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Name/date: Major work: Keywords: Key figures: Figures after: Aphorism: Political aspect: Associations: |
Louis
Althusser 1918- 1990 “Reading
Capital”; “For Marx” Structuralism,
dialectics,
de-centred totality,
causality, overdetermination,
interpellation Marx, Hegel, Spinoza Mao, Bachelard,
C Levi-Strauss, Lacan – ((contests:
Sartre/ Lukacs/ Gramsci)) G.Deleuze,
Rethinking
Marxism, E. Balibar, Resch, P.Macherery,
J Ranciere, Anti-historicism,
anti-humanism, PCF
(French communist Party), Stalinism |
Best known perhaps for his anti-humanist
interpretation of Marx, Louis Althusser’s predominant legacy is the
critique of Hegelian Marxism, and infamous analysis that the early writings of
Marx are trapped within either Hegelian or Feuerbachian
outlooks. Althusser was a life long member of the PCF in France and though
attacking its humanism in the 1960s remained pretty much obedient to its
demands crystallised in the 1966 that he should stay out of questions of
strategy (this has led many to write Althusser off as a Stalinist without
examining the content of his criticisms)
In academic terms,
Althusser’s legacy is the translation of Marxian concepts to acceptable
definitions, and their political de-radicalisation. Modifications of Leninist
ideas concerning change as result of combinations of contradictory forces into
Lacanian concepts such as overdetermination
have been fuel for many a post-Marxist psychoanalytical Marxism. The concept of
interpellation too – the structures act of naming the subject – have been used
in discourses that attempt to reintroduce an idea of subjectivity into the
general Althusserian framework of structural causality. Someone like Judith
Butler comes to mind in this regard.
Althusser remains
surprisingly popular as an introduction to Marx. His works like Pour Marx and
the essays on over-determination and humanism, emphasise the systemic dimension
of Marx’s work, and its scientific rendering of categories to comprehend the
work of the structure piercing through the spontaneous bourgeois interface of
surface appearances. The argumentative structure of these interpretations
mostly revolves around a challenge to the idea that Marx’s dialectic was an
inversion of Hegel’s idealist one. Althusser maintains that the uniqueness of
thought as content in Hegel, essentially the unity of content and form, means
that the dialectic retains a fundamental simplicity. Whilst this dialectic is
possible in the realm of the self-development of spirit or the absolute, it can
not be translated as a materialist method because the content of the material
world is always over-determined, that is, a combination of different and
contradictory elements. According to Althusser this complex concrete totality
is always presupposed by Marx and his method can not be understood as original
development from the simple to the complex.
That this purging of the
Hegelian dialectic, coincided with more political attacks on existentialism and
humanism is well documented. The ensuing controversy too involves the role of
history in Marx and Marxism which Althusser opportunistically presented as in
essence anti-historicist. The general intellectual environment here is the
deconstruction of the subject; its existence as posited by the structure, or
bearer of social relations above it – and in general terms the link with
post-structuralism is easy to perceive.
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Althusser
et le Jeune Marx – Pierre Macherey |
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