Post-Althusserian Theory

Communication présentée au colloque ‘Archipels Glissant,’ 31.5.18,
Université de Paris 8

La société martiniquaise, surdéterminée et structurée par le système capitaliste français, apparaît, Edouard Glissant nous dit dans Le discours antillais, comme une immense accumulation de marchandises, au sein d'une société de consommation de caractère néo-féodale.

L’articolo esplora il concetto di cittadinanza sviluppato da Étienne Balibar considerandolo all’interno della fase «post-marxista» del suo pensiero. Il testo cerca allora innanzitutto di situare il senso di questa fase. Quest'ultima non costituisce un abbandono, ma piuttosto una riflessione nuova sul marxismo, che riprende in particolare il concetto althusseriano di «surdeterminazione» per leggere i rapporti tra la classe, la razza e la nazione. È da questa riflessione, nonché dalla congiuntura socio-politica in cui Balibar si è trovato a intervenire, che emerge il concetto di «diritto di città». Questo è un atto di verifica del principio dell’«egalibertà», che l’autore rintraccia nella Dichiarazione dei diritti del 1789. Ma tale principio è correlato nell’opera balibariana a una dimensione antropologico-politica che gli permette di analizzare il divenire-soggetto del cittadino nella modernità considerando quest’ultimo come un individuo «transindividuale».

This project re-reads Althusserian Marxism as an aesthetic project in light of Althusser’s writings on art and drama. I contend that the Althusserian legacy points to a theory of theory as ultimately an aesthetic project aimed at surpassing the idealist dialectic of theory and practice.

Bu çalışmada, Fransız düşünür Louis Althusser’in ölümünden sonra yayımlanan Karşılaşma Maddeciliğinin Yer Altı Akımı ve Machiavelli ve Biz başlıklı metinlerinden yola çıkarak, içerisinde bulunduğumuz konjonktürde radikal bir siyasetin olanakları üzerine düşünmeyi deneyeceğiz. Söz konusu eserlerin, Althusser’in felsefi arayışı boyunca, politik pratiğin koşulları üzerine düşünme çabasında, yeni ve beklenmedik bir pozisyona karşılık geldiğini önereceğimiz bu makalede, sadece Althusser üzerine değil ama aynı zamanda Althusser ile birlikte ve yer yer de ona rağmen düşünerek, bu pozisyonun bir “karşılaşma politikasına” doğru nasıl geliştirilebileceğinin yollarını arayacağız. Sol siyasetin etkisini yitirmesine paralel biçimde dünyanın değişik yerlerinde otoriter lider ve rejimlerin yükselişe geçtiği, neo-liberalizmin yıkıcılığına küresel pandeminin yarattığı felaketin eklemlenerek kesif bir belirsizlik yarattığı bu konjonktürde, Althusser’in bu yeni pozisyonunun düzen dışı radikal bir siyaseti yeniden düşünebilmek için barındırdığı olanakları irdeleyeceğiz. Bu yolla, Althusser’i güncelliğini yitirmemiş bir felsefi figür olarak yeniden düşünme fırsatı da yakalamış olacağız.

The task of studying the impact of social class on physical and mental health involves, among other things, the use of a conceptual toolbox that defines what social class is, establishes how to measure it, and sets criteria that help distinguish it from closely related concepts. One field that has recently witnessed a wealth of theoretical and conceptual research on social class is psychology, but geographers' and sociologists' attitude of diffidence toward this " positivistic " discipline has prevented them from taking advantage of this body of scholarship. This paper aims to highlight some of the most important developments in the psychological study of social class and social mobility that speak to the long-standing concerns of health geographers and sociologists with how social position, perceptions, social comparisons, and class-based identities impact health and well-being.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.11.037

Drawing from the various theoretical constructs and analyses of class in sociology, economics, cultural studies, and sociolinguistics, I discuss a number of issues regarding class and possible future research avenues for sociolinguists. These include addressing and exploring how to move beyond the static categorical groupings of class membership including those of researchers themselves in their work on class, appraising the relevance and utility of the concept of overdetermination (Althusser, 1977; Resnick & Wolff, 1987) in examining the enactments of class discursive self-positionings in different domains and scales, the need to reexamine the construct of intersectionality, and problematizing the notion of identity politics as it relates to class.

The paper is about Vedic culture of Namboothiri society. Culture is ordinary; every human society has its own shapes, its own meanings, and its own purposes. Cultural studies are interested in lifestyle because the lifestyle is about everyday life defines identity, influences social relations and bestows meaning and value to artifacts in a culture. The Brahmanas of Kerala are known as Namboothiris. Historical evidence, as well as their own traditions, suggest that they came from North India and settle down in Kerala, migrating along the west coast. In fact, one sees this tradition all along the WestCoast from Sourashtra on; and the Brahmanical traditions in the Canarese (Karnataka) and Malabar Coasts are nearly identical to one another. Rigveda is a collection of poems, hymns, and invocation of deities, reflecting myths, rites, battles and insights of many kinds. Texts are procedures for rituals and rites of Brahmanas are generally derived from it. In yagam, Hothan through a chant of Rigveda manthrams invokes the God into the yajnavedi and their divine virtues into our souls(minds). The Vedic culture in Kerala is unique and self-contained. The Ghats, with an average elevation of 5,000ft; and roughly parallel to the west coast, some 30 km from the sea in the northern and about 60 km in the southern part of Kerala. There is one main gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. There is one main gap, the Pallakad gap, through which most east-west communication takes place. The Namboothiri are probably unique to have a sub-caste of Brahmanas who are excluded from vedams. A.D. Devoted to their rituals, tantric as well as Vedic, from which outsiders are excluded, they were relatively unaffected by modern education. Most Namboothiri's have been settled as peaceful villagers, country aristocrats, small landowners, connoisseurs of literature and the traditional arts (like Kathakali) scholars and gentlemen. The most conspicuous characteristics of Namboothiri are simplicity and exclusiveness, obviously, the former predicate does not extend to their rituals.

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation has been struggling for greater rights and autonomy for the indigenous Mayan peoples of Chiapas, Mexico for the last three decades. The iconography, semiotic system, and progressive myth-making the Zapatistas produce in the hundreds of murals adorning their communities disseminate a powerful anti-state and anti-capitalist ideology that mutually reinforces the Zapatista culture on which the functioning of their communities, economy, and overall sociopolitical campaign depend. We argue that their positive, forward-oriented and environmentally-sensitive art, and the broader political, social and pedagogical discourses it represents, are strongly congruent with Guattari’s later intellectual focus and political orientation towards developing an “ecosophy,” an ethico-aesthetic perspective that can enable greater freedom from the heavy chains of both the Mexican government and the global neoliberal capitalist system in which Mexico is embedded.

In Das Kapital lesen schreibt Althusser, dass "die Philosophie Spinozas eine theoretische Revolution anstößt, die in der Geschichte der Philosophie keine Vorläufer hat und wahrscheinlich die größte philosophische Revolution aller Zeiten ist, weil wir Spinoza aus philosophischer Sicht als den einzigen direk-ten Vorfahren von Marx betrachten können."Jedoch, so fügt er hinzu, "ist diese Revolution unter Schichten der Nacht begraben worden", insofern als es Marx selbst nicht gelang-außer in oberflächlicher Weise-, das Denken Spinozas zu verstehen. Das Ziel dieses Buches ist es, das diesen "Schichten der Nacht" zugrundelie-gende Muster zu rekonstruieren, indem die komplexe Entstehungsgeschichte jenes Vorurteils dargelegt wird, das in der deutschen Philosophie und Kultur den Namen "Spinoza" angenommen hat. Die vier Sektionen der Arbeit sind Leibniz und Spinoza, der Spinoza-Renaissance, dem Idealismus und Spinoza sowie dem Marxismus und Spinoza gewidmet und untersuchen die Haupt-probleme dieser Geschichte.

In Leggere Il Capitale Althusser scrive che «la filosofia di Spinoza introduce una rivoluzione teorica senza precedenti nella storia della filosofia e, proba-bilmente, la più grande rivoluzione filosofica di ogni tempo, al punto che pos-siamo considerare Spinoza, dal punto di vista filosofico, l'unico antenato diretto di Marx». Tuttavia, aggiunge, questa rivoluzione «è stata seppellita sotto strati di notte», tanto che Marx stesso non riuscì a comprendere, se non in modo superficiale, il pensiero di Spinoza. Lo scopo di questo libro è rico-struire la trama determinata di questi «strati di notte», offrendo la complessa genealogia di quel pregiudizio che nella filosofia e nella cultura tedesca ha preso il nome di "Spinoza". Le quattro sezioni, dedicate rispettivamente a Leibniz e Spinoza, alla Spinoza-Renaissance, all'idealismo e Spinoza, infine al marxismo e Spinoza, indagano i nodi principali di questa storia.

In a memorable moment in his celebrated book, For Marx, Althusser announces:
It is impossible to know anything about men except on the absolute precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes [réduire en cendres]. So any thought that appeals to Marx for any kind of restoration of a theoretical anthropology or humanism is no more than ashes, theoretically.
The myth of humanism – the view of the human subject as the end of creation and as being endowed with free will – was the subject of a seething critique by Benedict de Spinoza. Althusser was well aware of these strands of Spinoza’s anti-humanism, and it was partly by virtue of these strands that Althusser was so much attracted to Spinoza’s philosophy.
Still, from another perspective, Althusser was far more of a humanist than Spinoza, and it is the primary aim of this short essay to illuminate the ways in which Althusser – and his disciples – might have failed to appreciate the full extent of Spinoza’s attack on humanism.

В диссертации  предложен анализ концепций идеологии Грамши и Альтюссера в широком контексте развития марксистской теоретической традиции; прослежена эволюция (пост)альтюссерианской теории идеологии (1970-1990-е гг.), сопряженная с “поворотом к Грамши” в современной марксистской мысли (Э.Балибар, М.Пеше, Ж.Рансье, Н.Пуланзас, П.Херст, Г.Терборн, Т.Иглтон, С.Холл и британские культуральные исследования, Э.Лакло, Ш.Муфф, С.Жижек и ряд других авторов). Показано значение и актуальность концепций Грамши и Альтюссера для анализа взаимосвязей дискурсивных практик, субъективности и социальных отношений доминирования – междисциплинарной проблемной области, являющейся ключевой для современных направлений критической социальной мысли.

Th is article aims to show that the theory of violence in Marx and Engels is driven by a conceptual syntax which can be found in two important chapters of Hegel's Science of Logic ('Actuality' and 'Teleology'). Th ese categories are the timeless schemata of the appearance of historical violence in Hegel's Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. However it is possible to fi nd in Marx's writing on violence a sort of counter-movement that cannot be inscribed in the process of the becoming-subject of substance.

In this conversation, which took place across several months in the year 2021, Elizabeth Grosz describes her position with respect to "new materialism" and "the material turn": while she emphasizes the necessity of a feminist, antiracist materialist thought in the current situation marked by a global pandemic, she also stresses the equal importance of what she calls "the incorporeal": an excess in and of matter, materiality's heterogeneous virtuality, differentiality and becoming-other. Grosz describes the incorporeal as mutually implicated with materiality in a way that eschews both monism and dualism. The conversation roughly follows five topics: 1. How does one conceive of ontology without fixity? 2. How does matter "make sense"? 3. Can we think sexual differences beyond cisgender binarism and oppositional dualism? 4. What are the ethico-political implications of a materialist thought predicated on becoming and immanence? 5. Is psychoanalysis compatible with materialism, and is there a materiality of the unconscious? In the course of this exceptional interview, Grosz discusses the works of Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray, Karen Barad, Friedrich Nietzsche, and of course Gilles Deleuze, among many others.

Another old essay from a long out of print book.  A critique of Louis Althusser's interpretation of Marx as developed in his books For Marx and Reading Capital, this is also probably the most succinct summary I have given anywhere of the main arguments of my own book Marx's Method. 

Originally published in J. Mepham and J-H. Ruben (eds), Issues in Marxist Philosophy, vol. 3, Brighton: Harvester Press, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979, 27-54.

Much post-modern cinematic narrative has been preoccupied with apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian fantasies that closely reflect aspects of our lived reality.  This paper seeks to distinguish the boundaries between films categorized as apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian and to examine some of the most iconic cinematic artifacts in each of the categories to differentiate their parameters and to explore in detail dystopian film through the prism of cultural theory, to better understand the cultural work that specifically dystopia cinema does.  Dystopia film is primarily concerned with the social conditions inherent to patriarchal capitalism in which the narratives simultaneously expose and reproduce social and economic contradictions in an ideological process of repressive tolerance.  Contemporary dystopia films such as In Time (Andrew Nicoll, 2011) and The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) criticize the aspects of capitalism that contradict social mythologies in an effort to reconcile these contradictions with a valorizing fantasy of romance and revolution.

Cet article rend hommage à André Tosel en proposant une exploration de sa proposition d’un communisme de la finitude. Dans ce cadre, l’aliénation capitaliste se présente comme une contradiction en acte entre d’une part un fantasme d’illimitation et de maîtrise, refoulant la finitude, la contingence et la conditionnalité de toute réalisation humaine, et d’autre part, la condamnation de masses toujours plus nombreuses à une finitude résignée, à l’impuissance et à l’immaîtrise de leur existence, déniée dans sa puissance immanente de création de nouvelles normes de vie. Nous montrons ainsi comment pour Tosel les perspectives émancipatrices d’un communisme à venir ne sont pas séparables d’une nouvelle articulation du fini et de l’infini qu’il s’agit de penser, produire et expérimenter dans une nouvelle forme d’être-en-commun.

This essay measures Louis Althusser’s debt to Antonio Gramsci in light of his general theory of reading and his reflections on the science, philosophy, and politics of Marxism. It considers their respective approaches to reading, highlighting the differences between a “philosophical reading” in Althusser’s sense and a “political reading” in the spirit of Gramsci. Further, it considers how some of Althusser’s key concepts—ideology, the state, conjuncture, utopian realism—are elaborated through a critical engagement with Gramsci’s political thought.

Lise Vogel's study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, argues that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate forms of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. Vogel's insight draws on earlier innovations in the Marxist tradition, most explicitly that of Louis Althusser. She argues that Althusser allowed her to break from an empirically descriptive approach to domestic labor, because his separation of Marx's conceptual insights from his empirical illustrations helped her to understand reproduction's integral role within capitalism. However, Vogel's work is also comparable to Althusser's later work on ideology. He argues that the reproduction of the conditions of production is equally important as production itself, and that ideology maintains this reproductive necessity. While he names the family as a primary apparatus of ideology, he does not dwell on its role. Nonetheless, we can see an alternative framework of social reproduction, through further engagement with the feminist reading of Althusser developed by Judith Butler. However, as Nancy Fraser points out, this risks an excessively immediate understanding of the relationship between gender ideology and the mode of production. Renewed attention to Vogel can change the way that we read the Althusserian intervention, such that social reproduction can be understood more clearly. I argue for a new conversation between social reproduction theory and queer theory, mediated by a shared inheritance from Althusser. Butler's reading contributes a theory of ideology that richly describes the experience of gender identity, while Vogel provides a more rigorous grounding in historical materialism.

Categories such as chance, contingency, probability, and aleatoricism are often used, but not spelt out as the foundation for neomaterialism or more general materialist philosophies. As Marx and Engels (1968) point out, materialism has occupied a largely marginal position in the history of philosophy and, for Marx at least, even the staunchest materialists, such as Feuerbach, reveal a covert idealism. The problem lies, Marx (1959) argues, in the fact that practically all materialist philosophers-including Feuerbach-have maintained a 'subjective' perspective instead of moving towards a more third-party's view, one pertaining to science. This statement bears a striking resemblance to François Laruelle's project of non-philosophy, which calls upon the abandonment of the 'principle of philosophical sufficiency', assuming instead a posture of thought that emulates science's treatment of the real. 1 The latter concerns the fact that science does not seek to 'express' or convey 'the essence' of anything 'in itself'. Rather, it recognises 'the indifference of the real' to its aspirations and assumes a relation of unilaterality vis-à-vis the real (Laruelle 1989: 56). The outside world-exteriority-is not 'endowed with meaning' that science seeks to relay, but rather submits to its constitutive foreclosure whilst explaining 'how it works'. The latter is termed 'description' by way of 'cloning' the real (Laruelle 2014: 28, 51 et passim), or by way of superposition (Gangle and Greve 2017). The use of physics and categories of natural philosophy for contemporary materialist philosophy draws on the legacy of Greek atomism. In order to speak of materialism proper, rather than the one criticised by Marx as merely covert or reversed idealism, we claim that, following Marx, any contemporary re-appropriation of Greek atomism ought to posit the notions of clinamen (in Greek: παρέγκλισις), aleatoricism, uncertainty, and transcending the philosophical-theological belief in ideality, as its founding tenets. Materialist atomism seeks to traverse the membrane between subject and object, and to position itself beyond the logic of subjectivisation. In this way it transcends the centrality of subjectivity as the core problem of the pseudo-materialism criticised by Marx. Materialist atomism is implicitly projected onto the boundary between subject and object whilst displacing them, decentering them from their classical positions-as, for example, in the speculative binary criticised by Luce Irigaray (1985) in Speculum of the Other Woman. Therefore, its explicit problematisation needs to be articulated in a way that genealogises the origin of that very boundary. In this chapter we provide a genealogy of new materialism rooted/

First published in 1983, Lise Vogel’s study, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, has received renewed attention since its republication last year. Vogel makes a compelling argument that many socialist feminists relied on a dual-systems theory that maintains patriarchy and chauvinism as separate instances of cultural determination, without integrating them into the social totality of capitalist production and exploitation. I argue that Vogel’s work finds a complement in earlier analyses written by the Italian autonomist feminists, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Leopoldina Fortunati. However, Vogel’s notion of value creation maintains a more traditional perspective. While she subscribes to Louis Althusser’s epistemological concepts, the Italians follow a reformulation according to the viewpoint of the worker’s experience and the notion of the “social factory”, advocated by Mario Tronti. While autonomist feminism and social reproduction theory share a commitment to understanding reproductive labor – including housework and care labor  – as indispensable elements of the mode of production, they also depart from one another on questions of interpretation and practice, particularly regarding the application of the wage relation to domestic labor.

Se vi è un luogo in cui Althusser ha tentato di formulare una teoria della causalità, questo è senz'altro l'«Oggetto del Capitale», in cui confluiscono le riflessioni sulla dialettica di «Contraddizione e surdeterminazione» e «Sulla dialettica materialista». La questione al centro del testo è la novità introdotta da Marx con il Capitale rispetto al discorso dell'economia politica: se l'economia politica pensa i fenomeni economici in uno spazio piano, omogeneo, in cui regna un modello di causalità lineare e tran-sitiva, la teoria di Marx li pensa «in una regione determinata da una struttura regionale e inscritta essa stessa in un luogo definito di una struttura globale». Si tratta, nella metafora spaziale, di pensare lo spazio complesso e profondo dell'economico iscritto nello spazio complesso e profondo della storia: è necessario dunque, per pensare i fenomeni economici, costruire il concetto della struttura che li produce, cioè l'unità di forze produttive/rapporti di produzione, che tuttavia non può essere definita al di fuori della struttura globale del modo di produzione. Ciò significa che i fenomeni economici non solo non sono dati, ma non può essere loro applicato nemmeno un modello di causalità lineare: «per costituire il discorso rigoroso della teoria della storia e della teoria dell'Economia politica» è necessario produrre un nuovo concetto filosofico. In altre parole, la coupure con cui Marx inaugura il nuovo spazio scientifico dell'economico e della storia richiede una rivoluzione filosofica, la produzione di un nuovo concetto di causalità.

Recently, there has been much debate about the rise of an Evangelical Left in the United States. This debate has focused on the emergence of influential evangelical leaders breaking away from the Republican Party, such as Rick Warren. This debate mistakes a hegemonic crisis of (neo-)conservatism with a hegemonic crisis of neoliberalism. Instead, the evangelical movement in the United States needs to be analyzed in the context of neoliberalism and the decline of class-based forms of solidarity, which it replaced. Throughout their ascent, the evangelical institutions have inscribed themselves into and become a part of the neoliberal state. At the same time, the depth of the economic crisis, the remaining class character of the evangelical movement, the importance of evangelical churches as arenas of hegemonic struggles and, finally, the existing shift in national discourse in terms of the ecological question, the social question and the rehabilitation of the state vis-à-vis the market mark an opening of the political situation in the US that may eventually lead to a replacement of the current evangelical centrism by the actual Evangelical Left as part of a counter-hegemonic post-neoliberal historic bloc.

Althusser's Machiavelli and Us has often been considered as the French Marxist's first step on the path beyond Marxism. This article opposes this interpretation by showing that, while Machiavelli helps Althusser to renounce any attempt to deduce a communist political practice from the necessity portrayed by a theory of history, Althusser was mindful not to identify the relationship between the communist party and the masses with the relationship between the Prince and the people. From a Marxist perspective, a communist political practice must further the autonomous political initiatives of the masses that delineate a tendency towards the withering-away of the state and cannot merge with a practice of governing the people. This is why Marxism must not forsake its theory of history but employ it in the process of the subtraction of the party to its becoming-state by detecting the conditions of impossibility of the duration of a communist political practice.

As they make their way through Louis Althusser's and Jacques Derrida's texts, readers will cross innumerable curtains — 'the words and things', as Derrida says, as many fabrics of traces. These curtains open onto a multiplicity of scenes and 'mises en scène', performances, roles, rituals, actors, plays — thus unfolding the space of a certain theatricality. This essay traces Althusser's and Derrida's respective deployments of the theatrical motif. In his theoretical writings, Althusser's theatrical dispositive aims to designate the practical and material dimension of the scenes of ideology, materially enacted through role-plays, performances, acts, or discourses. At the horizon: a scientific discourse on ideology or, in his later works, a strategic intervention in the class struggle. This scientific and/or strategic orientation echoes Althusser's definition of materialism: 'no more storytelling'. In contrast, Derrida's 'closure of representation' reminds us that there's no presence — even the most 'material' — no 'truth' or 'correctness' — in theoretical or strategic terms — without effects of representation, differential repetition, narrative reconstruction: theatricality and materiality suppose a force of resistance, a secret heterogeneity, more curtain foldings. Hence the irreducible necessity of reading, storytelling, transformative interpretation. What are the implications for thinking inheritance and debt — for example, the one binding Althusser and Derrida, and us to them?

Analysing the notebooks and the references to Lucretius in Marx's works, Morfino concludes that it is possible to excavate a major discontinuity in Marx's interpretation. The Lucretius of the juvenile notebooks on Epicureanism, who functions as a model of abstract self-consciousness, is overtaken, in the scattered references from the period of Die deutsche Ideologie and Das Kapital, by a Lucretius for whom nature becomes a continuous process of transformation of its parts-a process in which the human species is itself immersed.