MOSCOW CONFERENCE – 24th May 2019

Thinking the fait à accomplir. Althusser's Contribution to

Current Debates on Materialism

1. Thinking the fait à accomplir, or, in English, the “deed to be accomplished” becomes for

Althusser, at a certain moment of his philosophical career, the “task of philosophy”, or, to be more

precise, the task of materialist philosophy – at least, this is what I will try to argue today. So, in this

paper I am going to touch upon a theme that is central to Marxism, and that returns to haunt

Marxism at almost every moment of his history – the question of philosophy, its status, its viability,

even its overcoming, or abolition. Obviously, this is the problem that is posed by Marx’s 11th thesis

on Feuerbach, for which “philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is

to change it.” I will not go into a detailed discussion of the thesis itself, or into the history of the

different interpretations that Marxists have proposed – clearly, this would exceed the scope of the

present paper; rather, I will look at the way in which Louis Althusser grappled with this question, so

as to investigate how the relationship between the two poles of Marx’s thesis, interpretation and

change, becomes for him the Kampfplatz in which the battle for a materialist philosophy is to be

fought out.

Now, one of the problems that concern me in my research is the way in which Althusser, in

his search for a materialist philosophy proposed a series of notions that later on have been taken up

by many, such as “void”, “contingency”, “event” – notions that displaced a certain understanding of

materialism but at the same time, for Althusser, entailed, a new way of doing philosophy which, I

think, (in althusseriana scholarship and beyond) has not been fully appreciated in its potential

implications. This is why I will not talk about what is today called “aleatory materialism”, i.e.

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Althusser’s late philosophy, which mobilizes precisely such notions as “void”, “contingency”, or

“clinamen” as a general philosophy for Marxism (most notably, “The underground current of the

materialism of the encounter, dated 1982), as an “assiette” for a new materialism. Instead, after

sketching briefly Althusser’s shifting definitions of philosophy in the sixties, I will pause to

consider a different definition of materialist philosophy – that I will call “philosophy of the deed to

be accomplished” – that can be found in, or extracted from, Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli

in the seventies – a definition which is distinct from other, more famous definitions of Marxist

philosophy or materialist philosophy provided by Althusser; and I will end by considering how such

a definition paves the way for a reconsideration of Althusser’s famous notion of interpellation –

which is perhaps one of the most abiding (but also controversial) legacies of Althusser – suggesting

that the main goal of a materialist philosophy is for Althusser to put forth what I will call a

“political interpellation”, which in my view is to be understood as a material effect produced by

a philosophy of the deed to be accomplished. Obviously, as I hope will be clear, what is at stake

here is the complex relationship, on which Althusser worked all his life, between knowledge (in the

double form of science and philosophy), politics and ideology, a “knot” that underwent many

displacements and that Althusser sought to clarify at virtually all steps of his philosophical

production.

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 From The Theory of Theoretical Practice to Class struggle

It is common practice to distinguish between different phases of Althusser’s thought

following his redefinitions of philosophy. In the first moment of his intervention (For Marx,

Reading Capital, first half of the sixties), marked by the struggle against empiricism and humanism,

dialectical materialism was defined – under the aegis of Spinoza - as “Theory of theoretical

practice”; Marxist philosophy, thus redefined, was concerned with establishing the concepts apt to

think of history and with effecting a break with ideology. The object of knowledge was to be

radically distinguished from the real object (as in Spinoza), and the object of the science of history,

the “conjuncture”, was to be known via the deployment of concepts such as overdetermination,

displacement and condensation, structural causality. At this level, Althusser’s materialism was

concerned with two “enemies”, so to speak. The first was the empiricist and idealist theory of

knowledge, for which the act of knowing was premised upon a subject-object relation, with

knowledge being produced via the extraction of an “essence” from the object itself. By insisting that

knowledge was a process of transformation of what he called “generalities”, Althusser

rematerializes and socializes the production of knowledge. On the other hand, “structural causality”

and overdertermination, as well as its avatars, radically de-centred the notion of social whole, thus

subtracting (at least, in Althusser’s intentions) Marxism from the pernicious influence of Hegel’s

idealism. This second aspect of Althusser’s intervention is marked by the idea that materialism –

and, a fortiori – a materialist ontology is characterized by an irreducible plurality, which is

represented in the Marxist topography as distinct levels of the social edifice, as well as by the

rejection of the notion of “origin” (for Althusser, central to Hegel’s dialectics) , in which resonates

the old philosophical notion of arché. This aspect is perhaps too easily overlooked in Althusserian

scholarship, where there is a strong tendency to focus on the epistemological twist imparted by

Althusser to “dialectical materialism”, or Marxist philosophy as he calls it. However, it is crucial to

notice that philosophy, at this stage, has also the fundamental task of clarifying the ontology on

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which a Marxist science (historical materialism) can function. This can be seen both in

Contradiction and overdetermination and in On Materialist Dialectics, and more precisely in

Althusser’s critique of the notion of “origin” in Hegel:

The materialist ontology implied by Althusser’s philosophy at this stage is thus ‘without origin nor

end’. But this does not mean that, as it is usually assumed, that it is impossible, within the

conceptual framework of this ontology, to think of any rupture. It is, on the contrary, only on this

bases that it becomes possible to free the conceptual space which only allows to conceptualise the

very possibility of a historical break. In this sense, the ontological break with Hegel is the

precondition to think politics, as Althusser stresses in Reading Capital where he writes that (for a

more detailed analysis of this, see my article in RP).

Immediately after the publication of the works in which this definition was first put forth,

however, Althusser opened the phase of self-criticism. The self-criticism had not to do with the

materialist ontology that one finds in the classical works (Lahtinen 2014, p. 116), but with the

relationship between politics and philosophy, which had been overlooked in the first definition. The

problems that Althusser sees in his definition of philosophy are thus summed up by Goshgarian in

his introduction to the collection of Althusser’s writings The Humanist Controversy: “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. This put philosophy […] at a double remove from all

other practices” (Goshgarian 2003, p. xiii-xiv).

In 1968, Althusser publicly proposed a second, “Leninist” definition: philosophy was not

separated from politics; it was, on the contrary, to be understood as “class struggle in theory”, as the

struggle between the idealist and materialist tendencies, which (in fact) reflected different class

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positions. In some notes dating from 1967 which will constitute the basis for all the subsequent

elaborations on this matter (Lenin and Philosophy included), Althusser points out the problem in his

previous works. There, he had unified philosophy and science under the heading of ‘theory’ (see

also Elementi di autocritica), without distinguishing properly between them, and this prevented him

from identifying the organic link between politics and philosophy. This distinction, argues

Althusser, is crucial :

Ce qui distingue fondamentalement une philosophie d’une science, c’est le

rapport organique, intime, intérieur, constitutif, que la philosophie entretient avec
la politique. Une science donne une connaissance purement théorique de son
objet. La philosophie produit un savoir abstrait, systématique, donc théorique,
mais qui présente cette particularité d’etre en meme temp une intervention, en
derniere ressort, de charactere politique (EPP II, p. 314)

It is this intrinsic politicity of philosophy that now moves centre stage in Althusser, albeit in a

‘subterranean’ manner, given that these notes will only be published posthumously. In the published

texts of this period, in fact, Althusser still focuses on the link between science and philosophy,

arguing that it is this relationship (philosophy-science) that is central to philosophy itself (Corso per

scienziati; Lenin and Philosophy). But in these notes, as well as other unpublished texts, Althusser

is clearly preoccupied by the problem of the status of philosophy and its organic link with politics.

For Althusser, such a link is double. On the one hand, he argues, philosophy is not determined only

by sciences, but also by ideologico-political facts:

On the other hand, such a two-fold determination entails that philosophy is essentially practical, that

is, essentially political, in its very structure:

La philosophie est politique parce que elle intervient (dans sa facon de penser la
totalité des choses, le rapport de different pratiques humaines, etc, dans sa
manière de concevoir le monde) directement à l’intérieur de la lutte ideologique
(qui est en dernier resort lutte de classes) EPP II p.315

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Althusser goes as far as to define a general structure of what he calls the philosophy effect.

According to what he argues in these notes, any philosophy, or better, any historically given

philosophical formation, constitutes itself as a ‘closed system’ that naturally arranges itself as a

‘topique’, which allows us to identify three fundamental effects which, taken together, constitute the

‘philosophy-effect’ or the ‘components’ of the philosophical unconscious: 1) Operation of

distinction-discrimination-differentiation; 2) Operation of hierarchisation; 3) Operation of

philosophy’s self-positioning in the space of the topic.39 It is important to remark that this structure

characterises not just one philosophy in particular, but philosophy as such: ‘what are called

philosophies are intelligible on the basis of the structure of these formations of the philosophical

unconscious’40. Now, if we take into consideration the idea – proposed by Althusser in the same

period – of the two tendencies in philosophy, the materialist and the idealist41, the question that

logically follows is: if only one ‘philosophico-political device’ exists, if, in other words, philosophy

is such a device per se, on what basis can we establish the difference between materialism and

idealism, or else between Marxist and pre-Marxist (in a logical sense) philosophy? At this point,

Althusser’s answer is that there is no such basis: the distinction is not possible. As a consequence,

the idea of a Marxist philosophy is abandoned in favour of another conception. Here, in fact,

Althusser proposes a crucial distinction, one that fully takes stock of philosophy as an operation.

Althusser proposes distinguishing two practices of philosophy, the first called ‘philosophical

practice I’ and the second ‘philosophical practice II’. ‘Philosophical practice I’ is nothing other than

the ‘manipulation’ of certain socio-historical content according to the system of agencies described

above, which is put to work without being modified by its use (‘this practice – rumination – leaves

the neurotical structure under which the philosophy-effect is compulsively repeated intact’42); by

contrast, ‘philosophical practice II’ is to be understood as a philosophical ‘cure’, which is made

possible by Marx’s discovery of the science of history (and, crucially, of ideology). ‘Philosophical

Practice II’ is thought of, by Althusser, according to the model of a psychoanalytical cure. It acts

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upon the philosophical formations (hence, we might suppose, not directly upon the socio-historical

content) in order to

Faire bouger the relationship between the levels [instances] that exist in the
relations of organisation [agencement] of the fantasmes constituting the
formations of the philosophical unconscious [...] [in order to] liberate the
objective content that philosophical discourses held under the domination and
organisation of the philosophy-effect43.

It is evident, then, that Althusser here distinguishes

This idea of philosophy will be defended by Althusser until the end of his public career, although

with different inflections. Whereas in Lenin and Philosophy he still insists on the link between

philosophy and sciences, in the 1978 public lecture “The transformation of Philosophy” Althusser is

more concerned with the ideological domain. This reflects his growing concern with the role of

ideology within the overall reproduction of the social structure and the struggle for hegemony, to

which he links the role of philosophy:

In this lecture, Althusser insists – as he had done in Lenin and Philosophy – that Marxists do not

need a philosophy, but a different practice of philosophy (TF, 149): “I filosofi marxisti devono

scoprire nuove forme di intervento filosofico, cioè una nuova pratica della filosofia”. This new

practice of philosophy, argues Althusser, will not have the form of a system, but – consistently with

what he had affirmed earlier, will have the task of “liberating” the social content repressed by

(idealist) philosophy.

For all its anti-Hegelianism, Althusser remains faithful to the Hegelian axiom for which

philosophy ‘comes after’. Of course, there are differences: philosophy is not placed at the

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culmination of a speculative system and it does not paint grey on grey. The opposite is true:

Althusser sees it as the decisive battle for the survival of Marxist science (historical materialism).

Nevertheless, philosophy comes after the foundation of a science (in this case, the science of

history, but Althusser often mentions the foundation of mathematics and physics, or the discovery of

the continent of the unconscious) and its task is one of defence of a certain form of rationality

against the siege of ideology. As Goshgarian put it, what we have here is Althusser’s version of the

Hegelian’s owl. This aspect, as I shall argue later, is capital, as this precisely what Althusser will try

to challenge with his reading of Machiavelli.

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 3. In his writings on Machiavelli during the seventies – writings that he will never publish in

his lifetime – Althusser carries out a series of reflections on the problem of the relationship between

philosophy-theory-politics that, while capitalising on the idea that philosophy is class struggle in

theory, Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli goes significantly beyond such a definition – to the

extent that I am inclined to consider it to be the third definition of materialist philosophy that we

can find in Althusser.

Reading Machiavelli, Althusser suggests that his writings inaugurate an entirely new mode

of thinking. Such a new mode of thinking -- which he refers to – especially in some unpublished

notes – as “philosophy of the deed to be accomplished -- is unique not because it thinks the truth of

politics as opposed the “imagination” of it (this is the standard reading of Machiavelli as a realist:

he thinks the verità effettuale against any idealization of politics etc….), but for different reasons.

The first one has to do that Machiavelli took it upon himself the task of thinking “the conditions of

possibility of the existence of what did not yet exist” as a singular “deed to be accomplished”. To be

more precise, Althusser argues that Machiavelli’s thought unfolds “in the element of the deed to be

accomplished” – in Machiavelli’s text, the unification of Italy out of the political fragmentation of

the time. The reasons for such a unique mode of thinking, which for Althusser belongs only to

Machiavelli, are not to be found (only) in Machiavelli’s genius, but also in his historical situation,

which defines his theoretical solitude:

Machiavelli is alone because he has remained isolated […] no one has thought in his

thought. And no one has done so for reasons pertaining to his thought

L’opposizione netta tra fatto compiuto e fatto da compiere è qui fondamentale. Questa

opposizione è evidentemente diversa dall’idea che la filosofia sia un Kampfplatz di tendenze: qui

Machiavelli opera una rottura con le filosofie del diritto naturale che è più radicale, poiché

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coinvolge l’esigenza di pensare il non-esistente.

What strikes Althusser is that Machiavelli’s theoretical analyses (especially in the Prince)

entail an entirely new position of thought before objectivity. The object of Machiavelli’s thought

is the absence of object itself. The objective exists only in the future, as something that has to e

attained. This displacement of the object into the future as an objective produces, as a contraccolpo,

a different consideration of the present itself. From this perspective, in fact, the historical

conjuncture under consideration is not a simple object, nor “the mere summary of its elements, or

enumeration of diverse circumstances, but their contradictory system which poses the political

problem and designates its historical solution, ipso facto rendering it a political objective, a

practical task”. Therefore, as Gramsci had already pointed out, the historical elements of a specific

conjuncture “are assessed as a relation of force”, a texture of intermingled forces that appear as

such only when traversed by the perspective of the “deed to be accomplished”. In this sense, there is

a veritable dissolution of the object under the pressure of the “objective” (in the sense of an aim, a

goal).

The second reason is even more important. What is crucial for Althusser is that Machiavelli

thinks the “deed to be accomplished” as an absolute novelty, as the appearance of something

completely new – as an unpredictable event that is not already prefigured in the conjuncture or in

the situation.

In Machiavelli’s text, notes Althusser, “the problem of The Prince is [...] the problem of beginning

[commencement]. The question that has forever haunted philosophy, and always will – with what

should one begin? - Machiavelli replies quite non-philosophically, but with theses not lacking in

philosophical resonance: one should begin with the beginning. The beginning is ultimately nothing

[rien]. […] Not nothingness [néant], but the void [vide]” (Althusser 1999, 67-68). So, whilst idealist

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philosophy, as Althusser puts it in a series of notes on philosophy dating from ’67, constantly

attempts to suture or mend the dominant hegemonic texture of the present so as to prevent any

rupture, to forestall any break, a materialist philosophy (thought in the wake of Machiavelli) does

just the opposite: it mobilizes “fragments of theory” in order to think the fait à accomplir as a

rupture, a break in the order of being.

But in what sense does Machiavelli start from the “void”? Well, firstly because he both

asserts the necessity of a Prince and rules out all the existing princes – this prince will have to start

from nothing, but is himself a “void” because his name is unknown; simply, he does not exist.

Secondly, because the “beginning” will be the result of a contingent encounter between this new

prince and a propitious conjuncture. This is why, crucially for Althusser, Machiavelli refrains from

assigning a name to him and to locate geographically the place from which he will start. “Here we

have the crucial point of this theory, where politics appears in person: in the form of a determinate

absence. [...]”.

Now, this refusal is for Althusser, first of all, the recognition of the absolute limits of

thinking. In an unpublished note, Althusser says in fact that “the refusal to close the gap [écart] in

thought is the recognition of the necessary role of concrete and unpredictable invention of history,

the recognition that solely the history of political practice can resolve this “contradiction“, close this

gap” – (here, we clearly recognise a critique of Hegel). But this requirement, which certainly limits

the pretences of theory, recognising the existence of an outside, brings to the fore the positive

contribution of philosophy to the occurrence of a “beginning” (that is, to the transformation of the

world – and this brings us closer to the problem posed by the 11th thesis on Feuerbach). Because if

the gap needs to be left open, none the less it has to be posited, its necessity has to be affirmed and

its form has to be specified (in Machiavelli, the form is the Prince). Thus, the operation that is

proper to a philosophy of the deed to be accomplished is for Althusser not the interpretation of the

world, but the active designation of a void, a non-existent, a determinate absence that

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supplements the existing given (the givenness of the given which Althusser refers to as fait

accompli, accomplished fact), the positing of a new “empty place”, which is necessary in order for

the transformation of the present conjuncture to take place. However, this “void” of which Althusser

is talking about is not a concept of a general theory, of a metaphysics of being (this is then quite

different from Badiou), but is always a specific void, related to a singular conjuncture and to its

materialist analysis (it takes into account the relation of forces and so on). In this sense, a

materialist philosophy of the deed to be accomplished is not interested in a thesis on the nature

of being (its incompleteness, or its ontological potency/power, and so forth – one can think of

Negri’s reading of Machiavelli here), but is concerned with the singular conjuncture and with a

singular analysis of the conjuncture, which opens it up towards a possible “deed to be

accomplished”. Thus, its materialism is not a materialism of matter, but a materialism of the

rupture, insofar as it inscribes itself within a relation of forces and assesses them with a view to a

possible event of beginning.

4. However, such a philosophy is not materialist only because of its own inscription within

the conjuncture and for its positing a void in the form of a supplement. For Althusser, it also has the

effect of breaking the closure on the text upon itself, thus producing material effects. As Althusser

remarked in a recently published text (available in French as Sur L’histoire), Machiavelli’s texts are

similar to some of Marx’s and Freud’s writings in that they designate another “space” that goes

beyond them, into the real world. It is at this point that the “philosophy of the deed to be

accomplished” prepares the groundwork for a reconsideration of the Althusserian theory of

‘interpellation’. For Althusser, in fact, this empty place is meaningful only through its “possible or

requisite subject”, that is, via the operation of interpellation that the positing of an empty place

entails. By positing a “void”, Machiavelli, (I quote)

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 practically, politically, implicates and involves us. He interpellates us from a place
that he summons us to occupy, as potential [possible] “subject” (agents) of a
potential [possible] political practice. This effect of captivation [saisissement] and
interpellation is produced by the shattering of the traditional theoretical text, by
the sudden appearance of the political problem as a problem(Althusser 1999, 32).

Thus, the “philosophy of the deed to be accomplished” is a prescription/designation of a new place

that it invites us to occupy. Now, the use of the concept of interpellation is capital and, at the same

time, problematic. It is clear that here Althusser is not referring to the interpellation of individuals as

subjects in terms of a “reproductive” interpellation emitted by the ideological state apparatuses.

Even less, is he speaking about “subject” in negative terms. On the contrary, this subject is what is

required in order to activate the political practice. This is, it seems to me, an eminently “political

interpellation” in the sense that it has to do with becoming a subject of a possible political

practice. Clearly, the notion of interpellation poses problems here especially because Althusser does

not articulate it with his theory of ideology. But if we bear in mind that for Althusser individuals are

“always-already subjects”, then the occupation of a certain space on the part of the subject

corresponds to the transformation from a subject into another subject, on the part of the same

individual. What is at stake here is the passage from being a certain type of subject, historically

determined by its class provenance and other factors, to another type of subject, i.e. a political

subject defined only by the “task”, by the “deed to be accomplished” (Althusser 1999, 26).

It is precisely this subjective moment of transformation that marks the difference between

the Prince as read by Althusser and the Communist Manifesto, in the sense that, for Althusser, the

latter misses it completely and therefore is not a “philosophy of the deed to be accomplished” in the

Althusserian sense. In Marx and Engels’ text there is no void, but rather the indexing of a presence,

of a subject that is already becoming the subject of history, much like in Negri’s reading of

Machiavelli the multitude is on its way to become a subject (but can’t yet). Marx and Engels’ text

indexes the subject-in-presence and does not open up the conjuncture towards a void to be

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occupied. Whereas for Gramsci the Prince was an utopian manifesto (because it appealed to a

Prince, therefore to someone other than the people), for Althusser it is instead the Communist

Manifesto that is utopian and ideological, due to its suturing of history and politics (in the sense that

the political agent or subject is given).

However, by stressing the moment of “interpellation” as a material effect, I do not intend to

suggest that Althusser is leaning towards subjectivism. The occupation of the empty space is not the

only condition of a “beginning”: the beginning is never only a matter of pure decision: it is an

encounter (by definition contingent) between a propitious conjuncture and a “subject”. In this sense,

the “beginning” of a new state, or of a revolutionary process, requires both subjective and objective

conditions. But as far as history is concerned, the subjective conditions are also “always-already”

part of the objective conditions. If a “group of individuals” decides to occupy the place of a possible

political practice, they can well become an active force in the conjuncture itself; they can participate

in the constitution of a (objective) propitious conjuncture. From this perspective, the “margin” of

objective contingency is actually – or can be – restricted. Yet, if Althusser oscillates between the

subjective act of responding to a political interpellation, at the same time stressing, with

Machiavelli, the “absolute limits beyond which it is not possible to master fortuna” (Althusser

1999, 79), it is perhaps possible to read - in this “gap” between the two sides, not totally thematised

by him - not so much Althusser's failure to relate two points of views present in his reading of

Machiavelli, but more so Althusser's idea of politics. Althusser “repeats” the almost tragic

conception of history which is Machiavelli's, in a sort of tragic revolutionary realism of the

impossible, in which the possibility of “making history” is ever only partially in the hands of (a

certain, specific group of) people. It is in the decalage between the necessity of a new beginning

and the absence of every “guarantee” whatsoever that Althusser, after Machiavelli, places politics,

and the task of a materialist philosophy of the deed to be accomplished.

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  Passage: transformation of the subject from ideological subject to  political subject :

Do I have to give up my determinations? My ideological task? Do I have to be defined by the task?

Well, I see that there must be a gap. I have to say that in Althusser there is atheory of what I call

overinterpellation

 Svenja: she likes the processual implications of the role of philosophy. But uncomfortable

because: why a void? A void ? philosophy remains neutral?  well no! I did not speak of

class position. But philosophy does not remain neutral, because: it uses fragments of theory

and takes a position (think for example about Machiavelli: specify the FORM, the strategy

etc

Why does the subject feel interpellated? Well, it doesn’t  no guarantess

 How much for me the biographical determines the idea of “determinate absence” Surely id

does, after ’68. But Machiavelli was studied already in ’62. Surely the subject becomes a

problem for him now, it’s not the party anymore….?

Althusser’s reflection on the relationship philosophy-politics (and science) has a two-fold aim. First,

Althusser is eager to clarify the active side of philosophy: the ‘interpretation’ of the world is not

harmless; it is not an operation that is detached from the world, but an active operation, i.e. an

intervention within a singular conjuncture. Second, this intervention is political because it is rooted

in the class struggle. Philosophy is political per se: “elle est politique chez elle […] le système des

ses categories n’est pas speculatif : il est par lui-même une intervention”. From this perspective, the

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point is not to oppose a philosophical interpretation of the world to its actual transformation. To do

this would be, for Althusser, to fall prey to a positivist ideology.

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