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April 4, 2006
Yesterday morning I went to a seminar in the Hugh Stretton Room of the Politics Department at Adelaide University by David McInerney, who runs the Interventions weblog. Entitled, 'Althusser's Underground Railroad: From Dialectical Materialism to the Non-Philosophy of the Non-State', the seminar was a speaking to, and from, this introduction to the recent Althusser edition of Borderlands that used to come out of Adelaide.
David's performance and text reconnected me to my reading Althusser in the 1980s in a novel and interesting way. He says:
...we have chosen the title Althusser & Us, both to evoke Althusser's Machiavelli and Us (1999), and to suggest that it is not just a matter of who Althusser might be today but rather of 'who' Althusser is for us, how Althusser's text 'speaks' to us.... What is distinctive about the essays included here is their sustained attention to Althusser's self-criticism of For Marx and Reading Capital (both published in 1965) and the extent to which they think with that self-criticism, together with the continuities that they identify between those early publications and Althusser's last writings. This continuity [is based on] a materialist conception of reading and literary (re)production .... each of the contributors to this issue insists on a material difference within Althusser's work, a fissure that Althusser opens up within his own thought as he engages in theoretical and political struggle.
I ws quite comfortable with that reading --"how Althusser's text 'speaks' to us" now. One can re- read Althusser's texts in the light where I am in the present struggling with the effects of neo-liberal mode of governance, the impacts of globalization and social conservativism, the rise of the national security state and the decay of liberalism after 9/11. However, I had no desire to go back and re-read strong>For Marx and Reading Capital--not after reading Schmitt and Agamben. Should I read the text on Machiavelli?
I was more interested in the late texts--those of a more open and impressionistic Althusser in terms of politics and political philosophy, which could help us make sense of the world that is forming around, and shaping, us. Thsi kind of reading prompts the question: so how does Althusser speak to us today 40 years on? What did David say?
David turns to other texts. He says that in his introduction to Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006) G.M. Goshgarian argues that:
Althusser's "Theory of theoretical practice" in For Marx and Reading Capital represents the philosophy of the state, whereas his later definition of philosophy as a theoretical struggle between idealist and materialist tendencies (which represents, "in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory" - Althusser 1984: 69) constitutes "the non-philosophy of the non-state" ..... This second definition of philosophy thus constitutes the crucial moment in Althusser's self-criticism, and it is on the basis of this transformation in his understanding of philosophy itself that Althusser proceeds to intervene within his early work to draw out and amplify those tendencies that eventually formed the basis for his 'aleatory materialism' of the 1980s.
As I listened I recalled the old phrase 'philosophy as a theoretical struggle between idealist and materialist tendencies', and I'd remembered wondering a decade or more ago what it had meant given the reductionist physicalist materialism I was surrounded by at university, Marx's deep roots in Aristotle and Hegel and the physicalist Marxists reduction of historical materialism to a materialisml based on physicalist atomism.
Then I vaguely remembered that Althusser had once said that there is no history of philosophy and I kinda lost interest in him. Hegel was more interesting in his understanding of history. Hegel stood in opposition to Althusser's view that if philosophy has a history, then it has no concept of its history no understanding of its relation to the passage of time, the "progress" of perspectives, or of the regressions and returns that make old perspectives relevant. The 'progress of perspectives' is what Hegel traced.
What came through David's seminar clearly is what is rejected by the later Althusser. It is a legislative philosophy that stands above the sciences, displaced in favour of a new practice of philosophy that is adequate to Marxist revolutionary practice ----a way of doing philosophy that is precisely a non-philosophy - or, perhaps, even an anti-philosophy. That doesn't get us very far does it? What could a non-philosophy of the non-state' mean?
How about an aleatory materialism? Or a materialism of the encounter and of contingency? That left me puzzled. What would that be like?
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Hi Gary,
I'm pleased that you found the borderlands issue engaging. I would definitely recommend reading Machiavelli and Us as a way into thinking about Althusser's later work, but also 'The Transformation of Philosophy' (from the collection Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays). I actually think that Althusser's claim that 'philosophy has no history' is one of his most interesting and worthwhile claims, and it relates stictly to the structure of philosophy. New philosophies appear, but the structure of philosophy is never transformed in the way that the sciences are transformed with the emergence of each new science. This is similar to but distinct from the claim made by Althusser that ideology has no history (the difference being that the structure of philosophy is necessarily unchanging - but can emerge and disappear - while that of ideology is eternal). Of course ideologies can come and go just like philosophies. I recommend reading Jason Read's contribution to the borderlands issue on this.
I can send some interesting stuff to you via email if you can get in contact with me. I don't think I have your email address.