: the standpoint of new materialism becomes that of reproduction.33 This conceptual shift, which assigns primacy to reproduction, implies that production is already split within itself. This also points to his reading of Capital, which shows that the capitalist mode of production is impossible

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to understand without both the ‘primitive accumulation’ of capital, and also the element of the political (state and law as the machinery and mechanism for social reproduction).34 More specifically, Althusser is interested in the functioning of ideology and ideological stateapparatuses. This involves a move away from the theory of commodity-fetishism as the sole ideological formation inherent to capitalist production,35 and towards an understanding of ideological formation as a general reproduction of social forms, which goes against the theory of reflection.36 Last but not least, the struggle for new materialism occurs on two levels: first, it is conceived as a critique of the dominant ideology and philosophical humanism; and second, as a critique of scientific revisionisms. In Althusser’s conjuncture, the actually-existing materialism was based upon the standpoint of productive forces supplemented by the horizon of humanism, while Althusser’s new tenth thesis is to be read as an encounter between reproduction (a new historical analysis) and the horizon of communism. This implies that a strategic link and tension between scientific and philosophical deviations is never without political effects. It also heralds the entry into the new field of politics, the move from the ‘level of interpretation’. It is here that we find the strategic difference between the tenth and eleventh theses.

The eleventh thesis: to transform philosophy. . . and the world The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.37 Already the first reading brings to light an explicit inconsistency between the tenth and eleventh theses, but also a dramatic and, perhaps, even irreconcilable tension within the eleventh thesis itself. The eleventh thesis is a radical rupture: it performs the jump from the level of interpretation to the level of transformation and transformative politics.38 Are these levels mutually-exclusive, in a specific relation of ‘critical complementarity’, or should one of the levels be simply abandoned, overcome at the expense of the other? Is Althusser’s reaction to the eleventh thesis not a clear rejection, once we try to evaluate it in terms of his concept of ‘theoretical practice’? Althusser wants to achieve the abolition of a schematic separation between (political) practice and theory, and ultimately bring theory under the primacy of practice. But already for Marx, the separation of theory and practice was not pertinent; he actually dissolved the old Aristotelian universe and distinctions of praxis, poeisis and theoria.39 The rupture evoked in the eleventh thesis is not a simple logical consequence of the preceding theses, but rather an ‘aspect change’, which is irreversible and retains a specific relationship with both aspects.40 Another important observation is condensed in the famous ‘subject of change’. The eleventh thesis does not have the same subject as the tenth thesis, which referred to philosophy generally; rather, the eleventh thesis refers specifically to the community of philosophers and scientists. The subject of the eleventh thesis is the (in)famous es that remains hidden at first glance.41 Philosophy will perform a different role than that explained in the previous Theses.42 The eleventh thesis does not stop at a final opposition of two fields: philosophy (interpretation of the world) and politics (transformation of the

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world). While some theorists and political activists saw in this thesis a call for the abolition of philosophy and the beginning of revolutionary practice, I will argue that this interpretation is incompatible with Marx’s and Althusser’s proposal for a new materialism. The eleventh thesis has been subjected to many interpretations in the history of philosophy, but today it is perhaps most productive to intervene in the context of recent debates about the ‘Communist Hypothesis’. Frank Ruda succinctly synthesises different readings of this short and enigmatic phrase. He categorises these readings into three distinct interpretative strands: transformative, reversing and exaggerate.43 The first transformative interpretation advocates a new philosophy of practice, which has to replace the existing interpretation of the world; philosophy needs to think practice and not just remain stuck in salon-discussions, which merely circulate different ideas.44 A typical representative of this interpretation was Ernst Bloch, who reads the eleventh thesis through the early Marx, relying upon a specific relation between the proletariat and philosophy: ‘Philosophy cannot be realised without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be abolished without the realization of philosophy’.45 The second reversing interpretation argues that to change the world means to interpret it differently; the world is constantly changing, so a different interpretation of this same change is needed. Adorno is the most visible supporter of this thesis, insisting upon the specificity of philosophical interpretation. Ruda ascribes the final, exaggerated interpretation to Žižek, who advocates the view that only through excessive, exaggerated reading are we able to intervene in the world; that is, we have to frame the meaning of the past (and the present) insofar as we want to influence the historical unfolding of events. All readings agree that the point is to change the world, but each of them interprets this change in its own way. 46 One of the ways to explain their difference is to bring forwards their assessment of the relation between masses and ideas. How much distance or engagement should philosophy adopt in this respect? Transformative interpretation can be read as a ‘leftist’ deviation that sutures philosophy to politics; it is revolution that in ‘the last instance’ determines and also abolishes philosophy. This interpretation places its hopes in and devotes its organisational efforts to the coming proletarian revolution. It consciously acknowledges the primacy of practice and the organisation of social forces. The reversing interpretation is positioned at the political ‘centre’. It advocates the defence of the autonomy of thought, which gives correct directions for political practice, which in turn executes changes. The relation between political and theoretical practice is, therefore, ‘mediated’; a certain translation takes place between the fields. Finally, the exaggerated interpretation is closest to the ‘rightist’ deviation and advocates an enlightened role of philosophy that sutures politics to philosophy. In other words, the role of philosophy is not only that of giving directions, but actively intervening in the world; this position, in the last instance, gives primacy to theory over practice. It can be argued that the first and third interpretations do not acknowledge the distance between philosophy (as interpretation of the world) and politics (as changing the world). The transformative interpretation submits a philosophy of practice to a revolutionary goal, which will realise communism and philosophy, while the exaggerated interpretation subjugates politics to philosophy; philosophy is then without any distance to the world, which would leave us with a definition of philosophyas-party. The reversing interpretation is the only one that maintains a distance; philosophy is assigned a relative autonomy and specific distance towards political practice. I will argue that in order to renovate the idea of communism, it is necessary to relate it internally to communist politics. This is possible only if we assess the movement from the tenth to eleventh thesis,

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reading them together. It is this that constitutes the strategic theoretical nexus advanced by Althusser: the triangle between philosophy, politics and science.

Philosophy-politics-science and the oscillating definition of philosophy Pierre Macherey argues that the eleventh thesis necessitates a completely new way of doing philosophy. Philosophy has to remodel the stakes, draw new demarcation-lines and find ‘new means to transform itself, to enter in the play of Selbstveränderung’.47 The standpoint of the new philosophy is, then, not at a distance from historical reality, but involves transformation, which entails an engaged position. Macherey’s interpretation comes close to one of Althusser’s pivotal definitions of philosophy, heavily influenced by his reading of Lenin. The task of any materialist philosophy is to declare war on all official ideologies and philosophies. Despite the similarities of both positions, however, there are some slight differences between Macherey and Althusser, which are of crucial importance. Althusser wrote most directly on the eleventh thesis in his ‘Note sur les Thèses’, in the early 1980s.48 The eleventh thesis needs to be observed from the perspective of the subject of the transformation, which is empty. It is not philosophers, or the philosophy of a ‘new race’ that will change the world. From this there follows a rather ambiguous conclusion: philosophy has to return to itself, it has to transform itself; only in that way will it be able to help to transform the world; in short, it is at a distance. Althusser’s claim regarding distance seems paradoxical; perhaps one could even equate it with the Adornian reversing interpretation and its defence of the autonomy of philosophy. Althusser wrote his text in 1982: a historicist might remark that this is a clear sign of the time, a symptom of a larger crisis of Marxism, of sobering up after the political reality of the gulag and the beginning of the end of actually-existing socialism. Or could this be read as yet another self-criticism? Perhaps in this last phase Althusser became disillusioned with the role of philosophy and abandoned his former project of philosophy as revolutionary weapon?49 There is only a small step to associating this distance with the idealist or armchair philosophy of which Lenin was so critical. However, we should not forget that Althusser never abandoned his initial claims about the primacy of practice (politics) over theory and the primacy of change over interpretation. This remains the case in his reading in ‘Note sur les Thèses’, which can for now be paradoxically named a taking up of position at a distance. This ambivalent position enables Althusser to define philosophy as a specific practice; it declares that the space of this specific practice has yet to be formed; its specific autonomy is only established through struggle. One cannot presuppose the autonomy of philosophy as if it were disconnected from the world. But in the same vein, philosophical practice cannot be reduced to either science or to politics. How, then, are we to understand Althusser’s insistence on the primacy of practice through philosophy? He conceives philosophy as a specific practice, which should affirm the primacy of practice. This is paradoxical, because philosophy can only affirm the primacy of practice over theory on condition that it refers to itself. Philosophy affirms theoretically the primacy of practice, as Althusser puts it: ‘this indicates the place that philosophy occupies relating to its stakes and in relation to its possible effects, but at the distance, not in relation to objects that philosophy

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thinks (philosophy has no object) but of theses that it formulates, that is to say on the condition that it takes into account its mode of existence in the forms of dispositif of the topique’.50 Philosophy thinks in relation to itself, its specific past, but at the same time it thinks its relation, its ‘conditionality’ with society; it thinks about its stakes, but also its political effects within the existing social relations, measuring them up against the future horizon of communism. In his late phase, Althusser produced a dialectical jewel that again confirms his constant and critical return to Hegel. Philosophy, according to Althusser, does not exist somewhere outside the world or above the world, in an ivory tower, from whence it travels forth into the heavenly kingdom of ideas. Philosophy affirms the existence of a series of practices – economic, political, scientific, artistic – external to philosophy. It is not that philosophy cannot act or reflect upon them, but that it does not produce them.51 Philosophy fights its own struggles and it does not intervene directly in other, non-philosophical practices. Most frequently, the philosophical effects are delayed, following up on major ruptures, or perhaps even being displaced. This makes it even more difficult to judge the direct effects of thought. According to Althusser, to establish an opposition between ‘taking up a position’ as materialist and ‘taking distance’ as idealist is too simplistic. Since many idealist philosophies and vulgar materialism assume a very strong and critical position vis-à-vis other orientations, this cannot be a sufficient criterion of demarcation. This is why Althusser insists on defining philosophical practice in this ambiguous and open manner. Certainly Althusser, like Marx before him, was aware of the material force of ideas. There are historical periods where philosophy can have direct political effects, but this is not a reason to ascribe to philosophy a role of making revolution. It is not philosophy that transforms the world, but the masses. Depending on different conjunctures and the emergence of new political forms, the movement of the masses produces different political alliances.52 However, these masses are not isolated from ideas; furthermore, in the revolutionary conditions, they also invent new ideas, propelling the new encounter of thought and politics. This encounter clarifies what Althusser means when he calls for philosophy to stay at a distance, preventing it from becoming a self-sufficient and self-legitimising discourse of a philosopher-king. This is also one theoretical point that brings Althusser in proximity to Badiou: philosophy becomes philosophy only at a distance from the (capitalist or socialist) state. Marxism itself was not immune to becoming an academic and state-philosophy, as history clearly showed. Dogmatic Marxism was at the centre of all actually-existing state-socialisms, which instead of rethinking ways of dissolving the state-apparatus and experimenting with new economic forms, instead swiftly entered into the service of reproducing the socialist state. Dogmatic Marxism became a state-philosophy imprisoned within existing ideological coordinates, in forms of humanistic palavering, or the expert language of technocrats. Althusser’s insistence on the distance of philosophy from the state means that he is diametrically opposed to suturing philosophy directly with the political. He had attempted to develop a conception of politics that would differ from the state, but which at the same time would not relegate the question of the state to a secondary phenomenon.53 At the same time, it is clear that Althusser does not take the autonomy of philosophy for granted, but throws it into the arena of political and theoretical struggles. Although finding an adequate thematisation of the relation between politics and philosophy in Althusser is a difficult task, we can nevertheless pinpoint at least two moments that are still pertinent today. First, he posits the overdetermining character of politics; and second, he locates the specific space of philosophical intervention. 54 He argues

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that philosophy intervenes in theoretical ideologies, the field between the ‘scientific’ and the ‘ideological’. Philosophy can be located at the burning, or symptomatic, points of both fields, where there appear ruptures, regressions, contradictions and deviations of spontaneous and other ideologies that permeate the scientific field. In this respect, Pupovac’s thesis that the triangle philosophy-politics-science remained crucial throughout Althusser’s enterprise is an important reminder.55 To simplify the argument, we could say that understanding this triangle enables us to tease out the manner in which combative philosophical practice intervenes in the scientific and ideological field, by demonstrating forcefully the primacy of rupture, which indirectly brings it into relationship with revolutionary political practice. On various occasions Althusser highlighted the specificity of these fields, dealing with different ‘matters’ and with their own ‘objects’ and laws’. Nevertheless, he also attempts to posit and take into the account their inter-relationship. Admittedly, he was never able to provide a single or satisfactory explanation of these interrelationships. Rather, he oscillates between different approaches, which are developed by the different readings of Althusser today. I would like to extract three fundamental readings of the triangle: historicist; conjunctural; and philosophist. As its name already implies, the historicist reading provides a temporal classification of Althusser’s thought. An emblematic analysis of Althusser can be found in Gregory Elliott’s major work Althusser: Detour of Theory56 and his foreword to Machiavelli and Us,57 where he classifies Althusser’s thought into three periods: first comes the stage of theoreticism, where Althusser asserts the primacy of science and refers to philosophy as ‘theory of theoretical practice’, as a general mediator among fields; a second stage of politicism, with the primacy of politics (‘philosophy as revolutionary weapon’); and the last stage of aleatorism, where he assigns primacy to philosophy. This answer undoubtedly provides us with a general overview of Althusser’s thought, but it does not help us to reconstruct the triangle of the new materialism. It seems that this interpretation simply ends up privileging one pole or another of the triangle in each of its respective phases: science, politics and philosophy. The second reading is conjunctural, and has recently been developed by Goshgarian and, earlier, by Balibar. Goshgarian is particularly interested in specific continuities and discontinuities in the relationship between politics and philosophy. In his introductions to recent English translations of Althusser, Goshgarian observes that the role of philosophy oscillates in Althusser. He begins by assigning philosophy a role of mediator between politics and science; in Althusser’s words, ‘philosophy represents class struggle in theory’.58 On the one hand, Marxist philosophy should be in the service of the people, mobilising and receiving correct ideas from the masses, and then in turn representing the proletarian struggle in theory. On the other hand, the scientific is also represented in politics by philosophy; by detecting crucial points and understanding the conjuncture, it helps to formulate the correct lines for guiding political action. From this, it follows that the role of philosophy is to mediate class interests between scientific discoveries and political transformations. The last reading can be called philosophist. This can be undertaken either via the early Althusser, conceiving philosophy as a ‘theory of theoretical practices’, which in fact grants philosophy an overall perspective from which to judge other practices;59 or else via the ‘aleatory’ reading of the late Althusser, purifying Althusser’s thought of its relation to Marx. Of these three readings, the conjunctural one is most closely related to the attempt to read the Theses in a way that responds to the call for a new materialism. Pierre Macherey perhaps

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quite justly remained critical towards this definition of philosophy as a mere mediator inherently linked to the model of representation.60 The critical reservation of Macherey is understandable not only because of the Spinozist orientation, but also in that it rightfully warns of the danger of falling back into a ‘reflection’-theory. However, I would argue that the conjunctural reading has the benefit of highlighting two general directions that can be taken in defining Althusser’s philosophy and new materialism: either we define ‘philosophy as party’,61 which gives directives to science and politics, or we understand ‘philosophy as a machine for class translation’ of discourses and practices.62

From oscillating philosophy to overdetermined philosophy? Althusser’s oscillation between these various definitions of philosophy can be read as a failure to provide a more refined and complex position. In a more positive sense, the place of philosophy in the aforementioned triangle is crucial in order to understand the internal fractures of Althusser’s work, and moreover to follow displacements and aspect-shifts within the triangle. Badiou has argued that Althusser remained a philosopher all through his work;63 but is it possible – despite the oscillations – to discern some fundamental feature of the philosophical orientation of his enterprise? The ‘undercurrent’ flowing from his work is not only its ‘interventionist’ and ‘combative’ nature. This dimension of the ‘Note sur les Thèses’ should be taken seriously: philosophy needs to remain at a distance from both fields, politics and science, but it should continue to intervene in them indirectly and produce varied effects, including non-philosophical ones. This claim is again very close to that of the mediating role of philosophy. If philosophy is conditioned by the conjuncture, then it can be argued that it ‘normally’ intervenes in the existing theoretical ideologies. When the social circumstances become revolutionary, however, philosophy might produce more than merely intra-philosophical effects, bringing it into close relation with the masses. Two further courses could allow for a more adequate conceptualisation of philosophy within Althusser’s triangle in order to avoid the criticism of representation advanced by Macherey. The first course would tie philosophy closely to the concept of ‘overdetermination’ and examine the relation between politics and philosophy (eleventh thesis), while the second would posit philosophy in terms of Marx’s concept of verwandelte Formen;64 that is, it would see philosophical forms as ‘transformed’ ideological forms, thus supplementing the triangle with the additional field of ideology, which examines the relation between science and politics. Philosophy would then be an activity articulating two fields (science and politics) in a process of working through ideology, constantly transforming ideological forms within and between the fields of the scientific and the political. Moreover, remembering that one field overdetermines the other helps to clarify the instable conjuncture of Marxist philosophy that relates to and evaluates the temporary effects of events and discoveries within these fields. The concept of ‘overdetermined causality’ is Althusser’s most important theoretical contribution, by means of which he reworks the Marxist topography.65 The complex causality and ‘double determination’ of social instances (not only politics by economy, and vice versa, but a certain conception of the ‘decentred centre’ that is at work in both) can provide a provisionary tool for rethinking the relationship between philosophy, politics and science. Much more than suturing philosophy with politics, what is peculiar to Althusser’s project is, rather, a continuing persistence of the specific place of philosophy and its engaged nature. Althusser does indeed subscribe to the

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view that politics determines Marxist philosophy, but he continues to maintain that it is the role of philosophy to detect displaced contradictions and articulate crucial points between science and politics. Philosophy also brings the future dimension into and through politics, meditating the unanticipated. This is the place where politics and philosophy start entering a productive partnership. When philosophy speaks from the horizon of the future society, communism, it becomes an equal ‘partner’, a friend in the mission of changing the world. In close ‘cooperation’ with historical analysis, philosophy thinks the change-in-process and acts on it. If Althusser can correctly be criticised for reproducing the division of academic labour,66 he nevertheless also responds to this aristocratic challenge with his text ‘Philosophy as revolutionary weapon’.67 Philosophy must not remain indifferent (like science), but has to learn with and from the masses.68 The thesis that rests on the Spinozian and Kantian maxim that ‘anyone can think’ actually shows what an important role Althusser attributed to philosophy in the transformation of the world, which in turn crucially marks his peculiar reading of and return to the eleventh thesis. Thus, the real change will occur only, when it is accompanied with a change in thinking about the world; in other words the new practice of philosophy things the change in the world, and in this way acts on it, executing that change practically and theoretically. Althusser’s second answer regarding the conception of philosophy stems directly from his ‘Note sur les Thèses’ and offers another intriguing conceptualisation via ‘transformed forms’ that relate the field of science to ideology. Following the early Althusser and Macherey, philosophical interventions are inscribed in the field of theoretical ideologies, that is, the field between the ‘ideological’ and the ‘scientific’.69 Philosophy’s task is to rethink the relationship between science, politics and ideology, which is constantly undermined, restructured and overdetermined. In his ‘Note sur les Thèses’, the first step Althusser takes is to demonstrate the ideological conditionality of all fields (science, philosophy, but also politics); while in the second step he sketches possible ways of breaking with ideology, or of how these fields can be (self-)constituted. Scientific discoveries (science), demarcation-lines (philosophy) and revolution (politics) all imply processes of rupture within those fields. In this text, Althusser does not explain precisely how philosophy and ideology work between those fields, but only gives a hint with the concept of verwandelte Formen – transformed forms, which demonstrate a specific relation of ideology to other fields.70 His suggestion is to define philosophy as a transformed form of ideology; philosophy thus works on the ideological forms as structurally necessary parts of reality. Is philosophy, then, as well as mediating between different fields, also naming ruptures in those same fields, and then being conditioned by them?71 Althusser perhaps only briefly suggested a direction that could overcome the conception of philosophy as (self-)mediation. The other more political suggestion lies in his insistence on ideas becoming material forces in society – but then why would simply thinking politics, separated from philosophy, not be valid for future critical explorations on the role of philosophy?72

Instead of a conclusion These two different ways of defining conjectural philosophy suggest the need to displace any fixation on the eleventh thesis of Feuerbach, and instead concentrate on rethinking the encounter of the tenth and eleventh theses. This contradictory encounter should not be understood as a simple merging of revolutionary theory and practice. Rather, Althusser’s encounter

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should be seen as the mutual crosscutting of historical analysis and the philosophical horizon of the future that points to the partisan position within theory. Revolutionary theory is accompanied by another necessary encounter between the revolutionary politics of the masses and thought as a conjunctural analysis of the present situation. Philosophy helps to create the site of the encounter between revolutionary practice and theory. An Althusserian-inspired orientation could then contribute to answering the question of what the idea of communism might be today. It could do so in a two-fold way: first, it would strive to examine critically what went wrong with actually-existing socialism and to affirm past revolutionary moments in order to mobilise historical resources; second, it would strive to think and invent new forms of political organisation, which demands of philosophy a form of political engagement. If philosophy remains unaware of its ‘overdetermined’ character, it can, even when attempting to grasp such a radical notion such as the idea of communism, end up in abstract opinion. This is the point where Althusser agrees with Lukács: ‘Every “theoretical” tendency or clash of views must immediately develop an organisational arm if it is to rise above the level of pure theory or abstract opinion, that is to say, if it really intends to point the way to its own fulfilment in practice’.73 The question of organisation is not simply a matter of vulgar political practice, experimenting and pragmatically calculating choices, but becomes the most abstract and simultaneously concrete point of any materialist orientation. It becomes a strategic link between revolutionary theory and practice, which guides the search for a new materialism today.

Notes 1 For example, G. M. Goshgarian tries to explain all of Althusser’s work in the light of the theory of the encounter; see his chapter in this volume. 2 It seems that at the end of his interesting analysis Vargas comes to conclusion that Althusser abandoned communism and Marxism (Vargas 2008, pp. 190–2). 3 Althusser’s concept of an epistemological break, which targets humanism, is also used to read Capital against Hegel. See Althusser and Balibar 1970; Althusser 1969a. 4 For a Žižekian reading of specific ruptures in Althusser, see Katja Kolšek’s text in this volume. 5 In his chapter in this book Panagiotis Sotiris also favours reading both tendencies at the same time. I develop this thesis in detail elsewhere (Kirn 2007). 6 The call is similar to Alain Badiou’s way of posing the problem of materialism. In the introduction to his Logic of Worlds, he argues that in the situation of reigning materialisms, it is necessary to draw the demarcation line between materialist dialectic and democratic materialism. 7 Althusser 1969a. 8 See Balibar 1995. Althusser most directly refers to Theses in his ‘Note sur les Thèses’ (Althusser 1994b). 9 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 5, p. 8. 10 Bloch 1996, p. 285. 11 Debenjak 2008, p.156. 12 Many mainstream Marxist approaches would use the causality linked to the spatial (linear) metaphor of base and superstructure that Marx developed in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy.

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13 Macherey 2008, p. 212. 14 The sixth thesis famously proclaims that the human essence is only ‘ensemble of social relations’. 15 Macherey 2008, p. 213. 16 See Bifo 2011. 17 The post-Fordist regime realises all human capacities and participates in the self-destruction of capitalism, where Feuerbach’s essence of man is finally being realised. But should we not instead argue that this ideal of the self-realisation of humanity is nothing but the normalisation of man’s needs and desires, a part of the ideology of ‘flexible personality’ (Holmes 2002) and remains very much linked to the general commodity-production and dominant individualist ideology? 18 Marx had addressed this issue in other places before, as in his 1843 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, or later in 1848s Communist Manifesto. 19 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 5, p. 49. 20 Macherey 2008, p. 215. 21 Slavoj Žižek’s critical remark on the troubles of French radical political philosophy (Žižek 2006, p. 55). 22 Contingency is clearly of crucial importance for any consideration of the origin of and transition between modes of production, but it does not suffice for more in-depth analysis of social circumstances. 23 In this perspective, a parallax view seems as an appropriate conceptual tool for understanding Marx’s basic methodological initiative (compare with Žižek 2006). It was not simply about interpretation, but how his reading – as a theoretical strategy – traversed different 'disciplines', as it attempted to grasp the object of capital. 24 See for example Lukács 1971, pp. 22–3. 25 While there are many differences between Lukács and Althusser, at least on this point their different approaches to Marx converge on the question of understanding totality from the partisan position of the proletariat. 26 It is true that Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach did not yet speak about production, but about practice, as against the intuition or sensuousness of Feuerbach. Marx’s concept of practice is an ‘ensemble of social relations’, which only opens a path towards production. See Balibar 2007c and Debenjak 2008, pp. 155–62, who argue correctly that the Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach still stood on the standpoint of practice. It is nevertheless true that his conception of praxis in this period differed from Feuerbach’s notion of practice and the materialism of intuition and sensuousness. Marx’s concept of praxis does not hide behind an idea of a human essence, but points to the ensemble of social relations, which was later framed in terms of production. 27 Marx succeeded in elaborating new concepts such as mode of production, tendency and class struggle, which meant that he broke with an ideological horizon. He began to practice a different theory, which can no longer be equated with philosophy, though at the same time Hegel remained an important reference. 28 See Balibar 2007c. 29 See Althusser 1969a, especially the chapter ‘Marxism and Humanism’. 30 Although Althusser 2003 always stressed the critique of Stalinism as crucial for the future of Marxist theory, one has to admit that his critique of economism and humanism is rather weak. 31 For criticism of Heideggerian Marxists see Žižek 1999, p. 13. Undoubtedly, also Derrida’s deconstruction, and some left-Heideggerians like Nancy and Blanchot attacked Marx’s humanism in the time when Althusser wrote.

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32 Althusser discusses these limitations, especially in Althusser 2006a. 33 Most notably, Althusser developed this in his ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ essay (in Althusser 1971a) and in his posthumously published book on reproduction (Althusser 1995a). Before Althusser, the theoretical implication for this move can be ascribed at least two important references: Lenin and Gramsci. The latter developed the first complex analysis of ‘superstructure’, which would rule out any mechanical causality of base-superstructure. 34 See Jason Read’s chapter in this volume for further exploration of this thesis. 35 Moshe Postone undertook an extremely important project in this respect, with his analyses of the importance of the form of production-relations (commodity-production) that determine ideology (Postone 1996, pp. 272–7). 36 See Frieder Otto Wolf’s chapter in this volume. 37 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 5, p.8. 38 See Macherey 2008. 39 See Balibar 2007c, pp. 40–1. It is not surprising that Marx presented a certain quandary for Hannah Arendt. The limitations of her reading of Marx are most visible especially in her third chapter of Vita Activa (Arendt 1958), which deals with the relation of work/poiesis. Habermas correctly notes that the theoretical revolution of supposedly distinguished activities had already begun with More and Machiavelli (Habermas 1973). 40 For a more detailed and evolutionary interpretation of Theses, see Debenjak 2008, p.158. 41 ‘Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kömmt drauf an, sie zu verändern’ (Marx 1969, p. 5). 42 See Labica 1987b. 43 See Ruda 2009. 44 This interpretation privileges Engels’s editing that inserted the famous ‘aber’ between sentences, as disjunction. See Labica’s excellent book on the Theses (Labica 1987b). 45 Marx and Engels 1975–2005 Volume 3, p. 187; translation modified. 46 Balibar correctly notes that, for Marx, the world will not be transformed by education alone (Balibar 2007c, pp.17–27). It was precisely the concept of revolution that enabled him to break with the idealistic horizon of his position in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where the level of interpretation was still linked to representation, and the subject of change (an idealist notion) was linked to the proletariat. 47 Macherey 2008, p. 227. 48 Althusser 1994b. 49 Althusser 1971a. As the interview’s title suggests, Althusser is interested in the role of philosophy in the class struggle. 50 Althusser 1994b, p. 42. 51 This can be taken as a minimal definition for materialism; there is something that exists outside thought. See also Žerjav 2006, who brings Marxist theory close to some central thesis of psychoanalysis. 52 See Althusser 1966b; 1973. 53 Althusser is also against the suturing of science with politics. The consequences of this suture might well lead into Lysenkoism. See also the work of Althusser’s colleague Dominique Lecourt on Lysenko (Lecourt 1976). 54 As Macherey 2009 lucidly argues, this conception of philosophy is at work from an early stage. 55 See Chapter 3 in Pupovac 2008. 56 Elliott 2006.

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57 Althusser 2000. 58 Althusser 1984, p. 67. 59 Althusser 1976a. 60 Macherey 2009. 61 See Pupovac’s chapter in this volume for a further discussion of this definition of philosophy. 62 This type of answer opens the challenge of ‘pragmatism’, or of how to find ideal communicative situations translating correct ideas from science to political practice. 63 Badiou 2008. 64 Močnik 2006 recently brought into discussion the concept that Marx used in Volume III of Capital, when he attempted to articulate the field of circulation and production, which in a general way connects the first and third volumes of Capital. This point was previously highlighted by Mamardashvili 1999. 65 See Althusser 1969a. The question of causality is crucial for any theory of history. Althusser criticised the Hegelian model of expressive totality, but most directly the model of economic base (economy), which determines superstructure (politics and ideology). Against this, Althusser develops a different causality of the ‘decentred centre’. In this new horizon, the economic determination of base-superstructure is replaced by a ‘double determination’, which entails additional conditioning of instances in the social structure. Overdetermined causality works in heterogeneous ways forming a complex inter-relation of instances of the social structure: politics, economy, culture, law, ideology and so forth. The inter-relation is by definition only graspable through its effects, that is, retroactively. If Althusser still retains the thesis that capitalist society is ‘in the last instance’ determined by the economic instance, with a certain contradictory development of the forces and relations of production, then he also expands this with another determination: this structural relation is ‘overdetermined’ by politics. 66 Rancière 2011. 67 Althusser 1971a. 68 Echoes of both the third thesis on Feuerbach and an allusion to the Chinese Cultural Revolution can be found in Althusser’s mode of argumentation. 69 See Macherey 2009. 70 Althusser 1994b. 71 Badiou’s conception is different from Althusser’s, but there are some points of convergence. According to Badiou 2009a, one of the tasks of philosophy is to maintain the place to think the compossibility of different truth-procedures. Philosophy is conditioned by four different truthprocedures. Althusser sketches out some of the conditions of philosophy in the text ‘What is philosophy’ in Althusser 1995a. 72 Sylvain Lazarus seems to push most fervently in this direction (see Lazarus 1996). 73 Lukács 1971, p. 299.

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Bibliography Unpublished texts by Althusser Althusser, Louis, ‘Notes sur Lévi-Strauss: Sur La Pensée sauvage’ [1962?], Imec archives, Alt2. A60-04, nos. 9 and 10: ‘Comment l’arbitraire devient-il nécessaire?’ (Althusser Fond 2, File A60, Dossier 4). —unposted letter of 24 November 1963 to Lucien Sève, Alt2.C6-02 (Althusser Fond 2, Correspondence). —Letter of 22 January 1964 to Michel Verret. —Letter of 14 August 1966 to Michel Verret. —Letter of 2 September 1966 to Michel Verret. —‘Diverses notes’ [1966], Imec archives, Alt2.A11-02.02 to A11-02.05 (Althusser Fond 2, File A11, Dossier 2, Folder 2 to Folder 5). —‘Note critique et autocritique pour le lecteur de Pour Marx et Lire le Capital, 16 oct. 1967’, Imec archives, Alt2.A9-05.07 and Alt.2.A10-03.05 (Althusser Fond 2, File A9, Dossier 5, Folder 7 and File A10, Dossier 3, Folder 5). —‘Rectification [19]67’, Imec archives, Alt2.A9-05.01 (Althusser Fond 2, File A9, Dossier 5, Folder 1). —‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ [1966–7?], Imec archives, Alt2.A8-02.01 to A8-02.04 (Althusser Fond 2, File A8, Dossier 2, Folder 1 to Folder 4). —‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ [1966–67], Imec archives, Alt2.A7-01.01 to Alt2.A8-01.01 (Althusser Fond 2, File A7, Dossier 1, Folder 1 to File A8, Dossier 1, Folder 1). —‘Projet d’une lettre à Voprossy filosofi’, Alt2.A9-03.01, third sheaf (Althusser Fond 2, file 9, Dossier 3, Folder 1). —‘Introduction à la philosophie’ [1977?].

Published texts by Althusser Althusser, Louis 1959, Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire, Paris: PUF. —1966a, ‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme dialectique’, Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, 11: 88–122. —1966b, ‘Sur la révolution culturelle’, Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, 14. —1969a, For Marx, London: NLB. —1969b, ‘Avertissement’, in Karl Marx, Le Capital, Livre l, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. —1971a, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: NLB. —1971b [1968], ‘Appendice A’, in Leggere il Capitale, translated into Italian by Raffaele Rinaldi and Vanghelis Oskian, Milan: Feltrinelli. —1972, Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: NLB. —1973, Réponse à John Lewis, Paris: Maspero. —1976a [1974], Essays in Self-Criticism, translated by Grahame Lock, London: NLB. —1976b, Positions, Paris: Éditions sociales. —1977a [1965], Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero.

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—1977b, 22ème Congrès, Paris: Maspero. —1978a, ‘Algunas cuestiones de la crisis de la teoría marxista’, in Louis Althusser, Nuevos Escritos, Barcelona: Editorial Laia. —1978b, ‘What Must Change in the Party’, New Left Review, I/109: 19–45. —1978c, Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste français, Paris: Maspero. —1978d, ‘Il marxismo come teoria “finita”’, in Althusser et al. 1978. —1978e, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, Marxism Today, 215–27. —1979 [1978], ‘The Crisis of Marxism’, translated by Graham Locke, in Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies, London: Ink Links. —1984, Essays in Ideology, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso. —1990a [1974]: Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, London: Verso. —1990b, ‘La solitude de Machiavel’, Futur antérieur, 1: 26–49. —1993a, ‘Sur la pensée marxiste’, in Futur antérieur, Sur Althusser. Passages, Paris: L’Harmattan: 11–29. —1993b, ‘L’unique tradition matérialiste’, Lignes, 18, pp. 71–119. —1993c, Écrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan, edited by Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, Paris: Stock/IMEC. —1993d, The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts, translated by Richard Veasey, London: Chatto & Windus. —1994a, L’avenir dure longtemps, Paris, Stock/IMEC. —1994b, ‘Note sur les Thèses sur Feuerbach’, Le Magazine Littéraire, 324: 38–42. —1994–5, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, 2 Volumes, edited by François Matheron, Paris: Stock/IMEC. —1995a, Sur la reproduction, edited by Jacques Bidet, Paris: PUF. —1995b, The Future Lasts Forever. A Memoir, translated by Richard Veasey, New York: The New Press. —1996a, ‘L’objet du Capital’, in Althusser et al. 1996. —1996b, Writings on Psychoanalysis, edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, New York: Columbia University Press. —1996c, Psychanalyse et sciences humaines. Deux conférences (1963–1964), edited by Olivier Corpet and François Matheron, Paris: Le Livre de Poche. —1997a ‘The Only Materialist Tradition, Part 1: Spinoza’ in The New Spinoza, edited by Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. —1997b, The Specter of Hegel: Early Writings, edited by François Matheron, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —1998a, La Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes, edited by Yves Sintomer, Paris: PUF. —1998b, Lettres à Franca, edited by François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, Paris: Stock/Imec. —1999, Machiavelli and Us, translated by Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. —2003, Louis Althusser: The Humanist Controversy and other Writings, translated by G. M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —2005, ‘Du matérialisme aléatoire’, Multitudes, 21: 179–93. —2006a, Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978–1987, edited by François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, translation and introduction by G. M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. —2006b, Politique et Histoire de Machiavel à Marx: Cours à l’École Normale Supérieure,1955–1972, Paris: Seuil. —2009, Machiavel et nous, Paris: Tallander. —2010a, Materialismus der Begegnung, translated by Franziska Schottmann, Berlin: diaphanes. —2010b, Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate Volume 1, Hamburg: VSA. —2012a, ‘On Genesis’ [1966], translated by Jason E. Smith, introduced by G. M. Goshgarian, Décalages, 1, 2, available at: http://scholar.oxy.edu/decalages/vol1/iss2. Accessed March 2012. —2012b, Über die Reproduktion, in Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate Volume 2, Hamburg: VSA.

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Other texts Adorno, Theodor W. 1969, Einleitung, in Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie, edited by Heinz Maus and Friedrich Fürstenberg, Berlin: Herman Luchterhand Verlag. Amariglio, Jack 1987, ‘Marxism Against Economic Science: Althusser’s Legacy’, Research in Political Economy, 10: 159–94. Amariglio, Jack and Antonio Callari, 1993. ‘Marxian Value Theory and the Problem of the Subject: The Role of Commodity Fetishism’, in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, edited by Emily Apter and William Pietz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press: 186–216. Amariglio, Jack and David F. Ruccio 2002, ‘Modern economics: the case of the disappearing body?’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 26: 81–103. Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB. Anscombre, Jean-Claude (ed.) 1995, Théorie des topoi, Paris: Kimé. Arendt, Hannah 1958, The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Arndt, Andreas 2003, Die Arbeit der Philosophie, Berlin: Parerga. Arthur, Charles J. 2002, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Leiden: Brill. Ashton, Trevor H. and Charles H. E. Philpin (eds) 1987, The Brenner Debate. Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bachelard, Gaston 1949, Le rationalisme appliqué, Paris: PUF. —1968, The Philosophy of No. A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, translated by G. C. Waterston, New York: Orion Press. —2002, The Formation of the Scientific Mind. A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, translated by Marx McAllester Jones, Manchester: Clinamen Press. Backhaus, Hans-Georg 1997, Dialektik der Wertform, Freiburg: Ça ira. Badaloni, Nicola 1981, ‘Antonio Gramsci. La filosofia della prassi come previsione’, in Storia del marxismo Volume III/3, Il marxismo nell’età della terza internazionale, Eric J. Hobsbawm et al. (eds), Turin: Einaudi. Badiou, Alain 1985, Peut-on penser la politique?, Paris: Seuil. —1993, ‘Qu’est-ce que Louis Althusser entend par philosophie’ in Lazarus (ed.) 1993. —2005a, Metapolitics, London: Verso. —2005b, ‘The Adventure of French Philosophy’, New Left Review, II/35. —2006, L’être et l’événement, 2: Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil. —2008, Petit panthéon portative, Paris: La fabrique. —2009a, Conditions, New York: Continuum. —2009b [2006], Logics of Worlds, translated by Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum. —2009c, ‘Louis Althusser’ in Pocket Pantheon, translated by David Macey, London: Verso. —2009d, Theory of the Subject, translated by Bruno Bosteels, New York: Continuum. —2012, ‘The (Re)commencement of Dialectial Materialism’, in The Adventure of French Philosophy translated by Bruno Bosteels, London: Verso. Badiou, Alain and François Balmès 1976, De l’idéologie, Paris: Maspero. Bakhtin, Mihail 1984, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balakrishnan, Gopal 2005, ‘Future unknown. Machiavelli for the Twenty First Century’, New Left Review, II/32.

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Index of Works by Louis Althusser 22ème Congrès 193, 198, 201, 287 ‘Algunas cuestiones de la crisis de la teoría marxista’ 109 ‘Appendice A’ 149 ‘Avertissement‘ 245 Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste français 287 ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ 35, 75, 80, 95, 98, 129, 144, 215, 222 ‘Crisis of Marxism, The’ 193, 272 ‘Diverses Notes’ 108, 110–11 ‘Du matérialisme aléatoire’ 40 Écrits philosophiques et politiques 4, 24, 73, 180, 193 Écrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan 87, 305 Elements of Self-Criticism 39, 110, 116, 118, 182, 286 Essays in Self-Criticism 38–9, 58, 123–4, 155, 161–3, 180, 182–3, 203, 209, 215, 220–2, 242, 286–7, 303, 305–6, 334, 351 Essays on Ideology 162, 351 For Marx xiii, xvii, xix, 75, 80, 89–90, 92–5, 98–9, 101–5, 121, 123, 129, 144–7, 149–50, 173–4, 182–3, 198, 203, 222, 272, 276, 278, 281, 284–6, 289–91, 295, 300, 303, 331, 333-4, 340, 348–9 Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts, The xxi, 116, 125 Future Lasts Forever, The. A Memoir 4, 181, 275, 285 Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, The xv, 108, 110–11, 117, 124, 162, 287, 334, 349 Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate 258

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‘Il marxismo come teoria “finita”’ 193 Introduction à la philosophie 110 ‘La solitude de Machiavel’ 61, 73 L’avenir dure longtemps 38–40, 124 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 32, 38, 40, 57, 117, 124, 151, 202, 222, 258, 287, 303–6, 319, 333, 350 Letter of 2 September 1966 to Michel Verret 110 Letter of 14 August 1966 to Michel Verret 110 Letter of 22 January 1964 to Michel Verret 110 Letter of 23 October 1966 to Yves Duroux 108 Letter of 24 November 1963 to Lucien Sève 109 Lettres à Franca 108, 110, 116, 144, 150 Lire le Capital (Althusser, Louis et al.) 108–10, 226, 242 ‘L’unique tradition matérialiste’ 61, 73 ‘L’objet du Capital’ 73 Machiavel et nous 61, 258 Machiavelli and Us 35, 43, 46, 48–51, 55, 78, 82–3, 115–17, 119–25, 345 ‘Man, That Night’ 89 ‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme dialectique’ 117 Materialismus der Begegnung 180–1 Montesquieu: Politics and History 89, 92, 93–9, 102–4, 106, 109 Montesquieu: la politique et l’histoire 38, 123 ‘Note critique et autocritique pour le lecteur de Pour Marx et Lire le Capital, 16 October 1967’ 110 ‘Note sur les Thèses sur Feuerbach’ 343, 346–8 ‘Notes sur Lévi-Strauss’ 109 ‘On Genesis’ 108, 110–11 ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ 35, 95, 102, 116, 144, 285

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Index of Works by Louis Althusser ‘On Theoretical Work’ 89, 90, 100–2, 106, 121 ‘Only Materialist Tradition, The, Part 1: Spinoza’ 39, 116, 124, 150–1, 161–3, 286 Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays xxi, 24, 38, 40, 109–11, 124–5, 151, 250–1, 258, 272, 287 Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 1978–1987 xv–xvi, 24–6, 28, 39–41, 58–60, 73–4, 108, 111, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 154, 159–60, 161–3, 180–1, 184, 201–3, 223, 272, 285–7, 350 Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx 89–95, 97–9, 102–4, 106, 108–10, 123, 182, 333 Politique et Histoire de Machiavel á Marx: Cours á l’École Normale Supérieure, 1955–1972 73, 123–4, 272 Positions 304, 317 Pour Marx 57, 110 ‘Projet d’une lettre à Voprossy filosofi’ 109 Psychanalyse et sciences humaines. Deux conférences (1963–1964) 87, 304–6 Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar) xiii, xvii–xix, 15, 41, 59, 63–4, 89–90, 92, 96–105, 108–11, 124, 127–8, 130, 135, 137–9, 144–7, 149–51, 153–5, 7, 161–2, 168, 173, 181–3, 198, 208, 210, 212, 217,

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220–3, 242–5, 265, 272, 279–81, 291, 303–4, 321, 348 ‘Rectification [19]67’ 110 Réponse à John Lewis 62, 73, 334 ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme scientifique’ 109, 111 Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes, La 3, 73, 108–9, 334 ‘Sur la pensée marxiste’ 109, 41 Sur la Philosophie 4 Sur la Reproduction 41, 104, 163, 248, 255, 258, 281, 286–7, 305, 318–9, 321, 324, 333–4, 350 ‘Sur la revolution culturelle’ 350 Spectre of Hegel, The: Early Writings 108–9 ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ 89, 100, 111 Über die Reproduktion 258 ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter, The’ 4, 19, 46–7, 49–51, 54–5, 57, 64, 68, 82, 104, 146, 152, 178, 180–1, 272 ‘What Must Change in the Party’ xxi Writings on Psychoanalysis 111, 163, 221, 259

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Index of Names Abbe, Ernst 249 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 63, 73, 342 Amariglio, Jack 220, 221, 223 Anderson, Perry 159, 277 Anscombre, Jean-Claude 319–20 Aragon, Louis 117 Aristotle 69, 91, 102, 161, 249, 266 Bachelard, Gaston xvi, 76, 105, 175, 280 Backhaus, Hans-Georg 251 Badaloni, Nicola 150 Badiou, Alain xiv, xviii, xix, 7, 76, 77, 79, 153, 155, 157–8, 160, 179–80, 207–9, 344, 346 Bakhtin, Mikhail 313, 315 Balakrishnan, Gopal 84 Balibar, Étienne xiv, 35, 96–9, 101, 104, 144, 153–4, 157, 160, 174, 193, 217, 247, 249, 251, 336, 345 Balmès, François 334 Baltas, Aristides 58 Bateson, Gregory 236 Benjamin, Walter 70, 143, 339 Berger, Denis 286 Berlinguer, Enrico 186 Bidet, Jacques 252–4 Biewener, Carole 221 Bihr, Alain 245 Blanchot, Maurice 165–6 Bloch, Ernst 336–7, 339, 342 Bloch, Joseph 80, 215 Bloch, Olivier 22 Bobbio, Norberto 185, 187 Bollinger, Stefan 148 Boothman, Derek 149 Bosteels, Bruno 151, 162–3 Bottigelli, Emile 277 Bourdieu, Pierre 256 Bourdin, Jean-Claude 5, 120 Brenner, Robert 39 Breton, Stanislas 12, 13, 64, 178 Brewster, Ben 92, 97

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Brohm, Jean-Marie 286 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine 139 Burgio, Alberto 143 Burnham, James 249 Butler, Judith xiv Buttigieg, Joseph A. 149 Cahiers pour l’analyse 8, 166, 191 Callari, Antonio xxi, 28, 38, 223, 242 Canguilhem, Georges 155, 175, 280, 300, 305 Carel, Marion 319–20 Cavaillès, Jean 155, 175, 280, 300, 305 Cercle d’épistémologie 166, 168, 170, 181 Cesarale, Giorgio 244 Charim, Isolde 249, 258 Charusheela, S. 219, 223 Christofferson, Michael Scott 285 Clastres, Pierre 235, 244 Clausewitz, Karl von 133 Coase, Ronald H. 243 Coassin-Spiegel, Hermes 149 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 321 Cornu, Auguste 277 Cournot, Antoine-Augustin 64, 90, 107 Croce, Benedetto 139, 141, 143, 144, 145, 149 Cullenberg, Stephen 222 Darwin, Charles xvii, 65–8, 73 Del Lucchese, Filippo 73, 120, 124, 173, 183 Deleuze, Gilles xiii, xvi, xviii, xix, 9, 12, 60, 120, 155, 159, 163, 165–9, 170–6, 178–84, 275 Democritus 4, 23, 160 Derrida, Jacques xiii, xv, xvi, 4, 9, 10, 12, 14, 23, 60, 62, 120, 137, 172, 182, 248, 275, 286, 349 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint 155, 277 Descartes, René 23, 87, 116, 175, 299, 301 Descombes, Vincent 85 Deyanov, Deyan 310, 320 Dimoulis, Dimitri 40 Dinucci, Federico 6, 22, 25, 26, 120, 124

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Index of Names Diskin, Jonathan 220 Dolar, Mladen 57, 78, 86, 259, 304, 306 Ducrot, Oswald 310, 318–21 Economakis, George 40 Elliott, Gregory xxi, 57, 109, 120, 124, 150, 154, 161, 258, 335, 345, 350 Engels, Friedrich 4, 6, 22, 41, 80–1, 87, 90, 95, 137, 148, 173, 183, 215, 255, 277–8, 318–19, 350 Epicurus xiii, 4–6, 9, 19, 22–3, 31–2, 39, 62, 64, 69, 90, 107, 120, 137, 160, 172, 263 Establet, Roger 242 Feltham, Oliver 151 Feuerbach, Ludwig xx, 6, 35, 62, 90, 172, 243, 299, 323, 336–9, 347, 349, 351 Finelli, Roberto 149 Foucault, Michel xviii, 60, 97, 110, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 174, 182, 183, 193, 201, 221, 248, 259, 275, 282, 286, 305 Fourtounis, Giorgos xvii, 57–8, 150, 163, 179, 183–4 Frankfurt School 249–50 Freud, Sigmund xiii, xvi, 23, 87, 194, 259, 289–91, 295–9, 301, 303–6, 319 Frosini, Fabio 74, 149 Gadet, Françoise 259, 317 Garaudy, Roger 108, 117, 277 Geertz, Clifford 244 Gentile, Giovanni 144 Gerratana, Valentino 139, 144 Gibson-Graham, J. K. 223 Godelier, Maurice 234, 237, 242–3 Goshgarian, G. M. xvii, 28–9, 38, 40, 58, 108, 110, 116, 117, 121, 123–4, 149, 150–1, 154, 162, 201, 202, 345, 348 Gramsci, Antonio xviii, 6, 13, 18–19, 20, 22, 53, 60, 69–70, 72, 74, 116–19, 122–5, 129, 134–5, 137, 138–44, 147, 148–50, 202, 248, 259, 350 Prison Notebooks 74, 118–19, 122–3, 139–41, 143–5, 149, 150 Guibert, Bernard 251, 258 Guillaume, Marc 244 Gurwitsch, Georges 320 Habjan, Jernej 321 Hands, D. Wade 221 Harvey, David 223 Haug, Wolfgang Fritz 139, 149

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xiii, xviii, 19, 23, 40–1, 63–5, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81–3, 81–6, 92, 94, 98–9, 116, 121, 123, 138–41, 149, 155, 166, 168, 171–8, 181–3, 188, 200, 215–16, 218, 241–42, 245, 250–2, 254, 256, 259, 270, 277–8, 280, 285–6, 323–4, 326, 328, 333, 336–7, 344, 348–51 Heidegger, Martin xiii, xv, xvi, xviii, 4, 9, 10–12, 14, 19, 22, 62, 69, 79, 120, 137, 163, 167, 172, 178–9, 184, 263, 349 Hobbes, Thomas xiii, xv, 4, 8–9, 62, 70, 81, 115, 123, 131–2, 137, 160, 249 Horkheimer, Max 200, 249 Husserl, Edmund 320 Hyppolite, Jean 168, 170, 171–2, 174, 181–3 Ichida, Yoshihiko 28, 38, 40, 69, 73, 84, 88, 150, 242 Ípola, Emilio de 111 Ives, Peter 149 Kaplan, Ann xxi Karatani, Kojin 85 Kautsky, Karl 250, 258, 339 Kayatekin, Serap 223 Kelly, Michael 285 Kerslake, Christian 170, 181–2 Koivisto, Juha 124, 125, 148 Korsch, Karl 277 Kristjansen-Gural, David 221 Labica, Georges 249, 258, 350 Labriola, Antonio 255 Lacan, Jacques xiii, xvi, xviii, xx, 79, 81, 157–9, 163, 166, 168, 170–1, 181–2, 248, 253–4, 259, 291, 294–308, 318–19, 321 Laclau, Ernesto xiv, 222 Lahtinen, Mikko xviii, xxi, 29, 38, 73, 124, 125, 150, 151, 198, 203, 222 Lefebvre, Henri 259–60, 270 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9–10, 32, 63, 64, 116, 170, 173, 175, 181, 183 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich xix, 4, 6, 32, 35, 79, 81, 83, 95, 98–102, 110, 116–18, 121–3, 140, 142, 148, 180, 186, 188–9, 193–4, 196–8, 201–2, 250–1, 254–5, 258, 277, 281, 283, 286–7, 328, 330, 343, 350 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 98, 109, 157, 159, 237, 321 Levine, Andrew 242 Lewis, 38, 62, 122, 124, 156, 158, 198, 202, 287, 334, 340

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372 Index of Names

Liguori, Guido 149–50 Lindner, Kolja 245 Lipietz, Alain 41, 242 Lo Iacono, Cristian 149 Locke, John 81, 115, 123, 133, 157, 177, 191, 249, 281, 309 Lucretius 4, 160, 175 Lukács, György xxi, 6, 156, 250, 277, 339, 340, 348 Macherey, Pierre xiv, 39, 40, 73, 86, 107, 110–11, 149, 151, 153, 155–6, 162, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 220, 242, 337–9, 343, 345–7, 349–51 Machiavelli, Niccolò xiii, xv, xvii, xviii, xxi, 3–4, 6–8, 18–19, 29, 32, 35–6, 43–4, 46, 48–55, 60–2, 64–5, 68–74, 78, 82–5, 87, 95, 99, 108, 115–25, 127–34, 137, 150, 153, 160, 180, 192, 249, 261–4, 266–70, 272, 332, 336, 345, 350 The Prince 6–7, 11–12, 18, 39, 50, 52–4, 60, 64, 68–72, 83–4, 115, 118, 120–4, 128–32, 161, 263–4, 267, 269–70 Madonia, Franca 108, 116, 144 Madra, Yahya 221, 223 Mamardashvili, Merab 318, 351 Mandel, Ernest 245 Marchais, Georges 321 Marcuse, Herbert 277 Marx, Karl xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 3–5, 9, 11, 13, 15–19, 22–3, 25, 31, 34–5, 37, 39–40, 45, 61–5, 68, 75–80, 82–3, 85–7, 89–99, 101–5, 108–111, 116–17, 120–3, 128, 129, 137, 139, 144–51, 155–6, 159, 165–6, 168, 172–5, 177, 180–3, 185–94, 196–203, 208–18, 221, 223, 225–32, 245, 249–51, 255–8, 261–72, 275–81, 283–7, 289–91, 295, 298, 300, 303–4, 318, 321, 323–5, 327–8, 330–1, 333–42, 344–5, 348–51 Capital xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, 15, 17, 18, 23, 34, 59, 63, 64, 89, 90, 92, 96–105, 108–11, 117–18, 120–1, 123, 127–8, 130, 137–9, 144–7, 149–50, 153–5, 157, 161, 168, 173, 194, 196, 198, 200, 208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 223, 225–6, 229, 231, 234, 238, 241–5, 249, 255–6, 261–3, 265, 268, 279–81, 304, 321, 330–1, 340, 348, 351 Grundrisse 91, 102, 214, 234, 261 Theses on Feuerbach xx, 35, 62, 243, 323, 335–8, 349, 351 Matheron, François 28, 38–41, 57, 61–2, 77,

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86, 88, 120–4, 147, 148, 150–1, 162, 193, 242 Mehring, Franz 318 Menger, Carl 232 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 156, 277, 286 Mezzadra, Sandro 223 Milios, John 40, 244 Miller, Jacques-Alain 168, 170, 181–2, 291 Mirowski, Philip 221 Mitterrand, François 118 Močnik, Rastko xx, 57, 258, 303, 307, 318, 321, 351 Montag, Warren xviii, xxi, 40, 48, 50, 56–60, 82, 87, 110, 124, 127, 150–1, 154, 161, 163, 175, 179, 183–4, 220 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Marquis de la Brède xiii, 7, 28, 38, 89–98, 102, 104, 108–9, 115–16, 123 Morfino, Vittorio xvii, 29, 31, 35, 38–9, 41, 61, 120–1, 124–5, 148, 150–1, 163, 222 Mouffe, Chantal 222, 258 Moulier Boutang, Yann 27, 38, 40, 80, 85–7, 120, 124 Mury, Gilbert 108 Nagel, Thomas 58 Nancy, Jean-Luc 167, 172, 181–2, 349 Navarro, Fernanda 4, 116 Negri, Antonio xix, 27, 38, 41, 73, 78, 86, 120–2, 124, 147, 151, 154, 161, 168, 181, 190, 201, 261–2, 267–72, 286 Nietzsche, Friedrich xvi, 9, 12, 252, 259 North, Douglass 230, 243 Özselçuk, Ceren xix, 207, 221, 223 Pascal, Blaise 32, 40, 69, 87, 292–3, 304 Pashukanis, Evgeny 325, 333 Pêcheux, Michel 259, 291, 294, 302–5, 317 Pfaller, Robert 306 Plato 69, 161, 338 Plekhanov, Georgi 255 Plotinus 175 Poe, Edgar Allen 107 Polanyi, Karl 234, 237, 243–4 Pollock, Friedrich 249 Poulantzas, Nicos 193, 200–1, 242, 282, 286 Ramonet, Ignacio 243 Rancière, Jacques xiv, 241–2, 244, 258–9, 286, 314, 321, 334, 351 Raymond, Pierre 24, 276 Read, Jason xix, 150, 151, 223, 261, 272, 350

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Index of Names Resnick, Stephen 221 Ricardo, David 81, 90, 227, 318, 339 Ricoeur, Paul 259, 286 Riha, Rado 86 Robbins, Lionel 229–30, 243 Roberts, Bruce 213, 221 Roth, Gerhard 149 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques xiii, xv, 4, 8–9, 18–19, 62, 64, 81, 115, 123, 137, 253, 258, 262–4, 266–7, 272, 295 Ruccio, David xxi, 28, 38, 221, 223, 242 Samuelson, Paul 221 Sartre, Jean-Paul xxi, 156, 163, 277, 287, 328, 334 Sato, Yoshiyuki 120, 124 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 320 Schmitt, Carl xvii, 69–70, 73–4, 130, 191 Schütz, Alfred 320 Semprun, Jorge 156 Sève, Lucien 109, 245, 287 Smith, Adam 81, 221, 279–80, 286, 339 Sotiris, Panagiotis xvii, 27, 41, 60, 124, 348 Sperber, Dan 320 Spinoza, Baruch de xiii, xv, xvii–xviii, 4, 7–8, 19, 31–2, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 61, 62, 63, 73, 76, 77, 78, 79, 86, 89, 90, 91, 94, 96, 101, 102, 105, 108, 110, 123–4, 137, 150, 153, 154, 155–63, 165, 167–78, 180, 181–3, 253, 261–2, 266–71, 280, 286, 291, 293, 302, 304–6, 324, 326, 328, 330 Ethics xvii, 39, 63, 90, 91, 154–7, 159, 160, 165, 167, 174, 178, 291, 324, 333 Short Treatise on God, Man and his Well– Being 108, 110 Spivak, Gayatri 219, 223 Sprinker, Michael xxi

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Stolze, Ted 170, 182 Suchting, Wallis A. 28, 38, 83, 87, 120, 124, 151 Terray, Emmanuel 73, 120, 122, 124–5, 242 Thales 251 Therborn, Göran 257–8, 260 Thomas, Peter D. xviii, 110, 124, 137, 149, 162, 223 Thompson, Edward P. 286 Tosel, André xvii, 3, 24–5, 28, 38, 41, 120, 122, 124, 139, 149, 167, 178, 181, 183, 200, 260 Tronti, Mario xix, 185–95, 197–203 Trotsky, Leon 142 Turchetto, Maria xxi, 151, 221 Vatter, Miguel 151 Veblen, Thorstein 232, 243 Verret, Michel 110 Vincent, Jean-Marie 286 Vološinov, Valentin 317–19, 321 Weber, Max 189, 196, 202, 230–2, 235, 237, 241, 243–4, 259 Wieser, Friedrich 232, 243 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xiii, 4, 9, 10, 28, 78 Wolf, Dieter 251, 258 Wolf, Frieder Otto xix, 258, 350 Wolff, Richard 221 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 39 Zedong, Mao xiv, 102, 110, 148, 260, 281–2 Zeiss, Carl 249 Žižek, Slavoj xiv, 41, 78, 81–2, 85–7, 259, 293, 304, 306, 342, 348–9 Zupančič, Alenka 86–7

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Index of Concepts absolute, the 13, 78, 171–2, 178 absolute beginning xvii, 33, 43–6, 50–4, 57 absolute knowledge xiv, 78, 138–9, 254 actuality 38, 128, 155, 169, 171, 323 affect 59, 63, 159–62, 176–8, 181, 183, 253, 264, 269–70 affection 63, 177, 181 aleatorism 47–50, 56, 345 aleatory 4–6, 15, 17–18, 22, 28–9, 32, 37, 40, 43, 46–8, 50, 56, 58, 62, 68, 80, 83–4, 160, 178, 263, 265, 271 encounter xvii, 5, 9, 28, 46–8, 50–2, 71, 75, 160, 267 materialism see materialism, aleatory science 96 structuralism xvii, 47–9, 52, 54–6, 58, 60 alliance between revolutionary movements 185, 192, 210, 257, 344 always-already 10, 33, 37, 44–6, 49, 53–4, 56, 80, 100, 146, 293–7, 303, 316, 338 ambivalence xiv, 145, 160, 183, 207, 300, 304, 343 anamorphosis 82, 87 anti-empiricism 34, 229 anti-humanism xiv, 13, 119, 153, 157, 159, 162–3, 202, 283, 293 theoretical xiv, 153, 159, 162, 283, 293 anti-teleology 29–30, 46–9, 116 atomism 34, 36, 62, 81, 106–7, 179 atoms 4–6, 8, 13–14, 31–3, 46, 48–50, 54–6, 60, 69, 75, 78, 81, 91, 178 attribute (Spinoza) 7–8, 78, 91, 147, 156–7, 161, 169–70, 178, 266 Aufhebung 83, 280 autonomia operaia 249 autonomy of politics see politics, autonomy of autonomy of the political see political, autonomy of the base/superstructure 80–1, 129, 133, 138, 174, 186–7, 189, 196 being xvi, 5–6, 9–10, 14–15, 22, 39, 43, 46, 48,

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52–3, 55–5, 64–8, 76–7, 86–7, 94, 154, 159, 166–72, 175–80, 264, 266, 269–70, 278, 325 capital 16, 97, 187–92, 194, 197, 208, 216–18, 232, 239, 241, 249–51, 255–6, 262, 265, 268–9, 271, 318, 325, 339, 341 capitalism, specificity of 16, 30, 34, 188, 217, 228, 231, 237, 242, 262, 327 catharsis 143 Catholicism 252–3, 258 causality 7, 32, 37, 44–5, 63, 81, 87, 93, 166–8, 170–1, 175–8, 180, 213, 290–1, 336, 346, 349, 350, 351 expressive 53, 63–4, 81, 173, 175, 181, 215 historical 7, 32 immanent xviii, 45–6, 49, 53, 63, 166–70, 172, 175, 179, 266, 291 structural 19, 32, 35, 38, 44–6, 48–9, 52, 56, 60, 63, 93, 130, 156, 166, 168, 173–5, 208, 215, 228–9, 237, 261, 265–6, 291 cause 5, 12, 44, 55–6, 67, 71, 79, 130, 154, 160, 175, 177, 183, 215–17, 226, 266, 277, 292 absent 32, 166, 168–70, 213, 291 immanent 44–5, 47–51, 53, 89, 168–70, 175–6 change 9, 22, 28, 67, 91, 104, 222, 237, 265–6, 271, 324, 328, 330–1, 333, 337, 343, 347 historical 94, 96, 103, 210 social 32–3, 36–8, 104, 342 civil society 132–3, 140, 142–3, 150, 190, 194–5, 198, 249, 333 class xix, 16–17, 83, 94–5, 142–4, 186–9, 190–3, 207, 233, 235, 249–50, 257, 259, 265, 280, 317, 345–6 class struggle xvii, 12, 19, 37, 79, 83–5, 89, 94, 98, 104, 106, 115, 120–1, 142, 144, 166, 190–3, 195–6, 198–200, 202, 203, 209–11, 221, 255–6, 282–3, 318, 321, 325, 327–8, 331

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Index of Concepts economic 115–16, 211 in theory 19–21, 30, 75–7, 82, 119, 172, 210, 215, 219–20, 263, 275, 284, 345, 350 primacy of 28–9, 34, 63, 115–18, 186, 198–9 classical political economy xix, 188, 208, 210–13, 218, 225–8, 231–3, 239, 241–2, 279–80 clinamen 5, 107, 179 Cold War 123, 280 combination 16–18, 31, 39, 91–7, 100–2, 104–6, 121, 170, 175, 214, 234, 237 see also conjunction; conjuncture; Verbindung common notions 8, 32, 156, 177, 183 common sense (senso comune) 20, 253 Communism 12, 17, 24, 28, 37–8, 43, 97, 249, 337–8, 340–2, 344, 348 communist movement, international 28, 33, 139, 150, 192–3, 198, 201, 202, 247, 257, 277 comparative analysis 241 complex whole 93, 173–5, 281 complexity 23, 28, 34, 36, 55, 67–8, 141, 167, 174, 194, 229, 236–7, 241, 262, 329 conatus 56, 155, 177, 179 concept 11–12, 56–7, 63, 91, 95, 100, 106, 111, 156, 171, 211, 228–9, 323, 339 conception of the world 20, 143–4, 150 concrete situation 103, 107, 110 concrete time 91 conjunction 5, 15, 17–19, 21, 24, 35, 64, 72, 80, 83, 89, 92, 97, 101–3, 105, 107, 157, 331 see also combination; conjuncture; Verbindung historical 83 conjuncture xiii–xiv, xviii, 7, 13–15, 17–19, 21, 31, 34–7, 50, 52, 58, 84–5, 92, 95, 97–101, 104–7, 115, 119–23, 127–30, 132–4, 143–4, 146–17, 150, 169, 179, 208, 216, 222, 264, 266, 270–1, 283, 345–6 see also combination; conjunction; Verbindung consciousness xx, 9, 138–9, 141, 159–60, 208, 210, 216, 218–19, 250, 265, 277–8, 283, 290–3, 295, 299–302, 305, 307, 318, 323, 325–7, 329–30 false 307, 318 constituent power 267, 269 contemporaneity xviii, 63, 64, 127, 138, 140–4, 150, 210, 218–19 contingency xix, 5–10, 13–14, 18, 23, 32, 37, 39, 62, 68, 72, 79, 93, 95–7, 107, 145–6, 157, 178–9, 208, 212, 214, 216–20, 222, 263–6, 268–71, 276, 326, 330, 336, 349

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of necessity 9, 18 contradiction 20, 27, 29–31, 33, 35–7, 41, 75, 78, 80–2, 92–3, 95, 98, 106, 110, 155, 119–20, 123, 129, 141–2, 144, 148, 151, 166, 171, 173–4, 190, 198, 208–10, 215, 222, 256, 276, 280–4, 286, 290, 294, 324–5, 327–8, 330, 332, 334, 337–9, 345, 347 crisis of Marxism see Marxism, crisis of critique 8–9, 20, 35, 69, 116–17, 119–20, 127, 137, 139, 141, 144–50, 171–2, 178, 187–8, 199, 201, 211, 214, 220, 222, 252, 255–6, 258, 269, 280, 282, 284–5, 289, 291, 293, 299–300, 318, 323–6, 329, 334, 338–41 of domination xix, 256 of existentialism xiv of historicism 218–19 of idealism 11, 19 of the PCF 99, 118–20, 198, 282–3 of political economy xix, 188, 225–6, 228, 238–9, 242, 256, 269, 280, 289, 339, 348 of politics 187–8, 255 of the principle of reason 5, 23 of the subject xx, 323, 326 of theoretical humanisms 211 decision 34, 69–70, 72, 121, 130, 330 deconstruction xv, 8–9, 11–13, 20, 24, 89, 166, 219 democratic philosopher 119 dependence 15–16, 66, 77, 100, 197, 250 despotism of capital 249, 250 determination xviii, 7, 28, 36–7, 39, 46–8, 78, 80–1, 87, 92–13, 95, 117, 121, 166–8, 171, 173–6, 178, 207, 212–15, 220, 222, 227–8, 230, 234, 237, 251, 289, 323, 326, 328–9, 331, 332, 346, 351 in the last instance 6, 28, 80, 87, 92, 94–5, 115, 121, 130, 166, 173, 209, 214–16, 234, 237, 289, 294, 298, 302, 330, 342, 351 determinism xix, 34, 37, 80, 86, 186, 209–10, 214, 216, 281 deviation of the encounter 5–6, 15, 31, 33, 60, 84, 94, 107, 178 deviation, political or theoretical 145, 231, 340, 342 dialectical materialism see materialism, dialectical dialectics 27–8, 34, 36–8, 75–6, 78–9, 85, 116, 178, 252, 255, 336 materialist 28, 75, 78, 255

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dialects 142 dictatorship of the proletariat xv, 137, 193, 199 différance 89 differentiality 169 discontinuity xvii, 4, 47, 49, 71, 80, 107, 166 discourse xx, 20–1, 38, 49–55, 58, 76, 90, 99, 132–4, 155, 157–8, 180, 188, 209, 212, 214–15, 220, 254, 259, 277–80, 297, 299, 302, 303, 308, 310–16, 319, 320, 338, 344 dislocation 141, 156, 167, 173–4, 176 dogmatism 328–9 dominance 31, 92, 95, 121, 232, 281, 330 dominant ideology 20–1, 116, 144, 148, 225, 316–17, 327, 339, 341 domination xix, 6, 9, 11–12, 16, 18, 21, 94, 140, 148, 190, 197, 227, 247–50, 253–7, 258, 264, 316, 324–5, 327, 332 dynamics 31, 94–5, 97–8, 189, 225, 227, 230, 235, 238, 241, 254 ecology 250 economic cycle 189 economic ideology 226, 231 economic theory 215, 221, 228, 231, 234 economic, concept of the 28, 87, 98, 104, 121, 166, 173–4, 186–7, 191, 194, 198–9, 207, 215, 227–9, 234–7, 242, 265, 269 economism xiii–xiv, xix, 34, 129, 197, 199, 208, 210, 277, 339, 340, 349 economy 80–1, 87, 92, 207–15, 217–20, 222, 229–31, 234, 236–8, 241, 264, 266 effect-philosophy 76–7 effectivity 7, 33, 36, 38, 45, 47–9, 53, 59, 60, 92–3, 156, 166–7, 173–4, 176, 216, 235–6, 241, 289–91, 293, 296–7, 325 eidetic form / logical form 320 empirical concept 106, 111 see also fact encounter xv–xviii, 3–15, 17–24, 27–38, 46–52, 54–6, 58, 60, 62, 64–5, 68–72, 75, 78, 82–4, 89–90, 92–7, 100–7, 120, 137, 145–8, 153–5, 159–61, 166, 177–80, 181, 183, 262–9, 338, 341, 344, 347–8 aleatory see aleatory encounter materialism of the see materialism of the encounter taking hold of the 46–50, 52, 55–6, 58, 60, 69–71, 103, 146, 151, 179 process of 48 theory of see theory of the encounter England 30, 254 énoncé / énonciation 315, 318 enunciator 310–11, 313–15, 319

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epistemological break 76, 96, 117, 154, 165, 172, 198, 209, 232, 234, 277, 283, 285, 301, 348 epistemology xvii, 76, 79, 81, 84, 102, 105, 150, 153, 155, 157, 208, 210, 211, 212, 220, 228, 232, 238, 263, 280 essence 16–17, 30, 36, 46, 48, 56, 59, 62, 64, 76, 83, 87, 89, 91, 93, 96, 102–6, 109, 138, 140–1, 143, 156, 167, 169, 171, 175–7, 181, 208, 212–13, 215–16, 220, 228, 233, 236, 256, 263–6, 338, 340, 349, concrete singular 34, 40, 56, 89–90, 101–6, 132, 156, 157, 161, 169, 176–7 formal 91 essential section 138, 140–1, 144 essentialism xiv, 16–17, 28, 30, 33, 46–7, 49, 125, 140, 144, 174, 210 Eurocommunism 137, 145, 180, 190, 192 event 11–12, 15, 17–19, 34, 49, 62, 72, 76–7, 80–1, 83, 86, 130, 143, 166–7, 178–80, 264, 266–7, 269–71, 277–8, 336, 338 exception 4, 14, 39, 95, 107, 129, 166, 178, 264, 270, 329–30 exchange value 238–40 experience 18, 80, 105, 156, 166, 218–19, 269, 299, 305, 326–9, 331–2 exploitation 16, 31, 94, 195–7, 199, 211, 221, 245, 280, 289, 318, 321, 325–7 expression xviii, 3, 20, 34, 76, 92–3, 129–30, 138–40, 143, 167–9, 171, 173, 175–7, 179, 181, 203, 219, 225, 239–40, 269, 290 fabbrica diffusa 249 fact 5–7, 18, 50, 55–6, 59, 104–5 see also empirical concept accomplished xvi, 7, 15–18, 47, 50, 70–2, 146, 265, 336, 339 ontological 50 to be accomplished 7, 17, 18, 70, 72, 265, 336, 338 factory, capitalist 249 false universality 324–7 family 250, 256, 281, 286, 319, 326 fantasy 33, 199, 303 feminist movement 252 fetishism 34, 236, 242, 245, 250–1, 265 finite theory 193–4 forces of production 16, 30, 37, 210, 227, 334 form xvii, 5, 12, 14, 23, 50, 51, 52, 55, 58, 70, 91, 104, 148, 155–6, 170, 250, 256

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Index of Concepts primacy of the encounter over the xvii, 28, 62, 64, 65, 68, 264 fortuna 50–2, 59, 70–2, 74, 95 freedom 4, 13–14, 16, 37, 41, 70, 121, 177, 192, 241, 253, 320, 325 freedom-subject 14 gender 250, 252, 255–6 God 5, 7, 13, 49, 64, 70, 78, 91, 129, 145, 154, 156, 159, 161, 165, 169, 177, 252, 254, 268, 294–5, 299, 301, 304, 319 governmentality 248 Hegelianism xvii, 141, 166 hegemonic apparatus 137, 142 hegemony 19, 22, 34, 37, 116, 137, 142, 147, 186, 202, 251, 271 hetero-integration 186, 200 heterodoxy 186 historic compromise 180, 186, 199, 201 historical linguistics 140, 150 historical materialism see materialism, historical historical necessity 7, 17, 130, 188 historical time 41, 96, 104, 128–9, 138, 142, 149, 218 historicism 17, 19, 28, 33, 116, 137, 139, 141, 145, 159, 208, 210, 218–19, 231, 233–4, 238, 271 historicism, absolute 117, 138–9, 141 historicism, idealistic 231 historiography 40, 96, 104 history xviii, 7–10, 13, 18, 23, 33, 41, 46–9, 54, 58, 61–2, 64, 68, 70–2, 77, 80, 83, 85, 89, 92–105, 107, 115, 119, 120–2, 127–9, 132, 137–9, 141, 143, 147, 150, 155, 158, 160–1, 166, 168, 170, 172, 190, 192, 194, 198, 202, 216–19, 225, 228, 230–2, 234–5, 238, 254, 261–2, 264, 267–8, 270–1, 281, 283, 289–91, 296, 321, 323, 325, 328–9, 333 laws of 15, 36, 83, 330 theory of 9, 13, 85, 103, 121, 139, 218, 225, 228–9, 242, 351 homo œconomicus 59, 81, 212, 221, 226, 229–30, 304 humanism 156, 159, 200, 202, 208, 210–14, 216, 221, 231, 242, 338, 340–1, 348 idealism 4, 6, 9–11, 13, 16, 19–23, 30, 32, 40, 76, 79, 141, 153, 178, 210, 214, 242, 245, 263, 277, 334, 337–8 idealism of freedom 4, 11, 13, 16–17, 19, 31

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identification 45, 83, 101, 140, 160, 217, 248, 253, 291, 298, 303, 307–11, 314–16, 320 ideological anthropology 212, 226, 228, 230–1 ideological, the 77, 143, 253, 331 ideology xvii, 8, 30, 44–5, 57, 137, 153, 156, 159–60, 163, 187–8, 190, 201, 221–2, 231, 233, 242, 249, 256–7, 259, 266, 271, 278–81, 286, 289–92, 294, 303, 305, 307–9, 312, 318–20, 323–5, 332, 337, 340–1, 346, 349, 350 bourgeois 81, 293, 351 dominant 20–1, 116, 118, 148, 225, 316–17, 339, 348 in general 248, 250, 253, 259 materiality of xx, 93, 248, 271, 292 and philosophy 143, 146, 150, 247, 282–3, 287, 331, 347 and politics xx, 266, 276, 283, 347, 351 proletarian 282–3, 287, 331, 347 and science 77, 138, 146, 154–5, 209–11, 220, 254, 263, 276–7, 284–5, 327 theory of xiii, xix–xx, 32, 43, 158–9, 177, 254, 289, 300, 302–4, 307, 320, 324, 326–8 and the unconscious 157–8, 253, 290 Il Manifesto 193–4 imaginary 7–8, 12, 19, 70–2 imaginary materialism see materialism, imaginary imagination 8, 32, 34, 156, 159, 161, 194, 266, 268, 271, 276, 284 immanence 44–5, 76–7, 83–4, 130, 166–7, 169, 171, 175–6, 178, 181, 291, 331 imperialism 32, 222, 330 impossibility 24, 37, 78, 80, 86, 211, 216, 293, 298, 305, 320, 329–31, 333 indeterminate, the 87, 167, 169, 176, 179 individuation 167, 169–71, 176, 178–80 infinity xviii, 5, 7, 78, 81, 87, 141, 161, 177, 319 institutional economics 208, 216, 230 integral state see state, integral intensity 170 interpellation xiv, xviii, xx, 13, 20, 43, 45, 54, 81, 158–9, 163, 248–50, 252–4, 257, 259, 292–6, 299, 302–4, 306–18, 321, 324–7, 332 interval xviii, 84, 127, 170 intervention xviii, 6, 22, 30, 32–6, 50, 57, 77, 105, 117, 129, 144, 157, 207, 212, 332 Jannot’s knife 91 knowledge 7–8, 12–13, 15, 32, 34, 37–9, 41,

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51, 75–8, 80–1, 86, 89, 91, 95, 97, 100, 102–3, 105, 117, 129, 139, 141, 150, 154–7, 175, 188, 208, 211–12, 218, 220, 225, 229, 231, 233, 238, 242, 263, 277–9, 283, 289, 301–2, 309–10, 314, 318–20, 323–24, 326–33 labour 23, 167, 188, 192, 213, 217, 220, 233, 238, 240, 250, 261–2, 264, 268–71, 280, 318, 325 abstract 218, 238–40 concrete 211, 239–40 of the negative 36, 69 lack 158, 168, 170 language 142, 157, 196–7, 278, 297, 308, 310, 317, 319, law 5–8, 14–15, 72, 92–4, 109, 128–30, 132, 168, 195–6, 207, 223, 253–5, 262, 265, 281–2, 301, 321, 325, 337–8, 341, 351 law of value 208, 213, 216, 238 lexical meaning / utterer’s meaning 309, 311 locutor 314, 316, 320–1 manifesto 53–4, 60, 84, 121–2, 124 Marxism xiii, xv–xvi, 13, 28, 87, 89–90, 103, 110, 115, 127, 138–9, 148–9, 156, 162, 165, 170, 173–4, 193–4, 214, 218, 232, 234–5, 253, 275, 277–80, 282, 284, 337, 340, 348 classical 28, 213 crisis of xiv, xix, 27, 29, 137, 186, 192–4, 198, 200, 335, 343 -Humanism 117, 150, 338, 340 imaginary 276 Western 138, 277 Marxist philosophy 76, 100, 116, 120, 138–9, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 166, 262, 270, 276, 345–7 Marxist theory xiii, 8, 38, 83, 99, 105, 115, 116, 118–19, 121, 123, 138, 185–90, 193–4, 196, 198, 221, 256, 286, 300, 329, 340, 349–50 Marxist-Leninist philosophy 251, 283, 287 masses xviii, xix, 20, 24, 54, 116, 118–20, 122, 195, 197–9, 202, 323, 329, 334, 342, 344–8 materialism xv, xvii, 4, 6, 9, 16, 22–3, 27–8, 32, 34–5, 39, 46, 60, 62, 79, 106, 116, 120, 141, 146, 155, 159, 172, 178, 210, 220, 235, 262, 293, 336–7, 339–40, 348–50 aleatory xv, xvi–xvii, 3, 6, 8–12, 15–17, 19–24, 27–9, 31, 46–9, 55, 57, 58, 62, 65, 75, 79–80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 95,

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106, 120–2, 145, 151, 166, 263–4, 266–7, 271, 302, 335–6 dialectical 6, 86, 120–1, 138–9, 335–6, 340 of the encounter xv, xvii, 3–4, 6, 9–13, 19, 23, 27, 29, 61–2, 64, 68, 71, 75, 78–9, 120, 146–7, 161, 166, 178–81 historical 9, 27, 35–6, 38, 75, 83, 100, 105, 138–9, 157–8, 188, 207, 233–4, 237, 255 of the imaginary 289, 292–3 Marxist 6, 19 new 264, 335–42, 345–6, 348 meaning 5, 6, 10, 12, 25, 53, 56–7, 65, 91, 97, 104, 132, 142–3, 146, 159–60, 209, 219–20, 232, 238–9, 302, 308–11, 319–20, 342 means of production 16, 18, 39, 217, 223, 227–9, 232, 234–5, 256, 262, 325 metaphysics 4, 9–10, 17, 22, 30, 39, 62, 141, 167, 263–4, 268–70, 290, 299 methodological individualism 233 migration 142 mode (Spinoza) 169, 176 mode of production xiii, xix–xx, 16–19, 23, 30, 65, 68–9, 96–8, 101, 103–5, 144, 157, 166, 168, 170, 199, 208, 214, 216–19, 226–31, 233–42, 247, 256, 262, 265, 269, 278, 283, 318, 321, 339–40, 349 model xiv, xviii, 4–8, 63, 65, 70, 72, 76, 80–1, 87, 92–3, 107, 131–2, 138–40, 166, 169, 171–3, 175–9, 187, 214, 228, 233, 235, 238, 252–3, 279–80, 293, 299, 302, 340, 346, 351 modern Prince 72, 74, 129 money-form 217, 239–40, 256 mystification 251, 327 nation 50, 54, 59, 69, 92–3, 109, 142, 316 national state 43, 50, 54, 59, 68–9 necessity xv, xix, 4, 6–7, 9, 14, 17–18, 20, 37, 39, 41, 46–7, 70, 72, 78–9, 93–7, 99, 107, 121, 129, 145–6, 157, 216, 218–19, 222, 263–71, 289, 293, 296, 300, 307, 330, 332 negativity 78, 168, 171, 178 neoclassical economics 221, 229, 232–3 new Prince 7, 18, 50, 52, 129 new principality 50–2 new social movements 250 non-contemporaneity xviii, 140–2, 150, 218 non-philosophy xviii, 147–8 nothingness 5, 9, 14, 33, 69, 82, 84–5, 168–9, 291

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Index of Concepts novelty 33, 46, 49, 51, 53, 58, 90, 95, 97, 107, 147, 158, 215, 328, 330–2, 336 object of knowledge, real object 34, 76, 78–9, 85, 106, 139, 146, 156–7, 160, 170, 210, 212, 228, 239, 280, 331 objet a 79, 82 occasion xviii, 71, 120, 282 ontology xvii, 9, 12, 27, 31–2, 76–8, 84, 86, 161, 169, 171, 175, 177–9, 208, 210, 262–4, 266–70 order 5, 8, 10, 12–13, 15, 20–2, 27–8, 32, 62, 67–9, 104, 129, 131, 133, 142, 157, 159, 230, 233, 245, 259, 265–8, 270, 278–9, 294–303, 305, 321, 323, 326–8, 332 organisation xiii–xiv, xviii, 5, 34, 66, 86, 118, 131, 133, 140–1, 143, 148, 180, 190–2, 199, 203, 225, 229–30, 234–5, 238–9, 241–2, 251, 348 origin 6, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 23–4, 31, 33, 40, 50, 57, 62, 69–70, 77, 82, 94, 122, 134, 168, 172, 208, 210–11, 219, 226, 230, 239, 264–5, 294–5, 300, 305, 319, 329, 334, 349 overdetermination xvii, 35, 63, 75, 78–82, 85, 93, 95, 97–8, 129, 140, 144–5, 158, 173–4, 184, 207–8, 210, 215–16, 219, 222, 237, 317, 346 parallax object 75, 78–85 parallax view 75, 78–9, 335, 339, 349 PCF (French Communist Party) xiv, 99, 117–20, 137, 139, 162, 165, 180, 185, 192–3, 198–200, 254, 275, 282–3, 285, 321 PCI (Italian Communist Party) 139, 185–6, 200 performative utterances 252 person [la persona] 141 perspective 21, 49, 51–2, 55–7, 75, 78–9, 136, 148, 259, 291, 308, 336 philosophical form 11, 148, 158, 255 philosophy xiii–xviii, xix–xx, 3–5, 7–12, 14–16, 18–24, 27–30, 32–3, 36–40, 50, 56–7, 59, 62, 67, 69–72, 75–9, 82–6, 89–90, 99–100, 105–7, 115–23, 127–8, 137–41, 143–51, 153–5, 157–62, 165–6, 172, 175–6, 180, 198, 209–10, 214, 220, 222, 249–53, 255, 257, 261–71, 275–8, 283–4, 286, 289, 292–4, 296, 299–303, 315, 323, 331, 336–9, 341–51 academic 117, 252 of history xix, 4, 9, 16, 22–3, 33, 69, 76, 83–4, 89, 140, 147, 155, 172, 263, 265, 276, 301–2, 342

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idealist 4, 6, 9, 30 materialist xviii, 19, 24, 30, 32–3, 39, 57, 59, 75–7, 79, 82–3, 85–6, 120, 214, 261–2, 269–71, 343 spontaneous 250–1 philosophy of praxis 116–19, 138–9, 144, 148–9, 159, 165, 167, 198 pluralism 92, 108, 144 political cycle 189, 197 political practice xiii, 22, 30, 34, 36, 51, 53–4, 83–5, 99, 101, 104–5, 120–2, 140, 185, 210, 220, 223, 247, 257, 279, 283, 327–9, 332, 341–2, 345, 348, 351 political society 140, 142–3 political, the xv, 70, 166, 186–7, 189–94, 197–9, 201–2, 207–8, 267, 269, 338, 341, 344, 346 political, autonomy of the 185–6, 189–93, 197, 199, 201, 202 politicism 150, 192, 199, 202, 345 politics xv, xviii, xix–xxi, 3, 13, 19, 22, 28–9, 33–4, 36, 38, 68, 70–2, 75–7, 79, 81–7, 95, 98, 99, 104–5, 115–17, 122–3, 130, 133, 137, 139–40, 144–5, 147, 150, 153, 157–8, 161–2, 165–6, 180, 185–94, 197–200, 207, 220, 226, 234–6, 251, 255–7, 263–70, 275–6, 281–2, 313, 324, 327–32, 336, 338, 341–8, 350–1 autonomy of 92, 137, 185–6, 189–93, 197, 199, 201, 202 positivity 178, 211 post-Marxism xiv–xv, xix–xxi, 28–9, 151, 215, 335 post-structuralism xv post-workerism xv potentiality 17, 27, 169, 176–7, 179, 182 practice xiv, xvii–xviii, 7, 11–13, 15, 19–22, 24, 28–30, 33–9, 41, 43, 45, 51, 57–8, 76–7, 82, 85, 92, 95–101, 105, 116–23, 127, 129, 140–1, 143, 145, 147–8, 150–1, 154–6, 159, 187, 192, 198, 207, 209–12, 215, 217, 220, 222–3, 235–6, 247, 251, 254–7, 259–60, 263–4, 266–70, 279, 281, 290, 292–3, 307–9, 318–19, 324–9, 331–3, 336, 338–49 praxis 6, 13, 35, 71, 76–7, 99, 165, 167, 180, 189, 337, 341, 349 prepredicative self–evidence 320 primacy of absence over presence 12, 14 of class struggle see class struggle, primacy of of the encounter xvii, 63–5, 68, 99

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of of of of

genesis 15 the masses 197–8 the political forces 198–9 politics/practice xv, xx, 100, 150, 165, 185–6, 197–9, 273, 324, 341–3, 345 of reproduction 17 of the relation over its elements 36, 62 of relations of production 16, 31, 34, 63–4, 186, 199, 266 of the structure 15 primitive accumulation xix, 18, 97, 217, 261–2, 265–8, 270–1, 341 principle of reason 5–6, 9–12, 14–15, 19, 21, 23 principle of sufficient reason 167, 178, 183 prise de position 83 problematic xvi, xiv, 10, 20, 29, 70, 80, 85, 96, 116–17, 122–3, 127, 132, 137–8, 156, 159, 208, 210–12, 218, 225–6, 233–4, 249–50, 259–60, 276, 292, 294, 301–2, 306–7 process 6–7, 9, 13, 23, 33, 36, 50, 55, 68, 76, 78–9, 96, 102, 107, 131, 140–1, 154, 156–61, 171–4, 177–9, 195, 209, 217, 227, 229, 235, 256, 259, 268–71, 284, 290, 297, 304, 306, 308–9, 314, 316–19, 325, 329, 333, 337, 346–7 process of knowledge 37–8, 89, 302, 331 process without a subject or goal 13, 158, 172–3, 177 productive forces 34, 192, 199, 227, 232, 281–3, 318, 339–41 psychoanalysis xx, 23, 38, 87, 157–9, 253, 259, 280, 291, 296–7, 299, 301, 350 queer movement 252 quilting 76, 82, 86, 303 race 133–4, 141, 343 racism 134, 250, 255 real object 34, 76, 78–9, 85, 106, 139, 146, 154, 156–7, 160, 170, 210, 212, 228, 280 recognition / misrecognition 11, 20–1, 23, 35–7, 39, 44, 161, 174, 211, 254, 295–6, 298, 300, 304, 307–8, 318, 326 reflexivity 172, 174, 299, 328–33 regulated society 143, 150 relations xvii, 8, 10–12, 18, 22, 28–31, 35–6, 38, 40–1, 44–6, 48, 51–4, 58, 63–4, 66–7, 76, 81, 86, 95, 97–100, 103–5, 116, 128, 128, 131–2, 138, 148, 150, 166, 168, 173, 175, 177, 179, 182, 187, 189, 196–7,

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199–200, 213, 221, 227, 231, 237, 240–1, 250, 256, 265, 268, 289, 292, 327, 351 of force 23, 129–132, 134 of production xix–xx, 16, 31, 34, 41, 45, 168–9, 173–4, 186, 191–2, 196–7, 199, 208–11, 227–8, 232, 235, 241, 247, 252, 256, 259, 281–2, 307, 316, 325, 327, 334, 339, 351 reproduction xviii, xix–xx, 5, 16–18, 30–3, 35, 38, 41, 45, 47, 104, 159, 168, 173, 186, 194, 196–7, 199, 205, 208, 213–14, 216–18, 238, 247–52, 255–6, 258–9, 265–6, 271, 281–2, 284, 286, 305, 307, 316–18, 324–5, 336, 340–1, 350 primary/secondary 248, 250–2 social 31, 41, 199, 256, 271, 316, 341 resistance 21–2, 27, 86, 120, 128–9, 131, 249, 255, 309 resource allocation 232 retroaction 39, 47, 49, 53, 56 return to Marx xv–xvi, xx, 298, 336, 340 revolution 9, 40, 80, 83–7, 91, 93, 95, 98–9, 129, 140, 142, 147, 154, 167, 183, 188, 230, 250, 252, 255, 257, 267, 271, 283, 290, 334, 336, 342, 344, 347, 350–1 American 267 French 9, 267 Russian 95, 98–9, 140, 142, 267 social 20, 38, 104 theoretical 40, 91, 93, 147, 154, 183, 230, 350 RSI (Real, Symbolic, Imaginary) 81, 253, 300–2 rupture xvi, xvii, xx, 5, 19, 27, 33, 38, 49, 76, 78, 80, 129, 138, 143, 153–4, 271, 276–8, 285, 291, 304, 331, 333–6, 340–1, 344–5, 347–8 S1 / S2 309, 314–15 science xx, 12, 15, 27–8, 30, 32, 38, 75–7, 79–80, 82–6, 90, 96–7, 99–106, 115, 118–19, 122, 138–9, 141, 146–7, 154–7, 159–60, 166, 175, 188–9, 207, 209–11, 213–14, 220–1, 225–6, 229, 232–3, 235, 238–9, 251, 254–5, 257, 263, 268, 276–80, 283–5, 296, 301–2, 305, 317, 323, 326–8, 330–1, 336, 338–40, 343, 345–7, 350–1 scientific ideology 328, 331 self-criticism 39, 76, 99, 115–22, 155, 182, 197, 209–10, 215, 276, 286, 329, 343 semi-theoreticism 115 signifier 158–9, 222, 294, 297, 309–14, 317, 320–1

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Index of Concepts singularity xvii, 15, 34–5, 46, 49, 51, 55, 93–5, 102, 105, 157, 159, 177, 275, 329–31 situation 10, 33, 87, 95–6, 99, 121, 131, 134, 158, 160, 180, 226, 231, 238, 241, 255, 263, 267, 281, 309, 313–15, 328–34, 339, 351 social articulation 237 social form xx, 31–7, 39, 41, 76, 90, 97, 101–2, 104, 106, 111, 121, 140, 142, 167, 173, 221, 226, 230, 234–5, 239–40, 256, 280, 283, 291, 341 social totality xviii, 32, 41, 92–3, 94, 96, 138, 140, 235, 278 society effect 38, 170, 265, 321 spirit 6, 78, 141, 171–2 spontaneism 328–9 standpoint of reproduction 248 state xiv, xix, xx, 6–9, 14–15, 18, 20, 30–1, 38–9, 43, 47, 50–1, 54, 59, 63–72, 74, 77, 79, 84, 94–5, 99, 101, 109, 117, 121–2, 127–8, 132, 137, 142–8, 150, 153, 156–11, 163, 177, 185–202, 222–3, 247–53, 255, 257, 260, 264, 267, 271, 281–2, 286, 289, 292–3, 296, 303–5, 316, 319, 321, 325–7, 332–3, 338–41, 344, 350 as apparatus 137, 190–1, 193–6, 199, 282, 344 ideological apparatuses of the 222, 232, 249–51, 253, 281, 292, 296 as instrument 194–6 integral 143 as machine xix, 98, 190–1, 194–7, 199, 249, 341 Marxist theory, of the 8, 137, 145, 147–8, 185–6, 188, 190–1, 193–202, 249, 267, 282, 286, 324, 340, 344 structuralism 27, 35, 44, 58, 60, 96, 127, 155, 157, 159, 169–70, 182, 210, 234, 261 structure xiv, 7, 13, 15–18, 20–1, 31, 35, 37, 39, 41, 44–50, 53–6, 58–9, 63, 65, 70, 81–2, 84, 86, 91, 94, 96–8, 101–7, 121, 128, 130, 134, 138, 144–6, 150, 156–9, 162, 167–70, 173–4, 179, 194, 196, 212, 214–16, 218, 221, 226–30, 233–42, 249, 251–3, 265–9, 271, 281–2, 289, 291, 295–6, 298, 301, 304–5, 309, 316, 319, 327, 330, 351 actualization of the 55, 170 causality of 47 effect of 44–5, 47–9, 229, 233 element of 45, 54, 103 and superstructure 236

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structured whole 44, 166, 171, 174 subject xiv, xviii, xx, 6–9, 12–13, 15–16, 20–1, 24, 27–8, 31, 40, 43–7, 49, 50, 53–4, 57–8, 60, 63, 69–72, 78–9, 81, 84–5, 90, 118–19, 128, 140–1, 151, 153, 155–62, 165, 167–8, 170–3, 177–8, 202, 207–13, 216, 218, 220, 226–9, 235, 237, 249–50, 252–3, 255, 257, 259, 265, 271, 278, 283, 291–305, 307–10, 314–16, 318–21, 323–9, 332, 339, 341, 343, 350 barred 81 -effect 80, 158, 207, 291, 306 -function 7, 21, 158 theory of the see theory of the subject subjection xiv, 11, 19, 128, 132, 159, 217, 251, 253, 259, 271, 292, 294–5, 297–301, 326 subjectivation 220, 253–5, 257, 259, 292–8, 300, 303, 307, 309, 314–15, 317, 321 process 292, 294–6, 300, 303 subjectivisation 158, 172, 293, 302, 304 subjectivity xviii, 5, 27, 31, 46, 53, 60, 79, 81, 151, 153, 158, 160–1, 207–8, 217–20, 223, 228, 254, 259–61, 265, 271, 277, 292–3, 295, 297–302, 306, 310, 324, 327–9, 331–3 substance 7, 12, 32–3, 37, 41, 56, 63–4, 73, 78–9, 110, 154, 156–7, 169–70, 176–7, 181, 213, 239 (Spinoza) 7, 37, 78–9, 156–7, 169–70, 176–7, 181 superstructure 80–1, 129, 133, 138, 174, 186–7, 189, 196, 214, 235–6, 269, 281–2, 289, 291, 348, 350–1 surplus-value 30, 90, 173, 210–13, 227–8, 237, 241, 245, 280, 286, 318 symbolic, the 81–2, 253–4, 259, 294–300, 302–3, 317 symptomatic reading 85, 98, 109, 166, 304 take [prise] xv, 15, 19, 75, 145, 178 tautology 80–1 techné 328 technocratism 328–9 teleology xiv–xv, 4, 9, 16–18, 20, 28, 30–3, 47–9, 64, 69, 80, 82, 97, 145, 172, 178, 267, 270, 328–9, 339–40 tenant-lieu 307 theology 10, 12–13, 71–2, 141 theoretical dispositive 49 theoretical object 34, 76, 79, 156–7, 227–8, 231, 238–9, 296 theoretical practice xiv, 30, 57, 76, 96, 99–101, 105, 119, 121, 150, 209, 341–2

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theoreticism 37, 76, 101, 103, 115, 117–18, 123, 157, 281, 328, 331, 345 theory xii, xix, 4–5, 8–9, 13, 16, 29–30, 32–3, 35, 38, 40–1, 43, 49–53, 55, 60, 64–5, 67–8, 70–1, 75–7, 79–80, 86–7, 115, 121–4, 128–31, 133–4, 137–9, 145, 148, 150, 155, 159–60, 166, 169, 172, 176–7, 213, 215–18, 220–1, 225–6, 228–9, 231, 237–40, 248, 250, 252–4, 263, 265, 275–6, 280, 285–7, 295–301, 304–5, 307–10, 317–21, 326, 329, 331–3, 338, 340, 346, 349–51 class struggle in 119, 145, 172, 209, 211, 220–1, 263, 275, 284, 345 detour of xiii, 3 of the encounter xvii, 31, 89–90, 95–7, 101–7 of fetishism 242, 245, 250–1 general 96, 99, 105–7, 157–8, 257, 259, 284, 287, 289, 326 of history see history, theory of of interpellation xx, 44, 163, 293–4, 303–4 of knowledge 39, 161, 232, 289, 302, 306, 324, 327 of the mode of production 17, 19, 23 and practice 11, 34, 82–3, 85, 92, 99–101, 105, 116–18, 127, 140, 165, 328, 336, 339, 341–3, 345, 347–8 regional 7, 105–6, 157, 228–9, 236, 316 of the social whole xv of the subject xx, 141, 157 of theoretical practice 29, 76, 82, 99–100, 117, 123, 209, 331, 345 of translatability xviii, 140 of the unconscious 158, 289, 291, 303 thesis 17, 80, 84, 171, 276 time 63–4, 67, 96–8, 101, 104, 127, 128, 129, 139, 143–4, 146, 170, 194, 210, 218, 275 timelessness 290–1 topography 89, 92–3, 96, 101, 104, 155–6, 215–16, 281, 289, 299, 305, 337, 346 topology xviii, 76, 166, 174 topos 84, 310, 320 torsion xvi, 77, 86, 166, 177, 180 totality 7, 8, 14, 35, 39, 44, 63–4, 73, 79, 81,

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86, 92, 97, 121, 127, 141, 161, 173, 181, 215–16, 229, 237, 241, 283, 287, 326–7, 331, 349, 351 transcendence 167, 175 transhistoricity of ideology 254, 257 translatability xviii, 140, 149 translation 101, 130, 137, 140, 143, 147, 165, 342, 346 unconscious, the xviii, 157–8, 253, 277, 283, 289–91, 295–303, 305 underdetermination xiv, 127, 222 univocity 176 use-value 212, 227, 229, 232, 241 utility 232 value 173, 208, 211–13, 216, 221, 226, 229, 231, 238–40, 280, 318 value-form 34, 40, 174, 213, 221, 238–1, 340 Verbindung 31, 39, 90–2, 101–2, 104, 234 see also combination; conjunction; conjuncture Verwandelte Formen (transformed forms) 318, 346–7 virtù 6, 15, 50–1, 59, 69–72, 74, 263–4, 266–7, 269 virtuality 169 void xvii, 4–9, 12–15, 22, 29, 32–3, 39–40, 46–8, 50, 52, 55–7, 69–71, 75, 78–87, 106, 130, 157, 162, 167–70, 179, 215, 219–20, 332 war 9, 127, 131–4, 250, 297, 303 of manoeuvre 140 of position 140 withdrawal 179 world xv, 3, 5, 6, 8–15, 17–18, 20, 24, 31, 39, 55, 63, 68, 72, 76, 89, 125, 138, 143–4, 154, 156, 161, 172, 175, 212, 230, 263–4, 266–70, 276–80, 284, 290, 293–4, 298, 326, 344 of commodities 239–40, 250 zero-institution 316–17, 321

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