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ALTHUSSER

A Critical Reader
EDITED BY
GREGORY ELLIOTT
m
BLACKWEll
o ~ UIC'" c.-'"J.. USA
Copyright ll:'l Preface, arrang ement and editorial matter , Gregory Elliot t, 1994;
indi vidual chapters copyright 0 individual cont ributors, 1994, unless otherwise sta ted
in the acknowledgements.
First published 1994
Firs! published in USA 1994
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A e lP cata logue recor d for this boo k is available from the British Library.
Library of eo"grts J Catalogi"g.j".p.,blilanon Dala
Althusser: A Critical Reader I Gregory Elhon.
p. em.
Includes bibliogra phical refercn,;es and index.
(SBI>: 0-631- 18806- 1 (alk. paper ] - ISB1'\ 0-631-18807-X (alk. paper )
I. Alt husser, Louis. 2. Philosophy, French - 20th century.
3. Ma rxist criticism. I. Elliott , Gregory.
B2430.A474A65 1994
194_ dc20
93--38739
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CONTENTS
Preface
Gregory Elliott
Acknowledgements
The Str ucture of CapItal
E. J. Hobsbawm
2 Mar xist Histor y, a History in the Making:
Toward s a Dialogue with Althusser
Pierre Vilar
3 Althusser's Theory of Ideology
Paul Ricoeur
4 History and Interaction: On the Srrucruralisr Interpretation
of Historical Materialism
Ax el Hcmneth
5 Althusser, Structuralism and t he f rench Epistemological
Tradit ion
Peter Dews
6 Thinking with Bor rowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan
David Macey
7 Message in a Bot tle: Althu sser in Literary St udies
Francis Mulh ern
8 Analysis Terminated, Analysis Interminable:
The Case of Louis Alt husser
Gregory Elliott
Bibliography of t he Published Writings of Louis Althusser
vii
xvii
10
44
73
104
142

177 .J
203
\
i
PREFACE
Towards t he end of his Cool Memories, Jean Baudrillacd scorn fully reflects
as follows:
Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, 50S-this, 50S-t hat: these are soft,
easy, post coitum bistoricx m ideologies, 'after-t he-orgy' ideologies for an easy-
goi ng generation which has known neit her ha rd ideologies nor radical phi lo-
sophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimenral in its politi cs
too, which has rediscovered altr uism, conviviality, int ernational chari ty and
t he individua l bleeding heart. Emotional out pouri ngs, solidari ty, cosmopol-
itan emonve ness, multi-media path os: all soft values harshly condemned by
t he Nietz.schean, Marxo-Freudian age. . . . A new generation, tha t of t he spoilt
children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed
children of history.'
Were it necessary to identify the thinker who best symbolizes the ' Ma rxo-
Fre udian age' , a st rong contender -would surely be t he Communist philos-
opher, Louis Alt husser, whose ' ideology' (to borrow Baudr illar d' s casual
ob scenity) pert ains to t he coitu m histor icum between the French int elli-
gentsia and Mar xism aft er t he Liberati on.
That Alt husser was t he accursed child of more t ha n one hist or y is by
now well-known; the post humo us publicat ion of his ' autobiography',
L' avenir dure longtemps, affords sufficient, if deceptive, t estimony. Yet
he not only figur es among t he int ellect ual progeny of a dramat ic French
histor y, punct uated not by the tr ibulations of le franc fort and Euro-
Disney, but by fascist leagues and Popular Front; by defeat and occupa tion,
collaboration and resist ance; by ' savage wars of peace' abroad (Vietnam,
Algeria) and undeclared ci vil war at home (t he overt hrow of t he Fourt h
Republic and installation of the Fifth, the ' Generals' put sch' and t he GAS,
May ' 68 and March '7 ?). lie was not only a contemporary of Les Temps
Modernes and Tel Quel, of exist ent ialism and (post-)st ruct uralism, of Ie
von PREFACE
PRUACE IX
noulleau roman and la nouvelle vague. He was a progenitor of intellectual
developments - one of which. by an unintended consequence of Alth usserian
action, was his own eventual effacement from t he scene. Alrhusser was an
agent. as well as a reagent (and victim). In elabo rat ing a version of Mar x-
ism which Fra ncis Mulhern has aptly described as '3 critical classicism','
he occu pies a cruc ial - and ineradi cable - posi tion in modern French
intellect ual culture.
To begin wi th, his endeavour to sal vage histori cal mat erialism as an
expla natory science. bot h from irs ossification under Stali nist auspices and
its demotion or denigration at Western-Marxist hands, renders him a
centr al figure in the anti-existent ialist and ant i-phenomenological turn
in French philosophy in the 1960s. J ust as, after reading Feuerbach's
Essence of Christ ianity, Engels and his conte mporaries 'a ll became at once
Feuerbachians', so, upon t he appearance of Pour Marx and Lire le Capital,
a cohor t of young French intellectuals turned Althusserian: where Sart re
had been, Alt husser would be. Or rather - and more accuratel y in one
crucial respect - where Sam e had not been, Alth usser would be: in t he
French Communist Part y. Refusing the available models of t he independ-
ent intellect ual - Sartre - and the compliant ideologue - Garaudy - Alrhusser
took advantage of the Khrushchevite thaw in the international Commun ist
movement to propound his critique and reconstr uct ion of act ually existing
Marxism from wit hin its ran ks. He ar ticulat ed Marxist phi losoph y and
Communist politics in a man ner t hat stilled, if it did not altoget her
dispel, the doubt s of a generati on instructed by the counte r-examples of
Zhdanovism and Lysenkoism. As hi s comrade and collabora tor, Et ienne
Bahbar, remark ed at his funeral:
To be at once totally a philosopher and totally a Commun ist. without sac-
rificing, subordinating, or subJe'C1ing the one to the ocher: such is the inrel-
lecrual singul ari ty of Al th usser, such was his wage r and the risk he
took.. ... Because Alrhusser won that wager, Marx ism .. and Communism are
inscribedin rhe history of French philosophyin the second h;l,lf of the rwen-
rierhcentury. And eo-one can dislodge them without leavinga gaping hole!
There is, however, a further - profoundly pa radoxical - reason for
Althusser ' s salience in post-war French intellectual history: namely, the
unwitting pilot role he played in the widesprea d tr ansfer of Par isian alle-
giances from versions of Mar xism t o var iet ies of ' post -Marxism' . Expel-
ling homo dialecticus and the Hegelian heritage. renouncing autarky and
restoring dialogue wit h non- (or even anri -] Marxist t raditions , assimilating
' Nietzscbeo-Heideggerian', as well as Spinozist-Bac hela rdian, motifs, the
Althusserian ' renovatio n' of histor ical ma terialism int ersected with broader
currents in Gallic philosophical cul ture. associated with the names of Claude
Levi-Stra uss or Jacques Lacan , Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, and
assembl ed unde r t he flag of convenience, 't heoret ical anti-huma nism' , by
those who spoke in verba "'llgistr i.
4
Sourc e and component pa rt of la pemie
68, 'st ruc tu ral Mar xism' may be seen in retr ospect as a transitional
th eoret ical problematic - a vulnerable compromise-formation, in effeer,
between the Marxisr legacy and non- Marxist modes, whose (a uto-) decon-
st ruction signall ed the eclipse of one ascendant star of the 'Nierzschean,
Frendo-Ma rxist age' .
wherher or not the cont emporar y discnchanrmenr with histori cal mat er-
ialism is justified, is a quest ion beyond t he remit of this Preface and Critica l
Reader (alt hough it is touc hed upon in Francis Mu lhern' s essay ). It could
be t hat its agent s (and patients) find themselves in t he unenviable cc ndirion
diagnosed by Sarr re in Words: ' Like all dreamers, I mistoo k di senchant -
ment for truth.' However that may be. an appreciat ion of what one of its
best an:.t lysts has dubbed 't he ri se and fall uf st ructural Marxism" is in-
dispensable to an underst and ing of the renaissance and obsolescence alike
of histori cal material ism in recent decades, not only in France but in t he
Augluph uu c wor ld. W il1lUut pr ereudi ug tu ex ha ust jvit y, All hu )ser : A
Critical Reader aims to cont ribute t o t hat task.
A few wurds abour the principles guiding its compilation are in urder.
First, alt hough it will be for the Crit ical Reader on Crit ical Readers do ubt -
less in the offing t o judge, I have (I hope) t aken the publ isher's r ubric
literally: what follows is a crit ical ant hology, composed in the belief
tha t cri t ique is a more genui ne form of int ellectual commemoration than
apologia. Accor dingly, it comes neit her to pr aise, nor to bury, Altbusser.
Hence - wit h the possible exceptio n of my own - each of the art icles pub-
lished here ref utes (which is not to say merely repudiat es) quintessent ial
Alth usserian propositi ons. Second, rat her than repri nting and commis-
sioning a host of shorte r pieces. I ha ve Opted for a combination of the terse
and synoptic, on t he one hand. wit h the det ailed and discurs ive; on t he
ot her: quanti tative quality, as it were. Third , I have given pr eference to
au thors who tr eat Alrbusse r's texts in various of their context s, locating
them. sub spede temporis. in one or mor e of the wider histor ies and cultures
t o which they belong . Fourth, I ha ve select ed contribut ions to the debate
which are eithe r less readily accessible. or less familiar, t han ot her items
in the secondary litera ture.' Fifth, whilst it is a matter for regret t hat t he
budget allowed me did not permit of more tha n a single tr anslation,' I have
tried to provide some indication of the cont inent al reaction, Mar xist and
non-Marxist , to Alth usser, by giving e ver vir tually half of the volume
to material which has for the most part been neglected by Angloph one
commentators.
Inevitably partial and ultimately arbit rary in its selections, in addition
to any sins of commission for which it is culpable, the Reader must con fess
at least one of omission: the highly regret table absence of any feminist
x PREf ACE
PREFACE XI
conrriburion, Thi s was not for want of solicitatio n. Howe... cr, of those
approached to a feminist balance-sheer of the Alrbussena a moment,
none, for a variety of reasons, found herself both willing and able to accept
the commission. Consequently, apart from passing references by David
Macey and Fran cis Mulhern, the volume is bereft of any reflection on a
key dimension of t he Althusserian impact upon intell ectual work, and I
can only cdec the reader elsewhere."
Each of t he ensuing texts speaks more than adequately for itself; and I do
not pr opose to paraphrase their cont ent. It may. however. be helpf ul briefly
to situate them, indicate their focus, and note any editorial interventions.
The Read er opens with E. J. Hobsba wm' s review of Pour Marx and Lire
Ie Capit al, originally published in the Times Lit erary Supplement in 1966
and then reprinted i n Revolutionaries (1973). Hobsbawm - an almost exact
contemporary of Alrhusser' s - should need no int roduction to prospective
readers; he is quire simply one of the foremost Mar xist histori ans of t he
twentieth cent ury. In the space of a mere five t housand words, he brings
his immense, cosmopolitan erudition, and more than three decades' experi-
ence (at rime of writing) of European Communism, to bear upon the advent
of Althusserian Marxism in Thorez' r ani Communiste Francais and de
Gaulle's France. Bene r than any comparable essay in English, Hobsbawm
both contexrualizes Althusser's initiative and tactfully sketches the main
lines of much subsequent criticism of it. In order to preserve the flavour
of the original, I have retained Professor Hobsbawm's own tr anslations
of Althusser's French and his citat ions from the first edition of Lire le
Capital.
Seven years after Hobsbawm introduced the name of Althusser across
the Channel, Althusserianism was in full florescence not only in Britain
and Western Europe generally, but in latin America, eliciting eulogy and
obloquy in equal measure. As Hobsbawm had foreseen, and as E. P.
Thompson's broadside of 1978, The Povert y of Theory, would demon-
strate, Marxist historians were especially sceptical of, or inimical to, what
Althusser himsdf described as ' the very summary (and therefore unilat eral)
character of the paragraphs devoted to "history" in the polemical con-
text of Keadmg Capttal.' The second text printed here revolves around the
blanket Althusserian condemnat ion of 'empiricism' and 'historicism' in the
practice of mainstream and Marxist historiography alike. A leading mem-
ber of the second generation of the Annales school of French historians,
Pierre Vilar, who from 1962 until his reti rement held the chair in social
histor y at the Sorbonne whose previous tenants had been Marc Bloch and
Ernest Labrousse, is the aut hor ot LJ Catatogne dan s rEspagne modeme
(1962) and A Hi story of Gold and Money (1969 ). His art icle - originally
published in Annales (january/February 1973), translated in New Left
Review that summer, and explicitly sub-titled 'Towards a Dialogue with
- is remarkable for its equanimity in the face of Althusser's
provocat ions. By turns generous in its admissions and firm in its rebuttals,
Vilar's wideranging tour d'borizon has been mod erat ely abridged by the
removal of two introductory sections (pp. 65- 72 of the original, dealing
with Mar x as historian and t he status of economic theory), and the sacrifice
of some explanatory notes added by the English editors.
While still largely unknown outside of the French academy, Althusser
had in 1955 crossed swords with Paul Ricoeur over the philosophy of
histor y. Thir teen years later, Ricoeur would be one of his interlocut ors at
the stormy session of the Societe francaisede Philosophie at which Althusser
read his celebrated lecture, 'Lenin and Philosophy'. " A leading post-war
French philosopher, for many years based at the University of Paris X
(Nanrerre), and then resident at Chicago University, Ricoeur is the author
of a voluminous oeuvre, ranging from Freud and Philosophy (1964) to the
three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983- 85). He is unique among the
cont ributors to this volume in that he is not now, and never has been, a
Marxist. Au-dessus de /a melee marxiste, the exponent of an innovat ive
blend of phenomenology and hermeneutics, Ricoeur is committed, reso-
Iutely against the Parisian current, to a certain humanism. These affilia-
tions are evident in his attent ive probing of Althusser's account of the
conjoint subjectificanon/subjection of social agents via the mechanisms of
ideology. Ricoeur's text derives from three lectures on Alrhusser delivered
as part of a series at Chicago in autu mn 1975, and eventually published
by Columbia University Press in 1986 as Lect ures on Ideology and Utopia.
The ext ract below essentially comprises the second and third lectures
(pp. 124- 57), specifically focused on the theory of ideology, whereas the
first interrogates Althusser's postulate of an ' epistemological break' in
Mar x's theoretical development. In preparing them for publication, I have
cut Ricoeur's resumes of previous lectures, anglicized spelling, punctuation
and references, and slightly amended the page reference system.
In an interview released in 1985 ju rgen Habermas remarked, with un-
WOnted hauteur, that ' (hp ving rejected the orthodoxy of the philosophy
of histor y, I had no wish to lapse back either into ethical socialism, or int o
scienrism, or indeed into both at once. This explains why I hardly read
Fortunately, the same has not been tr ue of all members of the
second or third generations of the Frankfurt School In 1971 Alfred Schmidt
published a car eful response to what he regarded as the 'structuralist
attac k on histor y', which was translated a decade later as History and
St ructure. The long text by Axel Honaeth tr anslated here originally
appeared in German in 19n , in an anthology of writings on histori cal
materi alism edited by him in collaboration with Urs Jaeggi.U Currently
Professor of Philosophy at the Free University, Berlin, and author of The
Critique of Power (1985) and The Struggle for Recognition (forthcoming
in English translation), Honnerh criticizes, inter alios, Vilar (whose essa)'
xn PREFACE PREFACE
XII
appea red in t he same collecti on ) for undue indulgence towa rds Alt husser.
Arguing that Alth usser conflates quite disti nct philosophical and politi cal
projects under the cat ch-all of 'historicism', and misconstrues Mar x' s
anatomy of the peculiar logic of capital as t he paradigm for a genera l
structural theory of history, Hcnnet h lucidly articulates the main areas of
contention between the pri ncipal rival schools of West ern Mar xism in the
19605 and 70s. To facilitate publicat ion of the article in its enti ret y, t he
notes - in particular, t hose referring to the details of contemporary West
German debat es and their accompanying literat ure - have, with Professor
Honneth's consent, been considerably abridged.
A prominent Briti sh exponent of t he Haber masian brand of Critical
Theory is Peter Dews, whose collection of interviews wit h Habermas has
already been cit ed, and whose Logics of Disintegrat ion: Post-Strncturalist
Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory, published by Verso in 1987,
was widely received as t he most balanced assessment to date of Derrida,
Foucault , er al. In t he course of t he research which formed the basis of that
book, in 1980 Dews dr afted a sixty-page chapter on 'St ruct uralism and t he
French Epistemological Tradi t ion', a lit tle over half of which is published
below. (Excisions, made at points where Dews embarks upo n detailed
discussion of Foucault, are signalled by ellipses. ) Locating For Marx and
Reading Capital in t heir nat ional phi losophical conjunctu re, Dews in-
vest igates Alrhusser's attempt to resolve t he cont roversy bet ween Levi-
Strauss and Sarrre over the stat us of histori cal knowledge, argu ing that
his Spinozisr inflection of the Bachelardian t radit ion of French historical
epistemo logy reproduces the very vices he reproves in Levi-Straussianst ruc-
turalism. Cont rast ing Alt husser's subsequent development with that of his
former pupil, Foucault, Dews indicates how the incoherence of Altb usser' s
' self-criticisms' helped to open the way for the relat ivist turn of the emer-
gent post -Alt husserian ism.
1980 was the year in whi ch Althusser's murder of his wife, Helene,
sealed more than one of his fares, In t heir var ious fashions. the remai ning
cont ribut ions to the Reader art retrospects, from the vant age-point (if such
it be) of t he 1990s, on the invariably dr amatic, and occasional ly anguished,
history associated with t he name of Louis Alrhusser.
In an essay written specially for t his volume, David Macey, aut hor of
Lacon in Contex ts (Verso, 1988) and an acclaimed recent biography of
Foucault (The Li ves of Mi chel Foucault, Hutchinson, 1993), casts a scep-
tica l eye over the de facto ' Rejection Front' formed between Ahhusser
and Lacan in opposi t ion to Mar xist and Freudian ' revisionism'. ~ t a c e y
acknowledges t he part played by Alrhusser's essay of 1964, ' Freud and
Lacan', in resuming the dialogue between historical materialismand psycho-
analysis brutally int errupted in the PCF by t he Gleichschaltung of the
Cold War in theory. And yet he reckons both it, and subsequent Althusserian
endeavours in t his field, to have been based upon readi ngs of Lacan tha t
are arguably matched in their tendentiousness only by Lacan's interpretat ion
of Freud Conceptual loans have to berepaid - and somet imes at compound
int erest.
like Macey an act or in the theoretical history he surveys, Francis Mulhern
is more inclined to accentu ate the posit ive dimensions of the Preudo-Marxisr
encounter staged by Ah husser, at least as regar ds Its salutary impact upon
literary studies in an Anglo-Saxon culture largely innoculared by t he experi-
ence of the 1930s against any ' materialist ' tampering wit h things of t he
spirit. In a new overview of the English inductions of lialhc constructions.
the author of a classic study of Leavism, The Moment of 'ScrutinY' (New
Left Books. 1979), explores the diversit y of Anglophone ' Alt husserianism',
isolates the aporias which smoot hed the passage from euphoria to dis-
enchantment , and concludes wit h a reassessment of Alt husser's cent ral
t heses t hat finds t hem fit neither for some arc de rriomphe, nor t he nearest
oubliette. As messges in bott les go, Althusser' s once fared well - possibly
t oo well - hut now deserve bet ter.
My own piece - a considerably revised and expanded version of a
review article" - is devoted to the ' retu rn of the repressed' , in the shape of
L'auenir dure longt emps, in the spring of 1992. Responding to t he patentl y
malevolent or merely credulous readi ngs to which the phi losopher' s ' wild
analysis' of his own case history had been subjected, I took the oppor-
t unit y of Alth usser's own observations on his theoreti cal formati on, as well
as the invaluable detail supplied by Yann Moulier Bourang, to adumbrate
themes - of Alth usserian het erodoxy and nonconremporaneiry - which I
intend to develop at lengt h in a forthcoming int ellect ual biography for
Blackwell, provisionally ent itled Althusser's Solit ude.
Finally, at t he publisher 's suggest ion, a bibliography of Alrhusser' s pub-
lished writ ings is, wit h due disclaimers, appended for the seriously curious.
In t he conception and realizat ion of t his Reader, I have incurred var ious
debts: to my edito r, Simon Prosser, for his encouragement and patience; to
David Macey and Francis Mulhern for once again gratuit ously adding to
their workloads; to Gordon Finlayson for underta king the translation of
the Honnerh art icle; and to Michael Cane, who invited me to writ e on
Alrhusser ' s 'rraumabiographv'. I am grateful to all of them.
NOTES
1 Cool .\ temories, verse, london, 1990, pp. 223-24.
2 Introduction to !\t ulMrn, N . Cont r mporary MllTri st lit"lJry Critiri sm.
l.ongman, london, 1992. p. 12.
1 ' Adieu' , in Balibar, Ecnts po"" Alt 1n4srr, La Decocverte, Paris, 1991: here
p. 122.
XIV PREFACE
PREFACE XV
4 See Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, 1.4Pmsee 68, Gall imar d, Paris. 1985 and
d. Ak x Callinicos, 'What is living and \\:'hat is Dead in the Philosophy of
Alt hussc:r' , in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprioker, eds, The Alth.l$snian
Legacy, Verso, London, 1993.
5 Sec Ted Benton's excellent book of that title, Macmillan, london, 1984.
0..)11;:1 (ull-Ieug th ll e..lIIK"lIl1 i ll Ensliloh are Mir iam G l ud.!> IIL1I11'" St'Ut.I"r<l /j>t
Analysis in Cont nnporary Social Thought: A Comparison of the TheoTies of
Claude UlIi-5t rauu and Louis Afrbussn. Rout ledge and Kegan Paul, London,
1974; Alex u llinic05, Altbuu l "'$ Ma rrirm, Pluto Press, London, 1976; E. P.
T ho mpson, 'The Povcn y of Th eor y', in his The POl-'u t y of Thmry and Other
Essays, Merlin, Londo n, 1978; Steven B. Smith, Reading An Essay
on St rua " , ,,1Mar xi sm. Cornd l Univcnity Press, Ithaca, 1984; Gregory Elliott,
Althusser: The Detour ofTheory, Verso, London, 1987; and Robert Paul Resch,
Althusu , and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory, University of Californ ia
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992. To these should be added Perry
Anderson's extended ar bitra tion of Thompson's indictment in A' gummts " 'ith;n
Engli sh Ma , xism, Verso, London, 1980 and t he conference papers collected
in Kaplan and Sprinker, eds, The AltJnme,ian Legacy.
6 Thi s CApl&ill.:o, fUI l;:A&UllJh:, CAd u"; UII uf NUllliall GClal>, 'Ahl lulo M'I'lo ll.1&IA-
ism: An Account and Assessment ', Ne w Left Review 71, January/February 1972
(reprinted in Nl R, ed., \t'estern Marxi sm: A Crit ical Reade" New Left Books,
London, 1977 and in Ger as, Lit"'o2tll' " of Revolution, Verso, Londo n, 1986);
of Andri Glucksmann, ' A Ventriloq uist Struct uralism' (1967), New Left Review
72.. Ma rch/April 1972 [reprinted in Western Ma, xi sm); of Jacques Ranciere,
' On the Theory of Ideology (The Politics of Alrhusserl' (1973), Radical
Philosophy 7. Spring 1974 (reprinted in Roy Edgley and Richa rd Osbo rne ,
eds, Radical Phil osophy Reader, Verso, Londo n, 1985); of Paul Hirst.
' Alrhusscr's Theory of Ideology', Economy and Society. vol. 5, no. 4, 1976
(reprinted in his On La w and Ideology, Macmillan, London, 1979); or of any
extract from Th ompson, 'The Povert y of Theory'.
7. As a result, t wo insightful early crit iques - bot h f rom within the Alt husscrian
mili eu - rem..in wl ..vilil..ble ill ElIg.l.i,J" Nicos 'Veu .....Ie tlioEot ie
mar xisre', Les Temps ModtTnes 240, 1966 and Alain Badiou, 'Le Irejc om-
mencemenr du marerialisme dialecnque', Critique 240. 1967. Ot her candi-
dates for tunslat ion from the French (to look no further) would have been
Henri Lefebvre. 'Sur une interpretation du marxisme', et 101 Socidi
4, 1967, or 'Les para doxes d'Alth usser'. L'Homme et 101 Societe 13, 1969 (bot h
in his A....Jela d.. st ruet K, alisme. Edit ions Anthropos, Paris, 1971);
Lucien Goldmann, ' L'Ideolog ie AUemande er Ies Theses sur Feuerbach",
L"Hommt et 101 Sociiti 7, 1968 (reprinted in his MarrismL et scienas humaines,
Gallimard, Paris, 1970); and Jea n Hyppohr e, 'Le " scieneifqce" et I' "ideo-
logtque" dans une perspective marxure', Diogine 64. 1968 (reprinted in
his Figlnes de la pensie pbil osopbiqKe, Presses Universitaires de France,
Pens, 1971).
8 T o M ich ele Buren 's ove rvie w of Mar xist f eminism, Womm'$ Oppreuion
Today, Verso, London, 1980 and co Benton, The Rise and Fall of St rKCt K, al
Ma, xism, pp. 134- 40. For a judicious cri tiq ue of Alt husscr by a femin ist:
sympat hrt ic 10 tkmmts of hununiu !ltt Kare Soper, Hwnanism and
Anti-HK1fUlmsm, Hutchinson, london, 1986. The main proeagcni se in t he
feminist: reception of Alt husscr in Brit ain was, of course, Juliet Mit chell: sec
a pecially ' Women: The Longest Revol ution', New Left RtlIit"W40, Nov emberl
Decmember 1966 (reprin ted in her collection of that t ide, Virago, London,
1984). and Woman's Est ate, Pengu in, Har mondsworth, 1971. A represen-
tative t ext of post-Althu ssetianism Ro.<ialind C.oward'!i ' Ret hinking
Marxism' , ml f 2.. 1978.
9 In a lett er of 28 March 1979 t o the editor of New Left Review, declining t he
invi tation to respond to Th ompson in the pages of t hat journaL Less ruffled by
Thompson than his correspo ndent had ant icipated, AlthUSStt stated t hat he
had found The Pot -my of Theory ' interest ing' .
10 As Vilac underlined to an int erviewer - the German hist orian, Peter Schonler
- in Kommune, voL 5, no. 7. 1987, Pp. 62ff .. where he recalls that in the early
19705 't he first thing I was asked, from Athens to Grenada, and from lima
to Berkeley, was to talk about Althusser.' For some fascina ting observations
on the issues raised by Vilar's counrcr-cnriquc, sec Schonkr's paper, 'Alt husscr
and An nales Hi storiogr aph y - An Impossible Dialogue?' , in Kaplan and
Spri nker, eds, The A/rhusstTian Legacy. Th at Vilar st ill regarded some of
Ahhu sser's questions as valid, even if he rejected his answers, is perhaps
att est ed by the fact that the volume in which he reprinted his 1973 essay is
entitled Une hist oiTe en const ruction: Approche marxiste et problb nati ques
conionaurelles, Paris, 1982,
11 See, respectively, Alrhusscr, ' Sur l'objecnvite de I'lus toire [l.ettre a Paul Ricoeur)',
Rev ue de I'Enseignement Phil osophique, vol. 5, no. 4, 1955, a nd Bulletin de
ta Societ e f,anfai se de Phil osophie 4, October/December 1968, pp. 127- 81.
12 ' A Philosophico-Polit ical Profile' , in Peter Dews, ed., Autonomy and Solida, -
ity: lrrten i ews wi tb f urgen Habermas, revised edn, Verso, London 1992: here
p. 149.
13 ' Ccschichrc und Int cra kti onsvcrhi hn issc. Zut et rukrurehsnschcn Deut ung des
Historischen Materialismus' , in Th eorien des Hi storischen Materiali$mll$,
Suhrkam p Verlag, Frankfun/ M.. 1977. Hon nct h discusses the circ umstances
in whi ch he composed his cri tique in a recent int erview, 'Critical Th eory in
Ger many Tod ay' , Radi cal Pbilosophy 65, Autumn 1993.
14 Published in Economy and Societ y, vol. 22, no. I, February 1993.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For permission to publish texts contained in this Reader the Editor and
publishers wish to thank the following copyright-holders:
E. J. Hobsbawm for 'The Stuct ure of Capital'.
New Left Review, London, for Pierce Vitae. ' Marxist Histor y, a History in
the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser' .
Paul Ricoeur and Columbia University Press, New York, for extrac ts from
Paul Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia.
Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt /M., for Axel Honneth, ' History and Inter-
action. On the Struct uralist Interpretation of Historical Materialism' .
Peter Dews for ext racts from his 'Struct uralism and t he French Epistemo-
logical Tradi tion' .
1
THE STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL
E. J. Hobsbawm
A few years ago an able and acute observer of Marxism could suggest that
the history of its evolution as a theory was virt ually at an end; or at all
events at a standst ill. It is plainly not possible to take such a view today.
The cracking of the apparently smoot h and firmly frozen surface of Sta-
linism in the Soviet Union and of the unified and apparently integrated
international Communist movement has not merely pr oduced, or revealed,
equivalent cracks in t he systemat ic compendium of dogma elabor at ed in
the 19305, and brilliantly simplified for pedagogi c purposes in the Short
History of t he CPSU. The thaw of t he ice-cap also wat ered the numerous
plant s of heterodox y, schism DC mere unof ficial growth which had survived
on t he mar gin of, or under, t he giant glacier. The hundred flowers hloomed,
t he schools began once again to contend, in a manner unfamiliar t o all
except the elderl y who could t hr ow their minds back to t he 1920s or t he
old who recalled t he days before 1914. Mar xism, which had apparentl y
aspired to t urn itself - and by force majeure had largely turned itself - int o
a closed system, communicating with the outside world chiefly by a ser ies
of operat ions designed to show t hat it had no need to do so, was opened
up again.
If we leave aside, as lacking much theoretical interest, the atte mpts to
retain somet hing like the old ort hodoxy unchanged (as in China or amo ng
some groups of sectaria ns in other countries), and the moves to accept
useful theories and techniques from the 'bourgeois' world without int e-
grat ing them into t he nominally unmodified Mar xist system (as happened
to some extent in the Soviet Union). the Marxist re-thinking of t he past ten
years has, broadly speaking, followed four pat hs. First, it has attempted
something like an archaeological operation, by identifying t he strata of
t heor et ical thin king which had gradually accumulated on top of Mar x' s
original thought, and for t hat matt er pursuing the evolut ion of t he great
man's ideas themselves t hro ugh its various stages. Second, it has sought to
2 E. J . HOBSBAWM THE STRUCTURE OF CAPITAL 3
identify and to pur sue the various original theoretical developments made
from time to time on t he basis of Mar xism, but for various reasons offi-
cially expelled trom, or never absorbed into, the main corpus of irs ideas.
Third, it has att empted to come to terms, where t his seemed apposite, wit h
the various intellectual developments which had taken place outside Marx-
ism, and once again were deliberately extruded from it in the Stalinist
period. Last, it has t ried to return to an analysis of the world [i.e., pri mar ily
of irs social, economic and political development s) after a long period when
the official interpretation had become increasingly remote from reality.
Among t he pre-Stalinist current s of Mar xism. one has long proved to be
parti cularl y fruitful and at t ractive to t he re-rhinkers, t he 'cent ral European'
strain, to use George Lichrheim's convenient term. Most of t he rare Corn-
muni st writers who retained any reputation as independent minds in t he
1940s and early 1950s belonged to t his t radition, e.g., Georg Lukacs,
Henr i Lefebvre or, nourished in t he Italian rather than German version of
Hegelianism, Gramsci. The cent ral Europeans formed part of t hat passion-
ate reacti on against the evolutionist positivism and mechan ical derermin-
ism to which t he theoretical leaders of t he Second International had tended
to reduce Mar xism, and which, in one form or anot her, provided the
intellect ual base for a return to revolutionary ideology in the year prew
ceding and following the Oct ober Revolution. For a brief period after
the collapse of syndicalism (which had absorbed part of t his left-wing
revulsion against the Kaurskys of the pre-1914 era) virtually all the rebel
currents flowed together into t he single cataract of Bolshevism. After Lenin's
death t hey began to diverge again, or rather t he gradual and systematic
construction of a single channel of official t heory called ' Leninism' forced
the rest out of the main st ream. Yet though Lenin' s own thought was one
of the forms of this reasserrion of revolutionary theory against ' revision-
ism' and ' reformism', and by far the most import ant in practice, it had
been by no means t he only one. Luxemburg and Mehring in Germany, t he
central-European Hegclians, and ot hers, con verged wit h Lenin in practice
as revolut ionar ies, but were in no sense Leninist in origin or intellectual
procedur es.
Politicall y the central European strain was revolutionar y, not to say
ult ra-left. Socially, it was not so much a collection of intellectuals - all
ideological schools are that - as one of men and women whose taste ran
to agitation, writing and discussion ra ther t han organization and t he (Bel-
shevikl execut ive life. In theory it was above all hostile to the Darwinian
and positivist versions of Marxism a/a Kautsky, and suspicious even of
t hose aspects of the marure Marx and Engels which might have encour-
aged determinism rat her than voluntarism. Even t he young Gramsci in
Tur in reacted to t he October Revolution by calling for a ' revolt against
Marx's Capital', Philosophi cally it tended to stress - against the more
official theorists of social democracy and t he revisioni sts - the Hegelian
origins of Marx and such of his yout hful writings as were then available.
The publication of the Fruehschriften by Landshut and Mayer in 1932 was
to provide t he cent ral Europeans wit h what has turn ed out to be their
basic text, t he 1844 Manuscripts, and their basic operat ional tool, 'aliena-
tion'. By this time, however, t he polit ical situation had changed. The
centr al Europeans no longer stood on t he ext reme left of the movement ,
a place now occupied by the Trotskyists (though in the west most of t hese,
as J. P. Nett! has pointed out, were in fact Luxemburgians). Their passion-
ate voluntarism, thei r own contempt for bourgeois science and their
idealization of proletari an consciousness had been selectively absorbed into,
even exaggerated by, the official Soviet doct rine. The main advantage
the central Europeans retained was the capacity to combine the passion
for social revolution, even t he readiness to accept t he Jesuit discipline of
t he Communist part ies, wit h the interests of rnid-twenrieth-cenrury western
intellect uals - such as avant-garde culture and psychoanalysis - and a version
of Marxist t heory which, against t he apparent trend of event s in the Soviet
Union itself, reaffirmed the humanist Utopia of Marx. War and resistance
brought them political reinforcement s, especially in France, from revol u-
tionar y intellectuals to whom the discovery of German philosophy (in this
instance not mediated by Marxism) gave a justification for t he assert ion
of human libert y, the act of t his assert ion and st ruggle, and t herefore the
function of the 'engaged' intellect ual. Via t he phenomen ologists Sartre
moved into somet hing like a position as honor ary cent ral European. and
eventually into what he at any rate considered Marxism. Th e collapse of
Stalinism relieved what had become an increasingly int olerable pr essure on
t he cent ral Europeans within t he Communist movement - Stalinist t heory
had shown a diminishing toleration for the Hegelian or pre-1848 element s
in Mar x - and left them as t he most obvious ideological nucleus for critical
Communist t hought. Paradoxically a strain of ideas which began on the
ult ra-left ended on t he right wing of the revolutionary movement .
Sooner or later a reaction was to be expected. It has now emerged under
t he leadership of Louis Althusser, a philosopher who has left the shado ws
of the great ~ c o l e Normale Superieure of the rue d' U1m for t he limelight
of Parisian intellectual celebrity; or at any rate celebrity in t he fifth and
sixt h arrondi ssement s, which is even harder to achieve. His rise has been
curiously sudden. Before 1965 he was virtu ally unknown even to the left-
wing public, except as t he aut hor of an essay on Mont esquieu and a
selection from Feuerbach. In that year no fewer tha n three volumes came
out as the first offerings of a series called Theone under M. Alt husser's
directi on: a collection of papers under the title Pour Marx
l
and two volumes
essentially recording t he papers pr esent ed at an intensive seminar by M.
Althusser and his followers called Lire le CapitaU (The laconic titles are
part of t he Alt husserian tr ademark.) Their success has been startl ing. It is
no reflection on t he very considerable gifts of the author - not least his
4 E. J . HOBSBA WM
THE STRUCTURE OF CAPrrAL. 5
Gallic combination of evident int elligence, lucidit y and sty le - to observe
t hat he has been lucky in the mom ent of his emergence. Th e atmosphere
of the Althusserian Qua rr ier Lati n is the one in which every self-respect ing
left -win g secondary schoo lboy or student is a Maoist or at least a Cast roire,
in wh ich Sart re and Henri Lefebvre ar e ancient monument s and the self-
lacerations of the int ellect ual ex-Communists of 1956 as incomprehensible
as the 'opportunism' of Waldeck-Rochet and Roger Garaudy. A new gen-
era tion of rebels requir es a new version of revolut iona ry ideology, and M.
Alt husser is essent ially an ideological hard -liner, challenging t he political
and inte llectual softening around him. It is typical that, t hough a member
of t he Communist Part y, he should choose as his publisher Fran cois
Maspero, t he mout hpiece of the ult ra-left.
This does not make him into a ' neo-Srali nisr' as his detractor s have
suggest ed. The eloquent and rather moving pages of intellectual au robiog-
raphy wit h which Pour Marx opens show no ind ulgence t o Stalinism,
but t heir t arget is not so much ' le contag ieux et implacable systeme de
gouverneme nr et de pensee [quil provoquair ces delires' - t he Althusserian
prose is in t he classic tradition - but th e 'condit ions of th eor eti cal void' in
which French Communism grew up and which Stalinism helped to conceal
behind that ' primacy of politics' which was in any case congenial to t he
Fren ch. It led t hose philosophers who were not conte nt to ' confine them-
selves to comment aries and meagte variat ions on the t heme of Great
Qu ot at ions' in sheer int ellect ual self-defence either to deny t he possibilit y
of any phi losoph y, or t o maintain some sort of dialogue with t heir pro fes-
sional colleagues by 'disguising themselves - dr essing up Mar x as Husserl,
as Hegel, as t he hu manist and ethical Young Marx - at the risk of soone r
or later confusing th e mas k wit h t he face'. The end of Stalin ist dogmat ism
did not ' give us back Mar xist philosophy in its int egrity'. It merel y revealed
it s absence. Yet - and here M. Althusser leaves a moderately well-beaten
t rack and at t he same time allows himself scope for a good deal of privat e
innovation - its absence was nor due merel y to the defects of the French
intellect ual left. It was not there because Mar xist philosophy, ' founded by
Mar x in the very act of founding his theory of histor y, has st ill largely to
be const ructed' ; M. Alrbusser's ambit ious purpose is to const ruct it.
In one sense this position has similarities wit h some tend encies of thought
in the Stalin era, for one of the characterist ics of tha t peri od was the
systemat ic assert ion of t he absolute originality of Marx: the sharp cut
which sundered him from Hegel and his own Hegelian yout h, and from
t he utopian socialists (Roger Gar audy was obliged to revise his Sources
[rancaises du socialisme scienti fique on t hese grounds in the late 1940s).
M. Alchll.....er a!..o calk.. nf rhe m upurp. i n Mar x' s evoluti on, and, while
placing it, with most st udents, aro und 1845, seems reluctant to accept
anything as fully ' Marxist' before the POflerty of Philosophy and t he
Communist Manifesto.
l
Bur of course t he Stalinist t heories had nn dnuht
abo ut what Mar xist philosophy was. M. Althusser is just prepared to
admit that cert ain think ers in the past began to ask the cruc ial question
how, e.g., the purpose of Capital differs from t hat of poli t ical economy -
Lenin, Labri ola, Plekhanov , Gr amsci and various Italian scholars follow-
ing t he underestimated Calvano Della Volpe, the Austro-Ma rxi sts (who
fell int o neo- Kant ianism), and some Soviet comment ato rs (who were in-
completely awa re of the implications of their analyses). But he denies that
t here is as yet a satisfactory answer.
for the re IS none In Marx hImself Just as classical political economy did
not quite see the point of what it observed, and what Marx formulated for
it, so that Adam Smith gives, as it were, the right answer to questio ns he
had not consciously asked, so Marx himself surpassed hi s own insight,
leaving us to recognize where it was he was going:
What pohncal economy does not see IS not somethmg pre-exetmg which
it might have seen but did not, but something it has itself produced in its
operation of knowing [conna;uanceb and which did not exist before this
operation. It is precisely the production {of knowledge] which is iden tical
with that object. What political economy does not see is what it makes:
its production of a new answer without question, and at the same time its
produc t ion nf a new lat ent '1l1t'Stinn carried within that new answer (l i re I,.
Capital I, pp. 25- 26). '
Marx himself suffers from the same weak ness, which is the inevi table
con comita nt of the process of understanding. He was a far greate r man
t han Adam Smit h, because, while unable to emerge fully into his own
novelt y, he reaches out for ' his' question, for mulating it somewhere or
other, perhaps in a different context, searching for t he answer ' by mult i-
plying t he images suitable for it s present at ion' . We, however, can know
what he lacked: 'le concept de I'Efficace d'une st ruct ure sur ses effers'
pp. 33-34). In discoverin g th is lack we can not only begin to grasp Mar xist
philosoph y - t he philosophy which Marx founded but did not const ruct
- but also advance beyond it. For
a science progresses, that is to say lives, only by paying extreme attention to
its points of theoretical Iragiliry. In this respect it holds its life less by what
it knows than by what it does not know; on the absolute condition of
circumscribing that non-known, and of formulating it rigorouslyas a problem.
It will be evident that the cor e of M. Alrhusser' s ana lysis is epistemolo-
gical. Th e nature of his exercise is the explorat ion of Marx' s process of
understanding and his main method an inte nsely detai led critical reading
of the works, using all t he resources of linguistic, literary and philosophical
discipli ne. The first reacti on of his own critical readers ma y well be that
the method s and c o n c e p ~ he applies ate not necessarily those emerging by

E. J . HOB5SAWM
THE STRUCTURE OF CAPI TAL
7
his own favourite process of epistemologica l advance, from Marx himself.
To say that 'along other roads contemporary theory in psychoanalysis,
in lingu ist ics, in ot her disciplines like biology and perhaps in physics has
confr onted the problem wit hout realizing t hat Marx had "produced" it
much earlier', may be true; but it is not impossible that the problem has
been discovered in Marx because of t he new and conside rable vogue for
linguistic 'str uct uralism' and freud in France. (Indeed, while st ructura l-
funct ionalist clements are easily recognized in Mar x, it is by no means so
dear what Freud has to cont ribute ro the understanding of Capital.) But
if in fact t hese are to some extent insights from t he outside (' nous devons
ces connaissances bouleversantes ... aquelques hommes. Mar x. Nietzsche
er Freud' ) it may be wondered whether the critical effort is merely confined
to ' making manifest what is latent ' in Marx.
A second reflection is that the Alt husserian t ype of analysis finds it
difficult. if not impossible, to get outside the form al st ructure of Mar x's
thought. M. Alth usser is aware of t his characterist ic ('at no point do we
set foot on the absolutely uncrossable front ier which separates t he "devel-
opment " of specification of the concept from the development and part icu-
larit y of things' ) and appears to justify it by abstract argument (' we have
demonstrat ed that t he validation of a scient ific proposition as knowl edge
in a given scient ific practice was assured by t he interplay of part icular
forms, which guarantee the presence of scient ificit y Iscienti ficitel in the
prod uction of knowledge, in other words by specific forms which confer
the character of - tr ue - knowledge upon an act of knowledge' ). Yet even
if this is true and t his met hod of validat ion can be applied as easily to
Capital as to mathematical propositions (which is not obvious) all math-
emat icians know t hat a considerable gap st ill remains bet ween their dem-
onst rat ions and such real life phenomena - for instance. t he evolution and
operat ion of the capit alist system - as may be found to correspond to their
discoveries. One can agree wit h M. Althusser's profound and persistent
dislike of empiricism, and st ill feel uneasy about his apparent dismissal of
any exterior criterion of practice such as actual hist orical development ,
past or futu re (' nous considerons le result ar sans son devenir' ). For in fact
Marx did get down to mr difficult problem of me concrete. If he had not.
he would not have written Capit al but would have remained within t he
sphere of general it y which domi nat es t hat mar vellous and neglected Int ro-
duction to t he Critique of Political Economy , which is in many respects
the key work of the Althusserian Marx, as the 1844 Manuscri pts are the
key work of the Hegelian-humanist Marx whom he rejects.
And indeed. as soon as ~ t . Althusser descends from the level where
Marxism establishes wha t history or econo mics can or cannot do ('t hr
mat hema tical formal ization of economet rics must be subordinate to
conceprcal formaliza tion' ) and t urns to its actual subject mat ter, he says
litt le that is new or interest ing. He produces a brilliant crit ique of the
vulgar-Ma rxist views on ' base' and 'su perst ructure' and a satisfying for-
mulat ion of t heir interact ion. But such pract ical applicat ions of the general
principle as are used to illust rate it are taken from Mar xists who have used
a more direct and less intellect ually self-contained route.
While studen ts like M. Godelier" facr t he concrete problems of histori c
periodization raised by Marx, and have, for insta nce, taken a leading pan
in the rediscovery and re-analysis of the ' Asiat ic mode of production'
which is one of the more interest ing intellect ual results of the revival of
original t hought amo ng Commun ist intellect uals since Stali n, E. BaJibar' s
long discussion of historical materialism (Li re le Capital, vol. 2) remains
resolut ely on the height s of what one might call meta-history.
Mor eover, M. Alt husser' s t ype of approach, valuable t hough it is,
simplifies away some of Mar x's problems - for instance, t hat of historic
change. lrls right to show that the Marxian theory of histori cal develop-
ment is not ' evolut ionist' or ' historicist' in the ninereenrh-cent ury sense,
but rests on a firm 'st ructuralist' foundation: development is the totalit y of
all combinations, act ual or possible. of the limited number of the different
elements of ' production' which analysis defines; those act ually realized
in the past make up the succession of socio-economic formations, Yet one
might object to thi s, as to the not dissimilar Levi-Str aussian view. t hat by
itself it does not explain how and why one socio-economic formation
changes into another but merely establishes the limits outside which it is
senseless to speak of histor ic development. And also that Marx spent an
extr aordinar y amount of his time and energy tr ying to answer these ques-
tions. M, Alt husser's work demonst rates, if demonstra tion be st ill needed,
the remark able theoret ical power of Marx as a thinker, his stat us and
originality as a ' philosopher' in t he technical sense of the word, and argues
persuasively t hat he is far from a mere Hegel t ransposed from idealism t o
materialism. Yet even if his reading of Mar x is correct, it is only a part ial
reading. ,. '
This does not diminish the facer of his ana lysis as a tool of neganve
criticism. Whate\'er we may thi nk of the polemical formulat ion of his con-
tent ions (' from the point of view of theor y Mar xism is no more an histori-
cism than it is a humanism' ), the streng t h of his object ions to the Hegelian
and 1844 Manuscripts int erpretat ion of Marx is substantial. the acuteness
of his analvsis of certa in weaknesses of the t hought of Gramsci (and their
reasons] oc' of Sartre is impressive, the critique of 'model-building' including
t hat of Wr berian ideal types, is to the point. This is due to some extent
to the personal abilities of rhe man whom Le MonJe (repon ing the special
session of the French Commun ist Part y's' Cent ral Committee devoted t o
t he discussion of his and M. Garaud y's views) calls a ' philosophe de grande
qualire', a qualit), revealed among other t hings in t he intellectual respect
he thinks he owes to some of t hose he criticizes. Nevertheless, it is also due
to the t hinker and the cause who so evidentl y inspire his passionat e study.

E. J . HOBSBAWU
TlfE STRUCTURE OF CAPfTAl

Om: reads him with attention, even with excitement. There is no mys-
ter y about his capacity to t he intelligent young, and t hough it may
fear.cd that the Althusserian school whom he will cer ta inly gather round
will more sch?lasric than sparkling. the net effect of his irruption
mro Mar xist debate may be positive. For his procedure is,
almost by definition, that of asking rather th an answering questions: of
denying that the right answers have merely to be re-established even by t he
closest text ual scrut iny of authority, because t hey have as yet to be worked
out. For M. Alrhusser the relation between Mar x and his readers is one of
activity on. both. sides, a dialectical confrontation which, like realit y, has
no .cnd. It IS cuneus and characte ristic t hat the philosoph er (who has also.
as In one essay of Pour Marx, doubled as a dra matic critic) chooses the
metaphor of t heatre - needless to say t hat of Brechnan theatre _ to describe
both Mar x's process of exposing what lies beyond him (the DarSle/lung
of 'ce mode de presence de la st ruct ure dans ses effers, donc la causalire
st ructu rale elle-meme' ] and the readers' relation to him:
C'est alan qu e nou s pouvons nous souvenir de ce rerme baut emen r
sympeornanq ue de la ' Darstellung" Ie rapp rncher de cet re ' machinerie' , et le
prendre a u mot, comme l'e xisrence meme de cene machi nerie en see dfets:
la mode ,J'e.llistenloJl: tie ceue mise-en-scene, tie ce theal re ltui 01 ii la fuis
sa propre scene, son propre text e, ses propres acreurs, ce theatre door les
spectateurs ne peuvenr en cue. d'cccasicn, spectateurs, que parce qu'ils en
sont d' abord les acteurs forces, pris dans les con t raintes tf un texre er de roles
do ne ils ne peuvent en erre Its auteurs, puisque c'esr, par essence, un thi iit re
sans auteur lUre Ie Capital, vel. 2. p. 177).
But pleasur e. of reading an intelligent and original thinker ought not
to blind us to his weakn esses. .M. Alrhusser's approach t o Marx is cer-
tainly.not t he most fr uit ful. As the above discussion has suggested tact-
fully. It be doubted whether it is very Mar xist, since it plainly
rakes no Interest In much that Marx regar ded as fundament al, and _ as his
subsequent writings, few though they are, make increasingly d ear _ is at
loggerheads with some of Marx's most cherished arguments. It demon-
the posr-Stalinisr freedom, even within Communist par-
ties. to read and Interpret Marx independently. But if this process is to be
taken seriously, it requires genuine textual erudit ion such as M. Althusser
does not appear t o possess. He certain ly seems unaware bot h in Pour Marx
and. Lire .Ie Capital of the famous Grundrisse, though the)' have been
available In an excellent German edirion since 1953, and one may even
suspect tha t his interpr etati on has pr eceded hi s reading of some of t he
texts wit h which he is acquainted. To t his extent he st ill suffers from t he
of the Stalinist period, which created a gap between the older
of enormously learned Marx-scholars and both t he political
acnvrsrs and the younger neo-Mar xisrs,
Mor eover the revival of Mar xism require s a genuine willingness to see
what Marx was tryi ng to do. t hough t his does not impl y agreement
with all his propositions. Marxism, which is at once a met hod, a body of
rheorerical t hinking, and collection of texts regarded by irs followers as
authoritative, has always suffered from the tendency of Marxist'S to begin
by deciding what t hey t hinle Mar x ought to have said, and then to look
fot text ual authority for their chosen views, Such eclecticism has normall y
been controlled by a serious study of the evolution of Marx's own thought .
M. Althuss er's discovery tha t the merit of J\h rx lies rmr sn much in his
own writi ngs, but in allowing Alth usser to say what he ought to have said.
removes t his cont rol It is to befeared that he will not be the onlv theorist
to replace the real Mar x by one of his own const ruction. Wh'ether the
Alrhusserian Mar x or other analogous constructs will rum out to be as
interesting as the original is, however, quite ano t her question.
NOTES
I Louis Alth usser, Pour Marx, Francois Maspero, Paris, 1965.
2 Louis Althu sser, Jacques Ranciere and Pierre Macherey, Llre feCapital T, Francois
Paris, 1965; Alth uw: r, Etienne Ralihar and Roger Establet,
Lire teCapitalfl, Ft anljOis Maspero, Paris, 1965.
3 Alth usser has since pushed the fron tiers of the 'pre-Marxist' Marx steadily
furthe r forward, unril linle before 1875 is accept able as properly non-Hegelian.
Unfort unately, t his elimina tes the bulk of Marx's writings.
4 Maurice Goodier, Rati01Ullity and Irrationality in &onomics (1966), New Left
Books, London,
MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 11
2
MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN
THE MAKING:
TOWARDS A DIALOGUE WITH
ALTHUSSER
Pierre Vilar
(. ,J While stressing the purely philosophical (that is, theo retical char-
acter] of his work, Althcsser himself believes it should interest histuriaus
and economists. Indeed, the very legitimacy of their disciplines is called in
question when Marx is simultaneously exalted as the first discoverer of the
scient ific foundations of these subjects, and then respectfully but firmly
convicted of not knowing that he was, and not saying so either. Here too
the term ' new' is employed with part icular insistence, as in 'new quant-
itative history' or 'New Economic History'. The reference back to over a
hundred years ago in discussing Marx does not alter this, since (precisely)
a century ago his novelty was so ' new' that even he could not understand it.
The point is (I imagine) that it answered tuu far in advance cerrain criteria
which recent ' histories of knowledge' have suggested to the philosopher.
Like Caesar's wife, scientific knowledge must be above all suspicion of
(i) ideology, (ii) empiricism. Alrhusser shows easily enough (alt hough by
allusion rather than by example, unfortunately) how non-Marxist econo-
mists erect naive ant hropology into theory through their appeals to the
concrete, the ' historical facts', No less easily (though again allusively) he
shows how historians, with their traditional care for 'exact' facts and their
relish for proud resurrections from the dead, have never formulated the
theoretical object of their science, Time, in parti cular, remains for them a
simple linear 'dat um',
We shall examine below, at the appropriate moment, the construct ive
and useful elemenrs in Alrhusser's powerful conrriburion to rhe building of
Marxist science, Mor e immediately, and no less usefully, let us try and
establish the limitations of a project which liquidates somewhat too easily
(in a way Marx was careful to avoid) the various ' habitable storeys' built
at different phases of scientific advance, of which none deserves to be
made an object of worship.
If one is a Mar xist, or simply anxious to achieve coherence, then there
is a preliminar y question one must put to Althusser. Given that he accepts
the basis of a critique of knowledge drawn from Marx, and suspects all
ideas which depart from it as ' pre-critical', 'empir ical' , or 'ideological',
given that in this way he claims the right to suspect Marx himself to the
extent to which the latter's revolution remained unfinished - how then,
can he fail to be equally suspicious vis-a-vis what he calls 't hose studies in
the history of knowledge now available to us' (he lets the reader guess
what these are, but this is not hard)? Why is he not as vigilant towards
that ' necessary philosophical format ion' which is indispensable, so he claims,
in order to read Mar x pr ofitabl y? I fear that one can detect here an
attit ude like that of Joan Robinson and similar economists, who certainly
enjoy 'reading Marx' but do so in the light of a ' necessary formation in
economics': their own, of course. Let it be clearly understood that I am not
advocating ignorance of ' modern' economists or ' today's' episrernologises,
in the name of Marxism. Onl y, it does not seem to me that it is fidelity
to Marx to see Capital as an anticipation of Foucault or a forerunner of
Keynes, it means rather subjecting foucaul r and Keynes to the sort of
systemat ic doubt Marx would have felt about them.
In the field of economics, Althus ser knows this so well that he envelops
both the greatest of old classics and the most learned young econometricians
in the same utter disdain; somewhat hastily it must be said. Whereas on
the other hand he is qui te ready to borrow from ' histories of knowledge'
the themes of a ' philosophy' whose mission, he says, is to ' watch over'
(veil/er) dialectical materialism as Lenin did from 1900 onwards, after the
first theoretical crisis in physics. However, Lenin had not hing against
physicists, he was attacking their interpreters. What would he have had to
say - one can at least pose the question - of those trends in epistemology
which for several decades now have so constantly opposed an anti-humanist
nec positivism to Marx's systemat ic prise de parti and an anti-historicist
and nee-idealist struct uralism to what Alrhusser recognizes quite rightly as
a 't heory of histor y' ? Not to speak of a critique of empiricism and com-
mun sense executed in the name uf the scient ific spirit, which bases itself
deliberately upon indi vidual psychoanalysis and neglects the exisrence of
classes, class struggles and class illusions?
A Marxist study of these Intellectual trends must be tempting to bot h
histor ians and philosophers. They bear witness to the (existent ial) ideolo-
gical reaction of a threatened class. AUsponta neous 'anti-historicism', every
'crit ique uf historical reason' is a carefully culrivared ant idote to Marx's
true discovery, his historical critique of reason.
Nevertheless, the indubitable Marxist sincerity of Louis Althusser and
12 PIERRE YILAR MARXiST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 13
his disciples forces us to classify t hem among the victi ms of t his tr ap,
rath er than among th ose who set it - and so, to explore Marx side by side
with them, although not in t heir fashion. On some poi nt s the hist ori an ca n
do for t hem what t he y have don e for him - indicat e cert ain possibiliti es
and pitfalls. If they have quite properly point ed OUt to us t hat the concept
of histor y has yet to be const ructed, we should point out to them in return
t hat it cannot be defined wit hout hist orians, and above all without t he
prodi gious historian that Mar x could sometimes be, whether he was 'doing
history ' implicitly Of in an explicit and tradit ional way.
I willingly gra nt that t he object Mar x is constr ucting in Capital is a
' theoret ical' one; indeed, this seems more self-evident to me than it does
to Alt husser. I admit t hat one ought neither to mi stake t hought for realit y
nor realit y for thought, and t hat thought bears to realit y only a 'relation-
ship of knowledge' , for what else could it do ? Also that the process of
knowledge tak es place cntirely within thought [where else un ear th could
it take place?) and that t here exists an order and hierarchy of 'generaliti es'
about which Althusser has had really major t hings to say. But on the ot her
hand I fail rc see what 'astounding' mistake Engels was commit ting when
he wrote (in a letter, incidentally, as a casual image) t hat concept ual thought
progressed ' asymptot ically' towards the real, while (according to Althusser)
rhe law of value to which Engels' image referred is 'a concept perfectly
adequate to its object since it is the concept of the limits of its variat ion
and t herefore t he adequat e concept of t he field of its Inadequacy' ;'
Such subtlety suggests, I concede, t he genuine difficulties we exper ience
in the definition of our procedures and t he practice of our research as
histor ians, in which it is easy to 'fall into empiricism' by adhering too
closely to t he object descri bed, to t he 'example' . However, the abyss of
empiricism is on ly separated by a hair 's breadt h from t he abyss of ideal-
ism. Too great a revulsion from 'examples', too st rong a wish to isolate
t he ' Holy of Holies of t he Concept' (I came across t his expression in a
recent ' Alth usserian' t hesis on Marx's not ion of economic laws) and one
risks being ' precipitated' (or catapulted) int o a world which is no longer
that of Mar xism. For, when reading the 1857 Introduction, if one should
' hear its silences', one should also take care not to silence its words: 'The
totality as it appears in t he head, as a totality of t houghts, is a product of a
thinking head, which appropriates the world in t he only way it can, a way
different from t he art ist ic, religious, pract ical and mental appropriat ion
of t his world. The real subject retains its autonomous existence outside
the head just as before; namely as long as the head's conduct is merely
speculative, merely theoret ical. Hence, in the t heoretical met hod t oo, the
subject, society, must always be kept in mind as the presupposiriont.! The
whole of Mar x is here. The world remains 'auto nomous' only if the mind
remains 'speculat ive' . The subject is society. The theori zer 'a ppropriat es' it
only if it remains always ' present' to him.
Alrhusser may tell us that in this Int roduction (from which everyone takes
what suits him, unfortu nately), Marx failed to discern the hierarchy of
abst ractions. But Mar x point s out different ways of 'appropriating t he
world' in it: t he empirical mode (the 'practical mi nd' ), the religious mode
(myt hs and cosmogon ies), the art istic mode (of whi ch Bachelard, Foucault
and even Alehusser make ample use). The scient ific mode proceeds out of
and differs from t hese. It pro ceeds out of t hem because it cannot do with-
out the ' practical mind' (in its ' techniques' ) and it progressively ' rectifies'
cosmogonies and t raditions. But it diffe r$ from them, and this is why all
serious epistemological studies are useful in indicat ing the 't hres holds'
between t he different types of knowledge. If by contrast one t ype of
abstraction is labelled 'good' and anot her ' bad' (as Ricoeur has done with
different 's ubjectivities' ],' then the very choice of vocabular y tends to lead
to a slide towards philosophical dogmat ism, and t he slightest dist ract ion
resul ts in 'ill-considered ideological condemnations.
Ult imately, this dispute bet ween empirical observat ion and t heoret ical
constr uction comes down to the same Methodenst reit between t he ' his-
t o rica l school' and t he ruarhemarica l eco nomists, t hat was contem po ra ry
and akin t o the cont roversy between Engels and Schmidt . Now if t his
dispute can be said to have been resolved and surpassed today, it is in the
direct ion whid i Ahhusser describes as ' IICW' - t ha t is, ill t erms uf the II U W
familiar imagery of theoret ical objects, combinatory games and logical
mat rices. Hence if Marx's inno vat ion (which, it is t rue, did herald all that )
is tak en as heralding onl y that, t hen it could well be argued t hat it has
achieved it s fulfilment in the recent development of economic science.
After all the lat ter defends it self against well-worn objections about the
gap bet ween model and reality or the unfathomable ' richness' of the world,
in the same way as Alrhusser legitimately defends Marx - by answering
that the ' object' in question is not t he same. To t his sort of economics, t he
utilit y-scarcit y game is a t heoretical game quite adequate for its object.
In addit ion, macro-economics has pr oceeded beyond such premises now-
adays: is not its operat ional concept of 'capital formation' perhaps only
anot her name for 'surplus value'? Some economists will not hesitate to
admit t herein a belated tr iumph of Mar xian discoveries. But would it be
' Ma rxist' simply to join them in accept ing thi s claim? No. Because t he
essence of Mar x's discovery was not a matt er of economics, of pure t heor y;
it was soci o-bist or ical in nat ure. It consisted in t he exposure of the social
cont radiction which t he free sponta neous format ion of surplus value
(t he ' accumulation of capital') generated within t he coherent totality of the
mode of product ion which susta ins it, and which it conversely defines.
At t his point we can rejoin Alt busser. Mar x's t heoretical object , his
cent ral concept and coherent whole, is certa inly the mode of prod uct ion,
seen as a struct ure bot h determinate and determinant. But its originality
does not lie in its being a t heoretical object. It lies rather in the fact that
14
PIERRE VI. AR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 15
this was the first theoretical object whi ch expressed a social whole, where
earlier attempts at t heory in t he human sciences had been confined to the
economy and had perceived social relat ions either as immutable (like the
physiocrats' conception of landed property) or else as ideals to be attained
(like the juri dical libert y and equalit y of liberal thought ). The second origin-
ality of t he mode of product ion as a t heoret ical object is t hat it is a
st ructure of funct ioning development, and as such is neither formal nor
static. Irs t hird originality is t hat such a structure itself implies the (eco-
nomic) principle of the (social) contradict ion which bears with it th e
necessit y of its destr uct ion as a st ructure, of its own deuruavraticn.
Inversely, t his acknowledgement does not allow one to liquidate all non-
Marxist economic theory with cont empt (which would be ridiculous). It
enables one to see that the latt er can perfectly well exist as theory, without
t hereby possessing t he statu s of 'science' (except for its upholders, and
Althusser ), and at t he same time be an ideology, not out of incoherence or
empiricism but because it claims universality for laws of only one level
(t he economic) wit hin only one mode of production (capitalism). Mar x's
critique of Ricardo, which Althusser considers insufficient, is in this sense
exemplary. One can and one should acknowledge and make use of t he
genius of ot her minds and the logic of other systems, provided one sees
clearly: (i) t he logical field wit hin which their hypot heses are valid; (ii) t he
bacciecs which no bourgeois t heorist may cross without denying his own
nature (Walrus, Keynes, Schumperer were perfectly aware of them); (iii)
t he pract ical domains where [he true limitat ions of t he t heor y's area of
judgement are revealed (not t he distance between model and realit y, which
is a feat ure of all knowledge). Here the limitat ions are: modificat ions in
t he structure of capitalism, politico-social pr oblems, the treatment of pre-
capitalist societ ies, and t he historical appearance of for ms of socialism.
The analysis of these questions is a t ask for historians. In it lies the hope
of a 'construct ion of the concept of hist ory' . However, to work in Mar x's
way it is not sufficient to say, with Alt husser, t hat 'classics' and ' modern s'
have ' different problemarics' , t hat not ions like t he 'opt imum' or ' full
employment' are of the same kind as physiocratic harmonies or socialist
ut opias, or that t he ' needs/scarcity' dualism is ut ilized as an 'empirical-
ideological dat um' when it is actua lly an archetypal ' t heoret ical' dualism
or 'const ructed' object. Un the cont rary, what we must strive to t hink out
historically (if we want to ' understa nd t he facts' as Mar x likes to say) is
how a theory, because it is partial (t he t heor y of one level of one mode of
product ion) yet claims uni versality, mayser ve simultaneously as a practical
and as an ideological tool, in the hands of one class, and for one period
of ti me. This t ime has t o be 'constructed', it is t rue. since it consists of
alterna ting defeat s and successes, movement s of pessimism and optimism,
moments when even appeara nces (profits) have to be camoufl aged, and
moments when the realit y itself (surplus value) can be exalted, if onl y
when it is rediscovered during phases o f expansion, as investment , as the
basis of enlarged reproduction. But what matters most is the percept ion of
what is invariably disguised. because it is given the status of an untou ch-
able hypot hesis - the equivalent of landed propert y for the physiocrars,
which for t he capitalist mode of production is: (i) the private appropriat ion
of t he means of production; (ii) t he determinati on of value by t he market.
On ce these 'relat ions of production' are taken for granted, t here is of
course no reason why one may not theorize effect ively on t he economic
level or elucidate the 'economic history' of the lands and epochs wher e
such relati ons have prevailed. But this is just why the hist orian who wants
to be a Mar xist will refuse to confine himself withi n 'economic history'
(except to study this or t hat case empirically). I have said on ot her occa-
sions and I will maint ain that so-called ' quant itat ive histories' are noth ing
but ret rospective econometrics, and t hat t he ' New Economic History' cannot
measure the realm of Clio. As Colin Clark has stated. history stands 'higher
up' in the hierarchy of the sciences than economics, because it contains the
lat ter! Fidelity to Marx demands t hat one add: and because it cannot be
divided.
In my own case (this is why it is d ear to me) this conviction arose from
a convergence between t he lessons of Lucien Febvre and t he lessons of
Marx. For Febvre, t he chief vice in the hist orical practice of his own time,
and t he chief object of his fierce attacks, lay in its ver y academic respect
for 'fixed boundar ies' : you take economics, you polit ics, and you, ideas. So
l owe it to Louis Althusser to express my astonishment and disappoint-
ment at finding that his theses on the 'Marx ist conception of the social
totality' conclude by stati ng not only the ' possibility' but t he ' necessit y' of
ret urning to a division of histor y int o so many different ' histories' . If
anything does have the odour of empiricism, it is precisely this plural it y,
In histor ical knowledge it sanctions all the old pretensions of t he 'special-
ist'. In social pr act ice - t his is one of the dramas of socialist construct ion
- it solicits t he world of science, the world of economic technocracy, the
world of polit ics, the wor ld of ideas, and t he world of the arts all to live
according to their own ' levels' and specific ' tempos'. Meanwhile, beneat h
t hem, in spont aneous processes, a symphony is orchestra ted undergro und,
J ref use to admit that one can affirm the 'specific dependence' of levels
on each ot her and then proclaim the relati ve independence of their histo-
ries. 'Independence within int erdependence' - is not the fate of verbal
games of t his kind well known, when the cont ent of the t wo terms is not
fixed ? Perhaps we should conclude that our task is to fix their definition.
But the example given (for once) by Althusser scarcely reassures one as t o
what t he dist inction of ' histories' has in stor e for Mar xism. It is that of the
history of philosophy. According to chronology. we are told, philosophers
succeed one another, This succession is not the history of philosophy, Who
would disagree? What work, what manual. still confuses them? It might ,
,. PIERRE YILAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 17
perhaps, be as well if some of t hem did. A reference book is always useful .
The same cannot be said of all const ruct ions. But what are t he distinguish-
jog mar ks of ' history' here? Alt husser demands t hat there be rigorous
definitions 0(: (i) t he philosophical (::;; t he t heoret ical ); (ii) irs appropriate
't ime' ; (iii ) its 'different ial relations', its distinctive 'articulat ions' wit h the
oth er levels. ..
Excellent pro posals. But we have seen above how the isolat ion of the
economic from the social led necessarily to an ideological definition of
the t ormer. How is this result to be avoided in defining the philosophical ?
Ideology is a superstructure. Science should not be. But where is the 'theo-
retical' to be situated? What is its degree of independence at each instant
vis-a-vis the other ' levels' ? To pass judgement on t his would require, as
well as the necessary philosophical formati on, a hist orical informat ion
capable of ' mastering' the whole relevant mat erial, of t he sort Mar x had
acquired before he talked about economics.
Now Althusser's procedure is t he inverse: he wants to derive from his
part icular 'relatively autonomous' histor y, a supposedly ' rigorous' defini-
t ion of 'facts' or 'events'. A ' philosophical event ' is that which 'effects a
mutation of the existing theor etical problemat ic' . The ' historical fact' is
whatever 'causes a mutation' in the existi ng st ruct ural relationships. He
even speaks of ' philosophical events of historical scope',' t hus testifying to
the persistent weight of the dramatization of ' nai vely gat hered' histor y
upon the language of t heor y.
There is in fact no event which is not in one sense anecdotal. Except
in idealist historiograph y, even the appea rance of a Spinoza or a Marx
has ' historical scope' only through and for the (more or less distant ) time
which will heed their t houghts. Otherwise, it may even be the repression
of their thought which constit utes hist ory. Furth ermore, have 'structural
relations' ever been modi fied by 'a fact' ? The most conscious of revolu-
tions have so far modified them only very imperf ectly. Not to speak of
techniques. Papin ' sees' the power of steam, and Wat t tames it, but his
' innovat ion' must be ' implant ed' in order to become a true 'force of pro-
duction'. Amongst ot her factors, in one limited world. Where is t he ' break' ?
Professional sensat ionalists like to multiply 'event s' . ' Historic facts' ar e
all the rage on a day of lunar landings or barricades. It may be objected:
exactl y, the theorist has to choose. But choose what ? The hous ewife who
cannot or will not pay ten francs a kilo for beans, or the one who does
buy, t he conscript who joins his draft, or t he one who refuses? They are
all act ing ' historically'. Conjunctures depend on t hem, they are reinforcing
or undermining structures. However imperfect its inter pretat ion may still
be, it is t he objecti fication of the subject ive through st atistics which alone
makes materialist history possible - t he histor y of masses, that is bot h of
massive, mfrast ruaurol facts, and of those human ' masses' which theory
has to ' penet rate' if it is to become an effective force.
One i s led to wonde r i f the t heorist o f t he concept of history has not
spent so much energy attacking a t ype of histor y that is now out moded,
that he has unwitti ngly become its prisoner. Having allowed histor y to be
divided up amo ng 'specialists' he t hen sets out in search of ' historical fact s'
and 'events'. An event cert ainly has its importance, above all its place -
fortuitous or int egrable - within the series of which it forms a part. But
although he will mistrust the excesses of the ' ant i-event ful' histori ography
which has transformed historical practice in the last forty years, the Marxist
historian remains loyal to It S cent ral pn nciple, which was that of Mar x.
He can have not hing to do, even verbally, with the myth of ' t he days
which made Fra nce' or even wit h ' the days that shook the world '.
Eisensrein's Octobe r ends with the declaration: 'The revolut ion is ove r.'
We know very well that it was just beginning.
The difficulty cannot be evaded by extending the sense of t he word
'event', al ter using the term ' mutation' to suggest the idea of a 'break '.
Today science and theory are ill wit h words. They invent esoteric words
for ideas which are not ; and t hey give familiar names to esoteric contents.
' Event' and 'chronicle' pass int o t he language at mathemat ics, while they
become suspect to historians. Genes star t to ' take decisions' just as it is
agreed t hat heads of state enjoy only t he illusion of doing so. ' Overdererm-
inat ion' and ' the effectivity of an absent cause' come to us from psycho-
analys is, as ' mutation' comes from biology.
But will a term invented for on e st ructure do for all ot hers ? Even Mar x
and Engels were not alwa ys fort unate in t heir use of this t ype of compari-
son. Schumperer wro te of Marx t hat he effected a 'chemical' blend bet ween
economics and histor y, not a mechanical mixture ." For long I found the
image a seductive one, since I had learned at school a very long time ago
that in a mixture t he element s remain separate while in a chemical compo und
a new entity is for med (in this case, t he Marxist totalit y). But what is such
a compar ison wort h for modern science? And what does it teach me in my
trade? Balibar would very much like to replace 'combinat ion' with the
mat hemat ical 'combinator y'. Yet he hesitates: ' pseudo-combinatory', 'almost
a combinatory', a 'combinatory, though not in the srrict sense .. ."
Would it not be bett er, since Mar x is still ' new', to decide to keep the
words which he did invent, and invent new ones where t hese are needed,
without borro wing fro m ot her sciences which cannot in an y case speak for
our own - if t hey could, why should we have to 'construct' the latt er? In
short, the theoret ical commentary on Capital seems to me to have had the
very great meri t of showing how histor y had always been written without
'knowledge' of exactly what ' history' was' (bur the same could be said of
so many t hings!). However, once again, wh ile it was good of Althusser and
Bahbar to pose the question, the y may have been imprudent to t hink t hey
possessed t he answer to it (t his is not said with any intention of reviving
the positi vistic scepticism of old Seignobos ).
11
PIERRE YILAR
MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKtNG
"
It is not possible to ans wer the question ' what is history?' by theory any
more than by practice alone. One can only try to answer, in Mar x's
fashion, by a passionat e dual effort at making a complex subject-matter
'one's own', which always demands a minimum of theory, and to 'con-
struct' t he object of thought corresponding to t hat matter. which demands
that the: rhmker both escapes from the latter yet holds it ' present' to hrs
mind. No research wit hout theory - and here the historian's complacency
about theory often rightly irritates the philosopher. But also. no theor y
wit hout research, or else the theorist will soon find himself accused (as the
econom ist used eo be) of meetly juggling with ' empty boxes'.
Looked at more closely, the boxes may appear less empty than was
thought, because historians are: less empiricist t han imagined. Instead of
taking idle: pleasure in negati ve: prono uncements - which are: part of an
ideological t rap - would it not be: more reasonable to take not e of some:
of t he steps forward that historians have made? In the same way, it might
be more scientific to attempt an historical balance-sheet of Marxism in the:
manner of historians, not ' judging' it according to our political or moral
preferences. but ' thinking' it as a phenomenon to be re-situated in rime,
Our philosophers are gladl y anti-humanist in t heir t heoret ical require-
ments; yet t hey appear irked by t he fact t hat - Lenin placed religiously
apa rt - far too many Mar xist t hinkers and polit ical leaders were ignorant
enough of the great heritage to try and live it as an ' ideology' rather t han
as 'science', in a ' historicist' perspective: rat her t han as an absolute. Above
all, they feel that compa red to the accelerat ing rhyt hm of the forces of
product ion, the mutation of t he world appears a slow process filled with
errors and horr ors; while: on the other hand there exists a t heory which
would make: history reasonable, if only it were bett er understood. Ahhusser
writes: ' On t he day that histor y exists as theory in the sense defined, its
dual existence as t heoretical science: and empirical science will pose no
more problems than does the dual existence of the Marxist theory of
political economy as t heoretical science and empirical science." 'No more'?
Is t hat not e: nough? The victory of socialist economics lies in the fact that
it exists - many believed it was impossible - not in its absence of probl ems.
The same may be said of socialism as a t otality, as a nascent mode of
product ion - which incidentall y perhaps invalidates the term ' totality' which
means a global st ructure truly in place. Its const ituti on within a hostile
world is certa inly no less drama tic and imperfect - possibly more so - after
a century of thought and fifty years of action, than was the installation of
the capitalist world or of the feudal world. They took cennoies to t hink
out their meani ng, cent uries to be born. The logic of the Napoleonic wars
must have: seemed very tricky to contempora ries.
Impat ience is not a virtue of theorists. Nicos Pou lanrzas is indignant at
the successive and contradictory interpretations wh ich the Thi rd Inter-
national gave of fascism. Well! Before interpreting one has to st udy, to see.
Struggles do not always leave rime for this. The victories of 'science' are
won in the long-run.
These considerations go somewhat beyond the aims of this st udy. But
t hey are not unrelated to them Economics, sociology and history (Marxist
and non-Mar xist alike) have always been subjected t o t he 'over-determining'
pressures of the present. Today they are more so than ever. In t he age
of positivism they defended themselves against such pressures. angrily
and nai vely, Nowadays, t hey have all become applied sciences, practical
sciences, whet her as politicology, empirical sociology, or vari ous prospec-
t uses, whether they accept the existence of t he class struggl e or believe in
'consensus'. Histor y is following their exampl e. It is as important to it to
explain Fidel Cast ro as Hernan Cortes, Our journals show t his well enough ,
This presence of the present in the past and the: past in t he present is
in no way cont rary to t he spirit of Marx. It is even one: of the latter's main
char acterist ics. But this is true only unde r certain conditions, which return
us to our argument. Does our way of looking at the past accord wit h
Marx's epistemological innovat ions. consciously or unconsciously? On
severa l important points, and on one in par ticular - that of historical time
- Louis Althusser's studies give us a clear consciousness of our var ious
lacunae, our loyalties and our infidelities, but also of cert ain of our gains,
In his discourse on 'histor ical time', Alt husser warns of two related abysses:
the ' homogeneous and continuous' time of common sense and historical
resear ch; and the time of Hegel - 'essential sections', t he ' historical present' ,
the conti nuity of time and the unit y of the moment.'
As for the second of these - what historian takes his business so un-
seriouslyas to accept these 'absolute horizons' the philosophers have brought
to life again? As for t he first. there are various SOrts of continuity. The time
of physicists is counted in millionths of a second; the t ime of sportsmen
in tent hs. Lived rime has traditionally been that of day and night, winter
and summer. sowing and harvest, the lean years and the fat ones, the
int ervals between births. t he expectation of deaths. Historical demography
is a great schoolteacher, as far as different ial temporalit y is concerned. The
time of men who have seventy ye:ars ahead of them is no longer that of
men who had thirty. Any more than t he time of t he Carib Indian is that
of t he Eskimo.
If the mistake of mechanical periodi zarion has been committed, it has
been made by econo mists, who, in thei r anxiety to oppose an 'o bjective'
time to t hat of historians, have: CUt t heir temporal series up into decades
or half-centuries wit hout realizing tha t t hey were destr oying the meaning of
t he series, even from the point of view of simple mathemat ical probabilit y.
Let me: go even further. It was t raditional history which 'const ruct ed'
time: - even t he old ' Annals', even the scholastic Chronicles. Events. reigns,
eras: these .....ere: ideological const ructions, but not homogeneous ones,
20
PIERRE VILAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 21
Thus. when chronological preoccupation became a critical one, how many
myt hs it demolished, how many texts it desacralized! Th is too is part of
the ' history of knowl edge', of t he ' production of knowl edge'? On the other
hand, when Mi chel Foucau lt loses his way in the economic domain. both
in his own chron ology and in chronology tout court , he ends up writ ing
neither arch aeology, nor history, nor science, nor epistemology, but
literat ure.
To date for the sake of dating is only a (usef ul) scholarly technique. To
'date intelligently' remains a duty for historians. For the consciousness of
successions in time and of relative durations is anythin g but a naweiy given
datum. It does not arise out of nat ure and myths, but against t hem. Wh y
is it t hat Alrhusser, who concludes that the concept of history is to be
identi fied with that of a time, has not felt to t he fuJI the content of the term
chrono-logy?
By cont rast, havi ng read Hegel, he overestimates the significance of
the not ion of penodization: 'On t his level, then. the whole problem of the
science of history would consist of the division of this continuum accord-
ing to a pericdizauon corresponding to the succession of one dialectical
tota lity afte r another. The moments of the Idea exist in the number of
historical periods into which the time cont inuum is to be accurately
divided. In this, Hegel was merely thi nking in his own theoretical prob-
lematic the number one problem of the historian's practice, t he problem
Voltaire, for example, expressed when he distinguished between t he age of
louis XIV and the age of l ouis XV; it is still the major problem of modern
historiograph y.t' " Let us say t hat after disengaging it from myths, history
tends spontaneously to systematize chronology. It is curious that it should
be reproached for so doing. From the Revolution onwards, French his-
toriography tri ed to do this on the basis of the concept of social classes.
Even our school-room periodization (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern
Times, the Contemporary Period) t ranslates the succession of the t hree
main modes of production, ' modern' times corresponding to the pre-
parati on of the thi rd mode thro ugh the tr iumph of the mercant ile econ-
omy. Thi s schema is Eurocenrrlc, poorly concept ualized, and naively
divided according to the ' mutation-events' of the SOrt dear to Althusser,
like 1492 or 1789. However, it does reassure us to some degree about the
convergence to be expected bet ween ' practical' approaches and t heoretical
'const ructions' .
It is tr ue that in Capital Marx gave us a 'construction of time' in the
economic field, and that this is complex and not linear: a 'time of times'
not measur able against everyday dock time, but adap ted to each t hor-
oughly conceptua lized operation (labour, pr oduction, the rot ation of dif-
ferent forms of capital). People have often affected not to notice this
discovery. However, who has taken this temporal const ruction - the time
of capitali sm - to its logical conclusion, if nor modern economi sts? Once
again, if this was t he essential Marxian innovat ion, it would have to
be declared accepted, perfected, surpassed. But it was not. It was, rather,
Marx's demonstration that ' rota tions' and 'cycles' (and nat urally ' revolu-
tions' too, in spite of cert ain plays on the double meaning of the word)
never lead back to their point of departure again, but create new sit uations
not only in the economy but in the social whole. This is the difficult y, which
t he philosophers will seize upon. To speak of 'crearive t ime' means not hing
(I did it once myself, unwisely). Levi-Strauss proposes 'cumulative histor y'
and ' hot history' (to evade the prob lem). It is not easy to name what
makes the new emerge out of the old.
To physicists th is is unimportant , and biologists ma y be reduced to
philosophizing about it: their subject-matters do not alter with the rhyt hm
of human lives. But the historian's domain is that of change itself, change
at the lev.el of struct ures as well as on the level of particular 'cases', To t he
historian, the temptat ion to search for stabilities is an ideological temp-
tation, founded upon the anguish of change. There is no way out of it:
save for a few fragment s on the point of vanishing, men in society no
longer live in pre-history - a term whose very invent ion shows that the
concept of history has itself a history, one less simple than Althusser
believes. Six t housand years at t he most comprise ' historical times'. A few
cent uries for m our familiar horizons, and two or three of t hem exhaust
our economy and our science. The 'long duration' is not so very long.
Between it and the 'event,' it is mean or usual time which is enigmatic.
Althusser agrees that ' historians are beginning to ask questions' about
all t his, and even doing so 'in a very remarkable way'. But (he goes on)
they ar e content to observe 't hat there are' long. medium and short times,
and to note the interferences resulting from their interaction, rathe r than
perceiving these as t he product of one commanding totality: the mode of
prod uct ion. A ten-line critiqu e and three names in parentheses fPebvre,
Labrousse, Brandel )!' : is thi s reall yenough to sit uate cont emporary ' histor-
ical practice' in relat ion to (i) historical time, (ii) Marx? To tell the truth,
one gets the impression that for Althusser, t he evocat ion of t hese three
names is a mere scruple. His criticisms are actually addressed to t he whole
of historiography from its beginnings, up to and including nearly all living
historians. Not that t his attitude is necessarily unjustified. It suggests a
very important investigation: it would be most valuable to know the role
of what Althusser splendidly describes as the 'elegant sequences of the
official chronicle in which a discipline or a society merely reflects its good
conscience, i.e., the mask of its bad conscience' " in class cult ure and
popu lar culture. both academic history and television spectacles.
But t his would mean a world-wide inquiry. And a second and more
difficult one, into the event ual role and sites of growth of ' t rue histor y',
supposing one could define tbis, and find it being practiced. On thi s
point Louis Altbusser's hopes for the const ruction of historical time, a
22
PIERRE VLAR
MARXIST HISTORY, A IN THE MAKriG 23
construction in Marx's sense, differ from our own. We shall set out the
latt er by considering t he three historians Althusse r ment ions and with
some reference to our own personal expeneace. However, we are perfectly
aware of the limitat ions of the arguments below in relat ion to the dimen-
sian of t he two questions to be posed. (i) what was, what is the historical
function of history as (ii ) what is now, and what could be, the
role of histor y as science?
The a ni)' historical practice which inspir es an approving word from
Althusst r is t hat ot Michel Fouca ult. The latter (he claims) is t he dis-
coverer of a ' real history' quite invisible within the ideological continuum
of linear time - time which it is enough to simpl y divide up into parts.
Foucault has discovered ' absolutely unexpected temporalities" ' new logics'
in relation to which Hegelian schemas (here the)" are again!) possess onl y
a ' highly approximate' value. 'on condition that they are used approx-
imately in accordance with their approximate nat ure'" - in short. he has
carri ed out a work not of abstraction but wit hin abstracti on, which has
const ructed an historical object , by identifying it, and hence also the
concept of its histor y.
If, when he wrote t hese lines, Alrhusser had known onl y the Foucault
of L'Histoire de la folie and Naissance de la clinique I might be induced
to share his fervour . However, if each 'cult ural for mati on' of t his sort must
have its 'own time', then what happens to the time of societ y at large? On
reading the first of these two works I experienced an anxious sensation of
'enclosure'. appropriate to the subject of course. but due also to the way
in which the latt er had been cut off on its own. I t hought t hat this dis-
satisfact ion was Marxist. Since then, Foucault has gone on to generalize
his method, in large works which display its vices more prominentl y than
its virt ues" At the outset, a few aut horitarian hypotheses. As soon as it is
a question of demonstr ation - wherever some light on the topic already
exists. one is confronted with jumbled dat es, forced readings of texts,
ignorance so gross that one must think it deliberate, and innumerable
hist orical absurdities (a redoubtable category). Above all, Foucault is
always ready to substit ute wit hout war ni ng for the 'episreme' he discusses,
not thought-out concepts (one would be grateful for that), hut his own
private imagery. Alt husser talks of ' delirium' in connection wit h Michelet.
Equal in this respect, Foucault's talent is no different. However, if he has
to choose bet ween two forms of delirium, t he historian will prefer Michelet.
Michel Foucault's modest y will surely forgive t his comparison.
lucien Febvre appears much less distant from Marx. Where does Alehusser
situate him, however? Among the assemblers of the 'linear rune' so ill-
adjusted to the historical tot alit y? No description could beless appropriate
to t he man. Among the promot ers of the elegant official sequences? Who
has not been guilty of t his to some degree? But who has demoli shed more
of them t han l ucien Febvre! All things considered, where can one find
more ' unexpected temporaliti es', 'antipodes of empirical history' or 'iden-
tified historical objects' t han in his work? Is not the unbeliever as good
an historical object as t he madman? Is Febvr e's ' mental equipment' quite
useless for the 'production of knowledge' ? It is very much a t rait of our
times to refer to lucien Pebvre in brackets, between a condemnation of
Michelet and an exaltation of Foucault, as somebody who 'began to ask
t he right questions' . That is, of times so concerned with communication
that each understands a ni)" one language in them - t hat of his 'training".
It is not by chance that we have come to read so many self-contained
'cultures' into the past. It would be useful to discover which other epochs
of crisis have shared this tendency to erect sealed partitions.
Febvre's sixteenth cent ury is not d osed: luther. Lefevre, Marguerite,
Rabelais, des Periers all appear t here within the exact limits which the
cohesion of the 'over-dererrnimng' totalit y imposes on them. But the latter
is in movement , ' One cannot judge a revolutionar y epoch b)" the con-
sciousness which it has of itself.' The historian had to demonstrat e this
against t he ideology of his own time. of the rulers. If he could do it, it was
because he had first of all made t he sixteenth cent ury 'hi s own', at all its
levels, and held it ' present' t hrough a process of research which was concrete,
but not empirical. His research was systematized by his struggle to deter-
mine its problemati c, against the historical positivism of the age, his st ruggle
for the massive fact against the minut e and precise fact, for tru e scrupu-
lousness against false erudition. It is a st ruggle which ofte n yields much the
same sounds as Mar x's bad-tempered scoldings.
' Real histor y' may spring in this way out of a practice and a criticism.
not from an affected ' rigc ur' but from a correctness shown by the absence
of any absurdit y. l ucien Febvre never called himself a theorizer or a
Marxist. But it would never have occurred to him to enclose Marx in the
nineteent h century as in a prison (as Foucault calmly does in The Order
of Things).14
Ernest Labr ousse's more evident relati onship to Marx does not incline
Althusser to give him any special consideration. He apparently wishes to
atta ck all ccnjunctural hist ory as such, through Labrousse. But the latter
is unjustly accused by Alt husscr's critique; especially when this critique
neglects the whole immense t radition from Vico to Kondra tieff, from Moore
to Akerman. from Levasseur to Hamilton (not forgett ing Simiand, if
one wants to remain gallocentricl, a tr adition t hat pretended to explain the
relati ons between cycles and dnoelopment, bet ween natural. economic and
historical time by the observation of statistical indices. Claimed. that is, to
answer the real question which has been posed.
Was t his question posed as a function of ' vulgar' time, or of t he Marxist
' whole', the 'mode of product ion' ? Here we face a genuine difficUlt).
Somet imes, in effect, conjuncrural history tends - by its expository methods,
b)"hast), commenta ry or school book vulgarization - to make histor y seem
24
PIERRE VILAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 2S
a product of time (which is meanin gless) rath er th an t ime (i.e., non -
homogeneous, different iated t ime) a product of histor y (i.e., of the moving
play of social relati onships within certain st ruct ures). A Marxist objecti on
to this position has already been made by Boris Porshnev, who, at first
glance, extended it (wrongly) to Labrousse' s work. The relationship be-
tween conjuncrural and Mar xist t reat ment s of hist ory thus certa inly needs
to be clarifi ed.
Mar x himself can help us in this respect. Co nsider his characteristic way
of treating the boom years of the 1!l50s (' t his society appear ed to enter
upon a new phase of development after the discover y of t he Californian
gold mines . . .'), or the hopes he shared wit h Engels at each sign of capi-
t alist crisis (the pardonable naivet y of a man of act ion), or his repeated
references to t he long period of economic expans ion aft er t he great Dis-
coveries whic h served as t he lau nching-pad of bou rgeois societ y, or his
int erest in Tooke's History of Prices and his reproaches to Hume for having
tal ked of t he monetary systems of Antiquity with out statistical evidence, or
(lastly) his syst emat ic analysis of the trade 'cycle' - a much mor e ' modern'
analysis than is often th ought. All this pr event s one trom counrerposmg
Marx to conjunct ural hist or y or from seeing the latt er as an innovation
with respect to him. What ought to be contrasted with his work are rat her
the underl ying theoreti cal foundat ions and t he often int emperate historical
conclusions of the various forms of con juncturalism.
Observation of t he real rhythm s of economic activity should start from
a stria concept ualizat ion of what it is that is being obser ved. For far too
long observers have simply registered nominal prices here, money pr ices
there, volumes of product ion here and stock-exchange quot at ions else-
where, long term curves here and short t er m curves t here, and fail ed to ask
themselves wh at was index and what was object , and what theory made
this an index of that ob ject. I crit icized Hamilton a long t ime ago for his
ulti mat e confusion of capital-formation wit h the dista nce between nominal
prices and wage-aggregates - which does not mean th at Marx was ignor-
ant of the categor y of ' inflat ionary profits' ! A concept or a sta nda rd are
only valid for one t ime: in spite of Marczewski (or Pourastlel I cont inue
to reject t he belief that it is meaningful to search for t he 1970 equivalent
of a 1700 income. Finall y, by elimi natin g one movement in order to isolate
another, one can creat e a statist ical mirage. There are pit falls in ' construc-
t ion' as well. This is why the most classical of conjuncrural movements can
be quest ioned, and it is enough to read 1mbert in or der to measu re our
theoret ical destitution faced with t he Kond ratieff wa ves." As the present
int ernational moneta ry crisis shows, while capit alism - since t he failure
of Harvard empiricism - has learned to t ame t he shorter-term (intra-
decennial) cycle; it has yet t o prove able to cont rol middle-range time.
Some are already inclined to dismiss the shorter cycle completely. But, as
an economic t ime of a long phase in the mode of production, t he lat ter is
an int egral part of t he corresponding historical ti me. The historian cannot
escape fr om the labyrinth of conj unct ure.
Alt husser does not always help us in our effort to take Marx as a guide.
Wi t hout examples, it remains purel y verbal to substit ute ' variations' for
' variet ies " to replace 'int erferences' with ' int erlacings'; and if we can find
only economic times in CapItal where can we grasp the ' different tempor-
al ities' of rhe ot her ' levels'? He warns us that ' we must regard t hese differ-
ences in temporal str uct ure as, and only as, so many objective indices of
th e mode of articulation of the different elements of st ructu res In the
general st ruct ure of the whole, . . It is only in the specific unity of the
complex str uct ure of the whole t hat we can think t he concept of th e so-
calle d backwardnesses, forwardnesses, surv ival s and unevennes ses of
development which co-exisr in t he structure of the real historical present : the
pr esent of the con;unaure.'16 Struct ure-conjunct ure in histo rians' practice
has t his' not become a ty pical grid guaranteeing noth ing in it self but dis-
tancing resear ch equally from quantitat ive empiricism and the traditional
'elegant sequences'? We know the location of the ' break' bet ween the
coniunct ural economism of Simiand and a struct ural conjunct uraJismcloser
to Mar x: it lies in the work of Ernesr Labrousse. Wh at has this to tell us
about 'temporalit ies'?
If one interprets Labrousse as saying: t he French Revolution was born of
a ' fusion' bet ween a long time - the economic expansion of t he eighteent h
century - a medium t ime - the intercycle of depression, 1774- 88 - and a
short time - the price crisis of 1789 which culminat ed (almost too perfectl y)
in t he seasonal paroxysm of July 1789, t hen it looks as if the demonstration
is a mechanist ic explanation of rhe revolution which shuffles t oget her linear
rimes as if they amount ed ro a causal concatenation. Bur is this what he
says?
In fact, the statistically observable short cycle which pulsates in the
econom ic and social realiry of rhe French eight eent h cent ury is the original
cycle of the feudal mode of production, in which: (i ) the basis of produc-
tion remains agricult ural; (ii) t he basic produ ctive techniques do not yet
dominate the stochastic cycle of product ion; (iii) the dues levied on the
producers should vary according to t he amou nt produced; (iv) charit y and
ta xatio n should cushion rhe worst forms of misery, in a bad year. However,
t his pr e-capitalist tempo already co-exists along with others in t he eight-
eenrh cent ury, which t houg h nor yer typical of the future mode of produc-
rion (like t he 'ind ustrial cycle' , for instance) pave the way for it and are
parr of it: (i) a long period of prepar atory accumulation of money-capital,
directly or indirectly colonial in origi n; whic h cr eates a mon eyed bour-
geoisie and 'b ourg eoisifies' part of t he nob ility; (ii) t he medium-term
possibility of commercial depressions (marke t crises, pr ice depressions)
affecting and upsetting growing numb ers of farmers, proprietors and
ent reprene urs who se prod uct s have ente red the commercial circuit and
2. PIERRE VILAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORV IN THE MAKING 27
become 'commod ities' - so many social stra ta interested in legal equal ity.
free markets, and the end of feudal struct ures; (iii) lastly, t he aggravation
of ' old-s ty le crises' in t he short run, since t hough they a.re less let ha.l th an
in the days of famines, the new speculat ion on shortages which they provoke
is less restrained by administrat ive taxes and ecclesiast ical redist ributions,
and they t herefore pauperize and proletarianize the masses more than ever
and turn the poorer peasants against bot h feudal or royallet..ies and mark et
freed om.
Wh.a..t better example dun this could one find of an 'interlacing of times'
as the 'process of development of a mod e of production' or even as a
t ransition from one mode to ano t her - t his convergence of 'specifi c tern-
poralines ' which in July/August 1789 resulted in the famous 'event' that
overthrew the whole juridical and polit ical st ructu re of society?
Alt husser is,l know. pr of essionally interested in the t imes of science and
phi lusophy; while legitimate anxiety about contempora ry histor y ma kes
him even more int erest ed in words like ' backward' , ' advanced', ' survivals'
and 'under -developme nt' . In his definition of 'con junc ture' he precedes
au... h ten us wi th <lo ll irou ical Su.....alle d', hoping ill this way tu dra w aueuuou
to the absurdity (and t he ideological dangers) of a terminology that takes
model s and goals for granted, and ends up by reading like a railway time-
tabl e, And certainly, ma ny of t he graphs dear to stat istical annuals justify
his irony. with their picture of a dolla rs-per-capita or rate -of-investment or
quant um-o f-scientific-journa ls line where some cou ntries seem to be on the
' Mist ral' express and ot hers on a slow-stopping t rain, However, this nec-
essary criticism of the verbal vainglor y of ruling classes and their economies,
and of the distorting mirror of certain quant itat ive cr iteria, ought not to
ma ke us forget essent ial Mar xist principles: (i) the primacy of the economic-
technical as synthes ized in rhe productivit y of labour; (ii) the need to escape
f rom vague descript ions by quanti ficat ion; (iii) the major reality const ituted
by the inequali ties of material development . .Marx always kept ' present'
Engl and 's advance and the potential of t he United States, as did Lenin
his concept of ' uneven development' . One must know how t o go beyond
linear time. But it is not sufficient to condemn it .
Suppose t here is a disjuncture between an inst it utiona l form, a mod e of
thought, an economic attitude or a social eth ic and the mode of prod uc-
tion whi ch we assume to be operative (these are all the oretical hypotheses).
Must we then say t hat the se 'morals'. 'a ttitudes' , ' t houghts" etc. are
' ad vanced' or 'b ackward' , are 'survivals', have an 'autonomous rhythm'
and so on? Would it not be bett er to say: to what extent is this mode of
production, taken to be in place. functioning, according to its own model?
In what areas does it do so? Ove r what ' durational scale'? In which sectors
is it an effect ive totalit y (already. if it is developi ng, and srill, if it has begun
to become destru ctur edl !
It is in thi s way that the full meanin g of 'conjuncture' must be understood
(not in Simiand 's ' meteorological' sense). Several different 'specific t imes'
ent er into it. In my own work on Spain. I have alwa ys deciphered structural
contrasts from the specificity of economic rhythms. In Catalonia, a small
zone. I di stingui shed up to three different rhythms in the process of modi-
ficat ion of the mode of produ crion.!" Duri ng the subsistence crisis of 1766
the rebels, priests and agitators levied popular taxes (taxat ions sauvages)
in the na me of concept ions of justice. moralit y and property belonging to
the rweltb cent ury, while at t he same t ime almost an y small shopkeeper' s
correspondenc e on free enterprise and true pric es is alread y couched in the
language of Samuel son. Here the specificit y of time is also a specificit y of
dass, St udy of the ' industrial cycle' is no less instructive. It is disappea ring
from the socialist economies, while t he slowness of the ir t ransformation
of agricult ural techniques maintains t he olde r 'cycle' st ill in being in the
count ryside. But any att empt to restore the market as a ' regulator' soon
ca uses th e 'industr ial cycle' to reappear, with inflati on as it s sign. Alter-
natively, when the same cycle is att enua ted under capitalism, t he latter is
depa rt ing from its own mod el. The sectoral locat ion of tr ansformati ons,
the class location of superst ructures, and the spatial locat ion of ' totalit ies'
are all disclosed by so many ' objective indices' .
This kind of analysis allows us t o go from t he theory t o the ' cases'. It
may help to build up the theor y - above all with regard to pr ocesses of
transition. It cannot be repr oached with conceptual izing time without regard
to the concept of t he mod e of product ion: it refers constantly to the lat ter.
If , by contrast. one looks for a 'specific ti me' to attach to each different
'l evel' then t his reference is very likely to be aband oned.
The name of t he third historian cit ed by Alt husser was an inevi table
one. Because of a ti ghtl y famous arnde." But an art icle which was
doubtless the source of Althusser's misconc ept ion. When after thirty years
of practi ce Fernand Braud el takes it into his head to theorize. the philo-
sopher cn es out: look. he's begrnmng to ask himself que sti ons! Not at all!
In 1958 Braude! ended by asking questions of aber prople, provo ked and
even irritated by their indi fference to histor ians' discoveries: The ot her
social sciences know little of the crisis that our historical di scipline has
undergone during the last twent y or thi rt} years; they tend to misunder-
sta nd our wo rks, and in so doing also misunderstand an as pect of social
realit y of which histor y is a good servant but not always a good sales-girl
- t hat is, social durat ion, or t hose multiple and contr adictor y forms of
t ime in the life of man .. . yet anot her cogent argument for t he import ance
and use of ,histor y or rat her of the dialect ic of durati on exhibited in t he
profession and sustained observation of huronans.:"
Profession, observation. work s, servant. sales-girl .. . These words must
have displeased our theorist. I note also the words which must have per-
suaded him to range Bra ude! among the unemancipated slaves of linear
t ime: the addition of days, his recitati f of conju nct ures. the rot ati on of the
,.
PIERRE YL AR
MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING
eart h, time as a measur e, t ime identical with itself and, in the plural, t imes
which lock into one anot her without difficulty and are measured bv t he
same stand ard. All this is quire opposed to Bachelard's sociological t ime.
Yet is it so di fficult to perceive the beginnings of a critique, the gleams of
irony behind Beaudet's insistence? Althusser has not 'sit uat ed' the essay.
For him, the knowl edge of histor y is no more historical than the knowl-
edge of sugar is sweet. Nonsense! The knowledge of this knowledge is
always itself historically constituted, whet her in Braudel, in Alrhusser, or
in Mar x (who knew t his well).
In 1958 Braud e! wonders about the destiny of his personal contribution
to such knowledge: the 'long tempo' , 'goo-history' conceived as something
imposed by space upon time. This is a weight y question. to which he t urns
twelve years after writing his Miditerranee, in response to other orientations,
some a matter of ' histor ical practice', others not, Implicitly ironizing at t he
expense of the ' recitanf" of conjunctur es, Brandel expres ses the fear t hat
the latter may lead to a kind of rerum to 'ev'ents' . Labrousse had passed
from his own 'long eighteenth cent ury' of 1933 to a subsequent emphasis
In 1~ 4 j on a pre-revolunonary 'Intercycle' of less than fifteen years, and
then - in 1948 - to a brilliant summary of revolut ions taken in the short
term: 1789, 1830 and 1848.!OThis earns him some friendly teasing on t he
'mcks of the trade' or the histori an as 'film drrecror'. f or Braude! the
histor ian should take up a stance above t he level of 'dramatic news' , If it
is objected t hat the t rade of the historian cons ists, precisely, in situating
events within the dynamic of structures, then (he insinuates) by trying to
do t his the historian will always end by sacrificing structu re to events.
When he wrote his essay, he could afford to be less anxious in the ot her
sense, concerning t he 'long term', But here he has since been outflanked.
Toda y, t here is an ' ant hropology' which seeks its permanent factors in the
logical struct ure of sociological 'atoms'. and an economics which has dis--
covered virtues in the qualitative mathematics of ' communication' . Always
responsive to the 'latest thing', Braude! is much drawn by such seductions.
These novelties go broadly in his direction - that of resistance to changes.
Yet he loves his own t rade. The historian welcomes 'long tempos' , But if
time disappears altoget her, then so must he. He therefore proposes the
term structure for ' an assemblage, doubtless an architecture, but more
import antl y for a reality which time wears away only with difficulty, and
carries forward only very slowly'. The t heorist may still look down his
nose at thi s. ' Doubtless', ' more import ant', that is not \"ery' rigorous' . And
what ever the rtalit y may be, it is not ' time' which erodes it, but 'some-
thing' whi ch wears it away unevenly according to the realiti es in question.
It is this ' something' which is the problem.
If one reality lasts longer than another, however, it will envelop t he
latt er, and it is this term 'envelop' which Braude! selects, stressing its rnarh-
emancal meaning. For him it designates the geographical and biological
const raints, the technical impotences out of which he built up his 'long
tempos', and whi ch include (ant icipating Foucault) th e ' persistent prisons'
of 'intellectual constra ints' or ' mental frameworks', Can one fail to situate
these statements in relation to Marx, when Braudel refers to him explicitly
as the first creator of 'hi storical models' and indicates in which sectors he
has t ried to follow his example, if not his method? If rhe referenct is not
too persuasive, however, I t hink this may be because Marx never thought
with partial model s: thus the concept of ' model' as applied to monetary
circola rion is no t Marxis t, whil e concep ts such as ' (.r1:r.i:)' ur 'mental equip-
ment ' are much more so, even if they do not claim to be 'models' ,
But t his does not mean t hat Marxist theory will be able to ignore the
problems posed by Fernand Braude! both in thil. essay and in his work as
a whole. Na ture, geographical space, resistant str uctures , a-histor ical
structures (if there are any such): wha t will t he historian make of these?
(i) Frrsr nature, In the unl y text uf his which can be considered as the
sketch of a possible historical tr eatise, Marx recalls finally t hat 'the point
of depart ure' is ' obviously the natural characteristics, subjectivelyand objec-
tively';" hi) Fundamen tal dcfinitiou uf producrivity also meut ious ' na tural
conditions' at t he end. Last but not least, For a dialecti c bet ween man
and nat ure can scarcely underesti mate t he import ance of 'natural cond i-
rions' . Onl y, one must set over against these ccudinc ns techniques [and then
science). Between any two victori es of the latter the mode of production
is framed within the limits thus marked out. The fifth of the ' points not
to be forgotten' in t he 1857 [nt roduction - 'dialect ic of t he concepts pro-
ductive force (means of producti on) and relat ion of prod uct ion, a dialectic
whose boundarie s are to be determined, and which does not suspend the
real difference" ! - shows, for example, how one should treat t he persist-
ence of 'crises of the old sort' in several modes of producti on in twentieth-
century Europe.
To think history geogra phically is not therefore cont rary to Mar xism. It
would, however, be more Marxist to think geography histor ically, Among
the ' permanences' how may we disti nguish the poles where man's grip is
most effective! The Mediterranean is full of t hem. But they are 'enveloped'
by desert s and mount ains. This is surely a fine object to be ' identified' and
'constr ucted' by a (dialectical) history; but Alrhusser is not sufficiently
awa re of this even to discuss it.
(ii) Then, spau. Thi s is equally an ob;ect to be const ruaed. Theories of
it have been suggested, and t hen worked out, but while Braudel has paid
atte ntion to them, Althusser has not, Th ey refine (and occasionally carica-
ture) the old temptations of geographers, economists and logicians in this
respect. Men, villages, towns, fields, factories, were not implanted 'any old
how', and we ought to be able to discover a logic to their location. Thi s
can give rise to many exercises in mathematics, graphics and cartogra phy,
none of which should be disdained. But if the historia n can take some
3. PIERRE VrLAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 31
lessons from them, he also has his own to give. The organization of space
in the service of man, a ' geography of t he will' , is quite t hinkable; thi s is
one of t he tasks of the day after tomorrow. One can also imagine a new
capit alism upon a new space, installing itself wit h no overall plan, accord-
ing to its own intern al logic. The United Stat es was a lmost like thi s
(as Marx often indicated ). The impet us of developme nt in t his case was
very powerful. It is now coming to be perceived as monstro us, so that the
mystique of 'ecology' has arisen around it.
In old count ries, however, the probl em is more complex t han this. There
history is not only an interlacing of times but of spaces as well. The logic
of a Breton village is not t hat of Nuremberg. which in turn is not that of
Manhattan. The nineteenth cent ury eviscerated medieval Paris and ruined
the Mar ais. The twent ieth cent ury is saving the Marais, and demolishi ng
Les Hailes in Paris. Barcelona took five cent uries t o move outside its
walls, invent ed t he Cerda Plan, then disfigured it almost at once. The Latin
American city bears with it t he cancer of the [avelas and the barriadas. The
periphery of the Mediterranean has become a play-ground, torn between
the skyscraper and the tent . .l he current Vedel Plan offers the vocat ion of
pleasu re-park to two-third s of arable France. In this world there is no
more ' long dur ation' .
But lustonans of rural landscape or urbanrzancn usually lose t heir way
in prehistory or in collective psychology. While space itself, if it escapes
the speculator. falls into t he clutches of t he empirical sociologist or t he
technocra t. If divorced from the concept of time. the concept of space is
ill-suited t o old count ries in which every stage of production, every social
syst em. has had its tow ns and fields, its palaces and cott ages, each histor -
ical totalit y nesting down as best it can in the heritage of anot her. A ' real
history' would draw up balance-sheets and display mechanisms and t hus
help to const ruct - this t ime in a concrete sense - a properly thought-out
combinat ion of past and future. Socialism can coun t some successes in t his
domain. It would be interesting to know what (if anything) t hey owe to
t he Mar xist conception of this combination.
(ii i} Hist orical time s and struggles bet ween groups are combined in still
anot her fashion. Wi th their terse assimilat ion of history to class struggle.
Marx and Engels gave rise to a long equivocat ion over their thought . It
came to be believed that they despised the ethn ic bases of political group-
ings. And at first this equivocat ion was a useful weapon in t he fight against
a conception of history founded ideologically upon t he might of monarchs
and national wars. But in t heir correspondence and t heir journ alistic
articles Marx and Engels employ the terms German, French, English, Turk
and Russian as often as they do ' proletarian' and ' bourgeois'. Class con-
tradictions are the mot or of history. as technique and economy are t he origin
of these cont radictions. However, this ' last instance' exerts its power through
many ot her realities. Again, among t he ' points not to be forgotten' of the
1857 Introduction, t he ver y first place goes to war, and th e last to peopl es,
races, et c." We are certa inly compelled to remember them. Nat ionalit ies
and suprananonalltles, fascist nationalisms and revolutionary nat ionalisms,
cent ralized states against ethnic minori ties, the resistance of moneta ry
auto nomies to mult inat ional economic bonds - all go to show a second
half of the t wentieth cent ury at least as sensitive as t he first (and possibly
mor e so) to t he existence or t he demands of polit ical forma tions expressing
the consciousness of groups. Here too Marx ism has a theory to propose,
decisively formul ated by Stalin in 1913, and based upon 'different ial tem-
pos' explained in terms of the cent ral concept of mode of product ion
(let me add: also of t he concept of class).
The political type-formati on corresponding to compet itive capitalism is
t he Nation-State-Market with a bour geois ruling class, which eit her devel-
ops out of an over-narrow feuda l framework (Ger many, Italy) or else at
t he expense of vast and heterogeneous empires (Aust ria, Russia, Turkey),
But the cond it ion of such for mati ons i s the pre-existence of 'st able com-
muniti es' , not eternal in characte r but historically constit uted by a number
of very different factor s over very long periods of t ime. In no sense does
Marxism accept t hese commu nit ies as absolut e ends-in-themselves, or
determi ning fact ors. They are t he pre-posed framework, t he instr uments
offered to one class with which to forge its state. In its own fashion t he
feudal world had already given examples of t his. The mercant ilist phase of
t he bourgeoisie directl y pr epared t he national state in France and England.
No w t his project ion backward suggests another one forward in t ime,
Other classes can in their turn take such 'stable communities' as the basis
for t heir action. Th eir success depends upon their ability to create a new
mode of producti on. On t he ot her hand, t he role of capita lism as a
nat ional instru ment has meanwhile been eroded. Rosa Luxemburg undul y
anticipated t he long-term tendency of capital to weave multinational t ies
and forge super-states (as Lenin's critique of her pointed out ). But today
this tendency is manifestly assert ing itself, and t he national bourgeoisies
are only feebly resisting it. It is peoples which resist, to the degree to which
the class struggle has crea ted revolutionary situations amongst t hem. Soc-
ialism. finally, faces the task of constructing t he past-future combinat ion
in the organizat ion of multinati onal spaces, as in t he organization of eco-
nomic spaces (scientifically if possible and - of course - on t he basis of a
concept of history). Everything here depends upon its analytical fidelity to
theory.
This t hree-fold dialect ic between (a) ' long times' and specific times of t he
mode of product ion, (b) the small spaces' of ethn ic group s and t he large
zones demanded by modern activity, and (cl between class st ruggles and
the consciousness of groups, has served my own historical resear ches very
well and thrown much light on the present for me, lienee I can only regret
that it was invoked neither by Fernand Braude! in relation to his ' long
32 PIERRE Vn..AR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 33
tempos' nor by Louis Althusser wit h regar d to his ' interlacing' of specific
tempos. Doubtless Ma rxist t heory becomes more opaque. as it penetrates
deeper int u a hietor y lirill under cousrrucriou.
(iv) Some words on a-historical struct ures. Th e historian (t he Marxist
historian above all) will dist rust t his concept. For him. everyt hing changes.
And nur hing is totally indepen dent of a global st ructure itself in w urst: of
modification. Yet if he admits the notions of ' long rimes' and 'stable com-
muniries' , why should the: resistant net works of the most ancient structures
- like t he family, or myt h - nut be inregrared in t he same ":3rq:;uriel>?
Nat ura lly the historian must be grateful to the et hnologist who has recon-
st ructed the logic of t hese str uctures when they have observed t hem in near
to their pure srare. But what will be of more concern to him are t he
gradat ions, modes and functions of such resistant networks inside societies
under t ransformation. Again. the 'interlacing of tempos' .
Two ot her claims of str uct ural ism (or srrucrural isms}, perhaps inevitable at
an early stage and no w anyway moderated, demand a different sort of
discussion:
Firstl y, t he au tonomy of fields of research. Anxious above all for a self-
sufficient explanat ion in terms of it s own int ernal str uct ures. each field
proclaimed any attempt ar historical int egration of irs case-st udies to be
useless, even scandal ous. Quite possibly t hi s impulse represented - in lit-
eratu re, for example - a health y reaction against superficial histor ical
treat ment of examples; yet to car ry it tOO far means leaving any concret e
case incompletely understood. I have t ried t o show this myself in t he
case of Cervantes,14 but I believe that essays of t his kind should ideally
come as t he conclusion of global historical research in depth. rather than
as objects st udied in their 0 " 1) right and vaguely related t o an approximate
history. Structurale-Mar xist essays generally suffer from lack of sufficient
hisrorical information; and Alrhus.ser has given us few particulars concern-
ing his combination of autonomo us-dependent ' levels' ,
Secondly, t here is another and global 'st ructuralist' pretension: all the
human sciences (history and t he quanr itarive 'social sciences' excl uded)
must be seen as constituting an 'ant hropology' based upon their formalizable
structu res. and in part icular upon rhose of communication. such st ructu res
being taken as the revelation of underlying psychological and int ellectual
mechanisms. Curiously, this 'ant hropology' wi th man as its ' object' declares
it self also anri-, or at least a-humanist. Yet to the extent to which it wants
to be, or thinks it is, an exact science, it would surely be very odd if it did
not rapidl y become an applied science and - consequently - tied to the
int erests of human beings and t heir social classes. The project it self rejoins
the old metaphysics of ' human nature' and is ideological in charact er: it
sets OUt to st udy societ ies on t he basis of their 'atoms', before observing
them on the macro-eco nomic and macro-social levels.
The assimilation of social relat ionships to a ' language' , and of economics
to a 'communication of goods' (neglecting production. and t he relationship
with nat ure) refurb ishes the ' naive anthropo logy' of exchange equilibrium,
A t heory of games in which all the players rake rat ional decisions always
makes it difficult to explain the existence of losers. All this arises from a
generalized confusion with t he science of linguistics, as renovated by str uc-
turalist discoveries after a long period of false hisroricization. But it is
already becoming d ear that the autonomy of linguistics is not integral,
Above all, while t he historian (as in the analogous cases of literat ure and
art) must assimilate enough of the st ruct ural ist lesson to avoid conferring
a histor ical meaning on what may only be a common inheritance, he
knows that d,{{erenttatJOns are still his domain. If histor ical semantics
remains an unploughed field. it is because changes in signs. words. here
represent changes in things; if 'stable communities' are separated by lin-
guistic barr iers, why do some resist the passage of time and events so much
bett er than others ? The questions which interest the historian are those to
which st ructuralism has no answer.
It is curious that Marx thought an analogy with language useful, in his
discussion of production: ' however. even t hough the most developed lan-
guages have laws and charac teristics in common wit h t he least developed,
nevert heless just those thin gs whi ch determine t heir development, i.e. the
elements which are not general and common, must be separated out from
t he determinations valid for product ion as such, so that in their unit y -
which arises already from t he identit y of the subject, humanity, and of the
object, nat ure - their essent ial difference is nor forgorren.t" Balibar is quite
right to point out that this text does not seek to dist inguish between
the generality of concepts and t he particularit y of the real, but rat her be-
tween rwo sorts of abst ract ion. two sorts of liaison between concepts in
the theory of hist ory, neither of which is privileged when it comes to
constit uting the t heory of knowledge. This remark is crucial for the debate
bet ween histor y and structuralism. It should he added. t hough. that Marx
warns the reader against any appeal to 'generalit ies' about man or nat ure
in economics, which rely upo n 'commonplaces gone mad', The common -
place and t he tautology are often rediscovered (nor always uselessly) in an
examinat ion of the logic of things. One must merely make sur e t hat ,
beneat h scholarly guise or vulgar mask, t he commonplace is not deliri ous.
I have deliberatel y chosen to be opti mist ic in a ti me of gloom. I have t ried
to show t hat history is bet ter equipped than is imagined by many theoretical
Marxists in pursuit of the (quite uri-Ma rxist) goal of absolute knowledge.
I have attempted to indicate the possible uti lizat ion by Marxist historians
of everyt hing in contempora ry historical research which seeks for a global
view of societ y, and which has t urned away from t he piecemeal t reat -
ment of fragments of reality - but without falsely attributing to Mar x such
PIERRE VLAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING
35
advances as have been made without major reference to his theories.
Finally. I have endeavoured - ....-irhout taking tOO seriously that itch for
novelty which tr oubles the epidermis of the younger human sciences - to
neglect nothing in them which may serve science in the Mar xist sense of
the term. like their inter-disciplinar y approach to society. Like empiricism.
str uct uralism is only ideological to the extent to which it aspires either to
an immobile universalism, or to an atomistic solitude.
It remains to tr y and point out some considerable and persistent diffi-
culties in the w;a y of scientific historical practice, and al so some of the
many and varied ways forward.
I do not think the problems lie in the direction of that ' theory of rran-
siticn' for which Ahhusser yearns. and claims not to find in Marx. Because
he is a philosopher, Althusser has remained more of a Hegelian than
he would like to be; so he has crystallized and enclosed his concept of the
mode uf production to auch all extent that it become, au anxiuus prublem
for him how one can either get in or out of it. He is right only if it is
necessary to erect 't ransition' as such into a new object of thought. But
Marx IIUt uuly prupu.'leJ a ... iable theor y uf the capitalist mode uf produc-
tion, after regarding and scrutinizing its operation from every possible
point of view (a theory which includes a prevision of the system's destruc-
non], He also regarded and scrutinized frum every angle the preceding
transition from feudalism to capitalism, start ing from those days in 1842
when the debates in the Rhineland Diet revealed to him the profound
conflict between twu different laws, two different concept ions uf ethics
and the world. even over such an apparently trivial episode as the gath-
ering of dead wood. This is, incidentally. a characteristic start ing-point ,
regularl y emitted frum its proper place at the head of Mar x's WurkJ
because editors are not sure whether it should be classified as 'economic' ,
'political' or ' philosophical' (of course its whole interest arises fr om this
unclassifiability).
Given the richness of the suggestions in Mar x' s own work, and i n that
of Lenin; given the previous (but by no means outdated) debates among
Mar xist historians like Dobb, Sweezy and Takahashi; given the advanced
state of work on ' modern times' as distinct from the Middle Ages and the
contemporary period, I think we may confidently state that we are pro-
gressing in rhe ' real history' of the transit ion from feudalism to capit alism
and that thi s will in t urn help us to theorize other historical transitions. I
leave out of account here my own experience of research in this field
which, while it is not for me to assess irs WOrth, has at least enabled me
to see and assess the work of others.
One regret: at the 1970 International Conference of Economic Histor-
ians in Leningrad the vague title of ' modernization' was chosen for what
in good Marxist terms ought to have bun called the tr ansition from pre-
capitalist modes of prod uction (feudal or even earlier). either to some form
of capitalism or to the socialist mode of production (even assuming that
the latter exists in rhe full sense). On this occasion, which called foe the
widest-ranging reflection on the count ries of Africa. Asia and America.
the ' western' histor ians simply retired into the tr aditional themes of their
assort ed 'specialities' ('the eighteenth centu ry', the ' priority of agriculture'.
' English leadership' . . . eec.), while the Soviet historians offered an imprcs-
sive set of result s, in the shape of collective syntheses on the different areas
of their country, but next to nothi ng on the processes involved, and even
less on their t heory. It ill becomes me to condemn this debate. or rat her
lack of debate, since I presided over it. However, my disappointment
makes me less restive in the face of Althusser's demands and rigours.
It is thus that the t heoretical abdication of Marxism takes the form of a
renunciation of t he concept of history.
So it is good that men like Boris Porsbnev or Witold Kula have under-
taken to construct a 't heory of the political economy of feudalism', in the
same way as Marx att empted to build a theory of the determinant eco-
nomic nexus of capitalism." One can understand, too, the often passionate
interest some young historians show for the ' Asiatic Mode of Production',
which Marx only refeered to in passing, but whose import ance and histor-
ical originality are beyond doubt. The title is an unfort unate one, however,
and does not acquire higher theoretical value by being knowingly short -
ened to 'AMP' . Occasions like this show one how difficult it is to theorize
validly on the basis of too part ial an experience, or too limited a knowl-
edge (here the historian has the advantage over Althusser ). It will take
many years, even decades of research to arrive at any global theory of the
very var ied forms of the ' AMP' . But in this field there is no hurr y.
What is more urgent is the elaboration of methods of passing from
theory to the analysis of cases (or frameworks for action), whose reality
generally consists neither in one single mode of production, nor in a ' tran-
sitjon' towards one of them. but in complex and often very stable com-
binat ions, not merely of t wo, but of several different modes of product ion.
The disti nction between the real ' socio-economic for mation' and the
theoretical object ' mode of production' should be generally familiar by
now, alt hough often t he vocabula ry of Mar xist studies remains indecisive
in this respect. But what we need to know (it is something I have often
asked m y ~ f ) is whether a complex struct ure. a ' structure of struct ures' ,
bears within itself a certa in power of determination, a n 'efficacity' (as a
mode of production .does),
In the case of Larin Americ.a - where the exception all but makes the
rule - Celso Furtado has employed multiple-parameter economic models
to build up an interaction of sectors wit h differentiated 'fundamental laws.t"
But he confines himself to the economy, and one may wandel" if the not ion
of ' maximization of profit' has any meaning outside the capitalist mode
of prod uction. Take anot her example, nineteenth-century Spain, which I
ae PIERRE YILAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY 1\1 THE MAKrNG 37
know a littl e bette r: it would be absurd to describe it as eit her ' capit alist'
or ' feudal'; ' semi-feudal' is a poor compromise t erm. and ' bisecroral' evokes
t he: idea of simpl e juxtapos itio n. Now even if one docs mere or less p e r ~
ceive t wo dominant forms juxta posed in t he same space, one must then
ask - are not t he solidarities between t hem sufficient to constitute an
original body, one characterized by this very juxtaposit ion. wit h its con-
tr adi ctions and conflict s, and the consciousness of these conflicts? Should
one t herefore, for each such ' format ion' , const ruct a corresponding t heo -
ret ical object? This is the normal procedure in chemistry.
The main problem remains causalit)" and it is not resolved by the use
of a term like 'effectivity' , I share Althusser's dist rust of the facile Marxism
which declares that ' necessity is asserti ng it self' wherever it is short of an
argument which will relate it s t heory to realit y. For Alth usser, t he mistake
lies in confronting t heory and realit y in this fashi on. The y are different
objects. However, if the histori an refuses t o rally to the th rong who de--
d are that ' t his is how thing s happened' (implying that histor y is not thee-
rencally thinkable), then he will quickl y find himself forced in practice to
choose, or to combine var ious sorts of causal relat ionshi ps: linear, alter-
native, stat ist ical or probabilist. But he should not concl ude this suffices to
make him a t heorist. l i e remains within empiricism, Often enough within
t he difficult empiricism of sociologists, as when they try very cautiously to
est ablish correla tions among series of different kinds, bet ween quantifiable
economic relat ions, rather less quantifi able social relat ions and a ment al
realm which may one day be quantifiable ... Alrhusser wishes, very under-
standably, to get away from terr ain like thi s. But through new and tent ative
met hodologies which have carried them far away from t heir old tr aditions,
today's historians have begun to be conscious of t he unity and complexit y
of their subject-matter; they are aware of its originalit y, and of the need
to seek a new ty pe of rationalit y for it, whose mathematical forms will
come much later on.
Althusser pro poses a solution: a 'st ructural causality' internal to the
mode of production, founded on the key concept of Dara ellvng (repre-
sentation) in Marx, designat ing the presence of the straaure in it s effeas.
Or (better st ill) it is in the effects t hat the whole existence of the structure
consists. This is a seductive not ion, and reinfor ces my conviction (alread y
stated abo ve) that no global structure can exist unless all its effects are
present. Yet I do not like Althusscr' s argument s. They are too d ose to
images. The image of t he Darstellung is t hat of a theatri cal representation.
It was first proposed by Mar x and while I appreciate its suggesnve force.
I can also sec its vagueness and incoherence. Elsewhere Mar x compares
a mode of product ion to 'a general illumination which bat hes all ot her
colours and modifies t heir parnculamy' and t hen to 'a parti cular et ber
which determines the specific gravit y of every being which has materia lized
within it ,.l l
S o, t his is not the best of Marx, at least on the level of expression (fa t
the idea is a powerful one). Neither are t he other Marxian metaphors in
which Althusser sees ' almost perfect concepts', in spire of t heir Incompat-
ibilit y with t hose just quot ed: i.e., mechan ism, machi nery, machine. me n-
rage (what would the reacti on be if one were to exploit these terms against
Mar xf}, Mar x also employs the word ' metabolism'. While it is above all
to psychoanalysis that Althusser himself refer s. How uncon vincing t hese
comparisons are, I repeat , when after all there is no good reason to expect
the social totalit y to behave like eit her a physiological or a psychological
whole. In fact , Marx like everybody else happened occasionally to choose
a word or meta phor for t he sake of effecr. and to make a more or less
happy choice. Th is is why I prefer to tr y and grasp his thought in the whole
of his work , in his t ypical forms of analysis, and in t heir ' illust rations'.
In t heir applications also. A psychoanalyst is a practiti oner. If he t alks
of ' t he efficacy of an absent cause'. [his concept evokes a certain number
of cases for hi m. If a cr eat ive Marxist (whatever his t heoret ical contribu-
tion may be - lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho-Chi -Mlnh, Fidel Cast ro) tests [he
efficacy of the mod e of prod uction he wishes to create upon a societ y long
condit ioned by some ot her (or several ot her) structures, it is then t hat he
t est s the validit y of it s concept . The hist orian sees similar test s, less con-
scious but by no means blind, in the England of ] 640 or t he France of
1789. Here histor y bears evidence.
A last difficulty: sometimes Althu ssc:ris led by ot her influences to define
struct ural causality as a simple logic of posit ions. The ' relat ions of produc-
ti on' would then l ow only from the place of men in the system - the latt er
become the supports rather than the subi eas of t hese relations. It is true
t hat for Marx social relat ionships are not exclusively mt er-subjecnv e, as
they are in vulgar economics, First of all because they comprise cert ain
relations with things (t his is the primacy of production). Then too because
he was never concerned to denounce indIVIdual exploiters, but to discern
t he nat ure of a social exploitation. Mar xism can thus never be reduced to
a theory of ' human relat ion s' (if so, why not ' public relati ons'! ). However,
to try and express all th is by declaring such reducti onism 'a n insult to
Mar x's thought' is to give way to an anti-humanism which risks an insult
to his person. To t he aut hor of the Manifest o, history is no chess-boa rd,
and t he class str uggle is no game. It is not even a 'st rategy' . It is a battle.
The difficult ies di scussed above prove t hat the field remains quite open
to whoever wants to solve them by researc h. But for a Marxist histori an
two avenues seem to me excluded: (i) t he repetit ion of t heoretical princi -
ples combined wit h criticism of whoever does not know of t hem, all in t he
service of skeletal and weightless construct ions; (ii) a historical practice,
which. however far removed from t raditional canons, confines it self to
specialist areas, partial prob lems, and tent at ive technical innovati ons, and
thereby remains loyal in fact to the least creative kind of empiricism.
38 PIERRE VLAR
M4RXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 3.
' Real' Marxist history, by cont rast. must be ambitious in order to
advance. It must - and no science can do otherwise - move ceaselessly
from patient and ample research to a theory capable of the utmost rigour,
but also {rom t beory to 'cases', in order to avoid t he risk of remaining
useless knowledge.
From research to theory- we have noticed far too many ill-solved t heo-
retical problems not ro stress this first way forward for the historia n -
comparative history in t be service of theoreti cal problemat ics.
If we ask - what is a structure? What is a structur e of struct ures? An
interlacing of differential tempos? An articulation of the social with [he
economic. or of the mental with the social? A class struggle? An ideology
in the class st ruggle? The relationship bet ween an agent 's place in produc-
tion and the human relationships presupposed by that place? The com-
bination bet ween class st ruggles, and conflicts bet ween et hnic or political
groups? Such problems, which ace both historical and theoretical, impose
one fundament al dut y upon us: research" They demand we take critical
account (as Marx did) of all t he economic, political, and social investiga-
tions of our own times, but without taking for granted the histor ical
specificit y of the last twen t y years. One does t his by going back in history.
By thi nking about all countries. The t heoretical validity of any subsequent
analysis will depend upon t he depth, t he precision, and t he range of such
investigat ions (whet her or not one decides to recount one' s inquiry as part
of t he result). The only danger of this procedure is its slowness. Engels
knew t hat Marx never began to write (still less to publi sh) anyt hing on a
part icular subject without having read everything on it. Thi s is one of t he
reasons why, as Althusser reminds us, Capital ends with - 'Social classes.
For t y lines, then silence' .1' It is t his silence which we should strive to
break, rather t han the hypothetical 'silences between words' .
Theory will not suffer from research. Here it is worth recalling (.. .)
Marx's chapter on money. Only the vast historical infor mation displayed in
the diversity of the facts, times, places and thoughts considered there allowed
him to at tain the theoret ical origindlity of the text. Of a rexr, that is, which,
alone among the almost inexhaustible literature on the topic, succeeded in
demysrifying the false problem of t he quanti tative t heory of money. In two
pages it says everything there is to say about what was later to beknown
as ' Fisher's equat ion', with the difference tha t it leaves no doubt in the
reader's mind about t he reversibilit y of the relat ionships involved. All pos-
sible hypotheses are mentioned, wit h the relevant historical examples in the
backgro und, so that no room is left for t he confusions which mathematical
fonnulations have inspired in later more nai ve (or hurried) historians.
It may be objected: but this is economics, not ' history'. Firstl y, this
is inexact - there is no such thi ng as ' pure' economics, and monetary ques-
tions are ceaselessly intertwined with ot her sorts of history [political, psy-
chological). Secondly, why not apply the same method to ot her concepts
which are neither more nor less theoretical and neither more nor less
historical, t han that of money? Class, nat ion. war. and state for example,
arou nd all of which t here has accumulated such a mountain of ideological
fabulation, and so many 'commonplaces gone mad' in the guise of theory.
Yet Alt husser, who affirms at one and the same time tha t t here is no
'general histor y' and that it is necessar y to 'construct t he concept of
history', says not hing at all about t hese intermediate concepts t hat are so
constantly mani pulated and so rarely examined. A constructive critique
ought surely to have borne upon this point, for which Marxism should
assume responsibility (as somet imes it does).
f rom theory to 'cases': here is the second, no less difficult, obligation.
It is a necessary duty, for what would a ' t heory' be if it did not help t he
historian to understand this countr y, t his time, or this conflict bet ter - if
afte r, as before, t hey appeared as mere chaos to him? If it did not help t he
man of act ion (any man of action, since all are concerned) to understand
his country, his time, or his conflicts better? But it is a difficult obligat ion
too, unfortunately. Alongside some massive successes whi ch must indicate
some degree of theoretical adaptat ion to 'cases' - Lenin in revolution,
Stalin in const ruction and war, Mao in t he overt hrow of a t raditional
wor ld - it is only too well known how Marxism has tended to alternat e
bet ween an abstract schematism whose validit y depended on its simplicity,
much too 'all-purpose' to allow proper applkarion, and (on the ot her
hand) ' revisions' in the name of real complexity that risk falling back into
merely empirical treatment of each 'case' - or else, into pure speculation
which merely leaves realit y 'autonomous'.
But what is t he ' t reatment' of a historical 'case' ? (i) There are certain
kinds of ' theoretical cases ', which present themselves in a number of dif-
ferenr exemplifications at one moment of history and demand a common
interpretation. Fascism, for example, or enlightened despotism: forms of
aut horit y which, by installing a certa in type of state, endeavour to save a
mode of product ion drawing rewards its end, while adopting (or pretend-
ing to adopt) part of the new mode of product ion whose advent appears
imminent. A theory of modes of prod uction, a theory of tr ansition, a
t heory of the state are therefore all involved. in the analysis of such real
cases; but t heir combinat ion may in t urn suggest a theory of t he phenom-
enon itself. (ii) Distinct from these easily grasped cases which seem to
invite t heory, there ace the multiple, dispersed, incoherent 'episodes' of
more ' historical' history - the rise and fall of men and governments,
parliamenta ry debates, coups d'erars, diplomacy, and (finally and above all
else) wars. We know t hat each such 'event' should become a ' case' , whose
part icularities would appear only as expressions of a wider ensemble or
hrsroncal moment, If not of a model, but we ace ' "ery far from this goal
It must be admitt ed t hat we have no t heory of t he art iculation between t he
global funct ioning of societies and the incubation of 'event s' .
4. PIERRE VLAR MARXIST HISTORY, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 41
'Politic:ology', ' polemology': suchterms testify to the need for science in
t his domain, but also to the tr end towards fragmentat ion of what "i s really
unit ar y. Is a 'political theory' of fascism possible with out a theory of war?
But can one call a caricatural strategic schema, a 'delirious commonplace'
which mixes up Salamis and Hiroshima, a ' theory of war'? A 'pol emolog y'
ought to relate together modes of producti on. types of state, types of army,
t ypes of tension, and types of class struggle, so that each conflict (past,
pr esent, DC possible) will appea r within a global framework wit hout the
effacement of its part icular na ture. Lenin was a mas te r of thi s. (iii) Fina lly,
the 'case' par excellence: that of the socio-economic formation within one
hist orically st able framework, the 'na tion' or 'state' (one of the problems
being the coincidence or non-eoincidence of these two cat egories). How
can the Marxi st historian pass fcom a genera l sociological theory to an
analysis of a juridicall y and polit icall y delimi ted 'body' of this kind, which
also depends upon (and is occasionally disrupted by) solidarities of a dif-
ferent t ype - an analysis which will be explicat ive of its past and effective
in its pr esent ?
The nineteent h centu ry gave to written and taught history an ideological
role in thi s regard. Hence t he Marxist tr adition has for long sought to
break with its national, nat ionalist and nationalitarian (nationolitoiress
perspecti ves, and every ' new' history has striven to find ot her ones. How-
ever, this old histori ography bears wit ness to a whole age. It is itself pan
of its own history. To expose its ideological character is certainly a step
forwar d in the direction of science. But it is imposs ible to renounce
exa mination of the overa ll tr ansformations of the world through t he prism
of nati onal 'cases' . All we can do is thin k t hem in a new way, by situating
the latter in relation to t he former.
One must also keep in mind the tccalit ing effects of each 'case' . We have
already obser ved briefly that, while the global social structure is deter-
minant , the ' regional' struc t ure ot a society - as a complex combination.
a structure of st ruct ures - must equally be recognized t hrough its effects.
Her e we touch upon t he noti on of ' total histor y' which I have often
defended, and which arouses some sarcasm. As if one could say everything
about everyt hingl But of course it is a quest ion only of saying what the
whole depends upon, and what depends upon the whole. This is a great
deal. But it is less than the useless accumulat ions formerly made by t radi-
tional histor ies, or by the juxtaposed specialist chapters in toda y's compen-
dia, which precisely claim to tr eat everything.
Whether in any human group or in a ' nat ion', the problem is, as usual.
to distinguish appearance from realit y. The appearance (which gives rise
to ideological histor y) is that there are ' national characters' and 'po wer
int erests' , which are given fact ors, and create histor y. The reality is that
'inte rests' and ' power s' are made and unmade on the basis of successive
impulses from the forces and modes of production; and t hat ' nat ional
chara cters' and ' national cultures' are modelled, over long durati ons, upon
the frame which these successive impul ses eit her create or maint ain. The
appearance (temperament s, languages, cultures) is, natu rally. registered by
common sense. Duri ng the Middle Ages, the university ' nati ons' already
lampooned each ot her consta ntl y, and the modern ' nat ions' have continued
to do the same in new circumstances, sometimes good-nat uredly, sometimes
violentl y. This is a dimension of t he question one must st udy carefully,
since everyone needs to be wary of its influence. The problem remains:
why groups? How must one conceive nations?
The answer can only be, once more: by ' penet rat ing' the subject-matter,
by making it 'one's own' . In 1854 Marx received from the New York
Tribune a request for some articles on a recent Spanish pronunciamiento
- the very archet ype of a bana l 'event ' . What did he do? He learned
Spanish, by reading translations of Chateaubriand and Bernardin de Se
Pierr e (which apparently amused him greatl y). Soon he was readi ng Lope
and Calderon and at last he could wri te to Engels - 'No w I'm in the
middle of Don Qu ixot e!' The great and good Spanish anarc hist militant
Anselmo Lorenzo was astonished by Marx's Hrspamc culture when he met
him in 1871; admiring, if somewhat outclassed, he descr ibed it as 'hour-
geois'. Neverthe less, in his series of articles of 1854-56, Marx had given
an historical vision of Spain of which only the t went ieth cent ury has been
able to appreciate the full lessons - one which encompassed all the major
features of Spanish history, wit hout a single absurdity, and which in
cert ain judgements on the War of Independance has yet t o be impr oved
upon." There was a genius at work here, admittedly. But also his met hod.
We asked above if Marx had ever meant to ' write a histor y' . Here is t he
answe r. In order t o write one art icle about one military escapade he did
not write a ' history of Spain'; but he thought it necessar y to think Spain
hist orically.
To think everything historically, that is Mar xism. In relat ion to this,
t he problem of whether there is or is not a ' historicism' is (as in the case
of ' humanism' ) a verba l side-issue. I distrust over-passionate denials. It is
important to know (we are told ) that the object of Capital is not England.
Of course not: it is capital. But the pre-history of capit al is called Portugal,
Spain and Holland. Histor y must be thought in terms of spaces, as well as
of times: ' WocJd history has not always existed" wrote Marx. ' History as
wocJd history is a result .' : "
Here is anot her crucial phrase. Born ou t of colonizat ion and the ' wocJd
market'. capitalism has universalized history. It has not unified it, cenainly
- this will be the task of anot her mode of produ ction. It is in thi s perspec-
tive that the histori an's ultimate ambition must lie. ' Universal history'
belongs to yesterday. Its time is not yet over. There is something laughable
abo ut t hese remarks one now hear s so frequently: ' We know too much',
'There are too man y specialists' , the world is ' too big' for anyone man,
42 PIERRE YILAR
MARXIST HISTOR Y, A HISTORY IN THE MAKING 43
one book , or one teaching-method to t ackl e ' universal history'. This im-
plicit encyclopaedism is the polar opposite of t he not ion of ' reasoned
hist or y', 'total history' or - simply - the 'concept of histo ry'.
It is possible to dream of three kinds of ente rprise: (i) 't reatises of
histor y' , an aim no more absurd t han ' t reatises of psychology' or of
'soc iology'; (ii ) na tiona l hist ori es clearly perlodized in relati on to th e
chronology of productive forces, social relati onships, differential tempos,
and combinations of regional st ruct ures; (iii) universal histories sufficiently
well inf or med to omit noth ing essent ial from t he f undament al traits of the
modern world, yet sufficiently schemat ic to let t he explanatory mechan-
isms be seen. The latt er are bound to provoke cries of dogmat ism and
ideology. Perhaps one should recall at thi s point the Manual of Poli ti cal
Econ omy of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the discredit int o
which it has fallen. Yet what has it been replaced by, except denials of the
unity of the social who le, and t he historical whole? On every level, Marx -
ist history remains to be made, as does history tout court. In t his sense,
all ' real histor y' must be ' new hist ory'. And all ' new' histor y wi thout
totalizing ambition will be a history old before its t ime.
NOTES
Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Readin g Capital, New Left Books,
London, 1970, p. 82.
2 GnmJrisse, PenguinfNew Lef t Rel,iew edition, London, 1973, pp. 101- 02.
3 See Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et verite, Paris, 1955, p. 26.
4 Colin Clark, T he Condi tions ot &onomic Progress, London, 1957, p. 2.
5 Readi ng Capital, p. 102.
6 Capitalism. Socialism and Democracy, London, 1961, p. 44.
7 Readi,tg Capit.zl, pp. 2I G, 22G, 241.
8 Ibid., p. 110.
9 Ibid ., pp. 94-95.
10 Ibid., p. 94.
11 Ibid., p. 96.
12 Ibid., p. 103.
13 Ibid.
14 Cf. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Tavistock, London, 1970, pp.
261-62.
15 See Gaston Imberr, Des mouvement s d e longue duree Kondr atieff, Aix-
en-Provence, 1959.
16 Reading Capital, p. 106.
17 See Pierre Vilar, La C.ztalogne dans L'Esp.zgne moderne: Recherches su r les
fOffdemcnts cCQnom iques des a ructures narional es, Paris, 1962, voL II, pp.
391- 400 .
18 ' La Longue duree', Annales; October/December 1958; translated as ' History
and the Social Sciences' in Peter Burke, ed., Economy and Society in Early
Modern Europe: Essays from Annales, London, 1972.
19 Economy and Society in Earl y MoJern Europe , pp. 12- 13 (translation
mod ified ).
20 Respecti vely, E)(Juislie d es mUU lI emelll$ d es prix et des revene s t tl Franc e II"
XV Il le siecle, Paris, 1933; La Crise de l'eccmcmie [rancaise ii la fi n de l' ancien
regime es au debut de la rit 'Oiution, Paris, 1944; ' Comment naissenr lee
revolut ion s' , in Actes du am gres h i ~ o r i q u e du centenaire de la ril lolr.ttion de
1848, Paris, 1948 (trans lated as ' 1848- 1830 - 1789: How Revolutions are Born',
in F. Cr ouzee, W. Challoner and W. St ern, eds, Essays in Euro pean Eco nomic
Hist ory 1789- 1914, London, 1969).
21 Grundrisse, p. 109.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., pp. 109-10.
24 Pierre Vitae, 'The Age of Vox Qui xote', New Left Ret; ew 68, July/August 1971.
25 Grundrisse, p. 85.
26 Boris Porshnev, Ocher k Politicheskoi Ekonomii Feodalizma; Moscow, 1956;
Witold Kula, An Economic Theory of t he Feudal System (1962), New Left
Books, London, 1976.
27 Celso Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America, Cambridge, 1970.
2R Gr undrisse, p. 107.
29 Reading Capital, p. 193.
30 Marx's wriringsonSpain are collecredin Marx and Engels,Revolution in Spain,
London, 1936.
31 Grundrisse, p. 109.
ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF D EOLOGY ..
3
ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY
Paul Ricoeur
In the previous lecture on Althusser, I discussed his concept of the ideo-
logical break and its epistemological implications. I.. .J In the present lec-
ture, I shall discuss Althusser's concept of ideology itself. This discussion
I
will proceed in three steps: first, how is the problem of ideology placed in
the superstruct ure-Infrastructure framework; second. what can be said about
particular ideologies, such as religion or humanism; and third. what is the
nature of ideology in general.
As to the first topic, one of Althusser's most important contributions is
his attempt to refine and improve the model of infrastructure and super-
structure borrowed from Engels. As we recall. the model is summarized
both by the efficiency in the last instance of the economic base - this base
is the final cause, the prime mover - and by the relative autonomy of
the superstructure. a model of the reciprocal action (Wechselwirkung)
between base and superstructure. For Alrhusser, the first point we must
understand is that whatever the value of Engels' model, it is. contrary to
Engels' own beliefs. as far from Hegel's dialectic as possible._I . . .) In FOT
Marx Althusser introduces the discussion by quoting the statement in Marx.
appearing as late as Capital, on which Engels relies: ' MWith [Hegel, the
dialectic] is standing on irs head It must be turned right side up again. if
you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell" '.1 Althusser
maintains that this declaration is not as easily interpreted as first appear s.
Engels falsely believes that there is a common element between Hegel
and Marxism, the ' rational kernel'. and that t here is need to dr op only the
'mystical shell'. This argument appeared frequently among Marxists, the
thought being that it was possible to keep Hegel's dialectics and apply it
no longer to the Hegelian Spirit but to new objects: to society, classes.
and so on. The common use of dialectical argument would imply, so the
argument goes, at least a formal continuity between Hegel and Marx,
For Alrhusser, however, this is still to grant tOO much, and with good
reason. We cannot treat the Hegelian dialectic as an empty or formal
procedure since Hegel keeps repeating that the dialectic is the movement
of the things themselves. Hegel is against any kind of formalism that
would allow us first to establish a method of thinking and then to go on
to solve the problem of metaphysics. This is what he discards in Kant . The
entire preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit is written exactly against the
claim that we must first have a method and then do philosophy. For Hegel,
philosophy is the met hod. it is the SelbstdarstelJung, the self-presentation
of its own content . It is not possible to separate met hod from content in
order to retain the method and apply it to new content. Therefore. even
the struct ure of the dialectic in Hegel (negation. negation of negation)
must be considered as heterogeneous to the structure of the dialectic in
Marx. If it is true that we cannot separate method from content, and I am
sure that it is. then we must define the Marxist dialectic in terms that leave
only the word 'dialectic' in common with Hegel. The question then is: why
the same word? In fact we should drop the word or say either that there
is no dialectic in Hegel or no dialectic in Marx; but this is anot her
problem.
In place of the Hegelian dialectic Althusser substitutes the concept of
s overdeterminarlon. This concept is obviously borr owed fr om Freud,
although there is also an implication of Lacan. (The influence of Lacan is
permanent in all Althusser's work and increasingly evident in his later
essays.) To introd uce the concept of overdetermination, Althusser starts
from a remark by Lenin. when Lenin raises the question: how was it
possible that the socialist revolution occurred in Russia. when Russia was
not the most advanced industrial count ry? Lenin's response is that to claim
that revolution should occur m the most mdustrial country implies that
the economic base is not only determinant in the last instance but the sole
determinant factor. What we must realize. t hen. is that the economic base
never works alone; it always acts in combination with other elements:
national charact er, nat ional history. traditions, international events, and
accidents of history - wars, defeat s, and so on. An event like a revolution
is not the mechanical result of the basis but something involving all the
'various levels and instances of the social formati on' ( F ~ I . 101). It is a
combination of forces. This nexus is what Althusser calls overderermination
and opposes to the Hegelian cont radiction.
It is difficult, though, to locate exactly the difference between Althusser
" and Hegel on this point. We could say that there is overdetermination in
Hegel also. Inwhatever chapter we read in the Phenomenology, each figure
has so many conflicting elements that precisely the dialectic must proceed
toward anothe r figure. We may say that rhe instability of the figure is a
product a t its overdeterminanon. Althusser's daim, and I am lessconvinced
by this argument, is that there exists in Hegel no real overderermination
involving heterogeneous factors. Instead. Alrhusser argues, the process is
.. PAUL RtCOEUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 47
one o f cumulative int er nalizati on, which is only appa rently an overdeter-
minarion, In spite of the compl exit y of a historical form in Hegel, it is
a..:r ually )im pk: i ll ib principle, Though t he ,"on/ en! of t he Hegelian figure
may not be simple, its meaning is, because finally it is one figure, whose
unit y is imma nent in its foem. In Hegel, says Alrhusser, an epoch has 'a n
inte rnal )pirituClI pri nciple, which 0111 never J dillitdy be anyt hing but t he
most abst ract form of that epoc h's consciousness of itself: its religious
or phil osoph ical consc iousness, that is, its own ideolog y' (FM, 103). Th e
' myst ical shell' affects and conta minates the supposed rarional ' kernel' , For
Althusser, therefore, I Iegel's dialect ic is t ypicall y idealistic: even if a his-
tori cal period has complex elements, it is ruled by one idea, it has a unit y
of its own. The point, then, is tha t if we assume with Alt husser the simplic-
ity of the Hegelian form. such tha t it can be encapsulated in a label like
t he master-slave relat ion or Stoicism, the contrast is to the compl exity of
Mar xist contradict ion. The comp lexit y of the contradictions spawning the
Russian Revolution are not an accident in Mar xist theory but rat her t he
r ule. The argument is that t he cont radict ions are always this complex.
If we put together thi s no tion of overdererminarion wit h Engels' concept
of causalit y in t he last instan ce by t he base and the reaction back on th e
base by the supe rst r uct ure. we then have a richer concept of causality. We
see t hat in fact the infrast ructure is always determined by all t he other
component s. There is a combinat ion of levels and str uctures. Th is pos ition
was or igina lly developed, we must not forget, to counte r the mecha nicist
tr end in Marxism - repr esented particularly by the German Social Demo-
cratic Part y, This mechanicism, whic h endo rsed a fatalist ic or determinist ic
view of histor y. was deno unced by Gramsc i in an interesti ng argument
reprod uced by Alrhusser, Gra msci says t hat it is always t hose with the
most active will who believe in determin ism; they find in this fata lism of
history a confirmation of t heir own act ions. (In a certain sense thi s is quite
similar to t he Calvinist ic noti on of pred esti nation.) Proponent s believe t hat
they are the chosen people of history. and therefore t here is a certai n
necessit y in history' s movement. Alt husser quot es Gramsc i's strong stat e-
ment t hat fat alism has been ' "the ideological " aroma" of the phil osophy
of pr axis " (FM, lOS n. l. The word 'a roma' is an all usion t o Marx's early
essay on Hegel' s Philosophy of Righr. Just as Mar x crit icized there th e
illusions of religion's spiritual aroma, here fat alism is subject to the same
censure.
Ca n we say that Althusser' s int roduction of the concept of overdeter-
minat ion in any way displaces the causalist fr amewor k of inf rast ructure
and superstructure? In act uality this framework is more reinforced than
qualified by this analys is. Althusser repeat edly affirms that the notion of
inf rast ructure and supe rstruct ure is what gives mean ing to overdete rmina-
tion, not the contrary. He acknowledges tha t it is Engel s' formu la which
in fact rules his own concept of overdeterminarion. Perhaps it is a concession
to Marxist ort hodoxy, I am not sure, but Althusser is ver y clear on thi s
point. Speaking of the accumulation of ef fective determi nat ions (deri ved
fr om the superstructu re) on determination in the last insta nce by the
econo mi c, Althus.ser says: ' It seems to me t hat t his clarifies the expression
overdetermined cont radiction, which I have put forward, t his speci fically
beca use the existe nce of overderermina non is no longer a fact pure and
simple. for in its essentials we have related it to it s bases" ,' (f t-.1. 113).
The concept o f overdererminarioa does not help to overcome the weakness
of the concept of infrast ructu re an d superstr ucture, since it is only a com-
menta ry on t he same argu ment. The fr amewor k of causali t y is affected not
at all.
As a sign t hat th is framework is st ill t roublesome for Alt husser - there
is a great sinceri ty and modest y in all his texts - Alth usser says that when
we put together the determination in the last instance by th e economy and
the reacti on back on the infr astr ucture by t he supers tr ucture, we hold only
' t he two ends of the chain' (f M. 112). This expression is an allusion to
~ L e i b n i z ' description of the problemat ic relationship bet ween determinations
made by God and determinations made by human free wills-Thus, Mar x-
ism repeat s a paradox t hat was t ypically t heological. the paradox of the
ultimat e determi nat ion; at issue is t he relat ive effect ivity of independent
actors in a play decided elsewhere and by someone else.
1I ]t has to be said that the theory of t he specific effectivity of the superstruc-
ture and other 'circumstances' largely remains to be elaborated; and before
the theory of thor effectivity Ot simultaneously... there must be elaborat ion
of the t heory of the particul ar essence of the specific elements of the super-
structure (FM, 113-14 ).
The role of overdererrninano n remains more than a solutio n. It is a way
of qual ifying a concept which itself remains quite opaque.
This is wh y I wonder whether it woul d not be more helpful to sta rt from
the Freudian-Alth usserian concept of overdet ermiaanon, to ta ke it for it-
self, a nd t hen tr y to see whether it does not imply anot her th eoret ical
framework than that of supe rstruct ure and infrast ruct ure. My alterna tive
would be a motivational framewor k; this structure would allow us to
unders tand that it is in fact in terms of motives and mot ivation that we
may spea k of the overderermination of a mean ing. Perhaps wit hou t a
concept of meaning, we cannot speak adequately about overdererminanon,
" The concept of ove rderermiaarion, I t hink, does not necessarily require a -,
causalisr framewor k. What confirms t his attempt ed change is that, accord-
ing to Alt husser himself, we mus t grant Some meaning to the relati ve
autonomy of the superst r uct ural sphere. I
[AIrevoluti on in thestructure [of society) doesnor ipso factomodifytheexist-
ing supers tr uctures and pan icuJarly the ideologies at one blow (as it would
48 PAUL RrCOEUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY ..
if t he economic was the sole determinant factor), for they havesufficient of
their own consistency to survive beyond their immediate life context, even
[0 recreat e. ro 'secrete' subst it ute condit ions of existence temporarily . , .
(FM, 115-16 ).
The superstr uct ure is a layer with its own consistency and finally its own
history. As t he int riguing Marxist theory of 'sur vivals' attempts to take
into account, we must come to understa nd why, for example, bourgeois
moralit y persists even after a period of social t ransformation. My claim is
that such practices may continue to prevail precisely because a certain
str ain of mot ives survives the change in the social framework. To my mind
at least, the independence, autonomy. and consist ency of ideologies pre-
suppose anot her framework than that of superstruct ure and infrastructure.
Let me t urn, though, away from thi s theme to what is the most inter-
est ing top ic for us in Althusser, the theory of ideologies t hemselves, ideol-
ogies considered for their own sake. Alrhusser undert akes this treatment in
t wo steps, and [his is expre ssed in my own treat ment of the problem: first
2he speaks of part icular ideologies, and then he t ries to say something
about ideology in genera l. The distinction between these two themes is not
made very clearl y in For Marx but appears rather in a later, very abstract
article called ' Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' . This art icle,
incl uded in Lenin and Philosophy, will be at the cent re of our att ention
when we discuss Alt husser's theory of ideology in general, but let me quote
it briefly here to indicare how Althusser introduces the distinction in ques-
tion. ' II)f I am able to put forward the project of a theor y of ideology i n
general, and if thi s theory really is one of t he elements on which theories
of ideologies depend, that ent ails an appare ntly paradoxic al prop osit ion
which I shall express in the following way: ideology has no history'. 2
Mainly under the influence once more of Freud and Lacan, Althusser says
that we need to pursue a theory of ideology in general, just as metapsychol-
ogy is a theory of the unconscious in general. an inquir y separate from
specific t reatment of the expressions of [he unconscious found in such par-
ticular ar eas as ment al illness, art , ethics, religion, and so on . As we shall
see, the reason ideology in general has no history is because it is a permanent
struct ure. Freud' s metapsychology is Ahhusser's model for the relation
bet ween particular ideologies and ideology in general. For our purposes,
examination of the natu re of ideology in genera l is t he mor e interesting
question, and so I shall treat t he problem of partic ular ideologies fairly
quickly.
The approach to a theory of ideology t hrough anal ysis of part icular
ideologies is more or less imposed by the Mar xist model, where ideologies
are always present ed in an enumeration. Those famili ar with Marxist texts
may have not iced t hat when Marx himself di scusses ideology, he cont inu-
ally opens a parenth esis and refers to specific - that is, religious. erhical,
aest het ic, and polit ical - ideologies. It is by enumerat ion of these for ms
that Marx builds the more- general analysis, a- metno;; !' quite similar to
Descartes' analysis of the cogito. We should not tar get either that Marx
also proceeded historicall y by a similar process: from the critique of relig-
ion, t o t he cr it ique of philosophy, and then t o the critique of politi cs. The
dispersion of ideologies is an import ant aspect of the problem, the fact that
there are ideologies, in the plural. We should not e, however, that within
Marxist texts as a whole the framewor k of response t o t his problem is not
always the same. In some texts the wor d ' ideology' is used to cover all that
is not economic, while in ot hers different iation is made between econom-
ics, politics, and ideologies. In his own comprehensive concept of ideology
in his later work, Althusser himself identifies t he politi cal st ruct ure as a
parti cular ideology.
Let me offer two exa mpl es of Ahhusser' s adoption of thi s enumerat ive
approach. his treat ment of humanism and of the state. In For Marx the
paradi gmatic example of a part icular ideology is humanism. Hu manism is
treat ed as an ideology and as an ideology that has deter minant boundari es.
It is defined as a specific ant hropological field. It is t herefore a cultural
patte rn, somet hing to which some people belong and others do not. A
particular ideology may be contrasted to ideology in general, which is not
a historical patt ern but a permanent struct ure, just like the Freudian un-
conscious. Again, the att raction of Freudian concepts is most import ant .
In spite of t he narrowness of t he concept of ideology when ident ified with
one problematic among ot hers, this concept is nevertheless quit e revealing
about t he st ructure of ideology in general, since in fact the general st ruc-
tur e of ideology in Ahh usser repeats the stru ct ure of humanism, as we
shall discover.
The case of humanism is cr ucial in another respect, since it gives us the
right to put The German Ideology within the same ant hropological field
as t he earlier text s. What defines humanism, even t hat which is called
socialist humanism, is a common parti cipat ion in the same ideology.
Therefore, Althu sser considers the rebirth of humanism in modern Marx-
ism a retu rn to Feuerbach and the earl y Marx; it belongs to t he same
ant hro pological field. Althusser' s analysis of humanism is a cent ral illus-
t ration of his uncompromising denial of any conceptual blending between
ideology and science ' [lin the couple "huma nism-socialism" t here is a
striking theoretical unevenness: in the framework of the Marxi st con-
ception IAlthu sser's own, of course], the concept "socialism" is indeed a
scient ific concept, but t he concept " humanism" is no more t han an ideo-
logical one' (FM, 223). For Althusser, humanist socialism is a monstr ous
kind of concept. Unfort unately, thi s posit ion sometimes has severe political
implicat ions. Duri ng t he 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, for example,
Ahhusser kept silent ; his stance allowed him to argue that purely theo-
ret ically, the reform movement was wr ong. The Czechoslovak socialists
50 PAUL RICOEUR
ALTHUSSER'S THfORY OF IDEOLOGY 51
were at tempting something that does not exist - humanistic socialism; they
relied on an impure concept.
The argu ment against linking the conce pt of humanism to t ha t of social-
ism is that the former ' designates some existents, but it does not give us
their essences' (FM, 223~ The argument is Platonic, an objection that
humanism speaks of existence - human beings, life, and so on - and not
concept ual struct ure. Althusser's perspective is a necessar y consequence of
the epistemological break. which places both the Manuscripts' idealism
of consci ousness and The German i deology' s concrete ant hropology on
t he same - and wr ong - side. In his strongest st atement about Marx's
theoret ical ami-humanism, Alth usser says:
Strictly in respect [0 theory, therefore, one can and must speak ope nly of
Marx's theoretical anti-humanism, and seein this theoretical anti-humanism
the Absolute (negative) precondition of the (positive) knowledge of the hu-
man world itself, and of its practical transformation. It is impossible to know
anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the philosoph-
ic.:l! (r hr o rl"tic-.:l !) myrh o f milo i'l rr nnc.t:n rn i I ~ h r ' l . So any t houghr rhiIT
appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoretical anthropologyor
humanism is no more than ashes, theoretically (FM, 229-30).
Here is perhaps the common side to Alth usser, the French struct uralist
group in genera l, an d others like Michel Foucault: the idea that the
' philosophical . .. myt h of man' must be reduced to ashes. On t he basis of
t his orientat ion, I do not see how it would be possible to build, for exam-
ple, a pretest against t he bet rayal of rights. Someone like Sakharov must
be treated as an ideologist , but Alt husser would say that Nobel Prizes are
bot h given to ideologlsrs and, even more surely, given by ideologists.
Never t heless, we have a hint of somet hing else in this analysis, when
Alth usser says t hat knowledge of an object does not repl ace the object or
di ssipate it s existence (FM, 230). To say that somet hing is theoretically
no more than ashes means that we do not change its realit y by arguing
that it does not really exist. To know that an ideology has no theoret ical
stat us is not to abolish it. Here again there is a reminiscence not only of
Spinoza - that in the second kind of knowledge the first one survives - but
also of Freud. when Freud says t hat it is not enough in a t herapeutic
process to understand int ellectually. if the balance of forces - of repression
and so on - has not changed also, To explain to someone that he or she
is caught in an ideology is not sufficient; it does not change the sit uation.
The claim that somet hing is ' no more than ashes, t heoretically' is only a
qualified claim.
We must deal. then, with a strange necessity: we know t hat humanism
has no theoretical status, but yet it has a kind of factual existence. By
relating humanism to its condit ion of existence, Althusser says, we can
recognize its necessit y as an ideology; it has, in Alrhusser's st range phrase.
a 'condit ional necessit y' (FM, 231). Alt busser must resort to th is term
because if Marxism is more t han a science, if it is a polit ics, and if polit ics
is itself based on t he assert ion that human beings have cer tain rights, then
Mar xism must take something from the ideological sphere in order to
accomplish somet hing pract ically. The conjunction between ideology and
science is a ' conditional necessit y' required by act ion, but this practical
conjunction does not abolish their t heoret ical break. As we can see, it is
ver y difficult to comprehend that t here may be somet hing abolished theo-
retically but st ill existent in such a way t hat we must rely on it in order
t o act.
A second example in Alth usser of a part ial or regional ideology - the
language is somewhat Husserlian - is the sta te. Here too Alt husser int ro-
duces some import ant changes in Marxist theor y. Althusser 's main im-
provemenr is engendered by his linking ideology to its political function.
that is, to the quest ion of t he reproduction of t he system, the reproduct ion
of t he conditions of production. Thi s problem has become quite popul ar
among modern Marxists; t heir view is that Marx studied the condit ions
of production, but t here must also be reflection on the condit ions of
t he system' s reprod uction. Examination mus t be undert aken of all tho se
institu t ions which have the function of reinforcing and reproducing t he
system's structure.
To make sense of this concept of reproduction, Althusser has to improve
the rigid Marxist concept of the state. which originates in lenin. In State
and Revolut ion Lenin views the state as merely a st ruct ure of coercion.
The function of t he sta te is repression. Nothing is left from Hegel' s Ideal-
ized concept of the stat e as the integration of individuals who know them-
selves as citizens th rough t he constit ution. On the contrary, Lenin's view
of the state is extremely pessimist ic: the state is an inst rument of repres-
sion. of coercion, for the benefit of the ruling class. The dict atorship of t he
proletariat will consist in the inversion of this coercive tool and its use
agai nst the enemies of t his t ransfor med st ate. Stal in effectively used t his
notion of inversion to enforce his own position. arguing t hat he was
simply using the bourgeois struct ure of the state against it s enemy. On the
day these enemies disappear , he said. t hen there will no longer be a need
for the state.
Althusser's contribution in Lenin and Philosophy is to say t hat we must
in fact dist inguish two aspects of state power. The first is the repressive
and coercive state apparat uses: government, administ ration. police, courts,
pri sons, and so on. The second is the ideological stat e appa ratuses religion,
educa tion. the family. the polit ical system, communicat ions, cultu re, and
so forth (LP. 136-371. The structure of the state is bot h repressive and
ideological. To any who might object tha t int roduct ion of ideology into
the t heory of the state involves inclusion of something pri vate and not
public. Althusser responds tha t th is division bet ween public and private is
52 PAUL RtCOEUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 53
a bourgeois concept. If we deny t he bourgeois concepts, which depend
on t he concept of privat e propert y. then we must consider the state as a
system of apparat uses which extend far beyond administrat ive funct ions.
Onl y for the bourgeois mentality are t here private and public spheres. For
Mar xist theory these two spheres represent aspects of the same function.
We may connect the import ance of t he state's ideological apparatuses
with the pro blem of t he system's need to reproduce it self by underst anding
that t his reproduction occurs th rough such ideological state apparatuses as
educat ion. I know many left ist educat ors in Europe - in Germany, Italy,
France - who use t his not ion of repr oduction to argue t hat t he function
of the school is to reproduce the system. not only by t he teaching of
technological skills but by the reproduction in students of the rules of the
system. The system is mainta ined by the reprod uction of its rule. (Once
again there is an intersect ion with Freud; the ideological state apparatus
has its counterpart in the superego.)
The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua nrm not only
the reproduction of its 'skills' but also the reproduction of its subjection to
the ruling ideology or of the ' practice' of that ideology, with the provisothat
it is not enough to say 'not only but also" for it is dear that it is in the forms
and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the
reproduction of the skills of labour power (LP, 128).
A system of oppression survives and prevails thanks to t his ideological
appara tus which both places individuals in subject ion and at t he very same
rime mai ntains and reproduces the syst em. Reproduction of the system and
ideological repression of the individual are one and t he same. Alth usser's
analysis here is quite powerful . We have to join two ideas: a stat e func-
tions not only by power but also by ideology. and it does so for the sake
of it s own reproduction.
There are parallels to t his analysis outside Ma rxism. In Plat o. for exam-
ple. the role played by the sophist s demonstr ates t hat no master rul es by
pur e for ce. The ruler must convince, must seduce; a certa in distortion of
langua ge always accompanies t he use of power. Na ked power never works;
( in t he use of politi cal power an ideological mediati on is unavoidably in-
volved. My question. t herefor e, is not at all whet her Althu sser's descrip-
tion is a good one. I. . .J Inst ead, it is the concepts used which int erest me,
and in th is context par ticular ly the notion ,Qf. appar ams. This conce pt
belongs to the same ano nymous and infrastr uc-
tur e. It is not by chance tha t Althusser 's term is apparatus and not insti-
t ution, because an apparatus is mor e mechanical. An apparat us is something
which functions, and therefore it has more concept ual kinship with struct ures
and reproduct ion, with st ruct ural language in general. All these functions
are ano nymous and can exist and go on by t hemselves. If, however. we
ra ise the Questi on: but how do these funct ions work. do we not need to
introduce, once again, some element like persuasion and therefore a certa in
captu ring of mot ivation? Once more the problem is one of legitimacy, of
t he claim to legitimacy and the process of just ification, and I do not see
how these issues work within the language of apparat us. My difficulty is
wi th t he conceptua l framewor k of causality at a place where I t hink another
- motivational - framework would be mor e helpful. The causal framewor k
has been imposed at t he beginning by the not ion of the det ermi nant factor
in the last instance. and consequently all of the new and quite interesting
chang es Althusser int roduces in Marxist t heory have to be put within this
imperative framework.
Let us set t his point aside. though. and turn to the most interest ing part
of Althu sser' s analysis., his attempt to provide a definition of ideology in
general. Thi s attempt will be decisive for t he rest of t he lecture s as a whole.
Alrhusser's attempt allows us to move from what we might call a geography
of ideologies to a theor y of ideology. Alrhusser's discussion is located in
two pri ncipal texts, pages 231-36 of For Marx and pages 149-70 of Lenin
and Philosophy. The latter is the sect ion of ' Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses' ent itled ' On Ideology' and is Althu sser's most discussed text .
I shall leave t his text for t he next lectu re.
In For Marx Althusser put s forwa rd three or four programmatic defi-
nitions of ideology, att empts to tr y, to test . and nothing mor e than that,
since he thi nks that this effort has not been undert aken in previous Marx-
ist t heory. As we shall see. Althu sser's definitions may not be so easy to
combine. Althu sser's first definit ion is readily und erstood, t hough, because
it is an applicat ion of the dist incti on betwee n science and ideology.
There can be no question of attempting a profound definition of ideology
here. It will suffice to know veryschematically that an ideologyis 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. Without embarking on the problemof the relat-
ions between a science and its {idcological} past, we can say that ideology,
as a system of representations, is distinguished fromscience in that in it the
pracnco-social function is more important than the theoretical function
(function as knowledge) (FM, 231).
There are four o r five import ant notions here. First, ideology i s a system;
this is consistent with wha t Alrhusser called a field - an anthro pological
field, for example - or a pro blematic. All these concepts overlap. Of what
is ideology a system. though? A system of representation. This is its second
t rait. Althusser uses the vocabulary of t he idealistic t radition; the vocabu-
lary of idealism is preserved in t he definit ion of ideology as Vorstellung,
repr esent at ion. Third t rait, ideology has a historical role. Ideology is not
a shado w. as it is in some Marxi st texts, since it plays a role in the
PA..... RICOEUR
AlTHUSSf R'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 55
historical process. It is a part of the process of cverdetermination. Thus,
we must connect the not ion of ideology's historical existence to its contri-
but ion to t he overdetermination of events. All these t raits are verycoherent.
What is mor e problematic is ideology's fourt h trai t, the relative import
Althusser ascribes to ideology's pract ice-social funct ion in cont rast to its
theoretical function. This t rait is more difficult to accept because if, for
example. we call humanism an ideology, surely it has some very theoret-
ical claims. To take anothe r case, what work is more t heoretical t han
Hegel' s? Alt husser's point is quite difficult to comprehend. because nothing
is more theoretical than idealism; Feuerbach and t he young Marx in fact
opposed Hegel' s work precisely because it was theory and not praxis.
Suddenly in Alrhusser, however, ....-e discover that praxis is ideological and
only science is t heoretical. I do not see how Alt husser's point here can be
maintained.
Althusser's second definition of ideology is more wit hin t he framework
of t he opposition bet ween t he illusory and the real. As we recall from
earlier lect ures, t his analysis has some grounds in t he young Marx. This
second definition of Althusser's will prevail in his later texts. Notice in the
following quot ation t he use of the phrase 'lived relation.' vecu; t his is t he
vocabulary of Husser! and of Merleau-Ponry, the language of existential
phenomenology.
So ideology is a maner of t he lived relation between men and their world.
This relation, that onlyappears as 'conscious' on condition that it is uncon-
scious, in tbe 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: relaeion,
.This is a torturous way of saying that ideology reflects in the form of an
imaginary relat ion somet hing which is already an exisrmg relation, t hat is,
\ the relat ion of human beings to t heir world. The lived relation is reflected
f 'as ideology. The more importa nt part of the text follows:
In ideologymendo indeed express, not: the relation between them and their
conditions of existence, but the .....ay they live the relation between them and
their conditions of existence this presupposes both a real rtlarion and an
'imaginary', 'lived' relation. Ideology, then, ts the expression of the relation
between menand tbeir 'world', that is, the (overdetermined)unity of tbe real
relation and dle imaginary relation between them and their real conditions
u( III iJo;u(ugy le;.a),d.uiull D illc:vilabl.y inYQlnl in die
relation, a relation thar expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist
or rtvolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describi ng a reality
(B.I, 13!-34)_
The vocabulary here is quite interesting, not only because .....e hu e t he
notion of the lived relanon, but because this relation is lived in an imaginary
mode. In an ideology the way of living t his relation is imaginary, This
definition int roduces an important shift from the vocabulary of the young
Marx, which it at first sight resembles. While in the young Marx the real
and the imaginary are opposed, here the lived and the imaginary are
coupled together. An ideology is bot h lived and imaginary. it is t he lived
( asJmaginatY. Therefore, webave a-real relation which is distorted in an
. imaginary later-discusSion; wemay note mat it
is difficult to adjust t his definition to the rest of Althusser's ....-ork, since
Alt husser speaks here of the real relations ot real individuals. even t hough
real individuals do not belong to t he basic phenomena. More generally,
though, it seems that to give an account of ideology we must speak t he
language of ideology; we must speak of individuals constructing dreams
instead of living their real life.
Althusser also int roduces at this point the notion of overdererminat ion
as appli ed no longer to the relation bet ween instances - between elements
of the superstruct ure and infrast ruct ure - but to the relationship between
the real and the imaginary. The concept of overderermi narion is used in a
context that is closer to Freud t han to Marx; t he mixture of t he real and
the imaginary is what Freud calls a compromise formation, and it is this
not ion that rules Althusser's analysis at this point . 'It is in t his overdeter-
minat ion of the real by t he imaginary and of the imaginary by the real t hat
ideology is active in principle . . .' lFM, 234). Thus, ideology is not somet hing
bad, it is not something that we attempt to put behind us; instead, it is
somet hing t hat pushes us, a system of motivation. Ideology is a system of
mot ivation that proceeds from t he lack of a dear dist inction bet ween the
real and the unr eal.
In his third definition of ideology. Ahhusser writes of ideology as
expressed in the language of layers. of instances. Althusser needs t his lan-
guage to preser ve ideology's reality, its real existence in history. As real.
ideology must involve real instances. real layers, an d not merely imaginary
dements; the imaginary has a kind of inexistence. In his later article on
'Ideological Apparatuses'. Ahhusser will t ry to adjust the definition of
ideology to incl ude both the terms of illusion and the terms of histor ical
existence, arguing that ideology has its materiality in t he famous ideologi-
cal appa ratus. The ap parat us will give a certai n material existence to t hese
dreams. At the time of For Marx, ho..... ever, Althusser had not yet solved
this subtle discrepancy bet.....een his definitions. His third definition of
ideology moves from the language of the lived to the language of instances.
So ideology ts as such an organic part every social rotahty. If is as if
human societies could not survive ..... ithout tbese specific Iorrnanons, these
systems of represeneanons (ar various levels), their ideologies.. Human soci-
eties secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to
their historical respiration and li(e. Only an ideological world outlookcould
56 PAUL RICO EUR AL THUSSER'S THEORY OF D EOLOGY 57
have imagined societies without ideology and accepted the utopi an idea of
a world in whic h ideology (nor just one of it s histori cal for ms) would dis-
appear wit ho ut trace, t o be replaced by science (f M, 232 ).
This text is quite positive toward ideology; it is a plea for recognition of
ideology's indi spensability. Alt husser argues against the utopian view of
those technocra ts who believe that we are no w beyond the age of ideol-
ogies. t hat we may now speak of the deat h of ideologies. In opposit ion to
thi s t heme, famous both in Europe and in th is coumry, Alrhu sser conrends
that t here will alwa ys be ideology, because people have to make sense of
t heir lives. This task is not the province of science, which cannot do
everyt hing, but rather the function of ideology. Althusser goes far in the
dir ection of a positive appreciat ion of ideology. It is difficult, t hough, to
t hink of ideology simult aneous ly as illusion (Alt husser' s second definition)
and as a real instance essenti al to t he histori cal life of societ ies. Perhaps the
mediati ng point is t he Ni etzschean view tha t we need illusions to survive
the hard ness of life, t hat we would die if we saw t he real truth of human
existence. Also involved here ma y be t he pessimist ic view t hat people want
ideologies because science does not give their lives meaning. Althusser is
ver y antipositivist and again t ypifies as utop ian t he posit ivist view t hat
science will one day replace ideology.
[T)his utopia is t he principle behind t he idea that ethics, which is in its
essence ideology, could be replaced by science or become scientific through
and through; or that religion could be destroyed by science which would in
some way take its place; that an could merge with knowledge or become
'everyday life", etc. (FM, 232).
Against t hose who maint ain t hat ethics, religion, and art are 'survivals',
lingering remnant s of earlier non-scient ific eras, Alth usser tends t o say that
they are necessary ingredients of any society. Ideologies are indispensable;
science cannot be everything.
For my part , I interpret this turn of Althusser 's in the followi ng way. If
we raise the requirement s of science so highly, then it is beyond our access.
Th e higher in fact that we raise t he concept of science, the broader be-
comes t he field of ideology, because each is defined in relation to t he ot her.
If we reinforce the scientific requirement of a t heor y, t hen we lose its
capacit y for making sense of ord inary life. Therefor e, the field of ideology
is so wide because the field of science is so narrow. At least this is my
interpretation of Alth usser's discussion here. Alt husser 's differentiat ion be-
~
tween science and ideology explains his posit ive recognit ion of ideology as
sometfiiiig1n t he indeterminate state of not being t rue but yet necessarily
vita l, a vital illusion. Th is perspective provides a way to interpret Marx's
statement t hat in a class societ y rul ing ideas have to take t he form of
universalit y. Thi s necessit y is not a lie, it is not a tr ick, for it is impo sed
by the unavoidable imaginary structu re itself. No one can think without
believing rhar what he or she t hinks is in some basic sense true. The
illusion is a necessary one.
The persistence of t his illusion that is ideology extends even unto the
hypot hesized classless society. Whatever the classless societ y may mean -
and again I do not discuss it at all in polit ical terms but only according
to its own condit ion of int elligibility - it has about it a qualit y of t he
eternal. (In Alt busser's ' Ideological Apparat uses' article, the word 'eternal'
ret urns and is compared to Freud's descript ion of the atemporality of the
unconscious.) Similarly, ideology is also atemporal. ' [Ijr is clear that ideol-
ogyjas a system of mass represent at ions) is indi spensable in any society
if men arc to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the
demands of t heir cond itions of existence' (FM, 235). The suggest ion is that
in every' society, even in one where by hypothesis class sn uggle no longer
exists, t here will always be a sit uat ion of inadequation between the
demands of realit y and our abilit y to cope. I am reminded of Freud's com-
ment s concerni ng death and t he hardness of life, t he fact t hat the price of
realit y is t oo high. The requirement s of the conditi ons of realit y ar e high,
an d our capacit y to adjust to realit y is limit ed.
It is in ideologyt hat the classlesssocietylives the inadequacy/adequacy of the
relation between it and the world, it is in it and by it that it transforms men's
' consciousness', that is, t heir attitudes and behaviour so as to raise them to
the levels of t heir tasks and [he condit ions of t heir existence (FM, 235).
We have here nearly a fourth definition of ideology as the the system o f
means by which we try t o adj ust our capacity t o change t o the act ual
condit ions of change in society in general. Therefore, ideology has a cer-
t ain et hical function; it at t empt s to make sense of the accidents of life, t he
painf ul aspect s of existence. We must int rod uce an existent ial language;
when we speak of cont radict ion, it is not a logical cont radiction, a conflict
bet ween structures, but a lived contradiction, a cont radiction between our
capaci ty to adjust and the demands of realit y.
To my mind, Alt husser's definit ions of ideology in general raise t he
following quest ions. My broadest question IS: if we assume the value of
Alt husser' s analysis, are we any longer able to speak of ideology simply as
non-science? Under this t heme, several more specific quest ions follow, which
I shall return to in later lect ures. First, is not t he quasi-ethi cal function of
ideology just as valuable as science? Second, how can we understand the
notion of the imaginary if t he real is not already symbolically mediated?
llurd, I S not the most pnrrunve function of Ideology - that which IS said
to emerge in classless societ y - not distor tive but integrat ive? And finally,
how do we know ideology if not because it belongs to a fundament al
51 PAUL RICOEUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 50
ant hropology; is it not only within this phi losophical anthropology that
t he vocabular y of Alrhusser's definitions - ' men' , 'conditions of existence',
' dema nds' , ' arrirudes and behavi our' - makes sense ? Is there not. t herefore,
a primitive connection between the lived and the imaginary that is more
radical than any distor tion?
The point abo ut Alrhusser's expressions is t hat they belong to the
vocabulary of humanism. To speak of ideology we must rejuvenate t he
vocabu lary of human ism. Even in the concluding sentence of his discussion
- a perhaps, though, a ,"om:.c!>!>ieJlI to the reader -
resorts to this vocabulary. 'In a classless society ideology isthe relay whereby,
and the element in which, the rel ation between men and t heir conditions of
existence is lived to the profit of all men' (FM, 236). Who would r.ay more
than this, t hat we are all dreami ng of the ki nd of society in which the
relat ions between human beings and their conditions of existence are lived
tu the prufit uf all? But t hi!> i!> pr ecisely t he: di scourse uf ideology. We lIIW, t
assume at least part of t he discourse of ideology in order to speak of
ideology. It seems as if we ca nnot speak of ideology in ano ther language
than its uwu. If we: utiliLe: the Ah h usser iau language: uf scieuce, then we
can speak only of apparat uses, instances, st ruct ures, and superst ruct ures
and infr astr uct ures, but not of ' condit ions of existence' , 'at tit udes and
beha viour' , and so un. At least tu a cer tain extent, therefore, onl y ideolc gy
may speak abo ut ideology.
A few more points also need to be made about Althusser 's conte ntion
that t he ' disproport ion of histor ical tasks to their condit ions' (FM, 238)
just ifies the necessit y o f ideology. Th is relati onship must be lived i n order
to become a contradiction and to be tr eated scienti fically. The relation of
disproportion also reinfo rces t he pr estige of t he concept uf alienation.
Alth usser mainta ins (. ..J that th is concept ca n be done away with, but are
we able to deny it theoretically and preserve it practically? Are not the
live:d cunrradictjcns the coudidons fur the: so-ca lled real rdariuns? Alrhusser
responds that if we return to t he language of alienation, it is because we
do not yet have a science of ideology. It is a pro visory language in the
absence of an adeq uate language. ' Within certai n limits this recourse to
ideology might indeed be envisaged as the substitute for a recourse to
theory' (FM, 24 0) or as ' a substi tute fa t an insufficient theor y' (FM. 241 1.
Alt husser has accused all Mar xist thinkers o f theoretical weakness, but he
assume s a certain t heoret ical weakness for himself in order to speak about
ideology in positive t erms. Because of the present weakness of our theory,
he says, we need the language of ideology in order to speak of ideology;
one day, however, our t heory will be strong enough to cast aside t his
vocabulary. This argu ment is for me the most ques tionable of Alth usser 's
claims. The qu estion is whether t his alleged confusion of ideology and
scientific theory is not required by the problem itself. Does not th is 'con-
fusio n' in fact exp ress the impossibility of dra wing the line bet ween the
lived cont radiction and the real basis? In order to speak in a meaningful
way of ideology, do we not have to speak of the motives of people, of
individuals in certa in circums tances, uf t he adequate or inadequate relat ion
bet ween human behaviour and its cond itions? We cannot eliminate as a
problem the status of a philosophical anthropology if we want to speak
about t hese issues,
[ . ..)
Alth usser's most advanced attempt to provide an inclusive concept of
idc:ulugy appc:an in the: Lenin and Philusuphy t:loS3.y rirled ' 1Jc:ulogy and
Ideological State Apparatuses'. The pur pose of t his essay, we should recall,
is to argue t hat the fundamenta l function of ideology is reprodu ction of
the system, t rainin g of individu als in the rules governing the system. To the
problem of product ion raised by Marx we must add t he problem of
reproduc tion. On the basis of t his reconceprualizarioa, we must then re-
formulate t he Leninist concept of the state - defined only in terms of
coercion - by adding the notion o f what Alr husser calls ideological state
apparatuses. Ideology is institutionalized and so appears as a dimension of
t he state. There is a dimension of the state which is not merely administ rative
or polit ical but specifically ideological. The superstruct ure is related to
reproduct ion t hrough specific inst itutional apparatuses, and the probl em
of a general t heor y of ideology is proposed in conjunc tion with this
reformulat ion.
In this text, Althusser goes so far as to ascribe to ideology all positive
functi ons which are not science. At t he same t ime, he emphas izes mor e
st rongly t han ever the illusory charact er of imaginat ion. Here Alrhusser
borrows from Spinoza the t heme that the first kind of knowledge is merely
a distorted conception of our relati on to the world He also and more
impo rtantly borrows fr om t he disti nction made by the French psycho-
analyst Jacques Lacan bet ween the imaginary and the symbolic. Significantly,
Ahh usser drops the noti on of the symbolic to retain the notion of the
imagina ry understood on the model of t he mirror relationship. The imagin-
ar y is a mi rror relation at a narci ssistic stage, an image of oneself that one
has in a physical mirror and also in all the situations of life in whi ch one's
image is reflected by others.
In turning to the text, we shall focus particularly on the section of
Alt husser's essay called 'On Ideology'. Althusser begins by contrasting his
position to t hat of Marx in The German Ideology. Here. Althusserclaims,
Mar x did not take seriously the par adox of a reality of the imagina ry.
In The Ghm41J IJ eology . . . (i]JeoIogy is'ccoceived as a pure illusion. a pure
dream, i.e. as rKKhingness. All irs reality ts external to it. Ideology is thus
thoughr as an imaginary construction whose status is exactly like the
thcoretic:al status of the dream amongwriters before Freud. For these wnt -
ers, the dream was the purelyimaginary, i.e, null, result of ' day's residues',
PAUL. RICOEUR ALTHU SSER'S THEORY OF IDEOL.OGY at
presented in an arbitrary arrangement and order, somet imeseven ' inverted',
in other words, in 'disorder'. For them the dream was the imaginary, it was
empty, null and arbitrarily 'stuck together' (b rit:oIi) (LP, 150-51).
Against this purely negative text Alth usser maint ains that ideology has a
realit y of its own; t he reality of the illusory. This statement seems to
challenge an other asserti on of Th e German Ideology, that ideology has no
histor y. (The argument, we remember, was that only economic history
really exists, This became the framework for all orthodox Marxist
approaches to history.) Alt husser in fact agrees that ideology is non-historical
but in a very different sense than that argued by The German Ideology.
(
Idealogy is non-historical not, as the or thodox approa ch would have it,
because its history is external to it but because it is just
like Freud's unconscious. Once more the influence of FCel:iit -is -strongly
reinforced. III his essay, 'The Unconscious', Freud said that the U IKU II-
scious is t imeless (zeitIos), not in the sense that it is supernatural but
because it is prior to any temporal order or connections, being prior to
t he le.... d of language, uf cult ure, and )U UII. (All earlier, similar assertion
appeared in t he sevent h chapter of Freud's Th e I nterpretation of Dreams.)
Althusser's explicit parallel between ideology and the unconscious draws
UII thil> Ual>il> a step further by- rciKicri ng as the
eterna l: ' ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious' (LP, 152). Althusser
suggests that in t he same way t hat Freud att empted to provide a t heory of
t he unconscious in general - as t he underlying structure of all t he cult ural
figures of the unconscious, which appear at the level of symptoms - similarly,
he himself proposes a theory of ideology in general t hat would underlie the
.particular ideologies.
On this basis t he imaginary features of ideology must bequalified and
imp roved. Here I raise two point s. First, what is distorted is not realit y as ">,
such, nut t he real condirions uf existence, but uur relat ion ru these condn - 1
ions of existence. We are not far from a concept of being-in-t he-world; it
is our relation to reality which is distorted, ' Now I can ret urn to a t hesis
which 1 have already advanced: it is not t heir real conditions of existence,
their real world, t hat "men" "represent to themselves" in ideology, but above
all it is t heir relati on to t hose conditions of existence which is represented
to them t here' (LP, 154), This leads to a most important insight, becaus?>
what s a relation In the conditions ri existence if not already an int er-
pretat ion, something symbolically mediated. To speak of our relation to /
r
,t he world requires a symbolic structure. My main argument , therefore, is
.that if we do not have from the start a symbolic st ruct ure to our existence,
tt hen not hing can be distort ed. As Althusser himself observes: ' it is t he
\ imaginary nat ure of t his relation which underlies all the imaginar ydistortion
t hat we can observe . . . in all ideology' (LP, 154- 55). We are not far from
a comp lete reversal in our approach to the problem of the imaginary, We
could not understand t hat there are distorted images if t here were not first
a prima ry imaginar y st ructure of our being in the world underlying even
t he distort ions. The imaginary appears not only in t he distorted forms of
existence, because it is already present in the relat ion which is distorted.
The imaginar y is constirurive of our relation to the world. On e of my main
quest ions, t hen is whet her this does not imply before t he distorti ng function
of imagination a constitutive function of imagination. Or, to use the lan-
guage of Lacan, is t here not a symbolic role of imagination distinct from
t he narcissistic eompon ent of imaginat ion, that is to say, distinct from t he
imaginary taken in the sense of the mirror relationship?
My second remark is t hat t his relation to our conditions of existence no
longer falls very easily wit hin the framework of causalit y. This relation is
not causal or nat uralistic but rat her an int erplay between mot ives, between
symbols; it is a relation of belonging to the whole of our experience and
of being related to it in a moti vational way. Ahh usser hints that
this relat ionship destroys t he general framework of superstructure and
infr ast ructure expressed in terms of causa tion; he says that here we need
' [ 0 leave aside the language of cau salit y' (154).
Thus, we must introduce two levels of imagination, one which is the
distorting, and anot her which is the distort ed and therefore the primar y.
[API ideology represents in its necessarily imaginary distortion not the exist-
ing relationships of production (and the other relationships that derive from
them), but above all the (imaginary) relationship of individuals to the rela-
tions of production and the relations that derive fromthem. What is
sented in ideology is therefore not the sysrem of the real relations which
govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those
individuals to the real relations in which they live (LP, 155).
Expr essed urure simply, t his means that ill fad we are never rd at eJ""
directl y to what ar e called the conditions of existence, classes and so on.
These condit ions must be represented in one way or anot her; they must ;
have their imprin t in t he motivational field, in our system of images, and)
so in our representa t ion of the world. The so-called real ca uses never
appear as such in human existence but always under a symbolic mode. It
is this symbolic Illude which is secondarily disrorred. Therefore. the notion
of a primit ive and basic distortion becomes questionable and perhaps com-
pletely incomprehensible. If everything were distort ed, that is the same as
if not hing were distorted. We must dig in under t he notion of distortion.
In so doing, we rediscover a layer not far finally from what The German
Ideology described as real life or real individuals placed under certain
circumsta nces. Alrhusser denies t his ant hropological approach, however,
claiming t hat it is itself ideological. As a result, this discourse remains en
I' ai r, float ing without a basis, because we must use the so-called language
62 PAUL RICOEUR AL THUSSER' S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 63
of ideology, the ant hropological language. in order to speak of this
primi t ive, ineluctably symbolically mediat ed relation to our conditions of
existence.
Perhaps ant icipat ing this difficult y, the text suddenly rakes a qui te dif-
ferent approach. Althusser relinquishes the language of representation and
subst itutes for it t hat of apparat us. He t urns away from the questions he
has just raised to consider the material crit eria of ideology. Alrhusser's
t hesis here is t hat ideology has a material existence. The clai m is t hat
while no Marxist ca n say anything that is not ideological concerning
the roots of distort ion in some more imaginary layer, he or she may still
speak scient ifically of t he ideological apparat us wit hin which t he distorti on
works. The only Marxist language about t he imaginary bears not upon
its ontological, ant hropo logical rooti ng but upon its incorpor atio n in the
state apparatus, in an instit ut ion. Therefore, we have a theory about
imaginat ion as institu tionalized but not abo ut imaginat ion as a symbolic
st ructu re.
While discussing the ideological State appararuses and their practices, I said
that each of themwas the realization of an ideology.... I now rerum to this
thesis: an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or prac-
tices. This existence is material (l P, 156).
The mate rialist approach asks, in which apparat us does ideology work?
And not, how is it possible according to the fundamental st ructur e of
human being? The lat ter question belongs to an ideolog ical language.
Que stions about the underlying imagi nary - t he non-distorted or pre-
distort ed imaginar y - must be cancelled for the sake of quest ions about
the apparatus . The appara tus is a public entity and so no longer imp lies a
reference to indi viduals. Althusser t alks about individual beliefs as belong-
ing to an ' ideological "concept ual" device (dispositif )' (157). In French
dispositif expresses the idea of something which funct ions by itself, some-
thing which sha pes behaviour.
It is difficult, t hough, to speak of the practice of a believer, for exampl e,
merely in terms of an appara tus unless the apparatus is reflected in the
rul es governing the behaviour. The ideological device which shapes t he
behaviour of t he believer - the example is Althusser's (LP, 157) - must
be such that it speaks to t he at titudes and t herefore to the mot ives of t he
individual involved. We must link t he apparat us with what is meaningful
for the indi vidual. The apparatus is an ano nymous and externa l ent ity,
however, so it is difficult to connect and to have intersect the norion of
apparat us with the notion of a practice, which is always t he pract ice of
someone. It is always some individual who is bowing, praying, doing what
is supposed to be induced in him or her by t he apparatus.
In order not to speak the lang uage of ideology about ideology, Alt husser
must put the notion of practice itself int o a behavio urisr framework, the
latter being somet hing more appropriately connected with the Marxist
concept of appara t us. The language of ideology, says Althusser, 'talks of
actions: I shall talk of act ion insert ed int o pr actices. And I shall point out
that these practices are governed by the rituals in which t hese practices are
inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparat us .. .'
(LP, 158). For Althusser t he concept of action is too ant hropological;
pract ice is the more objective term. Finall y, it is on ly t he material existence
of an ideological apparatus which makes sense of pract ice. The apparatus
is a mat erial framework, withi n which people do some specific things.
The behaviouri st overto ne in Alth usser is evident in t he following
quotation:
I shall-t herefore say t ha t, whe re un ly a eiugl e subject ... is ccncemed, the
existence of the ideas of his belief is material in that his ideas are his material
actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which
are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which
derive the ideas of thar subject (LP, 158).
The word ' material' i s used i n four ways: mat erial actions, kneeling, for
exa mple; material pract ices, kneeling as religious behaviour; material rituals,
kneeling as part of a service of worship; and the mat erial ideological
apparat us, the church as an institution. J ust as Aristotl e said that 'being'
has several meanings, so Althusser gives several meanings to matt er, a
comparison he explicitly acknowledges with some humour (LP, 156). While
admitt ing that the four inscri ptions of the wor d ' material' are affected by
different modaliti es, t hough, Althusser provides no rule for t heir different -
iation. ' I shall leave on one side,' he says, 't he problem of a t heor y of t he
differences between the modalit ies of mat eriality' (LP, 159). In fact, t hen,
we must qualify our concept of what is material in or der to apply it
properl y to somet hing t hat is not material in t he way, for instance, that a
chair is. We must rely on a polysemy of t he word ' matt er' to make sense
of t hese differences, and rhis is har dly forbidden, because in ordinary
language we use the word in so many divergent cont exts. We rely on a
common sense concept of mat ter or on the rules of everyday language, in
the Wittgensteinian sense, to extend and stret ch the not ion of materialit y
in order t hat it covers t he notion of practice.
The remaining part of Ahhusser's essay is devot ed to the functioning of
the category of t he subject in ideology. Alth usser says t hat t he function of
ideology and of t he subject is for each to give content to t he ot her.
I say: t he category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology, but at the
same time and immediately I add that the category of the subject is only
..
PAUL RICOEUR
ALTHUSSER' S THEORY OF LOEOlOGY 6s
consrir unve of all ideology insofar as all ideology has the function (which
defines it ) of 'ccosmunng' concrete individuals as subjects flP, 160).
Alth usser put s 'const itut ing' within quota tion marks because this is the
language of Husserl. The phenomenology of the ego falls under th e con-
cept of ideolog y to the exten t t hat it defines ideology; ideolog y is human-
ism. humanism relies on t he concept of the subject. and it is ideology
which const itutes the subject. Ideology and t he subject are mut uall y con-
stitutive. Whereas someone like Erik Erikson argues t hat ideology is a
facto r of identit y and so maintains that t he relations hip between ideolog y
and the subject shoul d betaken in a positive sense, the language of Althusser
is much more negative. We are forced to put on the side of ideology what
in a sense is t he most interesting philosophical pr oblem: how do we be-
come subjects? It is a bold att empt to give so much to ideology in ord er
to deny it so much also. This is why I have said that If .....e give t oo much
to science, we have to give still mor e to ideology. It becomes more and
more difficult to trea t ideology merely as a world of illusions, of super -
str uctures, because it becomes so consti tuti ve ot what we are that what we
might be when separated from ideology is completely unknown; we are
(
what we are precisely t hanks to ideology. The burden of ideology is to
make sub jects of u,s. It is a phil?sophical situation. since all our
concrete existe nce IS put on t he Side of Ideology.
Ahbusser's interesting analysis of what he calls 'int erpellat ion' demon-
strates more specifically t he relationshi p bet ween ideology and the subject.
' As a first for mulat ion, I sha ll say: all ideology hails or inrerpellat es con-
crete individuals as conc rete subjects, by th e functioni ng of the category of
th e sub ject' (LP, 162 ). We are consti tuted as subj ects t hroug h a process
of recogn ition. The use of the term ' interpellation' is an allusion t o th e
t heological concept of call. of being called by God. In its ability to inter-
pella te sub ject s, ideo logy also constit utes them. To be bailed is to become
a sub ject. ' The existen ce of ideology and th e hai ling or interpellat ion of
individuals as subjects are one and tbe same thing' (LP. J63). The idea is
that ideology is eternal and so does not belong t o t he hist ory of classes and
so on, and it acts to consti t ute and be const it uted by th e category of t he
subj ect. The theory of ideology in general rebuilds the framework of a
complete anthropology, but it does so with a negati ve cast. ThIS ant hro-
pology is t he world of illusion.
Ah husser' s claim abo ut the illusory nat ure of what constitutes us as
sub jects is based on th e Lacanian notion of th e mir ror -structure of the
imagination. ' We observe that the str uctu re of all ideal ogy, interpellati ng
individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolut e Subject is
specula ry, i.e. has a mirror-structure, and doubly specula r)': this mirro r
duplication is constitutive of ideology and ensures its funct ioning' (LP.
J68). Wh en emphasis is placed on th e primacy of illusion in t he symbolic
pr ocrss, all ideology must beillusory. Here there is a complete merg ing of
t he concept of t he mirror - the narcissistic structure - with ideology.
IJ w log y i:!o esta blished at tin: level uf l1i1rdMi !> lll, the looking at
itself indefinitely. Althusser takes as an illustrative example religious ideol-
ogy. He says t hat the function of Christian theol ogy is to redupl icate th e
subjel:t by an absolute subject; t hey dC C in a mirr or relat ion. ' TIll: dogma
of the Trinity is pr ecisely the theory of the duplication of the Subject (t he
Fath er) into a subject (t he Son) and of th eir mirro r-connexion (t he Holy
Spir it)' (LP, 168 n. ), rreanuem here is nut a goo d piece uf
work ; I do not thi nk it makes much sense. It is expedirive, Alrh usser
summarizes Trin itarian theology in a footnot e. We perhaps could say that
the minor relation would be mor e int eresting as an expression of a neu-
rot ic wa y of life. If we took, for exa mple, th e Schrebe r case analyzed by
Freud, and in pan icular what Freud called Schreber's t heology. we would
see this reduplicative prm.-ess, t here being in face no god to worship but
only a projection and retr oject ion indefinitely of oneself, a projection and
assimilation of one's own image.
It is most difficulr, rherefcre, to const ruct t he whole co ncept of t he
sub ject on the na rrow basis of the narcissistic relat ion of mirroring. We
can more easily understand thi s relation as disrortive, t he distort ion of a
constitution, but it is difficult to understand it as consrirurive itself. The
only way to maintain that this relat ion is constieurive - and this is Althusser' s
stance - is to argue the radical position tha t t he constit ut ion is the distor-
t ion, all constitution of a subject is a distortion. If ideology is etern al."
though, If t here are alwa ys alread y inte rpella ted individuals as SUbiectsy '
if the formal structure of ideology is continuingly the same. then what
happens to the epistemological break? The pr oblem of the epistemologi es
break has to be removed from t he sphere of part icular ideologies to that
of ideology in general. The break with religious ideology. with humanism,
and so on is noth ing compared to t he br eak wit h this mutual const itution
of primary ideology and subjectivit y. I woul d agree th at a break must
occu r. but not where Alt husser places it. Inst ead, we may break and we
have to break with the ' miscognit ion' (meconnalssanu) tha t adheres to
recognition (r econnaIssance), What point would there be in a critique of
miscognit ion if it were nor for the sake of a more faithful recognition? We
must make sense of true recogn ition in a \\ray that does nee reduce it 10
ideology. in th e narrow and pejorative sense o f that term. Alrhusser, how-
ever, rejects this possibilit y. He talks of 'the reality which is necessaril y
ignored (mecpnnue) [so ' miscognized', not ignored] in t he "'ery forms of
recognit ion . , " (LP. 170). AU recognition is miscognition; it is a very
pessimistic assert ion. If idealogy must have no value in itself, then it must
be the world of miscognit ion, meconnaissance. The whole dialectic of
recognition is broken by Al rhusser's ideological reduct ion of the problem-
at ic of the subject.
.. PAUL RICOEUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY 67
Instead of there being a relation of recogni tion, Alrhusser correlates the
mirror rela tion with a relation of subsumpri on. ' There are no subjects
exce pt by and for their subject ion' (LP, 169), he says. Alrhusser uses t he
play on words to indi cate t hat the subject means both subjectivity and
subject ion. The two meanings are in fact reduced to one: to be a subject
means to be submit ted to. Yet is t here not a histor y of t he individual' s
growth beyon d t he 'speculary' stage? What about t he dialectic of the
speculary and t he symbolic within imagination itself? For Alrhusser, how-
ever, to be a subject means to be subjected, to be submitted to an appar-
at us, the ideological apparat us of the state. To my mind, if ideology must
be tied to the mirror stage of the imagination, to the submitt ed subject, I
do not see how it would ever be possible to have as citizens authent ic
subjects who could resist the appara tus of the state. I do not see from
where we could borrow the forces to resist the apparatus if not from the
dept hs of a subject having claims t hat are not infected by this supposed
submissive constitution. How else will someone produce a break in t he
seemingly closed shell of ideology?
The task, then, is to disentan gle recognition (reconnaissance) from mis-
cognit ion (meconnaissance). I shalllater connect my analysis of Habermas
precisely at t his point . The problemat ic for Habermas is t he need to start
{rom a project of recognition. Ideology is tro ublesome because it makes
~
. possible the true recogni tion of one human being by another. Furt her,
if this situat ion is placed ent irely on the side of ideology, then no weapons
xist against ideology, because the weapons themselves are ideological.
herefore, we need a concept of recogniti on, what Habermas' more recent
work speaks of as a concept of communicat ion. We need a utopi a of total
recognition, of total communication, communication without boundaries
or obstacles. This supposes tha t we have an interest in communicat ion
which is not , we might say, ideology-stricken from the beginning. In order
to connect, as does Haber mas, the critique of ideology to an int erest in
liberation, we must have a concept of recognition, a concept of the mut ual
task of communicat ion, that is not ideological in the distor rive sense of
t hat word .
Before we reach our examinat ion of Haber mas, however, we shall spend
some t ime discussing Mannheim and Weber, and we have some final
questions of Althusser as well. To prepare for t he tr ansit from Althusser,
I would like to present a general framework of the questions ar ising from
our readings of his wor k. I shall consider five main problems. First is t he
question of the scientific claim of Marxism: in what sense is it a science?
While Alt husser speaks in some more recent writings of the discover y of
a cont inent, the cont inent of hist ory, even here the subject-matter is to be
raised to the level of a systematic science. The focus of t his history is not
empirical histori ography but the systematic concatenation of stages in the
development of economic relationships (from primiti ve communism to
feudalism to capitalism and so fort h). If we speak of science in a posit ivist
sense, then a theory must be submi tt ed to verificat ion and therefore to the
whole community of, we might say, intellectual workers. It is hard, though,
to ident ify t his science with t he science of a class. To put the noti on of
scientific verification within the framework of class struggle introduces a
practical concept within the t heoret ical framework. My question, then, is
in what sense can Marxism be a science if it is not verifiable or falsifiable
in the Popperian sense? Perhaps it can be scient ific in another fashion, t hat
of a cr itique. But what morivares a critique if nor an inter est, an interest
in emancipation, an interest in liberation, somet hing which pulls a crit ique
necessarily into the ideological sphere? It is quite difficult to t hink of a
non-positivist science that is not supporred by a human interest, a practical
int erest. It is also difficult to think of a science that is not understa ndable
for all, even for members of ot her classes. As we shall discover. the prob-
lem of Mannheim's paradox in fact starts from t he generalization of the
concept of ideology at the point where ideologica l analysis is raised to the
level of a science, that of the sociology of knowledge.
Our second problem, a corollary of t he first, concerns t he not ion of the
epistemologi cal break. Is a complete break understandable without some
kind of int ellectu al miracle, a sense of someone emerging from the dar k?
In Alt husser's more recent Essays in Self-Criticism, even while subjecti ng
himself to repr oach (saying that he has been too t heoretical and needs to
rerurn to the class st r uggle in a more milit ant way), he still reinforces his
concept of t he epistemological break. He says t hat it is an unprecedent ed
event. Althusser even speaks of Mar x as a son without a father, a kind of
absolut e or phan. He argues that it is the idealists who are always seeking
cont inuity. Possibly a certa in providenti alism does impl y continuity, but I
do not know why historical continuity alone should be considered necessarily
ideological and, perhaps, even t heological. The concept of discont inuit y
gives rise to difficult y itself. It does so pri ncipally if we consider, once
more, t he mot ivation of thi s break. The epistemological break appears
to be moti vated, and if we want to connect t his break to t he emergence
of a cert ain int erest, t hen we have to borrow this motivation from the
ideological sphere. The motivat ion belongs to the anthropological sphere,
to the int erest in being more fully human. We cann ot completely separate
the idea of the break from a certa in human project which is to be impr oved,
possibly even disclosed, by t his science.
For my part Althusser' s representation of the epistemological break does
great damage not only t o t he t heory of ideology but to t he readi ng of
Mar x. It causes us to overloo k an importa nt break in Mar x; it causes us
to place t he break at a different point from where it should be. Though
I am not a Marxist scholar, my reading of Mar x reinforces a conviction
that the mor e import ant change at the philosophical level comes not after
The German Ideology but bet ween the Manuscripts of 1844 and The
.. PAUL RtCOeUR ALTHUSSER'S THEORY OF IDEOLOGY
"
German Ideology, that is to say, in th e emergence of the concept of the
real human being, real praxis, individuals acting in certain given condit-
ions. Seen in this light, the destiny of ant hropology is not sealed by that
of idealism. The great damage done to Marx by Althusser is that he forces
us to put under one headi ng - anthropological ideology - two different
notions. The first is an ideology of consciousness, with which Marx and
Freud have rightly broken. The second, t hough, is t he ideology of real, con-
crete, human being, a being composed of dr ives, labour, and so on. This
latter notion, I believe, can be expressed in non-idealist terms. Ideology
and idealism, therefore, are not identified in such a way that no place any
longer exists for an anth ropology. For me, a non-idealistic ant hropology
is t he only way to make sense of all the other problems that we shall con-
sider dur ing t he rest of the lectur es. Marx's breakt hrough must make sense
at the level of t his deep-root ed interest in rhe plenit ude of indvidual existence.
The issues here lead us to a thi rd question arising from our reading of
Althusser, the problem of his conceptual framework. The concept ual
framework of infrastruct ure and superstr ucture is a metaphor of a base
wit h stories, an edifice with a base. This meta phor is quite seductive at first
sight, but it becomes very dangerous when taken literally to mean some-
thing prior to somet hing secondary or derived, One of t he signs that t his
metaphor IS rmsleadmg when frozen and take n literally IS t he difficulty of
reconnect ing t he act ion of t he base and t he reaction back on the base by
t he superst ructure, We are caught in a scholasticism of determinant factors
and real but non-determinant factors. This scholasticism, I believe, leads
nowhere, but t he metaphor is harmf ul for even more important reasons.
It is not t hat t he metaphor creat es par adoxes, for all doctrines in fact
proceed by solving their own paradoxes. Rather, the concept ual frame-
work here prevents us from making sense of some very interesting con-
tributions of Althusser himself to Marxist doct rine. In particular I t hink of
the concept of overdetermmanon, that IS, recogmnon of the Simultaneous
action of infrastructure and superstruct ure, the fact that in history the base
never act s alone but is always intert wined with actions, specific historical
event s, and so on. I wonder whether we could not make more sense of the
concept of overdetermi nation if we placed it in anot her concept ual
framework than t hat of infrastructure and superst ructure. Thi s might cause
us, in fact, to reconsider what finally is really t he base,
If we raise t his radical question about what is basic for human beings,
we may come to reali ze t hat a great deal of what is placed in t he super-
str ucture is basic from another point of view. Take into consideration any
culture, and we find t hat its symbolic framework - its main assumptions,
the way in which it considers itself and projects its ident it y through sym-
bols and myths - is basic. It seems that we can call basic exactly what is
usually called t he superst ruct ure, The possibilit y of this juxt aposition is
always present wit h a metaphor . We must destroy a metaphor by t he use
of a cont rary metaphor; we t herefore proceed from metaphor to metap hor.
The opposing metaphor here is t he notion of what is basic for human
beings: what is basic for human beings is not necessarily what is the base
in Mar xist st ruct ure. Indeed, I wonder whether t he notion of overdeter-
minat ion does not imply t hat we must in fact give up the distinction
between infrastruct ure and superst ruct ure.
This point is made even more evident when we realize that the very
action of the superst ructure implies some intermediary concepts which
break the infrastructure/superstructure fr amework. Once again let me refer
to t he concept of authorit y. A system of authority never works only by
force, by sheer violence; instead, as we have discussed, it works thr ough
ideology, through some meaningful procedures. These procedures call for
the comprehension of individuals, Althusser's schema of 'effectivity' must
be improved or perhaps completely recast in order to make room for the
claim to legitimacy, which is characteristic of a ruling aut hority whether
a group or class. I shall later turn to Max Weber to deal with this pr oblem
further, because his fundamental problem was how a system of aut hority
works. For Weber t he problem of domination implied a system of motives
wherein the claims to legitimacy of an authority att empt to meet the
capacity of behef In rlus legitimacy. We are forced to deal, t herefore, wrth
beliefs and claims, and it is difficult to put t hese psychological factors
wit hin a framework of infrastructur e and superstr uct ure.
Another reason we should question t his conceptual framework is if we
want to make sense of anot her of Althusser's claims, that ideologies have
a realit y of t heir own. I t hink t hat Alrhusser is right to assert the relati ve
autonomy and self-consistency of ideologies; in this he opposes t he classi-
cal Marxists, wit h t he possible exception of t he Italians, Gramsci above
all. The relat ive autonomy of t he superstr uct ure, t hough, requires that
ideologies have a content of t heir own. In turn, rhrs requires before an
understanding of these ideologies' use a phenomenology of their specific
mode. We cannot define these ideologies' structure only by t heir role in the
reproduction of the system. We must make sense of their meaning before
considering their use. The assumption that ideologies' content is exhausted
by their use is wit hout justification; t heir use does not exhaust t heir mean-
ing. We can take as an example the problem raised by Habermas, that in
modern societies - and particularly in the military-industr ial struct ure of
t he capitalist wor ld - science and technology function ideologically. Thi s
does not mean t hat t hey are constit utively ideological but rather that t hey
are being used ideologically. The present capt ure of science and technology
by a certain interest - in Habermas' terms, an interest in cont rol - is nee
const itutive of t he inner meaning at t heir field. We must distinguish be-
tween the inner constit ution of a given ideological field (grant ing, for
70 PALL RICOEUR ALTHU5SER'S THEORY OF D EOLOGY 71
t he: moment, that we: st ill want to call it an ideology) and its funct ion.
The probl em of distort ion docs not exhaust the constitution of a certain
sociological force or st ructure
As an example bere, we may return to Lenin's definition of the sure. In
determining that the st ate is defined only by its coercive func tion. Lenin
neglected its man y ot her funct ions; he did not 5 t hat t he coercive function
is a distortion of these other functions. Lenin's approach. however, t ypifies
the ort hodo x Marxist model Religion is said to have no other constit ut ion
than it s distort ing (unct ion, and some now say the same of science and
techno logy. Again I wonder, t hough, is not t he only wa y to give meaning
to the relative autonomy of the superst ructural spheres to disti nguish be-
tween the rules of t heir const it ution and the distorri ve modes of their usd
If we cannot ma ke this dist inction, then we have to say that t he procedur e
of unmasking is constitut ive of its object. The cont ent of an ideology be-
comes uniquel y what we have unmasked and noth ing mor e than t hat , a
very reductive procedure.
The fai lur e to recogni ze t he specificity of each superst ruct ural sphere -
the juridical, political, rel igious, cult ural - has not only dangerous theorer-
ical consequences but dangerous practical and political consequences also.
Once it is assumed that t hese spheres have no autonomy, then t he Stalinist
state is possible. The argument is that since t he economic base is sound and
since all the ot her spheres are merely reflexes, shadows, or echoes, then we
are allowed to manipulate the latt er spheres in order to improve the econ-
omic base. There is no respect for t he autonomy of t he juridical, t he political,
or the religious, because they are said to have no existence in t hemselves.
Do we not want , t hen, a quite different theoret ical framewor k in which
t he process of distort ion would have as its condition of possibility a ccn-
sti t ution which would not be defined by the disrornn g funct ion? This
would entail t hat the juridical sphere, for example, retain a certa in consn-
t urive specificity even tho ugh it may be true that it has been captured by
t he bourgeoisie for t he latter's benefit. If we tak e the relat ion bet ween
work and capital expressed in the notion of the wage, the wage is pre-
sented as a cont ract, and t he contract is represent ed as a juridica l act . The
juridica l form of the exchange suggests no one is a slave, since people hire
out their work and receive a wage in retu rn. Th is is clearl y a grave distort-
ion, because the juridical concept of cont ract is applied to a situa tion of
dominat ion. Here the real situation of exploitation is concealed in an
excha nge of wo rk and salary t hat is only appa rently reciprocal My claim
is that while the juridkal funct ion is grea tl y harmed by the way this
juridical framework in t he capitalist system serves to conceal the real
structure of exploitat ion, it is not exhausted, as the ort hodox Marxists
maintain, by th is disrcrr ive function. I insist on t he possibility of discon-
nect ing and reconnect ing the distornve and const it ut ive functions; th is
presupposes. once again, a motivat iona l framework.
The fourth problem ar ising from our reading is that of particular ideo-
logies. We may start here from the previous problem and ask wha t makes
these particular ideologies specific. Let us t ake the example of humamsm.
In the United States the argument for humanism may be tOO easy, because
humanism is a positive term, which is not alwa ys the case in Europe. We
must reconsider rhe concept of human ism in order to disentangle what
about it is ideological in the bad sense of that word, that is. a mere way
to cover up real situa tions. We must look for a strong concept of human-
ism, which would not beideological in a pejorative sense. Here I t hink that
a t heory of the system of interests. like Habermas', could help to show that
there exists a hierarchy of interests that is not reducible to t he mere int er-
est in domination or cont rol. Thi s would imply construction of a complete
ant hropology and not a mere assertion of humanism, the latt er being
merely a claim if not a pret ence. This strong concept of hwnanism must
be linked "to three or four ot her concepts within the same conce ptua l
framework. First is the concept of t he real individual under definite con-
ditions, which has been elaborate d in The German Ideology. Thi s not ion
provides a strong philosophical basis for a humanism t hat would not be
merely a claim. A strong concept of huma nism is implied, second, in the
ent ire problematics of legiti macy, because of the individual's relat ion to a
syst em of order and domi nation. Perhaps here is the individual's major
fight to achieve his or her identit y over again st a structure of authority. We
need to st ress, then, the important dialectic bet ween indi vidual and aut hor-
ity within the polarity bet ween belief and claim. Third, I would say that
the epistemological break relies on the emergence of t his human istic inter-
est. We can make no sense of the sudden outburst of t rut h in the midst
of obscurit y and darkness if it is not the emergence of something which
was distorted in ideology but now finds its trut h. In a sense, the break
must be also at t he same t ime a recover y of what was covered up by
ideology. I wond er whet her a not ion of radical break can be thought .
The fifth and final problem to arise from our reading is that of ideology
in general, Th is raises that most radical question: what is distorted if not
praxis as something symboli cally mediated? The discourse on dist ortion is
it self neither ideological nor scientific but anthropological Th is is in agree-
ment wit h all the previous suggest ions concerni ng a philosophical anthro-
pology tha t includes motives and symbol s. The parallelism between the
discourse on ideology in general and Freud's discourse on the unconscious
in general reinforces the argument . Thus. we must have a theory of sym-
bolic action. Recourse to the material existence of ideology does not sui-
fice, for how can an imaginar y relation be'an apparatus? The functioning
of the category of the subject in ideology becomes a warrant for ideology.
We cannot speak of miscognit ion (meconnaissanu) without the back-
ground of recognition (reconnaissance), a background that is not ideo-
logical but anthropological. I. . . )
72
PAUL RICOfU R
NOTES
For Marx, Allen Lane, London, 1969, p. 89. Further references to this work
will he indicated in the text in parent heses by the abbr eviation FM, followed
by a page number.
2 Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971, p.
150. f urther references to this article will he indicated i n the text i n parent heses
by the abbreviation LP, followed by a page number.
4
HISTORY AND INTERACTION: ON THE
STRUCTURALIST INTERPRETATION OF
HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Axel Honneth
(Translat ed by Gordon Finlayson)
The group of Mar xist theorists which has gat hered around Louis Alt husser
since the 19605 has been working on a new reading of Marxist t heory t hat
has bot h t heoretical and polit ical ramifications. The cogency of Althussec's
reading of Marx depends upon it s dual t rajectory. It attempt s t o make t he
elucidat ion of st rategic questions which concern t he labou r movement
dependent upon the resolut ion of t he central problems of Marxian t heor y.
Althusser t hus remains true to the goals of a philosophically informed
tr adition of opposit ional Marxism - namely, to deal wit h act ual polit ical
problems by means of a reint er pretation of Marxist t heory. The t heoretical
component of t he Althusserian programme consists in a critique of t radit-
ional Marxism. However, the critique is pit ched at such a fundamental
level that even manifestly opposed and discrepant int erpretat ions of Marx-
ism are elucidated on the basis of ident ical theoretical premises. Alt husser
cont ends that Stalinist Mar xism and the philosophical critique of Stalinism
share t he same erroneous assumpt ion, one that was already par t and parcel
of bot h the social-democratic revisionism of the Second Int ernational and
t he Hegelian-Mar xist critique of t his posit ion. In short, the critical claims
of Alt husser's reading of Marx are far-reaching and powerf ul. Bet ween his
str ucturalist reading of Mar x and his theoretical project proper, Ahhusser
pract ically endorses only Lenin's brand of Marxism, whilst all int ermedi-
ary positions (including legitimation theory and opposit ional theory) are con-
signed wholesale to the same history of error. In its own self-understanding
the Marxism offered by the Althusserian circle is therefore an epochal
reading, countering t radit ional Marxist theory. The programme of st ructu ral
Marxism is advanced in place of t he common assumption of economisric
"
AXEL HONNETH
HlSTORY AND WTERACTlON 75
Marxism and t he praxis-philosoph ical critique, which t he Althusser group
repudiares,
Marxism's theor etical relocation is then supposed to provide the only
legitimate access to the histor y of the labour movement. The polit ical
com ponent of Althu... ser's programme is to indicate the poli tical and srra-
regie consequences of the t heoretical failures of Mar xism, and therebv
indirectl y t o make them pertinent to contempo rary discussions of st rateg;.
Alrhll"""r i:li convinced t hat the cent ral theo ret ical errors of the history of
Mar xism were always linked to the st rategic and organizat ional mistakes
of the labou r movement. Thus he judges t he int erpretations of Marxism
which he deems erroneous to he direct indicanons of poli tical failur es,
j ust as toda y the abort ive theoretical critique of Stali nism point s to as
yet unresolved strategic problems of the Communist Parties, so Hegelian
M:mcism' s abo rtive critique of economism berrays a st rategically recklevs
form of politics - namely. one based upon spo ntaneity. ' Consequentl y, t he
Alrbusserians, in line wit h their polit ical self-underst anding, atte mpt to
for ge :I link wirh or thodox Le ninist parry politics, one which idr:nti fir:s
wit h neither the right nor the left wings of t he labour movement - i.e., one
that lies between t he polit ical concept ions of social democra cy, on the one
hand, and sovi et democr acy, on rhe ot her.
Because the polit ical self-conception of the Alrhusserians is bound up
wit h the critiq ue of [he systemati c misinterp retation of Marxist theory,
it is dependent on the presuppositi ons of their inte rpretati on of Marxism.
In this light I shall confine myself to the t heoretical aspect of their self-
conception. My int erest lies chiefly in the systematic development of the
theory of hisrory in R,."dil1g Capital, within which the Almusser school
wan ts to identif y and exec ute t he programme of a structural Mar xism on
the basis of a st ructu ralist reinterpretat ion of histo rical materialism. The
rhenry nfhisrory forms the rhenr erical cnre.. because it provid es rhe rl' .:t"Ons
for the Alth usserian school's bilateral move, dist ancing itself from tradit-
iona l Marxism. whil st simultaneously elaborat ing its new interpretation.
My criti que pursues t he logical argumen t in the const ruct ion of this rheorv
up to the point at which it manifests irs latent political function. .
Th e exrrao rdina rv of srmcmral reinrer prerario n of
the west European discussion of Marxism prin cipally derives from its main
aim, which is to solve the core problems of Mar xist theory with the aid
of ..r models of thought. Th r inrerprerar ion of Mar "(i..m of fered
by the Alrbu sser group merges two avenues of thought: an expansion of
the doma in of st ructuralist theory and a self-reflect ion on the part of
the tradition of Marxist thought. Notwithstanding frequent attempts to
distance: structu ral Marxism from social-scientific st ructural ism.' the two
approaches share a basic methodol ogical stance, which stems from the
model of structural linguistics. The object-domain of the social sciences is
investigated as a system, in terms of deep st ructures which consti tute the
relat ions between empirical manifestations or events, These relations then
provide the rhecrencal focus of inter est. Just as the st ruct uralist anal ysis
of language tak es its methodological reference points from the distinction
between actual lingui st ic utt erances (parole) and rhe linguist ic rule system
(L:mgue). so t he st ructuralism of the SOCial sciences is based on the distinc-
tion between the empirical context of events and the deep st ruct ure which
that conte xt .' The st ruct ural Mar xism founded by Alt husser,
tho ugh, gives a bold new gloss to this established not ion of method. When
he put t he stru ct uralist method to the test, Levi-Str auss was still abl e to
presuppose a collective mind wit h an invariant str uct ure and thus man-
aged to reconstr uct the rule-systems of archaic kinship relatio ns and mythical
world-views. In Foucault the same procedure assumes the form of a ret-
rospect ive reconstruct ion of t he fundament al rules of epochal forms of
knowledge. But Althusser extends t he object-domain ot st ruct uralism be-
yond the domai n of cultural symbolic media of human socialit y (i.e.,
linguistically structured mani festations); he now imputes the forms of organ-
ization ot social systems t hemselves t o deep structures.
The second characteristic which str uctural Marxism shares with social -
scientific st ruct uralism is the ' decenrering of the subject' . Accordingly, t he
object domain of the social sciences, whether construed as svmbolic forms
of knowledge. or material forms of domination, can no longer be under-
stood as the constitutive achievement of an individual t ranscendent al or
species-subject. The object domain is now underst ood to be the rule-system
which first constitutes the parti cular form of subjectivity. The aporias of
'anthropological dogmati sm' (Foucault), which would refer t he social con-
text to a human centre of acti on. are to be resolved from t he standpoint
of a structuralist theory, which conceives the social context as a cent reless
system of order. Thi s basic theoretical position was originally mobilized in
France agai nst the theoreti cal hubris of the epistemological subject.' The
original int enti on was to criticize the phenomenological attempt to rrear
the whole social nexus as an objecrivarion, into which t he subjectivity
of a tra nscendent al consc iousness had exte rnalized itself. However, the
tr enchancy of the st ructuralist critique is in inverse propor tion to its self-
confidence. By his critique of Mar xist theories of the subject Alrhusser
himself problematicall y weakens t he int ention of social-scienti fic st ructu r-
alism - namel y. to impute the constit ut ion Of social formati ons to centre-
less st ruct ures rather than to a transcendent al subject. The ' decentering of
the subject ' in struct ural Marxism is levelled not only against Marxise
at tempts to adapt phenomenological t ranscendentali sm to its own pur -
poses, but is also invoked will y nilly against existent ial, anthropological
AXEL HONNEYH HISTORY AND INTERACTtON
71
and praxis-philosophka l versions of Marxism. Thus, Alrhusser reformulates
the central questions of at a deep level. below the threshold at
which social processes can stll! be described as complexes of intentional
action.
Finally. structural Marxism adopts the concept of history from social-
scientific struct uralism, a concept which is supposed to result necessarily
from the 'decentering of the subject'. Since structuralism reduces the
histor ical of symbolic forms or hegemonic structures to the
sequence of invariant rule-systems, the historical context of which can no
longer be guaranteed by the unifying achievement s of a subject. the cat-
egory of history itself must now be understood as the discontinuous, but
int egrally st ruct ured, rule-systems. which merely follow one another. Levi-
Strauss and Godelier have utilized just such a concept of histor y, purged
of all remnants of continuity. to great effect in the field of ethnology, as
has Foucault in the field of the history of science. However, in the Marx-
ism of the Althusser school the structuralist concept of history assumes a
very particular funcno n.' This is due to the claim that the programme of
a structuralist interpretation of historical materialism can be made plaus-
ible via the critique of all non-struct uralist conceptions of histor y in tradit-
ional Marxism. According to its inner foundations, structural Marxism is
to be vindicated by criticizing the classical interpretations of Marx, in such
a way that the theoretical suggestions offered by the tacitly endorsed struc-
turalist theory of histor y are made explicitly convincing.
With this project in mind Althusser takes up the dualistic model int o
which Soviet Marxism had pressed Mar x's theory. However, structuralist
Marxism does not constr uct an ontological duality from the distinction
between historical and dialectical materialism, unlike Soviet Marxism, which
envisages a separate ontological discipline, grounding the materialist theory
of history. In the early works of the Althusser school a distinction is made
bet ween epistemology, constr ued as a 'theory of theoretical practice'. and
a theory of history. Today. the same dichotomy of disciplines is used to
distinguish between a philosophy which politically vindicates the basic
assumptions of Mar xism and the theor y of history; the theory of rheorer-
ical practice is now conceived as a specific component of the broader
discipline of historical materialism.' By subscribing to this dichotomy of
Marxian theory Althusser and his collaborators seek to overcome weak-
nesses in the foundations of the traditional concept of histor ical material-
ism. with the help of the struct uralist concept of history. In their critique
of 'historicism' they undertake to demonstrate the convergence of discrep-
ant interpretations of Marxism in a false concept ion of history.
The category of histor icism, which is to play such a decisive role in the
structuralist interpretation of historical materialism, is achieved by think-
ing the structuralist 'decentering of the subject' together with its conse-
quences for the concept of histor y. The structuralist approach calls into
question the use of the concept of cont inuous histor y, which requires the
presupposition of a unifying subject. In 'historicism . . . the different levels
of the totality of a social structure, their relation to one another and their
principle of cognition are grounded in an account of their genetic con-
stitution both by a creative subject of society and a linear principle of
history, perta ining to the self-development of this subject," However. as a
characterization of the different traditions of Marxism, identified by struc-
turalism. the categor y of 'histor icism' is still unclear. If structural Marxism
is to prove itself capable of grasping the specific ideological content of
those versions of Marxism it rejects. then it must first provide a clearer
conceptual definition of either the notion of 'history', or the notion of 't he
subject' which historicismcontains. Making this very objection, Poulantzas
has emphasized the variet y of senses which can be given to the concept of
the 'subject' within 'historicism'. ' In the course of the development of
Marxist thought the place of the subject has been occupied by the social
class qua the subject of history, the concrete individual as the species-being
of history, and also social labour." Similarly, the concept of histor y which
'historicism' employs displays a whole gamut of meanings, from evolution-
ar y models of histor y, on the one hand, to teleological philosophies of
histor y, on the ot her.'
The flexibility of the concept of 'historicism' seems to be its virt ue. By
exploiting the variety of its possible meanings, structural Marxism has
expanded 'historicism' into a system of ideology-critical sub-predicates.
Toget her these designat e interpretations of Marxism which share the his-
toricist prejudice, but differ in their respecnve conceptions of the subject
and of histor y. Two of the most prominent types of traditional Marxism
which Althusser constructs in this way. are 'humanism' and 'economism'.
'Humanism' uses the model of historicism to ground an interpretation of
Marxism in which the concept of histor y is guided in a variety of ways by
the idea of human self-creat ion. Althusser's worries pert ain to the obses-
sive way in which humanist thought conceives history as a continuous
self-obiecnvation of the human species. This crude caricature, into which
Althusser pressessuch divergent theories as phenomenological and Hegelian
Marxism. has been formed not so much from me original versions of these
int erpretations of Mar xism, but rather from their existentialist or anthro-
pological reconstructions, In each case. it is drawn from the critique of
Stalinism which prevailed in France, and which focused entirely on the
early works of .Marx.
1o
By 'economism' Althusser understands both the
Marxism of the Second International and that of Stalinism. In these theo-
ries the means of production arc conceived of as the cent ral unity through
which the forcesof production advance the course of history.' ! ' Economism'
and 'humanism' - or. to use Althusser's pointedly political formulation,
Stalinism and the critique of Stalinism - have a common denominator.
They share the theoretical ambition of reducing the complexity of the
7.
AXEL HONNETH
H STORY AND INTERACTtQN
7'
hist or ical pr ocess to either an instrumental or an ant hr opol ogical cent re,
so as t o int erp ret the: differenr domai ns of realit y as 'expressions' of th is
centre. In Stalinism thi s concept of histor y legitimates poli tical power as an
instrumentall y coerced expression of th e econom ic system. In the humanist
critique of Stalinism the: same concept of history takes the form of an
et hically orient ed anthropology, which still onl y understands power relat -
ions globally as a manifestation of alienat ion. Alrhusser concludes that
in bot h these concept ions of Marxism the specific social form of a tr an-
sit ional socialist society remains unclear."
Now we: are in a bett er position to understand how structural Marxism
attempt s to educe its own theoret ical programme from the critique: of
histori cism. Rat her than a centre of history being imputed to historical
ma terialism, there is the structure of a mod e of produ ct ion, wit hin which
t he (relat ively autonomous) social sub-systems assume a rule-governed
relation to each ot her. the rules of which stem fro m an ulti mat ely det er-
minant economic sub-system. Instead of a temporal cont inuum of histor y
there are mut ually independent tempo ralities, which in each case are fixed
by the part icular mode of functioning of t he socia l sub-systems rhae
suppo rt them.
Befor e exa mining what ensues from t hese basic assump t ions of materi-
alism, 1 wou ld like briefly to reconstru ct t he tacit presuppositi ons of
Althusser ' s concept ion of ' historicism'.
II
Th e concept of ' historicism' plays a const itutive role in the vindi cat ion o f
st ructural Mar xism. In the writings o f the Alt husser schoo l it comes to
designate all t heoret ical positions which recalcitranrly hi nder a correct
reconstruction of Marxist theory. In his own works Alrh usser so ext ends
the concept of ' historicism' that it eventually covers the whole tradition of
philosophies of histo ry. The label of ' Marxist historici sm' is t hen affixed
to all versions of Marxism which, whate.. .. er thei r divergent political and
th eoretical aims. nonet heless proceed from the assumption, inherited from
the phil osophy of histor y, of a self-developing cent re of history. The argu-
ments with which the Althu ssc: r schoo l rends to substant iate its global
suspicion s of Marxist histori cism are to some exten t congruent with West
Getman debates about the crisis in the founda tions of the historica l sci-
eaces. He re, rhe philosop hy of histor y which is presupposed by the modern
concept of history has recentl y been reconstr uct ed, in order t o counter the
social-scientific nai vet y of historicism. by redefining the methodol ogical
presupposit ions of a theoret ically oriented science of history. In this con-
text two theoreti cally disti nct challenges have been made to the categorial
implications of the modern conc eption of history - implicat ions whose:
Marxist credenti als have likewise been challenged by Althussc:r. The first
chall enge comes in the wake of Reinhart Koselleck' s conceptua l history.
which seeks out the socio-histo rica! p r o u p ~ i t i o l l ~ of the ca tegor y of
' history' in the singular. The second comes from the anal ytic phil osophy
of history (Dante ), and consi sts in an epistemological investigation of the
wa y in which continui ty i!> imp uted to the mod er n undereta uding uf hilt-
tory. Arguments of both kinds can also be foun d in Alt hussc:r.
In a series o f articles Koselleck has undertaken the task of tracing the
modern concept ion of histor y back m the experiences in which, during the
French Revolut ion, the hist orical cont ext of events cryst allized into an
object of theory. The plural form of t he word Gescbicht e (stories/histories)
which, up until the outbreak of th e French Revol ut ion, referred to histor-
ical events as an aggregat e of indiv idua l histori es, is replaced by the col-
lective singular form of the noun Gescbicbte (srorylhisto ry) in t he modern
experienceof histor y, because in rhe course of the revolutionar y years t he
pot ent ial for pr ogr ess and the uniqueness of hist ory became palpable. The
category of 'history' which integr ates histo rical events into the cont ext of
a process which is in pri nci ple al terable, suppresses t he category of many
' histories' in which histori cal events are thought together as self-cont ained
episodes. ' Behind t his finding of linguistic history our specifically modern
experience begins to make it self heard: movement , al terabilit y, accelera-
tion, openness to the f uture. revolutionary trends and their astonishing
uniq ueness, modernity ceaselessly renewi ng itself - t he sum of these tem-
poral experiences of our modern age is covered by the collect ive singular
form of hist ory and the concept t hereof.' U
This terminolog ical mutation ushers in t he theoret ical fiction of a sub-
stantia l unity of act ion. which guarantees the relations bet ween historical
events wit hin a process of histor y. The basic assumpt ion of bou rgeois
phil osophy of histor y. which arises wit h this conceptual al ter at ion, is the
adoption of a hist orical macr o-subject (t he peopl e. the state. or the species).
Histor y can then be understood as the process of the self-developmeur
of this macro-subject. Odo Marquard. drawing on Koselleck' s conceptual
history and on the work of Karl Lowir h, has take n issue wit h this tend-
ency of the philosoph y of histor y, by attacki ng the various versions of the
fictional subject of hi st ory." ju rgen Habermas traces the same conceptual
alteration analyzed by Koselleck back to the socio-economic conste llat ions
in which the mod.ern expe rience of history is originally t ooted. Accordingl y,
it is not so much the abstract experience of me histori cal process Ihist oTischer
PTou ssualitiitl tha t provides the backdrop in front of which histor y can be
philosophicall y represent ed a.. progresss, as the"capitalist system of producnon
which aims for a perpetual increase in productivity. The experience of
progress in the phil osoph y of history is accompanied by the experience of
crisis, ind uced by th e social COnt ext of capitalism, in such a wa y that
progress and crisis ar e the conjo int cent ral categories from which the
.. AXEL HONNETli HISTORY AND INTERACTION II
philosophy of history emergesin theeighteenth century. The world-historical
subject the n becomes the theoretical quantum by means of which t he
cr isis-ridden flux of history and t he progressive autonomy of action can
be thought toget her in a process of emanci pat ion which encompasses all
parochial and social indeterminacies." H. J. Sandkuhler sees the fiction of
t he species-subject , by din t of which histor ical event s can be assigned t o
a common history, as t he pressure for legitimat ion which arises wh en t he
bou rgeois ie insists that its particular class interest s, as opposed to the
feudal claim to dominat ion, are the universal interests of the human species.
'The consciousness of "history" in the singular is not, in the final analys is,
a result of t he dispute bet ween the revolutionar y bou rgeoisie and the feudal
ideology of legit imat ion. for it is not simply mankind, but rather ma nkind
as the bearer of t he mandat e of divi ne rule. which is empowered to make
histor y: I'
The Althusser school un pbcul y endorses considerat ions of rhrs kind when
it t ries to show that histori cist versions of Marxism rely on patterns of
t hought which arc: invariabl y congruent wit h the phil osophy of history. In
his dispute wit h John Lewis Alrhusser explains t he theor et ical pr esuppo-
sitions of t he bour geois philosophy of history as t he bour geoisie's inter est
in self-legitima tion. He claims that in the assumption of a macro-subject
in cont rol of history the revol utionary bourgeoisie recast s its own role as
t hat of th e rat ional subject of action. The concomitant concept of histor y
only made sense insofar as 't he revol ut ionar y bourgeoisie was st ruggling
against the feudal regime which was then dominant . To proclaim at that
time. as t he great bourgeois Hu manist s did, t hat it is man who makes
history, was to st ruggle. from the bourgeois point of view (which was t hen
revolutionar y), against the religious Thesis of feudal ideology: it is God
who makes htsrory.:" Alrhusser concludes t hat. with t he break-up of t he
political conste llat ions of the bou rgeois revolution, the theor et ical grounds
of its concept ion of history also vanish: namely, the assumption of a
universal centre of action, which reduces the complexity of histor y to a
linear temporal development . The unification of histor y in the positing of
an historical macro-subject seems to Alth usser to be a legitimate rheoret-
ical move, only insofar as t he polit icall y progressive (but st ill partial) inter -
ests of t he bou rgeoisie require the cloak of uni versalism against the feudal
claim to power. From this point of ,..jew t he historical-mater ialist versions
of the mod ern concept of histor y, which presuppose the macro-subject
eithe r qua class-consciousness (in the phi losophy of consciousness ). or
substantially qua the forces of product ion. can onl y be regar ded as
bourgeois relics in t he tradit ion of Marx ism. In fact t hese versions of
Marxism share wi t h bou rgeois philosop hies of histor y not only th e same
conception of history, but also the same int erest in legitimation.
Alth usser attempts to show tha t ' economism' and ' humanism' share the
ideological ambition to locate the polit ically authoritative unity of actio n
in t he centre which the y each assign to hist ory. What Alt husser means by
the 'economism' of the Second International. or of Stalinism, is concep-
tions of Marx ism whi ch try. ill a gambit. ru reduce the
domain of political act ion to the prog ress of the system, which is autono-
mous wit h respect to theory and merely instrumental in cha racter. In the
' humanism' of Hegelian Marxism or exisrenr ialism Alrhusser is pointing to
conceptions which phil osophically mask t heit political impotence vis-a-vis
the organization of the labour movement, with the concept of a class or
species-subject in control of history. Alt husser cont ends that ' humanist
histori cism may, for example, serve as a theo retical warni ng to intellectuals
of bourgeois or petty-bou rgeois origin, who ask themselves, sometimes in
genuinely tragic terms, whet her they reall y have a right to be members of
a histor y, whi ch is made, as t hey know or fear , outside ebem.:" Th us far
these lines of argume nt have been pursued no furt her in structura l Marxism.
Alrbusser himself has only briefly sketched his own t houghts on the matter.
H. M. Baumgartn er' s wor k ca n help us to demonst rate t he second area
in which West Germa n t heoret ical discussions complement the Ahhusserian
reflecti ons on historicism." Dr awing on t he wor k of A. C Da nr o,
Baumgartner has produced a phil osoph ical reconst ruction of t he not ion of
cont inuity in the philosophy of hist ory. He undertakes an epistemological
inspecti on of the various concept ions of a unified hi stor y. in orde r t o make
dear the outline of a new hist ori cism. Hi s criticism is levelled at those
versions of crit ical theori es of history which seek to overcome the onto-
logical conceptions of continuity in metap hysical histor y, by exposing them
as reifications. He sets OUt to prove t hat even t he post-Hegel ian attempts
to think t he conti nuit y of histor y as t he unif ying achievement of a cogni-
tive subject are tied ro the ontological presupposition t hat hist or y provides
an object ive context of meaning. Baumgartne r argues that it is impossible
to const ruct a systemat ically representative relation between t he rnulripl ic-
iry of historical events and t he not ion of histori cal continuity, since the
historical language of the object fails in principle tn reproduce the whole
'factical' course of history. Therefore [he expressions employed by the
critical th eor y of histor y ought nor to be associated wit h an y ontological
notions of cont inuit y. However, Baumgartner finds just such associations
in concepts like life. development and format ion (Bildungsprou ss) which
are used in t he tradition of the epist emological philosophy of history.
Baumga rtner draws some radical conclusions from his analysis: 'If the
continuity of hist ory is neithe r the tranquil cert ainty of continual change,
nor the task of cr eating a nexus of events, to be accomplished by intellect,
action or self-reflect ion, then history in gen eral is not to be understood as
a process. but only as a phenomenon of consciousness, namely man 's
master y of the past wit h respect to ItS possible interpretation now and in
the furure:
20
Baumgartner no longer values cont inuity as a feature of the
histo rical object domain itself, but as the mere formal pri nciple of every
. 2 AXEL HONNETH HISTORY AND INTERACTION .3
histori cal pr oposit ion. The unificat ion of historic events to histor ical con-
ti nuity according to interests now necessarily belongs to the tr anscendent al
st ruct ure of aarranve formation, within which alone we may experience
historical events as 'hist ory'. There is no longer a st raight pat h fro m thi s
result of Baumgart ner's investigat ions to the cri tique of historicism in t he
Althusserian school. However, from his crit ique of t he ontological norton
of continuit y we can begin to show what t heoret ical path must be taken
by st ructural Mar xism, if it is to redeem its promise t o reject ob ject ive
noti ons at historical cont inuity, and at the same time to avoid Baumgart ner's
t ranscendent al philosophical solut ion."
Like Baumgartner Alrhusser cri ticizes concepts of history which bar bou r
th e noti on of hi stori cal continuity as an ontological pr esupposition. In some
places he tr aces the historicist versions of Marxism back. to t he Hegelian
conception according to which historical time can be thought as a homo-
geneous cont inuum of history. Hist or y can be read as the pr ocess in whi ch
spirit comes to itself in a dialect ical self-ident ificatio n." Althusser rightly
sees a characterist ic weakness of tradit ional Mar xism in th is t rope, an
insight which holds independently of t he materi al cont ent of his cr itiqu e
of Hegel. Th e quest ion of the condit ions of the t heoretical unification of
hi story - a que st ion posed by t he disintegrat ion of th e idealistic philosoph y
of histor y - is dogmati cally pr ejudged by the very fact t hat history is
represented as a process of self-reahza non, If history can be thought as a
process of the int ernal development of a supra-individual systematic unit y
or unity of act ion, to which all historical events may be ascribed, then the
self-realizing macro-subject must already be presupposed. Thi s relic of the
metaph ysics of histor y has assumed the fonn of a dehistoricization of
the concept of t he prolet ariat in the Hegelian-Mar xist traditi on. Lukacs
has taken the category of the proletariat so far beyond any historical and
empirical determinati on that he ultimately depicts t he emancipation of the
prol etar iat as the formation (Bildungsprozess) of t he subject of histor y. For
Lukacs the act uality of history in historical materialism can only come to
self-knowledge because the prolet ariat recognizes this act uality as its own
creati on. The idea of self-knowledge t hen cont ains t he notion of historical
continuity, since it grasps all histori c event s as ob jectivat ions of a single
ident ical subject." In the tradit ion of t he Second Int ernati onal the relic of
the metaphysics of histor y assumes the form of an economistic ideology of
history. Her e t he dialectic between th e forces and th e relations of prod uction
has been so narrowly circumscribed to the role of the inst ruments of pro-
d uct ion t hat hi storical cha nges ha ve to be inter pret ed as causal conse-
quences of the development of pr oduction. Hist or y is under stood in sum
as an au tonomous progression, the locomotive of which is the unfolding
of the techn iques of prod ucti on." The development of producti ve forc es
which has shrunk to a mere vect or t hus pur ports to provide the meaning
of all histor ical events.
In the cases o f Hegelian Mar xism and t he Marxism of the Second
Int ernational alike the unit y of hist or y is vouchsafed by the pr ocess of
development of a self-creat ing subject. Structu ral Mar xism opposes this
theoret ical pr esupposit ion. However, whereas Baumgart ner reads t he con-
t inuity of hist ory merely as a met hodological t rope, Alth usser replaces it
hi mself ontologically wi t h the notion of discontinu ity. Althusser goes
beyond the st ructural -mod el of the Annales School, which starts from
the assumpt ion of object ively overlapping layers of conti nuity with varying
temporal rh yt hms, by conceiving history as the disconti nuous succession of
modes of production each with t heir own time. Althusser even assumes
that t here are different social strata, each with its own int ernal temporal-
it y, within the confines of t hese modes of production. History then be-
comes plural: a complex series of complet e, yet internally differenti ated,
temporalities. ' We can and must say: for each mode of production there
is a peculi ar time and history, punct uated in a specific way by the devel-
opment of the productive forces. The relations of pr oduct ion have the ir
peculiar time and history, punct uat ed in a specific way; the politi cal super-
struct ure has its own hist or y . . . scient ific formations have t heir own t ime
and history, etc. Each of t hese peculiar histori es is punctuated with peculiar
rhythms and can onl y be known on condit ion that we have defined the
concept of the specificity of it s historical temporality and it s punctuations
(continuous development, revoluti ons, breaks erc.j ." ! The quot ation demon-
strates how radi call y st ruct ural Marxism departs from t he not ion of
continuit y in the phil osophy of histor y. Cont inuity becomes a possible
form of historical ti me; with respect t o t he discontinuity of historical devel-
opment , however, it is secondary. Whil st Baumgar tner dr aws t he tr an-
scendent al phil osophical conclusion that continuity is merely t he for mal
principle of historical cognition, t he Alt husserian school make discontinu-
ity int o the ob jective form of the course of hist or y. Whilst for Baumgar t ner
t he collect ive singular form of histor y dissolves int o a mult iplicit y of
histo ries, to which we assign hist orical events from t he st andpo int of
pr evailing interests, in st ruct ural Mar xism t he unity of hist or y splits into
different histories, composed of their own respective modes of product ion
and sub-systems. Both concepti ons are obviously rooted in a single pre-
mise namely, they rule out t he possibility that the idea of hist orical con-
tinuity could be vindicated int ernally to the histor ical pr ocess. Neither
Baumgart ner' s transcendent al grounding of histori cism, nor the st ruct ur-
alist concept ion of hist orical materialism, take int o consideration that not
one but two histori es ha ve to be unified: the history that is only const rued
as a nexus of cont inuit y by thought, and the hist or y that crea tes from itself
a real nexus of cont inuity. Th e con tinuity of history need not al ways be
presupposed as an ontological nexus of all historical events, but can st ill
be grou nded objecti vely in the social context s of act ion, in which historical
events are always interpretati vely embedded in an histor ical continuum.
..
AXD.. HONNETH HISTORY AND INTERACTI ON
as
If we start from this theo ret ical possibility, t hen the concept ual presup--
posit ions of Baumgart ner and Alt husser become problematic. The t heory
of histor y would t hen have to contend wit h an Inter-subject ively already
constituted object -domain. The process of histor y would then be neit her
t he chaotic field of events which, according to Baumgartner, is only unified
by the constr uction of nar rat ives, nor the discont inuous of
rule-systems which. according to Althusser, completely excludes notions of
cont inuit y, but rather a binding process t hat is only disclosed by
act ion. Theoretical representations of historical conti nuity are then maten-
ally embed ded in the context of a life-world, wit hin which history is
collectively appropr iated and bequeathed. The representations would
to communicatively generated interpretations of histo ry, in which SOCi al
groups and classes have already unified hist orical events prior to any
scient ific rheories." The idea of a real nexus of world history can then be
thought mater ialistically, insofar as the process of capitalist international-
ization amalgama tes the space of unifying act ions int o an equall y real
global unit y. Under t hese condit ions the o( the subject of
no longer becomes a merely ontological posit, but a norman-..e projecnon,
in which the hist orically possible int egration of all socially and regionally
varying unities of act ion would be t hemar ized in terms of a self-conscious
humanit y. The ' subiecr' o( histor ical mat erialism is not to be
as a presupposed theoretical quantum, the self -realization of which consu-
tures history as a whole, but rat her as a global unity of action, which
results from the process of it s self-format ion.
Thi s constr uct ion cannot be accomplished in st ructural Marxism. where
t he concept of t he subject of history can only be seen as a necessary result
of t he phtlosophy of hist or y, whilst t he nonon o( histor ical contin uit y is
deemed a mere metaphysica l self-delusion. Hence the limitat ions of ' his-
toricism' are also t he limitations of str uctural Marxism. Whilst it is t rue
t hat t he concept of ' hrst oncrsm' remams bound up wit h rehcs of t he Mar xist
tr adition of the philosophy of histor y. not all concept ions of history can
be tarred with the same brush, (or certain among them could still provide
a new material basis (or the old not ions of the philosophy of history.
Accor ding to t he assumptions fro m which the critique of
ceeds, it is impossible to dist inguish t he philosophical idea of t he hist orical
macro-subject fr om t he materialist not ion of an interact ively constit uted
world society. In bot h cases Althusser would sec only histori cism. as if
there were no difference bet ween them. The systematic reason for this
logical impasse lies in the structural version of historical mat erialism. Here
the ob ject domain of hist or y is conceived along st ructuralist lines a deep
st ructure that cat egorially occludes the int er-subjective process of inter pre-
tation in which historical cont inuity could be anchor ed. This short-circuit
in t he cr it ique of historicism is at the same time the index of a concept ually
over-simplified reconstruction of historical materialism.
III
Marx understood t he unificat ion of many different histories into a single
world-hist or y as itself an historical event. In The German Idw log)' world-
history is held to be the result of a process whereby local productive
communities gear int o each ot her. by dint of t heir increasing market
dependency, and are finally united in the world market as a real complex
of relations. ' However far, in the course of this development . the individual
circles t hat act upon each other expa nd, however much the original self-
contained nat ures of the single nat iona lit ies are broken down by t he
development of t he modes of product ion. circulation and t hus t he naturall y
cult ivated division of labour between different nations. to t his extent
histor y becomes world-histor y . . . It follows t hat t his metamor phosis of
hi"mry inm world-hi..mry i.. nor an absrracr accompli..hrnenr of 'W"lf -
consciousness, world-spirit or some such metaphysical spectre. but rather
a wholly mat erial, empirically demons trable event, an event the proof of
whi ch lil':'> in C""'C"ry individual. in it.. wal king, talking. r;tt ing. dri nki ng and
even its way of dr essing.t" The unit y of histor y to whi ch we now refer in
the collective singular for m is not assumed to be an histori cal macro-
subject, whose dC"vt'lopmrnt yield.. t he penc,..... of hi..ror y, hut i.. rat he-r a
result of the hist orical concatenation of individual histories . The continuit y
of the process of hist or y becoming worl d-history is, strictly speaking. only
conceivable in t heory if it can find support in a comprehensive histor ical
expe rience which underlies all particular int erpretations of history. Only
from this perspective can a not ion of history be prod uced. which would
sublate all preceding int erpretative systems in the unit y of world-historical
continuity. Wit h the concept of the proletar iat Marx wanted to grasp t his
universal experience of hist ory. in which the manifold of historical events
forms itself into an act ion-or ientate d cont inuity. Itnforrunarelv, he was
unable consistently to avoid over-ta xing t he concept of t he proletar iat
from the stan dpoint of the philosophy of hist ory. However, Alth usser is
not even able to pursue this line of Marx's thought. ..... hich ret urns in t he
mature works. owing to t he t heoret ical presuppositions of his own critique
of historicism. wherein t he idea of a worl d-histo rical cont inuity can only
be understood as a met aphysical fiction of history.
Alth usser is forced int o dividing t he Marxian oeuvre into a pre-scient ific
phase. which he finds problemat ic, and a scientifically
Alt hough constantl y revising the da t ing, Althcsser had to distinguish an
historicist from a post- hist or icist stage ofMarxian theory. However. his-
to ricism is relevant here only in its humanist form. In Alth usser's eyes t he
historicist element s of Marx's argumentat ion are t hose which refer t he
spheres of polit ical and socio-econo mic phenomena back to an ant hro-
pological substrate (either species or labour ). in order t hen to t reat t hem
as an alienation of the human essence. Init ially. Alrhcsser levelled the
..
AXEL HONNETH HISTORY ANO INTERACTION 87
object ion against t his t rope of t he phi losophy of history only wit h reference
to t he early works influenced by Feuerbach - in particular , the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscript s. However, later in his systemat ic critique of
Hegelianism, Althusser pursues Marx's historicismeven in the minutiaeof
t he ar guments in t he matur e wo rks.28 Non et heless t he wor ks of t he Althusser
school are sustai ned by the systematic supposition that the idea of a non-
historicist theory of history can be derived fr om the theoretical struct ure
of Marx's Capital.
In Reading Capital Althusser takes issue with the concept of totality in
the tradition of Hegelian Marxism. Whilst in this intellectual tradition all
social appearances can be shown to relate concent rically to an historical
substrate, structural Marxism t hinks the social totality as a decent red unity.
If Hegelian Mar xism is organized on the model of an 'expressive totality'
which orders the different social domains around a centre, understood as
essence, so Althusser at tempts to derive from Marx's Capital a model of
social totality which sets OUt the social sectors in a cenrreless, yet hier-
archically structured, system of relations. In the concept of the 'str uct ural
tot ality' society is conceived as a whole, within which social sub-systems
are interrelat ed in a manner determined by the economic base-system. 'We
know that the Marxist wholecannot possibly be confused with the Hegelian
whole; it is a whole whose unity, far from being the expressive or "spir-
it ual" unity of Le ibnh ' or Hegel's whole, is constituted by a certain type
of complexity, the unity of a structured whole containing what can be called
levels or instances which are distinct and "relatively autonomous" , and
co-exist within this complex struct ural unity, art iculat ed with one anot her
according to specific determinations, fixed in the last instance by the level
or instance of the economy.:"
The not ion of 'struct ure' is supposed to supersede the historicist concep-
tions of historical materialism harboured by the philosophy of histor y,
because it posits the social nexus as a unity. whose elements are not
concent ric to a middle point, bur rather are determined by their mutual
positions. From this not ion of a ' str uct ural totality' Ahhusser hopes to
derive a Marxist theory of history which presupposes its object to be
neit her a cont inuous, nor a subjecr-centred, nexus of events. Accordi ng to
Ahhusser, historical materialism is a theory of history which penetra tes the
course of historical occurrences to the relevant srrucrural roraliries beneath
- tota lities which determine the 'epiphenomena' of which we have only
empirical anal ysis. Hence the at tempts in the tradition of Hegelian Marx-
ism to conceive historical materialism as a theoretical system for making
sense of anti-capitalist social experience is unsound, precisely because they
take theory, in historicist fashion, to be an expression of the historical
cent re of reality."
By contrast. Alth usser wants to understand historical materialism as a
theor y of struct ural tota lities, which applies throughout histor y. He finds
the basic form of such a struct ural tot ality in Mar x's category of the ' mode
of production'. This not ion is the connection between Ahhusser's reading
of Capital and a theor y of histor y denuded of any remnant of the philos-
ophy of history. He starts OUt from the lar ge assumption that in Capital
Marx had already worked out the deep structures of capitalist systems
from a politico-economic point of view. and that the Marxist theory of
history can only analyze historical phases of development in general by
widening the scope of its social theor y. Althusser's version of historical
mat erialism at tempts sociologically to enrich and historically to generalize
a concept which Mar x had already developed in the crit ique of political
economy. 'The object of histor y as a science has the same kind of theo-
retical existence and occupies the same t heoret ical level as the object of
political economy of which Capital is an example, and the theor y of
history as a science lies in the fact that the theory of political economy
considers one relatively autonomous component of the social totality
whereas the theor y of histor y in princi ple takes the complex totality as
such for its object . Other than this difference there can be no distinction
between the science of political economy and the science of histor y, from
a theoretical view-poinr.?'
The Marxist critique of political economy provides the model, complete
with categories and method, according to which Althusser construes a
whole Mar xist theory of history. The work of the Althusserian school
largely amounts to the att empt to extrapolate a general theor y of histor y
from the conceptual framework and the methodological articulat ion of
Capital.
In Althusser' s estimat ion the category of pract ice is the key term with
which the concept of the ' mode of production', developed by Marx from
his analysis of capitalism, is to be tr ansposed into a concept applicable to
histor y in general. Even in his early essays he takes the category of practice
as the basis of histor ical materialism, by understanding social systems as
a relational nexus of practices . Each social sub-system can be thought as
a socially stabilized for m of practice, such that under the general rubr ic of
'social pract ice' Althusser distinguishes between economic, political, ideo-
logical and theoretical types of practice. In a social system it is, in the last
analysis, always the economic instance - i.e. the instit utionally reproduced
structure of economic practice - which determines the relevant hegemonic
factor. The concept of 'structural causality' maint ains the methodological
aim not to conceive t he influence of the economic base on the superstruc-
ture in the manner of histor icism, where the latt er is directly dependent on
the former, bur in structuralist fashion, so that the economic base merely
delimits the functions of the superstruct ure. In struct ural Mar xism social
systems are taken as hierarchical matrices of relations based on an eco-
nomic sub-system, within which the non-economic sub-di visions are only
determined in terms of the scope of their influence, and not in ter ms of
.. AXfl HONNETH
HISTORY AND INTERACTION ..
t heir int ernal modes of functioning. The category of ' pract ice', however,
which is to some extent supposed to charact erize the substrate of this kind
of social :lo ,.:.tCIIl. no longer u.-.cd by in ib Marxian sense, ;l!lo
the purposive or goal-oriented activity of one or more acting subjects, but
is itself used in a st ructuralist way to designat e an intrinsically subiecrless
relation of d ements in action. On t he mod el of instr umental action all
forms of practice should be conceived as st ructures, in which t he agent, t he
technique and t he object of acrion funct ionally int erlock. 'By practice in
ge neral I !lo hall ll ll:au au y p ClI'.O') uf lrum(urmill iun uf a det er mi ua t e giveu
raw material into a determinate product, a tr ansformation effected by a
determinate human labour, using determi nate means ("of product ion"). In
any practice thus co nceived, the dete rminant moment (ur de ment) is neither
the raw material nor the product, but the pract ice in the nar row sense: the
moment of the labour of t ransformati on itself. which sets to wor k, in a
specific structure. men. means and a technical method of utilising the
means"This general definit ion of pract ice covers t he possibility of particu-
larity: there are different practices which are really distinct, even t hough
t hey belong organically to the same complex totality.m
Societies sho uld be unsrinringly broken down into forms of practice, an d
't ransformat ional labour ' is t he model which globally represent s t he inner
functional nexus of t hese practice forms. Individual types of practice are not
seen as processes of action which are to a certain degree supra-subject ive,
yet still int entionally art iculated; rat her, they are read as self-contained
systems of rules, which are independent of t he subject. and in which a
corres ponding ' mat erial' is reworked with t he help of systematic tech-
niques. Althusser can then grasp the social instances, of which social systems
are composed, as sub-systems in which the relevant , historically formed
structures of such objective practices are st abilized. Along with the four
forms of pract ice he t herefore also distinguishes four social instances: the
economic system, the state as hegemonic apparat us, ideology-forming
institutions, and the instance of theoretical practi ce.
Althu sser pluralizes the concept of practice in yet anot her prophylaxis
agains t the histor icist concept of history. He distinguishes between several
independent for ms of practice in order not to have to reduce history to
labour. in t he sense of a worJd-eonsrituting life practice. Anot her singularity
of Alrhusser's concept of practice - namely. its quasi-cybernetic const itut ion
- results from a similar considerat ion. In order not to have t o anchor the
social subst rate of act ion in an intentionally acting subject. Alrh usser grasps
social pract ice per se as inst rument al action - that is, as the systematic
activity of working on an object. However, Althusser only dudes historicism
on this point at the cost of an even crasser reduction; if, in histor icism,
social development can onl y be t hought as the self-objecrivanon of the
species through labour, for Althusser all social dimensions of action are
conceived in terms which an: tailored to instrumental-objective act ions.
Balibar too presupposes this instrumentalist reading of the category of
pract ice, wh ich Althusser explicitly bases upo n the notion of labou r in
CapItal, when he tries to establish what is in fact the central proof of
struct ural Marxism. In 'The Basic Concepts of Histori cal Materialism'
Balibar argues that the concept of mode of production, which Mar x de-
veloped in t he critique of political economy, already contains t he basic
conceptual equipment by means of which hisrory as a wh ole: can be recon-
st ructed as a discont inuous succession of social totalities. Balibar claims
more explicitly than Alth usser that modes of product ion cannot be com-
pletely reduced to the relevant structures of technical actions, but must be
seen as t he social forms of organization of the labour process: with the
category of ' modes of production' Mar x reads t he economic st ructure of
society as t he unity of productive forces and relations of production.
To make this insight into capitalist societies ca pable of forming the basis
of an hist orically universal t heor y, Bahbar breaks down 'modes of produc-
tion' int o t heir components" The constitutive elements of all histor ically
conceivable modes of product ion are: (a) direct producers (labour-power);
(b) means of production (objects and instrum ent s of labour); (c) non-
labourers (appropriators of surplus labour ). Furthermore, Balibar draws a
distinction between t wo systems of relations, in which t hese three system-
atic elements are always inter-connected" In t he relation of appropriation
direcr producers, means of prod uction and non-labour ers are connected
in the transformation of nature; in t he propert y relati on the same t hree
instances are connected in the dist ribution of hegemony. In t his way modes
of product ion are different iated by virt ue of the: relation t hat crystallizes
in each case between the relevant st ructure of the forces of production
(appropriation relation) and that of the relations of production (property
relat ion). 'By var ying t he combination of t hese: element s according to the
(1A"O connexions which are part of the str ucture of every mode of pro-
duction, we can rheret ore reconsti tute the various modes of production,
i.e. we can set out the presupposit ions for t heoretical knowled ge of them,
which an: quite simply the concepts of t he condit ions of their histori cal
exis rence.t"
In order to arrive at a concept of social totality from t his concept of the
mode of production. as prescribed by the programme of a general theory
of history. Balibar begins by construing all ot her instances of pract ice
according to the same model of t he combination of invar iant elements.
The social sub-systems, like the economic system that Mar x encapsulates
in the concept of the ' mode of prod uction'. are composed of elementary
component s the functio n of which is ordered in historically changing St ruc-
tures. ' . .. of social structure ... are themselves present ed in the
form of specificcomplex combinations (\ 'erbindungen)"They therefore imply
specific social relations, which are: no more patterns of the intersubjectivit y
of the agents, than are the social relations of production, but depend on
OIl AXEL HONNETH HISTORY AND INTERACTION ..
fu nctio ns of the proass concerned: in this sense I shall be rigor ous in
speaking of political social relat ions or ideological social relari ons.t" How-
ever, t hese social sulysu::ms only become int egrat ed in t he logical context
of a st ructural socia l totality if t he mode of production is not simply one
instance of practice amongst ot hers, but is the socially det ermi nant instance.
Then the st rocrures withi n which the non-economic levels of practice are
socially sta bilized, are once again subordi nate to the economic structure .
Althusser deploys the term 'matrix' to refer t o this cole of the mode of
product ion as rhe st ructure of str uctures; t he eco no mic system is t here-
by represented as the all-encompassi ng social st ructu re, containing t he
remaining social instances as its own components. From t his point of view
the mode of production is no longer merely the self-cont ained economic
syst em of relat ions, but t he deep structure which regulates all ot her stru c-
tures of practice. A displacement in t he st ructure of one mode of production
sets in train displacement in the st ructure of its other instances of pract ice.
In t his way we can construct a picture of a social system as an hierarchically
const ituted syst em of dependencies, which does not have to treat the
dependent sub-systems of a societ y as mere epiphenomena.
Balibar wants to illustr at e t his wit h the example of the hi stor y of
science. From t he perspective of t he st ruct ural theory of histor y scientific
labour is only of int erest insofar as it emerges in t he relational network of
instances of practi ce, est abli shed by the economic stru cture. Th e syst em of
science. whic h Balibar deems intrinsicall y autonomous, on ly becomes t heo-
ret ically relevant in the function that it assumes, in the confines of a mode
of production. for anot her sub-system. Accordi ng to Balibar , Marx worked
out 't hat intellect ual production is a branc h of product ion in the economic
sense of the term. But it does mean that intellectual product ion inter venes
in the histor y of the mode of production (in the strict sense) through its
products, which are suscept ible to import ation tkno wledges). And the
analys is of t he displacement of elements within the mode of produc tio n,
which t have reproduced above. alone enables us to explain why and in
what form t his intervent ion takes place. Thi s analysis cancels out all t he
questions that have been posed as to the technological "routine" of t he
ancient world and the middle ages, since the applicat ion of science to
product ion is not deter mined by the "possibilit ies" of t hat science. but by
the t ransfor mation of the labou r process which is an organic part of the
combination of a determinate mode of production. ' :" According to this
picture, the relation between economic mode of produ ction and social
instance of pract ice can be elucidate d in the following general manner. The
econo mic syste m is taken as t he st ructural template which establishes t he
fu nctio nal nexus in which t he social instances of practice arc co-ordinated.
Because t he not ion of a mode of production not on ly describes the structu re
of an economic instance or practice. but also has a say in the functional
composi tion of a social totality, Marx ma naged to lay t he foundat ions of
a Marxist theory of hist or y in Capital.
Th us all furt her basic concepts of histori cal materialism. which (to begin
with) were supposed to grasp the histor ically unspecific deep structure of
history. can be installed as sub-structures or functional quant a in terms of
the cent ral catego ry of the 'mode of production' . In thi s manner Balibar
derives both the concept of social ' reproduct ion' and of 't ran sit ion' be-
tween modes of production. 'Reproduct ion' is a reference system that
consists of hist ori cally invariant clements such as the subsistence level of
labour, and t he division of production into means of production and means
of cons umption. The hist ori cally specific st ructure o f t his reference system
is always est ablished by the relevant mode of production, and guarantees
the permanence of the social framework of practice in structurally det er-
minate ways. By 't ransitional' form between two modes of production
Balibar u nderstands a part icular type of mode of production in which the
economic axis of t he producti ve forces is different ly str uctu red from the
relat ions of production. In t he fully differentiated capitalist mode of pro-
duction both the process of production and the system of property divide
t he labourer fro m t he means of product ion (Marx ter ms t his ' rea)
subsumption'}. However, in t he pr e-capitalist t rans it ional stage t he ma nu-
facturing labour process still conjoins the labourer and the means of pro-
ducti on, although they are already separat ed in t he manufact uring system
of prope rty (' formal subsumpt ion') . Balibar generalizes th is scenario int o
the assumption that in the modes of product ion of hist orically transit ional
stages the st ruct ures of production relations and produ ctive forces are
al ways dist inctly or ' non-homologous ly' organized. The disjunction be-
tween the st ructure of product ion and the st ruct ure of pro perty. which
arises wit h t he dual det erminat ion t hrough former and futur e modes of
producti on. here puts an end t o the capacity of a society to reproduce itself
(a capacity which IS part and parcel of Its st ruct ural consnrunon), and
instead fr ees the ind ividual instances of practice from their dependence on
the economic base st ructure. Only t he advent of newly stabilized modes of
production will cause the instan ces of practice to be once more art iculated
hierar chicall y with the functional constitution of an econom ic structure,"
By way of this kind of conceptual explanation structural Marxism in-
flates the catego ries of Mar x's Caprtal into a theor y of histor y, which
eventually ev' en conceiv'es individua l human beings as functional elements
of a mode of product ion. Rather as Marx, in the notion of the 'characte r
mask', sees act ing subjects as mere personifications of economic relations,
individuals in the t heory of history arc supposed to be t reat ed in general
as links in supra-subject ive chai ns of practice. Not actin g subjects but
t orms of individualit y are no..... the tocus ot theoret ical int erest, Beyond the
politico-economic viewpoin t of Capital these forms of individualit y can be
Al B. HONNETH
HISTORY AND tNTERACTtoN
"
distinguished fr om each ot her by inst ances of pract ice which determine
t heir respective functions. "\(' e can now say that these "me n" , in their
theoret ical status, are not the concrete men , the men of whom we are told
in famous quotations, no mort t han that t hey "make histor y". For each
pract ice and for each tra nsformation of t hat practice, they are the different
forms of individualit y which can be defined on the basis of its combination
structure.. . . Men do not appear in the theor y except in the for m of sup-
ports for immanent struct ural relations and t he forms of t heir individualit y
only appea r as determinate effects of t he structure." ? As in functional ist
role-th eor y, structural Marx ism only evrr regards that portion of indi-
vidual act ions which is already subordinated to the claims of social func-
tions. Processes of socializat ion, which in the struct ural-functionalism of
Parsons are st ill conce ived as mediat ing processes bet ween t he drives and
energies of individuals, on the one hand, and t he cultural system of norms,
on the ot her, go by the board. in order to avoid the danger of any ant hro-
pocentric ar gument at ion entering t hrough t he back door of socializat ion
theory. Th is means, however, t hat t he social integration of the acting
subjects int o functional supports in this theory becomes simply one system-
immanent mechanism amongst ot hers. The st ructure of society is not
reproduced by means of individual personalit y struct ures. On the cont rary,
it subordinates individuals, as structural elements, to the functional hier-
archy. The agencies of socializat ion do not mediate between the claims of
t he functioning of society and t he needs of indi viduals, but rat her reflect
t he norms of class hegemony st raight onto the tabulae rasae of personality
str uct ures.
Alt husser' s concept of practice fosters this reduct ionism, in which acting
subjects become deindividualized systemic units, in order that social int e-
grat ion can be t reated as systemic integration. Because he deems social
contexts of actio n merely to be systemic labour processes, he can only
explain t he funct ioning of the ideological instances of practice - i.e., of the
socializat ion agencies - with the aid of instrument al not ions. The agencies
of socialization 'wo rk upon' individua ls ' by means of ideologies'. Wi th thi s
pict ure, redolent of theories of manipulation, in hi s essay ' Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses' Althusser wants to esta blish t hose areas of
social reproduction within which individ uals are moulded into politically
conformist and functionally competent members of the system. The con-
cept of ideological practice here is simply t he complement, in social theory,
to the idea of the functional 'support' or ' bea rer'. In con junction both
not ions are supposed to explain t he process by which individua l act ions
become functionalized int o socially determined forms of behaviour, which
Balibar and Althusser term 'fo rms of individuality'. h en in the not ion of
an ideological labour of the state indi viduals an: tacitl y presupposed as
merely passive ob jects of practice, that can be influenced willy nill)", which
is precisely what is meant by the concept of ' functional suppo rt' . Both
categories underplay t he structural-functionalist notion of the ' role' , by
bracketing out of their analysis t he motivat ional and af fective dimensions
of personality by means of which hegemonic norms first become socially
binding; Parsons, by contrast, acknowledges these dimensions as categories
of basic socialization.
St ructural Mar xism is forced into t his conce ptual posit ion because it
wants to make not only the catego rial framework, but also the methodo-
logical art iculation, of Capital int o the proto type of a general t heory of
histor y. According t o Althusser's reading of t he scientific struct ure of Marx's
analysis of capital, t his protot ype of the theor yof history requires theoretical
abstraction from all individual contexts of act ion. In their stead the t heory
of history reconst ruct s, like the analysis of capital, the non -inten tional
mechanism of its object, before systema tically examining the historical
for ms of its realization. J USt as Marx worked analytically through the
hist orical realit y of capitalism to the int ernal st ruct ure of the economic
syst em, so t he t heor y of histor y aims to capt ure the 'fundamental forms of
histor ical existence' - t hat is, t he st ruct ural totalit ies specific to the modes
of produ ct ion. From here the theory dr aws inferences regar ding the realit y
of hist or y:
h is tr ue t hat the theory of political economy is worked out and developed
by the investigation of a raw material provided in the last resort by the
practices of teal concrete history; it is true that it can and must be realized
in what ate called 'concrete' economic analyses, relating to some given con-
juncture or given period of a given social formation; and these trut hs are
exactly mirrored in the fact that the t heory of history, too, is worked out and
developedout by the investigationof raw material, provided by real concrete
history and that it too is realized in the 'concrete analysis' of 'concrete
situations'.K
In order to make the methodological parallel between Marx's analysis of
capital and Marx's theory of history dear. Althusser eviden tly makes use
of the Marxist disti nct ion betwee n or der of invesnganon (f orschung) and
order of exposition (Darstellung) .With these two categories Marx want ed
to disti nguish between the processes of scientific investiga tion and scientific
exposit ion. which would be useful in the formanon of the t heory of political
economy. The concept of t he 'order of investigation' is int ended to cover
the broad procedures of data creation and data evaluation. In Mar x' s own
case t hese included t he treatment of economic statistics, the testing of
classical economic theories, and t he evaluation of everyday experience. By
the concept of 'order of expos ition ' , however. Marx wants to designate the
particular form in which scienti fic presentati on does not purs ue chro no-
logical development, but rat her the ' internal logic' of capitalist relat ions.
Capit al reconstructs the capital ist social totality not by hist orical stages of
.. AXEL HONNETH HISTORY AND INTERACTION
"
the process of capitalization, but by the logically necessary steps of the
creation and accumulation of capi tal.
Now, Alrhusser's theor y of histor y takes as its methodological protot ype
precisely the same pattern of reflection with which Marx, in the course of
his mate ria l social resear ch, infers the 'concrete totality' of capitalism from
t he relatio n of capital which is fundamental to society. As wit h Marx' s
critique of political economy. Althusser's theor y of history is methodolo-
gically ground ed in material historical investigat ion and concerned with
histo riogr aph y. The st ruct ural theor y of history elaborates the historicall y
fundamental modes of production from the material under investigation-
modes of production which can be conceptually reproduced according to
the 'logic' operative in the art iculation of their instances. f rom this 'logi-
cal' plane of analysis the theory rises to the level of histor ical reality, by
gradually encapsulating the historical context of events in the increasingly
comprehensive categona l network of social-struct ural totalities. In this
process, however, historical periods can never be completely grasped in
theor y by reference to the structural total ity of a mode of production.
Rath er, they must be brought mro the framework of mut ually overlapping
modes of production (or social formations ). Histor ical events are only
adequately explained when, as Kar sz succinctly puts it, their 'social histor-
ical functional mechanism' is established."
Over and above the methodological vagueness in which this concept of
historical explanation is shrouded, it also reveals a singular consequence
of Althusser's argument. If sections of historical reality - in Althusser's
terms, 'concrete sit uat ions' - can only be grasped in the struct uralist theory
of history when integrated into the logical context of a social-struct ural
totality, then only the already systemically organized part s of these 'con-
crete sit uations' can be grasped by thought at all. This is because in the
theoret ical reference system of ' modes of production' socio-hisrorical phe-
nomena only ever occur qua structural elements or functional quanta. An
historical complex of events can only be partially derived by analyzing the
scale of its functional mechanisms - namely, as an objective domain of
events; however, the histori cal and factual exploitat ion of leeway in the
system takes place within interactive contexts of action, which Althusser's
theory must ignore. Because, with the analytic framework of the structur-
ally unified theory of history, the historical process takes as its model only
the reproduction of a social-structural totality, this theory of history is not
able to themarize the communicative process of interpretat ion through
which the system-process becomes relevant to action and thereby creates
situations in the first insta nce. Due to this conceptual shortcoming, the
historical reality which Althusser's theory of history is in a position to
grasp remains an impoverished reality; in this theory historical reality
exists only as a functionally hierarchized histor y of a system, not also as
a collect ively experienced history of actions.
Althusser and his students seem not to be aware of this analytic obstacle
to their theory of history. They begin from the assumption that the caregorial
framework of the universal theory of history already contains all the con-
cepts needed to describe rhe real process of histor y in Marxist fashion,
as a nexus of events. Under this presupposition a materialist version of
histor y is a mere application of the structural theory of history. Althusser's
reference to the 'concrete analysis of concrete situat ions' towards which
the theor y of history is supposed to be heading, bespeaks the same meth-
odological self-understanding. Clearer still are Alrhusser ' s claims to be able
to infer seamlessly from the level of abstr action of the general theory of
social-struct ural tota lities to the empirical history of events. These are
made explicit in a demand t hat Althusser makes upon his own version of
Mar xism. 'Marxism cannot claim to be the theory of history, unless, ell en
in its t heory, it can think the conditions of its penetration into histor y,
into all strat a of society, even into men's everyday Iives.'40 This sentence
reproduces a classical claim of Marxist theory. Historical materialism must
be able to determine the social-structural presuppositions and historical
domains of act ion Within which it has a good chance of bemg translated
into a politically effective programme of action. Only when theory has
been informed as to the emancipatory content of collective repositories of
needs and or ientat ions of interests can it hope to deduce orientat ions of
pract ice adequate to the sit uations of social groups.
However, Althusser seems not to notice that his own struct ural theory
of history, in its dispute with historicism, conceives histor ical development
merely as a structural displacement of functional mechanisms, and there-
fore expressly abstracts from situations of communicative action. But how
is the theor y of histor y supposed to be able to inform itself about social
learning processes, from which it could draw political strength, when dealing
with specific historical situat ions, when it has already decided that it has
to abstain from this histor ical context of interaction?The structural theory
of histor y has purified its basic concepts so thoroughly of determinations
of social action that not even retrospectively - qua historiography - can
it understand individual historical occurrences in rhe interactive network
of social struggle and collective processes of agreement. Hence in the ambit
of its own analytic framework the struct urally re-interpreted histor ical
materialism is indeed able, with increasing precision, to confine the histor-
ical domain of events to the functional limitations of social sub-sectors. In
other words, it can describe an historical period as an epoch of structurally
enabled possibilities of action. However, the social realization (or rat her
non-realizarionl of the objective logic of reproduct ion is not theoretically
accessible.
Pierre Vilar has difficulties such as th is in mind when he questions the
theor y of histor y advocat ed by the Althusserian school as to irs potent ial
for pract ical investigation. For how can a materialist histor iography which
.. AXEL HONNETH HISTORY AND INTERACTION
concentrates on 'this count ry, this time, or this conflict ' be theor eticall y
focused by means of basic str uct ural concept s, when t hese basic concepts
cannot be transposed onto an historical context of events! " Urs j aeggi
reaches a similar conclusion: he: att acks the categori al exclusion of the
'class struggle' in structu ral Marxism's t heory of histor y." In the opinion
of these t wo authors the st ructuralist reformulation of hist or ical materialism
reaches its limits where a materialist analysis of a parti cular historical
realit y begins. Both aut hors nonet heless still hold the struct ural theory of
history co be superior to alternative approaches and think that it would be
relat ively easy to ext ricate it from t he difficulties t hat seem to beset its
ana lysis, by simply extend ing its categories. For t his reason the systematic
limita tions of Althusser's reading of Marxism remain hidden in their
appraisal of his theory. In cont rast I hope to show, by way of concl usion,
that str uctural Mar xism only succeeds in reint er pret ing hist or ical mater-
ialism by means of the methodologically unsound move of making Mar x's
analysis of capital into the protot ype of a genera l theory of histor y.
IV
Alt husser and lus students have taken the cn nq ue of hrstoncrsm to the
point at which their programme of struct urally re-interpreti ng histor ical
materialism comes clearl y int o focus. The st ructural concept of history is
supposed to suppress the received ideas t hat have been so influent ial withi n
the histor y of Mar xism, and which imply that histo rical realit y is t he result
of a collective human or technological progress of creat ion. Whilst t hese his-
renee! conceptions depen d upon the assumption of a hisror y-consn tunng
subject, Althusser seeks to gain access to the historical totality in a wholly
different way, not via the philosophy of histor y. To t his end his srr uct ur-
ahst premises play the role of fundamental assumptions With which hIS
rorica! processes can be understood as supra-individual acts of reproduction.
If 'modes of product ion', which Marx investigates wit h the example of
capitalism, can be understood st ruct urally, as syst ems of rules, then every
hist ori cal process of development can be conceived as a succession of in-
terna lly regulated processes of reproduction. In t his manner Althusser can
convert t he whole of histor y int o an object of t heory, which does not have
to make the complementary presuppositions of an histori cal macr o-subject
and t he continuit y of all hist orical occurr ences. In this theor y histor y is
only accessible in the various histori es in which operat ive modes of produc-
tion st ructu rally reproduce themselves. However, the limits of t his pro-
gramme of t he theory of histor y are only reall y visible against t he backd rop
of Althusser's t heoretical self-understa nding. Both t he crit ique of histor -
icism and the carefully const ructed theory of histor y promise mor e than
they deliver.
The critique of histori cism blurs the difference between a contin uity of
histor y which is simply presupposed as an appendage of t he philosophy of
histor y, and a cont inuity which has been reconstructed from material his-
tory, by imputi ng to bot h the same basic not ion of the subject. Althusser
makes no disti nct ion bet ween a Mar xism which only speaks of a unified
histor y with respect to the real histori cal unificat ion of all particular read-
ings of history, and a Mar xism which al read y presupposes t his unity in t he
guise of a unified centre of all hist orical occurrences. In bot h cases Althusscr
attacks the not ion that all historical processes are centred around a macro-
subject, although it is only in t he latte r case: that the unification can be
imputed either to a collective subject of action or t o a technological substrate
of history; whi lst the former conception of history or ientates itself around
the histori cal relations of inte r-subjectivity. But then, in t he former case,
the crit ique of historicism is useless, for history is no longer thought as t he
prod uct of a history-constitu ting macro-subject, in analogy to a worl d-
cons titut ing epistemological subject. Alth usser makes no effort to distin-
guish between a conception of the subject t hat is over-burdened by the
philosophy of history and a concept ion of hist orical inter -subject ivity; he
is t herefore forced to leap from the critique of a Marxism which is grounded
in the philosophy of histor y to the concept of a supra-individual systemic
history, without even becoming aware of the funct ion of interactive con-
texts of act ion in realizing history. However, he pays the price for the false
crit ique of hist oricism in his exposition of the theor y of history.
The structural t heory of histor y atte mpts to explain an historically con-
crete nexus of events simply by reconst ructi ng the functional logic of the
socia l-structural totality. It is inte rested solely in the supra-individua l sys-
temic nexus so as to avoi d completely the danger of dissolving t he social
process of reproduction into inte r-personal actions. Furthermore, it is in-
terested onJy in the structure of this systemic nexus in order to exclude
t heoret ically the histo rical cente ring of history in a history-constituting
subject. However, Alrhusser can only identify t he actual course of history
by its structura l possibilities and cannot provide a concrete material explana-
tion of events as histor ical realities. Alt husser's theor y of history fails to
consider that the st ructurally construed functional tendencies of social
systems are only transla ted into real histor ical occurrences t hrough t he
interact ive historical practices of subjects of action, which is precisely what
his approach categorically excludes. The social framework of instances
does not isolate individual act ions per se, but only in the form of t heir
social interpretat ion, in order that the histor ical ' surface of event s' can
then be composed from these actions. For by met hodologically isolatin g
social functions from the int eractive relations in which t hey are realized as
sit uat ions, the structuralist theor y of history encounters similar analytical
limitations to st ruct uralist linguistics, with its division of linguist ic rule--
syst ems from the practical context of spoken language.

AXEL. HONNETH
HISTORY AND INTER.... CTION

Since the systematic conception of the st ructural theory of history can-


not be derived soldy f com the crit ique of historicism, Alt husser is forced
to call upon t he scientific model ot Marx' s analysis of capital in order to
make it intelligible. The general theor y of histor y is scientifically estab-
lished insofar as it is a fruitf ul generalizat ion of the methodological and
caregorial framework of Capital. Onl y thi s prior st ruct uralist readi ng of
the crit ique of politi cal economy enables Alt husser to t ranspose t he basic
tenets of st ructuralism onto a Mar xist theory of hisrcrv. This is because
in Altb usser's view the analyt ic framework of t he anahsis of capita l is
tailored wholly to the supra-individual funct ional mechanism of t he capit-
alist process of reproduction, and by virtue of this narrowness of analytic
focus t he t heory of history manages to mesh with t he structu ralist concep-
t ion of the evenr-const lrunng system of rules. Moreover, it is only because,
in Althusser's view, the categorial framewor k of Mar x's analysis of capit al
is t ailor ed to the element ary components of t he capitalist process of repro-
duction, t hat the theory of history is supposed to be able to confine it self
cat egor iall y to the st ruct ural element s of t he mode of production. The
vindication of t he struct uralist unificat ion of historical materialism t hen
hangs on a very t enuous t hread of argument . Alt husser makes the theor et-
ical claims of his theory of histor y depend solely on the contention that
Marx, in the crit ique of political economy, also worked out t he general
framework from which a t heory of historical totalit y could be ext rapo-
lated. In t his cont ent ion, t hough, Althu sser and his collaborato rs subscr ibe
to a crass misunderstandi ng of Marx's own claims for his analys is in
Capital. One does not need a highly nuanced crit ique of t he struct uralist
reading of Capital, but only the most cursory glance at the fundamenta l
st ructure of t he ana lysis of capital, to show that Mar x made his conce p-
tion of met hod and t he categor ial forma t ion of his theory depend un-
equivocally on t he histor ically specific structure of the capital relat ion.
Capital is so closely int erwoven with the socio-historical presuppositions
of its object of enquir y, tha t it can only be made into a general theory of
history by over-simplifying its analysis.
Recentl y, several different attempts t o clear up the method of the analy-
sis of Capital have been able to throw light upon t he histor ical content of
Marxian theory." In direct confrontation wit h Alrhusser' s reading of Capital
t hese works focus their interest on the theo retical presupposit ions under
which Marx harnesses the structure of Hegel's Logic for a systematic critique
of capitalism. They follow a line of questioning which has been well known
since Lenin's reference to the exemplary status of Hegel' s Logic, but has
never been given a detailed and explicit tr eatment. I shall make do at t his
junct ure with a brief sketch of t he results of these int erpretat ions, insofar
as the different accounts find points of agreement. They concur in the
cont ent ion that, alt hough Marx distances himself fro m Hegel in his early
wor ks, with his crit ique of idealism, he nonetheless gravita tes back towards
Hegel's systematic form of reflection in the economic theory of the lat e
work.
The Mar x of the Economic and l'hi!usopmca! Manuscript s t hinks Hegel's
Phenomenology as an ant hropological and epistemological insight int o the
universal-histor ical significance of human labo ur. Against Hegel Mar x
emphasizes the left-Hegelian motif of t he fact iciry of hu man subjectivity,
which evapora tes under t he presupposit ions of identity philosophy to a
moment of the self-developing spirit. At t his stage Marx holds the theory
of capita lism ro bea theory of t he self-alienanon of labour th rough private
pr opert y. The Marx of Capital, however, seeks a quite different meth-
odo logical access to the critique of capitalism. He no longer describes
capitalist social relati ons from the immediate standpoint of human subjec-
t ivity as a relat ion of alienati on, but rather immanently follows the cap-
italist suppression of subjectivity. Mar x t akes the real historical autonomy
of the capitalise process of valorization as the point of departu re for [he
analysis of capita l, by making the self-valorization of value into t he subject
of t heory. Because Marx sees the ' st ruct ural identi t y' (Reichelt ) of capital
t hr ough the lens of Hegelian ' Spirit ', he is able to make systemat ic use of
the st ructure of argument in the Logic. The process of the unfolding of
cap it al ca n be expounded in t he dialect ical figures of t hought of the self-
knowing Spirit . Mar x thus abst racts , along with Hegel, from all human
subject ivit y in order to be able to harn ess the lat ter's dialecti cal logic as a
model method for the analysis of capital, suited to t he real abst ract ion of
capitali sm. However, as a critique of capita lism t his method remains
embedded in t he anthropologically grou nded theori es of [he early wor k.
from which perspect ive the subject of capital can be shown to be an
illusor y subject that is grounded in human labour.
These sketches alone suffice to demonst rate t he consequences of such
int erpretat ion for Alth usser's theory of history; for if the critique of polit ical
economy systemat ically grasps only t he process in which capital subsumes
living social relati ons. then the hist ori cal realit y which is investigated in
t his crit ique can also only be the social nexus which has been oppressed
and defor med by capita lism. The pri ce of the form of exposi tion borrowed
from Hegel's Logic is an attenuated picture of realit y. 'The fully fledged
critique of political economy does not aim to expou nd the hist orical phe-
nomeno n of capitalism, but first and foremos t the "general concept of
capital" . Thereby histor y, insofar as it amo unts to more t han the documen-
tation of social struggles, can only be: themat ized from standpoints covered
by this conce pt. Hist or y steps into the purview of theory exclusively as t he
ground upon which the general concept of capi tal is realized' Structural
Mar xism ignores precisely t his met hodologicallimirat ion of historical realit y
in Capital: instead it blithely general izes t he met hodological and caregorial
basis of the analysis of capital into a theor y of history, whereas Marx t ook
it exclus ively as a scient ific attempt at the expos it ion of capitalism.
100 AXEL HONNETH I-ISTORY AND INTERACTION
'01
In the critique of political economyMarx abstracts fromsocial relations
of interacti on, because he wishes theoretically to expound only those do-
mains of reality which have already been subsumed by the capitalist process
of valorization. He denotes acting subjects wit h t he category of 'charact er
masks' because. in terms of the met hodological analysis of t he framework
of capita l, he is only inte rested in the funct ions of individuals which are
relevant to valorization. Mor eover, he largely reduces t he social context of
act ion to instrumental or instr umentalized social relations, because in the
pr ocess of capital accumulation only these reduced for ms at act ion could
be relevant . However, t his conceptua l move only makes sense owing to the
met hodological presupposit ion of t he analysis of capital and does not
suffice for either an explanation of the realit y of histor y under capitalism,
or an analysis of ot her social format ions. Mar x is full y aware of t his; his
historical and politica l works , and his remarks about pre-capitalist socie-
ties, change their basic conceptua l framework according to t heir theoret-
ical perspective. By cont rast, Althusser believes that he can t ranspose the
ana lysis of capital back onto the theory of histor y, without taking t his
deliberate methodological reduction into considerat ion, t hrough a caregorial
consideration of communicat ive processes of action. Only in this way can
he generalize from t he concept of the ' character mask' to that of the 'for m
of individualit y'. and from the concept of ' abstract labour' to that of the
' form of practice', in order that modes of pro duction as a whole can be
conceived as funct ional logical systemic uni t ies.
Because Althusser and his collaborators wrench the ana lysis of capital
apart from t he unique historical context in which it is theoreticall y located.
they can only perceive the whole of historical realit y as a process of repro-
duction, independent of t he relations of interact ion. Alt hough Marx
describes histori cal reality in the same terms, for him th is is only a description
of social relations under cond itions of capitalism, The tacit t ransformat ion
of the restr icted hist orical perspective of the cr itique of political econom y
into the whole trut h of a Mar xist concept of history allows the Althu sserian
school t o reconst ruct histori cal mat erialism on t he basis of str ucturalist
theory. For only on the assumption that the histor ical realit y which is
theoret ically conceived in Capit al, is in fact coextensive wit h the whole of
scientifically accessible histor y. can the historical ob ject of investigat ion be
so utterl y divorced from relations of int eraction t hat it can ult imately be
understood on t he struct uralist model as a t heor y of social rules of deter-
minat ion, Such a t heory has to occlude the communicat ive dimensions of
action. which const itute a social framework of relat ions as historical real-
it y in t he first place, because it mistakes Mar x's abst ract ion from the
history-forming context of action as an historically neutra l t heoret ical
st rategy.
Such a crass misunderstanding ulti mat ely entai ls pract ical-political con-
sequences. The theory of histor y which the Alth usserian school develops
by the methodological dehistoricizarion of Marx's analysis of capital at-
tenuate s the concept of socialist praxis along wit h t he concept of histor ical
realit y, Because Alrhusser's hist or ical mat erialism conceives t he capitalist
process of history only as a reproduction of the social-st ructural formation,
not as the experiential process of social gro ups and classes, it can not even
forge a politi cal link with t he self-interpretation of social revolutionar y
movements. This is why Alrhusser is politically tied to Lenin's conceptio n
of t he part y. In place of a t heoretical relat ion to the consciousness and
int erests of of t he class movement steps the part y, as a surrogate for class
cons cious ness . The political acts of t he party with respect to social
movements are instrumental. just like Alt husser's representation of system-
at ic practice in general.
NOTES
I would like to t hank my friends Ha ns Joas a nd Rainer Pari s for their advice and
comments .
Of course, t his pictur e of the history of Marxism is challenged by the att empt
of the early Lukacs to combine t he Hegelian cri tique of the objectivism of the
Second Intern ational with the philosop hical legitimation of Leninist poli tics.
2 Cf., in part icular, Louis Althusser, ' Elements of Self-Criticism'. in his Essays
in Self-Criticism, New Left Book s, London, 1976, chapter 3, and Saul Karsz,
Theone et pofitique: Louis Althusser, Fayard, Paris, 1974, chap ter 6,
3 See j ean Piaget, Structuralism, Routledge and Kegen Paul, London, 1971 and
Francois \ l ' a h ~ ed., Qu 'est-ce que le srrua ura/isme?, Editions du Seuil, Paris,
1968.
4 Georges Canguilhem, 'Mo n de l'homme ou epuisemenr du cogiro?' , Critique
242, 1967. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passerc n have expou nded the
theoretical development of the French social sciences since 1945 as a dispute
with subject-centred tr opes of t hought: ' Sociology and Philosophy in France
since 1945: Deat h and Resurrection of a Philosophy wit hout a Subject ', Social
Research 34, 1967 .
5 Compare Claude Levi-Straus s, T he Savage Mind, Weidmfeld and Nicolson,
London, 1972, chapter 9 (' History and Dialectic' ), Maurice Godelier, 'Le
concept de t ribu. Crise d'u n concept ou crtse des fondements empinques de
l'a nehrcpcl ogte', in his Horizon, trajeu marxiue s en anthropofogie, vol. I,
Francois Masper o, Paris, 1977; Michel Foucault, Int roduction to Archaeology
of Know/edge, Tavi srock, London, 1972; Louis Alt husser and Etienne Balibar ,
Reading Capital, New Left Books, London, 1970, pp- 119- '11.
6 For t he ear ly conception of the difference bet ween historical and dialect ical
mat erial ism in Ahhusser, see ' On the Materialist Dialectic' in his For Marx,
Allen Lane. London, 1969. p, 161. and Reading Capital. p. 182, On t he new
conception of t he difference, see ' Elements of Self-Cr iticism', chapter 2.
7 Nicos Poulanr zas, 'Theone und Geschichre. Kuru Bemer kc ng tiber den
Gegenstand des MKapitals"' , in W, Euchner and A. Schmidt, eds, Kritik der
102 AXEL HONNETH
HISTORY AND INTERACTION 103
politischen Okonomie heute. 100 Jahre 'Kapita/', Frankfurt /M., 1968, pp.
58-59.
8 Ibid., p. 60.
9 Here structural Marxism remains very vague in irs categories; for the most
part the differences between a social-scientific concept of evolution and the
concept of 'teleol ogy' in the philosophy of histo ry arc blur red; see Reading
Capital, p. 120 .
10 See the very early review article by I. Ferscher, 'Der Mar xismus im Spiegel dec
fran70 ir.c:hr:n Philosophie', in Tubingen, AocId . Mark
Post er, Existential Marxism in Post war France: From Sartre to Althusser,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1975. On Althusser's concept of
' huma nism', see ' Mar x ism and Humanism' , in For Marx; Reading CApita/,
pp. 119f f.; 'Reply to John Lewis', in Essays in Self-Criticism; and ' Marx's
Relation to Hegel', in Ahhusser, Po/itics and History: Montesqui eu, RoussellU,
Hegel and Marx , New Left Books, London, 1972.
11 On the economism of the Second International see Lucio Colletti, 'Bernstein
and the Marxism of the Second International', in his From Rousseau to Lenin,
New Left Books, London, 1972. For Althusser's concept of 'economism', see
Beading Capital, p p. 138ft, and ' Note on "The Critique of the Personality
Cult" " in Essays in Self-Criticism.
12 'Note on "The Cri tique of the Personality Cult" ', passim. For a critique of
this conception, which completely divorces Stalinism, theoretically and polit-
ically, from Leni nism, see Valentino Gerrarana, 'Ahhusser and Stalinism',
New Left Ret'iew 10111 02, j anuary/April 1977.
13 Reinhart Koselleck, ' WOl U noch Historie?' , in H. M. Baumgart ner and J.
. Rusen, Seminar: Geschichte und T heon e, Frankfurt/M ., 1976, pp. 17,23. See
the same aut hor's ' Hisrona Magistra Vitae' , in Natln und Gescbichte: Festsdni{t
fur Karl Lawith, St ut tgar t, 1969.
14 See O. Marquard, Schwierigkeiten mit der Geschicht sphilosophie, Frankfurt /
M., 1973, especially pp. 66ff.; Karl Lowith, 'iC'eltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen,
Stutt gart, 1953.
15 [ urgen Habermas, ' Dber das Subjekt der Geschichre', in hie Kultur und Kritik,
Frankfurt / M., 1973.
16 fl . J. Sandku hler, ' ZUt Spexifik des Geschichtsbewusstseins i n der burgerlichen
Gesellschafe', in R. Koselleck and W. Stempel, eds, Geschichte. Ereignis und
ErUihlung, MUnchen, 1973.
17 ' Reply to j ohn Lewis', p. 46 n. 9.
18 Reading Capital, p. 142.
19 H. M. Baumgart ner, Kominuitat und Geschichte, Frankfurt/ M., 1972.
20 Ibid., p. 253.
21 However, Ahhusser's early works were so epistemologically vague that some
of his finest crincs thought they had discovered arguments stemming from
Kant: see Andre Glucksmann, ' A Vent riloquist Str uctura lism', New Lef t Review
72, March/April 1972. Since then Ahh usser has clarified his epistemology in
such a way as to dispel such worries (d. ' Is it Simple to be a Mar xist in
Philosophy?' , in Essays in Self-Criticism).
22 Reading Capital, pp. 93-95.
23 Georg Lukacs, 'Reification an d the Consciousness of the Proletariat', i n his
History and Class Consciousness, Merlin, London, 1971.
24 Cf , Ni kolai Bukhari n, Ilisto,-i':<ll M<lte,-i<llism (1922), Ann Arbor Press,
Michigan, 1969.
25 Readi ng Capital, p. 99.
26 Site Habermas' objections to Baumgart ner's tr anscendent al narrarivism in
'Geschichre und Evolution' , in his Zur Rekollstruktioll des Hist orischen
Materialismus, Frankfurt /M ., 1976.
27 Marx and Engels, Werke, vol ume 3, p. 45.
28 On the distinct ion between the ' humanist' an d 'scientific' parts of Marxian
theor y, see j acques Ranciere, 'The Concept of "Cr itique" and the " Critique
of Political Economy" (1965), in Ali Rarransi, ed, Ideology, Method and Marx,
Routledge, London, 1989. On the dati ng and re-dati ng of the 'epistemological
brea k' in Marx's oeuvre, see Althusscr, ' Preface to Capit al Volume One', in
his Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971.
29 Re<lding Capital, p. 97.
30 See Alex Callinicos' Alt husser-oriented critique of Hegelian Marxism in
Althusser's Marxism, Pluto Press, London, 1976, pp. IOH.
Rl?ading (;apital, p, 109.
32 For Marx, p. 166.
33 Readi ng Capital, p. 216.
34 Ibid., p. 220.
35 Ibid., p. 250.
36 Ibid., pp. 309ft .
37 Ibid., p. 300; see also pp. 112ff.
38 Ibid., pp. 109- 10.
39 Theorie et politique, p. 171.
40 Reading Capital, p. 128.
41 Pierre Vilar, ' Marxist Hist ory, A Hi story i n the Making', reprinted as chapter
2 of this volume (here p. 39).
42 See Urs j aeggi, Theoretische Praxis: Probleme ines strukturaIen Marxismus,
Frankfur t / M., 1976, pp. 93ff.
43 I am referring especially to the works of H. Reichelt, Zur logischm Struktur
des Kapitalbegriffs be;Karl Marx, Frankfurt /M., 1970; M. Theunissen, ' Krise
de Macht: Thesen zur Theone des dialekrischen widersprcchs' , in W. R.
Beyer, ed., Hegel-Jahrbuch 1974, Koln, 1975; and R. Bubner, 'Logik und
Kapital. Zur Methode einer " Krl nk der politischen Okonomie" " in his
Dialektik und Wissenschaft, Frankfurt/M ., 1973. All these works are inspired
by the seminal essay of H. J. Krahl, ' Zur wesenslcgik der Marxschen
Warenanalyse', in his Konstitution und Klassenkampf, Frankfurt/ M., 1971.
44 Theunissen, ' Krise der Macht ', p. 325.
5
ALTHUSSER, STRUCTURALISM, AND
THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL
TRADITION
Peter Dews
The central theme of phi losophical debate in France in the immediate post-
war period - the problem of t he relation bet ween t he indi vidual subject
and the overarcbing structures of hi stor y - may be seen as t he product of
conflict ing moral and t heoretical imperatives. Both Sart re and Merleau-
Pant y, deepl y infl uenced by t he general interpretation of histo ry offered by
Mar xism, became dissatisfied with t he unconditional status accorded to
consc iousness in t he phenomenological tradit ion, and increasingl y attem pted
to account for the embeddedness of con sciousness in a social and historical
world with irs own immanent Jaws. Yet neith er thinker could ent irely
abandon the starring-point of the perceiving and acting subject inherited
from phenomenology, for within t heir frame of reference, to do so could
only mean surr ender to the objectivism and determini sm represented by
the codified Marxism of t he French Communist Parr y. Sart re' s solut ion,
exhaust ively developed in the Critique of Dialeaicol Reason, was to place
the individ ua l subject - no longer primarily a subject of thought and
perception, but of praxis - within the complex and perpet ually shift ing
structures of group, party and class, in an at tempt to show how the original
freedom and lucidity of praxis could be tra nsformed int o the inexorabili ty
and opa city of the social and hist or ical world Yet, despite the ingenui ty
of its elabo ration. Sarr re's posit ion remained open to the objection, first
voiced by Merlea u-Pont y in The Adventures of t he Dialectic. tha t history
cannot be seen as neatly divided bet ween the t ransparency of wills and t he
opacity of t hings, but is rather composed of an ' inrerworld' of significations
which are neither ent irely subjecti ve nor entire ly objecti ve. More broad ly,
Sart re shows a remar kable innocence in his use of a vocabulary of dualit ies
- subject and object. interiority and exrerioriry, necessity and freedom -
inheri ted from the western metaphysical tradition. By cont rast. Merl eau-
.'.
STRUCTURALI SM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 105
Pant y's last work is reticent, tent ative, oriented towards a domain in which
subject ivit y is so bound up with an inherited world of meaning - of which
[he pre-eminent bearer is language - that any Strict separation between the
t wo becomes impossible. The very categories of t he philosophical tradit ion
are to be revealed in their inadequa cy whe n confront ed wi th the pri mary
expe rience of wha t Mer lea u-Pont y terms N t re vertical or N t re sauuage.
At the start of the 1960s, however, these: lines of enquiry were tempor-
arily to becut short. Sart re's conce rn wi th the pr ocess in which ' Structures
ar e created by an activit y which has no st ruct ure, but suffers its results as
a structure' ,' with the way in wh ich an original fr eedom can t urn against
itself and become its own prison, was to remain neglected unt il over a
decade lat er. when Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus would revive the
same par adoxes in the new vocabulary of ' desire'. And Merleau-Ponty's
attempts to circumvent the illusions generated by the very language of
philosopliy wo uld not find their continuat ion until th e emergence of Jacques
Derrida's project of deconstr uction. For a t ime the cent re of the philo-
sophical stage remained unoccupied. as att ent ion was displaced towards
the ' human sciences' - par ticularly the ant hro pology of Levi-Strauss - and
the renaissance which t hey appeared to be enjoying under rhe impacr of
met hods imported from t he field of str uct ural linguist ics. Levi-Stra uss
himself tended to wards t he view that philosophy can only be a premature
and speculative attempt to deal with problems whose real solution must
depend upon an extens ion of the domain of science, and t his was a view
which gained credence in some quarte rs, Certainly there was a wides prea d
feeling t hat the field of philosophic al t hought was undergoing a fragmen-
ration, and that the totalizing ambitions of 'metaphysics' (a term implicitl y
equated with 'Sarrrianism" now stood in the way of a scient ific knowledge
of human beings and t heir social pr actices. The evident incompatibilit y
between ,the premises of Levi-Strau ss' apparently rigor ous and successful
explanations - an abst racti on from all considerat ions of genesis and devel-
opment, and a view of human activit y as entirely determined by social
stru cture - and th e cent ral conce rns of the philosoph y of the 1950s rein-
forced the plausibilit y of t his assumpt ion. The advent of st ruct uralism was
experienced both as a 'crisis of the subject' and as a 'crisis of hisrcry','
However, this crisis cannot simply be attributed t o a temporary ent hu-
siasm for a part icular blend of positivism and rationalism amon g sections
of the French intelligentsia. The Hegelian and existential ist assumpt ions
which had been central to French phi losop hy since Kojeve's influent ial
lectures in t he 1930s were long overdue for reconsideranon, and Levi-
Strauss' characteristic amalgam of sound, argument and sophistry - par-
tic ularl y as exemplified by rhe set-piece bat tle with Sart re which concludes
The Savage Mind - successfully idenntied the vulnera ble poi nts in th e
phil osophical archit ecture of the Critique. For Sart re (he fundamenta l
narrative of human history is defined by t he not ion of a loss and recovery
' 06
PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADIT ION 107
of freedom. Despite their apparent hopelessness, the 'counterfinaliries and
infernal circularities' which characterize the field of the pract ice-inert rep-
resent t he: only means by which human kind can advance towa rds a new,
non-antagoni stic form of reciprocit y, the attainment of which will mark.
the end of historicity as we understand it. History t hus recounts the con-
sequences of a fall from a state of original innocence - free individual
praxis - which can onl y be recovered on a collective level at the 'end of
time' . However, since for Sartre ' scarcity' is present at the beginning of
hist or y and const itutes one of its precondit ions (although it is not a suf-
ficient condition ). and since human histor y is 'born and developed within
the permanent framework of a field of tension produced by scarcity', ' the
original freedom of praxis can only be mythical: it cannot be equated with
the stasis of actually existing ' primitive' societ ies. Such societ ies do in fact
have a histor y behind them, but have reached a state in which scarcity is
no longer a source of destabilizati on and development , but is lived as an
equilibrium, as a ' pract ical project of keeping institutions and physical
corporate development at the same level'." Yet the members of such soci-
et ies do not thereby evade the miseries of t he historical process, rat her they
are condemned ' t o work from dawn t ill dusk wit h t hese (primit ive)
technical means, on a t hankless, threaten ing eart h' .' Since, for Sartre, it is
on ly within history t hat t he true potential of humanit y can be realized,
what he terms 'societies of repet ition' must remain tra pped in an endless
cycle of deprivatio n, aban doned on t he margins of time.
Levi-Strauss finds t his vision of history, and of humanki nd's status within
it. scient ifically unacceptable and morally abhorrent Above all, his objections
are cent red on the vision of history as a process of convergence towards
a single universal ideal, for such a vision reduces past societies and cultures
to a series of hierarchically ordered stepping-stones on the pat h to a true
humanit y. Against this Levi-Strauss ar gues that past and ' primit ive' societ ies
cannot be seen as forms of alienati on in which human capacit ies are con-
fined and distorted: ' Ma n does not realize his nature in an abstract humanity,
but in tradi tional cult ures whose most revolut ionar y changes still retain
whole sections and are themselves explained as a function of a situation
st rictly defined in time and space." In part Levi-Stra uss' resistance to any
evolutionary ranking of humanity is based on t he standard philosophical
argument that any criter ion for t he compara tive evaluat ion of cult ures
must itself be the product of a par ticular culture. Bur in relation to thi s
qu estion, as to a numbe r of ot hers, it is possible to derecr in Levi-Strauss'
work a tendency to substit ute for explicit philosophical argument the state-
ment of an ostensibly ' scientific' position. Thu s Levi-Str auss' relativism at
t he level of cult ure can be seen as dependent on his t heory of the relation
between mind and society, which is itself rooted in a materialist ontology.
For if all social and cult ural forms are simply permutat ions and projections
of certain inna te cha racteristics of t he human mind (perha ps even of a
I
,
,.
I .
L.
patt ern of binary oppositions physically coded in the brain), then all must
be seen as equal - and by implication equally valuable - ' realizat ions' of
human potennal. Correspondingly, the transition from one social or cultural
form to another cannot itself be seen as an expression of human capacit ies
in rhis sense. Histori cal change must be consigned to a region where, as
Levi-Strauss' metaphors - the t hrow of the dice, the t urning of a kalerdo-
scope - emphasize, cont ingency and accident reign. Thus Levi-St rauss' view
dispossesses human praxis of what is for Sarrr e irs defining charact eristic:
an ability to realize a communal project in tra nscending a pre-glven situation.
Since, for Levi-St rauss, human action is uniquely determined by social str uc-
tur e, it cannot be the source of the t ransition from one structure to ano ther.
Time ceases to be the privileged dimension of human self-realization, and
Sart re's Hegelian-Mar xist myth of history is exposed as ' t he last refuge of
a transcendental humanism' ."
This crit ique a t t he Sanrian vision of history is clearly premissed on an
account of the status of social-scienti fic knowledge which differs radically
from t hat of Sartre. The Critique of Dialectical Reason must be placed within
t he posr-Kannan hermeneut ic t radition, a tr aditi on which affirms that the
kind of systematic knowledge appropriate to human act ion must be based
o n a form of ' understa nding', rather t han t he ki nd of causal explanat ions
employed in the nat ural sciences. This is because, unlike events in natu re,
actions cann ot even be correctly identified without taking account of the
int enti ons and int erpretations of agents. In the classic form elaborated by
Dilthey, understanding involves a ' re-experiencing' (Nacberlebnis) in which
the thought-processes of the agent are imaginatively recreated; the capacit y
of the historian to interpr et the t races of t he past is directly attributable
to his or her own breadt h of experience and receptivit y. In Sartre's version
of this pr inciple the pan icipato ry aspect of understanding is pushed to an
extreme in which it is t he individual who ' makes' history wh o is also the
ideal int erpreter of history. ' Comprehension', states Sarrre, 'is simply the
t ransl ucidiry of praxis to itself, whether it produces its own elucidat ion in
const ituting itself, or recognizes itself in the praxis of the ot her." The
assumpt ion of the Critique is that an implicit int erpretation of the entiret y
of history can be gathered up into the immediacy of t he moment of free
act ion.
For Levi-Strauss, however, any philosophy which attempt s to found
knowledge in t he immediate experience of praxis is condemned to remain
wit hin a circle of illusion. The experience of praxis cannot be considered
as common to all human beings in all t imes, and therefore as the initial
bridgehead of understandin g, since such ' experience is determined by
' unconscious' categorial structures which are specific to a par ticular cul-
rure. Th us Levi-Str auss' remark tha t ' Descartes believes t hat he proceeds
directly from a man's interioriry to t he extenority of the world , wit hout
seeing that societ ies, civilizat ions - in ot her words wor lds of men - place
'01
PETER DEWS STRUCTURAUSM AND THE FRENCH EPfSTEMOLOGCAL TRADITION 109
themselves between these fWO ext remes' ,' equally expresses his atti tude to
Sarrre. The fundamental error of t he phenomenological approac h to
human action is t hat it reads expe rience wit hin a part icular society as un i-
versal human expe rience; it stri ves to at t ain a 'general interiority', whereas
there are only t he 'mreriorines' of specific cultu res. For Levi-Strauss ' under-
st andi ng' must consist in roral par t icipation - in which case the social
scienti st ceases to be an ' int erpreter' - or it cannot take: place: at alL In
contrast t o Sart re's view of t he ong inal Iuciduy of praxis, he: considers t hat
' 3 conscious being aware of itself as such poses a problem to which it
pro vides no soulrion.?" However, there does exist a solution, which con-
sists in considering human act ion as governed by an unconscious system
of social rules comparable to the rules of a grammar . To isolate this system
of rules requires a deliberat e break bot h with the immediate experience of
t he members of the societ y under invest igat ion, and with the assumpt ions
which the enquirer bri ngs fro m his or her own cult ure. Th us, although
Levi-Strauss rejects the possibilit y of a ' general interiorit y', he does accept
what could be termed a ' general exteriority' , which he equates with t he
domain of a st ructu ralist SOCIal science.
In the earl y and middle 19605 the spread of procedur es originat ing in
str uctural linguist ics to other areas - mythology, literature, cinema, in fact
all symbohc SOCial practices - and t heir apparent success In Isolating cer-
tain formal principles of organization, seemed to vindicate entirely Levi-
Strauss' stand against an all-embracing Dialectical Reason. Voices as diverse
as those of Lucien Goldmann, Paul Ricoeur, and Henri Lefebvre were
raised against the new int ellect ual fashion, but were inevitably isolated cases
of resist ance to what was in effect a massive shift of sensibility: for a time
to raise object ions to structuralism could only mean preferri ng some form
of metaph ysic to 'science' . In some quarters it was acknowledged that t he
stat us and explanati on of historical change had now become problemat ic.
But in general it was either assert ed t hat str uct uralist procedures could
alreadv deal wit h the diachro nic dimension, or that the question of 'd ia-
chronk: st ructures' , alt hoogh posing more difficulties t han that of synchronic
structures, could eventually be resolved by structural analysis. Certainly
Levi-Strauss staunchly defen ded himself against the charge of having ren-
dered historiogr aph y epistemologicall y disreput able. His only aim, he sug-
gested, was t o challenge the privileged position which had been accorded
to historical knowledge by post-war phenomenology."
Yet a closer look at t he arguments contained in the final chapter of The
Savage Mind makes clear that, alt hoogh Levi-Str auss begins with a refu-
tation of the part icular vision of histor y represented by the Critique, he
concl udes by disqualifying histor y - understood as the tempor al succession
of event s in human societ ies - as an object of rigorous knowledge. Con-
t empor ar y accounts of Levi-St rauss sought to minimize t his implication,
point ing to the passages in his writings where he pays tribut e to the work
of histori ans and suggests a complement arity bet ween the perspectives of
history and of anthropology. Yet in fact this apparent complementarity is
the thin disguise of a crude subordi nation: history exists as a reservoir of
fact to be absorbed and ordered by synchron ic analysis. This is not a
temporary aberration on Levi-St rauss' part, but a view which has remained
constant t hroughout his career. In an art icle on 'Histor y and Anrbro-
pology' first published in 1949 Levi-Strauss writes: ' By showi ng instit u-
t ions in the process of t ransfor mat ion, history alone makes it possible t o
abst ract the st ructu re which under lies many manifestat ions and remains
permanent t hroughout a succession of events.:" While in his polemic against
the Critique he remar ks: ' History consists wholly in its met hod, which
experience proves to be indispensable for cataloguin g the elements of any
st ruct ure whatever, human or non -human, in its enti ret y," ! Insofar as only
cert ain of the pot ential variant s of a st ruct ure are concretely realized,
anthropology must ' begin by bowing before t he power and the ina nit y of
the event' ," Once the underlying structure has been ident ified, however , it
can be instated as t he t rue object of science, while its empirical realizat ions
must be abandoned to t he domain of an untheori zabl e cont ingency.
In one respect Levi-Strauss agrees with the phenomenologists: since a
narrat ion of all past events, even if it were possible, would amount to no
more t han a meaningless chaos of dat a, t he wri ting of history requi res a
principle of select ion which will be dependent on t he int erests and ethical-
political commit ments of a part icular individual or group. Histor y, he
argues , is always ' histor y-for'. But whereas for Sarrre, as for othe r
hermeneut ic th inkers, th is dist inction supplies the knowledge of history
with a special human relevance and epistemological dignit y (in the nat ural
sciences, Sartre suggests with evident distaste, Reason must transfor m itself
int o 'a svstem of inema']," for Levi-Strauss this 'subject ive' factor in the
codificat ion of events renders historiogr aphy unfit for inclusion amongst
wha t he calls the ' hard' sciences. Yet this critique of the subject ive element
in historical knowledge inevitably raises questions about the epistemolog-
ical assumptions on wh ich Levi-St rauss' own work is based For, at first
glance, it is difficult to appreciate why anthropology should differ from
history in its need for a selection and organiza tion of material, which will
be based on certai n preferences and interests. Either these preferences must
be seen as not ult imately aff ecting t he results of an enquiry whose aim is
objective expla nanon (but then why cannot history aim fo r such expla-
narion t}, or the object ions which Levi-Str auss raises to the codificat ion of
histor ical events can also be raised abo ut t he codification of ant hropolog-
ical data.
Levi-Stra uss' only ans wer to th is difficulty relies on t he bare affirmation
that structural anthropology is ' object ive' because it isolates and descri bes
objectively existing st ructures, while history is condemned to remain marr ed
by subjectivit y since it con sists of ' a met hod with no dist inct ob ject
110
PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION "1
corresponding to it' , 16 Significantly, Levi-Strauss is also scornful of what he
considers to be the dilettantish use of structuralist procedures in literary
analysis, precisely because, here also, st ructu re is a product of the method
and not a property of the object." Viewed in this light, Levi-Strauss'
repeated affirmations that the importation of the methodological tools of
srrucrural linguisrics has enabled t he social sciences to cross a major epis-
remclogical threshold. and that they can now aspire to equality with the
sciences of nature, cannot be viewed as occasional lapses into positivism.
The y are an integral part of an epistemological posit ion which affirms that
'st ruct ural hypotheses . .. can be compared wit h independent , well-defined
systems, each in its own right enjoying a certa in degree of obj ectivit y,
which test the validity of the t heoretical construcrs.t" In Levi-Stra uss th is
tendency is reinf or ced by an assumpt ion that 'object ive' must ult imately
mean ' material '. Like Freud, Levi-Strauss cannot resist taking out the ' in-
surance policy' of supposing t hat statements about the 'huma n mind' should
ultimately be reducible to statements about the physical struct ure of t he
brain. He affirms t hat the human sciences are merely a 'shadow t heat re',
the dir ecti on of which has been tempora rily entrusted to t hem by the
sciences of nature."
This objectivist and reducrionisr conception of t he status of the human
sciences produces a number of cur ious discrepancies in Levi-St rauss' work.
As we have seen, Levi-Strauss has a stro ng affective commitment to t he
cognit ive and cultu ral par it y of all societ ies - 'Those societ ies we call
pri mitive', he affirms, 'a re no less rich in Pasteurs and Palissys t han t he
orhers.:" Yet his own methods of analysis are a vivid indicat ion of the
cognitive asymmetry of cult ures, since. they rely on the assumpt ion that
the ant hropologist may be able to provide an account of social practices
which is unavailable to member s of a society. In addition, Levi-Str auss' view
of the natural sciences as a model to be emulated by the human sciences
dearl y requires him occasionally to admit what he terms the 'a bsolut e
superiority of Western science' .21 Th us Levi-Str auss' fundament al affir-
mation that ' man thinks t he wor ld in accordance with certa in ment al
const raints, and the way in which he thi nks the world determines very
largely the way he acts upon n'," is never allowed to impugn the status
of knowledge in the culture t o which he himself belongs. Similarly, Levi-
Strauss' rationalist argument that the method of str uct ural anthro pology
demands a sharp break with the evidences of experience is never reconciled
with his repeated use of analogies based on a highly experimentalist view
of the nat ural sciences. It is one of t he paradoxes of Levi-St rauss' work
tha t it repeatedly and powerf ully raises the question of the cultural rela-
t ivit y of knowledge, only to dismiss this quest ion as a ' ph ilosophical'
diver sion from the explanatory t asks of science.
Set agains t these incoherences of Levi-Str auss' posit ion, certa in aspects of
t he earl y pro ject of Althusse r and his coll aborators, which emerged more
or less simultaneously with the vogue for structuralism, spring int o clearer
relief. Althusser is concerned, like Levi-Strauss, wit h t he crit ique of Hegelian
accounts of history and of phenomenological theories of knowledge. Indeed,
he wishes to make t his criti que t he foundation of a renovated Mar xism.
But he also wishes to avoid the structuralist relegat ion of the histor ical to
the stat us of a contingent and untheorizable residue, and its concomitant ,
a naively positivist view of social science. However, in app roaching th is
task , Alrhusser does not reject the assumption that only objects governed
by certain immanent laws of str ucture can be rigorously known, or reassign
to temporality a stat us superior to t hat of the synchronic. Rather, he argues
simultane ously on two fronts : against the phenomenological assumpt ion
that history possesses a distinctive dialectical form of int elligibilit y, and
against the Levi-Str aussian assumption that st ruct ural intelli gibility is not
characteristic of histor y. Thus Althusser's task is both to show tha t there
exists a ser'o f concept s in accordance with which it is possible to orga nize
t he historical past as an object of scient ific knowledge; and to just ify t hese
concepts not by a bar e affirmatio n of their cor responde nce with their
object, or by illusor y analogies with the experimentalism of t he natural
sciences, bur by a t heoretical reflection on the historical process of forma -
tio n of scientific concepts, and on the part icular format ion of the concepts
of Marxist theor y. It is precisely these t wo tasks which Althusser sees as
t he central, though as yet unconsolida ted achievement s of the work of
Marx himself: 'Ma rx could not possibly have become Marx except by
founding a t heory of history and a philosophy of the histor ical dist inct ion
bet ween ideology and science. >2J
In man y of its fund amental assumpt ions Althusser 's concep tion of the
'science of histor y', which he takes to have been founded by Marx, closely
resembles Levi-Str auss' conception of a struct ural ant hropology. For Levi-
Strauss social struct ures are ' entities indepe ndent of men's consciousness of
t hem (alt hough t hey m fact govern men's exrsrence), and t hus as different
from the image which men form of t hem as physical realit y is different
from our sensory percepti ons of it and our hypot heses about it.' H The
cognitive, affective and practica l capacities of t he individual are det er-
mined by systems of relat ions between caregories which are unconsciously
shared by all members of a given community. In Levi-Stra uss' account a
society is tormed by an ensembl e of such 'symbolic systems', ot which
language, marriage rules, economic relat ions, art , science and religion are
amongst the most prominent, and bet ween which it is possible to det ect
relations of correspondence, transformation and reversal.
Altho ugh levi-Strauss affirms strongly that it is structural linguisti cs
which provides the model for t he ana lysis of t hese diverse systems, he is
ta r more ambivalent about specifying any order of determi nation bet ween
them. At one point in The SOilage Mind he argues that ' Men's concept ion
of the relations bet ween nature and culture is a funct ion of modifications
of thei r own social relanons.t" Yet in t he same wor k he also suggests that
112 PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AN) THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADfTION 113
it is always the 'conceptual scheme which mediates between praxis [under-
stood as the general human capacity for act ion) and individu al practices'."
In fact, If an ulnma tely derermmant factor is to be isolated in Levi-Strauss'
work. this factor is not of a social character at all, but is rather the
'o bjective st ructure of the psyche and brain': culture must in the last resort
be reducible to nat ure. 8y cont rast, Alrhussec's theory remains resolutely
at the le..-el of social structure, and follows the traditional priorities of
Marxism in attributing ultimate determinat ion to the economic level of
society. In common with Levi-Strauss, however, Akbusser S ~ the social
format ion as a 'st ructure of struc tur es' whose functioning escapes the
consciousness of its members. Human individuals are nothing more than
t he supports or bearers of various kinds of social relations - economic,
ideological, political - whose forms cannot be dissolved back into an
original intersubiecrivit y. For bot h Althusser and Levi-Stra uss all effects
are effects of st ruct ure.
Despite these convergences, Alrhusser is highly critical of the implica-
tions of Levi-Str auss' conception of structure for the epistemological status
of histor y. lie perceives clearly that, in l evi-Strauss' scheme, ' Diachrony
is reduced to t he sequence of event s and to the effects of t his sequence of
events on the structure of t he synchronic: the histor ical then becomes t he
unexpect ed, the accidental , the factua lly unique rising or falling in t he
empty cont inuum of time for purely contingent reasons' (Re, 118). In
addition, Levi-Strauss sees societies as const it uted by a complex patt ern of
mirrorings and correspondences; t he various symbolic systems ' aim to
express certain aspects of physical and social realit y, and to an even greater
extent, the relations whi ch these t wo types of reality mainta in with each
ot her and which the symbolic systems t hemselves maintain wit h each
ot her'." In this respect, argues Althusser, the intelligibilit y of symbolic
systems does not greatly differ from that of t he Hegelian 'expressive total -
it y', each part of which serves to summarize all the others: in both cases
essence is revealed by a synchronic section which erases the real diversity
of practices. In Althu sscr's account the converse error is committed by
cert ain historians associated with the Annales school. Although t he notion
of diverse ' historical times' introduced by authors such as Braudel, l...abrousse
and Febvre represents an advance over the expressive totalit ies of Hegelian
historiograph y, the Annales authors tend merely to affirm the existence of
different temporal strata and rhythms - the political, the economic, the
geographical - wit hout attempting to esta blish any systemati c links be-
tween them. Faced wit h t hese t wo opposing tendencies, Althusser's tas k is
to elaborate a t heor yof history .....hich will avoid the spurious homogeneity
of the Hegelian conception, without allowing t he historical past to become
fragmented into a pluralit y of unrelated diachr onies,
The Althusserian solution to this problem depends on a ret urn to one
of the fundamental principles of Marxist theory: a periodization of t he
history of human societies in terms of modes of producti on. t.rienne Balibar ,
Alt husser's collaborator in Reading Capftal, goes so far as to suggest that
' Marx's construction of the cent ral concept of the "mode of production"
has t he funct ion of an epistemological break ..... ith respect to the whole
trad ition of the philosophy of history' (Re, 210). The argument behind
this affirmat ion, revealed by Alt husser in the course of an analysis of Hegel
(Re., 93-97), is tha t there exists a close relation between concept ions of
the social formation and conceptions of historical time: in Hegel's case the
expressive total ity of any given moment is complemented by the teleologi-
cal cont inuity of history as the development of Spirit. If this is correct , then
t he as-yer-enconst rucred Mar xist concept of histori cal time will depend
upon the elucidat ion of Mar x's t heory of social format ions as governed by
their modes of production, which is implicit in the analys is of the capital ist
mode of production to be found in Capit al. ln this way a Marxist t heory
of history can be recovered from the work of Marx's scient ific maturity,
avoiding a reliance on earlier texts in ..... hich Marx himself appears to
equivocate over the relation bet ween struct ure and agency.
Accordmg to Althusser, the drsnngurshrng feat ure of t he Marxrsr con-
ception of t he social ..... hole is its refusal to reduce real complexity to some
underlying principle of unit y, wberber t his principle be envisaged as spir-
rtual or marenal . He suggests t hat two forms of such a reduction, which
he refers to by t he generic title of ' historicism', have been active in the
Marxist tr aditi on itself. One of t hese, originat ing in t he Marxism of t he
Second International, envisages an automatic progress of civilization based
on the dialectic of forces and relations of production, and tends politically
towards reformism. The ot her, associated with the Hegelian Marxism of
t he young Lukacs, ident ifies Marxi st philosophy with t he self-consciousness
of the proletariat, which it sees as being potent ially the universal subject-
object of history, and implies an ultra-leftism. Both t hese forms achieve an
all-roo-Iireral inversion of t he Hegelian vision of history as t he progressive
unfolding of Spirit, while failing to displace the core of Hegel's philosophy:
the very notion of a subject of histor y. By cont rast, Althusser affirms that
a social formation must be viewed as a 'decenrred totality' in which each
instance - the economic, the political and t he ideological being t he initial
three which Alt husscr distinguishes - possesses its own autonomy and
effectivity. This conception implies that each instance or pract ice is deter-
mined not simply by the economic level, as in reducnonisr Marxism, but
is 'overdetermined' by the totality of ether practices, which it also in part
reciprocall y determines. However, Althusser is careful not to allow this
conception of the social forma tion to result in an equality of interaction
bet ween all instances. He affirms that in each social formati on there is one
instance which is dominant. This need not necessarily be the economic -
under feudalism, for example, it is politics which is in command But it is
the mode of produerion which ultimatel y determines which level is to be
114 PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 115
dominant. Thus the tr aditional Marxi st affirmat ion of the causal primacy
of the forces and relat ions of production should be taken to mean that it
is the economic ' base' which distribut es effectivity between the instances
of a social formation.
Undoubtedly, in t he years immediately following the publicat ion of For Marx
and Reading Capital, Alth usser's reformulation of the central concepts of
Marxist theory, alt hough port rayed by its oppo nents as dogmatic and
mechan ist ic, was primar ily experienced as a liberalizati on and a liberati on.
The introduction of the concept of 'relative autonomy' meant that it was
no longer necessary to tr ace the form and function of each superst ructural
instance back to its determi nat ion by the economy. Art. politics, science,
ideology: each had its own parti cular immanent struct ure and temporal
rhythm which merited an independent and unrrammelled investigation.
Significantly, conservative critics of Althusser within t he French Commu-
nist Partyaccused him of having weakened the explanatory basis of Mar xism
by lapsing into an incoherent pluralism. Both those for and against Althusser,
however. tended to overlook that Alth usser's liberalizat ion' was accom-
panied by a highly inflexible and apriorist ic conception of adequate his-
t orical expl anation. In Althusser's view t he causal and narrative sequences
of tr aditional historiography have no scient ific validity: a historical event
has not been trul y 'explained' until it has been identi fied as an overdeter-
mined effect of the complex st ructure of a social formation. In this area
the concept of 'deter minat ion in t he last instance' has a vital role to play,
since it is only this concept which ' makes it possible to escape the arbitrary
relativism of obser vable displacements by giving these displacement s t he
necessity of a function' (Re, 98). But since the notion of 'str uctural causality'
on which this necessity relies has yet to be elaborat ed, judged by Althusser's
criterion no historiogra phy so far produced can be considered to have
crossed t he threshold of scienrificiry. Alrhusser places himself in a posit ion
no less absurd than t hat of t hose English-speaking philosophers who have
insisted that historical explanat ion shou ld conform to the 'covering-law'
model appropriate to an inducrivisr concept ion of the natural sciences,
despite the fact t hat t he pract ice of historians shows no tendency wha tever
to approximate to t his model," Althu sser's similar attempt in Reading Cap-
ital t o force all scient ific knowledge of history into a preconceived mould
leads to a number of equally per verse conclusions. He suggests, for example,
t hat the apparently ' historical' pages of Capital dealing with ' primitive
accumulatio n', the struggle for the reduction of the working day, t he tran-
sit ion from manufacture to industr y, are merely raw mat erials for a histor y,
since t hese events are not subsumed under formal laws of str ucture. On t he
other hand, the theoretical sections of Capital are more tr uly ' historical'
since t hey constr uct t he t heory of one region of the science of history.
Indeed, Althusser argues t hat 'The only difference that can be estab lished
between the theory of political economy and the theory of history lies in
t he fact t hat economics considers only one instance of the social totalit y,
whereas histor y considers the totality as a whole' (RC, 109).
It will be clear that Ahh usser's attempt t o rescue historical knowledge
from its complicity with phenomenology, whi le avoiding its demot ion at
t he hands of struct ural ism, concedes far too many str ucturalist assump-
tions. Perhaps the most crucial of these is the assumption that the elements
of a social whole exist in a relat ion of mut ual support, and therefore form
an autonomous and self-per petuat ing system, for it is this which underlies
Althusser's decision to take modes of production as the fundamental forms
of historical being. In Structural Ant hropology Levi-Str auss argues that
kinship systems could not be ' t he arbitr ar y product of a convergence of
several heterogeneous institutions . . . , yet nevert heless funct ion with some
son of regularit y and effectiveness'." Accordingly, kinship practices should
not each be traced back t o a disparate source, but rat her integrated within
a synchronic system. Similarly, Ahhusser argues in Reading Capital that
knowledge of a society must be 'obtained exclusively from the t heory of
t he "body", i.e., of the contemporary structure of societ)'. wit hout its
genesis interve ning in any way whatsoever' (RC, 65). In neither case is any
attempt made to just ify the belief that all t he components of a social
system must be necessary and functional element s of t hat system. Althu sser
simply affirms t hat ' when we speak of the "exist ing conditions" of t he
wh ol e. we are speaking of it s "condit ions of existence " , 30 t her eby
eliminating the possibility of variations within a structure. Indeed, Althusser's
concept of 'structural causa lity'. of the struct ure as only being 'present in
its effects', implies that - correctl y read - these variations simply are the
st ructure.
By int roducing t his concept of 'st ructura l causalit y', Althu sser hopes to
distance his theory bot h from the posit ion of Levi-Strauss, in which the
social system is seen as a cont ingent realization of a set of necessary
relat ions, and from t he position of Engels - criticized in For Marx - in which
the necessit y of histor ical events is the product of an interact ion of micro-
scopic contingencies. Ahhusser considers t hat if a science of history is t o
be possible. its object must be governed by a strict necessity at all levels
of its t heorizat ion. Yet. in thin king t his necessit y. Althusser does not take
the usual view that each part icular histor ical configurat ion must be seen as
determined by a preceding configurat ion, and so on in an open-ended
sequence. Rat her, both Alt husser and Balibar tend in Reading Capital
towar ds a Spinozlsr view of science - although t his is never made fully
explicit - accordi ng to which all knowledge of necessity must be logico-
deductive in form. ' All t heor y is synchronic', suggests Bahbar , ' in so far as
it expounds a systematic set of conceptual determi nations' (R'C, 298) . The
Spinozist distinction bet ween t he random sequence of ideas produced in
the mind by the impact of external bodies, and t he 'concatenat ion of ideas
PETER DEWS
which rakes place accordi ng to the order of the intellect and enables the
mind to perceivethings through their firs t causes'," becomes the Althusserian
distinction between the realm of ideology and the empirical, and the rigour
of a Marxist science in which all the characteristics of a social formation
can be deduced from a 't heoretical object' , the concept of its mode of
production. Similarly, the Ahhusserian concept of 'st ructural causality' is
modelled on the relat ion which Spinola envisages between God and the
finite modifications of his attributes. That the hopelessness of this ration-
alism was not more frequently appreciated at the time may be attr ibuted
to the fact that Althusser tacitly adopts the Spinozist assumption of the
metaphysical identity of logical and causal relations. He can therefore
speak indifferently either of the deterministic mechanism of the social
formation itself, or of the logical implications of the 'theoretical object'
which corresponds to it: ' we are confronted with a system which, in its
most concrete determinations, is governed by the regularity of its "mechan-
ism", the specifications of its concept' ." It is for the same reason that
Althusser never appears unduly concerned about the relation, which many
commentators have found highly problematic, between the 'real object',
which remains in its self-identity outside thought, and the theoretical object
of Marxist science.
One of the intentions behind Ahhusser' s decision to view the autonomy
and necessity which he considers to be essential to any object of science
as characteristics of a structure, is to allay any lingering suspicion that
Marxism conceives of history as an inelectable progress towards a pre-
ordained goal. If historical events are only truly 'explained' by being
deduced from the structure of a social formation, if there is ' no history in
general. but specific structures of historicity. based in the last resort on the
specific struct ures of the different modes of production' (Re, 109). then
the totalizing ambitions of a Sarrre ace vain. Most importantly, no social
formation can be seen as automatically giving birt h to its successor, for if
it is axiomatic that a mode of production is a self-reproducing str uct ure,
then the dissolution of that structure must a be process of a 'completely
different kind' (R'C, 274). Yet this critique of teleology overshoots the
mark, For if modes of production are the fundamental forms of historicity.
there can be no 'historical time' in which the transition from one mode of
production to anot her takes place, In Reading Capital Balibar attempts
a solution to this problem by introducing what he terms 'forms of tran-
sition': 'manufacture', for example, may be considered as a form of transi-
tion between feudalism and capitalism Yet since theseforms are themselves
considered by Balibar to be 'temporary' modes of product ion, this 'solu-
tion' leads only to an infinite regress. Thus one of the ironies of Ahhusser's
theory of history is that it ends by reproducing that division between a
synchronic necessity and an untheorizable contingency which he had origin-
ally criticized in Levi-Strauss.
STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOlOGICAL TRADITION 117
In trad itional empiricist theories of knowledge, objectivity is ultimately
guaranteed by the possibility of a - more or less complex - reduction of
theoretical statements to statements abou t the experience of a perceiving
subject, which are considered to form a secure episremic base-line. How-
ever, Althusser follows the structu ralist lead in affirming the socially rela-
tive and symbolicallydetermined status of 'immediate' experience. He argues
that ' Without a critique of the immediate concepts in which every epoch
thinks the histor y it lives, we shall remain on the threshold of a true
knowledge of histor y, and a prisoner of the illusions it produces in the men
who live it.' }} As a result he is obliged to follow the Levi-Straussian dict um
that 'in order to attain the real. one must first repudiate lived experience. , }4
Yet. unlike Levi-Strauss, he is aware that the affirmation of this principle
raises many epistemological problems of its own; in particular, that an
alternative account of the objectivity of scientific knowledge is required.
One of the major resources to which Ahhusser turns in order to solve
this problem is the work of the French school of historical epistemology,
most eminently represented by Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher princi-
pally concerned with the physical sciences and wit h the theory of the
imagination, and by Georges Canguilhem, an histor ian and philosopher of
the life sciences who owes cert ain fundamental assumptions to Bachelard.
This recourse was entirely in accord with the temper of the 1960s, for in
Bachelard's work. produced at a time when phenomenology and existen-
tialism were the dominant currents within French philosophy, and the
prestige of the natural sciences at a low ebb, it is possible to find a highly
developed critique of empiricist and phenomenological theories of knowl-
edge. Unlike its structuralist successors, however. Bachelard's critique of
phenomenology is ultimately based on a philosophy of the human mind.
which he sees as marked by a fundamental dualuy, divided between a
'nocturnal' facet which constantly inclines towards reverie and the arche-
types of the unconscious, and a 'diurnal' facet which srrives towards in-
creasing abstraction and the rat ional application of concepts. In Bacbelard's
view our everyday experience (l'experiencecommune. I'experiencevulgairel
is inevitably imbued with affective colouri ngs, and haunt ed by the values
and libidinal investments of the unconscious. More generally. the mind
shows a spontaneous tendency towards both exaggerated part icularit y
and facile generalization which for m an obstacle to the development of a
scientific knowledge of phenomena. In consequence, such knowledge can
only be initiated by an 'epistemological break' (rupture epistemologique)
with the assumptions and givens of the everyday world, and a purging of
the sensuous - and even animistic - overtones which di ng to the concepts
of pre-scientific theor y, For Bachelard this break is not simply a regrena bly
necessary preliminar y to the real process of development of scientific
knowledge, but is an essential moment of its constitution. No statement
which appears 'flatly and evidently tr ue' can claim the name of science:
'"
PETER DEWS STRUCTlJRAUSM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION ".
self-evidence should rather be a cause for suspicion. For it is only in
correcting a pr evious error tha t knowledge ident ifies it self as such. ' The
essence of reflect ion', states Bachelard, ' is to unders tand tha t one had not
unders rcod.:"
Accordingly, the gravamen of Bachelard ' s crit ique is t hat phenomenol-
ogy rests complacently wit hin the orbit at immediate experie nce, attached
t o the misleading axiom tha t ' t he primit ive is always the fundamenta l.' In
doing so, it remains prey to precisely tha t play of imaginary investment s
which it is t he task a t science to recogn ize and suppress. Furthermore,
phenomenology encloses itself within an out moded cognit ive indi..idual-
ism. It fails to tak e account of the fact that t he elaborati on of knowledge
can only be a collective process, that t he experience of the individual cannot
be considered as unimpeachable, but must be laid open to the test ing of
the ' labourers of the proof ' , the community of scient ist s engaged in en-
qulry. Free of th is collect ive constraint, the phenomenologist s can simpl y
indulge 'the facile convictions of a soul illumina ted only by its inti mate
exper ience' cv In a striking ant icipat ion of Levi-St rau ss, Bachelar d suggests
t hat the phenomenologist must ' end by describing a personal vision of the
worl d as if he had nai vely discovered the meaning of t he whole universe' ."
Unlike Levi-St rauss, however, Bachelard does not consider th e domain of
science t o be automatically protected from such da ngers. Even her e a
constant guard must be mounted to prevent the purified ratio nality of the
concept from sliding back towards the reverie of t he image. Th e ' psycho-
analysis of objective knowledge' whi ch Bacbelard began to develop as a
result of his investi gations into th e imaginary explanat ions of pre-science,
is int ended to aid the detection and neutralization of unconscious int ru-
sions into the field of scient ific rationalit y.
These views lead Bachelard towards a dist inctive account of the object
of scientific knowledge and t he natu re of scientific tr uth. Since he deni es
tha t scient ific know ledge can be seen as an ext ension or induct ive gener-
alization of 'commo n sense' or everyday ex perience, Bachelard is obliged
to arg ue t hat the ob ject of science is not discovered, but is rather ' con-
structed' by a syst em of concepts, whose reference to sense-experience
becomes incr easingly tenuous. At the same t ime, since he tends to idemi fy
immediate experience wit h the 'r eal', Bachelar d does not assume t hat such
a system of concepts corresponds t o some deeper realit y underl ying
appearances." Alread y in his doctoral t hesis of 1928 he had dismissed as
an ' epistemological monstrosity' the ' idea of a coi ncidence between thought
and reality, of an adequation betwee n th eor y and expe rience' ." Rather, the
truth of science is embodied only in the cons tant suscepnbiluy of scient ific
theories t o rectification and adjustment in the light of furt her evidence, a nd
in the increasing coherence and comprehensi veness of their fundamental
concepts which t his brings about. This process is not simply one of minor
correction within a broad accumulat ion of knowledge. For major scientific
advances can provoke shock-waves which reach down to the very [nun da-
t ions of scient ific method. Thus, even aft er the initial break with the Jived
world, the history of science conti nues to reveal significant epistemological
discontinuities.
In his discussions of Marx' s theoret ical development , Alt husser makes
crucial use of the Bacbelard ian concept of an 'epistemological break', for
it is t his concept which allows him to discredit Hegelian and existent ialist
readings of Marx, by arguing tha t t he central texts on which these read-
ings are based - above all the Economi c and Philosophical Manuscript s of
1844 - must be seen as belongi ng to a ' pre-scientif ic' phase of Marx's
wo rk. Marx' s earl y texts are dominated by Hegelian and Feuerbachian
modes of thought, in which human beings are seen as the unconscious, and
therefore 'ali enated" creators and movers of their own social world, and
as such ~ h e y precede t he discoveries through which Marx est abli shes his
own distinct ive theoretical terr ain. Alt husser argues tha t t he epistemological
break in Marx' s work t akes place around 1845, and is most evident in The
German IdeoioKY and t he Theses on Feuerbach. It is in these wor ks t hat
Marx begins to abandon his early ' ant hropological' assumpt ions, and to
thi nk the history of human societies in terms of an entirely new system of
con cept s: mode of prod ucti on, relat ions of produ cti on. ruling class!
oppressed class, ideology. Thi s new system of conce pts no longer leaves
any room for human agents as t he ' makers' of history: Marx decisively
abandons the 'obviousness' of t he belief of bourgeoi s humanism that ' t he
actors of history are the authors of its text, th e subjects of its producti on '.
By using th e term ' epist emological br eak' to describe this process, Althusser
Stresses that the later 'scient ific' Marx cannot be seen as a development or
_ in Hegelian terms - as the 't ruth' of the young Marx. The concepts of
'a lienatio n', ' species-being', ' praxis' , cannot be simpl y amalgamated wit h
the t heoretical system of a work such as Capit al: t hey belong to a different
' problemat ic' .
It is this last term which Alehusser employs to descri be: the solidar ity of
t he fundamental concepts of a theory, and their pr iorit y over it s supposedly
empirical engagement s. The term is rarely used in Bachelard, but in principle
is clearl y present thr oughout his work. In The Philosophy of No, for
example. he argu es t hat t he result s of experiment and observation in t he
physical sciences can have no significance unless they are placed within a
specific theore tical framework, since it is only a structure of attit udes and
expectations whi ch can cause the scientist to look and examine, rath er than
simply see. In Reading Capital Althu sser develops this ar gument into a
general critique of th eories of knowledge, founded on the metaphor of
vision, which assume the possibilit y of an unfettered encounter between
subj ect and object. He points t o 'a fact peculiar to the very existence of
a science: it can only pose problems on th e t errain and within the hor izon
of a definite theoretical structu re, its problematic, which const itutes its
120 PETER DfWS
STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 121
absolute and definite cond it ion of possibilit y' (Re, 24 ~ The failure to not e
cert ain facts within a particular scient ific t heory is not the result of a
fort uitous oversight, for within any problema tic there is ' au organ ic link
bindi ng the invisible to t he visible' (RC, 24). Within this general parall elism,
however t here is one major difference between Althusser and Bachel ard.
For Bach elard a problematic, as a n orga nization uf per tinent quest ions, is
a sign of t he maturity of a science, of a capacity to narrow and direct
attention, to be cont rasted with the vague spontaneity of t he untutored
mind Furt hermore, there cannot be a theory of this rnind, uf t he native
imagina t ion: ' t he image', claims Bachelard , 'can only be st udied by means
of the image, in dreaming images such as t hey assemble in reverie. It is
non sense to claim t o stud y the imaginat ion obiecrively.t" For Althusser, to
abopr t hese assumpt ions would be to remai n tr ibutary to t he h u m a n ~ s m
which Marx has theoret ically discredited He arg ues that the epistemological
br eak does not consist in a leap fro m the spontaneous to t he orga nized,
from nat ure to cult ur e, but rather in a shift from one syste m of conce pts
to another: from an ' ideological pr oblemat ic' t o t he pr oblematic of a science.
Th is is not pri marily a passage f rom incoherence to coherence, for an
ideology ma y offe r a highly systema t ic view of the world. The cent ral dis-
tinct ion bet ween ideology and science is that the pr obl emat ic of the former
is prescribed by pr actical and social determinat ions of which it cannot be
conscious, while t he problemati c of a science makes possible an autonomous
development in accorda nce with an immanent criterion of t ruth. In t he
case of Marxism there is an additional distinction, however. The epistemo-
logical break not only reveals the pre-history of a science as er roneous, it
makes possible an explanatory account of that er ror: precisely a 't heory of
ideology',
On t he basis of t his account, Althusse r is abl e to laun ch a fur ther attack
on tha t broad current within t he Marxist t radition to which he gives t he
titl e 'histo ricism'. As we have already seen, histo ricism tends to reduce th e
str uct ured complexity of the social formati on to some simple unifying
principle, But it can now be perceived that , in the particular domain of
epistemolo gy, t he charact erist ic fault of historicism is to possess no rigor -
ous concept ion of the break bet ween science and ideology. In its cent ral
Hegelian for m - to be found in Lukacs or Gramsci - historicism affirms
that the cognitive validity of theor y cannot be assessed independent ly of its
role in ex pressing the wor ld-view of cert ain social forces at a particular
epoch. Marxism tends t o be viewed as simply t he most recent and t he most
universal of a series of philosophies which have st ructu red human thought
and act ion throughout history. Thus historicism places kno wledge in
dependency upon a form of historical realit y which is considered to be more
f undamental, thereby impugn ing it s auto nomy and (by implication) its
aut hority. Precisely because he places such empha sis on the independence
of Marxist theory, Althusser considers the status attribut ed to scient ific
and philosophical knowledge to he the 'symptomatic point ' (Re, 132) at
which t he reduction of levels characteristic of historicism reveals itself. Far
from viewing Marxism as a theorizat ion of t he experience of ann-c apitalist
stru ggle, Althusser considers that the only possible relation bet ween t heor y
and politics - alr eady indicat ed in his earl y essay on Monresquieu - is ' t he
correct ion of erra nt consc iousness by well-founded science' ."
In his discussions of t he theor y of science and of the general theory of
histo ry in Reading Capital, th ere is one corp us at historical research to
which Alt husser refers wit h unwavering approval. This is t he work of
Michel Foucaul t. The innovator y st udies produced by Foucault of t he
t ransfor mat ion of medical and psychiat ric discourses in t he west - of t he
historicit y of our conceptions of mind and body - are taken by Alth usser
to be exemplary in their dismantling of cont inuist accounts of the hist ory
of science, and t heir invest igat ion of t he ' paradoxical logic of t he condit-
ions of product ion of knowledges' (Re, 45). Foucault shows how t he 'self-
evidence' of the gaze of clinical medicine, or of the percepti on of madness
as a malady of the mind, is the result of a complex overla pping of medical,
legal, religious, et hical and polit ical practices, which are themsel ves deter-
mined by the economic, pol itical and ideological str uctu res of a parti cular
epoc h, In this respect Foucault 's work not only offers a model for t hat
' t heory of the history of the produ ct ion of knowledges' which the earlier
Alt husser takes to be the task of Mar xist philosophy; it teaches a gener al
lesson conce rning t he st ructure of a historical time which cannot be
reduced ro the ' ideological' categories of expr essive simultane ity or teleolog-
ical succession.
Althusser was not mistaken in identif ying a convergence between his
own int erests and t hose of his former pupil during t he 1960s. For the
historical analyses of scient ific discourse, or ' archaeologies' , which Foucault
produced at that period ar e clearl y indebted to t he t rad ition of histori cal
epistemology which is also cent ral to Althusser's work. Indeed, from the
point of view of Alth usserianism, Foucault tended to be seen as simply the
inheritor and developer of t his t radit ion. As late as 1971 Dominique Lecourr,
a follower of Alt husser who has specialized in epistemology, could suggest
that Bachelard, Cang uilhem and Foucault belonged to a common current
of ' ant i-posit ivism' (understood as the reject ion of any general theory of
scient ific met hod) and 'ami-evolut ionism' (understood as the denial of any
umlinear growt h of knowl edge) in t he philosoph y of science." Foucault and
the Alth usserians diverged, however, wit h regard to their predominant
allegiances wit hin this tr adit ion. Alrhusser' s cent ral interest was in the
theory of epistemological discont inuity developed by Bachelard, a theor y
which could be used to re-per iodi ze Marx's work and to re-est ablish t he
sciennficity of Marxism. Alt hough, during the 1960s, Foucault placed an
equal - if not st ro nger - emphas is on discont inuit ies in the development
122
PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 123
of knowledge, his work is much closer to the studies in the history of the
life sciences produced by Georges Canguilhem, in which the concerns of
historiography tend to predominate over those of pure epistemology.
Furthermore, whereas Bachelard rends to define the mat rix from which
science emerges in terms of an atemporal psychology of the unconsc ious,
Canguilhem is far more int erest ed in the social relativity and normative
foundat ions of certai n basic biological concepts, and even allows that the
life sciences may be permanently dependent on cert ain figurat ive modes of
expression. often of a polmcal or Ideological ongm. Placed in this lineage,
Foucault can be seenas once more shiftingthe focus of attention, thistime
from the 'life' to the ' human sciences' , and as extending the consideration
of ideological factor s to include the social and insti t ut ional frameworks
wit hin which t hese sciences have emerged.
The keystone of this tradition as a whole is the assumption that knowl -
edge can only be adequately understood if studied in its historical devel-
opment, rat her t han considered as the product of an encounter between
empi rical realit y and certa in immutable faculties of the mind. Ultimatel y,
t he influence of this assumption in f rance must be traced back to Comre,
who - in the first lesson of the Core-s de philosophi e positive - debunks
the ' psychological method ' ('t he so-called st udy of t he mind by the mind
is a pure illusion' ) and argues t hat the task of positive philosophy is to
t race ' the course actuall y followed by the human mind in action, throug h
t he examinat ion of the methods really employed to obtain the exact
knowledge that it has already acquired'." Comte's determinat ion to take
history seriously also enta ils an appreciation of t he fact t hat ' in order to
devote itself to observat ion the mind needs some kind of theory'," an insight
which will remain centra l to t he tradition as renewed by Bachelard and
tr ansmitted to t he epistemology of t he 1960s. However, the way in which
t his priority of theory over experience is presented by Althusser and Foucault
differs widely. In Alt husser's work the critique at empiricist t heories of
know ledge takes the form of a theoretical debate, centred on t he concept
. of a scientific problematic. In Foucault's writ ings, by contrast, one rarely
discovers explicit philosophi cal argument; rat her, his phi losophi cal posit-
ions emerge from a skein of nar rative whose ostens ible concern may be
more with polit ical and social trans format ions tha n wit h t he t heory of t he
sciences. Thi s is a technique which Foucault derives from Nietzsche, with
whom he shares a profound suspicion of the traditional discourse of philos-
ophy. Like Nietzsche , he is in search of a novel mode of expression which
will evade absorption by 't he int eriorit y of our philosophical reflexion',
wit hout lapsing int o 'the positivity of our knowledge'. "
The Birth of the Clinic, the first of Foucault 's works to be written in the
shadow of structuralism, offers a clear example of this obl ique procedur e.
Apparentl y, Foucault is concerned to analyse certa in transformations
which took place in medical discourse at the end of t he eight eent h and t he
beginning of the nineteenth centuries, and their relation to the social and
political upheavals of t he French Revolut ion. But The Birth of the Clinic
may al so be read as a cr itique of phenomenological accounts of knowl-
edge. In his later work Merleau-Ponry had attempted to out line what he
referred to as a 'genealogy of t ruth': he wished to show how discursive
knowledge must, at some ultimate point , be anchored in a revelation of
being which is prior even to the division between subject and object. Down
to the very headings of its chapters (voir, savoir, l'inuisible visible), The Birth
of the Ctmic offers a subtly inverted echo of Merleau-Ponry's positions. In
place of a ' genealogy of t rut h', Foucault proposes an 'archaeology of the
gaze' which will show how ' immediate percept ion' must be seen as a com-
plex end-product rat her than as a point of departure. Hi s historical analysis
shows that the suppos edly pristine look with which clinical medicine
cont emplates t he body of the diseased pat ient is in fact the result of the
congelati on of a complex set of procedu res of observati on and registra tion,
institut ional rules and forms of conceptualizat ion; while his description of
the faith of t he init iators of cli nical medicine - ' The gaze will be fulfilled
in its own truth and will have access to the trut h of t hings it it rests on
them in silence, if everyt hing keeps silent around what it sees'" - offers a
sly allusion to the nai vete of phenomenology, its belief in the possibilit y of
access to a pure, pre-linguist ic level of exper ience. Thus, despite striking
differences in mode of presentation, the positions of Foucault and Althusser
in the early 1960s appear to be parall el. In both cases a critique of the
tra ditional metaphor of knowledge as a form of vision leads to a concept ion
of t he relat ions between the perceived and the unperce ived as linguistically
determined. Althusser's ' problemat ic' seems to reappear in what Foucault
terms ' t he original distr ibut ion of the visible and invisible insofar as it is
linked with t he division between what is stated and what remains unsaid' . 47
In bot h Althusser and Foucault, however, this argument goes a crucial
step beyond anything to be found in Bachelar d, or in Canguilhem. There
can be no contesting t hat Bachelard's philosophy st resses the primacy of
theory over experience: he often refers to his posit ion as a 'rationalism' -
although an 'open rati onalism' - in which t he increasing conceptua l coher-
ence and mathematization of t heory, rather than an accumulation of
empirical detail, is seen as t he true mark of scientific advance, and he
tir elessly crit icizes philosophies which view scient ific knowledge as 't he
pleonasm of experience' ." Yet Bache1ard never suggests t hat theori es
uniquel y determine the facts to which t hey are applied, or t hat exper ience
and experiment play no role in the construction of theor y. And while he
crit icizes t he abst ract oppos it ion berweerr subject and object which he sees
as charact eristic of trad itional metaphysics, t his is not to red uce bot h
subject and object to 'effects' of the determinism of conceptual systems,
bur in order to explore a more subtle dialectic between ' t heory' and
'experiment' as it is man ifested in the actu al pract ice of the sciences. For
, 2< PETER DEWS
STRUCTURAUSM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRAOOtON 125
Bachelard the cask of an adequate philosophy of science is to steer a
delicate course bet ween realism and rationalism, rather than clinging blindly
to one or ot her at these alternatives. Indeed, his conception of an 'open
rat ionalism' consists precisely in the readin ess of t he scientist ro revise his
t heories in t he light of new evidence. 'When it is experimentation which
brings the first message of a new phenomenon', states Bacbelard, ' the
t heoretician ceaselessly modifies the reigning theory, to enabl e it to assimi-
late the new fact.' :" Nor is this adjustment limited to t he superficial and
ad hoc elements of theory. major transformat ions being attri buted purely
to conce ptual innovat ion. In the concludi ng cha pters of The Philosophy of
No Bachelard suggests that no t heoretica l principle, not even fundamental
logical principles such as t he law of identity. can be considered as immune
to revision in the light of novel experimental evidence.
In Alehusser' s work. however, the possibility of a ' feedback' from experi-
ence to t heory is enti rely excluded. This becomes apparent in a number of
context s. Firstly, from For Marx onward, Alrhusser adopts t he metaphor
of scienti fic activi t y as a ' theoret ical pract ice', a process of pr oduct ion in
whi ch the concept s of a theor y (which he terms ' Generality II' ) operate on
a ' raw material' which consists of ideological concepts, scient ific ' facts'.
and already elaborat ed scient ific concepts (Generalit y I), in or der to pro-
duce new kno wledge (Generalit y III). This meta phor of product ion implies
that experience, which Alth usser globally equates with ' ideology'. can onl y
be a passive pr imar y mat erial which the concepts of a science must shape
and elaborate: Alrhusser speaks of ' the pr iori t y of Generalit y II (which
wo rks) over Generality I (which is worked on)' (FM, 191). Secondly. in his
discussion of the concept of a ' problematic' in Reading Capital, Althusser
describes t he problematic as constituting ' t he absolute det erminat ion of the
forms in which all problems must be posed at any given moment in the
science' (Re. 25). If t his deter mination is abso lute . however, the re can be
no possibilit y of a modifica tion of t he problematic being provoked by an
empirical discovery; indeed, the distinction bet ween the empir ical and the
t heoret ical becomes mean ingless. Lastl y, Alt husser' s neglect of the role of
empirical evidence is reinforced. by his Spinozism. In Reading Capit al he
argues t hat once sciences ha ve been ' truly consriruted and developed they
have no nero for verificati on from external practices to decla re the
kno wledges they produce to be "tr ue", i.e. to be knowledges' (RC, 59).
This is because. as we ha ve al ready seen. Alt husser envisages a science
which has successfully constitu t ed it s ' theoreti cal object' 3S operating in a
purdy logico-deducrive manner. On t his basis Alrhusser is led to argue
t hat the ex periments of the physical sciences are in some way internal to
t heir ' t heoret ical practice' , thereby rendering incomprehens ible the role and
significance of predict ion. which necessarily assumes a t heory-independent
realit y. In general. any attempt to identify correlat ions and distincti ons
bet ween t heory and expe rience is condemned by Ah husser as a lapse into
'p ragmatism' .
In Fouca ult the relation between theory and experience is similarl y pr e-
sent ed as one of unidi rectional dete rmination, alt hough in his case the
reasons for t his concept ion are co nsiderabl y wider. Althcsser' s argument
is specifically concerned with the ' t heory-laden' status of scientific facts; he
onl y touches on t he questio n of a general prior ity of language over expe ri-
ence in his implicit recourse to the Lacan ian concept of the Symbolic as the
basis for a theor y of ideology. In Foucault, however. the argument is pre-
sented f rom t he start in terms of a pr imacy of the discursive overth e 'lived' ,
of the kind bro",dl y asserted by Thus Foucau lt's den ial of
't he heaven which glitt ers t hrough t he gri d of all ast ronomies' S is less an
ex pression of his adherence to Bachelar dian epistemology, t ha n to t he kind
of viewpoint suggested by Levi-Str auss' argument t hat : ' there are no natural
phenomena in the raw. These do not exist for man except as conc ep-
t ualisations, seemingly filt ered by logical and affective norms dependent on
culture...
n
In Th e Birth of the Clinic, fur exa mple, when Fouca ult ar gues
that - at the level of his analysis - t here exists ' no dist inction bet ween
theory and experience, met hods and results; one had to read the deep
st ructu res uf visibilit y ill which IidJ dUJ gaze are bou nd toge ther by cude s
of knowledge',Sl these codes tend to be seen as merely particular embo di-
ment s of t he general codes of a cult ure. At the close of the book Foucault
suggest s that bot h the emergence of clinical medicine and the lyrical poetr y
of a Holderlin can be seen as symptoms of a new consciousness of mort alit y,
of an ' irr upt ion of finitude', which charac terizes one phase of nineteent h-
cent ury thought. In his following book. The Order of Things, Foucault
greatly expan ds this conception. arguing t hat all the discourses of a par-
t icular epoch must be seen as determined by an underlying st ruct ure which
he refers to as the epiu eme. This st ructu re, which Foucault terms an ' his-
tor ical a pr iori' , constitutes t he fundamental ordering principles of a culture.
thereby pr oviding an implicit ontology in which all its conc rete modes of
kno wledge are rooted. As a result , there can be no possibility of any par-
t icular empirical discovery disturbing th is ontology: chan ge can only come
wit h the globa l shift from one episteme to its successor. In Foucault' s ac-
count, the history of western culture since the Renaissance is divided into
th ree immense and disconnected block s.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge. t he ret rospect ive discourse on
met hod which was the last of his books of th e 1960s, Foucault greatl y
modifies this conception, unde r the guise of a corr ection of misinte rpret a-
tions of his earlier work. He now denies that the epiu eme should be viewed
as ' a form of knowled ge or type of rationality which. crossing the boundaries
of the mos t varied sciences, manifes ts the sovereign unit y of a subject , a
spirit or a penod'." If the ter m episteme is still to be used, it should be
taken to denote a fluid system of disparat e yet inte rlocking 'discursi ve
practices'. However. this lessening of the rigidity of the episteme does not
extend to an admission of a possible interaction between empirical discovery
and the theoretical structure of science. Foucault insists that the object of
120
PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 127
a science ' does not awai t in limbo the order that will free it and enable it
to become embodied in a visible and prolix objectivity' ." The task of t he
archaeology of knowledge is t o account for t he constit ut ion of such objects
' wit hout reference to the ground. t he foundat ion of things, bUI by relating
them t o t he body of rules that enable them t o form as objects of discour se
and thus constitu te the conditions of their historical appearance' , Its cen-
tr al assumpt ion is t hat 'discourse is not a slender surface of contact or
confro ntation between a realit y and a language, the int rication of a lexicon
and an experience..'ss
This exclusion of any relat ion bet ween theory and experience leads to
serious difficulties in the work of both Foucault and Althusser. In Althusser's
case t he 'symptomatic point' at which these difficulties become apparent
is in his account of the historical emergence of the Marxist 'science of
history' . For Marx and Reading Capil al t reat this emergence almost purely
as an int ellectual event , as a break from ideology t o science within the
domain of theory. This treatment is reinforced by the t heory of philosophy
which Althusser espouses in these works. He suggests that 'philosophical
revoluti ons' follow on the heels of major scient ific development s, Plat onism
aft er the discoveries of the early Greek mathemat icians, Cartesianism after
Galileo. Such revolutions may be seen as 'the "reprise" of a basic scient ific
discovery in philosophical reflection, and t he production by philosoph}' of
a new form of rationalit y' (Re , 185). Accordingly, Alrhusser's own task
will be to elucidate and for malize the new form of rat ionalit y which is
contained in a ' pract ical state' in Marx's work, to provid e the 'Th eory
(dignif ied wit h a capital leite r) of (Marx's) theoretical practice' . Such a
theory will perform a task similar to that of Bachelar d' s 'psychoanalysis of
object ive knowledge' . It will prot ect establ ished sciences from the ideolog-
ical lures which constantl y surrou nd them. expose 'scient ific ideologies'
which have ilIicidy occupied the ' continent of history' opened up by Marx,
and establish new branches of Marxist research on the correct conceptual
foundat ions. Soon after the publication of Reading Capital. however.
Alth usser began to abandon this conceptio n. And in his Element s
d'aut ocm iqve (1974) it is denounced as a ' rat ionalist' and ' theorericist'
deviation. the essence of which is the flaw characterist ic of his early work
in general: a neglect of the realit y and effectivity of the class str uggle. The
recognition of thi s effectivity poses one of the central problems of Althusser's
later wo rk. For he must do so without reducing Marxism to a theorization
of the experience of class stuggle: such a reduction would return him to
t he framework of historicism.
Althusser's answer to this problem is a new view of the natur e of
phi losophy. The role of philosoph y is still to trace a line of demar cat ion
bet ween the scienti fic and the ideological, but it no longer does so in t he
positivist guise of a 'science of the scienrificiry of the sciences' . Rather,
phil osoph y must be seen as a representat ion of ' the class str uggle in theor y'
- a political bat tlegro und on which materialist and idealist tendencies
mark out their ever-shift ing posit ions. Philosophy possesses no ' theoret ical
object' of its own. but acts as a kind of go-bet ween, representing polit ics
in t he domain of science and scientificuy in the arena of politics. To defend
t he scient ific status of Marxism, therefore, now amount s to adopting a
class position in phi losoph)", to t he issuing of 'ma terialist' theses which
may be but which are not demonstrable" as are the propositions
ot a science. Furth ermore, a shilt in philosophical position now precedes
and makes possible the emergence of a new science. since philosoph y
works by ' modifying the position of t he problems, by modifying the rela-
t ions bet ween the practices and t heir object'." On thi s basis Ahhusser
attem pts to provide an histori cally denser account of the emergence of
Marx's discoveri es. He argues t hat, on Marx's road towards historical
materialism, ' it is polit ics t hat is the determin ant de ment: the ever deeper
engagement in the political m uggles of t he proletariat'. " Marx first had
to adopt a prol etarian political position, which was then ' worked out int o
a theoretical (philosophical) position', in order to effect the displacement
on which the emergence of a science of history depended.
It is in thi s way t hat Ahhusser att empts to preserve the non-posirional iry
of science ('all scient ific discourse is by definition a subject-less discourse ,
t here is no "Subject of science" except in an ideology of science' )," while
admitting the import ance of the class str uggle and of class viewpoints, But
t his att empt cannot be consistent. For. however mediaredly, Althusser is
still obliged t o admit t he possibilit y of a knowledge which is not the
knowledge of a science. In order to found his t heor y of histor y Marx had
t o adopt 'a position from which t hese mechanisms (of class exploitation
and domi nation) become visible: the proletar ian standpoint'." Yet if the
mechanism of society is already - in a reinstatement of t hat crucial meta-
phor - visible from the standpo int of the dominated class, then Alrbusser's
whole pro ject. whose core is a defence of the priorit y and indi spensability
of Mar xist theory, begins to falter. It is as a result of thi s contra diction,
among ot hers, that Ahh usserianism rapidly faded as a political and rheo-
rerical force in France in the 1970s.
Like Althusser, dur ing the 1960s Foucault attempts to produce a t heory
in which subject and object are seen as merely effects of the field of
discourse, rat her t han as its origins or causes. JUSt as the objects of a
science are a product of the discursive patterns of that science, so 't he
subject (and its subst itutes) must be stripped of its creative t ole and ana-
lysed as a complex and variable function of discourse.:" In order t o
explain t he appearance of di scour ses, therefor e, we need no recour se to
existent ial or psychological considerations: this appearance is governed
pur ely by 'codes of knowledge', or epistemes. or ' rules of formation ' . Yet,
in making this recommendat ion, Foucault. who appears to equate the
128
PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 129
psychological subject or the transcendental subject of phenomenology with
the subject tout court , ent irely overlooks the importance of the moment of
enunciation in discourse. His position rests on the characteristic structur-
alist confusion between the 'conditions of possibility' and the causes of an
event . In isolating what - in reference to The Order of Things - he terms
the 'formal laws' which govern a domain of statements. Foucault is not
thereby enabled to explain why any part icular statement should be pro-
duced on a particul ar occasion, just as Levi-Str auss' isolat ion of a putative
grammar of mythology does not explarn specific Instances of t he produc-
tion of myth, but only the rules in accordance with which such production
must take place. Any struct ural analysis of this kind must be supplemented
by a causal explanation of the individual event."
In The Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault att empts to overcome this
problem by denying that he is seeking to achieve a formalization in the
structuralist sense. His aim is rather to describe the immanent regularities
of precisely those statements which have histor ically been produced. But
this change fails to resolve the difficulty for a number of reasons. Firstly,
Foucault himselt admits that the description ot regularities is an endless
task, since there are innumerable ways in which statements may be said to
resemble and differ from each other: no definitive ' theory' can be achieved.
Secondly, even if such a theory were possible, it would still have no explan-
atory force. Such a post hoc reconstruction would only be of use in a
hermeneutic perspective; but, since Foucault is relentlesslycritical of projects
of interpretation, thi s possibility is excluded. Thirdly, the concentrat ion on
the immanent ' rules of formation' of discourse distracts att ention from the
fact that on many occasions (for example, the generation of a science in
a climate of religious or political terror ) even the internal configuration of
discourse requires explanation in terms of 'external' factors. One may con-
clude that what Foucault sees as the cent ral question of 'archaeology' -
' for what reason did a certain statement appear and no other in its placei ""
- has been left unanswered.
Foucault' s portra yal of the objects of scientific discourse as ent irely con-
stituted by that discourse contrib utes to the same impasse. Clearly, there
is an import ant element of truth in Foucault 's claim that 'one cannot speak
of anything at any time; it is not easy to say anything new; it is not enough
for us to open our eyes, to pay attention, or to be aware, for new objects
suddenly to light up and emerge out of the ground:" This insight into the
priority of frameworks has become a commonplace of recent philosophy
of science. But, in arguing for a tot al discursive determinism, Foucault takes
a crucial step beyond both his cont emporaries in the English-speaking
world, and even such an import ant influence on his work as Georges
Canguilhem. It is true that, in La Connaissance de la vie, Canguilhem
affirms: 'theories never emerge from facts. Theories only emerge from
previous theories, often of great annquity.r" Yet he immediately goes on
to offer a vital qualification of this stat ement which reinstates the role of
empirical reference: ' Facts are merely the path, rarely direct, by which
theories emerge from each other.' In general, Canguilhem's Nietzsche-
influenced philosophy of the value of the aberrant and the exceptional
for bids any determinism of the Foucauldian variety. He speaks of: 'a
certain anteno riry of intellectual adventure over rationalization, a presump-
tuous overstepping (dtfpasseme ntj, resulting from the demands of life and
action, of what it is already necessary to know and to have verified."! For
Foucault even 'discoveries' are rule-determined.
Part of Foucault's - and of Althusser's - mistake consists in making
the not uncommon leap from the discrediting of the idea of naked. pre-
theoretical facts to the conclusion that there can be no discrepancy between
the empirical implications of a theory and the actual course of events. (This
assumption is reinforced, in Foucault's case, by a concentrat ion on the
taxonomic and descriptive - rather than the predictive - aspects of system-
atic knowledge, and in Althusser's case by his Spinozist conception of
science.) But the fact that the description of events is always relative to the
vocabular y of a particular theory, does not entail that such events must
always be consona nt with the implications of such a theory. Much recent
philosophy of science in the English-speaking world has been concerned
with precisely such discrepancies: with the tact that they continue to occur
even in well-tested' theories; with the ad hoc strategems which are devised
to disarm their implicat ions; with those moments of scient ific crisis which
are provoked by the accumulat ion of such discrepancies; and with the
problem of the point at which it becomes rational to abandon such a
contradict ion-burdened theory. In the work of Foucault and Althusser,
however, no such problems can be posed. In For Marx Althusser takes care
to stress that even pre-scient ific ideologies are coherent, unified by a
problematic, thereby excluding an intensifying consciousness of contra-
diction as a factor in the transition from one theory to anot her. Similarly,
Foucault's narratives of episremic shifts communicate little sense of crisis.
In The Orde r of Things, for example, the contemporary discoveries of
palaeontology are att ributed no role in the transition from the fixism of
Natura l History to nineteenth-century evolutionary biology. And when
Foucault does discuss a moment of scientific crisis, as in the tenth chapter
of The Birth of the Clinic, he is careful to emphasize ('the difficulty of
reaching an understanding when one was in agreement as to the facts' )
that what is at stake is a pure clash of theoretical frameworks (' two
incompatible. types of medical experience' ), and not a situation in which
one theory began to appear increasinglyinadequate in the light of another."
As the preceding discussion has indicated, theories of the coherence of
systems of scientific concepts are closely linked with theories of continuity
and discontinuity in the history of science. If each proposition of a science
130 PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRAOITJOH 131
is seen as capable of facing the tribunal of experience independentl y, then
science will be seen as a grad ual process of al terat ion and accumulat ion.
If. on t he ot her han d, the proposmons of a science are seen as so closely
interrelated that none can be changed without altering the sense of all the
others, then each theory will determine its own set of ' facts' and there will
be no common world of reference shared by different theories. Since both
Alt husser and Foucault emphasize the rigidity and solida rity of problemancs,
or epistemes; or ' regimes of discourse' , the concept of discon tinuity plays
a cent ral role in t heir respect ive accounts ot the histor y ot science, Again
the t heme may be t raced back to Bachelard, who was concerned t hrough-
out his career to expose the not ion of 'an abst ract and invariable system
of reason' which would underl ie both ' common sense' and the successive
stages of science. In con t rast to this assumpt ion, Bachelard affirms t hat
't hought is modified in its form if it is modified in its obj ect." 7The histor y
of science is characterized by ' epistemological discont inui t ies' , aft er t he
occu rrence of which a science is concerned wit h new objects, conducts its
research according to new principles, and even adopts a new logic. Th ere
can be no simple linear accumulation of tr uths.
A number of comment at ors have point ed to a similarity between t he
innovations intr oduced int o epistemology in France by Bachelard and his
successors, and a similar transformat ion of philosoph y of science in t he
English-speaki ng wo rld, initiated by the work of Kuhn. Hanson and ot hers
in the earl y 1960s.
u
In Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions the
histor y of science is seen as divided up into a succession of what he t erms
'p aradigms' , theoretica l frameworks which are discont inuous in their
backg round assumpt ions, the kinds of ent ities which they posit, and their
assessment of which phenomena call for explanat ion. For Kuhn the t rans-
forma tion between one paradigm and its successor is so comprehensive -
his favoured analogy is tha t of a Gesralt-swirch bet ween two irr econcilable
images - that he is led to arg ue: ' In so far as their only recourse to (the)
world (of their research engagemen t ) is t hr ough what t hey see and do. we
ma y want to say t hat after a revolution scient ists are responding to a
different world.t" This may be compared with Bachelard's affirmation
t ha t: ' cont emporary science, Ininviting (the mind] to a new form of thought.
conquers for it a new t ype of representation. and hence a new world,' ?" In
bot h cases t heoret ical frameworks appal to determi ne the very nature of
realit y.
However, this con vergence is far less close than it at first In
Kuhn' s cast, at least in his earl y statements of his pos ition. t he t heory of
parad igm cha nges leads towar ds relativism, Kuhn arg ues tha t, since there
can beno paradigm-independent access to realit y, t here can beno neutral
sta ndpoint from which to access the comparat ive verisimilit ude of different
par adigms. Consequently, the history of science can no longer viewed as
the epic of cognit ive progress: ' We may .. . have to relinquish the notion.
explicit or impl icit. that changes of par adigm car ry scientists and th ose
who learn from t hem closer and closer to the truth.'?' None of th ese
conside rat ions apply to the work of Bachelard. Indeed, Bachelard's con-
cept ion of the t rans ition bet ween scient ific t heori es is a remarkabl y tr adit-
ional one. It is tr ue that he affirms an initial disjunction bet ween common
experience and the realit y posited by science (' The world in which one
thinks', states The Philosophy of No, ' is not the worl d in which one
rhinks' ]," but within the histor y of science it self Bacbelard refers far
mor e frequently to a ' rect ification' or ' recast ing' of the organizing principles
of a branch of science, rather than to a furt her process of rupt ure.
One of the comparatively rare occasions when Bachelard employs t he
term rupture epistemologique to refer to a break in scientific development.
rather than to the initial br eak with the lived world, is to be found in The
Philosophy of No, in a passage concerned with the discovery of the at omic
subs truct ure of chemical element s. Yet even here Bachelard emphasizes
t hat ' a non-Lavoisian chemist ry . . . does not overlook the former and present
usefulness of classical chemistry. It tends only to organize a more general
chemistr y, a panchemisr ry.t" In t he final chapte r of the book Bachelard
ext ends this observat ion: ' Generalizat ion by the " no" should include what
it denies. In fact. the whole rise of scient ific thought over the last century
derives f rom such dialecti cal gene ralizat ions, which envelop wha t is
negated. '?' Behind its Hegelian phraseology, this account of scient ific devel-
opment differs linl e from the traditional realist conception of earlier scient ific
theories as ' limiti ng cases' of later t heories, as approximately true or tru e
given cert ain add itional initial condit ions. Such development s may involve
a major reorganization of scient ific knowl edge - and in thi s sense there
ma y besaid to be ' discont inuit y' - but t here is no hint in Bacbelard 's work
of what English-speaking philosophers of science have come to refer to as
'incommensurability' . As a result , Bachelard has an ext remely fort hright
view of science as an enterprise of cognitive progress. In a lecture given in
1951 he affirmed: 'The temporality of science is a growt h of the number
of t rut hs, a deepening of the coherence of tr uths. The history of the sci-
ences is t he stor y of t his growt h and o f t his deepening."!
Alrhusser' s relati on to th is of Bachelard' s work is highly ambigu-
ous. On the one hand, he wishes to affirm the objectivity of science. yet
his general oppos ition to ' philosophies of history' makes him extremely
suspicious of the use of the concept of progress. in wha tever domain. Th us
in Reading Capital Alth usser suggests tha t ' t he real history of the devel-
opment of knowledge appea rs to us today' to be subject to laws qui re
diff erent to this teleologica l hope for the -religious t riumph of reason. We
are beginni ng to conceive this history as a hist ory punct uated by radical
discontmu ities .. . , profound reorgamu tlons which, If they respect the
cont inuity of the existence of the regions of knowledge (and even this is
not al ways the case). nevert heless inaugurate with their rupture th e reign
132
PETER DEWS
STRUCTURAL.I SM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 133
of a new logic, whi ch, far from being a mere development, the "trut h" or
"inversion" of the old one, literally takes its place' (Rc. However if
scient ific change does consist in one theoret ical space being subsriruted for
another, if it involves 'a transformation of the entire terrain and its enti re
horizon' (RC, 24). incommensurabilit y must follow, and wit h it relativism.
Althusser' s argument that 'every ideolog)' must be regard ed as a real whole
int ernall y unified b)' its own prob lemat ic, so that it is impossible to extract
one dement without alt ering its meaning' (FM, 62), appear s to point in the
di rection. it would be impossible to challenge ideological proposir-
Ions except by employing their terms in precisely their sense. and this
require already having accepted the problematic of the ideology in
question as a whol e. Alrhusser, however. draws back from these implicat-
ions of his own positi ons. In For Marx, for example. he speaks of the
transition from 'Generali t y l' to 'Generality Ill' in Bachela rdian terms as
the pr oduction of ' a new sciennfic generality which rejects the old one even
as it "englobes" it. tha t is, defines its relativit y and the (subordinat e) limits
of its validit y' (FM, 185). At ot her times, alt hough caref ul to substitute t he
term ' process' for that of ' progress'. Althu sser is prepared to admit an
accum ulati on of knowledge. In his 'Philosophy Course for Scient ists' he
refers to 'a double "d ialectic" ; t he total eliminat ion of "err ors" and t he
integ rat ion of earlier findings, still valid but t ransfo rmed. into the theoret-
ical system of the new insight s'." At a deeper level, Alth usser' s viewof the
emergence of Marxist science as being also the emergence of t he science
of irs own ideological pre-history indica tes a realist commitment [r elariv-
ism can have no theory of the social function of err or ); yet this commit-
ment is never reconciled with the relativist impl icati ons of many of his
own formulations.
[. . 1
Undou bted ly. one of the reasons for the failure of the Althusserian s to not e
the relat ivist impl icati on of Foucault's histori es of knowledge is that a
similar ambiguit y is deeply embedded in the work of Alrhusser himself: it
d ings t o the terms ' ob ject ivit y' and ' autonomy' which ar e central to
Alrhusser's account of science. When Althusser writes tha t ' It is not indi-
viduals who ma ke the hist or y of the sciences, but irs dialectic is realized
in and i.n t heir p: actice',n this statement may be taken as indicating
the kind of vrew of science put forwa rd in the Engl ish-speaking world in
the later wo rk of Karl Popper, For Popper, too, has attacked empiricist
th eories of knowledge and the view that t he statements of science can be
seen as symbolic o r linguistic expressions of mental states, resulting from
encounters between a subject and the world of percept ion; he has called
for an 'epistemology wit hout a knowing subiecr' ." Such an epistemology
would be based on t he 'sheer autonomy and anonymit y' of what Poppe r
terms ' t he t hird world'. the world of proposit ions. t heoreti cal systems.
1
errors and solut ions, which exists independently of the
consciousness and volit ion of huma n individuals. However, Popper' s third
world can only exist on the prc:supposit ion that in elemenrs are linked not
by causal sequ ences. but b)' cha ins of argument. whose validity can only be
assessed by reference to t he contemporary probl em-situation in the third
world, and not by recour se: to any psychological or sociological considerat -
ions . Such a view is also hint ed at by Bache1ard when, in a lecture such
as L'Actualite de l'mstoire des sciences, he argues for an autonomous
temporality of science on the basis ebae 'In rhe of the sciences -
besides t he link from cause to effect - there is established a link from
reason to consequence.t"
There ar e a num ber of point s in Alrbusser ' s work at which this appears
to be the sense of 'object ive' whic h is intended, although t his sense and t his
a:e never adequately clarified: for example, when Alt husser mys-
affir ms tha t science is not par t of the superst r ucture (Re , 133);
or insets on t he distinct ion between histor ical and dial ecti cal materialism
despite the fact that the latt er, as 't he discipline whi ch reflects on the
hiittcll Yof the: [onus of Io.ll owlaige: ami 0 11 the mechanism of their pr oduc-
tion' (R'C, 157), appea rs to be simply one region of t he former. In these
cases Alt husser seems to be groping towa rds a definition of the special
au tonomy and hiittOik ity of science as that of ' all axiological <lct ivit y, the
quest f?r tr uth' . " His reluctance to formulate thi s autonomy d earl y may
be attributed to the facr t hat such a conc eption appea rs to conced e an
unaccept able effecnviry to ideas, it seems to ignor e the rootedness of the
theoretical pra cti ce of science in determinate social and historical cond it-
ions. Thus th ere ap pears in Alt husser' s discussions of science a second
t ype of formula tion in whi ch theor et ical practice is seen as autonomous
but onl y in the sense of ' a utonomy' which is appli ed to all forms of
pra ctice within the Althusserian social formation. in Reading Capital
Alrhu sser wri tn: ' wc ha ve p<l id great aneution tu the cuucepts ill which
Mar x thinks the general co nditions of economic production . . . not only to
grasp the Marxist theory of the economic region of the capi talist mode of
but also to ascertain as far as possible the basic concept s
(product Ion. structure of a mod e of product ion. history) whose formal
e.laboration is equall y indispensable rc the Marxist theory of t he pr oduc-
[Ion of know ledge, and its histor y' (Re. 44 ). In short. what Alt husser does
is to the. of a pr ocess wit h the ' process of ob jectivity',
The epistemological independence of the development of science from the
of individual knowing subjects is conf used with the independ-
ence of social process from human consciousness and voliti on assumed by
Alrhusser's determinist social theor y, while t he ' rat ional autonomy' of science
is nor distinguished from t he 'relat ive autonomy' of an instance within the
Althusserian social format ion.
On e of the few commentators to noti ce thi s ambiguity in Alt husser wa s
' 34
PETER DEWS
STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOLOGICAL TRADITION 135
Alain Badiou, the aut hor of an influential reviewof For Marx and Reading
Capital . In this essay. 'Le (Re)commencemenr du rnateriaiisme dialecrique',"
Badiou noted a tension in Althusser's work between ' (a] philosophy of the
concept which strongly resembles an exhibition of the struc tured field of
knowledge as rnulri-rranscendenral and subjecrless' , and a Spinozist th eory
of 'causality wit hout negation' ." The first of these allows for an aut o--
nom)" of logical relati ons, but at the price of int roducing the ' dangerous'
notion of the t ransce ndenta l; while the second eliminates t ranscendence at
the cost of presenti ng scient ific statements as purd y causally determined.
Althusser is faced with t he 'difficult combination of a regional, regressive
and hist orical epistemology and a global t heory of the effects of structure' .
Th is difficulty is clearly reflected in Althus ser's chang ing position on the
stat us and natu re of Ma rxist phil osophy. In For Mar x and Reading
Capital Marxist philosophy is presented as being simply the t heory of
t heoretical for mat ions and of t heir history, yet at t he same t ime - at least
in Reading Capital - Alt husser realizes t hat this definition alone is in-
adequate, since it treats 'k nowledge as a fact, whose tr ansfor mat ions and
variati ons it treats as so many effects of the t heoretical practice which
prod uces t hem' (RC, 61). In other wor ds, a 'scienti fic' histor y of knowl-
edge, based on the Mar xist conception of t he social format ion, cannot in
it self provide t he means of dist inguishing t heoreti cal ideologies from
scient ific theories: astrology would be t reat ed with the same impartialit y as
ast ronomy. Th us what is needed, in additio n to a hist or y of knowledge,
is an account of the ' mechanism' by which the object of knowledge
prod uces the cognit ive appropriat ion of the real object, since ultimately
' the relation bet ween . . . the object of knowledge and the real object
constitutes the very existence of knowledge' (RC, 52 ). Althu sser, of course,
is uns uccessful in supplying such an account, since the descri pt ion of such
a ' mechanism' already presupposes a criterion for the identi ficat ion of
knowledges. Furt hermor e, in posing t he questi on as one of 'appropriation'
of t he real (t he not ion of correspondence is not far away ), Alrhusser not
only cancels all the da ring of his account of science as a form of produc-
tion, he also denies himself t he cent ral insight of the Bachelardian tradit-
ion: that objecti vity is not an ahisto rical relat ion, but must itself be
progressively and historically const ituted.
Althu sser's revised conception of philosophy as a kind of theorerico-
political go-between fails to ameliorate this posit ion, since Alth usser still
does not questi on t he division bet ween an ' object ive' history of science and
t he phi losophical justification of science. Rat her. philosophy becomes
simply a process of issuing t heore t ical dikt ats on t he objectivi t y of t he sci-
ences, wh ile the hist or y of the sciences is now consi gned entirely to historical
mater ialism. As late as his Essays in Self-Criticism, Althusser cont inues to
af firm the ' idealism or idealist connotations of all Epistemology' cons idered
as a speculative discou rse concerned with the furnishing of ' [usnficancns'
of science. and to suggest that ' if Epistemology is based on Histor ical
Mater ialism (t hough naturally possessing a minimum of concepts which
are its own and specify its object), then it must be placed wit hin it:
n
Thi s
viewpoint has been taken up and elaborated in wor ks by the Alt husscrian
Dominique Lecourt. In his book BacheJard: le jour et la nuit Lecourr
arg ues that Bachelard has open ed the way to 'a t heory of the history of
scient ific practice, of its cond itions (historical and mate rial) and of it s
forms'." However, Bacbelaed himself remained the victim of t he ' epist emo-
logical illusion', and cont inued to employ the tr aditional vocabulary of
t he t heory of knowledge even as he opened up new problems. He may be
read as att empti ng. in the 'specu lati ve' and ' idealist ' mode of philosophy.
to answer questions which in fact belong to ' the science of t he process of
scienti fic practice, a ca nton of histor ical mareriaiism'. "
Bot h Althu sser and Lecourr fail to recognize that their ori ginal err or lies
in the supposit ion chat discussion of the sciences must be divided bet ween
an ob jective and materialist history, and a 'speculati ve' epistemology.
Althusserianism never takes cognizance of the fact t hat - in the doma in of
t he sciences - histor y and philosophy ate complementary and intertwi ned.
that, in Canguiihem's phrase, 'wit hout relat ion to the history of t he
sciences, an epistemology would be an ent irely superfluous double of the
science of which it claimed to speak' ," while, without a philosophicall y
normati ve dimension, the history of science cannot even identify irs object.
This is th e posit ion of Bachelard, who ar gues, at th e beginning of La
Format ion de i'esprit scienti fique, that 'The epist emologist must . .. sift the
document s collected by the histori an. lie must judge t hem from the point
of view of reason, indeed fro m [he point of view of a reason which has
evclved.: " It is also t he position of Canguilhem, lucidly proposed in the
lecture which serves as an int roduct ion to his D udes d'bistoi re et de
philosophie des sciences, whe re he argues that t he relation of the history
of science to its object cannot be equated with the relation of a science to
irs object. The ob ject of a science is determined by the ensemble of verified
propositions whic h have been estab lished abo ut that object at a specific
moment. There may well be changes in this ensemble of proposit ions., but
these changes do net concern t he science itself. whose object may be
cons idered - in this sense - as non-temporal, The histoty of the sciences,
however, is conce rned precisely wit h the t ransformations of the concepts
which define the objects of the sciences. But concepts ate not objects. Since
the boun daries and transformations of a concept are always relative to a
specific inrerpretanon of that concept, the history of t he sciences cannot
itself be 'objective' in the scient ific sense: it can only be wri tte n fr om a
definite philosophical standpoint. For Canguilhem the history of the sci-
ences is not a description of discourses or practices, but 'a representation
of mean ings'."
Yet even i f these assumptions be gran ted, there still remains t he problem
13. PETER DEWS
STRUCTURALI SM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOlOGICAL TRADrTKl N 137
of the epistemological viewpoint from which the history of the sciences
should be written. In Bacbelard's work [his problem is resolved by [he
introduction of t he concep t of 'recurrence' . Bachelard assumes [hat the
only possible point from which to begin is the scientific values and arri-
tudes of the present. since to deny these values would be to deny the
ratio nality of the development of science itself. Once t his viewpoint has
been adopt ed, the mass of documentation on [he history of a science can
be divided into what is ' lapsed' and what is 'rat ified' , between those results
which must be consigned to t he pre-history of scientific kno wledge, and
those which can be integrated into t he sequence of the ' progressive forma -
tions of truth'." Thi s choice of standpoint does not imply any form of
dogmati sm, however. The relat ion between what is lapsed and what is
ratified is labil e, since such a 'recurre nt ' history of t he sciences appreciates
that the values and results on which it is based are t hemselves destined to
be replaced by unforseeabl e fut ure discoveries and developments, and
t hat therefore the history of t he sciences must be continually re-wri t ten.
Canguilhem, who ado pts the Bachelardian concept ion of recurre nce,
expresses the distinctiveness of thi s position in t he following way: 'One sees
the whole difference between recurrence, under stood as a critical judge-
ment of t he past by [he present of science, assured. precisely because it is
scient ific, of being replaced and rect ified, and the systematic and quasi-
mechanical application of a standard model of scient ific theory exercising
a kind of epistemological policing funct ion over the t heories of t he past. >90
The scientific present does not represent immutab le t rut h, but it offers the
only plausible perspect ive from which to judge t he scientific past.
[ J
Alrhusser's centra l concern is to establish the concept ual foundations of a
Marxist science of histor y, and to ensure t hat t his science is not itself
threatened with relat ivism and historicism by being portrayed as the prod-
uct of hi storical experience or histori cal forces. To achieve thi s end he
affirms an absolute disjunct ion between history as subiecnvely apprehended
and spontaneously theorized, and the 't heoretical object' of a Marxist
science of history. which is const ructed entirely in thought, according to
a ra tional necessity. This conception obliges him. at certain points. to take
his distance from Marx himself. In The German IdeoJogy, for exam ple.
Marx and Engels repeatedly affirm t hat their aim is to set out from 'real
actin men and on t he basis of their real life-process' : only in t his way can
the illusions of ideology and philosop hy beexposed. But for Alrhusser this
appeal to 'real history' and to ' real active men', to life against conscious--
ness, is itself ideological , a Feuerbachian residue in the works of t he 'epis-
remologlcal break', In For Marx he argues t ha t 'Th e cr it ique which, in the
last instance, counrerposes the abst raction it att ributes to t heory and to
science and the concrete it regards as the real itself, remains an ideological
critique, since it denies the reality of scientific practice, the validity of its
abstractions and ulnmately the reality of that theoretical "concrete" which
is knowle dge' (FM. 187). However, as we have already seen, Althusscr's
own posit ion leads to intractable problems in its attempt to construct a
purely deductive 'science' of hist ory. Later Althussenan texts acknowledge
this error . In his essay 'Sur la diaiecrique hatonque', Etienne Balibar
admits that Reading Capital, despite its critique of reductionism, had
remai ned wedded to eccnomism insofar as rhe ot her instances of t he social
t ormanon were seen as ultimately determined by the requirement s ot, and
therefore definable in terms of. the conditions of reproduction of me mode
of production. Balibar concedes that it is impossible to determine a priori
the essence of any social instance independently of its combinat ion with
other instances within a given social forma t ion. Furthermore, it is now the
social format ion, understood as a parti cular system of class struggles, which
reproduces or fails to reprod uce a given mode of production. rat her t han
it being the mode of production which defines the relat ions of a hierarchy
of subordinate instances." However. this concession to what would for-
merly have been termed 'empiricism' does not lead to any revision in the
fund ament al assumpt ions of Alt husserian epistemology. Unable to accom-
modate t he real without abandoning its own principles of sclentificity,
Althusserianism simply collapses int o inconsistency.
With Foucault the sit uat ion is quite different. Indeed. one of the deepest
principles of his work is precisely that ret urn from ' metap hysics' to real
histor y which Alt husser denounces in the Marx of The German Ideology.
In Foucau lt' s case, of cours e, the source is Nietzsche, who writes at the
beginning of Human. All-roo-Human: 'lack of historical sense is t he
hereditar y defect of all philosophers . . . Many of t hem take man automat-
ically as he has most recently been shaped by the impression of a particular
religion or even of particular political events . .. But everyt hing has be-
come; t here ar c neither eternal facts nor eterna l veriries.?" Th us. where
Alrhusser seeks to neut ralize empirical hist ory in order to make way for
the philosophi cally-accredited object of Marxist science. Foucault con-
siders that real history has already exposed the vagaries of phi losoph y. It is
for t his reason that. wher eas Althusser crit icizes t he aut hors of t he Annates
school for having inadequately theorized their object, Foucault argues in
the introducti on to The Archaeolog)' of Knowledge that the history of
disjunct temporalities and chronological series discovered by the Annales
historians has in itself exposed the illusions of tot alizing philosophies.
Foucault 's position is well summed up by a remark he makes at the end
of The Archaeology of Knowledge: 'If you recognize the rights of empirical
resea rch, some fragment of history, to challenge the transcendental
dimension, then )"OU have ceded t he main point." !
The contrast in the status of knowledge itself which t hese opposing
posit ions imply is perhaps even mote striking. Althusser app reciates t hat
131 PETER DEWS STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPISTEMOl OGICAL TRADITION 139
/
in discussing the histor y of science in terms of modes of t heoretical pro-
duction he is running a great risk. For such a history ' takes knowledges for
what tbe')1are, whet her t hey declare t hemselves knowledges or not , whether
they are ideological or scientificerc.: for know/edges. It considers them solely
as product s. as results' (Re. 61). [0 other words, the objective history of
science which Alth usser supposes possible fails to provide a normarive
cri terion for knowledge. And however much he twists and t ur ns, Althusser
cannot avoid the need for such a cri terion. In Foucault's case, however,
this is prec isel y the effect which he wishes to achieve: his aim is to treat
knowledge in an object ive, t hird-person manner as simply a form of social
pract ice like an y ot her. wit hout making an y epistemological judgement. It
is for thi s reason that, whereas BacheJard and Canguilhem t ake the scientific
present as the unavoidable vantage-point of historical episrernology, Foucault
at t empt s to distance himself from every presupposition of contemporary
science . However , this does nor mean thar Fouca ult has att ained a
philosophical neurraliry, as he himself oft en supposes. Rather, during the
1960s, he adopts a posit ion which. alrbough not identi cal with tha t of
Niet zsche - who views knowl edge as a pragmatic ' inventi on' , the prod uct
of a play of unconscious drives, biological contingencies and moral
imperatives - nevertheless has t he same effect. In describing modes of
rat ionality as det ermined by struct ures which ar e themselves hisrc rically
cont ingent. Foucault adopts the Ni erzschean view of the ' irrational' origin
of reason itself. In this wa y. even in those of Foucault's works in which
political struggl e has all but disappeared from view, the ground is being
prepared for the account of knowl edge which emerges dur ing the 1970s.
For if forms of scient ific discourse cannot be seen as accepted by subjects
on rat ional grounds, it becomes possible to construct a theory in which
such forms are imposed on subjects by t he operat ion of power. The way
is opl"n fnr a ' polit ics of truth '.
NOTES
j ean-Paul Sarrre, Between Ex istnuialism and Marxism, New left Books,
London, 1974, p. 55,
2 See Bernard Pinga ud, Int rod uction to L'Ar c 30. 1966 (special issue on Same).
3 Crit ique of Dialectical Reason, New left Books, London, 1976, p. 125.
4 Ibi d.. p. 126.
5 Ibid.
6 Cla ude Levi-St rauss, St ructural Anthropology 2, Penguin, He rmcodswcre b,
1978, p. 330.
7 Ti lt" S<Jv<Jge Mind. Wcidcnfdd and Nicolson, London, 1966, p. 262 .
8 Crit ique of Dialect ,ical Reason, p. 74.
9 Str uctu ral Anthropology 2, p. 36.
10 The Savage Mind. p . 2B .
' "
11 See 'Claude Levi-St rauss A Confrontation'. Newuft Review 62, july/August
1970.
12 Srruct ural Anrhropology, Penguin, Ha rmcndsworth, 1972, p. 2 1.
13 The Savage Mind, p_262.
J4 Du Mi el aux cend res, Librairie PIon, Pari s, 1966, p. 40 8.
15 Critique of Dia/ret ieal R,ason, p. 75.
16 Thr Savage Mind , p_262.
17 Seethe remarks on 'Stru ct ura lism a nd literary Cri t icism' in ' Answcr.; t o Some
Invest igati on s', St ruct ural Anthr opology Z. pp. 274-76.
18 Ibid.. p. 274.
19 L'Homme nu, librairie PIon, Pari s, 1968, p. 574.
20 St ruct ural Anthropology 2, p. 349.
21 L'Homme nu, p. 569.
22 ' Entrenen avec Claude Len-Strauss', in Raymond Belloue and Cat herine
Ocment , eds, Claude U t';-Strauss, Paris, 1979, p. 160.
23 Loui s Alt huS5Ct and Ene nne Balibar , Readi ng Capi t al, New Left Books,
London. 1970, p. 17, Funher references to this work will be indi cated in the
text in paren theses by the abbreviation RC, followed by a page nu mber.
24 St ruct ural Anrhropology, p. 121.
25 Thr Savage Mind, p. 117.
26 Ibid., p. 130 .
27 ' Int roduct ion 1 l'oeuvre de ,....t arcel Mauss'. i n Marcel Mauss, Soci oioRie et
ant h,opo!ogie, Paris, 1950, p. xix.
28 For a representative statement of t his position, sa: Carl G. Hempel, ' Reason s
and Covering Laws in Histori cal Explanation', in Sidney Hook, ed., Philosophy
and History: A Symposium, New York, 1963 (reprinted in Patri ck Gardiner,
Tbe Philosophy of Hi st ory, Ox ford Universit y Press, Oxford, 1974).
29 St ruct ural Ant hropology, p. 35.
30 f ur M"' ::I , Alltll lillie. LUIIJOII, 1969, " . 208. Funber refereuce, 10 this wUlk
will be indi cated in the text in parent heses by the abbreviation FM, followed
by a page number.
31 Part 2, Ptn[Wl'iit inn XVIII
32 Quot ed in Un j aeggi, Theorttiu:he Praus, Frankfurt/M., 1976, p. l OS.
33 Policiesand History: Mont esquieu, ROI4sseau, Hegel and Marx, New Left Books,
London, 1972, p. 99.
34 Trist N Tropiques, Penguin, Hannondsworth, 1976, p. 71 (trans lation mod ified).
35 Gaston Bachelard, Le No uvel esprit scientifique, Presses Universi rairesde France,
Paris, 1978, p. 178.
j 6 L' Actwitt rat lanal,ste de la physique eontemporame, Presses Umversnaues de
France, Pari s, 1951, p. 10.
37 L'Engagement rarionaliste, PressesUniversitaires de France, Pari s, 1972, p. 36.
38 Th" sta temen t requires .aqu.alific.u ion. D.Khd .ud oscillates betwee n const rue-
tivism and t he tacit assumpt ion th at scientific t heories do refer t o an under -
lying reality, But since he tends to equa te 'naive' realism with realism tout court,
ht' unable ro givr: a rhl"Orr:t iC' .:I1 stat us rn ll"i1liry.
39 Euai sur la connaissance approchee, Librairie Philosoph ique J. Vrin, Pa ris,
1928, p. 43.
40 La Poit ique de fa reverie, Presses Universitai res de France, Paris, 1960, p. 46.
14'
PETER DEWS
STRUCTURALISM AND THE FRENCH EPiSTEMOLOGteA L TRADl TKJN 141
41 Po/iti ,s and History, p. 38.
42 Sec 'Archacolog)' and Knowledge (Michel Foucault )', in Dominique Lecourt,
.. ",.1 Epistemology. New Lefc Books., London, 1975 .
43 Seanislav Andreski. ed., Essential Comt e. London. 1974, p. 32.
44 Ibid.. p. 22.
4S Michd Fouca ule, 'La du debars', Critiqw 229, 1966, p. 526.
46 Tb e Birth of tbe Cli"ic, Tavetcck, London, 1973, p. 108 .
47 Ibid., p. xii.
48 Le Rat;onalisme appliqui. Presses Universitaires de Prance, Paris, 1975 , p. 38.
49 Ibid., p. 2.
50 T he Archaeology of Knowledge. Tavistock, London, 1972, p. 191-
51 St ructural Ant hropolo gy 2, pp. 23 1-32.
52 The Birt h of the Clinic. p. 'JO.
B The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 191.
54 Ibid.. p. 45.
55 Ibid., p. 48.
56 Essays i n Self-Criticism, New Left Books, London, 1976, p. 58n.
57 Ibid., p. 168.
58 and Philosophy and Other F. ssays, New l .ch Books, London, 1971,
p. 160.
59 Essays i n Self Criticism, p. 161.
60 Lznguage. Counter-Memory, Practice, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1977, p. 138.
61 For discussion of thi s point, see Charles Taylor, 'Force et sens' , in G. B.
Madison, ed., Sens et existence, Par is, 1975.
62 ' Reponse au Cercle d'episeemologie', Cahiers pour l'analyse 9, Summer 1968,
p. 17.
63 The Archaeology o f Knowledge, pp. 44-45.
64 Georges Canguilhem, La Connaissance de ta vi e, Librairie Philosophique J.
Vein, Paris., 1965, p. 50.
65 Idi ologie er rationaliti . Librairie Philosoph ique j. Vein. Paris, 1977, p. 56.
66 The Birth of tb e O inic, p. 174.
67 Lt Noul'el esprit srient ifique, p. 56.
68 It should be not ed that meFrench term i pistimologie has a nar rower con-
not at ion than its English equivalent, being closer to the English term ' philos-
ophy of science' t han to 't heory of kno wledge' .
69 Thomas Kuhn, Tbr Structure of Rn 'Olutions, OUcago University Press.
Chicago. 1974, P. 111.
70 La Philosophie du non, Presses Universi taire:s de France, Paris, 1975, p. 121.
71 Tbr StrNCt.m: of Sciennjk Rn'Olutions., p. 170.
72 La Philosophi e dll non, p. 110.
73 Ibid., p. 65.
74 Ibid., p, 167.
75 ' L'Acruahte de l'hi seci re des sciences'. L' Engagement rationalisu , p, 139 .
76 Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of tbe Scientists and Other
Essays, Verse, Londo n. 1990. p. 122.
77 Politics and History, p. 168.
78 See Kar l Pop per, Objtll't Knowledge. Oxford Uni versity Press, Oxford, 1972,
especially chapt eR 3 and 4. Th e suggestion of an affinity bet ween Alrhusser
i
a nd Popper on this poi nt has been made, among others. by lan Hacki ng, ' Imre
Laka ros's Philosophy of Science', British Journal for tbr Philosophy of Science
:so. 1979. p. 394, and Paul Part on, "Ah husser'5 Epist emology', Radicd Philos-
ophy 19, Summer 1978, p. 8.
79 L'Engagemenr rationdisu, p. 46.
80 Georges Canguilhcm, Eludel d'histolre et de philo)opl,;r des sciences, libr airie
Philosophique 1- Vein, Paris, 1970, p. 19.
81 Critique 240, May 1967.
82 Ibid.. p. 466.
83 Essays in Self-Criricism, p. 124n.
84 Bachelard: Le jour et la nult , Grasse r, Paris, 1974, p. 95.
85 Ibi d., p. ior,
86 Etudes d'histoire et de philosop hie des sciences, p. 12.
87 La Formation de l'esprit scientifique, Librairie Philosophqu e I . Vrin, Paris,
1977. p. 17.
88 Georges Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de ri f/ext au XVlle et XV Ille
siedes, Presses Univer siraires de France, Paris, 1955, p. 158.
89 See L'Acth';te rariona/iste d e la physique comemporeine; chapter t.
90 Ideologic et ratir:maliti, p. 21.
91 Cinq etudes d u materialisme historique, Francois Maspern, Pari s, 1974, pp.
203-45. For an English version, see Etienne Balibar, 'Self Crit icism: An Answer
to Qu estions from "Theor et ical Pract ice'", Th eoretical Practice 7/8, j anuary
1973.
92 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, A11 Tt:;lt;Human, Vi, paragraph 2.
93 The Archaeology of Knowl edge, p. 203.
ALTHUSSER AND LACAN
143
6
THINKING WITH BORROWED
CONCEPTS: ALTHUSSER AND LACAN
David Macey
TIle reference to psychoanalys is, somet imes oven, sometimes covert, so
imbues the Ahhusscrian pr oject of foundi ng and elaborat ing a science of
modes of production and social forma tions tha t it app ears almost natural.
No doubt it always seemed rather less than natural to many in the French
Communist Part y, which had officially denounced psychoanalysis as a
' reactionary ideology' in 1949.
1
No significant revision of t ha t condem-
nat ion had taken place when ' Freud and Lacan' was first published in 1964
and Ahhusser's public gesture of t heor etical sympat hy for Lacan was a
courageous one. Yet the presence of psychoana lysis in Ahhusser's dis-
course does, with hindsight, begin to look distinctl y unnatural, though not
because psychoanalysis is t o be rejected as a reactionar y ideology in favour
of Pavlov. To go back to Althusser's references to Freud, Lacan and psy_
choanalysis is t o ret urn to text s which were once a familiar part of
intellect ual landscape on bot h sides of the Channel, due allowance being
made for the remarkably slow migrat ion of concepts across that st retch
of water . Going back can oft en be an unsett ling experience: the familia r
begins to look uncannily st range, natural allies to look like unna tur al
bedfellows.
In France. the mid 1960s saw the cement ing of what Michel Pecheux
nicely termed a ''' Triple Alliance" in theor y' bet ween the names o f
Ahhusser, Lacan and Saussure.! Saussure appears to have been of no great
int erest to Alrhusser himself, but the Triple Alliance was very much a
theoretical realit y. It could, on occasion, be tactically expanded to incl ude
Foucault - and especially the Foucault of Order of Things and The
Archaeology of Knowledge - and it could drift towa rds a with
a mor e generalized struct uralism, t hough Ahhusser would later admit that
his cardinal sin had been Spinozism and not st ruct uralism.J The ori gins of
the Triple Alliance are. however, t o be found in t he Rejection Front
unilaterally declar ed by Althusser in 1963.
I.
In an artic le on philosophy and the hu man sciences written in 1963,
Althusser remarks that ' Marx base d hi s theory on th e rejection of t he myth
of the " homo oeconomicus" , Freud based his theor y on the rejection of
the myth of the "homo pS)'chologicus" " addin g that Lacan ' has seen and
understood Freud's liberati ng rupt ure', " In correspondence with Lacan,
Alt busser is more expa nsive and tells the psychoanalyst: ' You are . .. the
first thinker to assume the theoret ical responsibility of giving Freud the
real concepts he deserves. . . . It was at the point where I realized thar I was
capable of giving Marx's thought .. . its theoretical form. t hat I found myself
on the t hreshold of understan ding you,'
Lacan and Althusser had, in the latte r's view, the 'same adversaries',
namely the ' pseudo- psychologists and t he other philosophers of "the
human person " and of "inrersubiect iviry" " t he 'technocrats' of st ruct ural.
ism. with their pretennons, homilies and their amat eurism, ' in short, t heir
theoret ical -impos rure', The Freudian and revoluti ons ar e analo-
gous in that their respective t heorist s were obliged to think in a ' no n-
philosoph ical form' because the historical constraints of the day had reduced
t heir thought to a 'wi ld' lsauvage) state. To that ext ent, neither revol ution
was complete, but Alt husser feels justified in prophesying its victory and
speaks of the joy of 'a reason whi ch has at last "come home" to its most
disconcerti ng and nearest objects . I prophesy: we have, largely thank s to
you, entered a period in which it is possible to be prophets in our own
count ry. I do not have the merit of running any risk in making this
eay; we now have the right to make it, as we have the means to do so m
th is country, which has at last become our5,' 5 Lacan repli ed t hat he had
read the copy of ' On the Mat erialist Dialectic' sent hi m by Alrhusser,
adding, in the characteristic tone that combines flatter y of his
a self-assurance borderi ng on arrog ance. ' I recognize my questions mit.
Preoccupied with his own batt les and with psychoanalytic politics. Lacan
did not become a majo r part icipant in the pr oject that was being tenta -
tivel y outlined by Althusser.
The Rejection From and t he subseq uent Triple Alliance had enemies in
common rat her than a shared project, and their pri mar y enemies were
humanism and eclecticism. Once more, Ahhusser' s undoub ted courage has
to be noted. The re is a real and tragic grandeur to his proclamation in
April 1965 that t he development of Marxist is 'a Com-
munists' and his claim t hat ' t he part y wants to urute theor y wit h ItS prac-
tical application." Th is, surely, was always the voice of a pr oph et crying
in the wilderness of his own land, of an int ellectual in the wilderness of
his own pan)'. Arguing t he case for theoretical ami-humanism in the PCF
was never going to be easy. This was the party which, since the Popular
Front of 1936 had insisted that the proleta riat was the rightful heir to a
national culture which was being debased by the bourgeoisie. And a major
part of that herit age was precisely the humanism of the Enlightenment. It
was also the party which, according to Althusser, had been born into a
theor et ical voi d. !
Th ere were many reaso ns, in Alrhusscr's view, t o st ress t he need for
ideological struggle and 't heoret ical formation' - not least t he ideological
effects of the wideni ng Sino-Soviet split, as reflected in the long-standing
te nsions between the 'Ita lians' (proro-Eurocommuni srs) and the 'Chi nese'
(proto-Maoists) in t he peF and its student organization. Hence t he further
'ana logy' between resistance to psychoana lytic and political ' revisionism',
Alt husser speaks o f the need t o combat 'psychoa nalytic revisionism' and
the 'fall into ideology [that] began ... with the fall of psychoanalysis into
biologism, psychologism and sociologism' ." The return to Freud and the
ret urn to Marx are, that is, bot h struggles against revisionism. One is a
st ruggle against the Marxist humanism of, say, Garaudy, the other a battle
against ' the reduction of a distinguished practice to a label suitable to the
..American way of life'" and a ' theology of enterprise' ." The per-
version in question is of course ego-psychology, or t he t heory tha t analytic
treatment should promote and strengthen a ' conflict-free' zone within the
ego. Ego-psychology is anathema to dut the ego itself
is an illusor y and alienati ng const ruct; there is no thera peutic gain to be
had in strengthening an illusory construct. The t hrust, if not the lett er, of
Althussel 'Scall ro arms deflects the dlguil)ellt "'Wdy [rom any cluucal context
and establishes a furt her analogy. At some level, he implies, the st ruggle
against psychoanalytic and theoret ical revisionism ate one and the same.
At a more banal, but no less real level, Lacan's scornful reference to t he
'American way of life' would have touched an anti -American chord in
many a French Communist (and not a few Gaullists). The allusion to a
' pact of peaceful coexistence' between psychoanalysis and psychology" -
which, as will become apparent, is probably borrowed from Georges
Canguilhem - was also highly carhected with polit ical connotations at a
time when peaceful coexistence between the 'super-powers' was regarded
in pro-Chinese circles as a prime symptom of revisionism. Political signifiers
are being used here to connote the existence of a concept ual parallel be-
tween Alt husser's Marxism and Lacan's psychoanal ysis.
At no point is t here a real attempt on t he part of the Triple Alliance to
'articulate' psychoanalysis and historical materialism, probably because it
would be doomed to failure - not least because of t he incompat ibility be-
tween t heir respective emphases on intra psychic reality and socio-economic
realit y. Balibar, for example, speaks rat her circumspectly of t he possibility
of discovering or detecting 'epistemological ana logies' between t he theo-
retical work of Marx and Freud, and explains them in terms of the similiar
'ideological sit uat ion' of the t wo t heorists.u Psychoanalysis is not a partner
in an art iculation but, rather. a provider of concepts. There is an obvious
irony at work here. Alrhusser describes Freud as having been forced to
t hink with impor ted concep ts. with ' concepts borrowed from the
thermodymamic physics then' domin ant " ! (t hereby avoiding t he difficult
issue of whet her or not Freud's reference to thermodynamic physics is a
metaphor, a borrowed conceptual framework, or an integral part of his
descriptions of the libido and t he primary processes). and then borrows
psychoanalytic concepts for a variety of purposes.
When allied wit h Mao' s essay On Con tradi ction (1937), psychoanalysis
supplies t he concept of overderermination, originally elaborated in The
Interpret ation of Dreams to describe the manner in which every element
of t he dream-content is expressed many times in the dream-thoughts. It
provides t he protocols for the pract ice of symptomatic reading. modelled
on the manne r in which Marx reads t he text s of classical polit ical economy,
exposing t he second text which exists in their slips and silences, and repro-
duced in the reading that allows Alt husser to detect t he epistemological
break divorcing the mat ure Marx from the young humanist of the 1844
Manuscripts.H The model is t he suspended or evenly-poised attention with
which the analyst listens to his or her analysand. refusing to reject or
privilege any verbalizat ion, just as the analysand follows the fundamental
rule of saying all and omitt ing nothing. I laving had years of personal
experience of analysis, Althusset was well awa re of just what the analytic
situation involved and, as if to forestall the obvious objection that analysts
listen rather than read, he again al gut-S ill terms of tacit all."logit-s: since
Freud, we have begun to understand what is meant by speaking; since
Marx we have begun to suspect what reading means." In a slightly more
mysterious way. psychoanalysis provides the raw mater ials foe the con-
st ruction of the idea of metonymic or st ruct ural causality, which describes
the effects of a structure on its component element s. Here, the import
prlK:ess is less d ear than it might be; the reader tends to be: referred by
Althusser to Jacques-Alain Miller," and thence to Lacan.
More conspicuously, psychoanalysis will feed into t he theory of ideol-
ogy. d",ssic."lIy rhe most difficult area fOI dlly val iet y of Marxism
to escape the ant inomies of false and true consciousness or the simplicities
of economic determinism. Alt husset displaces debates about ideology in
two directions in t he influential essay on ideology and ideological state
apparat uses.!" The two direct ions are not easy to reconcile. On t he one
hand, Alt husser moves towards a sociological account centr ed on t he
reproduction of t he conditions of prod uction, effecnvely reviving cert ain of
Gra msci's comments on t he distinction between state and civil societ y," or
t hose appa rat uses which funct ion ' by ideology' as opposed to the repres-
sive agency of t he state itself. On the ot her, he moves towards psycho-
analysis and a theory of t he constit ution of subjects and even subjectivity.
In ' Marxism and Humanism' (1964) ideology is described as being
'a matter of the lived relation between men (sic) and t heir worl d' ." The
canonical and slight ly di ff erent form ulat ion is fro m 1969: ' What is
expressed in ideology is . .. not the system of the real relations which
144
DAVID MACEY I
,

I
I
I
,
11
ALTHUSSER AND LACAN 145
146
DAVIl MACEY ALTHUSSER AND LACAN 147
govern the existence of individ uals, but the imaginary relat ion of those in-
dividuals to the real relations in which they live,'lOInit ially, no specifically
Lacani an connotations a ppear to attach to the notion, and imaginar y is
effectively synonymous wit h false, the antonym of science or Theory. It is
also made synonymous with lived experience.
Highly posit ive terms in any variant of the phenomenological tr ad ition ,
'lived' and ' lived experience' (Ie vicu) are, for Alt husser and his associates"
negatively connoted. As a bitterly self-critical part icipant in the Lire Ie
Capital pro ject was to note after the event , an excl usive concentration on
theor y and theoretical formation made it possib le to 'relegate everything
else, all the petty academic, financial or sexual miseries of students to the
domain of illusion which, in our discourse. was designat ed by a concept:
le V& U.' 21 Le oecu was to take a bitter revenge. One of the omens of May
'68 was the sit uationist pamphlet entitl ed De [a misere en milieu etudiant
(On the Povert y of Student Ufe ), and the issues raised in May certainly
pertained to le vecu. As a slogan of the day proclaimed, 'St ruct ures do not
take to the streets.' Another and more ad hominem slogan was yet more
cr uel: Alihusser a den ('Alt husser no good/At, you're useless' Itu sers arien) ).
Perhaps it is significant that the ISAs essay, which places so much stress
on the role of the educat ional apparatus, makes no ment ion of the fact
that that apparatus had recently ground to a halt . And that the praise for
the efforts of schoolteachers and masters should be innocen t of any refer-
ence to the rebellion of student s. It is also st riking t hat no mention is made
of the Ecole Normale Superieure - the ' amniot ic fluid' in which Alth usser
lived for so long - or of its undoubted role in the reproduction of a social
and intellectual elit e.
22
'Fre ud and Lacan' origina lly appea red in La No uvelle Critique in 1964.
When it appeared in English translation in New Left Review five years lat er,
Althusser prefaced it with a letter to his transl ator and a not e. Arguing
that certain of his earlier theses required expansion or correction, Althusser
made some strange suggestions that were never followed up. On the one
hand, 't he unconscious' should be ' rechristened' as soon as a bett er term
could be found. Furt her discussion should be devoted to ' forms of familial
ideology' and the 'cr ucial role they play' in initiat ing the function of the
instance of the unconscious. Th eir elucidat ion was a task for histori cal
materiali sm, and one that could not be undert aken by Lacan, ' given his
theoret ical formation' . Althusser concludes t hat 'no theory of psycho-
analysis can be produced without basing it on historical materialism (on
which the theory of familial ideology depends, in t he last insta ncej .t"
' Familial ideology' remains sadly unspecified, as does the reference in the
ISAs essay to t he 'ot her' (non-ideological) functions of t he family. Lapsing
int o near-banalit y and frustrating the hope that his wor k might have some-
thing to offer femini sm, Alth usser merely remarks in a footnot e that ' It lhe
famil y . .. intervenes in the reprod uction of labour power. In different modes
of product ion it is the unit of prod uct ion and/ or the unit of consump-
tio n.'!' The formulation pro vides litt le amm unition for struggles against a
male-dorninared society (or party).
The project t hat is being outl ined here clearly reveals the hegemonic
ambitions of histor ical materialism as it aspires to the role of epi stemolog-
ical Higb Court or even mere-science. Although he speaks in general terms
of the need for ideological criticism and epistemological elucidation - a
labou r at least initiated by Lacan - if t he specificit y of Freud' s discovery
is to be grasped, and if it is to be defended against 'psychoana lyt ic revis-
ioni sm', the comment s added in 1969 int roduce a disquieting not e. The
' rechristening' of the unconscious would be revisionist indeed, and t he
impli cation that the kernel of psychoanalysis must somewho w be separ -
ated out from 'fami lial ideologies' would be no less far-reaching. It would
at least appear to imply some recasti ng of the Oedipal complex, which
seems to-be the referent for Althusser's portmanteau allusion to 't he ideol -
ogy of pat erni t y-maternit y-conjugalit y-infancy' .2S
More astonishing is the use of fami lial metapho rs in ' Freud and Lacan'
itself. Arguing that Western Reason has always paid great attent ion to
birt hs, Althusser continues 'When a young science is born. the fami ly
circle is always ready for aston ishment, jubilation and baptism. For a long
time, every child, even the foundling, has been reput ed t he son of a father,
and when it is a prod igy, the fath ers would fight at t he gate if it were
not for the mother and t he respect due to her.!" The nineteent h cent ury,
however, saw the birt h of three ' natural' or illegit imate children: Marx,
Nietzsche and Freud. No mor e will be heard of Nietzsche (or of mothers).
Foundlings and illegiti mat e childr en are, of course, t he princi pal figures
in Freud's ' family romances' - t he myt hs invented by childr en in t heir
atte mpt to negotiat e Oedipal difficulties by saying 'these are not my real
parents.' A stran ge family roma nce appears to be at work in Althusser's
text, and especially in the cla im t hat ' fathers in theor y (Freud] could find
none' and that he had ' to be himself his own father, to construct with his
own craftsma n's hand s the theoret ical space in which to sit uate his own
discovery' P If a family romance is at work here, the implications of the
Young Marx/Mature Marx dichotomy and of references to a return to the
Freud of ' his maturity'28begin to look like elements in a complex network
of fantasy. Illegit imacy, or the fant asy of being one's own father, would
seem to be the precondition for the legitimacy of concepts and theor y,
The theoretician must not only be his own fat her; he must also deny ever
having been a child.
The loneliness of the innovat ive t heoretician is a recurrent mot if in
Alt husser: Marx. Freud, Machiavelli and Spinoz a together ma ke up a pan-
theon of lonely individuals str uggling in t heoretical solit ude to give birth
co their concepts," In 1964, it was not difficult to add Lacan to the pan-
theon. He had recently been removed by the Int ernational Psychoanalytic
".
DAVIJ MACEY ALTHUSSER AND LACAN ..,
Associat ion from its list of appr oved training analysts, and had openly
likened his situat ion to t ha t of Spinola when he was expelled and excom-
mu nicated from the synagogue on 27 July 1656.
30
Ahhusser clearly iden-
tifies wi th his pantheon and woul d later speak with nostalgia of t he
' marvellous t imes' when he at last achieved his one desire: 'Being alone
and right in the face of all' ." Theoret ical work obviously does nor suspend
the wor king of the imaginary.
At t he end of ' Freud and Lacan' , Freud is credited with the discovery
' t hat the human subject is decemred, constituted by a st ructure which has
no "centre" either, except in the imaginary misrecognit ion of the "ego" .
i.e. in the ideological format ions in which it "recognizes" itself.
on
The
formulation occurs after a reference to Freud 's compar ison of his discovery
of the unconscious to the Copernica n Revolution, that locus classicus of
his heroic history of the sciences and a crucial element in his self-image
(or self-misrecognition). Freud speaks of the realizat ion that ' t he ego is not
master in its own house', meaning tha t the unconscious has reasons of
wh ich the reason of t he ego knows noth ing.
Alt husser is projecting onto Freud Lacen's t heor y of t he mirror-stage, as
described in two of the best-known eents.
H
The mirror-stage describes that
crucial stage of development in wh ich a child of approximately eighteen
mont hs recognizes It S own image in a looking-glass. The image is unified
and present s a level of co-ordinat ion that the child has yet to achieve in
its act ual life; it is therefore greeted with jubilat ion. It also represent s,
however, an imaginary other - and an image of the other - and the child's
ident ificat ion is therefore an alienation, a misrecogniti on. Ident ification,
alienat ion and misrecogninon combi ne to produce a character istic pattern
of behaviour: the child identifies WIth ot hers, cr ying when It SS anot her
child fall, and complaining that it has been struc k when it is in fact t he
aggressor. Lacan finds in t his pattern the origins of all subsequent alienations
and Ident ificat ions: the rdennficano n of master WIth slave, of seduced With
seducer. It is the prototy pical situation tha t will lead to man's desire being
defined as the desire of/for the other. This is t he mirror t o wh ich Ahhusser
turns in his descript ion of ideology as an imaginary order.
Whilst he draws on Freud's theory of narcissism and t he descript ion of
the fort-da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Lacan's text also makes
it dear t hat his sources are not confined to t he psychoanalytic tr aditi on.
The behaviour of a child is contrasted with t hat of a chimpanzee of similar
age - an animal with better motor coordinat ion and no last ing int erest
in mirror-images. Primate ethology provides t he contrasting model, and its
findings are combined with those of child psychologists such as Wallon.
l4
Far from signalling a rejection of homo psycbologicus; the mirror-stage
represents t he introduction at element s of psychology and ethology into
psychoanalysis.
As t he child-chimpa nzee compari son suggests, Lacan is also concerned
with a human-animal contrast or different iation; the same concern appears
in his frequent references to Levi-Strauss' nature/culture transit ion. And
hIS concern here IS overdetermmed by hIS most powerfu l and lasting
philosophical influence - namely, Hegel - for whom the break-up of a col-
lectivit y of individuals associated as 'a commun it y of an imals' is a major
moment in th e development of indrvrduabt y, and accordin g to whom 'self-
consciousness .. . only has real existence so far as it alienates itself from
itself.' lSThe Hegel in quest ion is the creatio n of Alexandre Kojeve, whose
semmar, held at the Ecole Pranq ue des Haut es Etudes from l ~ j j to l ~ j ~
and regularly attended by Lacan i n the years 1933-37, influenced a gen-
erarion. " (A renewed interest in it recent ly triggered a debate about t he
'end of history' .)7) It was KO)C: \'e who provided the part icularl y violent
reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit and the concentration on the master-
slave dialectic that so marks Lacan. Kojeve and not Hegel himself suppl ies,
for instance, the notion of a strugg le for recognit ion and pure prestige, and
virtuall y ever y ment ion of the name ' Hegel' in the Ecrus should in fact
read 'Koieve'."
Althusser speaks of Lacan's ' paradoxical resort' t o ' philosophies com-
pletel yforeign to his scientific underta king (Hegel, Heidegger j' ." Tha t he has
misr ecognized a vital element in Lacan can be simply demonstrated by
means of two quotat ions pertaining to the phenomenology of 't he basic
category of the unconscious': desire." Th e first is from Kojeve himself:
' Desire is human . .. only if it is directed towards an ot her Desire and
towards t he Desire of an other.'41 The second, from probab ly the great est
of France's post-war Hegelians, illustra tes the ease wit h which a Lacanian-
sounding formula can appear in a readi ng of Hegel: 'The desire for life
becomes t he desire for an ot her desire or rat her, given the necessar y reci-
procit y of the phenomenon, human desire is always a desire for the desire
of an oeher.t" In his inaugural lect ure at the College de France, Foucault
descri bed t he recent history of French philosophy as being t he history
of an att empt: to escape Hegel, via eit her logic or epistemology, and added
that appeals aga inst Hegel might be 'one more of the ruses he uses against
us, and at the end of which he is wait ing for us, immobile and elsewhere." !
Lacan's mirro r is the 'elsewhere' in which Hegel waits for Althusser.
The existence of the Hegelian-Kojsvean strand in Lacan is not the only
prob lemat ic area. Althusser's t heses on ideology are dualistic, operating
with a science/ideology, real/imaginar y dichotomy, whereas Lacan intro-
duces a t riadic or tr initar ian structure of Real, Symbolic and Imaginary.
The orders int eract rather than being opposed to one another, and t here
is certainly no question of t he subject' s escaping their combined act ions.
And although the differences between Lacan and Alt husser may appear
verbal, the)' ate conceptual . For the Marxist t heoretician, ' real' is presurn-
ably synonymous with 'act ually existing'; for Lacan it refers to tha t wh ich
lies forever outside discourse, tha t which is uname nable to analysis and
150
DAVIl MACEY ALTHUSSER AND LACAH 151
akin to t he deity of negative theology: suscept ible to description only
in terms of what it is not. ' Imaginary' is not synonymous wit h 'fictive', and
designates the ability to create and identify with images or imagos.
use of t he term ' imaginary' is no doubt affected by t he characterist ic
tendency of rwenner h-cent ury French philosophy to t hink t he problem of
the ot her in purely visual terms, a classic example being Same's t heory of
' t he gaze' (Ie regard ]. Insofar as it is synonymous with the realm of cultu re.
it would seem that it is in fact the symbolic which is closest to most
definitions of ideology. Th e identification of the symbolic with ideology is
not, however, an option open t o Alt husser, since it would create an oppo-
sition between science and not only ideology, but also the whol e of human
existence.
The opera tion of ideology and its constitu tion of subjects ('[a lII ideology
hails or inrerpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by t he func-
t ioning of the categor y of the eobiecr'") is illustrated by a prim.al sc:ne of
Althusser's devising: an individual walking down the st reet IS hailed -
' Hey. you there?' - and turns arou nd. He thus becomes a subject, ' because
he has recognized that the hail was "really" addressed to him.. . . Experience
shows that the practical telecommunicat ion of hailings is such that they
har dly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, t he one hailed always
recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed.'H That an element of
humou r may be in play here is suggested by t he footnot e in which Althusser
alludes to t he 'special' form of ' t he policeman's . . . hailing of " suspects?",
but it unwitti ngly signals a flaw in the argument: the workings of ideology
are illustr ated by a sta te repressive pract ice. A sardonic Michele Barr ett
raises a furt her objection when she notes that int er pellation's supposed
universalit y is unlikely to apply to women, for whom the 'experience of
being hailed (especially by whistling!) on the st reet often. has the
opposite effect of denyi ng their individual identit y and interpellat ing t hem
in unner vingly generic terms.': " Nor is it likely t o apply to the young
blacks whose int erpellation on the st reets of Paris is more likely to result
in a beat ing (or even deat h) than in recogni tion. In terms of the relation-
ship with psychoanalysis, it is, however, the superimposit ion of a structure
of recognition upon one of misrecognirion that is so disastrous. The sub-
ject of Lacan's mirr or-stage does not recognize himself through t he verbal
inte rpellat ion of an other; he (mis-)recognizes himself in an image of the
self as oth er.
The interpellati on t hesis relat es to a sort of primal scene, in keeping with
the argument t hat ' ideology' (as opposed to ' ideologies') is eternal and has
no history. The suggestion is tentatively related to 'Freud's proposition
t hat the unconscious is eternal, i.e., that it has no histor y'," No reference
is given for this allusion, but it is probably to Freud's descript ion of the
' timelessness' of the unconscious. Timelessness is, however, merely one char-
acterist ic of t he unconscious, which is also t ypified by exempt ion from
mutual contradi ction, the dominance of primar y proce sses, and the
replacement of extern al by psychical reality." Whether or not the uncon-
scious (of an indi vidual) has or does not have a histor y is in fact the
subject of considerable psychoanalyt ic debate, with some arguing t hat it
is a phylogenet ic heritage transmitt ing a universal content, and ot hers that
it is constit uted by a process of primal repr ession, mythical or ot herwi se.
Once more, an epistemological analogy proves to be misleading in the
ext reme.
The supposed etern it y of t he formal st ruct ure of ideology, and the
primal scene that demonstrates its gender- and race-bound operations, indi-
cates the direct ion in which Althusser's essay seems to be moving: towa rds
a symbol-based t heory of ideology and, ultimately, towards Durkheim.
Significantly, an ear lier essay specifies that ' t he first form of this ideology,
the reality of this bond, is to be found in religion (vbond" is one of t he
possible et ymologies of the word religion ),'o This is far removed from t he
Communist Manif esto's insistence that the history of all hithert o exist ing
society is the histor y of class st ruggles. That history would appear, on the
cont rary, to have been pr eceded by the establishment of element ary forms
of ideological life. Hence, per haps, the near-tautology: ' Ideology has always-
already int erpellat ed individuals as subjects . .. indi viduals are always-
already interpellated as subjects ... individuals are always-already subjects:
5o
Althusser' s borrowings from Lacan are marked by a number of impor-
tant misrecognit ions, t he most crucial being the failure to recognize the
relevance to Lacan of the Hegelian tr aditi on. Alt husser attempt s to recruit
Lacan for purposes of his own, and t he form of the recruitment (or inter-
pellatlonh , reveal much more about the Marxist philosopher t han t he
psychoanalyst. Founded on t he basis of opposition to a host of adversaries,
the Rejection Front provides the starting-point for a new project : t he
epistemological liberation of Freud from the ideologies that beset him,
just as they beset Marxism. Lacan is the vital ally here because he defends
the ' irreducibilit y' of psychoana lysis and its object (t he unconscious l," and
because he 't hinks not hing but Freud's concepts, giving them t he form
of our sciennficity, the only scientificity there can be' .52 This is wishful
thinking on Althusser's part. As I have argued elsewhere, Lacan thinks a
good deal more - and less - t han Freud's concepts. He also 'th inks' sur-
realism, t he lessons of the classical psychiatr y in which he tr ained (and t o
which he owed his clinical and diagnostic acumen), the distinctive version
of Hegelianism bequeat hed him by Alexandre Kojeve, elements of phe-
nomenology . ..n The wishful t hinking does, on the other hand, help to
locat e Ahh usser's reading of Lacan/ Freud within a specific tradition.
In an essay originally published as t he preface to an American t ranslat-
ion of George Canguilhem's Le Nor mal et Ie pat hologique, Michel Foucault
describes the post-war histor y'of French philosophy as being charact erized
by a division between 'a philosophy of experience, of meaning and of the
152 DAVID MACEY ALTHUSSER AND LACAN 153
subject' and 'a philoso phy of knowl edge, rationality and of the concept ' .
The former tendency is associated with Sartr e and Merleau-Ponry, the
latter wit h Jean Cavai lles, Gaston Bachel ard, Alexandr e Koyre and
Canguil hem himself.$4 The representat ives of t he philosophy of conscious-
ness include the maio shared 'adversaries' of the Lacan-Althus ser front.
In a survey of the academic field of the 1950s, Pierre Bourdieu outli nes a
very similar int ellect ual typology, and speaks of t he ' almost universal cult'
of Canguilhem. The histor ian of science who, in the 19505, had been a
symbol of serio us-mi ndedness and rigour at a t ime when existent ialism
was tr iumphant, later came to be an almost totemic figure or tutel ary deity
for those rejecting dominant models in philosophy. "
Canguilhem is a major representative of the epist emologica l tradition
wit hin t he history of the sciences. His history is one of discontin uit ies - of
breaks, rupt ures and concept ual shifts - in wh ich t he sciences do not
evolve in linear fashion; whilst his concept of scientificity is a matt er of the
const itution of a t heoret ical object, and neither of some empi rical adequat ion
to the real nor of a compl acent reference to 'experiment al method' . The
normal/pat hological dist inct ion, wit hout which modern medical pract ice
and tho ught woul d be incomprehensible, is not, for instance, an empirical
' fact ', but a way of organizing knowledge about the body, It results from
t he existence of a knot of concepts.56
Canguilhem was Cavailles's successor at the lnstitut d'Histoire des Sci-
ences et des Techniques. Logician, histor ian of t he sciences, and victim of
the Gestapo, j ean Cavailles argued in uncomprom ising terms tha t science
was a matter of logic and therefore that ' [Ijt is not a philosophy of con-
sciousness, but a phi losophy of the concept that can supply a doctri ne of
science.t" In his posthu mously published autobiography, Althusser would
ad mit to knowing relat ively littl e about Cavaille s and to having cont ent ed
himself wit h ' a few formulat ions' ." The const antly self-deprecat ing tone
and mood of the autobiography make it difficult to know just what value
should be att ached to t he disclai mer , but Althu sser had cert ainly borrowed
' for mulat ions' t hat would mean a great deal to the younger theorists working
wit h him.
Canguilhem himself was a figure of enormous impor tance to t hose who
pursued the implications of the Alt husser/Lacan alliance. In the per iod
leading up to the publicat ion of Li re le Capital, Canguilhem's work and
t hat of Althusser's team overlap to a high degree. The Lire Ie Capital
seminar held at the ENS in 19h4-6S coincided with Ca nguilhe m's seminar
on t he problematic of the history of the sciences at the lnst itut d' Histoire
des Sciences er des Techniques. A det ailed compa rison of Alrhusser' s
medirarions on 't he ohjecr of Capital' and of Cangnilhem's on 'r he obiecr
of th e history of th e sciences' would no doubt be illuminat ing, but will
not be undertaken here." In 1967- 68, the current of influences wou ld be
reversed when Canguilbem began to re-read and reformulate Bachelard in
the light of t he work of Althusser and Foucault . The result was a short -
lived ent husiasm for the topic of 'scient ific ideologies' .60 In the preface
t o the second edit ion of the relevant essays, Canguilhem enigmat ically
remar ks t hat ' m o err is human; to persist in error is diabolical' and leaves
it to his reader t o decide whether or not his work of this period was
' aberrant' .61
Alt hough Lacan does refer to the Canguilhem t radition, and wa s lat er
to adopt t he ' mathematizati on' model of scientificiry associat ed wi th some
represent at ives of t he epistemo logical school (not ably Alexandr e Koyre),
he was in fact notoriously host ile to rigorous conc ept ualizatio n and
objected, for instance, to t he eminently conceptua l Language of Psycho-
anal ysis prod uced by Laplanche and Pont alis - Laplanche describes it as
' a critical reflection on every concept ' - on the grounds t hat it was 'too
scbolasuc' ." For a long t ime, Lacan's concept s remained fairly fluid. and
were subject to a constant and tactical process of redefinit ion. The highly
concept ual index appended to Ecrits is, of course, the work of ja cques-
Alain Miller and not Lacan.
Alth usser himsel f did not pursue the tasks he had set histor ical mat eri-
alism vis-a-vis psychoana lysis. They would be taken up by Cahiers pour
l'analvse. Th e journal of the 'Epistemological Circle' of t he ENS began
publicat ion in ja nuary 1966 and continued to appear unt il 1968, with
j acques-Alain Miller as it s principal edito r. The ' Averrissement' to t he first
issue - devoted to 'Truth ', no less - announced t hat it would publish t exts
dealing with logic, linguistics and psychoanal ysis, with a view to consti tut -
ing a ' theory of discourse' . Tha t dialect ical materialism would be of major
importan ce to t he Cahiers went without saying, hut the possibility of a
science of social forma tions soon became largely irrelevant . Not hing in t he
project relat ed to the ' particularity of a doctrine'; the aim was to ' [f)orm
ourselves, following the examp le of our mast ers, in accordance with the
rigour of concepts' ." As with the original Rejection Front, ther e was a
marked tendency to make analogies serve as arguments. Thus, it coul d be
claimed t hat psychoanalysi s, like Marxism, provides the principle for
'a new organization of the concept ual field'," but t he analogy was now
bet ween the field of t he statement lenoncel, defined as the field of logic,
and psychoanalysis, defined as the field of speech. " The philoso phy of the
concept was to be given a new incarnat ion.
To the extent t hat the Cahiers was a quasi-Marxist project, it is a dis-
tinctly odd one. Cat egori es such as class are almost t otally absent, t he
economic and t he polit ical disappear. As form al logic is increasingly brought
to bear on psychoanal ysis, Lacan is rea d in terms which obliterat e his
philoso phical-psychological past and promote rhe image of a psycho-
analyst born pur ely of an encounter bet ween Freud and a formal t heory
of discour se. Far from being a specific discourse, Lacan's work now becomes
part of a general instance of concept ualit y. \'(' hereas Alt husser and Balibar
154 DAVID MACEY ALTHUSSER AND LACAN 155
began by look ing for ' epistemological analogies' , the Cabiers grou p would
search for a logic of the signifier tha t typified the discourse of Science, and
not of t he plural sciences of which Canguilhem was the histor ian. The
emphasis on logic overrode the vision of a plurality of 'cont inent s' com-
mon to Canguil hem and Althusser." From the earl y 19705onwards, Lacan
was to int ernalize this reading via t he theory of the ' marheme' - a suppos-
edly formal syst em of not at ion desi gned to ensur e the integral transmission
of his teachings.
The second issue of Cahiers pour l'analvse (March-April 1966) was
devoted to 'What is psychology?' The title reproduces that of an article
by Canguilhem, originall y read to the College philosophique in 1956 and
published in the Revue de Mttaphysique et de mor ale two years later."
The answer to the quest ion is not favour able: psychology is a philosophy
wit hout rigour, an ethics that makes no demands, a medicine wit hout
cont rols." Most modern psychology is ' a professional pr actice , the whole
of whose "science" is inspired by t he search for t he "la ws" of ada ptation
to a soci o-rechnical environment'. " The original t arget had been Dan iel
Lagac he, former profe ssor at th e Sorbon ne, a long-term associat e of Lacan' s
and the author of an unsuccessful attempt t o ' unify' cli nical psychol ogy
and psychoanalysis.P In Canguilhem' s view the alleged unity of psychol-
ogy represent ed no more than a peaceful coexi stence pact bet ween het ero...
geneo us pract ices." Lagache was not particularly relevant in 1966, and the
target of Canguilhem's polemi c is displaced. By implication, it becomes a
defence of Laca n' s psychoanalysis, which is not discussed by Cangu ilhem
in t his article.
At th is poi nt, it is author ity, rath er than conce pts, which is being borro wed
by the Cabiers group. Its opposition to psychology usually remains remark-
ably ill-defined in that specific t heories are rarel y invoked. Canguilhem' s
critic isms of a specific project become part of a generalized anathema and
contribute to t he creation of a climat e in which Thomas Herbert (i.e.,
Michel Pecheux) can quite casuall y dismiss Melanie Klein and ob ject -
relat ions t heor y as an empiricist concept of th e relat ion between signifier
and signified grounded in an account of ' the pseudo-genesis of the order
of the symbolic within t he biological order'. " By now, Frege was more
likely to be the theoret ical mento r [han eit her Alt husser or Cangui lhem.
Alt husser 's sole wri tt en contri bution to [he Cahier s was a read ing of
Rousseau on the Social Contract which looked rather out of place, if not
simply archaic, in the context of t he proposed ' genealogy of the sciences'."
Th e ult imat e herita ge of the Reject ion Front of 1963 wou ld lie not in
historical and dia lectical materialism, but in the formalized Lacanianism
that was to emerge in the 1970s. Althusser would view it with a cert ain
dismay, referring to it as a mere var iant of a logical formal ism." In 1977,
Althusser' s reading of Freud himself was not dissimi lar to what it had been
in ' Freud and Lacan', and he st ill referred to t he need to relat e t he theory
of sex ualit y to ideological agencies and a pparat uses. The drea m of
scienti ficit y wa s still a possibility. Freud's concept of fant asy, Alt husser
concluded, was not a scient i fic concept because it was a meta pho r, ' but fo r
us, on the ot her hand, it may be t he concept of the limit t hat separates a
theoret ical for mation which has not yet become a science, from a science
that is to come. For there is, thank God , a littl e bit of fant asy bet ween
theoret ical format ion and science: the illusion of having attained scientificity
and, given t hat fantasy is cont radictory, perhaps a bit of a tru e desire to
attai n sciennficit y.'?' Maybe it is t he dream of scientificiry that is eternal.
NOTES
1 'La Psychanalyse, ideclogie reacnor malre' , La Nouvelle Critique, June 1949.
z Mtchel Pecheux, Language, Semanti cs and Ideology,Macmlllan, London,
p.21I.
3 Louis Althusser, Elements d'asao-critique, Hachette, Paris, 1974, p. 65.
4 Louis Alrhusscr, 'Philosophic et sciences humaincs", Ret'Ue de f'enseigne nlent
philosop hique, j une-july 1963, cited in 'Freud and Lacan' in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971, p. 181n.
t let te r nf 2fi November 19h'l tn I .::I C':1O, rt:prOOnr:M in Magan np.
UUeraire 304, November 1992, p. SO.
6 j acques Lecan, letter of 1 December 1963 [0 Althusset, reproduced in ibid.
7 Louis Althusser, 'Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Format ion:
Ideology and Ideological Struggle', Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy
of the Scientists and Othe r Essays, Verso, London, 1990, pp. 19, 41.
8 LouisAlthusser,'Inrrcductioru Today', in For Marx, Allen Lane, London, 1969.
9 'Freud and Lacan', p. 179.
10 jacques Lacan, ' Subversion du sujer et dialecnq ue du desir dans l' inconscient
freudien' (1960), Ecrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966, pp. 808-09; 'Variances de la cure-
type' (1955), ibid., p. 335, n. I.
11 ' Freud and Lacan', p. 186.
12 Etienne Balibar, 'Sur les concepts Iondamenraux du materialisme historique',
in Althusser and Balibar, li re Ie Capit al, Maspero, Paris, 1968, vol. 2, p, 137.
13 Alrhusser, 'Freud and Lacan', p. 182.
14 Louis Althusser, ' Du "Capital" ala philosophie de Marx', in Althusser and
Balibar, Lire Ie Capital, Maspero, Paris, 1968, voL 1, pp. 12-13 ; d . pp- 28-
29, where Althusser refers to 'a reading which we might dare to call symp-
tomat ic insofar as it detects in a single movement what is undetected in the
text it is reading and relates it to another text , present in a necessary absence
in the first text' .
15 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
16 jacques-Alain Miller, 'Action de l a structure' (1964), Cahiers pour l'analyse 9,
Summer 1968, pp. 93-105. Seealso Jacques Ranciere, Lire Ie Capital vol. 3,
Maspero, Paris, 1973.
17 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards
an Investigation}', in.Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 121- 76.
156
DAVD MACEY
ALTHUSSER AND LACAN 157
18 Ibid.. p. 1360.
19 ' Mar xism and Humanism', in For Man, p. 233 .
20 ' Ideology and Ideological State Appara ruses', p. ISS .
21 Jacques La u fon J'A/thusur, GaUimar d, Paris, 1974, p. 88.
22 louis Althusser, L' aven" Ju re Iongtemps , suit'; de Les faits: Alit obiographies,
Swckll MEG, Paris, 1992, p. 155: 'Wh.l( did the Ecole becomez .. . a substi t ute
for a matern al environment, for the amniot ic fluid.'
23 ' Freud and Lacan', pp. In-78 .
24 ' Ideology and Ideological Stat e Apparatu9C5' , p. 137 n. Cf. the not e t o ' Freud
and Lacan', p. 194: ' It is n Ol enough to know that the "" estern family is
patri archal and exogamic . .. we must also work out the ideological for ma-
lions that govern paternity, maternity, conjugality and childhood: wha t arc
"husband-and-wife-being. ", "father-being", "mother-being" and "child-being"
in the modern world?A mass of research remains to bedone on these ideological
forma tions. Thi s is a task for historical materialism.'
25 Ibid., p. 177.
26 'Freud and Lacan', p. 181.
27 Ibid., p, 182.
28 Ibid., p. 185,
29 See Gregor y Elliott, 'Alrhusser's Solitude' , in E. Ann Kaplan and Michael
Sprinker, eds, The Althusserja" Legacy, Verso, London, 1993 .
30 Jacques Lacan, Tho Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, The
Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoan alysis, London, 1977, pp. 3- 4.
31 Louis Ahhusser, L'avenir dure loogtemps, p. 177.
32 'Freud and Lacan', p. 201.
33 Jacques Lacan, ' Le Slade du miroir comme formareur de la fonction du j e eel le
qu'elle nous est rtveltt dans l'experience psychanalyt ique' (1949), Ecrits, pp.
93-1 00; ' L' aggressivite en psychanalyse', ibi d., pp. 101-124.
34 See, in particular, Henri Wallon, us Origines du cmaetbe chez I'enfa"t , Presses
Universiraires de Prance, Paris, 1949.
35 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, rr. J. B. Baillie, Har per and
Row, New York and Evanston, 1967, p. 514.
36 On Kojeve' s ver)' od d career, see Domin ique Auffret, Alexandre Ko;h'e: La
philosophie, that et la fin de l'histoire, Grasser, Paris, 1990.
37 Francis Fuku)'ama, The End of History and t he LAst Man, Hamish Hamilton,
Loodoo, 1992.
38 Kojeve is never mentioned in Ecrin. Lacan refers to him as a 'master' i n a
paper delivered in 1967 (' La meprise du sujet suppose savoir', Scilu:et I, 1968,
p. 33); d . Le Sbninaire. Lil.,e XX: Encore, Seuil, Paris, 1975, p. 97.
39 Ahhus:ser, ' Freud and Lecan', p. 188.
40 Ibid., p. 195n.
41 Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction.i la lecture de Hegel, Gallim.ard, Paris, 1979,
p. 169.
42 j ean Hvppolire, ' Sit uation de I'homme dans la "Phenornenologje" hegelienne'
(1947). in Fig.,res de la p-msie pbilosopbiq .,e, Presses Universaaires de France,
P.aris, 1991, p. 115.
4 3 Michel Foucault, L'01'dre d., di sco.,rs, Gallimard, Paris, 1971, pp . 74- 75.
44 ' Ideology and Ideological Sute App.J.ratmu', p. 162.
45 Ibid., p. 163.
46 Michele Barren, ' Alrhusser's Marx, A!thusser's Lacan', in The Al thu$Seri an
Legacy, p. 174.
47 ' Ideology and Ideological Stat e Apparatuses' , p. 152.
48 Sigmund Freud, 'The Unconscious', i n The Pelican Freud library. Vol 11: On
Metap sy.:hol ogy: TIJ<e TIJeory of Psyr:hO<Jtllllysis, Ilumondsworth , 198",
p. 191.
49 'Theory, Theoretical Pracnce and Theoretical Formation', p. 25.
SO ' Ideology and Ideological Stat e' Apparatu ses", p_ 164.
51 ' Freud and Lacan', p. 187.
52 Ibid., p. 198.
53 David Mace}', Lacan i n Contexts , Verso, London, 1988.
54 Michel Foucault, 'La Vie: l'expeneece et la science' , Re&'ue de meraphysique
et de morale 90, j anua ry/March 1985 , p. 4. First published as the preface to
On the Normal and the Pathological, Riedel, Boston, 1978.
jiji Pierre Bourdieu, 'Aspirant phdosophe un point de vue sur la champ umversnaire
dans Its annees 50' , in usenjeux phifosophiques des iZnnees 50, Centre Georges
Pompidou, Paris.
5G Georges Canguilhem, ' Le norm,,1er le puhologique' (1?51 ), i n La connaiss ance
de la ('ie, Vrin, Paris, 1989, p. 155,
57 j ean Cevanles , Sur la logique et la theorie de fa science, 4th edn, Vrin, Paris,
19R7, fl . 7R.
S8 Louis Althusser, L'aveni , dure longtemps, p. 75,
59 The gist of Canguilhem's argument s will befound in his ' L'objeede I'histoire
des sciences', Er.,des J 'hisroire et de phi fosophie des sciences, fifth edn, Vrin,
Paris, 1989, pp. 9-23.
60 Georges Canguilhem, 'Ou'ese-ce qu'une ideologic sciennfiquet' , i n Ideologic et
ratianalite dam f'hisrorre des sciences de la tie, second edn, Vrin, Par is, 1988,
pp. 33-4&.
61 Ibid., p. to.
62 j ean Laplancbe, Seduction, Translation, Drives, John Fletcher and Martin
Stanton, cds, Instit ut e of Contemporary Art s, London, 1992, p. 3.
63 jacques-Alai n Miller, 'Avemssemenr', Cahiers pour l'lZnalyse 1, j anuary!
February 1966.
(;4 j acques-Alain Miller, ' Action de 1.a structure', p. 93.
65 Ibid., p. 100.
66 Cf. Elisabeth Roudinesco, J.u:qUi:S Lacan 6' Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis
in Frana 1925-1985, Free Association Books, London, 1990, pp. 398-99,
67 For the backgrou nd and context, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, 'Situa tion d'un
rexre "Qu 'esr-ce q ue Ia p$)"Chologie?"' , in the collecti ve volume Georges
Canguilhem: Philosophe, historien rhs sciences, Albin Michel, Paris, 1983,
pp. 135-44.
68 Georges Canguilhern, ' Oc'ese-ce que 1.1 p..ycholoWe?, Cahiers pour l'anaIyse 2,
March-April 1966.
69 Ibid., p. 89.
70 Daniel Lagache, L'uni te de ta psychologie, Presses Universitaires de France,
Paris, 1949.
71 Canguilhem, ' Ou' ee-ce que [a psychologie?' , p. 89.
'58
DAVD MACEY
72 Thomas Herbert, 'Pour une rheorie generate des ideologies', Cahien pou'
!'analyse 9, Summer 1968, p. 81-
73 Louis Althu sser, 'Sur Ie ConereeSocial (Les Decalages)', Cabiers pour l'analyse
8, February 1968, pp. 5- 42.
74 Loui s Ahhusser, ' La Decouvert e du docreur Freud' (1977), in Leon Chertok,
ed., Di alogue ! ranco-sol'ierique sur Ia psychanul Y!>e, Privat, To ulouse, 1984,
p.86.
7S Ibid., pp. 96-97.
7
MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE:
ALTHUSSER IN LITERARY STUDIES
Francis Mulhern
Writing book s is like sending messages in bot tl es, Loui s Althusser was
once heard to remark, in sorrowful reaction to the international phenom-
enon of 'Althusserianism': you can never tell who will come upon your
words or what they will make of them.
In literar y st udi es. which were neit her first nor last amo ng Althusser's
interests, these messages were soon found and read. The experience (a
newly fateful word) was a daunt ing one, but there was also elation; it felt,
for many, like the definitive moment of liberat ion. But like all such mo-
ments, it was only a beginning, and, after nearly three decades of commen-
tary and elaboration, its meaning has come to seem more ambiguous and
elusive, nothing so simple as the revelation it once appeared to be.'
Althusser's theoretical intervention 'for Mar x' bore upon both the sub-
stance and the status of historical materialism.' Marx's revolution had
entailed mor e than a materialist inversion of Hegel' s dialectic, he main-
tained. The new theory abandoned the supposed expressivism of the old
philosophy, substituting the idea of an inherently complex social whole
whose political and ideological instances were 'r elatively autonomous' ,
'specifically effective', determined only 'i n the last instance' by the eco-
nomic. Determination, in t his concept ual scheme. was likewise compl ex:
not singular yet not merely plural, it was, so to say, typically exceptional
in its workings. Any cont radiction was as a rule internally marked by the
contr adictions that formed its condit ions of existence. in irreducible states
and processes of 'overdetermination' . A complex whole and thus complex
time: history so conceived could not move according to a single, regular
beat: rather, it must be seen as possessing a 'differential' temporality,
yielding an arhythmic succession of unique conjunct ures.
These, for Althusser, were the elements of historical materialism proper,
aft er its critical disengagement from historicism and humanism. Against
160 FRANCIS MULHERN Al.THU SSER IN LITERARY STUDIES
16'
the first, it proposed a decent red, non-expressive process; against t he sec-
and, it asserted t he primacy of str uct ures and pract ices over the concret e
individuals who were, rigorously conceived, their bearers; and in both
respects it broke decisively with the problematic of 'the subject' as aut hor
or sour ce of hist ory. 'The subject' was the pivotal category in Althusser's
ma in specific undertaking in historical materialism, t he explorat ion of the
concept of ' ideology'. This term and its associated meanings had led an
irre gular, mercuri al life in Marxist tr adi tion; in Alt husser 's thought , it
assumed a constant and overwhelming role. Ideology here was a relatively
aut onomous practice whose principal function was to secure the repro-
duct ion of t he relations of production; yet received not ions of illusion,
mystification, false consciousness and spiritualized interest conveyed little
of its existential sway. Not the work of subjects, ideology worked t hem,
'interpellating' the social singularities called individuals 'as subjects', into
the identities that qualified them as social agents. These identities sustained
an 'imaginary' relation to real cond itions, and yet were indispensable, now
and in any huma n future. To live at all was to live in ideology,
Knowledge, str ictly speaking, was scientific knowledge, the fruit of a
non- subject ivist t heoretical labour upon t he heterogeneous data of experi-
ence, t hat is, ideology. Here was Althusser's complementary claim - the
second aspect of his intervent ion - concerning the st at us of Marx's inno-
vation. As a science, historical materialism founded itself in a break with
ideology, constructing its theoretical object s, and elabor ating analyses that
would be governed by the protocols of t heoretical practice itself, not by
the (ideological) indicat ions of the empirical world.
Althusser's prospect us for t heoretical pract ice must seem overweening,
and in importa nt respects it really was. Like Karl Popper, whose fallibilism
is not t he most distant of comparisons, Althusser not only accorded unique
cognitive privilege to science hut invested it with the pat hos of heroism. It
was not surprising that suspicions of nee-positivism and Sta linist dogma-
tism should so readil y have arisen. Yet notwithstanding the leitmotiv of
Marxist murnphalism in his writ ing, Alrhusser' s ' ret urn to Marx' was not
an intellectual reversion to party t ype. His insistence on t he integrity of
science did not ent ail a claim of exclusivit y for historical materialism. The
t hNlrt'tical fidel within which hr- situated Marx's science was not rhr- old
'dialectical materialism' but th e human sciences - specifically, t he new
'quadrivium' of histor y, ethnology, psychoanalysis and linguistics, and their
lingua Franca, 'st mc ruralism'.' The pursuit of scienrificity here meant rhe
repudiation of int ellectual auta rky.
The general t hemes and orientations of Althusser' s Marxism were in
t he'mst>l vl'S suff icient to ("st <l hlish his <l ppf'al for t hf' Lefr in English literar y
st udies, among whom a sense of intellectua l illegitimacy was deep and
persistent. From t he classics, they inherited the synopsis of a general t heory,
and a few famous fr agments concerning Ancient art or Balzac's politics or
realism in the novel and drama. The great systemat izers of t he Second
International. irrespective of t heir individual cult ural complexions. tended
to see art mainly as a prestigious test case for their general explanatory
claims; they brought it down to eart h, but then left it t here. The Bolshevik
generation - not ably Lenin and Trotsky - found occasions for ideological
intervention in literar y life, but wrote littl e t hat might serve more general
purposes. The British Marxism of the 1930s - represent ed by Alick West,
Ralph Fox and, above all, Christopher Caudwell - was a collective embar-
rassment.' Its direct inheritors sponsored an uncompelling Communist
variant of familiar literary-academic procedure. The event ual scope of
Raymond Williams's long revolution was as yet undiscerned. Georg Lukacs's
work furn ished t he inescapable point of cont emporary reference, with his
successor Lucien Goldmann an increasingly conspicuous second. And what
both thinkers offered were lines of analysis t hat, though strong and sophis-
ticated, were incorrigi bly schematic in their t reatment of histor y and texts,
and - not oriously in Lukacs's case - prone to aest hetic dogmatism. The
Frankfurt School, or what was known of it in Britain at that time, offered
a r icher and crucia lly more modern intellect ual culture, but was not
exempt from t he gener al suspicion of summary tot alizing constr uctions.
Thoroughly as such Marxist styles might be learned, scrupulously though
they might be pract iced, the internalized reproach of the dominant tradition,
with its watchwords of fidelity to the empirical record and t he detailed life
of the text, would not be stilled.S
Then came Alt husser (' Cont radiction and Overdetermination appeared
in English in 1967, the entire For Marx in 1969; Reading Capital fol-
lowed in t 970) and t he prospect of a new departu re. Thanks to the new
historical concepts, the determinist and schematizing tendencies apparently
ingrained in Marxist literary studies could be criticized and overcome in
uncompromisingly Marxist terms. The new understanding of ideology,
wi th its crucial revaluation of 'experience', discomposed the first principle
of conduct in the domina nt critical tr adition. Beyond t he complement ary
errors of Marxist ' historicism' and liberal-humanist 'empiricism', it was
possible and necessary to broach the scient ific, historical-materialist con-
cept of art as an irreducible social practice, to imagine a properl y Marxist
rheory of an nna mhignonsly sp-c ified nbjecr.
Althusser's persona l interest in this project inspired two compelling
occasional essays, one on Strehler's Paris product ion of El Nos t Milan, the
ot her on the paint ings of Cremonini." Beyond their engagement with par-
ticular cases, these texts display ke-n awareness of general questions of
t heor y and met hod. Both accord analytic primacy to t he material event
(t he play, the canvas) and the pract ice it instantiates. The 'subjects' of
these practices (author, director , painter, spectator) are registered but
displaced: the reading of Cremonini's canvases is not cont rolled by the
evidence of the painter's intent ional project; t he Brechtian reflect ion on
16'
FRANCIS MULHERN ALTHU SSER IN LITERARY STUDIES ,.3
empat het ic theatre explores a non-psychologistic understanding of audi-
ence response. And .both essays are framed as polemics against critical
' gast ronomy', the established obstacle to criticism as knowledge.
Yet they cannot be taken as pilots of such a cr iticism. Alth ussec seizes
upo n Srrehler's Berrolazzi because its strange dual tempo dra mat izes some-
t hing like his own understanding of t he ideological. Cremonini's vert icals
and circles excite him because he sees in them a figurat ion of his own anti -
humanism. Both text s are, as it ..... ere, moments of counter-ideological
' recognit ion' (t he indispensable word). the more euphor ically articulate for
that . but the less inst ructive as adumbrat ions of a new theor y and pract ice.
However, Althusser' s only programmat ic declar ation concerni ng aes-
t bet ics, the lett er to Andre Daspre, appeared to underwri te t his conflation
of theoret ical specification and aesthet ic preference. Althusser's goal was
'a real knowledge of an '; his means - ' t here is no ot her way' - a ' rigorous
reflect ion on the basic concepts of Marxism' . For no w, he would elaborat e
' a first idea'. Art is cat egorially distinct from science; it does not pro-
duce knowledge in the strict sense. Yet it is not an indifferent mode of
the ideological. For art sustains a differentia l relat ion t o knowledge; it can
' make us see' t he ' realit y' to which it 'alludes', and this by virt ue of the
' int ernal distance' it establishe s within ideology, He was, of course. talking
here about ' authent ic art, not works of an average or mediocr e level' . , , ,7
If this was a call to a new theoret ical quest, it seemed that the likely route
wo uld be circular. ' First ideas' are always awkward (Althus:ser wrote
movingly about the unequal str uggle to innovate in received idioms), but
this one seemed all too sett led, Art as categorially distinct from science,
root ed in everyda y language vet capa ble of privileged insight; aest het ics as,
in effect, the elucidat ion of arti stic greatness, not the knowledge of a
specific practice but an elabora ted protocol of discriminat ion - these were
the commonplaces of the literary academy. It was not easy, at this point,
to see how Marxist self-reflection (which was not encouraged, on this
occasion. to communicate w-it h other crit ical knowl edges] would tra ns-
mut e them into science.
The declared cont ext of t he lett er to Daspre was t he work of Althusser's
young collaborator Pierr e Macherey, whose Pour une theorie de la
production lineroire (appearing in the same year, 1966) was the inau-
gural statement of Mar xist t heoret ical practi ce in t he field of the Iiterary.s
Macherey's book .....as, in two senses, a study in morphology. Its first
concern ..... as to determine the characterist ic shape of received literary criti-
cism - the forms of its attenti on - and to assert the cont rasting protocols
of a scienti fic alt ernative; its emerging theme. elabor ating the founding
thesis of this science. was the action of literary form in ideology, Received
crit icism acted as if to regulate ..... t iring and reading in the 'domain' of
literature. As a ' normative' pract ice, it judges comparative achievement; as
' int erpretation' it offers to resolve and mediate meaning; and in bot h modes
it proceeds fallaciously. act uall y ' replacing' ..... hat it claims to analyse with
ideal others - the .....ork as it might have been or in its 'full' meaning. A
scientific crit icism, in cont rast, would be a discourse of knowledge, a sys-
temat ic inquiry int o the ' laws' of a t heoret ically specified object. literary
' product ion' as a determinate mater ial pract ice in ideology,
The results of litera ry product ion, Macherey went on to claim, were t he
opposite of t hose affirmed in crit ical tradit ion: not composure and fullness
but incompleteness, discrepancy and absence. These were the effects of
literary form For although literat ure wa s no t science, it 'naturally scornled]
the credulous view of the world '; held within ideology, its ' determinate
insufficiency' nevertheless parodied and caricatured ideology, t hus offeri ng
an ' implicit critique' of it.' The task of a Marxist criticism was to trace t he
workings. of t his product ive disorder and to explain it.
Macherey's theoret ical excursion was in all relevant senses Althusserian,
but it was not in an)' ordinary sense Marxist. The official inspirat ion of the
book was Lenin - invoked here as elsewhere with unstinred ceremony -
but its more substant ial, though tacit. intellect ual debt was to a thinker
whose example had become canonical in Althusser's circle: Freud, The
imago of text and critic in Macherey's discourse was the sympto m and its
(psychojanalysr. Literary works could be understood as the dreams, jokes
and parapraxes of a divided collective subjectivity. The analogy is a powe r-
ful one (indeed. a little furth er meditation upon it might have refined
Macherey's undiscriminat ing crit ique of interpretat ion), but it does not
license the further assumpt ion concerning the different ial crit ical val ue of
the literary. Freud's symptomat ic texts are valuable as evidence for analy-
sis; in themselves the)' are modes of unkn owing, denial, confusion. But
according t o Macherey, cognitive privilege belonged to t he literary as such,
and not only to the theory tha t could explain its figurations. Like Ahhusser,
he conceded literat ure a place of co-primacy w ith science in the hierarchy
of culture,
Macherey would subsequently take quite different beertngs, " but, for
now, a dist inct ive Althus:serian problematic remained in force: the object
proper to Marxist t heoret ical investigat ion was 'ideology and literary form' ,
This was t he tide of the first English-language initiati ve under Althusser' s
general aegis, Terry Eagleton's pilot essay for his Criticism and Ideology,lI
The model of theoretical practice was evident in the shape of Eagleton's
inquiry, A probing review of the received criti cal culture in its liberal and
socialist for ms (Leavis and Williams respectively) led to a general t heoret-
ical constr uction of the place of the literary in the social whole, and thence
towards the summit. a 'science of the text ', The cent ral proposit ions of t he
book were in the main familiar: ' materialist crit icism' as an ant i-humanist,
anti-histori cist practice forwa rded in a break wit h ideology; literat ure as
ideology ' raised to the second power'; Freud as the exemplar y t heor ist and
,., FRANCtS MULHERN ALTHUSSER IN LITERARY STUDIES ,.5
reader of self-divided text ual product ion. Yet as well as elaborating and
varying these themes, Eagleton lodged punctual criticisms of Alt husser and
Macherey, He noted me tendentious reservation in the letter to Daspre,
and insisted. in opposition to Machete)", that the literature-ideology
relat ionship was not necessarily subversive. It ' ...ras, he observed, as if
literature must be spared ' t he shame of the sheerly ideological', as if ' t he
aesthetic must still be granted mysteriously privileged stat us, but now in
embar rassedly oblique style'.u Exactly so. But Althusser and Macherey
were not alone in the hour of their temptation. What Eagleton feared in
their texts he .....as in the end unable to banish from his own. The central
chapter of Criticism and Ideology recorded a struggle in process, here
assigning special powers to literat ure, there reserving t hem to the (duly
rigorous) reader. and never surrendering the conviction, wh ich was also
secure in Althusser and Macherey, t hat there existed a stable ent ity named
' literat ure' (or ' form') to be known, a real object awaiting its adequate
concept.
This undischarged essentialism found its counterpart in the closing chapter
of Eagleton's study, an attempt without precedent in Althusser or Macherey
to theorize different ial literary value. Rightl y affirming the necessity of
such a theory (different ial judgement is for many strictly analytic purposes
irr elevant or even diversionary, but in t he ordinary world of culture it is
ineluct able), Eagleton also maintained that a Marxist account of value
would be relat ional or transitive: a text is valuable, that is, not in itself, but
for certai n users in specificconditions (the presiding spirit here was Brecht ).
Yet his discussion gravit ated towar ds the opposite conclusion, seeking
value in the historical conditions of product ion of the text , and so suggesting
an originary and lasting endowment of disti nct ion or banality; literar y
value was, aft er all, the immanent variation of an essent ial ceregory."
In t hese texts, t he project of an Alt husserian Marxist t heory of the
aesthet ic was boldly launched and as surely frustr ated. Thei r governing
problemat ic was, as Alrhusser might have said. 'amphibological' : an old
category refigured as a new concept, an attempt to furnish a scientific
answer to an unsurmounted philosophical question." Macherey himself went
on to reject the question ' what is literature?' as an unwarrantable intr usion
into sovereign theoret ical space. His later work at once redrew the theo-
retical image of literature to emphasize its role in the product ion of ideo-
logical compromise, and. more radically, turned from literature as tex t to
literary culture as an institutionalized ideological pract ice - to ' t he literary
effect' as it is deployed in the educat ional apparatus of the class-divided
nat ion.' ! Eagleton noted the possibility of such modified lines of anal ysis,
hut chose not to pursue t hem; his subsequent work turned away fmm the
architectonic prospect us of Criticism and Ideology in favour of an inter -
vent ionist, ' political' criticism that, though not less t heoreticall y engaged
and still emphatically Mar xist. could not be called ' Ahhusserian' ,"
Meanwhile, another initiat ive had sprung into vigorous life. Taking early
shape in the years of Ahhusser's greatest productivity, the collaborative
work of t he Tel Que! circle centred on Phil lipe Sollers and Julia Kristeva
developed rapidly, reaching a crit ical moment of self-definit ion - so history
was pleased to have it - a few months after the events of May-June 196R .
11
Alt husser's affiliates maintained a pointed distance from Td Quel. as if in
awkward consciousness of eager but unsought company. " Althusser was
a canonical reference in the journal - like Lacan, an acknowledged Inti",
lever or influence, in its work. " But its closer mentors were Barthes, Derr ida
and Foucault. who led off the collective volume. Tbeorie d' ensemble.
20
Above all other t hings a resumption of French avam-garde traditions in
the arts, and at this time devoted to an anarcho- Maoist programme of
cultural revolution, Tel Quel set its theoret ical hearings in an int ellectual
network. (reseau was a favoured metaphor) that included Alrhusser and
partl y sustai ned him, but with very different intellect ual and polit ical
priorit ies. Alt husserian Marxism was t hus at once valorized and displaced,
funct ioning here as a privileged citation in a conr exr ar once familiar and
alien.
The more sanguine, less defensive evaluation of this development was
t hat Tel Quel offered a possible realizat ion of Ahhusser's vision of a non-
autarki c Marxism developing as a science among oth ers, in the space of
cultural theory. This, indeed, was the spirit animat ing a kindred project
that too k shape in Brit ain, in the work of Screen.
' The Screen project' is a familiar way of evoking a collaborative enter-
prise that eludes simple summa ry. The magazine never was int ellectually
homogeneous, in large part because of the discrepant interests in play in
its parent organization, the Society for Educat ion in Film and Television.
Its dominant int ellect ual tendency, in the crit ical passage of the 1970s, was
itself unst able, in ran ht-ca uV' of the qu ick tempos and syncopated rhj-rhm..
characte ristic of an import -dependent vanguard culture, and in pan also
because t here was no pre-esta blished har mony among the theoret ical
interests t hat now came to ~ fore. 'The Screen project' is not a true
singular. and there is no definit ive version of it. However. wit h such
qualifications made, the re was no mistaki ng t he difference bet ween th is
and the othe r, more str ictly canonical reading of Alrhusserian possibilities.
There was, to begin with, a ..... eight y difference of circumstance. It
cannot have been unimpo rtant that Screen's given field of activit}' was
cinema rather rhan Iireraecre. The sheer materiality of cinema as industry.
technical pract ice and experience was less easily spirit ualized than rhar of
the literary institution - whose conservative devotees. indeed. .....ould affirm
just so much, knowing full well the difference between a. conventi cle and
a cro wd. The strategic topa; of modern crit ical culture were not settled
trut hs here: aureurism rna)' have reiterated tradit ionalist notions of
composition and readi ng, but it also helped t o undo t he disciplinar y
' 66
FRANCIS MULHERN
ALTHUS SER IN LITERARY STUDIES 167
segregat ion of 'art' and 'entert ainment '; an d while essenti alist theor ies of
'film' were advanced. they encountered st ubborn resistance in the objective
complexit y of the developed filmic repertoire, with its mul tiple and variably
ordered matters of expression. Furthermore. the availability of a diverse
opposi tional film-maki ng cult ure. in which some of the journa l's editors
were directly involved, was bound to inflect all theoretica l reflect ion - as
Benjamin was awa re, any object appears differently in the perspective of
production.
Alt husser's demand for the anal ysis of specific, relat ively autonomous
practices and his cons truc tion of ideology as insti t uti onalized mater ial
pract ice furni shed the general terms legit imat ing an unconstra ined explora-
tion of cinema in its full histor ical and st ruct ural complexity; at the same
ti me, the whole histo ry of both dominant and crit ical cinema acted against
the kind of conceptual inert ia tha t patt erned the letter to Daspre. Screen' s
inquir y into the forma tion, functioning and rendential effects of cinemat ic
practices was pursued along lines at first par allel and soon convergent with
tha t of Tel Duel, in an inter-theoret ical discou rse on ideology, subject and
text .
Semiot ics, developi ng through a crit ical ingat hering of modern scientific
initiatives in poeti cs and linguistics - formalist. structuralist and ot her -
offered concepts and taxonomies that bore t he prom ise of a post-aesthet ic,
mat er ialist analy sis of textual forms and functions. Psychoanalysis
appeared not merely as a potent analogy but as a decisive cont ri buto r to
th e understandi ng of subjectivity. Marxism furnished terms of historical
undemanding and defined the polit ics of text and subject. There was more
t han one summary of t his theoret ical con junction. Peter Wollen identi fied
a meta-theoretical unity of pur pose: ' each concerns itself with an ar ea of
human activity t hat articulates nat ural wi th social history' - signs, labour
and sexuality. Stephen Heath. more tentative. spoke of ' the encou nte r of
Marxism with psychoanal ysis on the terrain of semioncs' ." There was,
equally, no regular it y of proport ion in the work produced under its aeg is.
Woll en's work did not (and does not) take the tot alizing course that his
genera l formul ation might be taken to indicate, rathe r moving from topic
to topic with unruffled flexibility of emphasis and theoretical reference.
Heat h was, in pract ice. the mor e concerned to probe the sense of the
general strategy in part icul ar settings of analysis. In t he Screen circle
genera lly, variat ions mult iplied. Consistent with its own crit ical themes,
this was an 'i mpure' project. lacking an essence.P The yield was very
imp ressive, but it furn ished the eviden ce t hat this second version of
Ahhu.sserian initiat ive - all at once broader, bolder and mor e modest -
was scarcely better insured than the first. The renunciation of Marxist
autarky in favour of a dialogic theor etical discourse enhanced product iv-
it y, but not, t herefore, predictable analytic output. This was not a story of
scientific progress from incompleteness int o not ional sufficiency. "' Iar xist
cult ural theory had need of that crit ical contact, but, dialog ue being what
it is when not a pious simulat ion, t heor ies have a way of talking back -
and with results that owe somet hing to rat ional debate but rather mor e to
force of circumstan ce.
Th roughout the 19705, Ahhusser remained an inspira tional reference. The
intensifying and increasingly influent ial work of the Birmingham Centre
for Contemporary Cult ural Studies was indebted to him. The names of
Eagleton and Macherey ident ified a whole crit ical tendency. Marxist-feminist
writers - Cora Kaplan and Penn y Boumdha, for example - looked to
Althusser 's historical concepts as a means of articulating class and gender
deter minations in text ual analysis.U Tony Bennett set out to liquidate
Marxism's deep dependence on essentialist not ions of literature and value
in a line. of investigation t hat, tho ugh inevitably divergent from the prior
analyses of Macherey and Eagleton and crit ical of them, was nevert heless
plainly Althusserian in spiri t." It was easy to believe, looking around, that
t he outloo k for t heoret ical pract ice was good.
In retr ospect, howev er, the 19'/ Os may he seen as the years of t he gr eat
Althu sserian inflation, a t rompe l'oeil sequence in which ever -great er
discursive circulation concealed a draining of conceptual value. Th ere were
at least t hree agencies at work In t his. One was th e banalizing process to
which any influent ial idea is vulnerable. Another, mor e substanti al. was
the progress of Althusser's leading Brit ish exponents, whose quest for
rigour led t hem to press one after anot her of their mentor's philosophical
proposals to the point of self-destr uction. " The thi rd, and much the
weight iest, was mor e general, and st rictly political: a relat ive decline of all
Marxisms, att endant upon the frustration, reversal or decomposit ion of
t he histori cal tendencies that had seemed to vindicate t hem. Marxism
commanded the attention of a whole gallery of int ellect ual and polit ical
interests because, Irrespect ive of ItS t heoretical or programmat ic cogency in
any given area (which, indeed, might not impress at all), it seemed the
inescapable context of radical thought and activi ty. As t he ideological
banner of a practi cal movement , It had a record of achievement (however
mixed), a social constituency actual or potential (the labour movement ).
and immediate prospect s i n every global theat re. Given such histo rical
endowments, Marxist t heory could survi ve any particular challe nge. The
corollary' - that without t hese pract ical supports, the theory would have
far less intuitive appeal - was not much dwelt upon, but there was no
evading the . force of t he eventua l demonstrat ion.
The ~ o u r s e of the 19805, in every part of the world, mocked every
conventional socialist expec tat ion. Social democracy, Communism. anti-
imperialism and revolutionary soctahsm - all were visited b)' counter-
finalities t hat could be said to falsify them as general formats of politica l
advance. The very name of socialism, long the site of fierce discursive
108 FRANCIS MUl.HERN Al.THUSSER IN UTERARY STUDIES
' 60
rivalry, now seemed too monologic for some left-wing sensibilit ies. His-
torical materialism - t he appropriately general t heory of historical pro-
cesses as dynamic wholes - fared no better. Appearing no longer to answer
to common-sense estimates of the probable or the pract ical, it suffered a
co-ordinate loss of crit ical authority. The stronger ra dical polit ical trends
of t he eighties were part icularist; and in t he radical academy, above all in
its departments of literary and cultural studies, matching styles of analysis
appea red - perspect ivist, and agnostic or host ile towards totali zing t hought,
It was this great ecological shift, rather than an)' newly di scovered problem
or any pre-given out come of int ellect ual ar bitration, tha t redrew t he
pattern of selection pressures, to the disadvantage of Marxism and in
favour of the counter-enlightenment themarics that now proliferated as
post-str ucturalism, or post-modernism, or - a hybrid for the t imes - post-

But even now, in a milieu increasingly indifferent to Marxism and ever
more ignorant of it, the name of Altbusser cont inued to be invoked. For
he it was whose concept of relative autonomy had caut iously opened the
transition to a social t heory no longer inhibited by t he dogma of a dosed
t otalit y with a determining economic ground. He it was whose t heory of
ideology, once relieved of its functionalist embarr assment , had recentred
cultural analysis on t he quest ion of the subject and its constructions. He
it was who had helped to nurtur e the int er-theoretical dialogue tha t was
now entering its maturit y. In t rut h, or so some theorists persuaded them-
selves, Althusser really was a post-struct uralist, t he Monsieur Jourdain of
the avant -garde. One veteran of the t heory wars, Ant ony Easthope, dis-
cerned in the whole sequence a grand narrati ve of anti- humanism. Easthope's
British I' ost-structuralism, a serial review of t he seventi es and eighties,
is generous, pleasingly worldly, and firmly socialist in spirit. Yet as a
constr uct ion of theoret ical history it is shaped by a Whiggish evolut ionism
that assimilates all pre-existing virtue to Althusser, and then forwards It
to the culminat ing moment of post -st ruct uralism. New Left Review's
Gramscian t heses on Britain are glossed in the light of the journal's later
int erest in Althusser, who is now accredit ed with sole authorship of a
t heme (relative auto nomy) as old as Engels. ' Althusser', we are told,
' imported int o Britain at least t hree lines of t hought . .. which can be
validly regarded as post-structura list: t he account of t he histor ical formation
as decent red; the assert ion t hat knowledge as proceeding from t heoretical
pract ice is discursively const ructed, the account of the subject as effect
rather than cause.' So much, then, for Darwin (the first ' line' ) or Popper
(t he second), or Freud (t he third). And so much for Alt husser, whose
work, for all its self-interpellat ion as Marxist, ' is best regarded now as a
str uct uralism passing over into post-struct uralism' . Z7 Excess a t hindsight,
teleological reversion, rationalization: Easthope's rendering provokes any or
all of these object ions. However motivated, it is unt enable as a summation
of the left theoretical cult ure of the past thirt y-odd years. But it does, in
its wa}', confirm the poignant impression t hat, by the end of the eight ies,
Alrbusser's name, enfolding cert ain vestiges of his ideas, survived as lirrle
more tha n a souvenir in a culture that had largely forgotten his int ellect ual
and polit ical pr ojects.
The t ransition to post -structu ral ism, in the sense of a generalized t bemarics
now cur rent in a post-Marxist academic Left, was not so much an auton-
omous cri tical process, more the (:ffo: t of man ifold polit ical disenchannuenr
- not a working out, however unforeseen, of Althusser's logic but an
abandonment of it. To sa)' so is not to deliver a summary judgement on
the diverse thinkers rhar found t he post-structuralist canon, or on t he
var ied wor k now proceeding in thei r joint and several names: t he new
culture of subversion is a whole far less than t he sum of its parts. Neither
is it to daim t hat there a pristine theoreucal practice, obscured but
not annihi lated by years of misappropriation, to which, like Althusser to
Marx, we must now return. The matte r is more difficult and the prospect
far less dear. [ II conclusion - thuugh t hat is nut rhe ideal wunl - it lIIay
be worthwhile to dwell a lit tle on some of Althusser's key ideas, and to
offer a provisional lat t er-day assessment of t hem.
Ided ogy was the theme for which Althusser became celebrat ed in radical
lit erary and cult ural st udies; and t he course of his thinking mar ked it as
his most ambiguous t heoretica l venture. Ahhusser's view was in one
respect familiar: t he concept of ideology implied a determinate relat ionship
bet ween cognitive deficiency and social interest; it was, in the aut horized
wor ds of his English tr anslator, a mode in which ' t he pracrico-social
predominates . _. over t he theoret ical, over knowledge' ," But the discrep-
ancy between knowledge and t he pracr ico-social had never been so insisted
upon. Ideology was pervasive, the spont aneous knowing-unknowing of
human experience in this and all possible societ ies.n Without relinquishing
the first, more familiar sense of the concept, Althusser t hen pur sued his
elaboration of the second, The ' imaginary relat ion' of ideology was t he
mode in which the ideo-affective life of humans assumed its socially viable
form as ident ity: ideology ' interpellates t he indi vidual as a subject .' In
arguing thus, Althusser effected a drastic and damaging conflati on of t wo
distinct problems: the funct ioning of ideology in its more familiar sense,
as a socially mot ivated different ial relat ion to knowledge, and the general
mechanism of human subject-format ion. How, in this perspect ive, could
ideology be known or displaced? Althusser's established response was: by
science and an . But if ideology was now identical with the anthropological
constant of ident ity-format ion, how could t hese be conceptualized as
ordinary historical practices? And if , contra riwi se, they coul d be retained
only as quasi-miraculous interventions in the imaginary - if, that is, they
170
FRANCIS MULHERN
ALTHUSSER IN UTERARY STUDIES 171
could no t be retained at all . but must rather be discarded as rat ionalist and
romantic myst ifications - what would remain of ideology as a crit ical
concepts These and kindred objections came from sympathetic and host ile
commentators alike. and most influentia lly from post -stru cturalist qua r-
ters. where a counter-construction had already taken shape. Althusserian
'science' was implica ted in the character istic disavo wal of meta-discourse.
which exempted itself from the condit ions of existence t hat it st ipulated
for its objects. The account of subject-format ion was either false, and
hence inadeq uate , or vahd, and ther efore subversive of its own pretensions
to final rationality. In either case, the ideal of scientificiry was unfounded,
as also was its put at ive ot her, the support ing fiction of ideology. 'Science'
was a gambit in 't he polit ics of truth'. a power-play in t he cont ent ion of
discourses and their subjects.
Th is destr uctive response has proved most att ractive t o cont emporar y
tast e. but t here were ot hers, including at least one of Ah hussenan mspl-
ration. Gbran Therbor n proposed a mechanism internal to ideology. such
that the fatali st ic unity subjectification-s ubiect ion could pass into self-
contr adrcnon, generanng cnses of Identit y and belief wit h uncertain out -
comes - in oth er wor ds, a material ' dialectic of consciousness' of the kind
t hat Ahhu sser tended to resist.'? The limitation of Tberborn"s analysis,
t aken over trom Alth usser, was its bracket ing of science (along wit h art )
as a special case, Just as Ahhusser's formalist analy sis of subjectification
occluded t he fact t hat all ideology adva nces t ruth-claims, so Therborn
encouraged the specular inference that knowledge-bear ing discourse is
somehow not implicated in t he for mat ion of subjects. There is no such
division of labour in the real wor ld of discourse. wh ere logics and rhetorics
act indissociably, and seldom according to a rule of inverse proport ions.
If t he t heor y of subject-formation holds at all, it must hold for all discur -
sive practice. Yet Ahhusserian reason seemed unable to secure its legitim-
ate philosophical defence of sciennficuy without abstr act ions of tbis kmd,
so provoking agnostic and irr ationalist counter-attack. This predicament
had a strictly epistemological ground in an anti-realist account of science.
which then found self-destructive confi rmation in a false reduct ion of culture
to ideology.
Raymond Williams has been seen as the humanist antithesis of the
Ahhusserian sensibility, but his developed theory of cult ure, far from
incompat ible wi t h the science/ideology distinction. may prove its safer
sett ing. Cult ure, in \'(' iUiams's sense. is the integrally historical making of
sense and of subjects, always both. " Its substance is the work of mate rial
pract ices - rhetor ics, institutions. Culture does not constitute an expressive
totality: its antagonisms are complex. its times differential, and its mean -
ings discrepant and changeable. Ideology (rest ored to a stricter sense as
socially determined mysrificanon) and science (understood. less heroically.
as fallible rat ional inquiry into the real) are present. but as contingent
facult ies of cultural pract ice, not its primordial essences. Literature is present
too. of course. b ut now in a role mor e evident to the later Macherey than
to Alrhcsser, as an ideological format ion in the histor y of writ ing and
reading. However. Macherey's analytic shift from tex t to institution, though
productive in itself. was less a resolution o f his earlier theoretical difficulty
tha n an escape from it. Inquiry into the forms and functions of texrcelit y,
however formalist it must often appear. will remain cent ral to any literary
theor y deserving its name. It seems to me very striking, in retrospect, that
Williams's understanding of literar y form was from earliest days free from
the essent ialism that hobbled Ahhusser and Macberey, as indeed it has
frustrated most Mar xist aesthetic theor izing.
Ideology enjoyed relative autonomy with in a complex whole determined
only in the last inst ance by the economic. This was probably the most
immediat ely appealing of Alth usscr's messages, legiti mat ing as it did the
elabor at ion of ' regional' t heories and analyses unin hibited by the snap
totalizanons for which mechanist ic and Hegelian styles of Marxism had
become not orious. The rich yield of work done und er its sign is a t ribute
to its int ellectual wor t h. But as a concept , it too displayed a propensity to
develop by its bad side. ' Relative autonomy' soon came under suspicion as
a compromise formation mediat ing th e antagonism bet ween a dogmat ic
philosophy of histor y and a properl y critica l and materialist concept of
pract ice. Proposed as a resoluti on of Mar x's social to pology, it was in-
creasingly exploited as a pas5.1ge into alternat ive t heoret ical space. Here
again thi s unsought outcome was facilitated by problems in Althusser 's
theoret ical formulat ions, though these were not nearly so grave as those
besetti ng the concept of ideology. It is t rue t hat t he term 'relati ve' often
serves as an ad hoc lubricant of inter-prepos itional friction. But the objec-
tion, del ivered with an air of unspari ng materialist rigour, that ideology is
deter mined or aut onomous - no t hird war - was ill-founded.
H
Conditional autonomy (a mor e precise designation) is the t ypical status of
com plex syste ms; only the humanist assumption that social life is utt erly
distinct from t he rest of reality lent credence to the confident disjunct ions
of Alth usser's progeny. It is also true. or so I would maint ain. that
Althusser' s formulat ion of ' t he last instance' was deficient . conflaring the
temporal and structural meanin gs of the concept with unfortunate result$.ll
But the re is no great difficulty in amending this aspect of the analysis, in
a plainly Marxist sense. Indeed, it seems odd that 'relative autonomy' and
'the insta nce' :!ohoulJ have au racted X> mu..:h aueruion when. at guably,
the mor e original content ion of Alt husser's discussion lay elsewhere. The
titular concept of his essay was not either of these. after all, but ouerdeter -
minut iU71 . vur vox: walt Hut - or lIutlllcn:1y - tu loosen the La J
wholes of mechanist or expressivist reasoning, redistribut ing causal resources
upwards from base to superstructure . but to substitute an alternative
172
FRANCIS MULHERN
ALTHUSSER IN LITERARY STUDIES 173
concept ion of the social as a whole. The concept of overdetermi nat ion did
not meed)' designa te the resultant of relat ively autonomous effectivities, it
offe red to speci fy the t ypical form of ""it y of th e social process, to sho w
how any pract ice was internally ma rked by the other practices that con-
stituted its conditions of existence, and thus - ' Hegelian' though it must
seem - to rethink, nut to disca rd. the notion of the presence of the whole
in all its pans.
If ' relative aut onomy' was the licence Althusser grant ed to radical liter-
ary and cuhural 'overde rer uuuarion' was the UJr n :'>VUIIJ ill\l; uLH
garion or challenge. It was scarcely limiting, in an ope rational sense this
was a conceptual instrument suited equally to locali zed text ual analysis
and to large-scale historical const ructions of period and genre. It legitim-
ated productive wor king relations with psychoanalysis (t he source of the
term, indeed) and semiot ics, where such concepts as Krist eva's ' inter-
text ualiry' provided support and specification; and it cleared a concept ual
space wit hin which key social determinations other than class could be
explored in a non-reduct ionist manner. But it was t he distinct ively Ma rxist
element in Alrhusser 's scheme - unlike its associated concepts, which might
be accommodat ed within any laodicean sociology of cult ure - and was not
spared t he general devaluat ion of the times. ' Overdet erminarion' was the
first word of many of Alt husser's English-speaking off spring; its meaning
remains under-explored.
This short sto ry of a conce pt and its fort unes ma y serve as a par able
concerni ng t he stat us of historical mater ialism in a wide r theoretical cul-
t ure. Alehusser's restr ict ive definition of dialect ical mat erialism and his
revised accou nt of Mar x's concept of history were complementar y aspects
of a single, funda mental decision to renounce the vision of Marxism as a
cosmology in the making, and therewit h to renounce theoretical autarky.
The return to Mar x would be rational only if pract iced as a t urning OUt
into critical solidarity with scient ific inquiry in general. Althusser' s defence
of Lacan - theoret ically, against the Zhdanovist traditions of his own
pan)' and. pract ically, against psychoanalytic officialdom - furnished the
strongest imaginable warr ant of his commitment to this revised ethics and
polities of culture. (It is now common knowledge t hat experience had
granted him a terrible cogniti ve advanta ge in the understanding of 'di ffer-
ential t emporalit y' and ' specific effectivit y' in psychic life.) His great theme
of ' reading' as work on the mat erialit y of t exts, which dr ew inspiration
from psychoa nalysis and also from the structuralism of the da y. was the
app rop riat e practical form of a critical and self-critical mode of int ellectual
conduct.
This was Althusser's most important single contribution to a Mar xist
cult ure, but becau se it was not merely pious it was not merely a gift. The re
was here a difficult - and increasingly unwelcome - dema nd It was possible
I
i.
to believe, in more euphoric moments, that a new theoretical synthesi s was
in prospect: an anti-humanist mat erialism. But this favoured locution was
actually so weak (' m3teri3lism' specifies nothing about the material world.
' anti -humanism' is a crude polemica l theme) tha t in practice it sponsored
the opposite of synthesis: a new, or not so new, perspect ivisrn. It has
31.....3)s seemed t o me rhat Althusser's orientatio n W3Sless dun the first but
mor e t han the second of these.
A project of synt hesis can hardly help but rekindle the old cosmological
dream, and in doing so, inhibit rat her t han assist rheorerical inquiry. His-
torical materialism claims t hat human for mations of sense and subject ivit y
are organized by deter minate modes of production and thei r associated
class relations. Psychoanal ysis claims tha t these formations register the
endu ring effects of the primal entr y int o socialit y, in patterns that arc at
once more and less var iable than economic systems. Neither can fully
account for the textual evidence; yet it seems difficult to take these claims
ser iously and at t he same t ime to believe t hat some higher resolut ion
awaits t hem. A small illust ration may concret ize the issue. It is t rue, let us
grant, t hat L'Education semimentale dramatizes and validates the process
of a certain bourgeois political disappointment, after the failure of the
1848 revolut ions. It seems true, too , that Plaubert 's figuration of persons
and their relat ions is governed by the imago of t he mot her. The novel
conde nses t hese distinct matters in such a way that they can be neit her
separat ed nor co-ordi nated in a relat ionship of essence and expression.
Haubert 's textual space is as it were occu pied t .....ice over, sratu rated at
once by the social meanings of French society in a certai n period and by
a certa in pattern of unconscious desire. In th is......e might say, it epitomizes
t he condition of all cul ture. where social and psychodynamic meanings arc
always jointly act ive, not only in their shared semiotic space but wi th in
each other, and according to logics tha t neither exclude patterns of co-
ordination no r depend on t hem.
To reason so is not, however, to offer simpl e support for a notion of
'pluralism', a word in which a dama ging ambiguity has flourished for too
long. As an instit utional prin ciple affirming t he rights of all int ellect ual
tenden cies, pl uralism is a necessar y conditi on of fruitful inquiry. But th is
meaning of the term is oft en used, witt ingly or not . to valorize a second
mean ing. which is more clearly regist ered as relat ivist or perspect ivist.
These tOO have their right s, but they derive no privilege, as intellect ual
posit ions, from their simulation of insti tut ional virt ue: collecti ve pluralism
does not vindicate, let alone en join. indi vidua l eclecticism. And the)' are
validated least of all by appea l to the name of Althus ser. To 53Ythat no
t heory can claim a monopoly on knowledge of the social is not to claim
tha t t ruth is relat ive, or perc ellized. Althusser af firmed. the first proposit ion
but would have rebutted its fallacious sequel Marxism cannot, in heroi c
isolat ion. harvest the yield of our possible social knowledge. Yet in so far
174 FRANCI S MUL.HERN
ALTHUSSER IN LITERARY STUDIES 175
as it lodges claims concerning t he general structure of the social, it not
only op poses alternative conject ures of the same sco pe, but also exercises
a crit ical check 0 11 claiurs of more limited applicati on. Th is is a logical
entailment, by wh ich Marxism surv ives or fails as a self-consist ent ratio nal
theor y." Reduced to tendin g ' class factors' in a per spect ivist schedule of
analysis, tilt: theory wou ld become precisely the kind of t hing against
which Lenin famo usly defined it : a ' t rade-union consciousness' in cult ural
st udies.
Renouncing the old cosmology (though his t one some times belied the
gesture) and resist ing the false alterna tive of perspectivism, Louis Alth usser
drafted a bold, vulnerable pro posal: in his own wor ds, here transposed, an
overdetermined unit y of theoret ical activity, endlessly no vel in it s configur-
at ions but determined in the last instance by Mar x's science of history. Just
how suggestive tha t proposal was, and how vulnerable to reduct ion or
rewriting, the past t wenty years have shown. Today, it remains, much
worn by time and handling but sti ll legible, a message to read, t hink abo ut
and act upon.
NOTES
These pages offer what, for wan t of a bet ter phrase, might be called a theo-
retical memoir. Laying no claim to the systemat ic achieveme nt of cr itica l or
hi storical reconstruction proper, t hey at e more perso nal in background and
per haps idiosyncratic in balance an d range. The text is also, and fo r this
reason, somewhat Anglocentr ic - a limitation I cannot sur mount here, but
wi"h to acknnwled ge, My rh:lnh t n \' tr:gnr y F.lIinrr for hi"
encouragement and critical advice.
2 For Marx, Allen Lane, London, 1969; Reading Capital, New Left Books,
London, 1970; Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, New Left Books,
London, 1971 , passim.
3 Roland Barth es spoke of ' a quadrwiwn of pilot sciences', th ough listing
economics and not psychoanalysis along with the other three (see Elements of
Semiology, Hill and Wang, New York, 1968, pp. 101- 02, n. 55 ).
4 My own contr ibution ro rhis culrure of embarrassment (' The Marxist Aesthetics
of Christopher Caudwell', New Left Rel/iew 85, May/June 1974) was typical
in its ' Ahhusserian' desire to raze the local theoreti cal herita ge. Th ough I
stand by t he destructi ve analysis proposed th ere, I have long felt that Ca udwell
deserved a more generous and more resourcef ul (t hat is, mor e tr uly critical)
reading.
5 Williams's famou s judgement on Caudwell epitomized a whole structure of
left literary-criti cal feeling; 'f or the most part his discussion is not even specific
enough to be wrong' (Culture and Society 1780- 1950, Penguin, Harmonds-
WOrth, 1961, P. 268).
6 'The " Piccolo Tearro": Bertolazzi and Brecht', in For Marx, and 'Cre monini,
Paint er of the Abst ract ', in Lenin and Philosophy.
7 'A Lette r on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre' , Lenin and Philosophy, at pp. 207,
204.
8 A Theory of Lit erary Production, Routl edge and Kegan Pau l, London, 1978.
9 A Theory of Lit erary Production, pp. 133, 59.
10 In collabora tion with Etienne Balibar. see t heir ' De l a linerature comme forme
ideologique', Litt b aturc 13, February 197'1; rrenslered QS ' On Literat ure QS
an , Ideological Form' (Oxford Literary Review 3, 1978) and reprinted in
Francis Mulhern, ed, Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, Longma n,
London, 1992 (to which subsequent references referl.
11 ' Ideo logy and Literary Form', New Left Review 90, March/April 1975;
Critk:ism and Ideology, New Left Books, London, 1976.
12 Criticism and Ideology, pp. 83- 84.
13 See my ' Marx ism in Literary Criticism', New Left Review 108, March/April
197 8, which advanced this critical argument, among others - but which, as
a whole, shared wit h its int erlocuto r the limiting problematic discussed above.
14 The tendency of Michael Spri nker's work , in rhe United Stares, runs counter
(Q th is suggestion. For him, the relation between t he aesthetic and the ideo-
logical for ms our 'curr ent hori zon of understandi ng' and, to that extent, 'we
remain determinately within the Alrhusserian problematic.' He would add,
however, that the conce pt of t he aesthetic is more elusive t han t he tra ditions
of bourgeois and Marxist reflection acknowledge (l maginary Relations,
Verso, London, 1987, pp. 2, 3). See, for more general int erest, E. Ann Ka plan
and Sprinker, eds, The Afthusserian Legacy, Verso, Londo n, 1993, which
includes a variety of Nor th American (a nd other ) appreciations of Alrbusser's
work.
15 ' On Literat ure as a n Ideological f orm', p. 35.
16 Criticism and Ideology, p. 56 . Eagleton's rerros pecrive assessment of Althusser
appears in t he preface of his Against the Grain: Essays J 975-1 985, Verso,
London, 1986, pp. 2- 4; in t he same volume, see also his ' Macherey and
Marxist Literary Th eory' (1975), pp. 9- 21.
17 Tel Quel , Tbeorie d'ensemble, Editions du Seuil, Pari s, 1968.
18 Bal ihar and Macherey associat ed Tel Que! with a vision o f art as ' anti-nat ure'
and ' violat ion of or der ' - a 're versal .. . character istic of conservative ideology'
(' On Literature as an Ideological Form', p. 54, n. 10). See also Eagleton,
Against the Grain, p. 4.
19 Thecrie d'ensemble, p. 8.
20 See Foucault, ' Distance, aspect, origine' ; Barrhes, ' Drame, poerne, ro man';
and Derr ida, ' La difference', Theone d'ensemble, pp. 11-24 , 25-40,41- 66
respectively.
21 Wollen, Readings and Writings: Semiotic Counter-strategies, Verso, Londo n
1982, p. 211; Heat h, Questions of Cinema, Macmillan, London, 1981, p. 201.
Wollen' s version o f t his t rinity formula was always firmly grounded in a
commit ment to science; he was corres pondingly more distant from Tel Quel
t ha n Heath, who was for a t ime an active collabor at or in th e journ al. Heath 's
Signs of the Times: Int roductory Readings in Textual Semiotics (co-edited with
Colin MacCabe and Christopher Prendergast , Granta, Cambridge, n.d.) marked
the entr y of Tel Quel int o British left cult ure.
22 Rosalind Cowar d and johnEllis's Language and Materialism (Routledge and
116 FRANCIS MULHERN
Kegan Paul, London, 1977) was widely received as a synopsis of Screen's
thinking, bur di d not claim that stat us for itself .
23 Sec Boumdha, Thomas HaTdy and Wo men: Sex ual Ideology and No rrot il-e
Form, Ha rvester, Brighton , 1982, and Kaplan, Sea Changes: Culture and
Femi nism, Verso, London, 1986.
24 Seehis Formali sm and Marxism, Methuen, London. 1979; also 'Mar xism and
Popular Fiction', first published in Literature and Hist ory 7, 1981, and reprinted
in Contemporary Marxist Lit erary Criticism.
25 The sociologists Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst were t he key figures here; their
reading of Alt husscr quickly rose to quasi-canonical stat us in Screen and its
literary-theoretical hinterland.
26 Tony Bennett explains his t ransit ion to 'post-Marxism' (not, he stresses,
ant i-Marxism) in his Outside Literatur e, Routledge, London, 1990, plm 1.
27 British Post-structuralism since 1968, Routl edge, London, 1988, pp. 17,21.
28 For Marx, 'Glossary ' (composed by Ben Brewster and amended by Althusser),
p. 252.
29 The absolut e qualiry of this thesis was confi rmed a cont rario by Alehusser's
one atte mpt to qualify it. Ideology, he wrot e, is ' an omni-historical reality,
in the sense: [that its] str uct ure and functioning are immutable, present in
the same form throughout what we can call history, in the sense in which the
Communist Mani f esto defines history as the: history of class struggles, i.e. the
history of class societies' (Lenin and Philosophy, pp. 151- 52). 1 this purported
qualification is valid, then the substantive t hesis fails.
30 The Ideology of Power and th e Power of Ideology, Verso, London , 1980.
31 For one compact summary, see Williams, Marxism and Lit eratle, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1977.
32 See, for example, Paul Hirst, On La wand Ideology, Macmillan, London,1 979,
pp. 52-53, 71-72 and passim, and fo r th e settled retros pect, Easrhope, British
Post st rU<:t urafism, pp.
33 Cf . the introduct ion to Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism, p. 25.
J4 Stephen Resnick a nd Richard Woolf appear to me [0 be trying to evade this
unaccommodating conclusion - or to bowd lerize it - when they maintain,
first, that for Alrhusser there can be no one social tru th, only a plurality of
t rut hs; but, second, that Mar xism should accept or reject exogenous theoretical
claims following an assessment of their 'soc ial conditions and consequences'
(' Althusser' s Liberation of Marxian Theory', in The Aft husserian Legacy,
65, 67).
8
ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS
INTERMINABLE: THE CASE OF LOUIS
ALTHUSSER
Gregory Elliott
Once everyt hi ng hal been sai d, tlVet'ylhlng 11111 r emain I 10 be laid.. . . EvtIfY-
Ihlng lUll r eml inl 10 say; everyt hi ng always r emaln l 10 be laid .
Ancte Gor z. The Traitor
81 au lI@u d@ eu e.communl@r, on comm" nQl.'I li per compr @ndr@?
louis AlttvJssar, Joumal de captivite
In a text read at t he funeral of Louis Alt hu sser, Jacques Derr ida obse rved
of him t hat he had
t raversed so man y lives . so man y personal, historical, philosophical and
political adventures; mark ed, inflected, influenced so many discourses, actions,
and existences by the radi ant and provocative force of his thoug ht, his
manner of being, of speaking, of teaching, that the most diverse and contra-
dictory accounts could never exhaust their source.'
And yet whilst t he ' uniq ue ad venture wh ich bears t he na me of Louis
Alt husser ' was indeli bly sing ular, it has as sumed, well beyond the border s
of his nat ive coun try, a represent ative status, i nseparabl e from the po st -
war advent ures of t he dialecti c. In a celebra ted formula of 1960, crit ici zed
fo r its historicism by Alrhu sser , Sar t re accre dited Marxism 't he untran-
sce ndabl e philosophy for our nme'.' Accordi ng to a pervasive self-i mage
of t he age, the hi stori cal moment 'e xpressed' by Marx ism has been sur-
pas sed, ceding, circa June 1968, to Rorry ' s ' Nort h Atl antic Postmodern
Bourgeois Liberal Democracy' as the unrr anscendable horizon of contem-
porary t hou ght. In conseq uence, the po st -war th ink er who, per haps more
than any othe r , sought to render Mar xism genu inely contempo ra ry, by
articulating modernist phi losophy and Co mm unist politics, had been laid
to intellect ual rest well before the officia l obsequie s of October 1990 .
171 GREGORY ELLIOn ANALYStS TERMINATED, ANALYStS INTERMINABLE
,,.
If Althusser's effacement from the scene occurred no less rapidly t han
his rise to prominence wit hin it, t his is. in part at least. attributable to his
int olerabilit y for a generat ion in whose 'former philosophical conscious--
ness' he once loomed so large. But t he ties t hat bind are not so easily
severed. Where denegaricn prevails. repression obtains. The 'enormous
condescension of posterity', to borr ow a phrase fro m E. P. Thompson,' is
no more reliable a guide to its obiter's t rue worth t han t he graruirous
adulation of antericrit y. Moreover, it is index enough that what Alrbusser
repr esent ed - the summation of the ' IllUSIOn of the epoch' tAlrhusserianism,
highest stage of Marxism?) - is one component of the theoret ical uncon-
scious of t he present.
Althu sser was not merely a Marxist - sufficient in itself to condemn him
to the philosophical equivalent of the Nat ura l Histor y Museum, so far as
much of t he class of ' 68 is concerned (having emba rked for Beijing in its
youth, and landed in Bel Air in middle agel! He was a Communist and
- what is doubtless worse - a french (not an Italian) one, and is corre-
spondingly susceptible to t he tendency to affix the label 'Stalinist' to any-
thmg and everyt hing which moves in that complex history, Furt hermore -
and noto riously - he was Nietzsche's companion in lunacy, compounding
the philosophico-polirical aa es d'accusanon of the late 19705 by the murder
of his companion of 35 years and wife of four in November 1 And
such cases are, at best, of pathological curiosity (unless, t hat is, they enjoy
the good fortune of having been edited and intr oduced by Michel Foucault ).'
' Neither amnesia, no r disgust, nor irony produces even t he shadow of
a critique:' In th e event, the first opt ion is no longer available to us, As is
its wont, the repressed has, t o the evident discomfort of some, returned
A vindicat ion of the Alt husserian programme across the disciplinary board
has recently been attempted; while t he papers present ed to a conference in
1988 on the Alrhussenan legacy have now been collected? Above all, the
simult aneous publicat ion in April 1991 of the first volume of Yann Moulier
Boutang's biography of Althusser, and of the philosopher's 'autobiography'
(due to appea r in English translation in aut umn 1993), has aroused a
massive wave of inreresr on bot h sides of the ChanneL' Within months of
its release in France, L'aoenir dure longlemps had sold 40,000 copies, attrac-
ti ng sustained - and, in t he main, serious - attention in the.French press'
and prompting a two-hour TV programme. The longest boo k written by
Althusser is set - if it has not alread y done so - to become the highest-
selling; the t hinker who endured a living deat h for the last decade of his
life is en joying a post humous existence among an audience much of which
had probably never heard of, let alone read, For Marx or Reading Capital.
Predictably, British coverage to dat e (including a slot on BBC 2's Late
Show in Oct ober 1992) has tak en irs cue from Althusser's 'con fessions'
and focused predominantl y, if not excl usively, on rhe sensational dimen-
sion of l'affaire Althusser, The ritual monotony of the ti tles prefacing reviews
- ' A Marxist murderer', 'Sex, murder and phi losophy', ' Marx and murder'
- explains t he space devoted to t he deceased adherent of an out moded
(and/o r iniquitous) doct rine by the mainstr eam press." If French com-
mentators had, doubtless inadvertentl y, conveyed the impression that
Alrhusser' s murder of his wif e weighed less heavily wit h t hem tha n his
failure to abjure the God that failed" - given Helene Ryt man's biograph y,
mora lity tales about anti-Communist beaut y and the Stalinist beast wer e
implausible - some of their Anglo-American counterpart s were readier to
insinuate the equation: fait divers", fait philosophique, or (Alt husserian)
Mar xism '" Madness '" Murder, It was left to the Sun's Augean stable-mate,
The Times Literary Supplement , under Mur dochi te propri etor ship and
Oakeshorrian presidency, to give full vent to the outrag ed decency of the
mora l maj orit y, in an art icle, riddled wit h errors, that entered an unwitting
affidavit against the benevolence of t he values it indignantl y count erposed
to t he Parisian contagion of theoret ical ann-huma nism."
' I am one thing, my writ ings are another', proclaimed Nietzsche in hi s
put at ive aut obiography." The point applies to Alrhusser, as to any ot her
thin ker: the genesis, the str ucture, the validit y, and t he effectivity of a body
of thoug ht are ana lytically disti nct issues for any inquiry t hat aspires to
somet hing other than ad homi nem incrimi nation or exculpat ion of ideas.
At any rate, the secrets of Althusserian Marxism will not be expose d by
edif ying inspect ion of its ar t isan's adolescent bedclot hes (or t he glacial
impropriet ies of his parent s' mar riage-bed, for that matter ), 'as a general
rule', he once objected to Plekhanov's imprudent speculations on the causes
of the French Revolution, 'concepts are not hidden in beds,'! ' By way of
variation on a Sartrean theme, it might simply be remarked: Louis Alt husser
became a manic-depr essive murderer, no doubt about it. But not every
manic-depressive murderer is Louis Alrhusser. The heurist ic inadequacy of
literary supplement psycho-babble is contained in these [\\'0 sentences."
The first t hing to be not ed about the occasion for Althusser's renewed
celebrity (or notoriety) is that the stat us of both his texts is no less com-
plex t han t heir charact er, u s faits, wr itten in 1976 and unfinished, was
scheduled for inclusion in an abort ive journal edited by Althusser's pupil,
Regis Debray. L'avenir Jure longtemps, almost four times the lengt h
(some 270 pages). and dr afted. characteristically, in feverish haste in the
spring of 1985 between bouts of hospitalization, was init ially intended for
publication, but then simply laid aside. No will having been left by Alrhusser,
his closest surviving relative - a nephew - became his executor and decided
to authorize their appea rance under t he auspices of the Inst it ut
de I'tdit ion conremporaine and the seemingly scrupulous editorship of
Olivier Carpet and Yann Moulier Boutang."
Alrhusser's unavailing st ruggle against t he psychological torment t hat
predated and punct uat ed his public career - the ' war wit hout memoirs or
memori als' evoked by him in his single most powerf ul essay, ' Freud and
10.
GREGORY fLUOn ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE
' 81
Lacan' " - has finally been granted its memorial and yielded memoirs of
a kind. But can the autobi ograp her's tale of how he became wh at he was
be tr ust ed? That t here are reasonable grounds for doubt is suggested, if by
nothi ng else, h)' the marked discrepancies between us fails and L'ouerur.
The former, under a t ypically laconic (and ironic) title. is composed in a
comic rege ter (It contains, for example, fictional encounters Wit h r apt
Joh n XXIII and General de Gaulle [ADI... 338- 39} ~ The latt er pert ai ns to
the converse mode - its tragic score unrelieved (indeed, intensified) by the
falsely Optimist ic notes It Stri kes towa rds Its conclusion. Essent ially cover-
ing the same terr ain. they do so quite differently, offeri ng not so much a
mut ual corrective as alterna tive perspect ives upon the Alth usserian destiny.
Where readings have not been flagrantl y culpable. they have too often
been unduly ingenuous. in pre-Freudian fashion taking Althus.scr at his
word and t herewith subscri bing to an ' idea of reading which makes a
writt en discourse the immediate transparency of the true, the, real dis-
course of a voice' ." As th e author of Reading Capit al insisted at t he outset.
there is no such thing as an innocent reading. Althusser's own stra tegy
vis-a-vis Marx - the 's ympt omat ic reading' which sought to reconst ruct
the latent st ruct ural matr ix (or t heoretical ' problemat ic') generative of the
manifest serial discourse - drew upon the Freudian int erpretation of dreams.
His analysis of the Althusser case and the reasons for his unreason - the
tangled. causal skein t hat culminated in an act of conjoint destr uction and
self-destruct ion - requires an analogous operat ion. The occasionally oneiric
discourse of L'allentr cries out. almost literally. for a sympt omatic reading.
It is immeasurably aided by Moulier Bout ang's meticulous reconst ruc-
t ion of Althusser's life up to 1956. which permits infor med and properl y
critical scrut iny of his own tendenti ous rendition. For there were many
Althu ssers, of whom Althusser' s is only one - one who does not exhaust
(may even t raduce) the plural and contradictory realit y commemorated
by Dercida and who must. accordingly, beapproached en connau sance de
cause. Yet the prohlem , baldly stated, is that , despite his biographer' s
heroic endeavours, such knowledge is not at our disposal and is unlikely
to be even when we possess the completed biography. The bare facts of
what Althusser once dubbed his 'aut o-heterobiographical circumstances', "
and their concatenation, are in the process of being established; the
implacable illogic of his unconscious remains recalcit rant to elucida t ion.
'Nothing', he justly remarked. in one version of those facts from another
scene, ' is as simple as t he unconscious elements on which analysis work s;
but nothing is as complicated as t heir individual combination' (ADL. 354 1.
Because the)" appear under his signature Alrhusser's own disconcerti ng
simplicities have been received as the disclosure of that individual combi-
nation in it s plenary complexity - as if, cont ra Pascal. t he Althusserian heart
had its reasons and they were known to Althusser' s head. Furthermor e, his
projectio n of the shadow of ' Althusser' onto the )oung Althus.scr - the
\
l
construction of his own histor) in the ' fut ure ant erioc'lO - has been accept ed.
as the aut horitative (since aut horized) version.
L'a veni r advert ises it self as the public explanation which Althu sser was
at once excused and denied by t he non-li eu (' no grou nds' ) decreed, under
Article 64 of the French pena l code, after the murder of his wife:
This is why, sinceeveryone has been able to speak in my place and the legal
process has prohibited me from any public explanation, I have resolved to
explain myself publidy.
I do so first of all for my friends and, if possible, for myself; in order eo
lift this heavy tomb-stone which weighs down on me. . . . Yes, to free myself
from the condition in which [I have been placed) by the extreme gravity of
my state ... my murder, and also - and especially - by the equivocal effects
of the decree of non-lieu from which I benefited, without being able, in faa
or in b.w, to contest the procedure. For it is under the tomb-stone of the
non-lieu, of silence and public death that I have been forced to survive and
learn to live (ADL, 23).
Reminding us that there was an Althu sser before and after - as well as
dur ing - Althu sserianism, the author stipulates that L'avenir const it utes
' neither a journal, nor memoi rs, nor autobiography' (ADL, 25 ), but rat her
what he once descr ibed t o his biographer as a 't raumabiography'. He
claims t o be 'sticking st rictl y to t he fact s', but immediat ely attaches a
cr ucial qua lificat ion: 'hallucinations are also facts' (ADL, 74). We are
dealing, not with the t ranquil recollection of an accomplished life, but t he
anguished retrospection of a death fcreold - one which ampl y confirms
Malraux's observation t hat what is t ragic about death is that it trans forms
life into destiny. L'avenir, in the words of its editors. is an ' inext ricable
melange of "facts" and " fantasies" (ADL, ixl.
Derrida had remarked that whilst public discourse about Alrhusser tended
t o associate his name With t hose of Marx or Lenm, hrs mnmates were
compelled to invoke ot her figures: Pascal, Dostoevsky, Ni etzsche, or Art aud
Anticipating this insight, Altbusser seeks to situate his text by all usion to
Foucault 's edition of Pierr e Riviere's testament and Rousseau's Confe ssions
(adding, 'alas. I am not Rousseau ' ). Ot her autobiographical wri tings tha t
come to mind are Sartre's Words and President Schrebe r's Memoirs of
my N ervous Illn ess. In effect, this is a fragment ary 'Wild (self-) analysis' :
something akin t o the test imony of a Nietzsche in the discourse of a Freud.
Just as Alrhu sser can lay claim to Rousseau's privilege and bane - ' I am
lake no one 10 t he whole world" ! - so his confessions are literall y excep-
t ional. for better and worse alike.
Much of their poignanc y. as well as their ambivalence, deri ves from a
fact so blmdmg as to n sk mVlslbdlt y: L'aventr IS a symptom of t he chrome
manic-depressive syndro me which it hopes to exorcize th rough a public
talking-cure. It opens - excruciat ingly - ..... ith t he scene of t he crime and
,,,
GREGORY ELLIOTT
ANALYSIS TERMINATED. ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE 183
doses, aft er apparent self-detection, wit h the explanatory commentary of
an 'ol d medical friend' (ADL. 273- 79). t herewith reinstati ng t he non-lieu
in conclusion. The first half of the book is gwen over to t he aet iology of
its subject 's ment al illness (or the origins of his madn ess) in a ' family
romance', enacted in Algeria and southe rn France ent re les deux guerres,
which soon acquires the contours of a fam ilial hor ror-story. From he
maternal aunt Alt husser learnt the fami ly secret: t hat his mot her's fianti
had been killed during the First World War; tha t she had subsequently
accepted the marriage-proposal of his brother; and that she had named
her only son aft er the love of her youth - and of her life. Th us informed,
Alt husser drew a devastati ng conclusion: he had, so t o speak. been born ,
not made. f or inscri bed in the infant Loui s' Christ ian name was the true
- and ot her - obj ect of her affect ions.
above all, It said: him [lui I, the third perso n pronoun which, rmgmg like the
summons of an anonymous third person, deprived me of any personahry of
myown, and referred t o t his man behind my back: Him was Louis [Lui, ("'ftait
Louisl. my uncle, whom my mother loved, not me (ADL, 34).
As dep icted by him, Ah husser' s mot her is a mater dolorosa st raight out of
t he pages of de Beau voi r's Second Scx.
22
Remembered as Q violated wife
- ' a mart yred mot her bleeding like a wound' (ADL., 33) - Lucienne Althusser,
nee Berger - the maiden name (proprio sensu) to which she reverted after
her husband's death in 1975 - is portrayed as a castrating mother, impelled
by her phobias to enforce a st rict regime of social and sexual ' hygiene'
upon Altbusser a nd his sister. Georgene. Fr om the domesti c mi lieu in
which her uncontested writ ran his father was, literally or meta phorically,
absent , inspiri ng in the son t he sense tha t he had no fathe r. The consequence.
so Alt busser claims, was a feeling of fathomless solit ude. relieved only
by his relat ionship wit h his materna l gra ndparents (' my t rue family. my
only famil y' ) in the ' infant paradise' of th e Bois de Boulogn e, ove rlook-
ing Algiers, or of Larochemillay, in the Morvan, to which t hey ret ir ed
(ADL, 56fl. ).
As Alth usscr notes (ADI.. 162- 65). the related themes of the ' fatherless
child' and ' solit ude' wou ld recur in his philosophic al writings.U Cherchez
Ja femme is the leitmot if of his case history:
My mot her loved me profoundly, but it was only much later, in the light of
my aoaly..is, that I understnod ho w .. . t hl" unhappy woman, \ hr: lin d a\
best she could what had happened to her: having a child whom she could
not restrain herself from bapt izing ' Louis'. with the name of the dead man
whom she had loved and still loved, in her soul. .. . I am recomposing here
what I lived and what I have come to understand of it. . . . In my case death
was the death of a man whom my mor:her loved above all else, beyond me.
In her 'love' for me, something paralyzed and marked me from earliest
childhood, fixing for a very long time what was to be my fate. It wasn't a
quest jcn of a fantasy, but of the ..-.: ry re4!ity of my life. Th us it is, for each
of 11<;;, rh:u :I f:l ou "}' hrtnmM li f l" (AnI .. 4R).
Whatever it was, it induced. we arc t old. the project t hat str uct ured
Alrhusser' s existence; ' to udu.:e her by realiZing her desire':
I realized what my mother desired and expected. . . from the person of the
oeher LoUIS - and I achlel'ed It In order to sedxa her: wisdom, puney, vi rtue,
pure intellect, disincamation, scholarly success, and, to crown it all, a 'lit er-
ary' career . . . and admission to an Ecole Normale Superieure. not Sainr-CJoud
- my uncle's - but better snll, the rue d' Ulm. Then I became the intellectual
whom people know of, who fiercely refused to ' dirty his hands' with the
media .. . and, my name on the first page of some books which my mot her
Tl? ti wiTh pritil", a renowned philoo;ophr T (AnT.. Sl-U).
Thus t o win his mother ' s love, by realizing her desir e, was for Althusser
simulta neously to reali ze his own being, by fashioning an ego (psychic and
corporeal ). The paradoxical effect of his pr oject - as with it s repet ition in
his relationshi p to his t eachers (ADL, 81) - was t o exacerbate t he perceived
original ex-cener iciey. seduet ion of ot hers mean t Althusser' s seducnon into
his own betrayal. For , ' I alwa ys had t he impr ession of not being me, of not
genuinely existing, but of existing only by and in artifias, namely the artifices
of seduction achieved by imposture . . .' (ADL, 53).
I n ' revelat ions' onto which crit ics have latch ed, Alrhusser confides that
the imposture extended to his phi losophical culture (more precisely, the
lack of it ) (ADL, 157- 58). I lo wever that may be, his formal education was
int errupted. after he had come sixt h in t he exa minat ions for admission to
the Ecole Norma le Superieure, rue d' Ulm, by the advent of war in September
1939. TIll: politi..:al opt jon curr ent in the: Cat hol ic and mUllarchi!ot circles
in which he had moved at the Lycee du Pare, Lyons - ' rat her Hi tler that
the Popular Front ' - mat eria lized with the colla pse of the Thi rd Repu blic.
Among these sacri ficed to Tral/ail. Famill e, Patrie in the ' st range defeat' of
Ju ne t 940 was Althusser. That the experience of capt ivity was a formative
influence is clea r. Notwithsta nding the man ifold pri vati ons it records. his
own account stres ses the redeemi ng Iea n nec while Sartre had never felt
frer.r than und er the Occupat ion, Alrhusser had never felt mor e secure
than in his prisoner-of-war camp (ADL, 99 ). Released from me maternal
embrace, he finally ui!oUJvcrnl mast urbation dud, ill the penon of Rubert
Dad. a friend whom he recalls as ' tender with me like a woman (t he
genuine mot her whom I had no t had )' (ADI.. 100 ). Accordi ngly. liberat ion
in 1945 induced nut elat ion, but disorienat ion, beroke nl ng reversion tu
t he isolati on which enha nced tha t 'nostalgic desire for fusion' (ADL. 88 )
moti vating subsequent attachments.
184 GREGORY ELL IOTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE 185
Post -war, th ose atta chments reduced, in essentials, to t hree: t he Ecole
No rma le Superieure - ' it too the subst itute for a maternal milieu, t he
amnioti c fluid' (ADL, 155 ) - whe re Alrh usser resumed his education and
secured an aca demic post afte r being received second at t he philosophy
agregauon in 1948; Helene Rytman - j ewess, res;stante, ex-Communist,
fallen on hard times - who m he met in 194 6; a nd the French Communist
Part y, to which he adhered in November 1948.
Helene 'ga ve me . . . t he prodigious gift of a world which I did not
know .. . a wo rld of solidarit y and st ruggle, a world of action ... a wo rld
of courage .. .' (ADL, 123 ). Yet the prospect of redemption so mirac ul-
ousl y opened up soon gave way to the threat of perdi tion. The relation-
ship with Helene, eight years his senior. to whom, so he claims, Alt husser
lost his virginity at the age of 28, was tr aumatic from the outset, plung ing
him int o a deep depression which necessitate d the first of a score of
hospitali zations, after Pierre Male had diagnosed sch izophrenia. (But for
the reversal of t his verd ict by Ju lian Ajuriag uerra, and its replacement by
severe melanchol ia, the affair might have ended there [116-17].)H Accordi ng
to Alt husser, he and Helene per formed an indispensable mater nal and
pate rna l function for one another. While Althusser replaced the parents to
whom, terminally ill, she had administered fatal eurhanas iac injections,
I I ~ l e n e was everyt hing for which he had yearned:
simultaneously like a good mother and a good father to me older than me,
loaded with experience and life, she loved me as a mot her loves her child,
her miraculous child, and at the same time like a father, a good father,
since she quite simply initiated. me into the real world, this infinite world
into which I had never been able to enter. . .. Through her desire for me -
pathetic me - she also initiated me into my role and masculinity as a man:
she loved me as a woman loves a man! (ADL, 123_24)
Indissolu bl y linked to these rites de passage was Alth usser's ind uction
into the world of Frenc h Communism, which he embraced, so he narrates,
afte r the loss of his Roman Ca tholic fa ith (ADL, 197). As the hopes borne
by the Resistance succumbed to the Cold Wa r, and the ' unit ed front' of
1944 -47 fra ctu red int o t he 't wo camps' of 194 8, Alth usser arr ived at t he
PCF' s own conviction: paraphrasing St. August ine, bors du paru, point de
)lJlut poli tique (outs ide t he party, 110 political salvat ion) . Even wit hou t
accentuating ci rcumstances, the con juncture woul d have proved inclement
for t he new academic recru it . Nizan's Serge Pluvinage may accurately
convey the pre-war experience of Communist intellectuals (' the qu esti on
of or iginal socia l sin was absolutely never posed');" as Althusse r's Int ro-
duction to For Marx at tested - possibly in conscious reminiscen ce (and
con tr adic tion] of T he Conspi racy - dur ing the cultur al Cold Wa r imputa-
t ions of original social sin flourished and pr ospered." Accentuating circum-
sta nces there were, ho wever, in the form of Helene's exclusion fro m the
party a nd Alrhusser's assumption of t he mission to secure her read mission.
So explosive an issue was this t hat if no salvation was to be had wit hout
the part y, damnation beckoned wit hin it.
Althusser basically reiterates the standard account of the affai r, arr r jb-
uting his wife's misfort unes to the mal evolence of Elsa Triolet, a nd con-
firms t he details supplied by one of t he part icipants in it, Emman uel Lc
Roy Ladurie." Accepting Helene' s version of events, Alt husser soug ht
to clear her name of t he charge of havin g been a double agent (t o whom
rumour s of supervising a sang uina ry episode of epu rat ion attached).
Without benefiti ng her, his zeal merely served t o expose him to the inq ui-
sit ion a nd cens ure of the PCF cell at t he ENS for consor ting wit h a ' Hirlero-
Trotskyite' (as t he inimitable Stalinist amalgam of the era had it ). In a
narrative significantly at variance wi th that suppl ied in Les faits (ADL, 336 ),
Alt husser claims in L'avenir to have joined t he unanimous vote for Helene's
expulsion from t he Peace Movement, but to have defied t he instr uction
of his branch to sever relations wit h his companion (ADL, 194-95). Di s-
consolat e at t he temporary ostracism of his comrades, yet consoled by her
love, Althosser asser ts t hat thi:,> ' veri tabl e Mosco w t ria l in the heart of
Pa ri s' induced a realist ic ap preciat ion of t he PCF and t he methods of its
adamantine leadership - an assessment con firmed by his experience of over-
hearing Lauren t Casanov a, thee ft::'>pt)I}:,>ible for io ubjuga til}g intellect uals
to ideol ogical recti tude, berat e t he biologist, Marcel Prenanr, on the subject
of ' bo urgeois' arithmet ic (ADL, 197).
While there is no reaso n t o doubt Alrhusser's insistence that he never
subscribed to the dementia of Lysenkoism, upon the public rep udiation of
which his own epistemology was based," it is possible t ha t his procl ai med
clairvoyance about the r CF is a ret rojecti on uf subseq uent di sillusion-
ment (as memorably expressed in Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans Ie part;
communiste in 1978).19 What is incont estable, as we shall see, is that t he
compa rative equanimity with which he affects to have greeted the sane-
tions of his comrades is belied by t he historical record.
In Les faits, discussing hi s impr ison ment in Germany, Althusser recount s
a plan which consisted in giving the guar ds to think t hat an escape had
been effected, and then, some weeks lat er, when the enemy had failed to
recapt ure the ' escapees' , making the genuine attempt. For hi m it exem-
plified ' t he problem of all phi losop hical (and politica l and militar y) prob-
lems: na mely, of knowing how to exit from a ci rcle while remaining wit hin
it ' (ADL, 313 ). Having identified his attachments, L'avenir becomes a
tale of a 'circle of circles' - the family, t he Ecole, the companio nshi p, the
party, t he clinic - and t heir mutual implicat ion and overdere rmination to
pr oduce, via what he once called t he ' necessity of contingency' , a singular
dest iny. Applying his uwn furmula, it mi ght be said that his nar rati ve
enacts his inabilit y t o find an egress fr om circles whose arc was inflected,
but not designed, by him, and wh ich degenerat ed from t he seemingly
'16
GREGORY ELLIOTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALY SIS INTERMINABLE
'.7
virtuous t o the intermittentl y vicious to the ulti matel y inferna l. Pace Sart re,
Hell is not other people.
By his own adm ission, A h h u ~ r a nd Helene constit ut ed a couple wh o"
by the end, could live neither wit h, nor without each other. Depen dent
upon her as a mai nstay and refuge, his self-dest ruct iveness fou nd expres-
sion in courting realization of his great est terror: abandonment by her.
In addit ion to the burden of anxiety and di stress imposed by his recurr ent
depression, Helene wa s subjected to his ' provocat ions' and humiliations
(for example, his relationship; with other women) - especiall y when in t he
manic phase of his psychosis IADl, 147ft ). Quite why things deteriorated
so inexorabl y and fat ally in 1980 is no t adequa tely explained by Althusser's
self-analysis. If it is t o be believed, conf ront ed wit h yet anot her depression
- possibly the most acute to dat e - Helene determined to leave him and
spoke of suicide, but did not act upon her resolutio n. What supe rvened,
in Alrhussce's final har rowing image of November 1980, amount ed to t he
' Hell for two, behind closed door s, of a deliberately organ ized solitude'
(ADL, 244), terminated only by the murder in wh ich ' my own dest ruct ion
symbo licall y passed through the destr uction of others - especially my dearest
and closest f ri ends, including t he woman whom I loved t he most '
(ADL. 269).
fiy th en, the fai lure of a plet hora of 't reat men ts' t o release Althusser
from the unr elenti ng grip of his madne ss, which dict at ed hospitalizat ion at
least once every two years, was evident. Althu sser is pai nfully fra nk about
his psychiatr ic history - fr om a wrenching account of subject ion to ECT
at the hands of a hospital ord erl y whom his patient s nicknamed 'Sta lin'
(ADL, 117-18), t hr ough the narcotic ana lysis undert aken, from 1950-62,
with Laurent Stevenin (ADL, 140 ), to the medical psychoanalysis, dispens-
ing wit h the indignities of the couch, he embarked upo n with Rene Diat kine
thereaft er. (Interest ingly, Ahhusser does not linger over the rationale for
this opt ion - at t he antipodes of his contemporaneous endorsement of
Lacan's ' return t o Freud ' in 'Freud and Lacan' .) The conscious themes of
his depression he isolates as t he terr or of abandonment; t he fear of vulner-
ability to a demand for love of whi ch he was incapable; and anxiety abo ut
public expos ure as an impost or (t his was the source of th e 'spectac ular
depression ' he suffered at the height of his celebrity, in t he immediate
aftermarh of pcblicancn of Pour Aftl rx and Lire I ~ CJpi t<JI, in the autumn
of 1965 ). Whatever their unconscious promptings and significance, t racked
down by Ahhusser t o t he mat ernal 'cast ra t ion' which deprived hi m of
he ' pbysil:<Io1 and J'Il'ychil: int egri t y' (ADl.., 128), their course inva riifbly
involved t ran sition from melancholic depths to manic summits:
Very rapIdly I passed from depressson to hypomania, which sometimes took
the form of a violent genuine mania. Then 1 felt mysd f to M omnipotent
over everything - the external world, my friends, m)' projects, my problems,
and those of others. Everything seemedto be - and was - incrediblyeasy.. , . It
will M understood that in rhis extraordinary facility and pretention there
was a massive dose of aggression, which was released . . . like a symptom of
the fanw )' of impotence and hence depression, for it was merely a defence
against my tendency to depression and against the fantasies of impotence
which nourished it. . . . My fear of being utterly impotent and my desire to
M omnipotent, my megalomania, were simply two sides of the same thing:
the desire to possess what I lacked in order to be 12 full and free man, and
which I was terrified of lacking (ADL, 13S).
Paradoxica lly, the ' securit y' of the psychiatric clinic answered to the
desire for omnipotence even as it cert ified Alt husser's impotence (ADL,
133 ). Within t he concent ric circles of the academy and the party the same
drama was played out in the exercise of his pub lic funct ions. Given that
Althusser 's characte rization of his purpose in t he chapters dealing wit h
phil osophy an d politics has fr equentl y been ignored by commentators, it
bears cita t ion:
. , . what l owe my reader, because l owe it to mysd t, is elucidation of the
subjective roots of my specific attachment to my profession of philosophy
teacher at the Ecole Normale Supeneure, to philosophy, politics, the party,
Illy Lvuk:; and theil illl.,aLI, i.e., how I found myself ... led to invest
and inscribe my subjective fantasies in my objective and public activities
IADL, 152).
I n effect, Althusser essays a n explanation of how the hearer of the name
Louis Althusse r became the artisan of Ah husserianism. Without conflating
qu estions of genesis and validit y, his reflect ions on the former provide
some elements for an understa nding of how it was he who arr ived at t he
elabora t ion of what, as he readi ly concedes to Ra ymond Aron, was an
' imag inary Mar xism' (ADL, 214 ).)0
Ahhusser 's ref usal to sta ge a retract ion of Marxism and all it s works
(including his own) has provoked hostile critics to cons tr ue L'auenir as
a self-det ract ion. Quite t he reverse of engaging in renunciation - a fact
whi ch will no doubt irr itate some readers and reassure others - Althusser
is unapologetic about the phil osophico-poli tical 'war of positi on' conducted
by him and his collabo ra to rs wit hin the PCF and affirms his enduring
commit ment to ' the materia list inspiration of Mar x', disdaining the thrills
and spills of post modernism (ADL, 215-16), Whil st criticizing the PCF
(over its treacherou s role in the May Event s, for example: ADL, 223),
Althusser vigor ously defends the rati onalit y o f French socialis ts opt ing for
membershi p and explains why he perse vered in hi s chosen course:
""ben I stayed in the pany, I thought . . . that by so doing on the basis of
an overtly oppositional position . . . I could prove, at least formally, that
188 GREGORY ELLIOTT
ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE
"9
opposit ional activity inside rhe party was possible on serious theoretical and
political bases, and hence that a transformatio n of it, maybe in the long run,
was a poss ibility (ADL. 227-18).
In a lett er of August 1972 (a his former Catholic teacher, Jean Guinan,
Alt husser had writt en: 'It is t rue that philosophy is a battl e, No doubt I
make many mistakes, but it is a combat which I love. And when I resume
the bat tle it is a sign t hat I am regaining my health a bir.?' After the defeat
of the Uninn of rhe I.e.ft in Mu ch 197R, dashing t he accnmulared hopes
of a decade or more, no furt her such signs wer e forthcoming fr om Alt husser.
In a subsequent lett er to Guinan, dated 3 December 1978, he announ ced:
'M y universe of thou ght has been abolished. I can no longer t hink. To
speak in t he language [of my yout h], I ent reat your prayers.t" All inter-
cessions having proved vain, Alrhusser succumbed to his dest iny.
As if in uncanny echo of Ni etzsche's exaltat ion - ' My t ime has not yet
come, some ar e born posrhumously'" - t he closing pages of L'avenir are
leavened with a desperat e opt imism of the will:
So, despite its dramas, life can still be beautiful. I am 67, bur at last I feel
- I who had no youth, since I was not loved for myself - I feel young as
never before, even if the affair must soon end.
Yes, the future lasts a long time (ADL, 272).
Per haps - but not for the aut hor of these lines. Wi th ult imate pathos, what
t he text cannot know is that, rat her t han register ing the conquest of
Althusse r's illness, its conclusion betrays t he mani c phase of his depressive
cycle. Wi thin weeks of its comple t ion, persecuted by the French gutt er-
pr ess, he was back in hospital. Louis Althu sser's time had come and gone.
Most are not reborn posthumously.
The over whelming impression con veyed by L 'avenir is of Alrhusser's
self-destr uct iveness, extending, in that lonel y hour of the last instance, to
t he destr uction of Helene. Yann Moul ier Boutang's exhaustive resear ch,
and its riveting first insta lment , confir m that thi s propen sity is mimed by
the t ext itself, in a consistent self-denigrat ion - even self-defamat ion -
which conceals a fact warranted by many of those to whom Derri da
referr ed in his eulogy: Alrhusser was a ma n wit h qualities. His own express
wish was that his test ament woul d solve his enigma t o public satisfact ion,
thus putt ing an end to demands for its elucidat ion and releasing him
int o an emanclpatory anonymity (ADL, 2 0 2 ) . J ~ L' avenir frustr ates that
aspiration and courts, instead, a furt her burst of the voyeurism at tend-
enr upon the events of 1980-81. For if not the 't issue of lies and half-
t ruths' detect ed by one of his closest associat es," it is, as Moulier Bourang
conclusively demonstrates, a re-wri ting of a life th rough t he pri sm of its
wreckage.
Setting aside ccmpa ranvely minor issues (such as Althusser's affect atio n,
ii fa Wittgenstein, of ignor ance of the history of philosoph y), his biogr a-
pher can claim t o have revealed t he profundity of Alrhusser's revisions
in five pri ncipal respect s. Firstl y - and cr ucially - the inversion of the
Althusserian family romance can be firmly dated - to July 1964 - and
confidentl y att ributed - t o none ot her t han Helene Rytman. She it was, in
a letter of 26 J uly 1964 quot ed by Moulier Bourang (LA, 74-75), who
advanced the 'wild analysis' of t he familial dynamic, as a fatalit y ab origine,
faithf ully reproduced by her compan ion. Having, like Althusser 's closest
male friend of the 1950s - the suicide, Jacques Man in <endur ed a wr etched
childhood, Helene, to put it no higher, abett ed Alrhusser in the projection
of the man ic-depr essive shadow of maturit y onto his infancy." Secondly,
and relatedl y, a cent ra l relati onship in the young Alt husser's existence is
underplayed and left largely unexamined in his narr at ive: hi s int ense bond
wit h his' sister, Georgene, whose own histor y of ' nervous illness' infallibly
t racked his own. Suffice it for now to indicate that, some rwc weeks after
receiving Helene's revelat or y let ter in t he summer of 1964, Alt husser had
a dream which ant icipates the scenario of November 1980. Transcri bed
by him, and found among his papers, it commenced th us: ' I must kill
my sister.. .. Kill her wit h her agreement, moreover .. .' (LA, 75 ).)7
Thirdly, Alt husser postdates the onset ot his recurren t depression to t he
post -war period, passing over in silence the t rials he experienced bot h
duri ng his schooldays and then in capt ivity. The latter , however , are
inscribed in t he desolate record of une vie sans bistoire UC, 245) he kept
at Schleswig."
Moulier Boutang's other main cont ribut ions concern Althusser's rela-
tions hip wit h Roma n Cat holicism and t he cont roversy over Helene's Re-
sist ance record . Regar ding t he for mer, it is likelyt hat, whilst not polit ically
aligned with Action Francai se, the pre-war Cat holic-Nationalist acti vist
of Jeunesse Chrerienne was considerably furt her to the right than he is
prepared to concede in L'avenir, More importantly, his gravi tation to the
left after the war, and eventu al affiliation to t he int ernat ional Communist
movement. involved no ' break' , epistemological or ot herwise, wit h the
fait h of the one holy and apostolic Cat holic Church int o which he had
been born. On t he cont rary, as his first post -war publication suggest s,"
Alt husser' s involvement with the left-Cat holic j eunesse de l'Eglise reached
its peak after his adhesion to t he r CF (LA, 276f.). He gradually det ached
himself from it bet ween 1950-52, t erminating his associat ion only when,
in 1953, the Vatican anat hemat ized it and t he ' worker priests' . Th ereaft er,
the philosopher who quo ted Niccolo Mac hiavelli and Cardinal de Rerz
wit h equal facility, who placed the devotional writi ngs of Santa Teresa of
Avila alongside the Collected Works of Comrade Lenin of Petr ograd on
his bookshelves, and who reportedly pinned Pascal's evocation of t he
'eterna l silence' of t he Galilean universe, as well as Marx' s injunct ion to
'90
GREGORY ELLIOTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANAL YSIS INTERMINABLE
'9'
chang e t he world, on his study wa ll, responded with virt ual omor fati to
his ineluctable ident ity: a lapsed Catholic.
If the organizat ion to which Alth usser transf erred his allegiances proved
so unamenable to the rehabilitation of his companion, it was, so Moulier
Boutang gives us to understand, because there was no smoke without fire.
Event ual illuminat ion of t his obscur e episode is promised in t he second
volume of the biography. In the account to hand, while indicating that
Althu ssec was playing wit h fire, Moulier Boutang suggests that his claim
to have voted for Helene' s excl usion from the Peace Movement amount s
to a screen-memory for the catastrophic breakdown which, contrary to his
own narrat ive, he suffered after submitting to t he will of the ENS cell on
his liaison dangereuse (LA, 423fL)
In sum, it can be said that Moulier Bourang has the virtues of Alt husser' s
vices, putting every rea der of the ' autobiogra phy' in his debt by t he met ic-
ulousness with which he has scanned the ret urn of a repr essed histor y
that has yet to be concl uded. If he has not (t hus far ?) resolved the
Alt husserian enigma, he has sounded it and, in so doing, rendered his
work at once ind ispensa ble to every st udent of his subject.
That said. we may rerum the compliment: when it comes to t he ques-
ti ons of Commun ism a nd Mar xism, Althusser possesses th e virtu es of his
biographer's vices. The second vol ume may ma ke amends. It s predecessor ,
however, is ma rke d by an antipathy which does less t han justice to Althusser
in this respect. However offensive it might sou nd to ant i-Stalinist sensibil-
ities, it needs to be remembered t hat, in the aft ermath of Vichy and Occu-
pa tion, and given th e SFIO's promotion of t he Cold War and French
colonialism - a record summarized by two critics as sociali sme ex pedition-
naire4<l - t he PCF, whose role, once it committed it self to the Resistance,
was peerless, was an eminentl y defensible option for anyone on the left in
France." Here the few pages devoted to t he issue by Eric Ho bsbawm are
wort h infinitely mor e tha n Moulier Bourang' s ma ny. Writ ing Althusser' s
script avant la lettre on t he dilemmas face d by Communist int ellectuals of
his generat ion, Hobsbawm observed in 1964 that
the communist who cut himself off from the party - and this was long
almost the automatic consequence of dissidence - lost all possibility of influ-
encing it. In countrieslike France, where the pan}'increasinglywas the socialist
movement, leaving it meant political impotence or treason to socialism; and
for communist intellectuals the possibilities of settling down as successful
academic or cultural tigures was no compensation. The fate of those who left
or were expelled was anti-communism or oblivion except among the readers
of little magazines. Conversely, loyaltyleft at least the possibility of influence."
Hobsbawm' s polarity is roo stark, as Sar t re's endeavou r, during t he
Kor ean War, to t heor ize the political practice of t he PeF from outside its
ranks tesnfies." But as Anderson argues, whatever the choice about mem-
bership, the likes of Alt husse r and Sarrre were united in the ir conviction,
corroborated by polit ical realit y, t hat t he Communist movement repre-
sented t he only available embodiment of socialist politics:" Consequently,
the y were damned if they did; and da mned if they did n' t. The price Althusser
paid for his part y card - submission to the exigencies of t he line of the day
- was heavy, by any calc ulat ion. Yet the opportun ity it afforded, in a
country in the heart of whose capital Algerians could be murdered in their
scores in October 1961 by the guardians of Liberti. Egalitt. fraternite,
should not be underest imated. Beaut iful Parisian souls in the present are
unreliable guides to t he 'dirt y hands' of the not so distant past.
Pending Moulier Bout ang's sequel, the t heme of ' imaginary Marx ism' -
Aeon's accusation and Alt husser's admission - is worth dwelling upon
bri etly. Ra ymond Williams once drew a distinct ion between thr ee variet ies
of Mar xism in post-war Brita in: t he ' legitimating' , the ' operati ve', and the
'academic' ." Assimilation of t he Alth usserian project into Britain fell,
pr ima rily, into the thi rd category. Its mot ivation in France, by cont rast ,
was predominantly operative: a contribut ion to t he t ransformation of the
PeF via theo retica l reconstru ction of its official ideology. The par adox, of
course - conducive to t he pervasive recept ion of Althusserian Mar xism
as legitimating - was t hat, in or der for t he operation to be licit wit hin
t he PCF, it had to wear t he colours of legitimacy. Transformation could
on ly pr oceed by the revindication of t radi tion: hence t he ruse de guerre,
ident ified by Alrhusser, of a heresiarch posing as a defender of the faith
(Spi noza made t he point long ago: there is no heretic without a text ):
.. . obiecnvelv, there: existed no possible form of political intervention in the
part)' other than the purely theoretical, and, moreover, one based upon the
exisring or recognized theory so as [0 rurn ir back against [he parry's use of
it. And since the recognized theory no longer had anything to do wit h Marx,
but conformed to the highly dangerous inanities of dialectical materialism
Soviet- ti.e., Stalin-) style, it was necessary - and this was the only possible
route - to return to Marx, to t his thought which was politically quite un-
impeachable, for sacred, and to demonstrate that dialectical materialisma fa
Stalin, with all its theoretical. philosophical, ideological and political conse-
quences, was utterly aberrant (ADL, 188-89 ).
Alrhusser ' s ente rprise ma y have been ' rheorericist ' - based upon the wager
that political history could be put back on the tracks of October by a
conversion to theoret ical rectit ude; it was far from Mar xological, invoca-
tions of a reversion to t he let ter of Marx not withstanding.
Alth usser is both frank and lucid about the t endentiousness of his
' symptomatic reading' of the Marxist canon and reconstr uction of the
corp us. His pur pose, he maintains, accurately divined by his seniors in t he
10'
GREGORY ELLIOTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE 193
PCF, was to release contempo rary Marxi sm from what he regarded as
the false prom issory notes issued by t hem in its name and t hereby to
' render it genuinely contempora ry' :
I acknowledge it willingly, for I did indeed suppress everything i n Marx
which struck me as incompatible with his materialist principles, but also
such ideology as remained in him - above all, the apologetic categories of
the ' dialectic', even the dialectic itself. Th is, in the shape of its fa mous ' laws',
seemed to me to serve merely as a retrospect ive apol ogy (justifica tion)
vis-a-vis the accomplishedIacr of the aleatory development of history for the
decisions of the party leadership (ADL, 214).
Int egral to any redemp tion of t he cont emporane ity of Marxi sm was t he
concept ion of it as a developi ng, 'finite t heory' of histor y, rather than the
cosmology, accomplished science ot anything and everyt hing 'trom protein
to poet ry'," bequeathed to the Third International by the Second. Alrhusser's
int ervention was designed, as it were, to salvage ' historical materialism' -
the scient ific resear ch programme initiated by Mar x - from ' hist orical
Mar xism' - the inst it utiona lized ideology of political organ izations (above
all, t hose of historical Communism)." Accordi ngly, while Althusser pre-
served t he t raditiona l terminology of the sanct ioned tripartite division of
Marxism into 'dialectical mat erialism', ' historical mate rialism', and 'scien-
t ific socialism', in his renditi on the second of these was emphat ically not
a sub-set of th e first, assigned the regional (socio-economic) instantiat ion
of t he laws of a dialectic cast, in Plekhanovite or Stalinist fashion, as an
ont ology of matt er-in-movement. Cont rary to the mat eria list metaphysic
of Mar xist or t hodox y, ' histo rical materialism' connoted no more - and yet
no less - t han t he 'science of history'," merely commenced by Marx and
in urgent need, after the depredations of decades, of re-comme ncement -
if needs be, by a comprehensive recasting of it s theoretical probl emati c.
Alt husserian ' imaginary Mar xism' aspired to constit ute t hat renovat ion of
histori cal materi alism apt to interpret t he cont emporary world, t hereby
arming t hose, in the main affiliated to the internationa l Communist move-
ment, endeavou ring to change it.
The ant iqui t y of Althu sseriani sm - and of Marxi sm in general - is a
ubiquitous art icle of int ellectual faith in these new ti mes (in the words of
t wo commentators {rom the mid-1980s, Alt husser's Mar xism 'seems very
dated and, like the Beat les' music or Godard's first films, inevitably evokes
a recent but vanished past']." Progression does not invariably constit ute
progress and Freud's caut ion might be erected over the philosoph ical
advent ure-playground of postmodernism: ' a cont radict ion is not a refuta-
tion, an innovat ion not necessarily an advance.U'' Yet that sense of a ' recent
but vanished past' indicates somet hing part ially confirmed by L'avenir: the
complex non/cont emporaneit y of Alt husserianism, or the degree to which
it repr esent ed a phil osophi cal format ion t ransitional bet ween Marxism
and postmodernism, one of whose effet s pervers was to facilitate inte llec-
tual t ransfer from t he one to t he other.
In his fine obituar y of Alrhusser, Ted Benton noted t hat much post -
Marxi st t heorization effects a unilateral, ami-Marxist radicalization of
Althusser' s own theses." Var ious exa mp les of t his might be cited. But to
restr ict ourselves to one di mension in which Althusser ant icipated t he
post -Ma rxist bonfire of metaph ysical vaniti es, we may select an issue on
which L'aueni r and Moulier Bout ang's biography offer some fascinat ing
and illuminat ing mater ial: meta-narr ati ves and the 'end of histor y' .
A persistent theme of Alt busser's discussion of his Marxism is t hat
philosophies of hist or y seduce t heir parti sans into that most hapless of
po litical. indisposit ions: 'telling ourselves stori es' (ADL. 203 ~ 52 Althusser 's
recast ing amounted, in effect if not in word, to a revolt against ortho dox
hist orical mater ialism, with its meta-narrative of t he advance of the pro-
ducti ve forces towards an inel uctable communism, as a pseudo-mat erialist
'inversion' of Hegelian theodicy - its mystical kernel concealed wit hin a
material shell - st arring the Ruse of Economic Reason. The abiding sin of
all such ' philosoph ical novels' resided in their incorr igibly ' realist' nar ra-
tive st ruct ure, plot ting a story wit h a hero (e.g. humanit y or the prole-
tariat ) and an appointed end (e.g., communism), t hat abst racted fro m the
specificities of the con juncture which it was the t ask of an aut hent ically
historical mater ialism to elucidate, t herewit h furn ishing t he knowledge
of a ' concrete sit uation' mandatory for any polit ical pract ice aspiring t o
tra nsform it for t he bette r. Accordingl y, ' philosophical novelists' - among
whom Alrhusser instances Sartre (170) - were no more adequate a 'guide
to action' t han the ' alchemists of revoluti on' ridiculed by Marx. Capital
- t he ' Book in which the Second Int ernational read the fata lity of t he
advent of socialism as if in a Bible' - supplied, so Alrhusser insisted, the
requisite corrective: the opening up of the 'continent of Histor y' to scien-
tific exploranon."
Mention of Sart re remi nds us t hat. in tandem with his rejection of
the Stal inist prolongation of the philosophy of hist ory in a ' right -Hegelian'
version - economism as Soviet raison d' etat - Althusser dismissed any ' left-
Hegelian' variant - humanism as raison de la revolution - by way of anti-
Stalinist response. Indeed. by tax ing Marxist humanism wit h instatement
of an odyssey of the human essence, from its alienat ion in capitalism t o its
reappropriation under commun ism. Alth usser asserted an underl ying con-
cept ual affinity between these ph ilosoph ical symbo lic antagonists, whatever
their overt polit ical animosity. Furthermore, so the later Althusser would
maint ain, t heoretica l Stalinism was ma rked by a combination of economism
and humanism, ' histomat' amount ing to what Raphael Samuel has dubbed.
in ano ther cont ext, a ' technological humanism' ."
194 GREGORY El.L10TT ANALYStS TERMINATED, ANALYStS INTERMINABLE
'"
De te [abula narratur, we might be tempt ed to respond. For t hanks to
Moulier Bourang's research, we now know that t he young Alrh usser was
a partisan of an apocalypt ic Hegelian Marxism, (mis)consrrued as the
philosophical vindicat ion of a Stalinism at the height of its post-war powers
of attraction (and repulsion)." Yet before Alt husser was Alt husser - prior
to his own epistemological break wit h Hegelianism - he declined a centr al
postulate of t he Hegelian Marxism nourished in France by Alexandre
Kojeve's immensely influential lectur es on the Phenomenology (published
as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel in 1947), and lately given, via an
inversion of the inversion, a new lease of posr-Cold War life by Francis
Fuku yama: the ' end of history' .56
In L'avenir (169) Althusser notes the salience of the theme in post-w ar
French intell ectu al culture, criticizing the 'astound ing bureaucrat ic content '
with which Kojeve, as a self-proclaimed (albeit non-practicing) 'Stalinist of
strict observance', endowed it. What Moulier Bout ang discloses (LA, 314ff.)
is that in an ext raordinary 72-page lett er of 25 December 1949 - 22
January 1950 to his for mer teacher, Jean Lacroix, explaining his adhesion
to Marxism and the r e F, Althu sser repr oved bot h Jean Hyppolite' s attri-
bution of the nee-Hegelian not ion to Marx and t he t hen common deduc-
t ion from the fashion able equation Histor y = Alienation: i.e., End of
Alienat ion = End of History. Quotin g th e relevant passage from th e 1859
Preface to A Cont ribut ion t o the Critique of Political Economy, Althusser
insist ed that Marx had projected communism as the end of 'prehistory' -
historically determinate economic aliena tion/ exploitation - and not of his-
tory - some realm from which the dialect ic and cont radictions would have
vanished. ushering in universal harmony among humankind. Consonant
wi t h t he Cold War t imes, Alt husser' s meditations ended on a bureaucrat ic
- philo-Stalini st - note of their own: ' And I believe t hat we can close t his
chapter on the end of histor y, while rejoicing together at the fact that his-
tory cont inues, that Marx was not Hegel, and that Stalin and Thorez ar e
not Hyppolite' (LA, 319).57
In his synopt ic account of the 'end of history ' t apas, And erson discusses
rhe part played by t he ninet eent h-century philosopher, Antoine-Augusri n
Cournot, in its Gallic transmission. What he underst andably neglects is
Cournor's possibly equally important role in its repudiation by Alt husserian
Mar xism. (Understandably, because Althusser' s one - positive - reference to
Cournot is made in passing.)SI Thanks to a recent essay by Althusser's former
pupil. Emmanuel Terray , a possible subrerranean influence of Cournor upon
the Alt husserian mut ati on of historical mat erial ism, and commitment to
communism as a quasi-Pascalian wager, has been brought to the surface."
Anderson write s of Cournot 's theor y of chance and pr obablilit y:
In a famous definition, he declared chance events to bet hose that were pro-
duced by the encounter of two independent causal series. Since the universe
was not the outcome of a single natural law. but was plainly governed by
a variety of different mechanisms, there were both processes governed by
more or less linear causal sequences, and occurrencesset off by intersections
between them. This was the difference between what was regular and what
was random, each equally intelligible - the contrast, for example, between
. lilt" movement o f planet s and me teo rs, or uf des and glit\;it"u . . . .
The innovation of his philosophy of history was to bewhat he called an
aetiofogy: a systematic enquiry into the weave of causes that composed the
fabric of history. The task of such an enquiry was to trace out the compll-
cared patterns of chance and necessity that had shaped human development,
by distinguishing between threads of 'independence' and 'solidarity' within
its causal connnuum."
Transpos ed to histo rical mat erialism - especially in t he Alt husserian
mani festo of 1962, 'Contradict ion and Overdet erminarion ' - the yield is a
reconceptualization of an y social format ion as a decentred ' struct ure of
struct ures' , each possessed of 're lat ive autonomy' and ' specific effectivity',
correspondingly irreducible to an economic first cause or primordial
essence, and governed by an (admitt edly elusive) 'st ruct ural causalit y'. Co n-
sequently, historical mater ialism was not a philosophy wi t h guarant ees -
a t ranscript ion of historical necessit y. But nor was it a ratification of
hist orical chaos. Positi ng and respecti ng the compl exity of the histor ical
proc ess, as t he product of independent causal series and t heir interlacement ,
it was the scient ific t heory of necessary conti ngency. Therein revolution is
t he (explicable) exception th at proves t he (implacable) rule."
Historical mat erialism aI'Al rhusser, then, was not a histor icism, econom-
ist ic or humanist. As a ' process wi t hout a subject or goal(s)', co use th e
specifically Alt husserian categor y. hist or y was neit her agonistic ali enati on
- t he descent from primitive communism into class society - nor its irenic
subl at ion - the realization of the classless telos pr esent in germ at the or igin.
The political impli cat ion was apparent - and drawn (bringing Althusser
int o disrepute with the leadership of his part y, to look no further). To the
complexity of history, irreducible t o a uniq ue cau sal mecha nism. t here
corresponded t he constit utive complexit y of any communist society th at
might - just might - arise from it. Reject ing some , at least, of the elemen ts
of ninereenrh-cenrurv utopian socialism assimila ted by its putativel y
' scient ific' successor, Alt husser ad vanced an anti -utopian conception of
communism. In a conjugat ion of Durkheimian funct ionalism an d Fr eudian
realism about 'civilizat ion and its discontent s'. he explicitly contradicted
t he prospect us of an 'end of ideology'. and implicitly dispensed with t he
project ion of an ' end of polit ics' (the mere Saint -Simoni an ' administ ration
of thin gs' envisaged by Engels in Anti-Diihring and Lenin in Stat e and
Revolution ).62
It is not necessary to endorse Alt husser' s ext ravagant claim in L'aueni r
- ' theoret ical ant i-humanism was the sa le (posit ion] t hat authorized a real
,..
GREGORY ELLIOTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALY SIS INTERMtNABLE
practical humanism' (1nj - to appreciate the impulse behind it. Rightly
or wrongl y. Alrhusser's Communism restri cted itself to goals that are modest,
and yet sufficiently imperat ive at a rime when the proclaimed end of his-
tory has nor termi nated the problems due brought Communism into being
as a political movement : the eradication of Hell from Earth, not the con-
struction of Heaven upon it; or. alternatively put . humani ty's entr y into its
eart hly inheri tance - one that did not exclude the 'everyday unhap piness'
ascribed by Freud to t he common human condition (and for which Louis
Alrhusser might readily have exchanged his awesome capacity for suffer-
ing). Such a commitment to practical humanism accounts for the presence
of some impeccably humanist passages in an oeuvre notor ious for its
ast ringent theoretica l prono uncements on t he 'myth of man ' , One of them
- q uoted by Derrida at Althu sser ' s funera l - beautifull y captures the con-
junction tha t imparted so met hing of irs singular ity to Althu sser ian Mar x-
ism and rende red irs aut ho r hu ma n, all tOO h uman:
Yes, we are .. , united by . , . the same myt hs, the same themes, rhar govern
us withour our consent, by the same spontaneously lived ideology. Yes . " we
still ear of the same bread, we have the same rages, rhe same rebellions, the
same madness (at least in the memory where stalks this ever-imminent pas
sibility), if nor the same prostration before a rime unmoved by any History,
Yes, like Mot her Courage, we have the same war at out gates, and a
handsbreath from us, if not in us, the same horrible blindness, the same dust
in our eyes, the same eart h in our mout hs. We have the same dawn and
night, we skin the same abysses: our unconsciousness. We even share the
same history - and tha t is how it all starred."
NOTES
' Louis Althusser', us l..dtrrs December 1990 (now tr anslated in
E. Ann Kaplan and Michad Spri nker, eds, The uglXy, Verso.
london, 1993).
2 Jean-Paul Sarere, Critiqw o f Dialectical Reason, Volume I, lLh Books,
London , 1976, p. 822; d . Louis Althus.sser and [rienne Balibar, Reading
Capital, New Lefr Books, London, 1970, P. 135.
3 Preface (1963) to T he }.faking o f the Engli sh WOTking Class, Penguin,
Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 12,
4 See Regis Debray, ' A Modest Contribution to the Rites and Ceremonies of me
Tenth Annivenary', Nrw Left Rn i rw 115, Ma}'/June 1979, pp. 58-59.
5 d . Etienne Balibar 's observances in 'The Non --Contemporaneity of Althusser',
Kaplan and Spt inket, eds, The Altl1l lJSn ian ugacy, p. 1.
6 Loui, Ahh uucr, For Marx, Allen Lane, london, 1969, p. 139.
7 See Robert P. Resch, Althuun and the Rennual of Marxist Social T'hffiry,
California University Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992, and K3p1an and
Sprinker, eds, The Althuunian uglXy. Two further recent publications of
note are Etienne Balibar, Ecras pour La Deccc verre, Paris, 1991,
whim includes a text read at Althusser's funera l (tra nslated i n Rethinking
Marxi sm, voL 4, no. 1. Spring 1991l; and S}' lvain Lazarus, ed., Politique n
philosoph ie dans l 'oew re de Louis Alt busser, Presses Uni versieaires de France,
Paris, 1993, cootai ning pa pers by Balibar and ot hers presented to a colloquium
on Althusser at the University of Paris VJIJ, (Saint-Denis) in March 1991.
8 Louis Alrhusser, L' at-enir dure longtemps, suit'; de I.es faits: Autobiographies,
edited and introduced by Olivier Carpet and Yann Moelier Boutang, Stock!
L\lfC, Paris, 1992 lbencefonh ADL); Yann Bcutang, Louis Althusser:
Une biographie. 1 - La formation du my tbe (1918-1956), Bernard
Grasser, Paris, 1992 [he ncefort h LA), Subsequently, a second volume in the
' Edition posth ume d'oeuvr es de louis Alt husser' has appeared. consisting of
mat eria l utilized by Moclier Bourang in his coverage of the 1939-45 period:
Loui s Althusser, Journal de captit'iti: Scalag XAI1 940-1945. Carnets -
Correspandances - Textes;edi ted and introduced by Olivier Carpet and Yann
Moulier Bourang, Stockll MEC, Paris, 1992 (hencefort h JC).
9 See, for example, the reviews by Michel Conrar, Le Monde des livres, 24 Apri l
1992; Robert Maggiori, Libiration, 23 April 1992; Didier Eribon, Le Nouvel
Obsenateu" 23-29 April 1992 ; and j ean Lacos te, Le Qui nzaine Litt erairo,
Apt il 1992,
10 See, respect ively, the accounts b y Edward Fox,lndependent Magazine, 11 July
1992; Gilbert Adair, Independent, 2 July 1992; and Mar k Lilla, Times Literary
Supplement , 25 September 1992. The most infor med and sympathetic response
was tha t of Martin Bright, Guardian, 27 June 1992.
11 A point underlined to me by David Macr:y (personal communicat ion),
12 In fairness, it should be noted that as regards present ation coverage reached
a nadir elsewhere - wit h the front page of the London Ret'iew of Book s, 17
December 1992, which stro ve to maintai n its reputa tion, following the depar-
rur e of irs for mer editor , by Iearuring a photograph of Alrhusser beneat h the
capt ion: "The Paris Strangler' .
13 EcceHomo: How One Becomes w hat One Is, Penguin, Harmondswonh., 1975,
p.69.
14 Alrhusser and Bali bar, Reading Capital, p. 112.
tS Sante's reproof of vulgat Marxist treatment of Valef}' is t o be found i n his
Search for a Method (1960 ), Vinta ge Books, New York, 1968, p. 56.
16 Perha ps the only immed iate cause for regret was the non-inclusion, i n an
appendix, of duet: chapters from an earlier draft of ADL, t'A'O of them - on
and Spinoza - replaced by Ahh usser's tesumi of his ' road to
Mar x' on pp_208-13 (in the current chap tr:r xviii), and the third (signalled in
chapter xix, Po 233) consisting of reflccnons whim Alebusserlikewise planned
to develop elsewhere (in a work devoted to 1.A lIiritable tradition mat hia/isle).
The anJ SpinOLa chapters have now been publi!ihed. however,
with an introduction by Ccrpe t, unde r tid e ' L'unique tradit ion mat erialiste",
Lignes 18, Editions Hazan, Ja nuary 1993, pp. 72-119.
17 See Es5iT)" orr IdJlogy, Vena, London, 1984, p p. 157_58 .
18 Althusset and Balibar, Reading C:Jpital. p. 16.
19 De lasupeTstnuture: Droit - i ttlt - Mia/ogk, unpubl ished manuscript , March
- April 1969, p, 138.
198 GREG ORY E1.LKlTT ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE
' 99
20 a . f or Mar x, p. 54. For some furt her reflections, inspired by Freud, on the
theme of 'retrospective anticipation', see ' L'unique tradition materiahste', p. 90.
21 Cf. t he opening declaration of Rousseau's Confessions (Penguin edition,
Harrnondswortb, 1953, p. I7): ' I have resolved upon an enterprise which has
no precedent, and which, once complete, will have no imitator. My purpose
is to display to my kind a port rai t in every way tr ue (0 nat ure, and the man
I shall portray will bemyself. Simply myself... . But I am made unlike any
one I have ever met; I will even venture [0 say that I am like no one in t he
wh ole wo rl d. I may he no bet t er, bur at least I am diffe rent'. No re t oo his
per tinent discl aimer in the introduction ro Book Seven (p. 262 ): ' I may omit
or transpose facts, or make mista kes in dat e; but I cannot go wrong about
what I have felt, or about wha t my feelings led me to do; and these are the
chief subjects of my story.'
22. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, Penguin edi tion, Harmondswort h,
pp. 529-30.
23 See, for example, the opening paragraphs of ' Freud and Lacan', Essays on
Ideology, pp . 147- 48 and my exploration of the theme i n ' Ahh usser's Soli-
tud e' , Economy and Society, vol. 17, no. 4, 1988 (reprinted in Kaplan and
Sprinker , cds, The Al thusseri an Legaey).
24 For furt her details, the reader should consult Elisabeth Roudinesco, La bataifle
de cent ansi Histoire de La psychanaJyse en France, 2 - 1925- 1985, Editions
du Seuil, Paris, 1986, pp. 384-85, 389- 90, and especially Moulier Boutang,
LA, pp. 365ft.
25 Pau l Nizan, The Conspi racy (193 8), Verso, London, 1988, p. 223.
26 'It is al so characteristic of our social history that the intellect uals of petty
bourgeois origin who came to the Par ty at that time [i.e., after the Liberation
- GEl felt that t hey had to pay in pure activity, if not in political activism,
the imaginary Debt they thought they had contracted bynot being proletarians':
For Marx, p. 27.
27 See, for example, Roudinesco, La bataifle de cent ens, p. 384 and Emmanuel
Le Roy Ladurie, Paris - Montpelfier: P, C. - P. S. U. - 1945-1963, Gallimard,
Paris, 1982, pp. 76 -77.
28 See, int er alia, For Marx, pp. 21-39 and especially Althusser's fort hright preface
of 1976, 'Unfinished History', to his pupil Dominique Lecours's Proletarian
Sciencei The Case of Lysenko, New Left Books, London, 1977.
29 Substantially tra nslated as ' What Must Change i n rhe Part y', i n New Left
Review 109, May/j une 1978.
30 Cf. Raymond Aron, 'Alt husser ou la lecture pseudo-st ructuraliste de Marx',
in his D'une saint e famille Ii ('autre: Essais sur les ma rxi smes imaginaires,
Gallimard, Paris, 1969. Althusser does not, however, endorse Aron's relat ed
reproac h (pp. 73, 78-79) that Ahhusserianism constituted ' Marxism for
agrege s' ; quite the reverse,
31 Quoted in j ean Guitton, Un siede, une vie, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1988, Part
IV, cha pter 4.
32 Ibid.
33 Ecce Homo, p. 69.
34 Significantly, i n a conversation with Guin an i n which he revealed the exist-
ence of his memoirs - ' the story of my fearful tra umas' - Althusser had
repudiated the pretent ion of their author: 'I have never achieved transparency.
So, like Mallarme, Alain and Heidegger, I have practised the met hod of
obscurum per obsce rius, to the obscure via the more obscure:
35 Pierre Ma cherey, quoted in Fox, Independent Magazine, 11 jul y 1992.
J6 The impact on Althusser of Martin's death. by his own hand, in September
1963 is intimated nor only in the moving dedication of For Marx to him, but
by the obit uary notice Alrhusser wrote for the Annuaire de I'Ass ociation
Amicafes des anciens eleves de l'Eccl e normale supbieure (196 7), in which he
observed that Mart in ' had sn uggled for t wen ty yean; - cold, calm, st rong,
precise - without ever collapsing or giving in, without a single word of
complaint: dignified He chose deliberat e deat h so as not to li ve another death
in the night of an agony wit hout end' (quoted in Moul ier Bourang, LA,
p. 451 ).
37 Something of the intimacy of t he relationship is conveyed by the letters from
bro ther to sister published in Jc, pp. 265- 84.
38 See especially j e , p. 88 - Althusser's entr y for 12 April 1942, after a gap of
several weeks: 'I have just lived one of the most severe trials of my existence.
and the most dangerous.' Ahh usser 's pr ison not ebooks also refute the notion
that it was contact with Commu nists in Genn any which rallied him to the
PCF. A text of 1943 - ' L'esperance' , published in the Sralag XA journal, Le
Lien - does, however, intimate affiliatio n to a kind of proletaria n French
nat ionalism, inspired. no doubt. by his former history teacher, j oseph Hours:
see j C, pp. 345-52.
39 ' Une question de faits' , in L'i vangi fe capt if, Cahier X of [eunesse de l'Eglise,
Paris, 1949.
40 George Ross and j ane j ensen, ' The Tragedy of th e French Lef t', N ew Left
Review 171, September/October 1988, p. 18.
41 J ust as its sister-pa rt ies were for socialists in ot her countries. Cf. Lucio Magri,
'The European Left between Crisis and Refoundat ion', New Left Review 189,
September/October 1991, pp . 6- 7: ' ... a historical experience is now ending
in painful defeat - an experience which, both mat erially and in terms of ideas,
served sometimes as a model and in any case as a reference point for broad
movements of liberat ion. It is now fashionable in the '.X'est, even on the Left,
to treat that connection as a thorou ghly harmful product of manipulat ion or
folly - that is, to consider the October Revolut ion and its sequel not as a
process which degenerat ed in stages but as a regression ab origine, or a pile
of rubble. But the historical reality is rat her different. First Stalinism, then the
authoritarian power of a bureaucratic, imperial caste, were one side of that
historical process . . . but for decades another side also continued to opera te:
the side of nat iona l independence; the spread of literacy, modernization and
social protection across whole cont inents; the resistance to fascism and victor y
over it as a general tendency of capitalism; support for and involvement in the
liberation of three-quart ers of humanit y.from colonialism; containment of the
power of the mightiest imperial state.'
42 ' Intellect uals and Communism', reprinted in E. j . Hobsbawrn, Revolut ionaries,
Quartet, London, 19n : here p. 29.
43 The Communists and Peace (1952- 54), Hamish Hamilton, London, 1969; d .
Andre Gorz, Th e Traitor (1958), Verso, London, 1989, pp. 225- 29.
200 GREGORY ELLIOn
ANALYSIS TERMINATED, ANALYSIS INTERMINABLE '01
44 Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, New Left Books,
London, 1976, p. 44.
45 ' Notes on Ma rxism in Britai n since 1945' , New Left Review 100, November
1976 - February 1977 (reprinted in Williams, Problems in Materialism and
Culture, Verso, Lond on, 1980).
46 The coinage is Francis Mulhern' s, i n the Introduction to his ant hology, Conte,"
porary Marxist Lit erary Criticism, Longman, London, 1992, p. 6. As Alrhusser
wrote in an essay dat ing from 1967, 'Marx did ncr "say everyt hing", not only
because he did not have the time. but because to "say everything" makes
no sense for a scientist; only a religion can pretend to "say everything", By
con tra st, a scienti fic theory, by definition, a I W3)"S has something else to say.
since it exists onl y in order to discover. in t he very solution of pro blems, as
many, if not mote, problems than it resolves' (' On Th eoretical Work : Diffi-
culties and Resources', in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philoso phy of t he
Scientists and Oth er Essays, Verso, London , 1990 : here p. 59). The echoes of
Popperian epistemology are striking.
47 The formula ' historical Mar xism' is adopted from Costanzo Preve, ' La lutte
contr e le sens commun dans Ie mouvement communiste "historique" au xxe
siecle", in Sylvain Lazarus, ed., Politiquo et philosophie dans I' OOUl!1 0 do
Louis Alt husser, who glosses it thus (p. 130): ' I. e., really, effectively existing
[Marxism], incor porat ed into huge party, state and trade-union apparat uses'.
Althusser's mo st explicit comments on the subject occur in his 'Mar xism
Today (1978 ), in Philosophy and the Spont aneous Philosophy of the Scientists.
48 The point is made by Bahbar in Reading Capit al, p. 202 a nd by Ahhusser
in Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, New Left Books, London, 1971,
p. 43.
49 Luc Ferr y a nd Alain Renaue, La pensee 68: Essai sur l' anti -humani sme
contempo rain, Gall imard , Paris, 1985, p. 200.
50 Quoted in Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Ti me, Macmillan, London, 1989,
p. 334.
51 ' Louis Alrhusser' , Indepedent , 27 Ocrober 1990.
51 Indicative of Alrhusser's heterodoxy here is his citation of the 'revisionist'
hist orian of t he French Revolution, Francois Furer, for repudiating the
'ideology' of 1789 in whose constr uction and propagat ion French Communist
intellect uals (e.g., Alben Soboul) played a centr al role.
H Reading Capital, p. 120. As he makes clear (ADl.. p. 168), Alth usser is
referr ing nor to Nausea or t he Roads to Freedom tril ogy, when he speaks
of ' phi losop hical novels', but to Being and Nothingness and t he Critique of
Dialectical Reason. Whatever the justice of the char ge, one thing is certairu
t he dilemmas confront ed by Sart re's fict ional biograp her, Ant oine Roquennn,
are not surmou nted by Alth usser's own autobiograp hical story-telling. See
N" U!>II", Penguin, Hanuuudsworrh, 1983, pp. 61- 63.
54 'Briti sh Mar xist Historians, 1880- 1980', New Left Review 120, March/ April
1980, pp. 83-84. For Althusser's analysis of theoretical Stalinism, see ' Note
on "The Criti que of the Personality Cult" " in his Essl1)' s in Serf-Cri ticism, New
Left Books, London, 1976.
55 See LA, pp. 259 - 76, cont aining a mple quotation fr om Althusser's 1947
Memoire de Dipldme d'etudes superieures, ' La nonce de conte nu dans la
philosop hic de G. W. F. Hegel' . Th us far, only a br ief extract from t his key
ea rly work has appeared in print , as ' L'esprlr d' Iena contre la Prusse',Magazine
Utterair e 293, No vember 199 1. Its publicat ion in full is promi sed in a
fonhcoming collect ion of Ahbusser 's philosophical texts by IMECIEditions
Stock.
56 Francis Fuk uyama, 'The End of History?' , The National Interest 16, Summer
1989, and The End of History and t he Last Man, Hamish Hami lton, London,
1992. Of t he many critical responses, readers are referredto Joseph McCarney,
' History under t he Hammer' , T imes High", Education Supplement, 1 Decem
her 1989 and ' Endgame of History', Radical Philosophy 62, Autumn 1992;
Perry Anderson, ' The End s of Histor y', in his A Zone of Engagement , Verso,
London, 1992; and Alex Callinicos, 'Is Hi story Reall y Over?' , paper read
ar t he Rad ical Political Thou ght Confe rence. University of Sussex, November
1992 . My own thoughts on the contr oversy are set out in 'The Cards of
Confusion: Reflect ions on Historical Communism and th e "End of History" ',
Radical Philosophy 64, Summer 1993, (to be reprint ed in Christopher Bertram
and Andr ew Chitt y, eds, Beyond the End of History?, forthcoming, Verso,
Lond on, 1994 ).
57 Significant ly, i n his Modern French Philosophy (Cambri dge Universit y Press,
Cambridge, 1980), which commences with Kojeve, Vincent Descombes employs
the identical formula to Ahhusser - ' philosophical novel' - to characterize
Kojeve's constr uction of Hegel, 't he austere Hegelian Phenomenology turns into
a kind of serialized philosophical novel, where one drama tic scene follows
anothe r; pict uresque char acters come face to face, reversals of situation keep
up t he suspense, and the reader, avid to know the end of the story Ila fin de
f'histoir eJ, clamours for mor e' (p. 27).
Descombes' analysis of Alt husser' s subsequent philosophica l st rategy
[p. 118) anticipat es Alrhusser's own :
. . . Marxism was in difficulties on two sides.
I . In the rear, where it ran the risk of being dr awn along in the decline of those
philosophies [assembled by Althusser under the heading 't heoretical humanism')
with which opinion tended 10 associate it.
2. In the front, where its theory of economic determinism (positing a relation
of caUM and effuJ, rat her than one of isomorphism, between infrastructure and
superstructure) came under fire from structu ralist posmons.
Caught between the IwO, Althusser, a self-acknowledged communist philos-
opher, might well have described himself in the words thai Srendhal gives 10
Lucien Leuwen: 'I am a cavalry general in a lost battle, who forgets his own
inreresrsand attempts to have his cavalry dismount in order to engage the enemy
in fanuy.' It i . a tlif liLuh lIlan,-",uvr" that Altb uO>;II[ aUlIlllpl.S i ll aba ntlo ninll tl.1I
tr eacherous ground of praxis and the 'dialectic', leaving the existentialist regi-
ments to fight it out alone with the' structural ist amller y, siding with the laner
himself, taking advantage of the general surprise ro consolidate his hold and
emerging finally as winner of t he' day. Such audacious tactics evidently entail
certain sacrifices which his ranks must first be persuaded to accept; the entir e
Hegelian heritage must be repudiated, and likewise all kinship between Marxism
and dialectical philosophy of history. The charger of 'cont radiction, driving force
Note, finally, that after thebattle had been definitively lost, Althusser's address
in Paris was none other than 8, rue Lucien Leuwen . . .
58 In the 1% 8 lect ure ' Lenin and Philosophy' : Philosophy and the Sp0rlt alleous
Philosophy of theScient ists and Ot her Essays, pp. 172- 73 ('. . . French philos-
ophy .. . can be salvaged from its own history only by the few great minds
whom it Sl' t its fare, hke ('.om It' and Durkheim, or buried in oblivion,
like Cournot and Cour urar. .. .') .
59 Le troisieme;ourdu commu" isme, Actes Sud, Aries, 1992, pp. 63-68, to which
I am indebted for what follows.
60 'The Ends of History', pp. 295-96; see also p. 297.
61 ' Contradiction and Overdererminanon' can be consulted i n Altbusser's For
Mar x. For his own retrospective on it, see ' Is it Simple to be a Marxist in
Philosophy?', in PhilosopJry and the Spontaneous Phif osopJry of the Scient ist s,
pp. 213- 23. The shrewdness of Ter ray's accoun t is confirmed by compar ing
the art icle in which he first sketched it - ' Une rencontr e: Althusser et
Ma chiavc\' (in Sylvain Lazaru s, cd., Politi que et philosophie dans l'oeeore de
Louis Althusser, especially pp. 157- 58)- wit h Ah husser' s own comments on
Machiavelli in the posthumous publicat ion, ' L' unique tradition marenalisre",
p.
62 Thus, i t is no cause for surprise that Ah husser is recalled by one of his for mer
students as having rebuked him for the suggestion that 'if people were com-
munists, it was for t he sake of happiness. In essence, his reply was: you
mustn't say tha t. It is in orde r to bring about a change of mod e of produc-
tion. . .' See Philippe Gavi, Jean-Paul Sam e and Pierre Victor, On a raison
de se revolt er, Gallimard, Paris, 1974, p. 197. In addition to Freud's Citil-
izauon and irs Discontents. see the New Int roductory Lect ures on Psycho-
analysis (Penguin edition, Harmondswonh, 1973, pp. 213-1 9) for a summary
statement of his anti-utopia nism, specifically aimed at Bolshevism. For some
contemporary reflect ions on t hese issues by a Marxist influenced by Althusser,
see Ted Benton, Natural Relat ions, Verso, London, 1993, pp. 200, 215- 21.
Ahhus ser's freudian affiliat ions doubtless go some of the way to explain his
disdain for Her bert Marcuse (cf. the peremptory dismissal in Essays in Self
Crit icism, p. 118 n. 13), whose attem pted Frendo-Marxist synthesis in Eros
and Civilization repudiates Freud on t his score. As I hope to show elsewhere,
Alt husser and Marcuse are ultimat ely less incompatible in cert ain Freudian
respects than they imagined.
63 For Mar x, p. 150.
202 GREGO RY ELLIOTT
of history', on which only a while before t he Ma rxisr philosopher was seen to
parade, becomes a jaded Rceinante, to be r id of in all haste.
!
,
I
t
i
!
j
I
:1
I

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE PUBLISHED
WRITINGS OF LOUIS ALTHUSSER
Any bibliography of Ahhusser' s wor k suffers from an in-built (if not planned)
obsolescence, given the regular emergence of new material fro m the philosopher's
archives deposit ed with the lnstirut Memoires de l'edirion contemporaine, based in
Paris, in July 1991. Three more collect ions of previously unpublished material are
currently scheduled for publication by IMEC, in collaboration with Editions Stoc k:
a two-volume selecti on of philosophical and political texts (mcl udmg the
thesis on Hegel) and a collection of correspondence. Accordingly, what follows does
not claim to be comp lete, but is as comprehensive (and accurate) as possible, as of
November 1993. h ems are listed in chronological order of appearance. rat her t han
composition, the date of the latter being pro vided in brackets wh en app ropriate.
,",' here English tr anslat ions are avai lable, full detai ls are given on a separate line.
1949
' Une question de faits' , in L'et1angile captif, Cahier X of [eunesse de l'Eglise,
Paris, 1949, pp. 13- 24.
1951
2 Contr ibution to the discussion, in "[ cumecs nati onales d'erudes pedagogi ques
des professeurs de philosophie' (1950), Rel'ue de l'Enseignemera Phil osophique,
vel. 1. nos 1-2, 1951, p. 12. .
1953
3 ' A propos du marxisme", Revue de l'Enseignement Philosophique, vol. 3, no.
4, 19 B , pp. lS- 19.
4 ' Note sur Ie marena lisme dialectique", Revue d e l 'Enseignement Philoso phique.
vol. 3, no. 5, 1953, pp. 11-17. .
1955
5 'Sur l' objecnvire de l'hisroire (Len re a Paul Ricoeur)' , Ret'ue de I'Enseignemeru
Phi!osophique, vol. 5, no. 4, 1955, pp. 3-15.
204 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED WRITINGS BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED WRITINGS 205
1958
6 'Despore et mona rqu e chez Monresquieu' , Esprit, vol. 26, no. 11, 1958,
pp . 595-614.
Ext ract from 7.
1959
7 Montesquieu: la poUtique et f'histoire, Presses Umversitaires de France, Paris,
1959.
Translated by Ben Brewst er as 'Mon resquieu: Politi cs and Histo ry , i n Louis
Alt husser , Politics and Hi story: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, New
Left Books, London, 1972, pp. 9- 109.
1960
R ' Nnte du t radurteur' (195R), in Lu.-l wig Fener bach ,
Tex tes choisi s (1839-1845), edit ed and tr anslated by louis Alt husser, Presses
Universitaires de France, Paris, 1960, pp. 1-9.
9 ' Les " Manifestes philosophiques" de Feuerbach', La Criti que 121,
December 1960, pp . 32-38.
Reprinted i n 24, pp. 35-43.
Translat ed by Ben Brewster as ' Feuerbach's "Philosophical Mani festoes"', in
Louis Althusser, For Marx, Allen Lane, London , 1969, pp. 41- 48.
1961
10 'Sur Ie jeune Marx (Quest ions de rheone )' , La Pensi e 96, April 1961, pp.
3- 26.
Reprinted in 24, pp. 45- 83.
Tra nslated by Ben Brewster as ' On the Young Mar x: Theoret ical Quest ions', in
For Marx, pp. 49- 86.
1962
11 Review of Raymond Polin, LA politique morale de John Lock e, in Rn 'ue
d'Hi stoire Mod erne et Contemporaine 36, 1962, pp. 150- 55.
12 'Contr adiction er surderemu narion (Notes pou r une recherche)' , La I'ensee 106,
December 1962, pp. 3-22.
Reprint ed (with appendi x) in 24, pp. 85- 116.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'Con tradiction and Overdeterminarion: Notes
for an Investigation', New Lef t Ret'iew 41, January/February 1967, pp. 15-35;
repri nted in For Marx, pp. 87-128.
'i
i
13 ' Le "Piccolo, Bertolaui et Brecht (Notes sur un t heatre matenalisre)' , Esprit,
voL 30, no. 12, 1962, pp. 946-65.
Reprinted in 24, pp. 129-52.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'The "Piccolo Teatro" : Bertola zzi an d Brecht -
Nores on :l Theat re', in For Marx, pp. 129-S1 .
1963
14 'Le e " Manuscrits de 1844" dc Kar l Marx (tconomic polit iquc et philosop hic)' ,
La Pensee 107, February 1963, pp. 106- 09.
Reprinted in 24, pp. 153-60.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'The " 1844 Ma nuscripts " of Karl Marx: Polit ical
Economy and Philosophy', in For Marx, pp. 153-59.
15 ' Philosc phie et sciences humaines', Ret'ue de l'Enseignement Philosophique,
vol. 13, no. 5, 1963, pp. 1- 12.
16 ' Sur la dialect ique marerialiste (De l' inegalire des origines)' , LJ Pensee 110,
August 1963, pp. 5-46.
Reprinted (minus appe ndix) in 24, pp. 161-224.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'On the Materialist Dialectic On t he Unevenness
of Ongins' , in For Man, pp. l fil - 2.l8 .
1964
17 ' Problemes et udiaurs', La NOlltelle Critique 152, January 1964, pp. 80- 111.
18 'Teoria e merodo' and 'Gli str umenti del marxismo', RJnascita, 25 January 1964,
pp. 27-28; 1 February 1964, pp. 28-29.
19 Present ati on of Pierre Macherev, ' La philosophie de la science de Georges
Canguilhem' , La Pensee 113, February 1964, pp. 50-54.
20 ' Mar xisme er humanisme', Cahiers de l' l nsti tut de Science E.conomi que
Appliquee 20, June 1964, pr. 109-33.
Reprinted i n 24, pp. 225-49,
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Marxism and Humanism', i n For Marx, pp .
219- 41.
21 ' Freud et Lacan', La Nouvelle Critique 161- 162, December 1964 - January
1965, pp. 88- 108.
Reprint ed i n 78, pp. 9-34 and i n 110, pp. 23-52.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Freud and Laca n', New u lt Review 55, Mayl
J une 1969, pp. 49-65; reprinted in Louis Ahhusser, Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, New Left Book s, London, 1971, pp. In- 202, and subsequently
in Louis Alt husser, Essays on Ideology, Verso, Londo n, 1984, pp- 141- 71.
1965
22 ' Nore complement aire sur "J' humanisme reel '", La Nouvelle Critique 164,
March 1965, pp. 32-37.
206 BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLI SHED WRITI NGS BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLISHED WRITINGS 207
Reprinted in 24, pp. 251-5 8.
Tran slat ed by Ben Brewster as ' A Complementary Note on "Real Humanism"' ,
i n For Marx, pp. 242-47.
23 ' Preface: Aujcurd'hui', in Louis Ahhusser, Pour Marx, Francois Maspero, Paris,
1965, pp. 9- 32.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Intr oduction: Today' , in For Marx. pp. 19-3 9.
24 Pour Marx, Francois Maspero, Paris, 1965 .
Con tains 9; 10; 11; 13; 14 ; 16; 20; 22; 23.
Translated by Ben Brewster as For Marx, Allen Lane, London, 1969 [subse-
quently reprinted b)" New Left Books and Verso).
25 ' Esquisse du concept d'hisroire', La Pensee 121, August 1965, pp. 2-2t.
Extract from 27.
26 ' Preface: Du " Ca pital" a1a philosop hie de Mar x' , in Louis Alt husser, j acques
Ranciere and Pierre Ma cherey, Lire le Capital I. Francois Masperc, Paris, 1965,
pp.9- 89.
Secon d, revised edition Maspcro, Paris, 1968) t ranslated by Bcn Brewster
as ' Part 1: From Capital t o Marx' s Philosophy' , in Louis Althusser and Etienne
Balibar, Reading Capital, New Left Books, London, 1970, pp. 11- 69.
27 'L'uLjcct J u "CotVilotl''', ill Louis li clIlICBalikLauJ Establet ,
Lire le Capital II , Francois Maspero, Paris, 1965, pp. 7- 185.
Second, revisededition (Francois Maspero, Paris, 1968) translated by Ben Brewster
as 'Part II: The Object of CapitaI', in Reading Capital, pp. 71-198.
1966
28 'Theone, prat iq ue theor ique et format ion rheorique. Iddologj e er lurte
idOOl ogique' (1965), published in Spanish in Casa de fas Americas (Havana) 34,
1966, pp. 5-3 1.
Translated byJames H. Kavanagh a s 'Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical
Formation. Ideology and Ideological Struggle' , in Louis Althusser, Philosophy and
the Spont aneous Philosophy of the Scientists e- Ot her Essays, Verso, London,
1990, pp. 1-42.
29 ' Marerialisme historique et marcrialisme dialeceique' , Cahiers Marxist es-
U ninistes 11, April 1966, pp. 90-122.
30 ' Repcnse aAndre Daspre' , in ' Deux lettres sur la connaissance de l'ar r' , La
Noul'elle Critique 175, April 1966, pp. 141-46.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' A Letter on Art in Reply to Andre Daspre', in
Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, pp. 203-08; reprinted in Essays on
Ideology, pp. 173- 79.
31 ' Cremonini, peintre de l'abstracrion', Democrasie Nouvelle 8, August 1966,
pp. 105- 20.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract', in Lenin and
Philosophy and Ot her Essays, pp. 209- 20.
32 ' Sur Ie " Conner social" (Les Dccalagesj', in L' jmpense de Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Cahiers pour ('Analy se 8, 1966, pp. 5- 42.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Rousseau: The Social Cont ract (The Discrepan-
cies)' , in Politi cs and History: Atontesquieu , Rousseau, Hegef and Mar x, pp.
111- 60.
33 'Sur l a revolution cuhurelle', Camers Marxi stesJ.inini stes 14, Novemberl
December 1966, pp. 5-16 .
1967
34 ' Sur le tr avail rhcorique. Difficulrcs er ressources' , La Pensee 132, April 1967,
pp.3-22.
Translated by James H. Kavanagh as ' On Theoretical Work: Difficulties and
Resources' , in Philosophy and t he Spontaneous Philosophy of th e Scientists &
Ot her Es; ays, pp. 43-67.
35 ' Prefazione', in Louis Alrhusser , La revoluciim teorica de Marx, Siglo XXI,
Mexico/Buenos Aires, 1967, pp. ii- xvi.
36 Correspondence with R. Domereue, inLouisAlrhusser and R. Domeraue, Marx-
ismo segundo Alt husser: polemi ca AlthusserGaraudy, Signal, Sao Paulo, 1967.
37 Obituary of Jacques Marrin, Annuaire de l' AssociariOfI Amicales des anciens
eler'es de r Ecole normal e supb ieure (1967). ENS, Paris, 1967.
'96.
38 ' La filosofia, la politica et la scienza (Una len era di Louis Althusser sui pensiero
di Gramsci)' , Rinascit a, 15 March 1968, pp. 23-24.
39 ' La philosop hic comme ar me de la revolut ion (Reponse a huit quesrions)',
interview with Mar ia Antonietta Macciocchi, La Pet/see 138, April 1968, pp.
26-34.
Reprinted in 78, pp. 35- 48.
Tra nslated b) Ben Brewster as 'Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon', New
u ft Review 64, NovemberfDecember 1970, pp. 3- 11; reprinted in Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays , pp. 13-25.
40 ' An die deurschen Leser' (1967), in Louis Altbusser, Fur Marx, Suhr kamp,
Frankfurt M., 1968, pp. 7-15 .
41 ' La tache historique de Ia philosophic marxiste' (1967), published in revised
form in Hungarian as ' A Marx ista Filozcfia Torrenelmi Feladara', in Louis AI-
thusser, Marx - Az E/mefet Forradafma, Kossuth, Budapest, 1968, pp. 272-306.
42 ' A Magyar Olvasohoz' (To My Hungarian Readers), in Marx - Az: Elmelet
Porradalma, pp. 9-15.
Published in French in Saul Karsz, Thi orie et po/itique: Louis Althusser, Fayard,
Paris, 1974, pp. 315- 20.
43 'Averrissemenr' (1967), in Louis Ahhusser and Etienne Baliber , Lire fe
Capital, second edition, 2 vols, Francois Maspero, Paris, 1968, pp. 5- 6.
Transla ted by Ben Brewster as ' Foreword to the Italian Edition' , in Reading
Capital , pp. 7- 8.
20. BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLI SHED WRITINGS
I
; BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLI SHED WRITINGS 20'
44 'Lenine et la philosophic', Bulletin de la Societe de Phifosophie 4,
October /December 1968, pp. 127-81.
Reprinted (minus the inrervennons of Jean Wahl, Paul Ricoeur, et al.) as U nine
er /a pbil osophie, Francois Masperc, Paris, 1969 and in 60, pp. 5- 47.
Tra nslated by Ben Brew-ster as 'Lenin and Phil osophy', in Lenin and Philosophy
and Ot her Essays, pp. 27-68; repr inted in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philos-
ophy of the Scientists & Other Enays, pp. 167-202.
1969
4S ' Comment lire "Le Capital" ?', L'Humanite, 21 Mar ch 1969.
Reprinted i n 78, pp. 49- 60.
Translated as ' How to Read Marx's "Capital?' , Marxism T oday, Oct ober 1969,
pp. 302-05.
46 ' Avernssemenr aux lecteurs du l ivre I du "Capreat'", in Karl Marx, Le
Capital: Livre I , Gamier-Plammericn, Paris, 1969, p p. 5-30.
Translat ed by Ben Brewster as 'Preface to Capit al Volume One', in Lenin and
Philosophy and Ot her Essays, pp. 69-1 01.
47 Leners t o Maria Antoni etta Macciocchi (1968- 69), in Macciocchi, Lertere
dall'im erno del P.C.J., Giangia como Fehrinelli, Mil an, 1969, pp. 3--6, 23-26,
53-64, 126-27, 331--61.
Tr anslated by Stephen M. Hellman in Macciccchi, Letters from inside t he Italian
Communist Part y t o Louis Althusser, New Left Books, Londo n, 1973, pp. 3- 5,
21- 23, 48- 57, 112- 13, 295-320.
48 ' A propos de l'arricle de Michel Verret SUt " Mai etudianr' ", La Pensee 145,
j une 1969, pp. 3-14.
49 'To M y English Readers' (1967), in For Marx, pp_ 9-15.
50 ' A Lette r to the Tra nslat or ', i n For Marx , pp. 257-58.
51 'Letrera a Pesenn', Rinascita 32, 1969.
52 'Crise de I'homme er de la societe, in ' L' glise aujcurd' hui', Lumiere et Vie,
vol. 28, no. 13, 1969, pp. 26-29.
1970
53 ' Ideologic et appareils ideologiques d'etat (Notes pour une recherche)', La Pensee
1St , j une 1970, pp. 3-.'\8.
Extract from De la superstrua ure: Droit-erar-ldedogie (unpublished manu-
script, 1969), reprinted in 78, pp. 67- 125.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Ideology a nd Ideological Stat e Apparatuses: Notes
towar ds an Investigati on', in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, pp. 121-
73; reprinted in Essays on Ideology, pp. 1- 60.
54 'Sur Ie rapport de Marx a Hegel' in Jacques d'H ondr, ed., Hegel et
l a pensee moderne, Presses Umversitaires de France, Paris, 1970, pp. 85- 111.
Reprinted in 60, pp. 49- 71.
Translated by Ben Brewster as ' Mar x's Relation to Hegel', in Polit ics and Hi s-
tory: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx , pp. 161-86.
55 'Lenine devanr Hegel' (1969), in 'ill . R. Beyer, ed., Hegel - f ahrbuck 1968/
1969, Meissnheim A. Glan, 1970, pp. 45- 58.
Reprint ed in 60, pp. 73-90.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'Lenin before Hegel', i n Lenin and Philosophy
and Othe r Essays, pp. 103- 20.
1971
56 ' Forewor d' (l970), in Lenin and Philosophy and Ot her Essays, pp. 7-9.
57 Letter to [he t ran slator (on ' Freud and Lacan ' ), i n Lenin and Philosophy and
Ot her Essays, pp. 177- 78; reprinted in Essays on Ideology, pp. 141-42.
58 ' Prefazione' (1970), in Marta Harnecker, Los conceptos element ales del
mat eTialismo hist6ri co, second edition, Siglo XXI, Mexico/ Buenos Aires, 1971.
published in French as 'Marxisme er lurre de classe' in 78, p p. 61-6.
1972
59 'Sur une erreur polirlque. Les mat tres auxil iaires, les erudianrs rravailleurs er
l' agregation de philosophie', France Nouvelle, 25 j uly 1972, pp. 9-12; 1 August
1972, pp. 10-13.
60 Lenine et fa philosophie, second (expa nded] edit ion, Francois Masperc, Paris,
1972.
Cont ains 44; 54; 55.
61 'Reply to j ohn Lewis (Self-criticism)' , Marxism Today. October 1972, pp. 310-
18; November 1972, pp. 343- 49.
Published in French in revised form in 66, pp. 9--68.
1973
62 'The Conditi ons of Marx' s Scientific Discover y (On t he New Definition of
Philosophy)' (1970), Theoretical Pract ice 7/8, january 1973, pp. 4- 11.
Published in French as 'Sur l' evolution du jeune Marx' i n 72, pp. 103-26.
63 Presentati on of Dominique LeCOUlt, Une crise et so n enie", Francois Maspero,
Paris, 1973.
64 'Note sur " Ia crit ique d u culte de l a personnalite" (1972), in Louis Ahhusser,
Ripo,, )e ,j fohn Lewi), Francois Maspero, Paris, 1973, pp. 69-90.
Translated by Grah ame Lock as ' Nc re- on "The Critique of t he Personality
Cult" " in Louis Alt husser, Essays in Self-Criticism, New Left Books, London,
1976, pp. 78-93; repr inted in Essays on Ideology, pp. 115-32.
65 ' Remar que sur une categoric proces sans Sujee ni Fin(s}', in Ri ponse afohn
Lewis, pp. 91-98.
210
BIBUOGRAPHY OF PUBUSHEO WRITINGS a IBLrOGAAP H.Y OF PUBLIS HED WRITINGS 211
Translat ed by Graharne Lock as ' Remar k on t he Category; Process without a
Subject or Goal (s)' , in Essays in Sel f-Criti cism, pp. 94-99, repri nted in Essays
on Ideology, pp. 133-39.
66 Ri ponse aJohn Lewis, Francois Ma spero, Paris, 1973.
Contains 'Avertissement' ; 61; 64; 65.
Translated by Grahame Lock as ' Reply to John Lewis', i n Essays in Seff-
Criticism, pp. 33-99; repr inted in Essays on Ideology, pp. 61- 139.
67 Intervention on ' Les oommu nistes, les inrellecruels et la cult ure', France
Nouvelle , 18 Septembe r 1973, p. 11.
1914
68 [Mimeogr aphed text] (1970), in Saul Karsz, Theone et pofitique: Louis
Althusser, pp. 321-23.
69 Let ter (1967), in Regis Debray, La critique des armes, Editi ons du Seull, Paris,
1974, pp. 262-69.
Translated by Rosemary Sheed as ' Let ter from Louis Alt husser' , in Debray, A
Critique of Arms, Penguin, Harmondswonh, 1977, pp. 258- 67.
70 ' j ustesse et philosop hic', La Pensee 176, Aug ust 1974, pp. 3-8.
Extract from 71.
7 1 Phi(osophie et philosophie spomanee des savants (1967), Francois Maspero,
Paris, 1974.
Abridged a nd revised version of Cours de philosophie pour scienti(jques: Intro-
duction, unpublished man uscri pt, Nove mber 1967.
Translated by Warren Montag as ' Philosophy a nd t he Spontaneous Philosophy
of the Scientists (1967)', in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the
Scientises & Other Essays, pp. 69- 165.
72 Elements d'autocritique (1972), Hacherte, Par is, 1974.
Also contains 62.
Translated by Grahame Lock as ' Element s of Self-Crit icism' , in Essays in Self-
Criticism, pp. 101-61.
73 ' Quelque chose de nouveau', L'H umamte , 12 October 1974.
Translated by Gra hame Loc k as 'Someth ing New', in Essays in Self-Criticism,
pp. 208-15.
1975
74 'Les cornmunistes er la philoso phic', L'Humani te, 5 July 1975.
75 'Est-il simple d'cr re rnarxisre en philosophi c! (Sourenance d'Ami ens)' , La Pensee
183, October 1975, pp. 3-3 1.
Reprint ed i n 78, pp. 127- 72.
Translat ed by Gra hame Lock as 'Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?' ,
i n Essaysin Self-Criticism, pp. 163- 207; repr int ed in Philosophy and the Spontane-
ous Philosophy of the Scientists o Other Essays, pp. 203-40.
1976
76 Lett ers to Luis Francisco Rebello (1975), in Louis Alt husser and Luis Fran-
cisco Rebello, Carras 500re a revolufao portuguesa, Sura Nova, Lisbon, 1976,
pp. 15- 25, 33-36, 41- 42.
77 ' Avant-Propos. Hisroire rerminee, histoire interminable', in Dominique Lecourt,
Lyssenko. Hisunre reelfe d'une ' science proli tarienne', Francois Mas pero, Paris,
1976, pp. 7-19.
Translated by Grahame Lock as 'Int roduct ion: Unfinished History', i n Lecourt ,
Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko, New Left Books, London, 1977, pp.
7- 16.
78 Positions, Editions Sociales, Pari s, 1976.
Contains ' Note'; 21; 39; 45; 53; 58; 75.
7'J La transformaci6n de la /iloso/ia, Universidad de Gra nada, Gra nada, 1976.
Translat ed by Thoma s E. Lewis as 'The Transformation of Philosophy' , in Philos-
ophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scienti st s & Other Essays, pp.
241-65.
'on
80 'The Historic Significance of the 22nd Congr ess' (1976 ), in Etienne Balibar,
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, New Left Boo ks, London, 1977, pp.
193- 211.
Published in French in revised form a s 83.
81 ' Sur Marx er Freud' (1976), publ ished in German as 'Uber Mar x und Freud',
in Louis Ah husser, ldedcgte und tdedogische Staatsapparate, VSA, Hamburg,
1977, pp. 89-107.
Published in French in slightly abr idged form as ' La decouverte du Doct eur
f reud dans ses rapport s avec Ia thecrie marxiste', in The Unconscious, vol. I,
Mersniereba, Tbi lisi, 1978, pp. 239- 53; reprinted in 110, pp. 222-45.
Tr anslated by w arren Mon tag as 'On Marx and Freud' , in Rerhinking Marxism,
vol. 4, no. 1, 1991, pp . 17- 30.
82 ' Note sur les appareils ideologiques d' i tat (Al E)' (1976), published in Germa n
as 'Anmerkung uber die ideologische Staa rsapparate ', in ldeologie und ideologische
Sraatsapparate, pp. 154- 68.
Translat ed in abridged form by Jeremy Leaman i n 'Ext racts from Althusser's
"Note on t he ISAs" " Economy and Society, vol. 12, no. 4, 1983, pp . 455- 65.
83 22eme Congres, Francois Ma spero, Paris, .1977.
Translated by Ben Brewster as 'O n t he Twenty-Second Congress of t he French
Commu,)ist Pal'ty', N ew Le(l Review 104, Jul y/Augw,t 1977, pp, 3-22.
84 'Alcune parole gr osse', Paese Sera, 16 April 1977.
85 'Finalmente qualcosa di virale si hbera dalJa crisi e nella crisi del marxismo',
l/ Manifesto, 16 November 1977.
212 BIBUOGRAPHY Of PUBLISHE D WRITINGS
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PUBLI SHED WRITINGS
213
Published in French in 11 MlDtiftsto. ed., POJlt'Oir er opposition dans leJ sodl ris
post- rn 'Olution naires. Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1978 .
Translated by Gra ha mc Lock as 'The Crisis of Mar xism' , Ma rxism Today, July
1978, pp. 215- 20, 227; repr inted in II .\ !anifesto. ed., Power and Opposition in
Post Remlut ionary Socid ies, Ink Links, London. 1979, pp. 225- 37.
1978
86 ' Avant-Propos' (l 977l. Gi rard Dumm itt Le concept de loi ico nomique dans
'Le Capit al', FraOl;ois Masperc, Par is, 1978, pp. 7-26 .
87 'La quesnone della seato, oggi c nella rransizione', interview with Rossana
Rossanda (1977 ), II Manifesto, 4 April 1978.
Reprinted as ' IImarxismo como reorta "finita? ", in Louis Alrhusser et a).. Diseutn e
(0 slaw, De Donato, Bad. 1978, pp. 7- 21.
Published in French as 'Ent reuen', Dialect iques 23, Spring 1978, pp. 5- 12.
88 ' Des inrellecruels communistes signenr une lenre collect ive pour reclamer "une
veritable discussion polirique" dans leur parti'clet ter from Louis Althusser, Etienne
Balibar, Guy Bois, Georges Labice,Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Mauri ce Moissonier,
Monde, 6 April 1978.
89 'Ce qu i ne peueplus durer dans le part i communiste', Le Monde, 25- 28 April
1978.
Expanded version published as Ce qui ne peut plus durerdans le parti communiste ,
Francois Maspero, Par is, 1978.
Translat ed by Pet rick Camiller as ' \'('hat Must Change i n the Parr y', Left
Rel.'iew 109, May/June 1978, pp. 19- 45.
90 ' AI " punto eero" della [coria', interview with Giorgio Fann, Feese Sera, 6 May
1978.
91 ' j e ne veux pa s ctre un mart yr', Ineervew in Les Nout elles Litt eraires, 15 j une
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92 'Start cines Vorwom: Vier Fraaen an Louis Ahhusser', int erview with Peter
Schc nl er, in Louis Alrh usser, Die Krise des Marxismus, VSA. Hamburg, 1978,
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93 'II marxismo oggi' , in Enciclopedia & ropea, vol. Vll , Aldo Garunti, Milan,
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Reprinted in Loui s Althusser, Quel , he dn e ' ambi.:lri! nel partito commlMista,
Aldo Garunti, Milan, 1978, pp. 107-26.
Published in French in .\of Mensuel, marxisme, mout'ement. 43, j anuary 199 1,
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Translat ed by ja mes H . Kavanagh as ' Marxism Today" in Philowplry ana the
Spontaneous Philosophy of tbt! Scientists c- Othn Essays, pp. 267-80.
1982
94 'Lam' (1977). in Exposicion Ant alogica 'Hammaje a Wilfredo Lam', 1902-
1982, Madrid, 1982, pp. 141- 42.
i
,.
f
"
I,
II
II
"
i
I
'I
I
.i
1983
'La decou vert e du Dr. Freud' (1976), Ret,.,e de Afideci ne
vol. 25, no. 2. 1983.
Reprint ed in Leon Cherrok, ed., Dialogue franco-rof.'iet;que sur la psychanal yse.
Edmons Privat, Toulouse. 1'84, pp. 81-'7; and in 110, pp. 1'5-21'.
1987
96 'So lit ude de Machiavel' (1977 ), published in Germa n as ' Die Einsamkeie
Machia vellis' , in Louis Ahhusser, Schrifren, Band 2: Mat:hialelli, .\ fcmresquieu,
Rousseau - Zur Philosophie der Neuuit, Argume nt, West Berlin, 1987.
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Published in French in Fumr Antbieur I, Spring 1990.
Transfated by Ben Brewster as ' Machiavelli' s Solitude' , & onomy and Societv,
vol.. 17, no. 4, 1988, pp. 468-79.
1988
97 Filoso{ia y marxismo. int erviews wit h Fernanda Navarro, Siglo XXI, Mexico,
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Forthcoming in French, Lertres francaises/Mercure d e France, 1994.
1990
98 [Dream text], Ei semanal, November 1990,
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99 ' L'espr u J ' lcn,,- I.'UI ll n: Lo PI UC ', Litl truire 293. N'uvl:mLcI 1991.
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100 L'at'emr dure longremps, suiv; de us faits: Aut obiographies. edit ed and
introduced by Oli vier Carpet and Yann Moulier Boatang, Stockll MEC, Paris,
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Tr anslated by Richar d VCMe)' as Future Lasts A Long Time. Chane and
Windus, London, and The New Press, New York. 1993.
101 Jourrr.U de captiliti: Stalag XA I 1940-1945, Carnets - -
Texu e; edited and introd uced by Oli vier Cc rpet and Yann Moulier Boutang,
Stock ll MEC, Paris, 1992.
,
' 14
BIBLtOGRAPHY OF PUBUSHED WRfTlNGS
102 Lerrer of 26 November 1963 to Jacques Lacan, in .\ f ag,;nine Littiraire 304,
Novcmbee 1992, pp. 49-50; reprin ted in t 10, pp. 272 - 5.
1993
103 ' L' unique tradition materialisre', Lignes 18, January 1993, pp. 75- 119.
J04 ' Leerres e D .. .. (1966), in Louis Alth usser, Eaits sur 14 FrNlJ
et f .m:a1l. f'dirr:d lind l""r:vnTM hy Olivif:r f'.orprr ancl Fr:m(oi o; M:n h" rClfl ,
Srockll M EC, Paris., 1993. pp. 57-110.
105 ' Trois notes sur l a rheone des discou rs' (1966). i n F.critssur lapsychana/yu,
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106 ' Sur le t ransfert et le conrre-rransferr (Petites incongmi res portarives]' (1973),
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107 'Lert re ouverre aux analysant s et analysres se reclamanr de j acques Lacan'
(1980), i n t.airs sur fa psychana/yu, pp. 249-57.
108 ' Rema rques complernentaires sur 1. reunion d u PLMSa intjacques du 15
ma rs 191W' ( 1980 ), i n urits sur /a psychana/yse, pp. 258-66.
109 Correspondence with jacques Lacan (1963- 69), in & ,;ts sur la
pp. 271-305.
110 & rits sur fa psychanafyse: Freud et Lacan, edited and int roduced by Olivier
Ccrper and Francois Marhercn, Sto.;k/IMEC, Paris. 1993.
Contains 21; 8J; 95; 102; J04; 105; 106; 107; 108; 109.

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