Materialism, Realism, Naturalism: Althusser's Philosophy Reconsidered

Reading notes on a very important new book that offers us one of Althusser's most important manuscripts of the 1970s. A text that offers important insight into the evolution of Althusser's conception of a new practice of materialist philosophy, of the emergence of the materialism of the encounter and of his conception of the history of philosophy

Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Volume 46, Issue 2, June 2016, pp. 143–164, 2016

This paper undertakes an historical re-evaluation of Louis Althusser's philosophical legacy for modern Marxism. While Althusser self-consciously sought to defend the scientific character of Marxism, many of his closest followers eventually exited the Marxian paradigm for a post-structural post-Marxism. We argue that this development was predominately rooted in a series of philosophical errors that proved fatal in a period of retreat for European socialism. There has always been, however, a second post-Althusserian legacy associated with the critical realist conception of Marxism initiated by Roy Bhaskar. Bhaskar found part of his inspiration in Althusser's successful posing of the question of Marx's science and this paper sets out to excavate the proper links between Althusser and Bhaskar in order to deepen the relationship between critical realism and scientific Marxism.

The heyday of Louis Althusser’s influence stretched between the early 1960s, with the publications of For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1968), and the early 1970s. Thereafter, Althusserianism precipitously declined with the rise of poststructuralism and anti-Marxist politics, as well as trenchant critiques by fellow Marxists, from Jacques Rancie`re’s Althusser’s Lessons (1974) to E. P. Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory (1978). The former blamed Althusser’s anti-humanism for the denunciations of the student movement by the intellectual class, while the latter characterized his philosophy as ‘‘Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of Theory’’ (1978: 374). Yet, as Warren Montag notes, ‘‘the effect of the repeated efforts... to finish with Althusser once and for all is to defer the desired end and thus paradoxically keep his oeuvre alive’’ (2013: 2). After Althusser’s death and the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, there was renewed interest in his work. Such interest only grew with the steady stream of posthumous publications of Althusser’s writings and the visibility and impact of figures such as Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, and Étienne Balibar, long influenced by Althusser. This still unfolding legacy is fertile ground for critical reevaluations of Althusser’s place in the Marxist tradition.

The recent publication of Althusser’s 1972 course on Rousseau and of his important manuscript, from the second half of the 1970s, on the Initiation to Philosophy for non-philosophers, along with other texts already published from the same period, such as Machiavelli and Us, the ‘Transformation of Philosophy’ lecture and the texts on the crisis of Marxism, offers us the possibility to retrace Althusser’s confrontation with the question of a new and highly original materialist practice of philosophy as a parallel process with this attempt towards a left critique of the many shortcomings of the communist movement in a period of strategic crisis. These texts help us realize that the materialism of the encounter should not associated only with the posthumously published texts from the 1980s, but, in contrast, should be viewed as an integral part of Althusser’s theoretical and political endeavor after this beginning of his self-criticism in the second half of the 1960s. Consequently, the materialism of the encounter, the radical refusal of any teleology and the quest for a practice of philosophy that will liberate the social and political practices of the subaltern classes, the virtual forms of communism emerging the margins and interstices of capitalism, are all integral aspects of Althusser’s attempt to rethink the politics of social emancipation and communism.

Thought: A Philosophical History (Routledge), 2021

Marx’s Thesis Eleven famously declares that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it’. As such, the thesis perhaps constitutes the most concise criticism of philosophical thinking. However, its precise meaning remains uncertain, and the exclusive alternative between thinking and acting is considered a paradoxical injunction even within Marxism itself. This chapter begins with an analysis of the notion of the heteronomy of thought as it appears in The German Ideology, followed by a reconstruction of Althusser’s criticism of the naïve materialism present in this and other works of Marx. The central argument of the chapter is the claim that Althusser rearticulates the disjunction of Thesis Eleven as the difference within the domain of thought itself, in what Althusser calls ‘theoretical practice’: while ideology only reflects the real, science intervenes in it. However, Althusser’s epistemological Marxism remains locked in the Kantian understanding of the real as radically unknowable, and thus it is unclear how, if at all, science touches the real. The final part of the chapter thus opens the question of a possible return to the Hegelian concept of the real and discusses what exactly separates historical idealism from historical materialism.

Rethinking Marxism, 2014

In an argument first published in 1996, Richard Wolff set out how Marxist epistemology could be strengthened by introducing both the Althusserian concept of overdetermination and elements of the Hegelian dialectic. While this paper wholeheartedly agrees with Wolff’s work towards a reflexive Marxism, it finds his proposed reinsertion of Hegelian philosophy into Marxism problematic. This paper argues that an alternative to Hegelianism can be found in Althusser’s arguments for aleatory materialism. Highlighting the importance of ‘chance’ events, aleatory materialism contains the same epistemological reflexivity that Wolff finds in Hegel’s dialectic, yet provides a stronger supporting ontology for Marxist theory. Aleatory materialism supports Marxist epistemology by detailing arguments for historical conjunctures that contain both overdetermined contradictions and situated causality. From this perspective, it becomes possible to argue that epistemology can contain both theoretical analysis of contradictions and concrete analysis. This allows for complexity without abstraction and specificity without reductionism or essentialism.

Radical Philosophy, 1979

Décalages, 2016

The reading of Althusser that emphasize the continuity of his thought between 1960 (or even earlier) and 1987 is fast becoming the accepted one. However, within this consensus, the majority opinion is that, in his last works, Althusser denies, rejects, or simply abandons the theory of the relation he had previously specified as necessary between good scientific knowledge and effective political action (where “effective” is defined as a political action that secures and maintains a desired good). This denial of the scientistic aspect of his project has had significant deleterious political and philosophical effects. In order to combat these effects and to show that the reading of Althusser which finds a pronounced continuity in his conception of the relations among science, philosophy, and politics is the correct one, this essay will examine Althusser’s “scientism.” The meaning of this term (one that differs slightly from contemporary usages) will be specified before showing how and in what way Althusser’s political philosophy between 1960 and 198 can be described as “scientistic.” This survey will show the continuity in Althusser’s position vis-à-vis the sciences: namely, that if we want good (i.e. desired) socio-politico-economic changes to result from our political actions, then it is necessary to engage in social scientific research or, at the very least, to consult such research and to use this knowledge in our political decision making.

Studies in East European Thought, 1980

To what extent, if at all, does Louis Althusser’s innovative use of Freud’s concept of ‘overdetermination’ contribute both to the reworking of Marxist political theory, and to the development of a viable materialist analysis of the social and political world? This paper elaborates and evaluates the theoretical writings of Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe, set within a critical contextualization and appraisal of Marx, Hegel, and Freud and Lacan’s development of psychoanalytical theory. Through a subtle and detailed account of Althusser’s “deconstruction” and reworking of the materialist dialectic, this paper shows that Althusser’s objectives were both to separate Marx’s understanding of the dialectic from Hegel’s and to criticize economistic and mechanistic variants of historical materialism. Yet, paradoxically, his efforts were unsuccessful in seeking to conserve the basic assumptions and parameters of the Marxist paradigm. Nonetheless, the concept of “overdetermination” as developed in For Marx makes possible a richer and more flexible kind of materialist social and political analysis.