sign in sign up
<<
Home , Louis Althusser

Wrltlnp on : Freud and Lacan , edited by Olivier Corpet and Fran~oisMatheron translated by Jeffrey Mehlman New York: Columbia University Press, 1996

Reviewed by Martin Jenkins

If Spinoza was the philosophical detour which led Althusser to the distinctive Marxist of Reading and , Lacan was also a vital and often ambiguous presence on the horizon of Althusser's thought. This collection of Althusser's writings, elegantly translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, brings together a number of texts on Freud and Lacan that demonstrate Althusser's constant attempt to force an encounter between psychoanalysis and . Drawing on the Stock/IMEC volume! published in 1993, these texts show us Althusser concerned with psychoanalysis as a vital to his project of a reconstruction of Marxism, and also provides us with a glimpse of Althusser the analysand and as protagonist in the involuted institutional that always surrounded Lacan. The main texts are the well-known essay 'Freud and Lacan', and 'The Discovery of Doctor Freud'. The latter text was at the centre of the ' Affair'; an earlier draft (included in this book) was revised for an International Symposium on the Unconscious held at Tbilisi in 1979. Althusser did not himself attend the Symposium but the paper was published with several paragraphs missing; the paragraphs were those in which Althusser praised Freud as in some respects a superior practitioner of than Marx. The earlier draft was subsequently printed in 1984 without Althusser's permission. The resulting furore led some to hint darkly at Soviet censorship and lack of respect for intellectual property rights; others held that it was a simple confusion based on two similarly titled texts. Mehlman's resume of the 'Affair' allows no simple conclusion. Also included are Althusser's letters to his analyst Rene Diatkine which were written in 1966, two years after 'Freud and Lacan'. The letters combine theoretical ruminations with Althusser's attempt to browbeat Diatkine into a recognition of Lacan'simportance ('... outside of Lacan, there is at present no one.' p. 49). Most interesting are Althusser's speculations on and the unconscious that foreshadow the major essay 'Ideology and Ideological Apparatuses' of 1969. Of less theoretical interest are Althusser's letters to Lacan, though they shed some biographical light. Althusser identifies with Lacan as a tragic outsider like himself, 'howling their loneliness' (p. 160), despairing of ever being heard. As befits the Father,Lacan's

1 Loui~ A1thusser, Eerits sur la Psyehanalyse, Stock/IMEC, 1993; revised edition, Le Livre de Poche, 1996. The edition reviewed here omits a short piece on transference and counter-transference and an interesting sketch of 'theories of discourse' of some 60-odd pages. The latter text's omission is to be regretted. 'enkIns' A1th••••• r replies are of a perfunctory terseness. Finally there are two interventions that A1thusser made at the time of Lacan's dissolution of his Ecole Freudienne in 1980. In 'An Open Letter' and 'Some Complementary Remarks' A1thusser explains his bizarre appearance at a meeting called to ratify the dissolution; Lacan is characterised as an 'unfortunate and pitiful Harlequin' (p. 127) whom A1thusser denounces in the name of the Holy Ghost (the libido). The sorry picture of two great thinkers, one senile, the hypermanic, is both chastening and moving. What then do these texts tell us of A1thusser's interest in psychoanalysis? The most basic concern is with a parallel between Marxism and psychoanalysis; such an affinity is at a high level of generality but is illuminating none the less. This affinity is two-fold: both are dialectical and materialist. 'If the minimal thesis defining is the existence of reality outside thought or consciousness, Freud is indeed a materialist, since he rejects the primacy of consciousness not only within knowledge but within consciousness itself ...' (p. 107). On the question of A1thusser claims that Freud· ... explored figures of dialectic very close to those of Marx but at times richer than them.' (p. 108). This richness lay in the distance from Hegel's notion of dialectic. While Marx was too close to Hegel, Freud 'shattered' the all too Hegelian category of contradiction. A1thusser claims that Freud's use of the concept of overdetermination •... had the advantage of bringing into relief what separated Marx and Lenin from Hegel, for whom contradiction, precisely, is not overdetermined.' (p. 108) A1thusser stresses that Marxism and psychoanalysis are both necessarily conflictual, not only by reason of their but in their very constitution: 'The conflictuality of Marxism is constitutive of its scientificity, its objectivity.' (p. 110) Such 'conflictuality' is inevitable because both Marx and Freud made a radical break with bourgeois ideology in the founding of their sciences. In A1thusser's lapidary formula regarding Marx and Freud he states •... for that truth is dangerous'. (p. 108). Set against bourgeois hegemony, these sciences (Marxism and psychoanalysis) fall subject to resistance and attack from without, and this assault is reproduced within these very sciences themselves in the form of revision and scission. The dialectic of resistance/ attack/ revision/ scission is the necessary condition of a conflictual science. It is worth stressing that 'conflictuality' is not purely internal to theoretical discourse but also refracts the contradictions with which (qua class struggle) is riven, the History within which that science is inscribed. A1thusser envisages his project as a struggle against the theoretical repression of such 'conflictuality' within Marxist theory and the concomitant historical amnesia; the consequence of which was an incorrect or impoverished practice. Most immediately this task of theoretical 'desublimation' was aimed at the policies adopted by the PCF; on the one hand, A1thusser was engaged in a critique of theoretical Zhdanovism, and on the other, a critique of humanist

2)7