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Freeing Althusser from Spinoza

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Freeing Althusser from Spinoza C ABSTRACT: C R R I The concept of structural causality, associated with the work I S of Louis Althusser, was, one can say, short-lived: even its foremost S I I Freeing AlthusserS advocates seemed to drop it just about as quickly as they picked it up, S while other concepts in Althusser’s work continued to be popular. This & & paper proposes to discuss both the problems with and the merits of C C R the concept, calling particular attention to the philosophical work it R I was supposed to do, which was both critical and constructive, negative I from Spinoza: T T I and positive. Critical and negative in that it offered a way to avoid I Q both a naturalistic mechanism and a Hegelian expressivism. In other Q U U E words, it aimed to avoid both a naïve materialism and a naïve idealism. E Constructive and positive, in that it was contributing to a new picture of A Reconsidera- # # 3 the relationship between structure and what is structured, by trying to 3 give an account of the manner in which structure was present and “in the real”: and, I will add, thereby providing the groundwork for a better version of dialectical materialism. There is no doubt that Spinoza’s tion of Structural philosophy provided Althusser with the model for thinking of this form of causality. But the use of Spinoza as a model can also be identified as the source of many of the problems with the concept. An essay by Warren Montag dealing with an exchange between Althusser and Pierre Causality Macherey will serve as the basis for my discussion of Spinoza and structural causality. Keywords: Althusser, Hegel, Macherey, Montag, Spinoza, structural causality. “Thought must begin by placing itself at the standpoint of Ed Pluth Spinozism; to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all Philosophy” (Hegel 1994, p. 257) “But if Spinoza is called an atheist for the sole reason that he does not distinguish God from the world, it is a misuse of the term. Spinozism might really just as well or even better have been termed ACOSMISM… Spinoza maintains that there is no such thing as what is known as the world; it is merely a form of God, and in and for itself it is nothing. The world has no true reality, and all this that we know as the world has been cast into the abyss of the one identity. There is therefore no such thing as finite reality, it has no truth whatever” (Hegel 1994, p. 281) 336 Freeing Althusser from Spinoza: A Reconsideration of Structural Causality 337 Freeing Althusser from Spinoza: A Reconsideration of Structural Causality In so many ways, for so many reasons, Spinoza seems to be a C Spinoza, since it will lead to a different way of evaluating the relationship C R R philosopher who is preferable to Hegel – non-totalitarian, radically I between the apparent and the real. The way to get at this is through a I democratic, a seemingly communist, horizontal ontology… So why S reconsideration of structural causality. S I I try to free Althusser from Spinoza? In 1979 Pierre Macherey asked, S S intentionally messing with the chronology, “Hegel or Spinoza”? His The foremost criticisms of the concept of structural causality & & answer, of course, was “Spinoza,” and his reason for putting Spinoza target its fatal circularity. As Ted Benton argued, the concept seems C C after Hegel was to suggest that Spinoza had been capable of reading R to do either too little or too much: it cannot do much to help us to R Hegel in a certain sense, and was in fact a better reader of Hegel than I understand specific causal relations among elements of an event or a I T T Hegel had been of Spinoza. At the end of his book, he claims that I totality– and so it is essentially useless as far as political and critical I the choice for Spinoza is made, not without some reservations, in Q practice goes. And if structural causality is about the causality of Q U U the expectation that Spinoza’s work would aid in the development of E something like a totality itself, then it makes structure way too strong, E a non-Hegelian dialectic, one that would avoid, among other things, external, and transcendent – yet again making the concept theoretically # # what Macherey called the “evolutionism” of Hegel’s. I will assume this 3 uninteresting, tautological, and as far as practice goes, even debilitating 3 criticism of Hegel is familiar enough. Also, Spinoza’s work could, it was (Benton 1984, pp. 64-5). On this view, the Spinozism that inspired hoped, serve as a better basis for materialism. Yet it is fair to say that the structural causality would make the concept a bit too God-drunk. jury is still out on all this. Such objections to structural causality seem to follow a Popperian There are some obvious reasons why a Spinozistic model line of attack, and this seems to be the consensus view of its problems. is problematic for any project that wishes to continue with both What Gregory Elliot calls Althusser’s “rationalist epistemology” is materialism and dialectics. Such necessary conceptual tools as time, described by him as “untenable – condemned by an internalism which change, negation…these all have a shaky status in Spinoza’s philosophy insulated theoretical discourse from empirical evidence and severs it – or, strictly speaking, on the Hegelian interpretation of Spinoza at from its real referent” (Elliot 1987, p. 329). Since there is nothing that least, they have no status at all. Then there is the theism. This is why could count as a refutation of the theory of structural causality, this Hegel called Spinoza’s philosophy an ACOSMISM. The God-drunk account goes, the concept cannot really be considered to do all that philosopher was certainly no atheist: what he did deny, Hegel argued, much. What is philosophical and rationalist about it, which Elliot calls was the reality of the world itself. By denying the reality of time, the its “internalism,” dooms it to the status of a pseudo-science. reality of human experience itself is called into question. Thus, “the For a similar conclusion in slightly different terms, we can also world,” such as we know it and experience it, it can be fairly argued, turn to Jacques Rancière, who, in an interview about the Cahiers project, does not exist, Spinoza’s philosophy must hold. Macherey does not ever was asked by Peter Hallward: really address this aspect of Hegel’s criticism. Perhaps that is because And this idea of structural causality, central to analysis of the the denunciation of the apparent world in Spinoza actually goes ‘action of the structure’ (to use the Cahiers’ phrase)…could it have, in quite well with the Althusserian critique of ideology and its embrace principle, served as mediation between theory and practice, once all of science as a radical break with the empirical. Isn’t something like reference to consciousness, to the subject, to militant will, etc. was Spinoza’s acosmism entirely appropriate as a model for a wide range of removed? And this way, through the analysis of causality, it would contemporary approaches to human experience, from psychoanalysis be possible not only to study history but to understand how to make to Marxism, all of which are suspicious of what is merely apparent and history. (Rancière 2012, p. 269) seemingly obvious? To which Rancière replied: My reconsideration of the question “Hegel or Spinoza” here is Yes, certainly, it allowed for a kind of double attitude. First one in large part driven by concerns about acosmism. Freeing Althusser could say, here we are presenting theory, as far as can be from any from Spinoza, I am arguing, means freeing Althusser from Spinozistic thought of engagement, of lived experience; this theory refutes false “acosmism”. And this, I believe, brings his work closer to Hegel than to ideas, idealist ideas about the relation between theory and practice. But 338 Freeing Althusser from Spinoza: A Reconsideration of Structural Causality 339 Freeing Althusser from Spinoza: A Reconsideration of Structural Causality one could also hope that theoretical practice itself might open up other C model, time, space, or structure to which it is applied – such as, most C R R fields for new ways of thinking about political practice… In fact it didn’t I notably, the capitalist mode of production, its origins, its conditions, its I open any such fields. (p. 269) S future. A theory of structural causality on its own will not tell us much S I I And although Rancière does not in this interview go into specific S about the particulars of the social movements, transformations, etc. S reasons for why the concept did not open up ways for thinking about that are associated with that mode of production’s appearance. Yet, & & the links between theory and practice, one can easily imagine that the philosophically speaking, the concept continues to do much more than it C C circularity problem would be a major one. R seems at first blush. R But it is Jean-Claude Milner, interviewed by Knox Peden in the I I T T same volume, who refers explicitly to what he thinks was the lamentable I It seems that no discussion of structural causality can get started I absence of Popper for those working in France during this period. Now Q without turning to how Althusser himself developed it as an alternative Q U U that Popper’s line of questioning is better known in France, Milner E to other views of causality, called mechanism and expressivism.
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