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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal
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On Marx and Freud
Louis Althusser & Warren Montag
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Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society, 4:1, 17-30, DOI:
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Rethinking MARXISM Volume 4. Number I (Spring 199 I )
On Marx and Freud
Louis Althusser
Translated by Warren Montag
It is generally recognized today, despite symptomatic resistances which must be
examined, that two previously unheard of and unforseeable discoveries in the
order of the social or human sciences disturbed the universe of the cultural
values of the classical age, the age in which the bourgeoisie rose to power. The
discoveries were those of historical materialism-or the theory of the,conditions,
forms, and effects of the class struggle-Marxs oeuvre, and the unconscious,
Freuds oeuvre. Before Marx and Freud, culture rested on the diversity of the
natural sciences, complemented by the ideologies or philosophies of history, so-
ciety, and the human subject. With Marx and Freud, scientific theories sud-
denly came to occupy regions until then reserved for the theoretical forma-
tions of bourgeois ideology (political economy, sociology, psychology) or rather
occupied surprising and disconcerting positions in the interior of these re-
gions.
It is, however, also generally recognized that the phenomena addressed by Marx
and Freud, who sought to grasp the effects of the class struggle and the effects of the
unconscious, were not unknown before them. An entire tradition of political
philosophers and above all practitioners, as Spinoza said of Machiavelli (who
directly addressed the class struggle and to whom we owe the thesis of the
anteriority of contradiction in relation to contraries), the most familiar being the
philosophers of Natural Law, who spoke of class struggle indirectly in the guise of
juridical ideology, recognized well before Marx the existence of classes and the
effects of the class struggle. Marx himself recognized the bourgeois historians of the
Restoration and the economists of the school of Ricardo, like Hodgskin, as direct
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18 Althiisser
ancestors from whom he demarcated himself through his critique of the bourgeois
theory of class struggle: these authors recognized the existence of classes and of
class struggle. In the same way, the effects of the unconscious that Freud studied
were recognized in some form from the time of high antiquity, in dreams, prophe-
cies, the phenomena of possession and exorcism consecrated by definitive practices
and treatments.
In this sense, neither Marx nor Freud invented anything: the objects, the theories
that they respectively produced existed before they were discovered. What did they
produce? A definition of their object, its limitation and its extension, the
characterization of its conditions, its forms of existence and its effects, a formula-
tion of the conditions necessary to a knowledge of the object and to any action upon
i t, in brief, its theory or the first forms of its theory.
Nothing could be more banal than this observation since it is true that, for
materialism, a discovery does no more than produce the form of knowledge of an
object that already exists outside of thought. But things become more interesting
when we recognize that the conditions of these disconcerting discoveries completely
overturned the conditions previously recognized us normal f or any discovery. And
it is certainly not by chance that the two discoveries that upset the cultural world
within the space of fifty years pertain to what is conveniently called the human or
social sciences and that they break with the traditionul protocol cf discover?, in
the natural sciences and in the theoretical formulations of ideology. Nor is it by
chance that from the moment Marx and Freud were sufficiently known a number of
contemporaries experienced this rupture as the manifestation of a certain affinity
between the two theories. From there, given that certain of these contemporaries
were prisoners of the ideological prejudice of the monism of all objects of
science, it is not by chance that they were led to see the nature of this affinity as an
identih, of objects: Reich, for example, sought to identify the effects of the
unconscious isolated by Freud with the effects of the class struggle isolated by
Marx.
We still feel, or at least many of us do, the same presentiment: too many things
connect them. A4ur.r and Freud must haw something in common. But what? And if
Reichs failure has shown us where and how not to seek their point of encounter (i n
the identity of their objects), the conviction persists that there exists something in
common in this double experience, something unprecedented in the history of
culture.
In the first instance i t can be argued that Freud offered us, exactly like Marx, an
example of a materialist and dialectical thought.
If the most minimal thesis that defines materialism is the existence of reality
outside of thought or consciousness, Freud is truly a materialist insofar as he re-
jects the primacy of consciousness not only in knowledge but in consciousness
itself, that is, insofar as he rejects the primacy of consciousness in psychology in
order to think the psychic apparatus as a whole in which the ego, or conscious-
ness is only an instance, a part or an effect. On a more general level, Freuds
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Marx and Freud 19
opposition to all idealism, to spiritualism and religion, even disguised as morality,
is well known.
Concerning the dialectic, Freud furnished it with some surprising figures that he
never treated as laws (that questionable form of a certain Marxist tradition): for
example, the categories of displacement, condensation, overdetermination, and so
on as well as in the ultimate thesis, a meditation on which would take us a long way,
that the unconscious does not know contradiction and that the absence of con-
tradiction is the condition of any contradiction. There is in this everything necessary
to explode the classical model of contradiction, a model too inspired by Hegel to
serve the method of Marxist analysis.
Do these philosophical affinities suffice to allow us to grasp the theoretical
community between Marx and Freud? Yes and no. We might well stop there and
retire in silence; the philosophical balancesheet is already rich and leaves each
science to function on its own side, that is, to confront its own object, irreducible as
an object, to the philosophical affinities of which we have just spoken. However,
another phenomenon, still more astonishing, must engage our attention: it is what I
have called the conflictuul character of Marxist theory and Freudian theory.
It is a fact of experience that Freudian theory is a conflictual theory. From the
time of its birth, and the phenomenon has not ceased to reproduce itself, it has
provoked not only strong resistance, not only attacks and criticisms but, what is
more interesting, attempts at arinexution and revision. I say that the attempts at
annexation and revision are more interesting than simple attacks and criticisms, for
they signify that Freudian theory contains, by the admission of its adversaries,
something true and dangerous. Where there is nothing true, there is no reason to
annex or revise. There is therefore something true in Freud that must ge appropri-
ated but in order that its meaning may be revised,for this truth is dungerou.s: it must
be revised in order to be neutralized. There is a relentless dialectic in this cycle. For
what is remarkable in the dialectic of resistance-criticism-revision is that the
phenomenon that begins outside of Freudian theory (with its adversaries) always
ends up within Freudian theory. I t is internally that Freudian theory is obliged to
defend itself against attempts at annexation and revision: the adversary always ends
up by penetrating it and producing a revisionism that provokes internal counterat-
tacks and, finally, splits (scissions). A conflictual science, Freudian theory is also a
scissional science and its history is marked by incessantly recurring splits.
Of course the idea that a science could by its very nature be conflictual (and
scissional), governed by a dialectic of resistance-attacks-revisions-splits, is a verita-
ble scandal for rationalism, even if this rationalism calls itself materialist. Rational-
ism can certainly admit that a completely new science (Copernicus, Galileo) can
come into conflict with the established power of the Church and with the prejudices
of an ignorant age but this happens as if by accident and only for the moment it
takes to dissipate ignorance: in principle science, which is reason, always carries the
day, for the truth is all-powerful (Lenin himself said Marxs theory is all
powerful because it is true), and more powerful than all the shadows of the world.
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20 Althusser
For rationalism, the idea that there can exist sciences conflictual by their very
nature, haunted or even constituted by contestation and struggle, is pure non-
sense: these are not sciences but simple opinions, contradictory in themselves like
all subjective points of view and therefore dubious.
Before Freudian theory, Marxist science offered an example of a necessarily
conflictual and scissional science. It is not a matter of an accident, or of the
astonishment of ignorance caught short, of the ruling prejudices pushed from their
position of comfort and power: it is a question of a necessity organically linked to
the very object of the science founded by Marx. The entire history of Marxist theory
and of Marxism proves it, above all the history of Marx himself. Beginning in
Hegel and Feuerbach in whom he thought to find a critique of Hegel, Marx only
came to occupy the philosophical positions from which he could discover his object
through a long internal and external political and philosophical struggle. He came to
occupy these positions only by breaking with the dominant bourgeois ideology,
after ideologically and intellectually experiencing the antagonistic relation between
the dominant bourgeois ideology and the political and philosophical positions that
permit the discovery of what the immense edifice of bourgeois ideology and its
theoretical formulations (philosophy, political economy, etc.) are designed to dis-
simulate as they perpetuate the exploitation and domination of the bourgeois class.
Marx was convinced that the adversary of the truth that he discovered was not
accidental error or ignorance but the organic system of bourgeois ideology, an
essential component of the struggle of the bourgeois class. This particular error
never had any reason to recognize the truth (class exploitation), since on the
contrary its organic class function is to mask, in its class struggle, the system of
illusions, indispensable to their subordination, to which it subjects the exploited. At
the very heart of the truth, Marx encountered the class struggle, a pitiless
irreconcilable struggle. At the same time he discovered that the science he founded
was a partisan science (Lenin), a science representing the proletariat (Capital),
and therefore a science that the bourgeoisie is incapable of recognizing but that they
nevertheless will combat to the death and by any means necessary.
The entire history of Marxism has verified and continues to verify every day the
necessarily conflictual character of the science founded by Marx. Marxist theory,
true and therefore dangerous, rapidly became one of the vital objectives of the
bourgeois classs struggle. We see the dialectic referred to earlier at work: attack-
annexation-revision-split; we see the attack directed from the outside pass into the
interior of theory which thus finds itself invested with revisionism. In response there
is the counterattack and, in certain limited situations, splits (Lenin against the
Second International). It is through this implacable and inescapable dialectic of an
irreconcilable struggle that Marxist theory advances and is strengthened before
encountering grave, always conflictual crises.
These things are well known but their conditions are not always fully understood.
It will be admitted that Marxist theory is necessarily involved in the class struggle
and that the conflict that opposes it to bourgeois ideology is irredeemable, but that
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Marx and Freud 21
the conflictuality of Marxist theory is constitutive of its scientijkity and objectivity
will be admitted only with difficulty. One will fall back on positivist and economist
conceptions to distinguish its conflictual conditions as contingent in relation to its
scientific results. This is to fail to see that Marxist science and the Marxist
researcher must take a position in the conflict of which Marxist theory is the
object and must occupy proletarian theoretical class positions, antagonistic to any
theoretical position of the bourgeois class, to constitute and develop their science.
What are these theoretical class positions, indispensable to the constitution and
development of Marxist theory? They are philosophical positions, dialectical and
materialist, that permit one to see what bourgeois ideology necessarily occults: the
class structure and class exploitation that characterize the social formation. For
these philosophical positions are always and necessarily antagonistic to bourgeois
positions.
These principles, if not this specific formulation (theoretical class positions), are
generally accepted by Marxist theoreticians in their general sense. But we cannot
avoid the suspicion that they are only superficially recognized without their real
meaning and all its consequences being understood. Is it necessary to use a less
fashionable but more striking expression? The idea is, at bottom, that to see and to
understand what happens in class societies, it is indispensable to occupy proletarian
class theoretical positions; there is the simple postulate that in a necessarily
conjlictual realit?, such as a society one cannot see everything,from everywhere; the
essence of this conflictual reality can only be discovered on the condition that one
occupies certain positions and not others in the conflict itselj. For to passively
occupy other positions is to allow oneself to participate i n the logic of the dominant
ideology. Of course, this condition flies in the face of the entire positivjp tradition
through which bourgeois ideology has interpreted the practice of the natural sci-
ences, since the condition of positivist objectivity is to occupy no position, to
remain outside conflict whatever it may be (once the theological and metaphysical
age has passed). But there is another tradition traces of which can be found among
the greatest thinkers, for example, Machiavelli who wrote that it is necessary to be
the people to know the Prince. Marx said in substance nothing else in his entire
oeuvre. When he writes in the preface to Capital that the work represents the
proletariat , he declares in essence that only on the basis of proletarian positions can
Capital be known. If we take Machiavellis phrase in its strongest sense, we may
say that it is necessary to be proletarian to know Capital. Concretely, this means
not only having to recognize the existence of the proletariat but also sharing its
struggles as Marx did for four years before the Manifesto, having participated in the
first organizations of the proletariat to be in a position to know Capital. To adopt the
class theoretical positions of the proletariat there is no other way in the world than
practice, that is, personal participation in the political struggles of proletarian
organizations. It is through this practice that an intellectual becomes proletarian,
that is, begins to move away from bourgeois or petty-bourgeois theoretical class
positions towards revolutionary theoretical positions, that he or she can know
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22 Althusser
Capital-as Machiavelli said, it is necessary to be the people to know the
Princes. For there is no other way f or an intellectual to become part of the people
than through the practical experience of the peoples struggle.
If I may be permitted here a word on a well-known formula: it is Kautskys and it
is taken up by Lenin in What I s to Be Done. It concerns the fusion of the workers
movement and Marxist theory. According to this formula, Marxist theory is elabo-
rated by intellectuals and is introduced into the workers movement from the
outside. 1 have always been convinced that this formula is unfortunate. For that
Marx and Engels were formed as bourgeois intellectuals outside of the workers
movement is an obvious fact: they were trained like all the intellectuals of their time
in the bourgeois universities. But Marxist theory has nothing in common with the
bourgeois theories with which the intellectuals were endowed; on the contrary, it
says something totally foreign to the world of bourgeois theory and ideology. How
then were highly educated bourgeois intellectuals able to forge or conceive a
revolutionary theory which serves the proletariat by telling the truth about Capital?
The answer seems simple to me and I have already said it i n so many words: Marx
and Engels did not forge their theory outside of the proletariat and its positions but
from within the positions and revolutionary practice of the proletariat. It is because
they became organic intellectuals of the proletariat through their practice in the
workers movement, without ever ceasing to be intellectuals, that they were able to
conceive their theory. This theory was not imported from outside into the
workers movement; it was conceived through an immense theoretical effort within
the workers movement. The pseudo-importation of which Kautsky spoke was
simply the expansion. within the workers movement, of a theory produced outside
of it by the organic intellectuals of the proletariat.
These are not secondary questions or mere curiosities but problems that touch on
the very meaning of Marxs entire work. For this displacement (as Freud liked to
say in relation to his own object) towards revolutionary theoretical class positions
not only has political consequences but theoretical consequences as well. Con-
cretely the politico-theoretical or philosophical act of abandoning bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois theoretical positions is heavy with theoretical and scientific con-
sequences. It is not by chance that Marx wrote the simple formula critique of
political economy as the subtitle of Capital. And it is not by chance that the
meaning of this critique is often mistaken for Marxs judgement concerning an
uncontested and incontestable reality. whether or not, for example, Smith or
Ricardo understood the relation of surplus-value to rent, and so on. Matters are
considerably more complicated. In the displacement that led Marx to occupy
proletarian class positions in theory, he discovered that, despite all the merits of his
authors, the existing Political Economy was not fundamentally a science, but a
theoretical formation of bourgeois ideology. playing its role in the ideological class
struggle. He discovered that it was not simply the details of the existing Political
Economy that had to be criticized but that the very idea, the project, the existence of
Political Economy had to be called into question and rejected: it could only be
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Murx and Freud 23
thought as an autonomous, independent discipline on the condition that the class
relations and class struggle that it had as its ideological mission to obscure were
themselves distorted. Marxs theoretical revolution thus resulted in the conclusion
that there is no Political Economy (except for the bourgeoisie whose interests are
only too clear) and even more that there is no Marxist Political Economy. That is
not to say that there was nothing there, but that Marx suppressed the supposed
object of Political Economy in favor of an entirely different reality that became
intelligible on the basis of very different principles, those of historical materialism,
for which the class struggle becomes determinant in understandirig so-calfed eco-
nomic phenomena.
There are many other examples in Marx that show that his theory of class
struggle differs utterly from bourgeois theory and that his theory of ideology and of
the state was equally disturbing. In any case, the displacement towards class
positions in theory, the revolution in the object (that becomes something completely
different of which not only the limits but the very nature and identity have changed)
and the practical-revolutionary consequences can all be set in relation. It is certain
that this overturning of the traditional protocol of knowledge has not made the tasks
of Marxs readers any easier. But what they have not failed to notice is the
theoretical and scientific fecundity of a conflictual science.
But what of Freud in all of this? It will be found that Freudian theory, in a
somewhat different way and on another level, is in a similar situation by virtue of its
conjlictuality .
By constructing his theory of the unconscious, Freud in effect touched an
extraordinarily sensitive point in moral, psychological, and philosophical theory,
calling into question through the discovery of the unconscious, a certaip natural,
spontaneous idea of man as subject. The unity of which is assured or crowned
by consciousness.
For it may also be seen that this bourgeois ideology can only with great difficulty
renounce this key conception without also renouncing its very function. It (or its
functionaries, as Marx would say) resists, criticizes, attacks, and finally invades
Freudian theory, revising it from within after having attacked it from without. We
will here recognize the dialectic that we have already analyzed. It is the dialectic on
which the necessarily conflictual character of Freudian theory is based.
But, it will be asked, what is the common denominator that allows us to relate the
hostility of the bourgeois theory of man in the face of the theory of the uncon-
scious to the hostility of bourgeois ideology towards the theory of class struggle?
Isnt what is necessarily the case for Marx only accidental for Freud? How can we
compare what emerges from the class struggle of a society to the defense mech-
anism of the ideology of man?
In fact, the comparison is not as arbitrary as it seems. The ideology of man as a
subject whose unity is assured and crowned by consciousness is not just any
fragmentary ideology; it is quite simply the philosophical form of the bourgeois
ideology that has dominated history for five centuries and that, even if it no longer
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24 Althusser
has the vigor it once had, still reigns in large sections of idealist philosophy and
constitutes the implicit philosophy of psychology, morality, and political economy.
It is not useful here to recall that the great idealist tradition of bourgeois philosophy
was a philosophy of consciousness, whether empirical or transcendental, for every-
one knows this, even if this philosophy is now giving way to neopositivism. It is
more important to recall that this philosophy of the conscious subject constituted the
implicit philosophy of the theory of classical Political Economy and that its eco-
nomic version, which Marx criticized by rejecting any notion of homo economi-
cus (according to which man is defined as a subject conscious of its needs) and
this subject-of-need, is the ultimate and constitutive element of any society. Ac-
cordingly, in man as subject of his needs can be found not only the final
explanation of society, but also, and this is crucial, the explanation of man as
subject, that is, as a unity identical to itself and identifiable through itself, in
particular, by the through itself that is self-consciousness par excellence. The
Golden Rule of materialism: never judge a being by its consciousness of itself! For
every being is other than the consciousness it has of itself. But it is perhaps even
more important to point out that this philosophical category of the subject conscious
of itself is naturally incarnate in the bourgeois conception of morality and psycholo-
gy. It will be understood that a subject conscious of itself, responsible for its acts,
may be obliged to obey norms in good conscience, a method more economical
than imposing them on the subject by force. And it will be understood according to
the simple definition of the moral subject (the subject-of-its-actions) that this subject
is merely the necessary complement of the legal subject (subject-de-droit) which
must be a subject and be conscious in order to have an identity and to be accountable
to laws (ignorance of which is no excuse), a subject who must be conscious of the
laws that constrain it (Kant) but which it is not obliged to obey in good con-
science. We may surmise that the famous psychology of subject that was and
remains the object of a science, psychology, is not a natural, brute given but a
strange problematically mixed nature revealed finally in the philosophical destiny of
all the subjects that comprise it: the legal subject, the subject of needs, the moral (or
religious) subject, the political subject, and so on.
It would be easy if we had the time to show the ideological conspiracy that takes
shape under the domination of bourgeois ideology around the notion of the subject
conscious of itsev, a reality terribly problematic for a possible or impossible
human science, but nevertheless a reality terribly necessary to the structure of class
society. In the category of the self-conscious subject, bourgeois ideology represents
to individuals what they must be in order for them to accept their own submission to
bourgeois ideology; it represents them as endowed with the unity and consciousness
(which is this unity itsel0 that they must have in order to unzfy their different
practices and actions under the unity of the dominant ideology.
I have intentionally insisted on the category of the inseparable unity of any
consciousness. It is not by chance that the entire bourgeois philosophical tradition
presents consciousness as the very faculty of unification, the faculty of synthesis,
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Murx und Freud 25
whether in the framework of the empiricism of a Locke or a Hume, or in the
framework of the transcendental philosophy that found its expression in Kant after
lying dormant in his precursors. To say that consciousness is a synthesis means that
it is the realization in the subject of the unity of the diversity of its sense data (from
perception to knowledge), the unity of its moral acts, the unity of its religious
aspirations, the unity of its political practices. Consciousness thus appears as the
function, delegated to the individual by human nature, of the unification of his
practices whether they are cognitive, moral, or political. Let us translate this
abstract language: consciousness is necessary for the individual who is endowed
with it to realize within himself the unity required by bourgeois ideology, SO that
every subject will conform to its own ideological and political requirement, that of
unity, in brief, so that the conjlictual violetice of the class struggle will be lived by
its agents as a superior and spiritual form of unity. I emphasize this unity,
otherwise known as the identity of consciousness, and the function of unity because
it was this unity that Marxs critique called most forcefully into question when Marx
dismantled the illusory unity of bourgeois ideology and the fantasy of unity that it
produced in consciousness as the effect it needed in order to function. I emphasize
this unity because, through an encounter fraught with meaning, it is that on which
the Freudian critique of consciousness is concentrated.
In fact, if we understand Marx, there is nothing mysterious about this sensitive
point in the classical philosophical tradition and in the theoretical formations of
bourgeois ideology, like psychology, sociology, and political economy, or in the
practical formations such as morality or religion that Freud attacked. It is enough to
understand that the different subjects-conscious-of are unifiers of the social
identity of one individual insofar as they are unified as so many exan les of an
ideology of man, a being naturally endowed with consciousness , to grasp the
profound unity of this ideology and its theoretical and practical formations. We
need only understand this profound unity to grasp the reasons behind the depth of
the resistance to Freud. For in discovering the unconscious, a reality whose
existence he did not forsee (a fact that confirms his political innocence which itself
concealed a great ideological sensitivity), Freud did not touch just any sensitive
point in the existing philosophical, moral, and psychological ideology; the ideas
that he upset were not there by chance, one fact of the development of human
knowledge or illusion; thus, he did not touch merely a sensitive but secondary,
localized point. Without knowing it at first (but he found out very quickly), he had
touched the most theoretically sensitive point in the entire system of bourgeois
ideology. The paradox is that Freud, apart from some schematic and questionable
efforts (Totem arid Taboo, Civilization and its Discontents, etc. ) never really
attempted to grasp and think as a whole this bourgeois ideology that he had struck in
its most sensitive point. Let us go even further: he was not in any condition to do
this for to do so he would have to have been Marx. But he was not Marx: he had an
entirely different object. It was enough that he revealed to a stupefied world that this
other object existed for the consequences to make themselves felt and to provoke the
Ip
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26 Althusser
unleashing of an uninterrupted series of attacks against him by all those who for one
reason or another, but all united by the conviction of the dominant ideblogy, sought
to silence him. The words of Freud as he drew near to the United States are well
known: They dont realize that we are bringing them the plague. They remind us
of Marx speaking of Capital as a weapon aimed at the head of the bourgeoisie.
These are the words of men who not onl y know what they are fighting but who also
know that they bring to the world sciences that can only exist in and through
struggle since the adversary cannot tolerate their existence: conflictual sciences
without any possibility of compromise.
We must not remain at the level of these generalities, no matter how correct they
are, for this simple reason: Freuds object is not Mau,rs object. There is in fact in
Freud something completely singular that renders a comparison at once meaningless
and important.
Freuds object is not Marxs object. Marx attempted to define a social formation,
recognizing the determining role of the class struggle within i t, on the basis of
which he built his entire theory of the relation between the forces of production and
relations of production as well as his theory of the superstructure (law and state,
ideologies). The prior theoretical condition that governs this theory in which
relations (of production, between classes. etc.) are determinant. a theory that
presupposes the idea of a causality through relations and not by elements. is the
rejection of the theoretical presupposition of classical Political Economy or idealist
theories of history, the knowledge of the individuals who are the subjects (ongoing
and final causes) of any economic or historical process. For this reason Marx was
careful to specify at a number of points in Capital that individuals must be
considered as supports (Triiger) of functions, these functions being themselves
determined and fixed by the relntions of the (economic, political, and ideological)
class struggle that move the whole social structure even when it is merely repro-
duced. In the introduction to the Contribution to the Critique qf Politicd Economy,
Marx says it is necessary to begin not with the concrete but with the abstract. This
theory of the primacy of relations over elements (termes), the theory of individuals
(capitalist or proletarian) as supports of functions verifies the thesis of the Introduc-
tion. Marx never lost sight of concrete individuals but held that they were concrete
insofar as they were the synthesis of many determinations. Capitol remains today
one of the most important studies of these multiple determinations and it never
proposes a means of reconstituting concrete individuals through a synthesis of
multiple determinations, considering them only provisionally, as supports in order
to discover the laws of the capitalist society in which concrete individuals exist,
live, and struggle. I n any case, there is enough in Capital as well as in Marxs
historical texts for us to know that Marx could not go beyond a theory of social
individuality or the historical forms of individuality. There is nothing in Marx that
anticipates Freuds discovery: there is nothing in Marx that could provide the
foundations of a theory of the psychic.
But in his unfortunate attempts at generalization, Freud never ceased to repeut
under questionable conditions what he had discovered elsewhere. For what he had
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Murx and Freud 27
discovered had no bearing on society or social relations but only on the very
particular phenomena that affeited individuals. Although it can be maintained that
there is a transindividual element in the unconscious, it is in the individual alone
that the effects of the unconscious are manifested and it is on the individual that the
cure operates, even if it requires the presence of another individual (the analyst) to
transform the existing unconscious effects. This difference is sufficient to distin-
guish Freud from Marx.
It remains that what Freud discovered occurs in the individual. And it is here that
we encounter an unexpected form of conflictuality and with i t, a new difference
between Freud and Marx, and at the same time a principle that enters in part into
the effect of subjection exercised by ideology on subjects. It seems that the mas-
sive refusal of psychoanalysis by the philosophers (or the revision to which they
submit it for having destroyed their pretensions), including Marxist materialists
who too often take refuge in an ontological conception of the Leninist thesis
of consciousness-reflection, by doctors, psychologists, and others is not only
the result of a mass ideological antagonism, although at the level of the masses
this antagonism is inevitable. It seems that we must add another specific de-
termination to this antagonism to explain its allure: the fact that it is sup-
ported by a characteristic of the unconscious object itself. This supplementary
element pertains to the nature of the unconscious, which is repression. If it
is thus, it is not too much to say that individuals do not resist the idea of the un-
conscious for exclusively ideological reasons but also because they themselves
have an unconscious that automatically represses, in the form of a repetition com-
pulsion (Wiederholungszwang), the idea of the existence of the unconscious. Every
individual thus spontaneously develops a defensive reflex in the &ice of the
unconscious, a reflex that is part of his own unconscious, a repression of the
possibility of the unconscious that coincides with the unconscious itself. Every
individual? This is not absolutely certain: it has not been established that the de-
fenses are always so active, experience showing on the contrary that there exist
subjects in whom this resistance is sufficiently overcome (as a result of the dis-
position of their internal conflicts) to permit them to recognize the reality of the
unconscious without this recognition provoking radical defensive or avoidance
reactions.
This road, like others, leads us into Freuds discovery. What did Freud discover?
I am not to be expected to provide a general account of Freudian theory but only
some remarks that will situate it theoretically.
It would be wrong to believe that Freud proposed the idea of a psychology
without consciousness, in the manner of the behaviorists whose efforts he ridiculed.
On the contrary, he accorded the fundamental fact of consciousness its place in
the psychic apparatus; he attributed to it a special system (perception-
consciousness) at the limits of the external world and a privileged role in the cure.
Further, he affirmed that the unconscious is only possible in a conscious being.
When it came to the ideological primacy of consciousness, Freud was ruthless: We
must learn to free ourselves from the importance attributed to the symptom of being
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28 Althusser
conscious , Why? Because consciousness is incapable by itself of furnishing a
distinction between systems.
Freud in effect did not simply discover the existence of the unconscious; he
rejected the notion of the psychic as a structured unig centered on consciousness:
instead he conceived it as an apparatus composed of different systems irreduc-
ible to a single principle. In the first topic (spatial figuration), the apparatus includes
the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious with the additional instance of
a censor that represses representations of drives in the unconscious unacceptable
to the preconscious and the conscious. I n the second topic, this apparatus includes
the id, the ego, and the superego, repression being carried out by a part of the ego
and the superego.
This apparatus is not a centered unity but a complex of instances constituted by
the play of unconscious repression. The splitting of the subject, the decentering of
the psychic apparatus i n relation to consciousness and to the ego. is accompanied by
a revolutionary theory of the ego; the ego, no longer considered the seat of
consciousness, becomes itself to a great extent unconscious. I t is for this reason that
consciousness is blind to the difference between systems for it is only one system
among others, the ensemble of which is governed by the confictual dynamic of
repression.
At this point, if from a distance, we cannot help but think of the revolution
introduced by Marx when he renounced the ideological bourgeois myth that thought
the nature of society as a unified and centered whole and began to think any social
formation as a system of instances without a center. Freud, who did not know
Marx, thought his object (which had nothing in common with that of Marx) in the
spatial figure of a topic (we are reminded of the 1859 Preface to the Contribution)
and a topic without u center. the diverse instances of which have no other unity than
the unity of their conflictual functioning in what Freud called the psychic appara-
tus, a term (apparatus) that cannot but make us think, if discretely, of Marx.
I mention these theoretical affinities between Marx and Freud to show at what
point the overturning of the traditional forms of thought and the introduction of
revolutionary forms of thought (topic, apparatus, conflictual instances without any
center, possessing only the unig of their conflictual functioning, the necessary
illusion of the identity of the ego, etc.) can either signal the presence of a
disconcerting object or run up against the ideology that prohibits it and the repres-
sion that it awakens. From this we can attempt negatively to define the Freudian
unconscious.
The Freudian unconscious is psychic., a fact that prohibits any identification of it
with the nonpsychic, as every mechanistic materialist current would have the
tendency to do, or to an effect derived from the nonpsychic. The Freudian uncon-
scious is thus neither a material reality (the body, the brain, the biological or
psychobiological) nor a social reality (the social relations defined by Marx as
determining individuals independently of their consciousness), different from
consciousness and thus even from the psychic, but producing or determining
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Marx and Freud 29
consciousness without its knowing i t. It is not that Freud ever denied the existence
of a relation between, on one hand, the unconscious and, on the other, the
biological and the social. All psychic life is supported by the biological by means
of the drives (Trieben) that Freud conceived as representative, sent by the somatic
into the psychic. Through the concept of representarion Freud registered his
objective recognition of the biological anchorage of the drive (which is always
finally sexual) while at the same time liberating the drive of unconscious desire
from any essential determination by the biological; the drive is a concept that marks
the limit between the somatic and the psychic. And this concept that is at the limit is
at the same time the concept of this limit, that is, of the difference between the
somatic and the psychic. It is not that Freud ever denied the existence of a relation
between the system of the instances of the ego and objective or social reality, traces
of which may be found not only in the reality principle. but also in the perception-
consciousness system and in the superego. But in his insistence on speaking of the
external surface of the psychic apparatus, Freud is once again thinking a limit: by
basing this apparatus on the external, social world, he designates a difference
internal to reality that is thus recognized and identified.
There is no doubt that for Freud the phenomena produced by the psychic
apparatus, and above all the effects of the unconscious, do not constitute the true
reality but rather a reality sui generis. Must unconscious desires be granted a
reality? It is difficult to say . . . When one is faced with unconscious desires un-
derstood in their ultimate truth, one is forced to say that psychic reality is a
particular form of existence that is not to be confused with material reality (Freud
1900, 620). Or again: the experience of objective material reality carries no weight
for unconscious processes; the reality of thought is equivalent to the reality of the
external world, desire is equivalent to action. We must never convert the value of
reality into repressed psychic formations . . . One must always pay with the
currency of the country that one is exploring (ibid).
If it designates this reality sui generis, unique in its kind, the Freudian uncon-
scious obviously has nothing in common with the unconscious of the philosophical
tradition: Platonic forgetting, the Leibnizian indiscernable, and even the dos of
Hegelian self-consciousness. For in these cases the unconscious is always an
accident or a modality of consciousness-the consciousness of the true recovered
through a forgetting of the body, but subsisting in itself in this forgottenness (Plato);
the infinitesimal of a consciousness too small to be perceived (Leibniz); or
consciousness in itself in the in-itself, the for-itself of self-consciousness, before
being discovered in the new for-itself of self-consciousness (Hegel)-for the truth
of its unconscious forms grasps the unconscious as misrecognized (mkconnue)
consciousness. The destiny of philosophy is to lift this misunderstanding, so that
the truth may be unveiled. To take things in this symptomatically oblique and
limited way, it may be said that for Freud, consciousness is never the truth of its
unconscious forms, because the relationship of consciousness to unconscious forms
is not a relation of property (its forms), which can be put another way: conscious-
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30 Althusser
ness is not the subject of the unconscious, a thesis that can be verified in the cure
where it is not a question of consciousness reappropriating itself, or ils truth in the
form of its unconscious, but rather of contributing to a recasting of the apparatus
(dispositf) of fantasies in an unconscious submitted to the work (Durcharbeit) of
analysis.
And I would like to end by insisting on one final point. The Freudian uncon-
scious is not the nonconscious (psychic) structure that psychology would re-
constitute out of typical individual behaviors as their so-called unconscious
preproduction. We have seen in France an interpretation of this nature from
Merleau-Ponty who read Freud in the light of Husserls philosophy of the
concrete transcendental. Merleau-Ponty tended to think this structure of behavior
as an antepredicative a priori, determining the meaning and form of behaviors in the
interiority of their thetic consciousness. On the basis of this synthesis or ante-
predicative structure, he sought a means of rejoining the Freudian unconscious.
Theories of the same type can be developed without explicit recourse to Husserl,
passing through behaviorism or, in the more subtle manner of Pierre J anet, even
based ori the foundation of the materialist genesis of the stereotypes of the
structure of behavior.
I believe that from the Freudian view two criticisms can be directed at this
attempt. The first is that this theory of the unconscious as structure (montage) of
behaviors does not question what we have seen to be at the heart of psychological
ideology: the notion of the unity of the subject considered as the subject of its
behavior and its actions (from which we can draw the conclusion that consciousness
is not necessary to the principle of unity). The second is that this attempt does not
change terrain in relation to that of psychology: it simply expands the structure of
behavior whether conscious or not by means of a form of reality that it calls the
unconscious. It matters little whether this expansion is transcendental or empirical
(and genetic) for it resembles the nonconscious of which we have spoken rather than
the Freudian unconscious. We must not be mistaken about the unconscious. As
Freud said: One must pay with the currency of the country that one is exploring
and no other.
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