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Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn, Peter Thomas - Encountering Althusser - Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought-Bloomsbury Academic (2012)
Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn, Peter Thomas - Encountering Althusser - Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought-Bloomsbury Academic (2012)
ALTHUSSER
Encountering Althusser
Politics and Materialism in
Contemporary Radical Thought
Edited by
Katja Diefenbach
Sara R. Farris
Gal Kirn
and
Peter D. Thomas
www.bloomsbury.com
www.janvaneyck.nl
This publication was made possible by the generous support of the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system,
without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result
of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
2012021316
ISBN: 978-1-4411-1915-5
3 ‘An immense aspiration to being’: the causality and temporality of the aleatory
Giorgos Fourtounis╇ 43
6 The very essence of the object, the soul of Marxism and other singular things:
Spinoza in Althusser 1959–67
G. M. Goshgarian╇ 89
12 Althusser and Tronti: the primacy of politics versus the autonomy of the political
Sara R. Farris╇ 185
Bibliography╇ 352
Index of Works╇ 368
Index of Names╇ 370
Index of Concepts╇ 374
Notes on Contributors
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.
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 post-
Yugoslav 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 materi-
alism, 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 trans-
lates 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).
x Notes on Contributors
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).
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
Notes on Contributors xi
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
xii Notes on Contributors
A detour of theory
T 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 materi-
alist 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
xiv Introduction: Encountering Althusser
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 interven-
tions 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 signifi-
cantly 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
Introduction: Encountering Althusser xv
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 interna-
tional 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 inter-
sected 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 philo-
sophical 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.
xvi Introduction: Encountering Althusser
At the same time, by grasping the theoretical repetition of an author as his or her differ-
entiation – 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, intensi-
fying 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 inter-
national (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.
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
xviii Introduction: Encountering Althusser
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 insuf-
ficiency 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.
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.
Part One
Aleatory materialism
and the philosophy of
the encounter
1
The hazards of aleatory materialism
in the late philosophy of Louis
Althusser1
André Tosel
.â•›.â•›. [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 .â•›.â•›. This detour via theory
.â•›.â•›. 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
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 philos-
opher 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
4 Encountering Althusser
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:
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
The hazards of aleatory materialism 5
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 deter-
minate 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
6 Encountering Althusser
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’ philo-
sophical 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 sixteenth-
century 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
The hazards of aleatory materialism 7
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 accom-
plished 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 .â•›.â•›. [an] assignable but minute parallelism of thought and
the body .â•›.â•›. 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.
8 Encountering Althusser
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 incom-
plete, 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
The hazards of aleatory materialism 9
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
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” .â•›.â•›. 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” .â•›.â•›. “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 .â•›.â•›.
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 .â•›.â•›. singular individuals wholly distinct
from one another’.27 Wittgenstein loses historicity in order the better to think ‘the opening of
The hazards of aleatory materialism 11
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.
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 .â•›.â•›. 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
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 homoge-
neity 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.
The hazards of aleatory materialism 13
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 inter-
pellation, 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 devel-
opment, 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 decon-
struction 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]:
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 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
The hazards of aleatory materialism 15
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 self-
reproduction 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
The hazards of aleatory materialism 19
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.
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 trans-
formation 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 .â•›.â•›.
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 decon-
structive 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].
The hazards of aleatory materialism 21
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 materi-
alism 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 uncer-
tainty is a problem.
24 Encountering Althusser
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].
The hazards of aleatory materialism 25
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 materi-
alism 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.
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 expla-
nation is discarded.5
Materialist readings
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 anti-
historicist 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.
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 risk-
taking 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
Rethinking aleatory materialism 31
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-teleo-
logical 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
32 Encountering Althusser
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
Rethinking aleatory materialism 33
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 demar-
cation 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’
34 Encountering Althusser
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 manifes-
tation 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 underes-
timate 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 repre-
sentations 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
Rethinking aleatory materialism 35
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.
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-dimen-
sional 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 materi-
alist 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
36 Encountering Althusser
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. .â•›.â•›. 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 deter-
minations 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 neces-
sarily 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.
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.
Rethinking aleatory materialism 37
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).
Rethinking aleatory materialism 39
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 .â•›.â•›. There are encounters only between series .â•›.â•›. of beings that are the results of several
series of causes .â•›.â•›. 3. Every encounter is aleatory, not only in its origins .â•›.â•›. but also in its
effects .â•›.â•›. no determination of these elements can be assigned except by working backwards
from the result to its becoming in its retroaction .â•›.â•›. [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 .â•›.â•›. 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.
40 Encountering Althusser
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.
Rethinking aleatory materialism 41
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 .â•›.â•›. 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
.â•›.â•›. [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.
3
‘An immense aspiration to beingâ•Ž:
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
44 Encountering Althusser
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 trans-
formation 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: ‘.â•›.â•›. [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 ‘always-
already’ 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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 45
contrary the structure is a cause immanent in its effects .â•›.â•›. [where] the whole existence of the
structure consists of its effects .â•›.â•›. [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 combi-
natory 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 struc-
tural 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
46 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›.’, 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 struc-
tural 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 consti-
tuted 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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 47
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 struc-
tural 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 retro-
action 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›.’: 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.
48 Encountering Althusser
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 consti-
tution, 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 consti-
tutive 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.â•›.â•›.’31 Here, the aleatory encounter lapses into
a necessary encounter between an essence-like structure, given in advance as a logical possi-
bility, 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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 49
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-essen-
tialist 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 effec-
tivity, 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 tempo-
rality 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, struc-
tured 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.
Indeed, the discourse of ‘The Underground Current .â•›.â•›.’ 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 .â•›.â•›.’ 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.
space, in order to influence its ‘logic’ and become the decisive, ‘causal’ factor for this accom-
plishment: 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 .â•›.â•›.’: 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 incom-
mensurable 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 ‘protago-
nists’ 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.
52 Encountering Althusser
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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 53
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
54 Encountering Althusser
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] .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›.’, 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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 55
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 charac-
terised 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 .â•›.â•›.’: 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 .â•›.â•›.’
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, coter-
minous 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
56 Encountering Althusser
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
‘An immense aspiration to being’ 57
Thus, instead of being the concept of a theorised object, this notion of the void is a philo-
sophical 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 indis-
sociable 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 .â•›.â•›.’ 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 ‘.â•›.â•›. [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.â•›.â•›.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.
58 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›.’ (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 .â•›.â•›. 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.
60 Encountering Althusser
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:
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 .â•›.â•›. 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.
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’.
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.
History as ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’ 65
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, al�though it did take place; but its possible nonexistence sheds light on
the meaning of its ale�atory 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:
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.
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
66 Encountering Althusser
passage from one stage of difference to another, may be safely attributed to the cumulative
action of Natural Selection .â•›.â•›. 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 adapta-
tions 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
History as ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’ 67
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 navel-
frequenting 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 insec-
tivorous 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:
.â•›.â•›. 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
68 Encountering Althusser
‘The Underground Current’, Darwin’s theory instead seems to be its invisible centre. Its funda-
mental 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 ever-
increasing circles of complexity’.
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 condi-
tions 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
History as ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’ 69
of the ‘great hound’. In sum, an atomized country, every atom of which was descending in
free fall without en�coun�tering 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 beÂ�lieve 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 ‘philo-
sophical 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 sev�enteenth 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 apolo�getics. 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 philo-
sophical 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
70 Encountering Althusser
that gives place to the form.31 Who decides, decides the form, and this decision, which consti-
tutes 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 en�counter 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
History as ‘permanent revocation of the accomplished fact’ 71
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 the�ory 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
72 Encountering Althusser
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 retrospec-
tively 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 seculari-
sation 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.
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).
74 Encountering Althusser
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 ‘.â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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.
5
The parallax object of Althusser’s
materialist philosophy
Katja Kolšek
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 histor-
icist 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 mecha-
nisms 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 materi-
alist 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 ‘effect-
philosophy’ 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
The parallax object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy 77
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 appro-
priation 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 condi-
tions, 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
78 Encountering Althusser
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 unsur-
passable 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 determi-
nation 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.
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 corre-
sponds 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 perspec-
tives’.18 The paradox that this object causes is a precise one:
.â•›.â•›. 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 epistemo-
logical 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.
80 Encountering Althusser
Overdetermination is in truth the political place. And it must indeed be stressed that overde-
termination 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 overde-
termination 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 overde-
termination, 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 ‘deter-
mination 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 disap-
proves 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,
The parallax object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy 81
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 determi-
nation in the last resort).
In order to elucidate how the void as the parallax object functions in opposition to the episte-
mological 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
82 Encountering Althusser
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.
The parallax object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy 83
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 distin-
guishing 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 episte-
mology 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 antag-
onism (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 character-
istic 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
The parallax object of Althusser’s materialist philosophy 85
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 possi-
bilities 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.
86 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. 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: ‘.â•›.â•›.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 .â•›.â•›.
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.
88 Encountering Althusser
‘Man alone is a triumphant error who makes his aberration the law of the world’.
Louis Althusser, ‘Man, That Night’ (1947).1
S 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 conven-
ience, 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” .â•›.â•›. 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
90 Encountering Althusser
subject’, to borrow his 1967 remark about Feuerbach’s impact on twentieth-century phenom-
enology.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 conti-
nuity? 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
The very essence of the object 91
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 .â•›.â•›. 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
the premise that ‘the end of history .â•›.â•›. 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
.â•›.â•›. 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 singu-
larity 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 stand-
point 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 .â•›.â•›. [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.
The very essence of the object 95
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.â•›.â•›. a throw of the dice’.49
It does not reduce ‘diachrony’, as structuralism does, ‘to the sequence of events .â•›.â•›. 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) .â•›.â•›. 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.
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
The very essence of the object 97
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
.â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. as the real prehistory whose real confrontation with other .â•›.â•›.
practices and .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. a relation of production, and therefore .â•›.â•›. what we can call,
in a phrase that clashes with the classical system of categories .â•›.â•›. 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.
98 Encountering Althusser
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] .â•›.â•›. 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 contra-
dictions 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.
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
The very essence of the object 99
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, “enigmati-
cally”, ‘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 .â•›.â•›. 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 distin-
guish between the two practices .â•›.â•›. 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
100 Encountering Althusser
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 always-
already been defined and situated, not with the conjuncture that situates it). This explains
the practical function of philosophy, a function reflected .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. but is a political function nonetheless, justifying
what Lenin called a partisan position in philosophy and thus, in a very elevated sense .â•›.â•›.
what we can call the primacy of politics in philosophy (not over it). This point merits eluci-
dation. 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
The very essence of the object 101
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 connec-
tions 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 identifi-
cation 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 revolu-
tionary 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
102 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. preceded its own irruption’ and
‘obeys .â•›.â•›. 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
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
104 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. it functions atemporally .â•›.â•›.
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 enter-
prise 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
The very essence of the object 105
“combination” .â•›.â•›. 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 trans-
formed 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 encap-
sulated 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 singu-
larity 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
106 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. but only the Theory of their articulation in their current conjuncture .â•›.â•›.
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 condi-
tions 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 repre-
sents ‘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
The very essence of the object 107
modes in which it exists, the more so as Althusser does indeed affirm in the same ‘post-
theoreticist’ 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 .â•›.â•›.) (cf. Epicurus, clinamen, Cournot)
(theory of the deviation cf. Epicurus) .â•›.â•›. 2. Theory of the conjuncture (= structure) .â•›.â•›.
Philosophy as general theory of the conjuncture
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.
108 Encountering Althusser
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.
The very essence of the object 109
Althusser’s
non-contemporaries
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.
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 posthu-
mously-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
Althusser, Machiavelli and us 117
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, intellec-
tuals 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 ‘theoret-
icism’ 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 ‘petty-
bourgeois 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
118 Encountering Althusser
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 theoret-
icist 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 institu-
tions 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.
Althusser, Machiavelli and us 119
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’.
120 Encountering Althusser
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’ .â•›.â•›. 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 distinc-
tiveness 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
122 Encountering Althusser
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.
Althusser, Machiavelli and us 123
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 inter-
vention 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.
124 Encountering Althusser
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.
Althusser, Machiavelli and us 125
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).
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 commen-
tators, 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
128 Encountering Althusser
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 antago-
nistic 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 exteri-
ority 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
Conjuncture, conflict, war 129
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 struc-
tural 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
130 Encountering Althusser
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 fasci-
nation 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 demon-
strating 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 self-
reflection 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
Conjuncture, conflict, war 131
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 repression-
model 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 intel-
ligibility 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
132 Encountering Althusser
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.
Conjuncture, conflict, war 133
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 histori-
cally 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 mecha-
nistic 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 hetero-
geneous 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
134 Encountering Althusser
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) differ-
ences 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 previ-
ously (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.
Conjuncture, conflict, war 135
‘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
138 Encountering Althusser
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 conse-
quences 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
.â•›.â•›. 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
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 (dialec-
tical 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
Althusser’s last encounter 139
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 propo-
sition 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
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 .â•›.â•›. Language changes with the transformation of the entire civili-
sation, 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 neces-
sarily 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 contempora-
neity 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.
Althusser’s last encounter 143
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 insti-
tutions 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 repre-
sents 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,
144 Encountering Althusser
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
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.
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 deter-
mining 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 accom-
plished 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, ‘decom-
posing’ 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
Althusser’s last encounter 147
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 origi-
nally 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 revolu-
tionary 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
148 Encountering Althusser
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.
Althusser’s last encounter 149
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.
150 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 intellectual-
political 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
Althusser’s last encounter 151
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.
10
Althusser and Spinoza: the
enigma of the subject
Caroline Williams
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
154 Encountering Althusser
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
.â•›.â•›.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
.â•›.â•›.’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, .â•›.â•›. 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
156 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›.
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 ‘.â•›.â•›.
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
Althusser and Spinoza 157
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 consti-
tution 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. by the concept of substance .â•›.â•›.which plays the role of the concept of the
articulation of the attributes’.26 I will not begin to deconstruct the strange, metaphoric usage
158 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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.
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) .â•›.â•›. 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 philo-
sophical 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
160 Encountering Althusser
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.â•›.â•›.) 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,
‘.â•›.â•›. where the dice are thrown back on the table unexpectedly .â•›.â•›. 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
Althusser and Spinoza 161
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 individu-
ality – 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 under-
standing 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,
.â•›.â•›. 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] .â•›.â•›. For Spinoza, politics is then grafted on to the world’s imaginary
and its necessary myths .â•›.â•›. 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 devel-
opment 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.
162 Encountering Althusser
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.
11
Althusser with Deleuze: how to think
Spinoza’s immanent cause
Katja Diefenbach
Althusser’s symptom
I 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 untrans-
latable 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
166 Encountering Althusser
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 formula-
tions 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 termi-
nology. 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.
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 solidifi-
cation, 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 (substantiali-
sation); 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’
168 Encountering Althusser
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
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 ‘correspond-
ences 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 labour-
power or representatives of property’.40 Even if the object of their study is fundamentally
170 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. [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
Althusser with Deleuze 171
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 alien-
ation, 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 anthropo-
logical 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 desig-
nates 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 reintro-
duces 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
Althusser with Deleuze 173
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
174 Encountering Althusser
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 recog-
nition); the evolutionistic periodisation of modes of production through one single principle
that drives the universalisation of the particular (division of labour); and the essentialist under-
standing 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
Althusser with Deleuze 175
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 deter-
mination 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 degra-
dations 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
176 Encountering Althusser
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 charac-
teristics 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 dislo-
cation 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 modifica-
tions; 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 potenti-
ality; 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
Althusser with Deleuze 177
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 .â•›.â•›. 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
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 contin-
gency, a lawless act, arising without reason, and destructuring and unbinding the embodied
Althusser with Deleuze 179
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 .â•›.â•›. 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 differ-
entiation. 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 contin-
gency 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’
180 Encountering Althusser
– 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 neutral-
ising 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.
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 [.â•›.â•›. der aleatorischen und provisorischen Beschaffenheit des Seins entsprechen .â•›.â•›.] in
Althusser 2010a, p. 72: ‘Which word to use to think the consistency of this subversion, .â•›.â•›.
which in the interior of philosophy .â•›.â•›. 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.
Althusser with Deleuze 181
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.
Althusser with Deleuze 183
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 popular-
frontist 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 political-
theoretical 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
186 Encountering Althusser
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 elabo-
ration 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.
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
Althusser and Tronti 187
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 conserv-
ative 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? .â•›.â•›. The
political holds together two things, the state plus the political class.9
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, wage-
labour, 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
Althusser and Tronti 189
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
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
190 Encountering Althusser
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
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 .â•›.â•›. 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
.â•›.â•›. [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
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. .â•›.â•›. The importance of workers’ spontaneity is reduced quali-
tatively 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 ‘political-
conjunctural’ 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 institu-
tions, as distinct moments of the struggle between classes, rather than as constitutive and
necessarily interwoven practices.
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.
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
194 Encountering Althusser
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 quasi-
Freudian 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 accom-
plished 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 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
196 Encountering Althusser
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, estab-
lished 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 previ-
ously 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,
Althusser and Tronti 197
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
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 trans-
formations, 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.
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 affir-
mation 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 repre-
senting 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
200 Encountering Althusser
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.
Althusser and Tronti 201
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.
Part Three
Thinking production
and reproduction
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 circu-
lates 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 (objec-
tivity) 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 scien-
tific 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
208 Encountering Althusser
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-to-
reform 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 theoretical-
humanist 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 episte-
mological 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 construc-
tions 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 deter-
mined 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 possi-
bility 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,
Louis Althusser and the concept of economy 209
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).
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 antago-
nistic 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 formu-
lated 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-deter-
mining 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
Louis Althusser and the concept of economy 211
To this, Althusser’s response was that the ‘economic is never clearly visible, does not
coincide with the “given”’, thus ‘.â•›.â•›. 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 distribu-
tions 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.
.â•›.â•›. 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
212 Encountering Althusser
which founds all the acts involved in the production, distribution, reception and consumption
of economic objects on the economic subjects and their needs .â•›.â•›. 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
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 specifi-
cally 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 ground-
rent.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,
214 Encountering Althusser
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
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.â•›.â•›.’ 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
216 Encountering Althusser
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 preoccupa-
tions. 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 deter-
minate 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 orien-
tation 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
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 surplus-
value 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 .â•›.â•›.’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 conse-
quence 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,
218 Encountering Althusser
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 homog-
enising 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.
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 condi-
tions 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 wage-
labour, 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.
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 ‘.â•›.â•›. Marxist science and the Marxist investigator are obliged to
Louis Althusser and the concept of economy 221
take a position in the conflict whose object is Marxist theory, are obliged to occupy (proletarian)
class theoretical positions .â•›.â•›. 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.
222 Encountering Althusser
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
226 Encountering Althusser
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 historical-
social 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 peculiar theoretical structure of Political Economy depends on immediately and directly
relating together a homogeneous space of given phenomena and an ideological anthro-
pology which bases the economic character of the phenomena and its space on man as the
subject of needs (the givenness of homo œconomicus). .â•›.â•›. As all the subjects are equally
subjects of needs .â•›.â•›. 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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 227
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 anthropo-
logical, 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 ‘differ-
ential 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
228 Encountering Althusser
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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 229
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 surplus-
value, 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 .â•›.â•›. modern economists’, who
submerge ‘the essential dissimilarity [die vesentliche Verschiedenheit]’, the distinctive charac-
teristics 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
230 Encountering Althusser
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 mathe-
matical 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 under-
stand 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 appro-
priation 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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 231
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 indis-
pensable 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 ideal-
istic 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
232 Encountering Althusser
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 recon-
struction 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;
Althusser and the critique of political economy 233
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 corre-
spondence 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 ‘devia-
tions’, 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
234 Encountering Althusser
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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 235
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 [‘jedes-
maligen’]).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 articu-
lation (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 tradi-
tional 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 neces-
sarily 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
236 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›. [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 super-
structure), 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 anthro-
pologists 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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 237
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 struc-
tures 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 never-
theless 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 recip-
rocal 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
238 Encountering Althusser
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.
since ‘the natural form of the commodity becomes the value-form .â•›.â•›. only within the value-
relation 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 ‘value-
form’, 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
240 Encountering Althusser
‘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. .â•›.â•›. 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.
.â•›.â•›. 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
Althusser and the critique of political economy 241
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 signifi-
cance 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 insti-
tutionalist 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 postu-
lates’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.
242 Encountering Althusser
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 every-
thing his theory is meant to oppose (humanism, anthropology, ideology, Hegelian idealism, the
youthful Marx.â•›.â•›.).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.
Althusser and the critique of political economy 243
T 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
248 Encountering Althusser
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).
task of political revolution, which allows one to account for why Althusser sees state appara-
tuses 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
The problem of reproduction 251
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 articu-
lation 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
252 Encountering Althusser
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
The problem of reproduction 253
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 generali-
sation 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 identi-
fication 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
254 Encountering Althusser
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
The problem of reproduction 255
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 subjecti-
vation, 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.
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 persis-
tence 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 transforma-
tions 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 contra-
dictions. 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
The problem of reproduction 257
In light of these desiderata left by Marx’s elaborations, we need to take seriously the self-
criticism 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 revolu-
tionary 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 illumi-
nating 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 mecha-
nisms 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.
258 Encountering Althusser
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.
The problem of reproduction 259
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
260 Encountering Althusser
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?).
16
To think the new in the absence of
its conditions: Althusser and Negri
and the philosophy of primitive
accumulation
Jason Read
L 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 philos-
opher 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
262 Encountering Althusser
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 transforma-
tions in which effects are never reducible to intentions.
To think the new in the absence of its conditions 263
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 simul-
taneously 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
264 Encountering Althusser
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.
To think the new in the absence of its conditions 265
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 uncon-
scious 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.â•›.â•›.), 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
266 Encountering Althusser
regarding the two modes of production suggests, this reproduction has often been under-
stood 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 unpre-
dictable 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 repro-
duction, 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
To think the new in the absence of its conditions 267
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 philoso-
phers 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
268 Encountering Althusser
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 fundamen-
tally 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 accumu-
lation, 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 sociali-
sation, 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
To think the new in the absence of its conditions 269
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 .â•›.â•›. its constructions are construc-
tions 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 reinter-
pretation 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 under-
lying 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 common-
ality 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 transcen-
dental 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
270 Encountering Althusser
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 under-
standing 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.
To think the new in the absence of its conditions 271
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 determi-
nations 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 transfor-
mation 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 orien-
tation, 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 incor-
poration 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.
272 Encountering Althusser
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.
Part Four
The materiality of
ideology, the primacy
of politics
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
276 Encountering Althusser
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 parti-
sanship, 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, ‘inter-
nally 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
The impossible break 277
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:
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 .â•›.â•›. and the French philosophers and politicians .â•›.â•›. 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 elabo-
ration 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 tradi-
tions 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.
The impossible break 279
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. .â•›.â•›. But there is in Marx a second quite different reading, with nothing
in common with the first. .â•›.â•›. [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
280 Encountering Althusser
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 empti-
nesses 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 anti-
establishment while still firmly rooted in the university establishment. In these years of political
contradictions, with their interrelated mobilisations and transformations, the perspective
The impossible break 281
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 splin-
tered 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 build-
ing’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 charac-
teristics 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
The impossible break 283
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 trans-
formation 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 every-
thing 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 reappro-
priation 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 contra-
dictions 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
284 Encountering Althusser
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 redefi-
nitions, 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
The impossible break 285
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 impos-
sible 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 impos-
sible 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.
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.
286 Encountering Althusser
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, Editing-
Broadcasting 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.
The impossible break 287
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.
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 institu-
tions) 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
290 Encountering Althusser
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, ‘.â•›.â•›. 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 philo-
sophical 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 consti-
tuting 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
The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious 291
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 under-
standing 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, never-
theless lies in a crucial homology between the structural causality implied in the formations of
the Unconscious (dream, lapsus, neurotic symptoms.â•›.â•›.) and the structural causality involved
in ideological effects (the ‘obviousness’ of being a subject, or the ‘subject-effect’) character-
istic 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
292 Encountering Althusser
reflected form (as in pre-Marxist ‘philosophy’) .â•›.â•›. [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
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 consequen-
tiality – 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 ‘subjec-
tivisation-’ 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-elabo-
ration: 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 state-
ments suggest a few remarks for the purpose of our analysis.
294 Encountering Althusser
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 insuf-
ficiencies 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 interpellation-
as-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
296 Encountering Althusser
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.
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, subjecti-
vation 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.
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 consti-
tuted 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 self-
knowledge, 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.
300 Encountering Althusser
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 correl-
ative 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 constitution-
interpellation-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 subjec-
tivity (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.
The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious 301
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 self-
knowledge, 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 inter-
pellated 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 psycho-
logical 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, antago-
nistic 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,
302 Encountering Althusser
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 repre-
sents, 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 ‘subject-
effect’ [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
The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious 303
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 constituted-
interpellated 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.
304 Encountering Althusser
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 ‘.â•›.â•›. 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. [.â•›.â•›.] 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.
The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious 305
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”
.â•›.â•›. 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.
19
Ideological interpellation:
identification and subjectivation
Rastko Močnik
A 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
.â•›.â•›. 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
308 Encountering Althusser
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.
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 enunci-
ators, 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 enuncia-
tions 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 actuali-
sation of the topos certainly does introduce subjective markers or ‘shifters’ that refer to the
enunciation-situation (here, now, us.â•›.â•›.), 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 retroac-
tively 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
Ideological interpellation 311
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 inter-
preter, 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 inter-
preter’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 interpel-
lated 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 intro-
duced 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 recog-
nises 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 argumen-
tation-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
312 Encountering Althusser
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 super-
ficial 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.
Although the first point has important consequences, it is in itself rather trivial. It can be illus-
trated 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
Ideological interpellation 313
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 articu-
lation 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
{ E2
presented as unjust
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’
E2’
presented as a public good
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
314 Encountering Althusser
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
{ E2
presented as just
E1’ We
{
as the ones who are joining this just struggle
D’
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
Ideological interpellation 315
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
{ E2
presented as objectionable
E1’ We
{
D’ presented as the agents of these acts
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-mecha-
nisms 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 state-
apparatuses – 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 repro-
duced 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 ‘monop-
olised’ 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 school-
apparatus. 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 opera-
tions 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.
Ideological interpellation 317
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 summa-
rised as follows:
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
318 Encountering Althusser
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 surplus-
value, 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 ‘.â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. “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
Ideological interpellation 319
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: ‘.â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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).
320 Encountering Althusser
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 ‘.â•›.â•›. in argumentative strings of discourse, the argument and the conclusion have no semantic
value independently from one another .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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 .â•›.â•›. 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
Ideological interpellation 321
person who, according to the very meaning of an utterance, is the person responsible for that
utterance .â•›.â•›. [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 .â•›.â•›. The subject is what the signifier represents for another
signifier [Un signifiant, c’est ce qui représente le sujet pour un autre signifiant .â•›.â•›. 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.
322 Encountering Althusser
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.
20
‘Es kömmt drauf an’: notes on
Althusser’s critique of the subject
Ozren Pupovac
T 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?
324 Encountering Althusser
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 subjec-
tivity, 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 interpel-
lation: 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
‘Es kömmt drauf an’ 325
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 contra-
diction 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 juridico-
political 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 formu-
lation 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 possi-
bilities’ 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
326 Encountering Althusser
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 inade-
quacy 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.
‘Es kömmt drauf an’ 327
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 contradic-
tions 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
328 Encountering Althusser
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 presupposi-
tions 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 .â•›.â•›. [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
‘Es kömmt drauf an’ 329
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 presup-
posed 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 intelligi-
bility, 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
330 Encountering Althusser
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 deter-
minations 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 contra-
diction 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 contin-
gency 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 transfor-
mation 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 interpre-
tation 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
‘Es kömmt drauf an’ 331
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.
332 Encountering Althusser
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 inter-
vention 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 objec-
tivity 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 quali-
tative 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
‘Es kömmt drauf an’ 333
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.
334 Encountering Althusser
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 .â•›.â•›.’ (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.
21
Between the tenth and eleventh
theses on Feuerbach: Althusser’s
return to new materialism
Gal Kirn
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
336 Encountering Althusser
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 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 bürger-
liche 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
338 Encountering Althusser
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 substi-
tuted 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 always-
already 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 philoso-
phers’ 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.
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 materi-
alism 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
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 339
is necessary to elaborate a concept which allows thinking together the determined (historical-
social) 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 under-
stood 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 objec-
tivism 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
340 Encountering Althusser
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
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 materi-
alism 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-philo-
sophical 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 stand-
point 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
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 341
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 state-
apparatuses. 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 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
342 Encountering Althusser
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 organi-
sational 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 inter-
pretation 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 philosophy-
as-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,
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 343
reading them together. It is this that constitutes the strategic theoretical nexus advanced by
Althusser: the triangle between philosophy, politics and science.
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
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 345
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 demon-
strating 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 inter-
relationships. 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 discon-
tinuities 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
346 Encountering Althusser
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 direc-
tives to science and politics, or we understand ‘philosophy as a machine for class translation’
of discourses and practices.62
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 enter-
prise? 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 ideol-
ogies. 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 philo-
sophical 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
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 347
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 revolu-
tionary 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 trans-
formation 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 under-
stood as a simple merging of revolutionary theory and practice. Rather, Althusser’s encounter
348 Encountering Althusser
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 accom-
panied 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.
Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach 349
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 truth-
procedures. 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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Index of Works by
Louis Althusser
22ème Congrès 193, 198, 201, 287 ‘Il marxismo come teoria “finita”’ 193
Introduction à la philosophie 110
‘Algunas cuestiones de la crisis de la teoría
marxista’ 109 ‘La solitude de Machiavel’ 61, 73
‘Appendice A’ 149 L’avenir dure longtemps 38–40, 124
‘Avertissement‘ 245 Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 32, 38,
40, 57, 117, 124, 151, 202, 222, 258, 287,
Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti 303–6, 319, 333, 350
communiste français 287 Letter of 2 September 1966 to Michel Verret
‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ 35, 75, 110
80, 95, 98, 129, 144, 215, 222 Letter of 14 August 1966 to Michel Verret 110
‘Crisis of Marxism, The’ 193, 272 Letter of 22 January 1964 to Michel Verret 110
Letter of 23 October 1966 to Yves Duroux 108
‘Diverses Notes’ 108, 110–11 Letter of 24 November 1963 to Lucien Sève
‘Du matérialisme aléatoire’ 40 109
Lettres à Franca 108, 110, 116, 144, 150
Écrits philosophiques et politiques 4, 24, 73, Lire le Capital (Althusser, Louis et al.) 108–10,
180, 193 226, 242
Écrits sur la psychanalyse: Freud et Lacan 87, ‘L’unique tradition matérialiste’ 61, 73
305 ‘L’objet du Capital’ 73
Elements of Self-Criticism 39, 110, 116, 118,
182, 286 Machiavel et nous 61, 258
Essays in Self-Criticism 38–9, 58, 123–4, Machiavelli and Us 35, 43, 46, 48–51, 55, 78,
155, 161–3, 180, 182–3, 203, 209, 215, 82–3, 115–17, 119–25, 345
220–2, 242, 286–7, 303, 305–6, 334, 351 ‘Man, That Night’ 89
Essays on Ideology 162, 351 ‘Matérialisme historique et matérialisme
dialectique’ 117
For Marx xiii, xvii, xix, 75, 80, 89–90, 92–5, Materialismus der Begegnung 180–1
98–9, 101–5, 121, 123, 129, 144–7, Montesquieu: Politics and History 89, 92,
149–50, 173–4, 182–3, 198, 203, 222, 93–9, 102–4, 106, 109
272, 276, 278, 281, 284–6, 289–91, 295, Montesquieu: la politique et l’histoire 38, 123
300, 303, 331, 333-4, 340, 348–9
Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts, The ‘Note critique et autocritique pour le lecteur de
xxi, 116, 125 Pour Marx et Lire le Capital, 16 October
Future Lasts Forever, The. A Memoir 4, 181, 1967’ 110
275, 285 ‘Note sur les Thèses sur Feuerbach’ 343,
346–8
Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, The ‘Notes sur Lévi-Strauss’ 109
xv, 108, 110–11, 117, 124, 162, 287, 334,
349 ‘On Genesis’ 108, 110–11
‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ 35, 95, 102, 116,
Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate 258 144, 285
Index of Works by Louis Althusser 369
‘On Theoretical Work’ 89, 90, 100–2, 106, 121 220–3, 242–5, 265, 272, 279–81, 291,
‘Only Materialist Tradition, The, Part 1: Spinoza’ 303–4, 321, 348
39, 116, 124, 150–1, 161–3, 286 ‘Rectification [19]67’ 110
Réponse à John Lewis 62, 73, 334
Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of
the Scientists and Other Essays xxi, 24, ‘Socialisme idéologique et socialisme
38, 40, 109–11, 124–5, 151, 250–1, 258, scientifique’ 109, 111
272, 287 Solitude de Machiavel et autres textes, La 3,
Philosophy of the Encounter. Later Writings, 73, 108–9, 334
1978–1987 xv–xvi, 24–6, 28, 39–41, ‘Sur la pensée marxiste’ 109, 41
58–60, 73–4, 108, 111, 123–4, 148, Sur la Philosophie 4
150–1, 154, 159–60, 161–3, 180–1, 184, Sur la Reproduction 41, 104, 163, 248, 255,
201–3, 223, 272, 285–7, 350 258, 281, 286–7, 305, 318–9, 321, 324,
Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, 333–4, 350
Hegel and Marx 89–95, 97–9, 102–4, ‘Sur la revolution culturelle’ 350
106, 108–10, 123, 182, 333 Spectre of Hegel, The: Early Writings 108–9
Politique et Histoire de Machiavel á Marx:
Cours á l’École Normale Supérieure, ‘Théorie marxiste et parti communiste’ 89,
1955–1972 73, 123–4, 272 100, 111
Positions 304, 317
Pour Marx 57, 110 Über die Reproduktion 258
‘Projet d’une lettre à Voprossy filosofi’ 109 ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of
Psychanalyse et sciences humaines. Deux the Encounter, The’ 4, 19, 46–7, 49–51,
conférences (1963–1964) 87, 304–6 54–5, 57, 64, 68, 82, 104, 146, 152, 178,
180–1, 272
Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar) xiii,
xvii–xix, 15, 41, 59, 63–4, 89–90, 92, ‘What Must Change in the Party’ xxi
96–105, 108–11, 124, 127–8, 130, 135, Writings on Psychoanalysis 111, 163, 221,
137–9, 144–7, 149–51, 153–5, 7, 161–2, 259
168, 173, 181–3, 198, 208, 210, 212, 217,
Index of Names
Diskin, Jonathan 220 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xiii, xviii, 19,
Dolar, Mladen 57, 78, 86, 259, 304, 306 23, 40–1, 63–5, 69, 70, 72, 76, 78,
Ducrot, Oswald 310, 318–21 81–3, 81–6, 92, 94, 98–9, 116, 121,
123, 138–41, 149, 155, 166, 168, 171–8,
Economakis, George 40 181–3, 188, 200, 215–16, 218, 241–42,
Elliott, Gregory xxi, 57, 109, 120, 124, 150, 154, 245, 250–2, 254, 256, 259, 270, 277–8,
161, 258, 335, 345, 350 280, 285–6, 323–4, 326, 328, 333,
Engels, Friedrich 4, 6, 22, 41, 80–1, 87, 90, 336–7, 344, 348–51
95, 137, 148, 173, 183, 215, 255, 277–8, Heidegger, Martin xiii, xv, xvi, xviii, 4, 9, 10–12,
318–19, 350 14, 19, 22, 62, 69, 79, 120, 137, 163, 167,
Epicurus xiii, 4–6, 9, 19, 22–3, 31–2, 39, 62, 172, 178–9, 184, 263, 349
64, 69, 90, 107, 120, 137, 160, 172, 263 Hobbes, Thomas xiii, xv, 4, 8–9, 62, 70, 81,
Establet, Roger 242 115, 123, 131–2, 137, 160, 249
Horkheimer, Max 200, 249
Feltham, Oliver 151 Husserl, Edmund 320
Feuerbach, Ludwig xx, 6, 35, 62, 90, 172, 243, Hyppolite, Jean 168, 170, 171–2, 174, 181–3
299, 323, 336–9, 347, 349, 351
Finelli, Roberto 149 Ichida, Yoshihiko 28, 38, 40, 69, 73, 84, 88,
Foucault, Michel xviii, 60, 97, 110, 128, 129, 150, 242
130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 174, 182, Ípola, Emilio de 111
183, 193, 201, 221, 248, 259, 275, 282, Ives, Peter 149
286, 305
Fourtounis, Giorgos xvii, 57–8, 150, 163, 179, Kaplan, Ann xxi
183–4 Karatani, Kojin 85
Frankfurt School 249–50 Kautsky, Karl 250, 258, 339
Freud, Sigmund xiii, xvi, 23, 87, 194, 259, Kayatekin, Serap 223
289–91, 295–9, 301, 303–6, 319 Kelly, Michael 285
Frosini, Fabio 74, 149 Kerslake, Christian 170, 181–2
Koivisto, Juha 124, 125, 148
Gadet, Françoise 259, 317 Korsch, Karl 277
Garaudy, Roger 108, 117, 277 Kristjansen-Gural, David 221
Geertz, Clifford 244
Gentile, Giovanni 144 Labica, Georges 249, 258, 350
Gerratana, Valentino 139, 144 Labriola, Antonio 255
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 223 Lacan, Jacques xiii, xvi, xviii, xx, 79, 81, 157–9,
Godelier, Maurice 234, 237, 242–3 163, 166, 168, 170–1, 181–2, 248, 253–4,
Goshgarian, G. M. xvii, 28–9, 38, 40, 58, 108, 259, 291, 294–308, 318–19, 321
110, 116, 117, 121, 123–4, 149, 150–1, Laclau, Ernesto xiv, 222
154, 162, 201, 202, 345, 348 Lahtinen, Mikko xviii, xxi, 29, 38, 73, 124, 125,
Gramsci, Antonio xviii, 6, 13, 18–19, 20, 22, 53, 150, 151, 198, 203, 222
60, 69–70, 72, 74, 116–19, 122–5, 129, Lefebvre, Henri 259–60, 270
134–5, 137, 138–44, 147, 148–50, 202, Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 9–10, 32, 63, 64,
248, 259, 350 116, 170, 173, 175, 181, 183
Prison Notebooks 74, 118–19, 122–3, Lenin, Vladimir Ilich xix, 4, 6, 32, 35, 79, 81,
139–41, 143–5, 149, 150 83, 95, 98–102, 110, 116–18, 121–3, 140,
Guibert, Bernard 251, 258 142, 148, 180, 186, 188–9, 193–4, 196–8,
Guillaume, Marc 244 201–2, 250–1, 254–5, 258, 277, 281, 283,
Gurwitsch, Georges 320 286–7, 328, 330, 343, 350
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 98, 109, 157, 159, 237,
Habjan, Jernej 321 321
Hands, D. Wade 221 Levine, Andrew 242
Harvey, David 223 Lewis, 38, 62, 122, 124, 156, 158, 198, 202,
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz 139, 149 287, 334, 340
372 Index of Names
Liguori, Guido 149–50 86, 88, 120–4, 147, 148, 150–1, 162, 193,
Lindner, Kolja 245 242
Lipietz, Alain 41, 242 Mehring, Franz 318
Lo Iacono, Cristian 149 Menger, Carl 232
Locke, John 81, 115, 123, 133, 157, 177, 191, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 156, 277, 286
249, 281, 309 Mezzadra, Sandro 223
Lucretius 4, 160, 175 Milios, John 40, 244
Lukács, György xxi, 6, 156, 250, 277, 339, 340, Miller, Jacques-Alain 168, 170, 181–2, 291
348 Mirowski, Philip 221
Mitterrand, François 118
Macherey, Pierre xiv, 39, 40, 73, 86, 107, Močnik, Rastko xx, 57, 258, 303, 307, 318, 321,
110–11, 149, 151, 153, 155–6, 162, 173, 351
175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 220, 242, Montag, Warren xviii, xxi, 40, 48, 50, 56–60,
337–9, 343, 345–7, 349–51 82, 87, 110, 124, 127, 150–1, 154, 161,
Machiavelli, Niccolò xiii, xv, xvii, xviii, xxi, 3–4, 163, 175, 179, 183–4, 220
6–8, 18–19, 29, 32, 35–6, 43–4, 46, Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat,
48–55, 60–2, 64–5, 68–74, 78, 82–5, 87, Marquis de la Brède xiii, 7, 28, 38,
95, 99, 108, 115–25, 127–34, 137, 150, 89–98, 102, 104, 108–9, 115–16, 123
153, 160, 180, 192, 249, 261–4, 266–70, Morfino, Vittorio xvii, 29, 31, 35, 38–9, 41, 61,
272, 332, 336, 345, 350 120–1, 124–5, 148, 150–1, 163, 222
The Prince 6–7, 11–12, 18, 39, 50, 52–4, Mouffe, Chantal 222, 258
60, 64, 68–72, 83–4, 115, 118, 120–4, Moulier Boutang, Yann 27, 38, 40, 80, 85–7,
128–32, 161, 263–4, 267, 269–70 120, 124
Madonia, Franca 108, 116, 144 Mury, Gilbert 108
Madra, Yahya 221, 223
Mamardashvili, Merab 318, 351 Nagel, Thomas 58
Mandel, Ernest 245 Nancy, Jean-Luc 167, 172, 181–2, 349
Marchais, Georges 321 Navarro, Fernanda 4, 116
Marcuse, Herbert 277 Negri, Antonio xix, 27, 38, 41, 73, 78, 86,
Marx, Karl xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxi, 120–2, 124, 147, 151, 154, 161, 168, 181,
3–5, 9, 11, 13, 15–19, 22–3, 25, 31, 190, 201, 261–2, 267–72, 286
34–5, 37, 39–40, 45, 61–5, 68, 75–80, Nietzsche, Friedrich xvi, 9, 12, 252, 259
82–3, 85–7, 89–99, 101–5, 108–111, North, Douglass 230, 243
116–17, 120–3, 128, 129, 137, 139,
144–51, 155–6, 159, 165–6, 168, 172–5, Özselçuk, Ceren xix, 207, 221, 223
177, 180–3, 185–94, 196–203, 208–18,
221, 223, 225–32, 245, 249–51, 255–8, Pascal, Blaise 32, 40, 69, 87, 292–3, 304
261–72, 275–81, 283–7, 289–91, 295, Pashukanis, Evgeny 325, 333
298, 300, 303–4, 318, 321, 323–5, Pêcheux, Michel 259, 291, 294, 302–5, 317
327–8, 330–1, 333–42, 344–5, 348–51 Pfaller, Robert 306
Capital xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, 15, 17, 18, Plato 69, 161, 338
23, 34, 59, 63, 64, 89, 90, 92, 96–105, Plekhanov, Georgi 255
108–11, 117–18, 120–1, 123, 127–8, 130, Plotinus 175
137–9, 144–7, 149–50, 153–5, 157, 161, Poe, Edgar Allen 107
168, 173, 194, 196, 198, 200, 208, 210, Polanyi, Karl 234, 237, 243–4
212, 214, 215, 217, 218, 223, 225–6, Pollock, Friedrich 249
229, 231, 234, 238, 241–5, 249, 255–6, Poulantzas, Nicos 193, 200–1, 242, 282, 286
261–3, 265, 268, 279–81, 304, 321,
330–1, 340, 348, 351 Ramonet, Ignacio 243
Grundrisse 91, 102, 214, 234, 261 Rancière, Jacques xiv, 241–2, 244, 258–9, 286,
Theses on Feuerbach xx, 35, 62, 243, 323, 314, 321, 334, 351
335–8, 349, 351 Raymond, Pierre 24, 276
Matheron, François 28, 38–41, 57, 61–2, 77, Read, Jason xix, 150, 151, 223, 261, 272, 350
Index of Names 373
absolute, the 13, 78, 171–2, 178 52–3, 55–5, 64–8, 76–7, 86–7, 94, 154,
absolute beginning xvii, 33, 43–6, 50–4, 57 159, 166–72, 175–80, 264, 266, 269–70,
absolute knowledge xiv, 78, 138–9, 254 278, 325
actuality 38, 128, 155, 169, 171, 323
affect 59, 63, 159–62, 176–8, 181, 183, 253, capital 16, 97, 187–92, 194, 197, 208, 216–18,
264, 269–70 232, 239, 241, 249–51, 255–6, 262, 265,
affection 63, 177, 181 268–9, 271, 318, 325, 339, 341
aleatorism 47–50, 56, 345 capitalism, specificity of 16, 30, 34, 188, 217,
aleatory 4–6, 15, 17–18, 22, 28–9, 32, 37, 40, 228, 231, 237, 242, 262, 327
43, 46–8, 50, 56, 58, 62, 68, 80, 83–4, catharsis 143
160, 178, 263, 265, 271 Catholicism 252–3, 258
encounter xvii, 5, 9, 28, 46–8, 50–2, 71, 75, causality 7, 32, 37, 44–5, 63, 81, 87, 93, 166–8,
160, 267 170–1, 175–8, 180, 213, 290–1, 336,
materialism see materialism, aleatory 346, 349, 350, 351
science 96 expressive 53, 63–4, 81, 173, 175, 181, 215
structuralism xvii, 47–9, 52, 54–6, 58, 60 historical 7, 32
alliance between revolutionary movements immanent xviii, 45–6, 49, 53, 63, 166–70,
185, 192, 210, 257, 344 172, 175, 179, 266, 291
always-already 10, 33, 37, 44–6, 49, 53–4, 56, structural 19, 32, 35, 38, 44–6, 48–9, 52,
80, 100, 146, 293–7, 303, 316, 338 56, 60, 63, 93, 130, 156, 166, 168,
ambivalence xiv, 145, 160, 183, 207, 300, 304, 173–5, 208, 215, 228–9, 237, 261, 265–6,
343 291
anamorphosis 82, 87 cause 5, 12, 44, 55–6, 67, 71, 79, 130, 154,
anti-empiricism 34, 229 160, 175, 177, 183, 215–17, 226, 266,
anti-humanism xiv, 13, 119, 153, 157, 159, 277, 292
162–3, 202, 283, 293 absent 32, 166, 168–70, 213, 291
theoretical xiv, 153, 159, 162, 283, 293 immanent 44–5, 47–51, 53, 89, 168–70,
anti-teleology 29–30, 46–9, 116 175–6
atomism 34, 36, 62, 81, 106–7, 179 change 9, 22, 28, 67, 91, 104, 222, 237, 265–6,
atoms 4–6, 8, 13–14, 31–3, 46, 48–50, 54–6, 271, 324, 328, 330–1, 333, 337, 343, 347
60, 69, 75, 78, 81, 91, 178 historical 94, 96, 103, 210
attribute (Spinoza) 7–8, 78, 91, 147, 156–7, 161, social 32–3, 36–8, 104, 342
169–70, 178, 266 civil society 132–3, 140, 142–3, 150, 190,
Aufhebung 83, 280 194–5, 198, 249, 333
autonomia operaia 249 class xix, 16–17, 83, 94–5, 142–4, 186–9,
autonomy of politics see politics, autonomy of 190–3, 207, 233, 235, 249–50, 257, 259,
autonomy of the political see political, 265, 280, 317, 345–6
autonomy of the class struggle xvii, 12, 19, 37, 79, 83–5, 89,
94, 98, 104, 106, 115, 120–1, 142, 144,
base/superstructure 80–1, 129, 133, 138, 174, 166, 190–3, 195–6, 198–200, 202, 203,
186–7, 189, 196 209–11, 221, 255–6, 282–3, 318, 321,
being xvi, 5–6, 9–10, 14–15, 22, 39, 43, 46, 48, 325, 327–8, 331
Index 375
primacy of the encounter over the xvii, 28, identification 45, 83, 101, 140, 160, 217, 248,
62, 64, 65, 68, 264 253, 291, 298, 303, 307–11, 314–16, 320
fortuna 50–2, 59, 70–2, 74, 95 ideological anthropology 212, 226, 228, 230–1
freedom 4, 13–14, 16, 37, 41, 70, 121, 177, ideological, the 77, 143, 253, 331
192, 241, 253, 320, 325 ideology xvii, 8, 30, 44–5, 57, 137, 153, 156,
freedom-subject 14 159–60, 163, 187–8, 190, 201, 221–2,
231, 233, 242, 249, 256–7, 259, 266,
gender 250, 252, 255–6 271, 278–81, 286, 289–92, 294, 303,
God 5, 7, 13, 49, 64, 70, 78, 91, 129, 145, 154, 305, 307–9, 312, 318–20, 323–5, 332,
156, 159, 161, 165, 169, 177, 252, 254, 337, 340–1, 346, 349, 350
268, 294–5, 299, 301, 304, 319 bourgeois 81, 293, 351
governmentality 248 dominant 20–1, 116, 118, 148, 225, 316–17,
339, 348
Hegelianism xvii, 141, 166 in general 248, 250, 253, 259
hegemonic apparatus 137, 142 materiality of xx, 93, 248, 271, 292
hegemony 19, 22, 34, 37, 116, 137, 142, 147, and philosophy 143, 146, 150, 247, 282–3,
186, 202, 251, 271 287, 331, 347
hetero-integration 186, 200 and politics xx, 266, 276, 283, 347, 351
heterodoxy 186 proletarian 282–3, 287, 331, 347
historic compromise 180, 186, 199, 201 and science 77, 138, 146, 154–5, 209–11,
historical linguistics 140, 150 220, 254, 263, 276–7, 284–5, 327
historical materialism see materialism, theory of xiii, xix–xx, 32, 43, 158–9, 177,
historical 254, 289, 300, 302–4, 307, 320, 324,
historical necessity 7, 17, 130, 188 326–8
historical time 41, 96, 104, 128–9, 138, 142, and the unconscious 157–8, 253, 290
149, 218 Il Manifesto 193–4
historicism 17, 19, 28, 33, 116, 137, 139, 141, imaginary 7–8, 12, 19, 70–2
145, 159, 208, 210, 218–19, 231, 233–4, imaginary materialism see materialism,
238, 271 imaginary
historicism, absolute 117, 138–9, 141 imagination 8, 32, 34, 156, 159, 161, 194, 266,
historicism, idealistic 231 268, 271, 276, 284
historiography 40, 96, 104 immanence 44–5, 76–7, 83–4, 130, 166–7, 169,
history xviii, 7–10, 13, 18, 23, 33, 41, 46–9, 54, 171, 175–6, 178, 181, 291, 331
58, 61–2, 64, 68, 70–2, 77, 80, 83, 85, imperialism 32, 222, 330
89, 92–105, 107, 115, 119, 120–2, 127–9, impossibility 24, 37, 78, 80, 86, 211, 216, 293,
132, 137–9, 141, 143, 147, 150, 155, 158, 298, 305, 320, 329–31, 333
160–1, 166, 168, 170, 172, 190, 192, indeterminate, the 87, 167, 169, 176, 179
194, 198, 202, 216–19, 225, 228, 230–2, individuation 167, 169–71, 176, 178–80
234–5, 238, 254, 261–2, 264, 267–8, infinity xviii, 5, 7, 78, 81, 87, 141, 161, 177, 319
270–1, 281, 283, 289–91, 296, 321, 323, institutional economics 208, 216, 230
325, 328–9, 333 integral state see state, integral
laws of 15, 36, 83, 330 intensity 170
theory of 9, 13, 85, 103, 121, 139, 218, 225, interpellation xiv, xviii, xx, 13, 20, 43, 45, 54,
228–9, 242, 351 81, 158–9, 163, 248–50, 252–4, 257, 259,
homo œconomicus 59, 81, 212, 221, 226, 292–6, 299, 302–4, 306–18, 321, 324–7,
229–30, 304 332
humanism 156, 159, 200, 202, 208, 210–14, interval xviii, 84, 127, 170
216, 221, 231, 242, 338, 340–1, 348 intervention xviii, 6, 22, 30, 32–6, 50, 57, 77,
105, 117, 129, 144, 157, 207, 212, 332
idealism 4, 6, 9–11, 13, 16, 19–23, 30, 32, 40,
76, 79, 141, 153, 178, 210, 214, 242, Jannot’s knife 91
245, 263, 277, 334, 337–8
idealism of freedom 4, 11, 13, 16–17, 19, 31 knowledge 7–8, 12–13, 15, 32, 34, 37–9, 41,
378 Index
51, 75–8, 80–1, 86, 89, 91, 95, 97, 100, 106, 120–2, 145, 151, 166, 263–4, 266–7,
102–3, 105, 117, 129, 139, 141, 150, 271, 302, 335–6
154–7, 175, 188, 208, 211–12, 218, 220, dialectical 6, 86, 120–1, 138–9, 335–6, 340
225, 229, 231, 233, 238, 242, 263, of the encounter xv, xvii, 3–4, 6, 9–13, 19,
277–9, 283, 289, 301–2, 309–10, 314, 23, 27, 29, 61–2, 64, 68, 71, 75, 78–9,
318–20, 323–24, 326–33 120, 146–7, 161, 166, 178–81
historical 9, 27, 35–6, 38, 75, 83, 100, 105,
labour 23, 167, 188, 192, 213, 217, 220, 233, 138–9, 157–8, 188, 207, 233–4, 237,
238, 240, 250, 261–2, 264, 268–71, 280, 255
318, 325 of the imaginary 289, 292–3
abstract 218, 238–40 Marxist 6, 19
concrete 211, 239–40 new 264, 335–42, 345–6, 348
of the negative 36, 69 meaning 5, 6, 10, 12, 25, 53, 56–7, 65, 91,
lack 158, 168, 170 97, 104, 132, 142–3, 146, 159–60, 209,
language 142, 157, 196–7, 278, 297, 308, 310, 219–20, 232, 238–9, 302, 308–11,
317, 319, 319–20, 342
law 5–8, 14–15, 72, 92–4, 109, 128–30, 132, means of production 16, 18, 39, 217, 223,
168, 195–6, 207, 223, 253–5, 262, 265, 227–9, 232, 234–5, 256, 262, 325
281–2, 301, 321, 325, 337–8, 341, 351 metaphysics 4, 9–10, 17, 22, 30, 39, 62, 141,
law of value 208, 213, 216, 238 167, 263–4, 268–70, 290, 299
lexical meaning / utterer’s meaning 309, 311 methodological individualism 233
locutor 314, 316, 320–1 migration 142
mode (Spinoza) 169, 176
manifesto 53–4, 60, 84, 121–2, 124 mode of production xiii, xix–xx, 16–19, 23, 30,
Marxism xiii, xv–xvi, 13, 28, 87, 89–90, 103, 65, 68–9, 96–8, 101, 103–5, 144, 157,
110, 115, 127, 138–9, 148–9, 156, 162, 166, 168, 170, 199, 208, 214, 216–19,
165, 170, 173–4, 193–4, 214, 218, 232, 226–31, 233–42, 247, 256, 262, 265,
234–5, 253, 275, 277–80, 282, 284, 337, 269, 278, 283, 318, 321, 339–40, 349
340, 348 model xiv, xviii, 4–8, 63, 65, 70, 72, 76, 80–1,
classical 28, 213 87, 92–3, 107, 131–2, 138–40, 166, 169,
crisis of xiv, xix, 27, 29, 137, 186, 192–4, 171–3, 175–9, 187, 214, 228, 233, 235,
198, 200, 335, 343 238, 252–3, 279–80, 293, 299, 302, 340,
-Humanism 117, 150, 338, 340 346, 351
imaginary 276 modern Prince 72, 74, 129
Western 138, 277 money-form 217, 239–40, 256
Marxist philosophy 76, 100, 116, 120, 138–9, mystification 251, 327
143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 166, 262, 270,
276, 345–7 nation 50, 54, 59, 69, 92–3, 109, 142, 316
Marxist theory xiii, 8, 38, 83, 99, 105, 115, 116, national state 43, 50, 54, 59, 68–9
118–19, 121, 123, 138, 185–90, 193–4, necessity xv, xix, 4, 6–7, 9, 14, 17–18, 20, 37,
196, 198, 221, 256, 286, 300, 329, 340, 39, 41, 46–7, 70, 72, 78–9, 93–7, 99, 107,
349–50 121, 129, 145–6, 157, 216, 218–19, 222,
Marxist-Leninist philosophy 251, 283, 287 263–71, 289, 293, 296, 300, 307, 330,
masses xviii, xix, 20, 24, 54, 116, 118–20, 122, 332
195, 197–9, 202, 323, 329, 334, 342, negativity 78, 168, 171, 178
344–8 neoclassical economics 221, 229, 232–3
materialism xv, xvii, 4, 6, 9, 16, 22–3, 27–8, 32, new Prince 7, 18, 50, 52, 129
34–5, 39, 46, 60, 62, 79, 106, 116, 120, new principality 50–2
141, 146, 155, 159, 172, 178, 210, 220, new social movements 250
235, 262, 293, 336–7, 339–40, 348–50 non-contemporaneity xviii, 140–2, 150, 218
aleatory xv, xvi–xvii, 3, 6, 8–12, 15–17, non-philosophy xviii, 147–8
19–24, 27–9, 31, 46–9, 55, 57, 58, 62, nothingness 5, 9, 14, 33, 69, 82, 84–5, 168–9,
65, 75, 79–80, 83, 85, 86, 87, 89, 95, 291
Index 379
novelty 33, 46, 49, 51, 53, 58, 90, 95, 97, 107, idealist 4, 6, 9, 30
147, 158, 215, 328, 330–2, 336 materialist xviii, 19, 24, 30, 32–3, 39, 57, 59,
75–7, 79, 82–3, 85–6, 120, 214, 261–2,
object of knowledge, real object 34, 76, 78–9, 269–71, 343
85, 106, 139, 146, 156–7, 160, 170, 210, spontaneous 250–1
212, 228, 239, 280, 331 philosophy of praxis 116–19, 138–9, 144,
objet a 79, 82 148–9, 159, 165, 167, 198
occasion xviii, 71, 120, 282 pluralism 92, 108, 144
ontology xvii, 9, 12, 27, 31–2, 76–8, 84, 86, political cycle 189, 197
161, 169, 171, 175, 177–9, 208, 210, political practice xiii, 22, 30, 34, 36, 51, 53–4,
262–4, 266–70 83–5, 99, 101, 104–5, 120–2, 140, 185,
order 5, 8, 10, 12–13, 15, 20–2, 27–8, 32, 62, 210, 220, 223, 247, 257, 279, 283, 327–9,
67–9, 104, 129, 131, 133, 142, 157, 159, 332, 341–2, 345, 348, 351
230, 233, 245, 259, 265–8, 270, 278–9, political society 140, 142–3
294–303, 305, 321, 323, 326–8, 332 political, the xv, 70, 166, 186–7, 189–94, 197–9,
organisation xiii–xiv, xviii, 5, 34, 66, 86, 118, 201–2, 207–8, 267, 269, 338, 341, 344,
131, 133, 140–1, 143, 148, 180, 190–2, 346
199, 203, 225, 229–30, 234–5, 238–9, political, autonomy of the 185–6, 189–93, 197,
241–2, 251, 348 199, 201, 202
origin 6, 9–10, 13–14, 16, 23–4, 31, 33, 40, 50, politicism 150, 192, 199, 202, 345
57, 62, 69–70, 77, 82, 94, 122, 134, 168, politics xv, xviii, xix–xxi, 3, 13, 19, 22, 28–9,
172, 208, 210–11, 219, 226, 230, 239, 33–4, 36, 38, 68, 70–2, 75–7, 79, 81–7,
264–5, 294–5, 300, 305, 319, 329, 334, 95, 98, 99, 104–5, 115–17, 122–3, 130,
349 133, 137, 139–40, 144–5, 147, 150, 153,
overdetermination xvii, 35, 63, 75, 78–82, 157–8, 161–2, 165–6, 180, 185–94,
85, 93, 95, 97–8, 129, 140, 144–5, 158, 197–200, 207, 220, 226, 234–6, 251,
173–4, 184, 207–8, 210, 215–16, 219, 255–7, 263–70, 275–6, 281–2, 313, 324,
222, 237, 317, 346 327–32, 336, 338, 341–8, 350–1
autonomy of 92, 137, 185–6, 189–93, 197,
parallax object 75, 78–85 199, 201, 202
parallax view 75, 78–9, 335, 339, 349 positivity 178, 211
PCF (French Communist Party) xiv, 99, 117–20, post-Marxism xiv–xv, xix–xxi, 28–9, 151, 215,
137, 139, 162, 165, 180, 185, 192–3, 335
198–200, 254, 275, 282–3, 285, 321 post-structuralism xv
PCI (Italian Communist Party) 139, 185–6, 200 post-workerism xv
performative utterances 252 potentiality 17, 27, 169, 176–7, 179, 182
person [la persona] 141 practice xiv, xvii–xviii, 7, 11–13, 15, 19–22, 24,
perspective 21, 49, 51–2, 55–7, 75, 78–9, 136, 28–30, 33–9, 41, 43, 45, 51, 57–8, 76–7,
148, 259, 291, 308, 336 82, 85, 92, 95–101, 105, 116–23, 127,
philosophical form 11, 148, 158, 255 129, 140–1, 143, 145, 147–8, 150–1,
philosophy xiii–xviii, xix–xx, 3–5, 7–12, 14–16, 154–6, 159, 187, 192, 198, 207, 209–12,
18–24, 27–30, 32–3, 36–40, 50, 56–7, 215, 217, 220, 222–3, 235–6, 247, 251,
59, 62, 67, 69–72, 75–9, 82–6, 89–90, 254–7, 259–60, 263–4, 266–70, 279,
99–100, 105–7, 115–23, 127–8, 137–41, 281, 290, 292–3, 307–9, 318–19, 324–9,
143–51, 153–5, 157–62, 165–6, 172, 331–3, 336, 338–49
175–6, 180, 198, 209–10, 214, 220, 222, praxis 6, 13, 35, 71, 76–7, 99, 165, 167, 180,
249–53, 255, 257, 261–71, 275–8, 283–4, 189, 337, 341, 349
286, 289, 292–4, 296, 299–303, 315, prepredicative self–evidence 320
323, 331, 336–9, 341–51 primacy
academic 117, 252 of absence over presence 12, 14
of history xix, 4, 9, 16, 22–3, 33, 69, 76, of class struggle see class struggle,
83–4, 89, 140, 147, 155, 172, 263, 265, primacy of
276, 301–2, 342 of the encounter xvii, 63–5, 68, 99
380 Index
singularity xvii, 15, 34–5, 46, 49, 51, 55, 93–5, structured whole 44, 166, 171, 174
102, 105, 157, 159, 177, 275, 329–31 subject xiv, xviii, xx, 6–9, 12–13, 15–16, 20–1,
situation 10, 33, 87, 95–6, 99, 121, 131, 134, 24, 27–8, 31, 40, 43–7, 49, 50, 53–4,
158, 160, 180, 226, 231, 238, 241, 255, 57–8, 60, 63, 69–72, 78–9, 81, 84–5, 90,
263, 267, 281, 309, 313–15, 328–34, 118–19, 128, 140–1, 151, 153, 155–62,
339, 351 165, 167–8, 170–3, 177–8, 202, 207–13,
social articulation 237 216, 218, 220, 226–9, 235, 237, 249–50,
social form xx, 31–7, 39, 41, 76, 90, 97, 101–2, 252–3, 255, 257, 259, 265, 271, 278,
104, 106, 111, 121, 140, 142, 167, 173, 283, 291–305, 307–10, 314–16, 318–21,
221, 226, 230, 234–5, 239–40, 256, 280, 323–9, 332, 339, 341, 343, 350
283, 291, 341 barred 81
social totality xviii, 32, 41, 92–3, 94, 96, 138, -effect 80, 158, 207, 291, 306
140, 235, 278 -function 7, 21, 158
society effect 38, 170, 265, 321 theory of the see theory of the subject
spirit 6, 78, 141, 171–2 subjection xiv, 11, 19, 128, 132, 159, 217, 251,
spontaneism 328–9 253, 259, 271, 292, 294–5, 297–301, 326
standpoint of reproduction 248 subjectivation 220, 253–5, 257, 259, 292–8,
state xiv, xix, xx, 6–9, 14–15, 18, 20, 30–1, 300, 303, 307, 309, 314–15, 317, 321
38–9, 43, 47, 50–1, 54, 59, 63–72, 74, process 292, 294–6, 300, 303
77, 79, 84, 94–5, 99, 101, 109, 117, subjectivisation 158, 172, 293, 302, 304
121–2, 127–8, 132, 137, 142–8, 150, subjectivity xviii, 5, 27, 31, 46, 53, 60, 79, 81,
153, 156–11, 163, 177, 185–202, 222–3, 151, 153, 158, 160–1, 207–8, 217–20,
247–53, 255, 257, 260, 264, 267, 271, 223, 228, 254, 259–61, 265, 271, 277,
281–2, 286, 289, 292–3, 296, 303–5, 292–3, 295, 297–302, 306, 310, 324,
316, 319, 321, 325–7, 332–3, 338–41, 327–9, 331–3
344, 350 substance 7, 12, 32–3, 37, 41, 56, 63–4, 73,
as apparatus 137, 190–1, 193–6, 199, 282, 78–9, 110, 154, 156–7, 169–70, 176–7,
344 181, 213, 239
ideological apparatuses of the 222, 232, (Spinoza) 7, 37, 78–9, 156–7, 169–70, 176–7,
249–51, 253, 281, 292, 296 181
as instrument 194–6 superstructure 80–1, 129, 133, 138, 174,
integral 143 186–7, 189, 196, 214, 235–6, 269, 281–2,
as machine xix, 98, 190–1, 194–7, 199, 249, 289, 291, 348, 350–1
341 surplus-value 30, 90, 173, 210–13, 227–8, 237,
Marxist theory, of the 8, 137, 145, 147–8, 241, 245, 280, 286, 318
185–6, 188, 190–1, 193–202, 249, 267, symbolic, the 81–2, 253–4, 259, 294–300,
282, 286, 324, 340, 344 302–3, 317
structuralism 27, 35, 44, 58, 60, 96, 127, 155, symptomatic reading 85, 98, 109, 166, 304
157, 159, 169–70, 182, 210, 234, 261
structure xiv, 7, 13, 15–18, 20–1, 31, 35, 37, take [prise] xv, 15, 19, 75, 145, 178
39, 41, 44–50, 53–6, 58–9, 63, 65, 70, tautology 80–1
81–2, 84, 86, 91, 94, 96–8, 101–7, 121, techné 328
128, 130, 134, 138, 144–6, 150, 156–9, technocratism 328–9
162, 167–70, 173–4, 179, 194, 196, 212, teleology xiv–xv, 4, 9, 16–18, 20, 28, 30–3,
214–16, 218, 221, 226–30, 233–42, 249, 47–9, 64, 69, 80, 82, 97, 145, 172, 178,
251–3, 265–9, 271, 281–2, 289, 291, 267, 270, 328–9, 339–40
295–6, 298, 301, 304–5, 309, 316, 319, tenant-lieu 307
327, 330, 351 theology 10, 12–13, 71–2, 141
actualization of the 55, 170 theoretical dispositive 49
causality of 47 theoretical object 34, 76, 79, 156–7, 227–8,
effect of 44–5, 47–9, 229, 233 231, 238–9, 296
element of 45, 54, 103 theoretical practice xiv, 30, 57, 76, 96, 99–101,
and superstructure 236 105, 119, 121, 150, 209, 341–2
382 Index
theoreticism 37, 76, 101, 103, 115, 117–18, 123, 86, 92, 97, 121, 127, 141, 161, 173, 181,
157, 281, 328, 331, 345 215–16, 229, 237, 241, 283, 287, 326–7,
theory xii, xix, 4–5, 8–9, 13, 16, 29–30, 32–3, 331, 349, 351
35, 38, 40–1, 43, 49–53, 55, 60, 64–5, transcendence 167, 175
67–8, 70–1, 75–7, 79–80, 86–7, 115, transhistoricity of ideology 254, 257
121–4, 128–31, 133–4, 137–9, 145, 148, translatability xviii, 140, 149
150, 155, 159–60, 166, 169, 172, 176–7, translation 101, 130, 137, 140, 143, 147, 165,
213, 215–18, 220–1, 225–6, 228–9, 231, 342, 346
237–40, 248, 250, 252–4, 263, 265,
275–6, 280, 285–7, 295–301, 304–5, unconscious, the xviii, 157–8, 253, 277, 283,
307–10, 317–21, 326, 329, 331–3, 338, 289–91, 295–303, 305
340, 346, 349–51 underdetermination xiv, 127, 222
class struggle in 119, 145, 172, 209, 211, univocity 176
220–1, 263, 275, 284, 345 use-value 212, 227, 229, 232, 241
detour of xiii, 3 utility 232
of the encounter xvii, 31, 89–90, 95–7,
101–7 value 173, 208, 211–13, 216, 221, 226, 229,
of fetishism 242, 245, 250–1 231, 238–40, 280, 318
general 96, 99, 105–7, 157–8, 257, 259, 284, value-form 34, 40, 174, 213, 221, 238–1,
287, 289, 326 340
of history see history, theory of Verbindung 31, 39, 90–2, 101–2, 104, 234
of interpellation xx, 44, 163, 293–4, 303–4 see also combination; conjunction;
of knowledge 39, 161, 232, 289, 302, 306, conjuncture
324, 327 Verwandelte Formen (transformed forms) 318,
of the mode of production 17, 19, 23 346–7
and practice 11, 34, 82–3, 85, 92, 99–101, virtù 6, 15, 50–1, 59, 69–72, 74, 263–4, 266–7,
105, 116–18, 127, 140, 165, 328, 336, 269
339, 341–3, 345, 347–8 virtuality 169
regional 7, 105–6, 157, 228–9, 236, 316 void xvii, 4–9, 12–15, 22, 29, 32–3, 39–40,
of the social whole xv 46–8, 50, 52, 55–7, 69–71, 75, 78–87,
of the subject xx, 141, 157 106, 130, 157, 162, 167–70, 179, 215,
of theoretical practice 29, 76, 82, 99–100, 219–20, 332
117, 123, 209, 331, 345
of translatability xviii, 140 war 9, 127, 131–4, 250, 297, 303
of the unconscious 158, 289, 291, 303 of manoeuvre 140
thesis 17, 80, 84, 171, 276 of position 140
time 63–4, 67, 96–8, 101, 104, 127, 128, 129, withdrawal 179
139, 143–4, 146, 170, 194, 210, 218, 275 world xv, 3, 5, 6, 8–15, 17–18, 20, 24, 31,
timelessness 290–1 39, 55, 63, 68, 72, 76, 89, 125, 138,
topography 89, 92–3, 96, 101, 104, 155–6, 143–4, 154, 156, 161, 172, 175, 212,
215–16, 281, 289, 299, 305, 337, 346 230, 263–4, 266–70, 276–80, 284, 290,
topology xviii, 76, 166, 174 293–4, 298, 326, 344
topos 84, 310, 320 of commodities 239–40, 250
torsion xvi, 77, 86, 166, 177, 180
totality 7, 8, 14, 35, 39, 44, 63–4, 73, 79, 81, zero-institution 316–17, 321