ALTHUSSER A Critical Reader EDITED BY GREGORY ELLIOTT B BLACKWELL Oxford UK & Cambridge USA Copyright © Preface, arrangement and editorial matter, Gregory Elliott, 1994; individual chapters copyright © individual contributors, 1994, unless otherwise stated in the acknowledgements. First published 1994 First published in USA 1994 Blackwell Publishers 108 Cowley Road Oxford OX4 lJF UK 238 Main Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Althusser: A Critical Reader / Gregory Elliott, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-631-18806-1 (alk. paper) - ISBN 0-631-18807-X (alk. paper) 1. Althusser, Louis. 2. Philosophy, French - 20th century. 3. Marxist criticism. I. Elliott, Gregory. B2430.A474A65 1994 194-dc20 93-38739 CIP Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain by T. J. Press, Padstow, Cornwall This book is printed on acid-free paper CONTENTS Preface vii Gregory Elliott Acknowledgements xvii The Structure of Capital 1 E. ]. Hobsbawm Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser 10 Pierre Vilar Althusser's Theory of Ideology 44 Paul Ricoeur History and Interaction: On the Structuralist Interpretation of Historical Materialism 73 Axel Honneth Althusser, Structuralism and the French Epistemological Tradition 104 v Peter Dews Thinking with Borrowed Concepts: Althusser and Lacan 142 David Macey Message in a Bottle: Althusser in Literary Studies 159 Francis Mulhern Analysis Terminated, Analysis Interminable: The Case of Louis Althusser 177 / Gregory Elliott Bibliography of the Published Writings of Louis Althusser 203 ) PREFACE Towards the end of his Cool Memories, Jean Baudrillard scornfully reflects as follows: Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy­ going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philo­ sophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopol­ itan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age.. .. A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history.1 Were it necessary to identify the thinker who best symbolizes the 'Marxo- Freudian age', a strong contender -would surely be the Communist philos­ opher, Louis Althusser, whose 'ideology' (to borrow Baudrillard's casual obscenity) pertains to the coitum historicum between the French intelli­ gentsia and Marxism after the Liberation. That Althusser was the accursed child of more than one history is by now well-known; the posthumous publication of his 'autobiography', L'avenir dure longtemps, affords sufficient, if deceptive, testimony. Yet he not only figures among the intellectual progeny of a dramatic French history, punctuated not by the tribulations of le franc fort and Euro- Disney, but by fascist leagues and Popular Front; by defeat and occupation, collaboration and resistance; by 'savage wars of peace' abroad (Vietnam, Algeria) and undeclared civil war at home (the overthrow of the Fourth Republic and installation of the Fifth, the 'Generals' putsch' and the OAS, May '68 and March '78). He was not only a contemporary of Les Temps Modernes and Tel Quel, of existentialism and (post-)structuralism, of le VIII PREFACE nouveau roman and la nouvelle vague. He was a progenitor of intellectual developments - one of which, by an unintended consequence of Althusserian action, was his own eventual effacement from the scene. Althusser was an agent, as well as a reagent (and victim). In elaborating a version of Marx­ ism which Francis Mulhern has aptly described as 'a critical classicism',2 he occupies a crucial - and ineradicable - position in modern French intellectual culture. To begin with, his endeavour to salvage historical materialism as an explanatory science, both from its ossification under Stalinist auspices and its demotion or denigration at Western-Marxist hands, renders him a central figure in the anti-existentialist and anti-phenomenological turn in French philosophy in the 1960s. Just as, after reading Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, Engels and his contemporaries 'all became at once Feuerbachians', so, upon the appearance of Four Marx and Lire le Capital, a cohort of young French intellectuals turned Althusserian: where Sartre had been, Althusser would be. Or rather - and more accurately in one crucial respect - where Sartre had not been, Althusser would be: in the French Communist Party. Refusing the available models of the independ­ ent intellectual - Sartre - and the compliant ideologue - Garaudy - Althusser took advantage of the Khrushchevite thaw in the international Communist movement to propound his critique and reconstruction of actually existing Marxism from within its ranks. He articulated Marxist philosophy and Communist politics in a manner that stilled, if it did not altogether dispel, the doubts of a generation instructed by the counter-examples of Zhdanovism and Lysenkoism. As his comrade and collaborator, Etienne Balibar, remarked at his funeral: To be at once totally a philosopher and totally a Communist, without sac­ rificing, subordinating, or subjecting the one to the other: such is the intel­ lectual singularity of Althusser, such was his wager and the risk he took. ... Because Althusser won that wager, Marxism ... and Communism are inscribed in the history of French philosophy in the second half of the twen­ tieth century. And no-one can dislodge them without leaving a gaping hole.3 There is, however, a further - profoundly paradoxical - reason for Althusser's salience in post-war French intellectual history: namely, the unwitting pilot role he played in the widespread transfer of Parisian alle­ giances from versions of Marxism to varieties of 'post-Marxism'. Expel­ ling homo dialecticus and the Hegelian heritage, renouncing autarky and restoring dialogue with non- (or even anti-) Marxisttraditions, assimilating 'Nietzscheo-Heideggerian', as well as Spinozist-Bachelardian, motifs, the Althusserian 'renovation' of historical materialism intersected with broader currents in Gallic philosophical culture, associated with the names of Claude Levi-Strauss or Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault or Jacques Derrida, and PREFACE IX assembled under the flag of convenience, 'theoretical anti-humanism', by those who spoke in verba magistrif" Source and component part of la pensee 68, 'structural Marxism' may be seen in retrospect as a transitional theoretical problematic - a vulnerable compromise-formation, in effect, between the Marxist legacy and non-Marxist modes, whose (auto-) decon- struction signalled the eclipse of one ascendant star of the 'Nietzschean, Freudo-Marxist age'. Whether or not the contemporary disenchantment with historical mater­ ialism is justified, is a question beyond the remit of this Preface and Critical Reader (although it is touched upon in Francis Mulhern's essay). It could be that its agents (and patients) find themselves in the unenviable condition diagnosed by Sartre in Words: 'Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchant­ ment for truth.' However that may be, an appreciation of what one of its best an'alysts has dubbed 'the rise and fall of structural Marxism'5 is in­ dispensable to an understanding of the renaissance and obsolescence alike of historical materialism in recent decades, not only in France but in the Anglophone world. Without pretending to exhaustivity, Althusser: A Critical Reader aims to contribute to that task. A few words about the principles guiding its compilation are in order. First, although it will be for the Critical Reader on Critical Readers doubt­ less in the offing to judge, I have (I hope) taken the publisher's rubric literally: what follows is a critical anthology, composed in the belief that critique is a more genuine form of intellectual commemoration than apologia. Accordingly, it comes neither to praise, nor to bury, Althusser. Hence - with the possible exception of my own - each of the articles pub­ lished here refutes (which is not to say merely repudiates) quintessential Althusserian propositions. Second, rather than reprinting and commis­ sioning a host of shorter pieces, I have opted for a combination of the terse and synoptic, on the one hand, with the detailed and discursive, on the other: quantitative quality, as it were. Third, I have given preference to authors who treat Althusser's texts in various of their contexts, locating them, sub specie temporis, in one or more of the wider histories and cultures to which they belong. Fourth, I have selected contributions to the debate which are either less readily accessible, or less familiar, than other items in the secondary literature.6 Fifth, whilst it is a matter for regret that the budget allowed me did not permit of more than a single translation,71 have tried to provide some indication of the continental reaction, Marxist and non-Marxist, to Althusser, by giving over virtually half of the volume to material which has for the most part been neglected by Anglophone commentators. Inevitably partial and ultimately arbitrary in its selections, in addition to any sins of commission for which it is culpable, the Reader must confess at least one of omission: the highly regrettable absence of any feminist X PREFACE contribution. This was not for want of solicitation. However, of those approached to offer a feminist balance-sheet of the Althusserian moment, none, for a variety of reasons, found herself both willing and able to accept the commission. Consequently, apart from passing references by David Macey and Francis Mulhern, the volume is bereft of any reflection on a key dimension of the Althusserian impact upon intellectual work, and I can only refer the reader elsewhere.8 Each of the ensuing texts speaks more than adequately for itself; and I do not propose to paraphrase their content. It may, however, be helpful briefly to situate them, indicate their focus, and note any editorial interventions. The Reader opens with E. J. Hobsbawm's review of Four Marx and Lire le Capital, originally published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1966 and then reprinted in Revolutionaries (1973). Hobsbawm - an almost exact contemporary of Althusser's - should need no introduction to prospective readers; he is quite simply one of the foremost Marxist historians of the twentieth century. In the space of a mere five thousand words, he brings his immense, cosmopolitan erudition, and more than three decades' experi­ ence (at time of writing) of European Communism, to bear upon the advent of Althusserian Marxism in Thorez' Parti Communiste Fran9ais and de Gaulle's France. Better than any comparable essay in English, Hobsbawm both contextualizes Althusser's initiative and tactfully sketches the main lines of much subsequent criticism of it. In order to preserve the flavour of the original, I have retained Professor Hobsbawm's own translations of Althusser's French and his citations from the first edition of Lire le Capital. Seven years after Hobsbawm introduced the name of Althusser across the Channel, Althusserianism was in full florescence not only in Britain and Western Europe generally, but in Latin America, eliciting eulogy and obloquy in equal measure. As Hobsbawm had foreseen, and as E. P. Thompson's broadside of 1978, The Poverty of Theory, would demon­ strate, Marxist historians were especially sceptical of, or inimical to, what Althusser himself described as 'the very summary (and therefore unilateral) character of the few paragraphs devoted to "history" in the polemical con­ text of Reading Capital'.9 The second text printed here revolves around the blanket Althusserian condemnation of 'empiricism' and 'historicism' in the practice of mainstream and Marxist historiography alike. A leading mem­ ber of the second generation of the Annales school of French historians, Pierre Vilar, who from 1962 until his retirement held the chair in social history at the Sorbonne whose previous tenants had been Marc Bloch and Ernest Labrousse, is the author of La Catalogne dans l'Espagne moderne (1962) and A History of Gold and Money (1969). His article - originally published in Annales (January/February 1973), translated in New Left Review that summer, and explicitly sub-titled 'Towards a Dialogue with PREFACE XI Althusser'10 - is remarkable for its equanimity in the face of Althusser's provocations. By turns generous in its admissions and firm in its rebuttals, Vilar's wideranging tour d'horizon has been moderately abridged by the removal of two introductory sections (pp. 65-72 of the original, dealing with Marx as historian and the status of economic theory), and the sacrifice of some explanatory notes added by the English editors. While still largely unknown outside of the French academy, Althusser had in 1955 crossed swords with Paul Ricoeur over the philosophy of history. Thirteen years later, Ricoeur would be one of his interlocutors at the stormy session of the Societe fran9aise de Philosophie at which Althusser read his celebrated lecture, 'Lenin and Philosophy'.11 A leading post-war French philosopher, for many years based at the University of Paris X (Nanterre), and then resident at Chicago University, Ricoeur is the author of a voluminous oeuvre, ranging from Freud and Philosophy (1964) to the three volumes of Time and Narrative (1983-85). He is unique among the contributors to this volume in that he is not now, and never has been, a Marxist. Au-dessus de la melee marxiste, the exponent of an innovative blend of phenomenology and hermeneutics, Ricoeur is committed, reso­ lutely against the Parisian current, to a certain humanism. These affilia­ tions are evident in his attentive probing of Althusser's account of the conjoint subjectification/subjection of social agents via the mechanisms of ideology. Ricoeur's text derives from three lectures on Althusser delivered as part of a series at Chicago in autumn 1975, and eventually published by Columbia University Press in 1986 as Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. The extract below essentially comprises the second and third lectures (pp. 124-57), specifically focused on the theory of ideology, whereas the first interrogates Althusser's postulate of an 'epistemological break' in Marx's theoretical development. In preparing them for publication, I have cut Ricoeur's resumes of previous lectures, anglicized spelling, punctuation and references, and slightly amended the page reference system. In an interview released in 1985 Jürgen Habermas remarked, with un­ wonted hauteur, that '[h]aving rejected the orthodoxy of the philosophy of history, I had no wish to lapse back either into ethical socialism, or into scientism, or indeed into both at once. This explains why I hardly read Althusser.'12 Fortunately, the same has not been true of all members of the second or third generations of the Frankfurt School. In 1971 Alfred Schmidt published a careful response to what he regarded as the 'structuralist attack on history', which was translated a decade later as History and Structure. The long text by Axel Hoiineth translated here originally appeared in German in 1977, in an anthology of writings on historical materialism edited by him in collaboration with Urs Jaeggi.13 Currently Professor of Philosophy at the Free University, Berlin, and author of The Critique ofPower (1985) and The Struggle for Recognition (forthcoming in English translation), Honneth criticizes, inter alios, Vilar (whose essay