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John Merrick
12 January 2017 Etienne Balibar - From Althusserian Marxism
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Etienne Balibar's short book, The Philosophy of Marx, has

rightly become the classic introduction to Marx's work
since its first publication in English in 1994. Covering the
entire range of Marx's writings, from his early
philosophical writings to Capital and his later work, The
Philosophy of Marx is not only a clear and concise guide to
Marx but places his writing in its theoretical and historical
context.
The new edition of The Philosophy of Marx is substantially
updated, with a two substantial new essays which examine
Marx's philosophy (one covering his Theses on Feuerbach,
the second on Marx and politics), as well as a new
introduction, reproduced below. In it, Balibar discusses
the genesis of the book, his relationship to Althusser's
philosophical reading of Marx, and the problems of a
Marxist philosophy.

For this week only, and to celebrate the publication of the

new and substantially updated edition of Etienne Balibar's
now classic introductory text, we have 40% o our entire
list of Karl Marx primers. To see the full list click here.

I wrote this little book on Marxs philosophy in 1993, at

the request of two friends: Franois Gze, managing
director of ditions La Dcouverte, and my colleague at
the University of Paris I, Jean-Paul Piriou, an economist
and trade unionist no longer with us, who founded the
Repres collection to help educate students in the social
and human sciences in a spirit critical of reigning
orthodoxies and uninhibited by disciplinary boundaries.
Obviously, the publishers idea was that these titles,
written so far as possible in an accessible style, without
jargon but also without over-simplification, might prove
of interest to a wider readership. Twenty years later, I
think it can be said that those objectives have pretty
much been achieved, both in the Francophone world
(where the book has been reprinted several times) and
abroad (where several translations are still in print). So I
abroad (where several translations are still in print). So I
do not regret the eort I devoted in a few weeks of
intensive work to assembling and summarizing, in a
strictly limited space, what I believed I had learned over
thirty years about the objects of Marxs philosophical
thinking and its modalities and problems. The endeavour
seems to have enabled various groups of readers, whether
beginners or not, to enter Marxs intellectual universe
from a particular angle, supplying them with the where-
withal to discuss his relevance. It also allowed me to
formulate some interpretative keys which I had been
researching for a long time, comparing them with those
of other readers who were my contemporaries.1

But twenty years is a long time. The world has changed

the social world which Marxs famous Eleventh Thesis on
Feuerbach demanded should be changed, not merely
interpreted. I myself (to say nothing of other
philosophers of my generation) have changed. Would I
write this little book in the same way today? Such, in sum,
is the question posed to me by Frieder Otto Wolf in the
name of future readers of this book in the German-
speaking world, and which might just as readily (or so I
believe) be put by French or English readers.

The answer, obviously, is no: I would not write it in the

same way. But the answer is also that I am not convinced
I would be able to produce such a synthesis today,
although I have not stopped going back to Marxs texts
since the 1990s: to test their ecacy in dealing with
various current philosophical and political issues (in no
particular order we might cite the economy of violence
and the ambivalence of its eects, the changes in
subjectivity and the capacity for action induced by
capitalist globalization, the internal conflicts of
 universalism, the administrative and ideological function
of borders, the prospects for trans-national citizenship,
the crisis of European secularism and its French variant,
lacit, etc.); and, in return, to examine the potential
which such issues might lead us to discover in the
thought of the author of the Communist Manifesto and
Capital. I could of course proceed to numerous additions
and corrections, but the likely upshot would be a much
greater dispersion of themes and problems and today,
unlike in 1993, I could probably not construct a guiding
thread that makes it possible to connect them for the
purposes of a single question.

Yet far from believing that the forcing I engaged in is

meaningless, I am tempted to think that it involves a kind
of necessity, at the intersection of a major historical
turning point and an experience of collective
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associated. And since I am wholly persuaded that the

theoretical and practical utilization of philosophers
must always contain a self-critical dimension (even a self-
deconstructive one, as Derrida would say) which
demands an awareness of their own historicity, I shall
today take the risk of asserting that an understanding of
this encounter from yesterday is one of the conditions
for our thinking tomorrow, with and against Marx. I
must therefore say a word about it and to that end must
ask readers to use their imagination to take themselves
back to the start of the 1990s, especially in Europe. (I shall
return in a moment to the implications of such
Eurocentrism.)

It might very simply be said that what collapsed then,

with the sudden democratic revolutions in the countries
of real socialism under Soviet hegemony, was the very
of real socialism under Soviet hegemony, was the very
idea of social revolution, and that what began to emerge
was the highly problematic character (in Europe and
beyond) of the virtuous circle wherein a combination of
market economy and liberal parliamentarism supposedly
ensured the transformation of politics into its opposite:
what was just beginning to be referred to as good
governance.2 In a way, this change of perspective was a
trompe-loeil, because it was based on a strict inversion of
the discourse of revolution, without any real analysis of
the history of socialism or the transformation of
capitalism (and their interaction). But it also contains an
injunction to rethink the categories of the philosophy of
history which in the West, from the onset of modernity,
made it possible to conjoin ideas of progress,
emancipation and revolution, giving rise to various right-
wing or left-wing grand narratives. (Among them, in
speculative terms, the dialectical narrative of progress
via the power of the negative, or by the conversion of
violence into social institutions and formations, is
unquestionably one of the most eective.)3 Those, like
me, who share the hope for emancipation contained in
the idea of communism (and who let us confess it here
still share it, though without any illusions about it
answering to some historical necessity or containing in
and of itself any guarantee of its correct application),
should be particularly sensitive to this injunction. If they
wish to be philosophers, they need to understand,
theoretically and historically, what blocked Marxisms
capacity for self-criticism (and, in practice, what
rendered inoperative or doomed to disaster all attempts
at a revolution in the revolution, to quote the phrase
coined by Rgis Debray propos the Cuban Revolution at
its outset, but which also applies to the Chinese Cultural
Revolution, or at least the idea behind it, and the Prague
Revolution, or at least the idea behind it, and the Prague
Spring).4 But they would also need to determine
whether, in the family complex constituted by the
teleologies of historical progress in the bourgeois era
(Turgot, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Spencer, etc.), Marxism
contains a specific dierence, even an irreducible
dierence, guaranteeing it an enduring critical role
beyond the decline in the idea of progress (Georges
Canguilhem).5

Was Althusserian Marxism, to which from the time of

the texts written with Althusser in the 1960s (Lire le
Capital)6 I sought to contribute as best I could, well
placed to confront such questions and their philosophical
implications? Yes and no.

Yes, because like other major twentieth-century Marxists

such as Benjamin or Bloch (and, it should be said, in
almost complete ignorance of their contributions: aside
from Marx, Engels and the major classical philosophers,
plus Freud, his principal interlocutors were Lenin, Stalin,
Mao, Gramsci, Brecht and Lukcs), what Althusser (and
we along with him) sought in his recasting of the concept
of history, and his attempts to construct a topography
for historical materialism (organizing dierent practices
within one and the same over-determined causality), was
essentially a way of wresting the historicity of class
struggles from linearity, predetermination or prophecy,
so as to restore to it its character of unpredictable
eventfulness and perpetual beginning.

Yes, again, because, at the cost of numerous oscillations

and contradictions, its stubborn use of the concept of
science, relating it to an analysis of the objectivity of
social relations and concrete historical situations,
tended decreasingly to apply to Marx a pre-existing
tended decreasingly to apply to Marx a pre-existing
model of scientificity (be it axiomatizable mathesis, the
applied rationalism of the experimental sciences, or
what Foucault called the structuralist counter-sciences:
linguistics, psychoanalysis and anthropology), and
increasingly to transform the concept of science by
incorporating in the knowledge process, in a reflexive but
open or even aporetic fashion, the very conflictuality that
it sought to explain. This was also a way of continuing the
Leninist idea of a party science, except that partisanship
now no longer contained any a priori criterion of truth or
correctness.7

But no, because Althusser quite deliberately remained a

Marxist heterodox on some points and very orthodox,
even dogmatic, on others. This had various, possibly
connected consequences. First of all, it meant, obviously,
that he had no intention of giving up on the reality of
class struggles in the economy, society and history (which
remains, I believe, one of the least contestable strong
points of Marxist discourse and its critical capacity vis--
vis the dominant ideologies), but also that he saw nothing
sociologically or culturally determined about the forms of
organization deriving from a certain European history (in
particular, a certain hierarchical ordering of civil society
and the state), which made it possible for class conflicts
to become relatively autonomous and generate a specific
consciousness. By the same token, despite sometimes
fruitful encounters and dialogues (for Althusser with
Charles Bettelheim; for me, subsequently, with Immanuel
Wallerstein), criticism of the Eurocentrism pervading
historical Marxism (whether party Marxism, state
Marxism or intellectual Marxism) could not be taken to a
conclusion, and the teleology inherent in the idea of a
European model of world history remained unshaken (de
te fabula narratur, Marx had underscored in Capital,
te fabula narratur, Marx had underscored in Capital,
virtually addressing the whole world from the wings).

Second, it meant that the concept of emancipation

underlying Althussers thought (though rarely
formulated as such) remained structurally conceived in
terms of a (revolutionary) transformation of the
conditions of exploitation of labour in its various forms
and degrees. This made capitalism not only a
determinate mode of production, but the essential social
relation on which all the rest depended. This ruled out
regarding other forms of domination as themselves
structural and deprived the concept of over-
determination, just formulated, of much of its analytical
function. Hence Althussers blindness, in particular, to
womens struggles against patriarchy and sexism (even if
some feminists have been able to import into their
analysis categories such as interpellation, fashioned by
Althusser in connection with the dominant ideology),8 to
say nothing of his vehement repudiation of the student
struggles against the disciplinary model of bourgeois
education in 1968.

Finally, it meant that, prior to completely displacing the

question by inventing the aleatory materialism of his
last texts (which dispels the very idea of a social
formation divided into dierentiated instances, each of
them contributing in its way to the society eect), and
despite his celebrated declaration in For Marx that the
lonely hour of the last instance never comes, Althusser
could not (in fact, would not) accept that the mechanism
of the displacement of dominance in dierent historical
conjunctures extended to calling into question
determination in the last instance by the economy. This
prevented him from criticizing the economism dominant
in state ideology (socialist or liberal) since the nineteenth
century as radically as he criticized humanism other
than by peremptorily inverting this economism into a
utopianism or eschatology of the end of economics.9

On account of these characteristics, which I am in no way

claiming (with the dubious superiority of the survivor)
betray weakness of thought or character and have only to
be formulated for it to be obvious how to overcome them,
at least if one does not wish to abandon conceiving
emancipation in terms of social conflict, Althusser (and
with him the Althusserians, of whom I was in a way the
most loyal i.e. the least lucid) therefore remained
utterly Marxist. It might even be said that he made it a
point of honour, at a time when so many others were
happily declaring either that Marxism had failed
completely or that it had never existed in the sense of an
honestly defensible intellectual position. And thus (other
than in some messianic insights which, strangely
enough, aligned him with what other philosophers
looked to Marx for when it came reawakening the
spectre and restoring him to life amid the devastation of
the neo-liberal order that succeeded the collapse of real
social- ism),10 he entertained an essentially negative
image of the way to break the circle of Marxism and anti-
Marxism (still very much alive today), which principally
consisted in an internal critique of its conceptual
economy.

With this summary description of the conjuncture as it

appeared to me in 1993, on the basis of my own formation
and my experience, I hope to create a better
understanding of how I proceeded in my little book,
making the most of the constraints imposed by the kind
of text it was and the moment of its publication.
of text it was and the moment of its publication.

On the one hand, I had decided to draw as radical a line of

demarcation as possible between the philosophy of Marx
which I conceived as a problematic open to all kinds of
transformations, reformulations and extrapolations,
whose starting point is not the oblivion of Marxs words
and sentences but their intrinsic vacillation11 and
Marxism an intellectual and institutional historical
phenomenon, circumscribed in time by the end of the
historical cycle of organization of the labour movement
and class struggle (from the emergence of the social-
democratic parties in the late nineteenth century to the
collapse of the regimes of real socialism in the late
twentieth century) and circumscribed in space (not so
much by confinement within the borders of Europe as by
the exportation from Europe of a certain model of analysis
of social struggles and their becoming-conscious,
concomitant of imperialism and opposed to it). There was
no question of separating a good Marx from a bad
Marxism, to prevent the second contaminating the first,
in accordance with a firmly established tradition among
Marxists themselves. The point was to vouchsafe the
means with which to vary the relations uniting them (in
Marx already, for it would be illusory to think he had
nothing to do with the constitution of Marxism), and thus
to bring out a discrepancy or non-contemporaneity in
their relationship which is also a means of analysis and a
spur to reflection for us today. But since any Marxism,
even of the heterodox variety, basically needs to attribute
a certain consistency and completeness to Marxs
thought and, if need be, create it, I had to endeavour
instead to present it as essentially multiple, uncertain
about its own options and strictly unfinishable in the
hope that this description would help introduce new
philosophical workers to the successive worksites
philosophical workers to the successive worksites
opened by Marx, which can become inter-linked
depending upon the conjuncture (particularly its crises or
dramas), but not integrated into an organic whole.

I tried to persuade my publisher to entitle the book The

Philosophies of Marx, to signal this internal multiplicity
and openness. But he refused (thus depriving me of a
certain aesthetic satisfaction but possibly saving me from
a misunderstanding), both because he thought that title
unintelligible to students and because the same
collection featured two books devoted to Marxs
Economics and Marxs Sociology, respectively.12 This
division of labour was not exactly down to me, because I
had in mind what (in his preface to the German
translation) Frieder Otto Wolf excellently dubs a
philosophische Ttigkeit in other words, a philosophical
activity rather than some self- standing philosophy,
whether system or method. I constantly had in mind
Foucaults formula, defining his own activity as
philosophical fragments in historical worksites.13 The
two authors cannot be superimposed, but they share a
refusal of philosophy as a meta-theoretical precondition
and hence the same postulate of the immanence of the
philosophical in inquiries and analyses pertaining, if you
like, to materialism.

On the other hand, I had decided to try to grasp and

explain the speculative question that makes it possible
for Marxs investigations to unfold as alternative
openings (from which I constructed the three chapters of
my book). I identified this guiding thread with the old
issue of the unity (or fusion) of theory and practice. We
know that this has its roots in the very origins of Western
metaphysics, in the verses by Parmenides asserting that
thought and being are the same and the Socratic debates
about the relationship between two types of philosophy:
that which teaches a form of conduct, way of life or
manner of self-government and that which
contemplates the eternal verities reflected in the
structure of the human soul. But we also know it
underwent a radical transformation with the discovery
by German idealism that theorys horizon is the
elucidation of the conditions of experience and that the
immanent objective of practice is transformation of the
world. Marx unquestionably belongs to this line of
thought. That is why, in the wake of the critical schema
for transcending the antithesis between the old
materialism and idealism set out in the Theses on
Feuerbach, I often point out today, by way of provocation
and to demonstrate the relativity of these terms in
context, that Marx is the last great representative of
German idealism more precisely, its activist variant.14
The issue, however, is whether he pertains to it in the
form of a consummation and, consequently, a synthesis
or system even more coherent than those of his
predecessors (Kant, Fichte, Hegel) or whether, on the
contrary, he represents a displacement of it and a
reopening which, without any pre- defined solution,
revives the issue of what an inherently critical
philosophical activity might consist in.

In order to proceed as far as possible in the second

direction, starting out from Marxs own formulations, I
chose in my book (especially its conclusion) to convert
theory into science (with the caveats indicated above: a
science still to come in its procedures and objects) and
practice into revolution (which from my standpoint
obviously means a revolution in the revolution that
revolutionizes itself, at the same time as its historical
revolutionizes itself, at the same time as its historical
models), to make critique the objective of their
articulation or encounter. In short, I sought to
definitively distance myself from the dialectical schema
of the resolution of the split between subject and object
which dominated the whole of classical idealism, even if
this schema yielded extraordinary speculative fruit in
Marxism itself in particular, the messianic conception
of the proletariat as the subject-object of history in
Lukcss History and Class Consciousness (1923), a work of
genius inseparable from the brief moment when the
Bolshevik Revolution seemed to be the beginning of a
world revolution. And, against a certain legacy of the
Frankfurt School (even though I admire, along with the
critique of the eets pervers of rationality in general, its
unique capacity to analyse everyday forms of subjection
to the logic of the commodity something wholly lacking
in Althusserianism),15 I also sought to conceive that
theory is never critique in and of itself, but only by dint of
a problematic (aleatory) relationship to emancipatory
processes, real rebellion or revolution, which it
anticipates or whose repercussions it experiences. In
short, in the mode of philosophical activity which I
believed I had discovered in Marx (and possibly others),
the requirement of knowledge is taken so far that it risks
not only undermining the dominant ideologies, but also
revealing the illusions that inform the desire for
emancipation. The requirement of revolution (or the
refusal to adapt endlessly to the intolerable existing state
of aairs) is pushed so far that it always risks revealing
its aims to be not so much possible as impossible, given
what we perceive of the tendencies to transformation of
capitalism (and, more generally, market, bourgeois,
patriarchal, imperial society) and their counter-
tendencies. But this double risk is precisely what must be
tendencies. But this double risk is precisely what must be
run to introduce something new, in philosophy as well as
in existence.

Today, with as much conviction as yesterday, I believe I

can say that Marx did indeed run that risk to the benefit
of science as well revolution, creating between them, in an
interface which can only be grasped via its eects, a field
of critical intervention and conceptual creation with very
few equivalents in the history of modern thought. I repeat
it here, even if much has changed in the way I would now
attempt to think for my own part, or through new
readings, the philosophical objects with which Marx was
concerned: the collective (or, rather, relational, trans-
individual) political subjectivity he called praxis; the
eect of misrecognition inherent in social relations of
domination (which he alternately called ideology and
fetishism, sometimes prioritizing the relationship
between individuals and classes and sometimes their
relationship to the commodity and monetary form); the
repercussion on capitalisms individualistic and
utilitarian logic of its own destructive eects (what, in
The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx called the bad side by
which history progresses if it progresses).

That is also why, to put it in a word when a whole

discussion (out of place here) is required, I did not
introduce into the discussion the notion of an ethics
peculiar to Marxism, which might be said to be the
requisite systematic complement of any articulation of
scientific knowledge with revolutionary politics. I know
that this absence will astonish or even shock some
readers. It will be taken as evidence of an inveterate anti-
humanism that has resisted all the bereavements and
lessons of history. Might I hazard a rather dierent
working hypothesis? Ethics does not need to be named as
such to inhere in thought. Or rather, as soon as it is
named as such and proposes to represent the
philosophical mediation between the standpoints of
knowledge of the world and transformation of the world,
it inevitably becomes an enterprise of conciliation and
reconciliation (Vershnung), albeit in a hypothetical,
normative form. In my view, what is required to give
ethics its due, in knowledge and politics alike, is instead
to dwell in contradiction: not in immobile, passive
fashion, but in the form of a constant, uneasy endeavour
to find their shared points of application and to eect the
convergence therein of substantial intellectual and social
forces. I have certainly changed a lot in twenty years,
while the conjuncture in which we live is now almost the
complete opposite: not the terminal crisis of an attempt
to build socialism, but a structural crisis, whose
development is unpredictable, of a (productivist) mode of
accumulation and a (financial) mode of regulation of
capitalism, at the cost of extremely violent ruptures in
the consciousness and aectivity of subjects. But I still
think that with Marx, as I construe him at least, the ethics
we need is one which divides between irreconcilable
demands, rather than assuming they will emerge as two
sides of the same coin if only human beings demonstrate
a modicum of good will. Science must no more be
sacrificed to revolution than revolution to science; it is
the malaise or angst consequent upon this permanent
tension that should stop us from slumbering.

The new edition of The Philosophy of Marx is out now, and

available from the Verso website with a 40% discount
(alongside all the other books in our Marx reading list),
free postage and bundled ebook.
----------

Notes

1. I was moved to discover on the website devoted to the

online publication of Daniel Bensads archives a note on
tienne Balibar, La Philosophie de Marx, dated 1993,
which underscores our points of agreement and
disagreement. See danielbensaid.org.

2. The World Banks discussion paper Managing

Development: The Gov- ernance Dimension, often cited
as initiating systematic use of the term in its
contemporary sense, dates from August 1991.
3. I have discussed this in Violence and Civility: On the
Limits of Politi- cal Philosophy, trans. G.M. Goshgarian,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2015.

4. Rgis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed

Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (1967),
trans. Bobbye Ortiz, Penguin, London, 1968.
5. See Georges Canguilhem, The Decline in the Idea of
Progress, Economy and Society, Vol. 27, nos. 23, 1998.
On the origins of the complex, see also Bertrand
Binoche, Les trois sources des philosophies de lHistoire
(17641798), second edition, Presses de lUniversit Laval,
Quebec, 2008. 6. I cannot resist the (self-) ironic pleasure
of informing readers that the collective work Lire le
Capital by Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancire, Pierre
Macherey, tienne Balibar and Roger Establet, published
in 1965 by Franois Maspero, has been included on the
list of national com- memorations for 2015 by an ad hoc
committee of the Culture Ministry. Shamelessly, I even
agreed to compose the notice for this purpose, for one
agreed to compose the notice for this purpose, for one
must face up to the lesson of the passage of time, of
which institutional recognition is also a part. Obviously,
some will see this as confirmation of their least indulgent
prognoses.

7. By a fortunate invention of translation, this idea, which

featured in particular in an unpublished essay of 1976,
Sur Marx et Freud, became, in the 1977 German version
provided by Rolf Lper and Peter Schttler, the idea of a
schismatic science, which is much more powerful and
clear than its partial French equivalents. See Louis
Althusser, Ideologie und ideologische Staatsapparate.
Aufstze zur marxistischen Theorie, Reihe Positionen 3,
VSA, Hamburg and West Berlin, 1977, p. 93. An English
translation of the French text can be found in Louis
Althusser, Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan,
trans. Jerey Mehlman, Columbia University Press, New
York, 1996.

8. The most brilliant example, combined with a very

interesting critique, is obviously that of Judith Butler,
The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection,
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997.
9. The most detailed work from the Althusserian school
studying the sym- metry between economism and
humanism in the light of the theses of For Marx, is
Franois Regnaults Lidologie technocratique et le
teilhard- isme, published anonymously (under the
signature XXX) in Les Temps modernes, no. 243, August
1966.

10. Obviously, I am thinking of Jacques Derridas famous

book, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy
Kamuf, Routledge, New York, 1994, which, without
Kamuf, Routledge, New York, 1994, which, without
naming him, contains a sharp critique of Althusser. See
my Eschatologie/tlologie. Un dialogue philosophique
interrompu et son enjeu actual, Lignes, nos. 2324,
November 2007.

11. Vacillation: a word I had previously used to propose a

genealogy of the issue of ideology in Marxism. See The
Vacillation of Ideology (198387), in my Masses, Classes,
Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philoso- phy before and
after Marx, trans. James Swenson, Routledge, New York,
1994.

12. See Pierre Salma and Tran Hai Hac, Introduction

lconomie de Marx, Editions La Dcouverte, Paris, 1992;
and Jean-Pierre Durand, La Sociologie de Marx, Editions
La Dcouverte, Paris, 1995.
13. Michel Foucault, Michelle Perrot, et al., Limpossible
prison, ditions du Seuil, Paris, 1980, p. 41.

14. See my Praxis (in collaboration with Barbara Cassin

and Sandra Laugier), in Barbara Cassin (ed.), Dictionary
of Untranslatables: A Philo- sophical Lexicon, trans.
Steven Rendall, et al., Princeton University Press,
Princeton, 2014.

15. Whereas it was rediscovered in his own way by the

other great French Marxist of the twentieth century,
Henri Lefebvre, who put it at the centre of a whole
section of his oeuvre, from the Critique of Everyday Life
(194781) to The Right to the City (1968) and The
Production of Space (1974).

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