Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production Edited by Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2022 by Northwestern University. Published 2022 by Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Montag, Warren, editor. | Wasser, Audrey, editor. Title: Pierre Macherey and the case of literary production / edited by Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser. Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2022011420 | ISBN 9780810145115 (paperback) | ISBN 9780810145122 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810145139 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Macherey, Pierre. | Macherey, Pierre. Pour une théorie de la production littéraire. | Literature— History and criticism— Theory, etc. | Literature— Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN45 .M3173 2022 | DDC 801.95— dc23/eng/20220308 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022011420 Contents Introduction 1 Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser Postface to A Theory of Literary Production 17 Pierre Macherey Why Read, Macherey? 29 Audrey Wasser Spoken and Unspoken 43 Ellen Rooney Baudelaire’s Shadow: On Poetic Determination 63 Nathan Brown What Is Materialist Analysis? Pierre Macherey’s Spinozist Epistemology 87 Nick Nesbitt Blackness: N’est Pas? 119 David Marriott What Do We Mean When We Speak of the Surface of a Text? Reflections on Macherey’s A Theory of Literary Production 145 Warren Montag Reading Althusser 165 Pierre Macherey Between Literature and Philosophy 179 An Interview with Pierre Macherey by Joseph Serrano Works by Pierre Macherey 203 Contributors 217 Index 219 Introduction Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser The recent publication in English translation of two of Pierre Macherey’s most important and influential works, his contribution to Reading Capital (1965, trans. 2015) and Hegel or Spinoza (1979, trans. 2011), has served to call attention to the power and originality of Macherey’s thought. A Theory of Literary Production (1966, trans. 1978; reissued 2006), however, available in translation for more than forty years, remains an unsettled text that continues to provoke disagreement about its basic positions. Far from consigning the book to a particular historical moment—s pecifically, the structuralist moment of the 1960s— its capacity to produce contradictory readings enabled it to survive this moment, and several others, as if some of its most important postulates were deferred at the outset, intelligible only under conditions that did not exist in 1966 or even in 1978. While the publi- cation of some of Macherey’s most important texts in translation is no more likely to eliminate the heterogeneous effects of A Theory of Literary Pro- duction than the appearance in 1990 of his second book on literature, The Object of Literature (under the title À quoi pense la littérature? Exercises de philosophie littéraire; trans. 1995), these texts taken together help clarify its arguments and, in doing so, distinguish the conflicts proper to it from those projected on it. Another source of the ambiguity surrounding Macherey’s first book for English- language readers is the lack of a comprehensive account of the theo- retical conjuncture in which Macherey wrote (beyond vague notions of a structuralist or structural Marxist moment). Without understanding the stakes and objectives of what Macherey conceived as an intervention, English- language critics, commentators, and those who simply applied something of what Macherey wrote systematically overlooked essential aspects of his proj- ect and misread others. In part, this may be explained by the twelve- year gap between the publication of the French original in 1966 and its English translation in 1978. The interest elicited by the appearance of Althusser’s For Marx and Reading Capital in English in 1969, and the collection of articles (including several on art and literature) published as Lenin and Phi- losophy in 1971, led readers who sought an “Althusserian” literary criticism 1 2 Warren Montag and Audrey Wasser to Macherey’s text, which was originally published in Althusser’s Théorie series. In the absence of an English translation, Terry Eagleton’s presentation of Macherey’s text in Criticism and Ideology (1976) took on an unusual importance and continued to shape the reception of Macherey’s work long after it was translated, in part because of this work’s conceptual and stylis- tic density, the difficulties of which Macherey himself later acknowledged. Eagleton’s account of Macherey is itself a revealing exercise in philosophical and theoretical translation: it captures and often enlivens some of Macherey’s most important theses (above all, those involving criticism as judgment) and, at the same time, blocks the apprehension of others (the entire constellation of theses mobilized to articulate the critique of interpretation). Fredric Jameson also played a role in shaping what was visible of Mach- erey’s work in the United States. The opening of The Political Unconscious (1981) devoted more than twenty-fi ve pages to Althusser and Macherey’s positions on interpretation, causality, and structure. Some commonalities between Jameson and Macherey’s practices of reading are certainly worth noting here— for example, the “limitations” and “strategies of containment” that Jameson identifies and juxtaposes in his reading of other critics can be compared to the attention Macherey pays to the décalage exhibited in the lit- erary work.1 In this way, both thinkers arguably take as their object of study not an “object” in the traditional sense but a difference, a dislocation, or a discrepancy. Yet on the whole, Jameson’s work represents a missed encounter with Macherey’s. Althusser and Macherey’s arguments are folded into what is broadly characterized as a Nietzschean, antihermeneutic tendency in post- structural French thought, while their specifically Spinozist commitments are largely unaddressed, as are Althusser’s arguments about the unevenness of historical time. Of Macherey in particular, Jameson says very little, preferring to assimilate Macherey’s position to Althusser’s without recognizing the dis- agreements that unfolded between the two precisely over the role of literary interpretation in working out a concept of structure. The latter is represented by Macherey’s essay “Literary Analysis: The Tomb of Structures” in part 2 of A Theory of Literary Production.2 Through these early and decontextualized readings, Macherey’s work nevertheless played an important role in changing some basic assumptions concerning both the literary text and the act of reading. It often did so, how- ever, indirectly, that is, in the form of an absent cause. While each decade after 1970 saw an increase in the number of references to Macherey, the effects of his work were significantly greater than the number of direct citations would indicate. On the one hand, the critique of normative approaches to literature, the negative consequences of which were on full display in the debates over the canon, together with his rejection of the postulate of the formal and thematic unity of the literary work, helped initiate a transformation of the very concepts of literature and the literary text. This critique allowed read- ers to look for the historicity of literary works, not in their relation to the Introduction 3 world outside of them, but internally, immanent in both their form and their content, that is, in the impossibility of the coherence and consistency of these latter— an approach that in turn necessitated a decentering and reconceptu- alization of the very idea of the author, whose role as creator and proprietor had served as one of the most important guarantees of the ultimate unity of the work. This coincided with, but was not the same as, the transformations of basic concepts of literary studies wrought by early receptions of decon- struction and “la nouvelle critique.” On the other hand, Macherey’s approach to the questions posed by lit- erature remained only partially intelligible to readers. Readers of the English translation expected, and thought Macherey had provided, a more or less finished theory of literary production, when in fact the entire first, theoreti- cal, section of the book is devoted to the more modest task of identifying and dismantling what Macherey called the illusions (rendered in English as “fal- lacies”) that had so far prevented the development of a theory of literature, or of what he would call in the course of his exposition “literary produc- tion.” The illusions he identifies all serve in different ways to deny or negate the complex reality of the literary work and the process of its production. The constitutive contradictions, conflicts, and discrepancies that every liter- ary text displays are treated as superficial or inessential, whether as a puzzle needing only to be reassembled in its proper order or as mere surface phe- nomena, functions of the work’s deep structure. In some cases, the unity of the text is restored with a reference to its origin in the mind of an author, or to the coherence of its historical moment. These approaches, despite the sig- nificant differences between them, share a conception of reading as an act of reduction. In one case, that to which texts must be reduced to be understood is internal to them, the essence to be recovered from the excrescence that surrounds it; in the other case, their meaning is contained in their external, spatiotemporal origin. Perhaps the most influential of Macherey’s analyses was his account of the normative illusion, the act of judging works accord- ing to the degree of their deviation from a norm or ideal external to them. Criticism of this type tells us what a work is not and what it lacks in relation to an ideal invented by criticism. The positivity of the work is irrelevant to judgment whose concern is to apply an aesthetic legality (whose effects are not limited to the realm of literature) to decide whether a work has obeyed or violated its letter and spirit. Macherey’s insistence on the constitutive discrepancies of the literary text is a way of underscoring the text’s irreducible materiality. And this attention to materiality necessarily extends to literary criticism itself. An analysis of the ways criticism denies the material existence of literature cannot in turn deny the material existence of the illusions that govern the practice of read- ing: to do so would mean simply inventing a new set of illusions to add to the old. Macherey’s illusions, however, are neither pathologies of a perceiv- ing subject nor insubstantial apparitions that will disappear in the light of