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ALTHUSSER’S LENIN

WARREN MONTAG
There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every
revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations
of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much
that must appear miraculous.
—V. I. Lenin, “Letters from Afar,” first letter

Althusser’s Lenin, the Lenin he put to work in the field of philosophy, was admittedly an Warren Montag is the Brown Family
assemblage built from bits and pieces of different texts, both philosophical (Materialism Professor of Literature at Occidental
College in Los Angeles. His most
and Empirio-Criticism and the Philosophical Notebooks), and political/practical (above recent books include Althusser and his
all, Lenin’s reflections on the revolutions of February and October 1917). But from such Contemporaries (Duke, 2013) and The
scraps and spare parts machines (or apparatuses) can be built, and Althusser’s Lenin Other Adam Smith (Stanford, 2014).
Montag is also the editor of Décalages,
may be understood as something like a philosophical machine, capable of moving or dis- a journal on Althusser and his circle,
placing things in both theory and practice. The importance of Lenin for Althusser will and the translator of Étienne Balibar’s
come as a surprise to many readers, in part because little attention has been devoted Identity and Difference: John Locke and
the Invention of Consciousness (Verso,
to the place of Lenin in his thought. The relative silence that surrounds such works as 2013).
“Lenin and Philosophy,” or even Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scien-
tists (which elevates—as it imitates—what one writer has called “a veritable mania with
Lenin,” the act of drawing lines of demarcation, to the status of philosophy’s vocation)1
testifies to the generalized illegibility of Althusser’s reading of Lenin.2
Even his extended use of Lenin, specifically the Lenin of the period 1917–21, in “Con-
tradiction and Overdetermination,” has been systematically overlooked, as if the Lenin
cited in Althusser’s analysis of the conjunction of conflicts that made the Russian Rev-
olution not simply possible but necessary was little more than a kind of raw material
for theoretical or philosophical reflection, rather than a compelling example of what
Althusser would later call “the philosophy of the conjuncture” or even “the philosophy
of the encounter.” In fact, the role of Lenin in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” is
often assumed to be that of a stand-in or placeholder for Mao whose “On Contradiction”
Althusser legitimates (at the moment that the Sino-Soviet split had begun to produce
political effects within the French Communist Party) by reading it not only as a continu-
ation of Lenin’s reflections on historical contradiction, but as an attempt to systematize
what in Lenin’s texts had remained in the “practical state.” For many of Althusser’s read-
ers past and present, Lenin, or rather one of the many Lenins “which the conjuncture
had ‘selected’ ”3 and employed for different, even opposing, purposes, always and neces-
sarily served as a temporary representative or emissary who had been delegated to speak
on behalf of other political theoreticians or philosophers, from Machiavelli and Spinoza
to Mao whose theses could only be presented effectively if they were passed off as the
work of someone else, someone of Lenin’s authority. It was as if Lenin, for reasons that
remain to be articulated, could not have been the proper object of Althusser’s reflections.
Further complicating Althusser’s relation to Lenin was his sense that the “official
Marxism” of the Communist movement was not only inadequate to the practical exis-
tence of class struggles but constituted a formidable obstacle to the construction of the

DIACRITICS Volume 43, number 2 (2015) 48–66 ©2015 Cornell University

50 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

theory that would render these struggles intelligible. At the same time, he understood
the difficulty (derived from the nature of its “official” status, which was not reduc-
ible to a purely intellectual consensus) of transforming or displacing it. Convinced of
the futility of a frontal assault or a direct confrontation, Althusser, fascinated by what
he would later call “philosophical strategy,” chose instead to pursue something like a
guerilla war in the realm of theory, that is, a strategy of infiltration and impersonation
that would allow him to gain a position
Althusser found himself having to within its walls from which an effective
attack could be launched. Thus, when
distinguish or, to use the Leninist phrase Althusser described Spinoza’s philosophy
less as a doctrine than as an operation in
that became a kind of Althusserian slogan, which Spinoza impersonates his enemies
in order to gain access to their stronghold
to draw a line or lines of demarcation within and, in this way, turn their own weapons
against them, he simultaneously offered a
Lenin in order to reveal to us, or perhaps retrospective theorization of the way he
himself “did” and had always done philos-
produce, something that did not preexist ophy, although without knowing it.4 The
fact that Lenin, understood as the name of
the intervention that “revealed” it, a Lenin an oeuvre and thus as a discursive entity,
was one of these weapons compelled
beyond Lenin. Althusser to produce a Leninist analysis of
how the Leninist mode of analysis had been taken over and placed in the service of insti-
tutions whose relation to the existing order could only with difficulty be described as
antagonistic. Althusser found himself having to distinguish or, to use the Leninist phrase
that became a kind of Althusserian slogan, to draw a line or lines of demarcation within
Lenin in order to reveal to us, or perhaps produce, something that did not preexist the
intervention that “revealed” it, a Lenin beyond Lenin.
But every strategy carries its own risks: however necessary they may have been,
Althusser’s “detours”—that is, his repeated reliance on strategies of impersonation and
his disguise of the fraud that, along with force, was one of the cardinal virtues of war
according to Hobbes—undoubtedly produced unintended consequences that helped
shape the contradictory way his own work was read. Critics accused him of advancing
Spinoza disguised as, and thus at the expense of, Marx and, at nearly the same moment,
of smuggling Marx (illegitimately) into philosophy by presenting him as Spinoza. More-
over, even commentaries sympathetic to Althusser and his project often resorted to a sort
of typological reading (that he himself in his self-critical moments appeared to endorse)5
that took the form of “in talking about X, he is really talking about Y,” which assumed
that Althusser could not or would not speak directly about Y, insofar as the latter was
understood to be the object of some kind of repression or exclusion. Under such condi-
tions, reading Althusser became above all an operation of translation: X equals Y (and
theories X1 X2 X3 = Y1 Y2 Y3 , etc.). Complicating and perhaps calling into question these
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 51

assumptions was the problem of the necessary detour, that is, the detour imposed not by
tactical imperatives, but by the impossibility of grasping certain philosophers except in
mediated form, through a representative, often a theoretical ancestor or a descendant in
whom certain common traits were more visible. In some cases, notably that of Machia-
velli, it seemed impossible to arrive at the face behind the mask, as if to read him was to
discover behind every mask yet another mask. Thus, to understand Machiavelli was to
understand how his meaning in important ways eludes our understanding and proves
insaisissable, or, literally, “ungraspable.”6 It is never finally clear whether the detour rep-
resents a strategic calculation on Althusser’s part or an attempt to gain access to texts
that often seemed like impregnable fortresses capable of repelling every assault.
If there is any truth to what we might call the Straussian reading of Althusser, no bet-
ter example could be found than Althusser’s Lenin. His correspondence clearly shows
the discrepancy between his private and public statements on Lenin and thus appears to
support the idea that he sought, especially in the crucial years 1962–63—from “Contra-
diction and Overdetermination” to “On the Materialist Dialectic”—to use Lenin strategi-
cally, that is, to ventriloquize him. In this way, he hoped to propose specific notions and
concepts whose novelty would render them unacceptable to his audience unless they
could be attributed to an authority of Lenin’s stature, as if the more unprecedented and
perhaps subversive (but of what?) the ideas Althusser advanced, the greater the need
to attribute them to a foundational figure. But it is crucial to keep in mind that this is
no more than what Althusser intended to do, or at least said he intended to do, and not
necessarily what he did. If indeed the discussion of Lenin was intended to be merely a
pretext, preceding, and for a time obscuring, the discussion that it served to facilitate,
I would argue that, in this case at least, the pretext deviates from the purpose it was
intended to serve to become as important as what it conceals. If, as he himself avowed
and others insisted, Althusser’s texts are frequently, if not obsessively, marked by what
he later called the logic of lieu-tenance,7 that is, a logic of delegation or the stand-in
(Lenin for Mao or Machiavelli, Marx for Spinoza, or the reverse), this logic, by virtue of
its very operation, breaks down at certain precise points and gives way to usurpation, to
a confusion of the impersonator and the impersonated, of agent and author. Thus, to fol-
low Althusser’s constant strategic and tactical ruses and evasions, his use of philosophi-
cal fraud and disguise, is to enter a circle in which every stand-in stands in for another
stand-in, constituting a chain of substitutions without origin or end. Can it be that for a
complex set of philosophical and political reasons, Lenin becomes intelligible only in the
guise of Lenin pretending not to be himself?
On December 22, 1962, and therefore in the interval of nearly a year that separated
the composition of “Contradiction and Overdetermination” from that of “On the Materi-
alist Dialectic,” Althusser wrote to his correspondent, Franca Madonia, that he had been
rereading Lenin in order to prepare his response to the critics of “Contradiction and
Overdetermination”: “I am reading (or rereading) Lenin’s theoretical texts on philoso-
phy. God, it’s weak. I have once again confirmed that Lenin, the incomparable political
clinician, the incomparable practical-theoretician (in the sense of reflection on concrete
52 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

situations, reflections on concrete historical problems) is a weak theoretician as soon as

he rises beyond a certain level of abstraction.”8 What makes Lenin “weak” here is the fact
that, according to Althusser, he remains a “practical-theoretician” (théoricien-pratique)
who, no matter how “incomparable” his “concrete analyses,” cannot “rise beyond” or
above the practical state to the degree of abstraction necessary to theory. A few sen-
tences later, Althusser adds that when Lenin is doing theory or thinks he’s doing theory,
“he does no more than define and state practical concepts, that is, concepts with which
one wages hand-to-hand combat, tactical concepts for immediate defense, for ‘close
combat’ as one says . . . while real theory assumes something other than these tactical
concepts, that is, perspectives that are properly both theoretical and ‘strategic.’ ”9
Thus, for Althusser, writing in 1962, Lenin engaged in practice, not theoretical prac-
tice, but its opposite, practical theory, that is, practice disguised as theory or, worse,
practice imbued with the belief that it is theory when it is merely practice. In doing so,
according to Althusser, he sacrificed what is properly theoretical to the accomplishment
of immediate, tactical, objectives: the abstraction required to move “beyond,” and thus
both outside of and above, the practical realm in order precisely to supply the theory
without which practice is unintelligible. The exigencies of the struggle might have, at
particular junctures, demanded a tactical ruse in which concepts developed for hand-
to-hand combat are passed off as theory, but Lenin, Althusser suggests, elevated this
tactic to the level of strategy, or even principle, with profoundly negative consequences
for “the official tradition of Marxist philosophy.”10 Paradoxically, the problem Althusser
faces at this point and which no theoretical abstraction can address even if it concerns
the effectivity of theory, lies not in explaining the fact of Lenin’s weakness or demon-
strating its truth, “but in getting it accepted.”11 Althusser explains to Madonia that to
attempt to persuade Communist intellectuals and party leaders of Lenin’s weakness as a
thinker is to risk provoking the defensive reactions of “a system that is not only of a theo-
retical order but is at the same time institutional, or a stimulus that determines behav-
ior,”12 as if Althusser had very early on conceived of the Communist Party as an appara-
tus, an organization of stimuli that produce certain behaviors, a notion far from the idea
of an association of (class) conscious individuals. In such apparatuses, Lenin’s words,
extracted from their historical contexts and arranged in a kind of liturgy, are inseparable
from the rituals that undoubtedly correspond to the stimuli to which Althusser refers.
This fact alone renders the act of reading Lenin unusually difficult (and Althusser’s let-
ter is profoundly marked by this difficulty) in that it requires a separation of Lenin and
his texts from official Leninism, and the ability to read differently what continues to be
read to and for us.

>>

I want to pause here to make two observations on what is admittedly an early assessment
of Lenin’s relation to philosophy, but which is nevertheless interesting and in certain
ways surprising.
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 53

1) Althusser’s criticisms, although less explicitly aimed at Lenin, will appear in “On the
Materialist Dialectic,” written a few months later. In fact, it appears that Althusser’s “first”
definition of philosophy—a definition that seeks to protect philosophy (and its privileged
relation to the sciences) from the contamination of the political, that is, not simply from
the attempts by the PCF to impose an “official philosophy” on its adherents, but even
from the combat that is constitutive of politics itself—represents an initial distance prise
from Lenin’s positions. To free philosophy from the imperatives imposed by the struggle
in its immediacy, that is, the ever-changing adjustment of tactics in a war that postpones
the construction of a theory, even a theory of Marxism, to the time of peace that will
never come, Althusser must raise it to a level of abstraction beyond the close combat in
which Lenin, using every weapon at his disposal in a struggle whose boundaries could
not be fixed in advance, engages the enemy even on the terrain of philosophy itself. It is at
this moment that Althusser will demarcate himself from Lenin and distance philosophy
from the exigencies of political practice by introducing the distinction between Theory,
“theory,” and theory. Althusser defines theory (lowercase, without quotation marks) as “a
specific form of practice,” while “theory” in quotation marks is “the determinate theo-
retical system of a real science,” the concepts by which it reflects upon the results of its
own practice. Finally, Theory (with a capital “T”) is “general theory, that is, the Theory of
practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory of the existing theoretical
practices (of the sciences), which transforms into ‘knowledges’ (scientific truths) the ide-
ological product of existing ‘empirical’ practices (the concrete activity of men).”13 Althus­
ser’s decision to preserve the word theory, altered only by purely graphic, and therefore
unpronounceable, distinctions had the effect (although this is not its only effect) of unit-
ing the different notions of theory in the form of a hierarchical succession whose apogee
would be Theory, raised by the majuscule as well as by its “generality,” above the theo-
retical practices of the sciences, which are in turn elevated by their practice above the
ideological products of the empirical practices or concrete activity of men. The letter to
Madonia allows us to see the extent to which Althusser’s first definition of philosophy is
not simply a “theoreticist” (or rationalist) error, as he would later say,14 but represents an
active attempt to deny, not simply its political character, but more importantly the extent
to which philosophy participates in and is the site of social and political struggle. In fact,
it might be argued on the basis of some later remarks Althusser would offer on his first
definition of philosophy as “the theory of theoretical practice,” that it was precisely this
conception of philosophy as a kind of meta-theory, a theory of theories, that determined
the oversights and blindness in his reading of Lenin, allowing him to take a theory of
philosophical practice so anomalous that it proved illegible from the position he then
occupied for the absence of theory as such.15

2) While it is well known that Althusser rather quickly renounced the definition of phi-
losophy I have just cited from “On the Materialist Dialectic,” which would thus repre-
sent an early stage in his thought, it is worth noting that within a few years Althusser
54 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

would return to the notions, even the errors, he attributed to Lenin. In his later read-
ing, however, these notions no longer serve as negative examples of philosophy held
captive by politics, but precisely as the only adequate description of philosophy as it is
practiced, above all when it denies its practical and political dimension. Can Althusser’s
development be understood then as a linear succession of coherent and theoretically
consistent stages without unevenness or conflict? To approach him in this way would in
fact render him the exception to the rule that there are only exceptions (“the great law
of unevenness [l’inégalité] suffers no exceptions”),16 meaning that philosophy lives and
moves on the basis of its internal conflicts, the contradictions that animate it and bring it
to life, imposed by its immanence in the struggles that traverse social life. “Lenin” then
might be understood as the name of the contradiction proper to Althusser’s reflection
on contradiction, the structure inherent in its dispersion, and the perpetual deviation
of this reflection from itself. In this sense, the struggle for or against Lenin is obscured
by Althusser’s apparent attempt not to appear to criticize Lenin in his published texts,
apparent because it is never clear that his Lenin is Lenin and not a stand-in or substitute
for another figure (individual or collective) or whether his analysis is positive or nega-
tive. This obscurity is internal to Althusser and his project, the effect rather than the
cause of its “conflictuality.”

In order to put these arguments to the test, we must grasp them or the phenomena
they concern, in “the practical state,” that is, the discursive forms they take in Althusser’s
texts. We might start by returning to the Lenin of “Contradiction and Overdetermina-
tion” to see if he is indeed the mere practitioner (or “clinician” to cite Althusser’s striking
term) who diagnoses and treats the contradictions of the “current situation” or conjunc-
ture as it presents itself to him without understanding it through its causes or producing
a general theory of historical contradiction. It is worth recalling here that the criticisms
directed at Althusser’s 1962 essay—namely that it advanced a pluralist, “hyperempiri-
cist” conception of the social whole that rendered its essential unity unthinkable and
had jettisoned the motor force of history, the contradiction between the forces of pro-
duction and relations of production—were, in fact, whether the concerned parties knew
it or not, responses less to what Althusser himself said than to his citations from Lenin,
particularly from the “Letters from Afar.”17 It was as if, through Althusser’s Communist
critics, the official philosophy of Communism, supposedly founded by and in Lenin, was
compelled to defend itself against Lenin’s own words:
That the revolution succeeded so quickly and—seemingly, at the first superficial glance—
so radically, is only due to the fact that, as a result of an extremely unique historical situa-
tion, absolutely dissimilar currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary
political and social strivings have merged, and in a strikingly “harmonious” manner.18
The fact that these words, mobilized by Althusser to play specific roles in his “little
theoretical theater,” appeared subversive of official Communism (and official Lenin-
ism) is in one sense hardly surprising.19 Lenin’s objective in these letters, written shortly
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 55

after the February Revolution (1917), was to impress upon his comrades and potential
allies the utter inadequacy of the notion, central to the theory and practice of the Second
International, that the apparent diversity of the historical moment could be understood
as a series of emanations from the central contradiction that, in the Russian case, had
not yet matured into revolution, a notion functionally identical to the Hegelian notion
of contradiction as Althusser presents it here. Lenin’s insistence on the “absolutely
different” and “the absolutely heteroge-
neous” currents whose very conjunction By presenting these key passages, routinely
produced an explosion was incompatible
with Hegel’s concept of totality, a concept overlooked by the official philosophers,
based on the sublation of difference and
diversity. Lenin’s theoretical innovation Althusser essentially played his Lenin
was driven by the pressing need to shift
the revolutionary movement away from against the mythical figure of Communist
a philosophical/theoretical heritage that
had hardened into a “dogma” (of the prog- hagiography, citing text against text, to call
ress of history through a fixed and inevi-
table form of contradiction) and toward into question not simply the theoretical
a theory that could serve as a “guide to
action” by making intelligible the balance errors that follow from the notion of a
of forces and the concatenation of antag-
onisms in which the Bolsheviks had to “simple historical contradiction,” but its
intervene with “clinical” exactitude (and
which in no way resembled the bipolarity political effects as well.
of a simple historical contradiction and its
phenomena).20 Althusser’s citation of Lenin’s words served simultaneously, however, to
repudiate the theoretical culture secreted by the official institutions of Western Euro-
pean Communism in 1962 and their tendentious imitation of the very Social Democratic
parties Lenin criticized earlier in the twentieth century. By presenting these key pas-
sages, routinely overlooked by the official philosophers, Althusser essentially played his
Lenin against the mythical figure of Communist hagiography, citing text against text,
to call into question not simply the theoretical errors that follow from the notion of a
“simple historical contradiction,” but its political effects as well.
However, as he himself would later say, perhaps in part reflecting on these earlier bat-
tles, there is no “empty corner of the forest. In philosophy every space is always already
occupied. Within it, we can only hold a position against the adversary who already holds
that position.”21 Thus in a footnote Althusser introduced Mao’s “On Contradiction”
as offering a theory of historical contradiction that is in its essence not only different
from but opposed to the Hegelian conception as Althusser has described it and which
may therefore be understood as an alternative to it, as if the choice imposed upon us
now were Hegel or Mao.22 Indeed, in Mao’s text, the law of uneven or unequal develop-
ment disrupts all the categories of the Hegelian dialectic, above all the idea of a single
56 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

contradiction whose opposing terms are identical, and of which every aspect of the his-
torical totality would be the phenomena, in turn reducible to the center from which
everything radiates. Mao begins his operation of decentering by importing inequality
into the contradiction itself, declaring its terms unequal—a principal and a secondary
aspect—and unequally related to each other. His materialization of what are in Hegel
necessarily spiritual aspects of contradiction as forces, the bourgeoisie and the proletar-
iat, meant that the contradiction between them could never be understood as an identity
of opposites susceptible to a fusion into one term. Equilibrium or equality between these
aspects could only be a temporary effect of their inequality or, more precisely, of the
active antagonism that joins them in battle.
A contradiction thus understood cannot produce or reproduce itself in what would
be the phenomena of its essence. Mao not only disrupted and disturbed, but displaced
the central contradiction, thereby producing the necessarily empty place of the absent
center that permits a constant alternation of contradictions. At any given moment, a con-
tradiction occupies the place of the principal contradiction, while others assume the
place or function of secondary contradictions. Further, even the relations between the
aspects of the principal contradiction are subject to constant variability: determined
by the interaction between all the contradictions of a specific situation, the opposites
in struggle within each contradiction are not necessarily antagonistic, that is, in open,
irreversible conflict. Thus, while there is always contradiction, not every contradic-
tion is antagonistic or explosive. As in the case of Lenin, Mao’s theoretical innovation
emerged in the context of intra-party struggle over tactics: he argued for the tempo-
rary necessity of a tactical alliance with otherwise hostile forces. The “dogmatists” in
the period 1935–37 vehemently rejected Mao’s argument that the struggle could only be
advanced by entering into a patriotic, anti-imperialist united front against the Japanese
with the Kuomintang, the party of the “national bourgeoisie,” whose army had waged
relentless war against the Communist Party and the Red Army.23 Mao’s response took a
philosophical or theoretical form: his adversaries’ position was based on an inadequate
and simplistic notion of historical contradiction that allowed principles rather than “the
concrete analysis of the concrete situation” (a phrase from Lenin that Althusser cited
frequently) to determine tactics.24 The conjuncture, the precise alignment and balance
of forces, thus compelled Mao to reconceptualize the very notion of historical contradic-
tion, destabilizing the Hegelian version by postulating a multiplicity of contradictions in
motion, any one of which might be, in a given conjuncture, the principal or determinant
contradiction, while the others remained secondary. Similarly, no teleology of history
could explain which contradictions were composed of forces locked in antagonism and
which were, although only temporarily, composed of non-antagonistic forces capable,
for however brief a time, of unity.
Althusser’s note, while acknowledging that Mao’s sketch of contradiction “appears
in a quite un-Hegelian light” (apparaît sous un jour étranger à la perspective hégélienne),
concludes by exposing in the form of a paradox its two weaknesses: it remains at once
both “descriptive” and “abstract.”25 In fact, the exposition of Mao’s theory of contradic-
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 57

tion might well be understood as a striking example of what Althusser condemns in

Lenin: the elaboration of a “tactical concept,” or concepts, whose emergence and func-
tion were determined by the fundamentally practical objective of convincing a majority
of the party leadership of the necessity of a united front with the Kuomintang against
the Japanese invaders. Were the distinctions between primary and secondary and antag-
onistic and non-antagonistic contradictions separable from the specific struggles Mao
used them to describe, that is, could they rise to the level of generality proper to theory
as Althusser understands it in his letter to Madonia?
Althusser’s critique of “On Contradiction” as too “descriptive” appears to contradict
the accompanying charge that Mao’s theory is “in certain respects abstract” in that it
presents the problem of contradiction in formal terms that would seem to pertain to
an invariant dialectic of history rather than to the specificity and singularity that char-
acterize the Marxist conception of contradiction. While Althusser notes the apparent
incompatibility of the terms of his critique of Mao, he makes no effort here or elsewhere
to resolve or explain it. His brief summary of “On Contradiction,” however, is highly sug-
gestive. In this short note, he reduces Mao’s theory to a set of relations between three
binary oppositions: “principal and secondary contradiction; principal and secondary
aspect of a contradiction; antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction,” all gov-
erned by “the law of the uneven development of a contradiction” (la loi de l’inégalité de
dé­veloppement des contradictions).26 Althusser’s account of Mao’s notion of contradic-
tion thus renders it a structuralist and even formalist theory according to which history
necessarily appears in the invariant forms of each aspect of contradiction. Within its
system, a given historical moment can only be understood as the actualization of a set of
possible forms: e.g., principal or secondary (contradiction or aspect of a contradiction),
antagonistic or non-antagonistic. All of history can be read through the grid of these
oppositions, which alone gives coherence and intelligibility to a particular conjuncture.
It can be applied indifferently to any epoch, mode of production, or social formation and
moreover offers the kind of theory that can be learned and applied by rote. From this
system, there emerges a theory of contradiction not as a spiritual identity of opposites,
but rather as an allotment of pre-given unequal and dissymmetrical roles or positions.27

>>

Interestingly, no one more clearly understood the implications of Althusser’s note than
Alain Badiou, writing more than a decade later. In his very anti-Althusserian text, Théo-
rie de la contradiction (1975), he articulates the silences of Althusser’s brief note very
precisely to describe and then immediately reject the reading of Mao’s “On Contradic-
tion” suggested there. As if speaking à la cantonade, that is, in an apostrophe, responding
to an objection never voiced in his text, Badiou takes great care to warn the reader that
Mao’s theory might mistakenly be read as a logic of pre-given places into which compet-
ing parties are distributed, as if to read Mao in 1960s France was to translate the theory
of contradiction into a synchronic order of places or roles, something like a syntax of
58 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

history. Instead, it is a theory of forces: “the thought of contradiction does not consist in
a duplication of the system of places by a structural estimate of forces (a combinatory).
The process is essentially dissymmetrical, with a dissymmetry that cannot be schema-
tized because it is qualitative.”28
We may now understand the tactical imperatives that determined Althusser’s use
of “On Contradiction,” which serves him here in a double capacity: it provides both a
quasi-official alternative to, if not a critique of, the simplicity of the Hegelian notion of
contradiction, and the reassurance that to complicate this simple notion, to insist on
the irreducible complexity and heterogeneity of contradiction, is not automatically to
fall into what Althusser himself would later call the reign of the aleatory. The brief note
serves in a sense to introduce Lenin in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” as if he,
despite being Mao’s predecessor in a chronological sense, is his successor in the tempo-
rality proper to theory and, more specifi-
The peril he faces does not lie in the fact cally, the theory of contradiction. Here, the
form of the Hegelian contradiction—what
that he will criticize Lenin for not being the Althusser calls (with a certain audacity) its
simplicity, a simplicity that survived even
philosopher he should have been, but that its “materialist” transformation according

he will precisely not do so, that he will

to which the contradiction between the
forces of production and the relations of
production became the motor of history,
instead reflect on—and, in a profound sense, all other contradictions being its phenom-
ena and thus reducible to it—divides into
in—Lenin’s own reflections on the precise two. Mao takes his distance from Hegel by
showing that the domination exercised by
nature of the contradiction that produced or a single, “beautiful” contradiction can only
be the temporary effect of the operation of
determined the Russian Revolution in 1917. a set of oppositions whose terms cannot
be understood as identical but rather as
unequal and dissimilar: principal and secondary, contradiction and antagonism, antago-
nistic and non-antagonistic. Through the gap that is thus opened up (and made visible
through Althusser’s intervention) lies the way to Lenin and a theory of contradiction
irreducible to the alternatives of Hegelianism and Maoism.
When Althusser turns to Lenin “to attempt a moment’s reflection on the Marxist
concept of contradiction,” he does so, he tells us, at his “risk” (à ses risques et périls).29
What is the risk in (re)turning to Lenin, a figure all the more important to party appara-
tuses as he is regarded as a philosophical non-entity, ignored, if not despised, by philoso-
phers, including by Marxist philosophers of every school and tendency, beginning with
Althusser himself, at least according to his own testimony? What follows in Althusser’s
text shows very clearly that the peril he faces does not lie in the fact that he will criti-
cize Lenin for not being the philosopher he should have been, but that he will precisely
not do so, that he will instead reflect on—and, in a profound sense, in—Lenin’s own
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 59

reflections on the precise nature of the contradiction that produced or determined the
Russian Revolution in 1917. He will set aside the morceaux choisis or selections that have
passed for Lenin and instead risk following Lenin’s words without knowing in advance
where they might lead. If we in turn follow Althusser as he follows Lenin, we will be led
to the question to which, along the way, he silently points like someone tracking his prey
and which it is left to us to articulate: does anything in Lenin’s reflections resemble what
we have thus far understood as contradiction?

>>

Althusser’s discussion begins not with a quick summary of the theoretical abstractions
necessary to analysis, but precisely in the realm of practice, the level from which Lenin,
as Althusser would later assert, had such difficulty rising. In fact, it is not simply the
realm of practice, but more specifically, the realm of combat. Referring to Machia­velli’s
The Art of War and Vauban’s two treatises (the Traité de l’attaque des places and the
Traité de la défense des places), Althusser argues that Lenin, who had no choice but to
master the arts of both advance and retreat, learned that strategy begins with the ability
to discover the weak point or the defect in both the system of defense and the system of
attack. While such a theory clearly served Lenin well in determining the correct tactics
for intervening in the conjuncture to tip the balance of forces in a “pre-revolutionary sit-
uation,” Althusser insists that the theory of the weak link also explains the fact or event
of the revolution. Russia was the weak link in the system of imperialist states, politically
and economically backward and little prepared for the war it had so confidently entered.
The war brought enormous suffering for both combatants and non-combatants alike,
but it had only found and brought to light and not created the “weakness” of the weak
link. This weakness “was the product of this special feature: the accumulation and exac-
erbation of all the historical contradictions then possible in a single State” (l’accumulation
et l’exaspération de toutes les contradictions historiques alors possibles en un seul état).30
As if to underscore the importance of this proposition, Althusser will repeat the phrase,
“accumulation and exacerbation of historical contradictions” one page later. More-
over, it does not appear possible to identify or enumerate all the contradictions, as if
their number exceeds the requirement of Lenin’s argument and would overwhelm his
account of the conditions of possibility of the Russian revolution. In fact, the sheer num-
ber of contradictions seems less important here than the effect of their aggregation or
addition (Althusser uses the verbs accumuler and cumuler), which he links to the exacer-
bation/exaspération of these contradictions, as if the intensity of the antagonistic forces
increases as they are added together.
If Althusser appears at certain points to have proposed a purely quantitative notion
of contradiction, such that every contradiction is equivalent to and commensurable with
every other, as if they could be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided, he will
turn to Lenin’s words to reintroduce the element of incommensurability proper to any
revolutionary situation. Lenin, according to Althusser, arrived at the position that the
60 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

accumulation of contradictions is less an addition than an encounter and a conjunction

between dissimilar things, that is, things that are irreducible to each other or to any-
thing else and between which there is no natural, pre-given agreement or harmony, but
which nevertheless conjoin into an assemblage. Even this already complex conjuncture,
however, was insufficient to explain the event of the revolution. Lenin reminds us that
among its necessary conditions were “other ‘exceptional’ circumstances, incomprehen-
sible outside the ‘tangle’ (enchevêtrement) of Russia’s internal and external contradic-
tions.”31 Here enchevêtrement (translated as “tangle” in English, but which also means
“entanglement”) has replaced or, perhaps more accurately, qualified and specified the
sense of accumulation, so that the bipolarity of the Hegelian notion of contradiction is
displaced in favor of an image of a great number of strands, each woven of other strands,
entangled in an absolutely singular configuration. As in the notion of the entanglement
of particles in physics, or perhaps, in another sense, as in Spinoza’s notion of the singu-
lar thing, the enchevêtrement to which Althusser refers does not simply signify spatial
propinquity, but also the fact that for a certain duration the “circumstances” or “forces”
that he describes as entangled act in such a way that, as in Spinoza’s singular thing,
they “preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves” to form a single
conjuncture.32
Althusser’s Lenin is far from Hegel indeed, far from the notion of the historical
contradiction and its phenomena and just as far from a re-allotment of contradictions
within an invariant syntax that persists through every historical moment: only a con-
cept borrowed from Freud, precisely the kind of practical concept for which Althusser
denounced Lenin as weak, the instrument or perhaps weapon closest at hand, allows
Althusser, not to supply the theory that Lenin’s “practical theory” lacked, as he insisted
in his letter, but to glimpse the theory already immanent in it. Freud’s “overdetermina-
tion” does nothing more, but also nothing less, than make visible the terms and even con-
cepts of Lenin’s theory of contradiction as an enchevêtrement or entanglement of lines, a
knot or node (noeud) through which alone the central contradiction between labor and
capital must be “activated.” The entanglement is the spatiotemporal coordinate at which
occurs “an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ so that whatever their origin
and sense (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolu-
tion in origin and sense, or even its ‘direct opponents’), they ‘fuse’ into a ruptural unity
(unité de rupture).”33 This represents Althusser’s reading of the remarkable passage from
“Letters from Afar” cited above in which he emphasizes that what makes the histori-
cal situation “extremely unique” is the “merger” or combination of absolutely dissimilar
currents, absolutely heterogeneous class interests, absolutely contrary political and social
strivings to produce an effect. The unity of the conjuncture, that is, its existence as a
singular thing, derives from a convergence of the “dissimilar,” the heterogeneous, and
the contrary that in no way derives from the negation of difference, as if it were a har-
mony woven from the elements of discord: not only is conflict not overcome, it is the
permanent condition of the persistence of the “unity” the various currents and move-
ments together form, like multiple armies locked in battle. The particular property of the
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 61

revolutionary conjuncture is that the effect produced by the “cohesion” of “absolutely

different,” heterogeneous and opposed tendencies and forces is the retroactive rupture
and decomposition of the composite thing that is its cause, a cause that takes shape as
such only at the moment that the entanglement of forces breaks apart, its unity revealed
to be a “unité de rupture,” the ruptural unity so rare as to be called “miraculous.”
The fact that Althusser would later return to these themes under the banner of alea-
tory materialism does not compel us to assign his reflections in 1962 to the category of
prolepsis or anticipation, as if the later were superior to the earlier. In fact, we might say
that the implication of Althusser’s argument in “Contradiction and Overdetermination,”
combined with the specificity of the material he introduces through citation, is that his
effort in the mid-1960s to think “structural causality,” the existence of a structure in its
effects, on the one hand, and the philosophy of the encounter, the accidental conjunc-
tion of a multiplicity of singular things, on the other, represents two ways of thinking the
same problem, even if these terms and ideas appeared so dissociated that they could be
seen as alternatives.
Soon enough, Althusser would have cause to reconsider his initial critique of Lenin
as the inventor of merely “practical concepts” suited only for combat, unable to produce
“real theory” that requires philosophy to remove itself to a place “beyond” the battle-
field. Toward the end of 1967 (and thus five years after the publication of “Contradiction
and Overdetermination,” and two years after the publication of For Marx and Reading
Capital) he reports, again to Franca Madonia, that reading Lenin “systematically” has
allowed him for the first time to understand the “objective effects (the enigmatic reac-
tions of the readers)” of his early “formulas” concerning philosophy, above all “a formula
like ‘philosophy is the Theory of theoretical practice,’ ” which simultaneously affirms
philosophy’s relation to the sciences while denying its relation to politics.34 Indeed, the
conjuncture, in particular the “philosophical conjuncture,” in which everything that
could be summarized as “Althusserian” constituted one of the most important forces in
play, has revealed in Lenin what five years earlier had remained invisible. In proposing a
“startlingly original” theory of historical contradiction, Lenin simultaneously produced
“a kind of definition of . . . philosophical practice.” He did so, not because he positioned
himself above or beyond the realm of political practice, but precisely because he did not
do so. The good “clinician” that he was, Lenin was acutely attuned to philosophy’s reiter-
ated denial of its practical existence, of its participation in political struggle, and aimed
to confront philosophy with its objective effects. It is on this point that Althusser’s Lenin
approaches Althusser’s Machiavelli: philosophy is itself the site of conflict, the pitiless
war of the armed prophet (as collective a figure as the Prince) on the side of a truth that
is only as true as the “objective effects” it produces. Thus, his earlier view of Lenin is not
simply corrected or rejected in 1967–68, but is strangely reversed, as if Althusser’s initial
denial of the perpetual war in and of philosophy simultaneously affirmed and denied
the nature and stakes of this conflict, leaving them visible even as he crossed them out.
Further, only the return to Lenin five years after “Contradiction and Overdetermination”
allowed Althusser to see the discrepancy between philosophy as he actually practiced
62 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

it in that essay and the idea of philosophy as the theory of theoretical practice. It was
as if in discussing Lenin’s critique of previous conceptions of historical contradiction,
Althusser had imitated or mimicked, although in a way that he could recognize only ret-
rospectively, Lenin’s practice of philosophy, that is, what Lenin actually does, not simply
in a “philosophical” text like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, but even in an appar-
ently “political” text like the “Letters from Afar” that, insofar as Lenin is compelled to
recast the notion of contradiction, takes on a directly philosophical significance.

>>

The culmination of Althusser’s reflections on Lenin was undoubtedly “Lenin and Phi-
losophy,” originally delivered as a lecture to the Société Française de Philosophie on
February 24, 1968. Nine days before the lecture, he had written to Madonia that
the “communication” on Lenin and philosophy before the very sanctimonious, solemn, and
old Société Française de Philosophie is going to be extremely funny. I rejoice in advance to
think of all those official personalities from the university sitting there wisely only to hear it
said that Lenin was more powerful than they. I’m “itching” to tell them certain things that
would simply stop them from speaking (like “the encirclement of the cities through the coun-
tryside,” by completely changing the traditional “rules” of philosophical “war” and strategy)
because they will have nothing more to say (unless they are angry at me), but I will “restrain”
myself, for things are premature and I will “deal with” them when the moment arrives and
when I choose to do so—that is, under favorable conditions.35
Althusser was certainly correct to assume that his address would provoke an angry
response. When he cited Lenin citing Joseph Dietzgen’s characterization of philoso-
phers as “lackeys with diplomas” (laquais diplômés), the session chair, Jean Wahl, inter-
rupted Althusser’s discourse (a highly unusual, if not unprecedented, action) and took
the microphone to say that “it is difficult to tolerate these words,” which he will never-
theless tolerate, but only because “he who cites them, Louis Althusser, is himself agrégé
et universitaire.” Further, and to Althusser’s dismay, the Société included Wahl’s remarks
in the transcript published under its auspices, as if “Lenin and Philosophy” could not
appear without an accompanying disclaimer.36
What in “Lenin and Philosophy” was so intolerable that Wahl was moved to assume
the very identity Althusser had, from his point of view, so scandalously imputed to him
as a philosopher, that of the indignant servant protecting the sanctity of the master’s
domain? Invoking Lenin against the pretensions of philosophers who believe that they
have been called to provide the theory of all existing theories and to police this totality
by adjudicating its conflicts, Althusser directly confronted the objective effects of his
own statements concerning the work of philosophy and its place in “the beyond” of the-
ory and practice. Against the transcendence that rational reflection seemed to demand,
Althusser declared the absolute immanence of philosophy in its effects, outside of which
it has no existence. Philosophy in its activity (despite its denials and the compensatory
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 63

apparatuses that arise to confirm these denials) paradoxically exists only in the non-
existence of “le rien philosophique,” the absence of “a line that is not even a line, not even
a trace (qui n’est même pas une ligne, pas même un tracé), that is, not even the mark of
what is now absent, “but the simple fact of demarcating itself,” (mais le simple fait de se
démarquer), the opening of a gap, a separation, a fissure but one that cannot be bridged
or covered over. Philosophy’s entire existence is confined to “the emptiness of a distance
taken,” (le vide d’une distance prise) the void that results from demarcation.37 But this
disappearance was merely the form of philosophy’s immanence, the cause that exists
only in its effects. Philosophy is the process by which the conjuncture thinks itself in its
antagonism and dispersion, the line that marks its conflicts and their enchevêtrements,
but only insofar as it is woven into the knot upon which it reflects.
In the period before 1968, it was Lenin who showed Althusser the way forward, Lenin,
reputed to be a dogmatist but who, as Althusser showed, had paradoxically abandoned
himself to the entanglement of the conjuncture, that is, to the “necessity of contingency,”38
to the immanence of a theory of the conjuncture that develops only within it, not on it.
That Althusser could only follow him part of the way was certainly the effect of his own
conjuncture in which the power to think ebbed and flowed with the power to act.
64 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2
Notes
This essay is an expanded version of a talk presented
during the colloquium “Pour Althusser” at the Univer-
sité de Montpellier 3, May 27–28, 2013. I want to thank
Walter Richmond and especially Alyssa Virker for
their help with Lenin’s Russian.
1 Baron, Plekhanov: The Father of Russian Marx-
ism, 215.
2 See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, 11–43 (“Lenin and Philosophy”); 71–83 (“Lenin
before Hegel”).
3 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 13.
4 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, 134. See
Spinoza, The Ethics, 41 (pt. 1, prop. 15, scholium).
5 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, 133: “It is the
work of philosophy itself which is at stake here: for it
requires steps back and detours. What else did Marx
do, throughout his endless research, but go back to
Hegel in order to rid himself of Hegel and to find his
own way, what else but rediscover Hegel in order to
distinguish himself from Hegel and to define himself?”
6 Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, 6.
7 Althusser, “Three Notes on the Theory of
Discourses,” 49.
8 Althusser to Franca Madonia, 22 December
1962, in Lettres à Franca, 306; my translation.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 167, 168.
14 Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, 105–6.
15 Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous
Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, 71.
16 Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 212.
17 See, for instance, Gilbert Mury, “Matérialisme et
hyperempirisme.”
18 Lenin, “Letters from Afar” (first letter, March
1917), 302.
19 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses,” 174.
20 Lenin, “Letters on Tactics” (April 1917), 43.
21 Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous
Philosophy of the Scientists, 144.
22 Althusser “Contradiction and Overdetermina-
tion,” 94n6.
23 Mao also faced opposition from the Right in
the party, which, following the directives of the USSR,
advocated a dissolution of Communist forces into the
Kuomintang and a suspension of land reform. Mao,
by contrast, advocated maintaining the independence
of the Red Army (de facto if not de jure), as well as
the process of land reform both in the liberated zones
and, if at a slower pace, in the nation as a whole.
24 See Lenin, “Kommunismus,” 165: “it gives no
concrete analysis of precise and definite historical
situations.” The target of Lenin’s critique is none
other than the “very Left-wing” Georg Lukács who
advocated a boycott of parliamentary elections on
the basis of abstract principles rather than a concrete
analysis of the conjuncture.
25 Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermi­
nation,” 94n6.
26 Ibid.
27 In a general sense, it is far from clear that
“On Contradiction” offers a theory adequate to the
complexity of the conjunctural analysis exhibited in
its practical and political source: Mao’s “On Tactics
against Japanese Imperialism” (1935).
Althusser’s Lenin >> Warren Montag 65

28 “La pensée de la contradiction ne consiste pas

à redoubler le système des places par une estimation
structurale (combinatoire) des forces. Le processus est
essentiellement dissymétrique, d’une dissymétrie non
schématisable, parce qu’elle est qualitative” (Badiou,
Théorie de la contradiction, 100–101).

29 Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermi­

nation,” 94.

30 Ibid., 95–96.

31 Ibid., 96.

32 See Spinoza, The Ethics, 74 (part 2, prop. 13).

33 Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermi­

nation,” 99.

34 Althusser to Franca Madonia, 6 December 1967,

in Lettres à Franca, 755.

35 Althusser to Franca Madonia, 15 February 1968,

in ibid., 758.

36 See Yves Sintomer’s “Notes éditoriales” follow-

ing “Lénine et la philosophie,” in Solitude de Machia-
vel, 138–39, note 2, i.

37 Althusser, “Lénine et la philosophie,” 132.

38 Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital, 45.

66 DIACRITICS >> 2015 >> 43.2

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———. Essays in Self-Criticism. Translated by Grahame
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———. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In
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———. “Lénine et la philosophie (1968).” In Solitude
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