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Althusser: the Detour of Theory (Historical Materialism Book Series)

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Althusser: the Detour of Theory (Historical Materialism Book Series) Althusser The Detour of Theory Historical Materialism Book Series Editorial Board Paul Blackledge, Leeds – Sebastian Budgen, Paris Jim Kincaid, Leeds – Stathis Kouvelakis, Paris Marcel van der Linden, Amsterdam China Miéville, London – Paul Reynolds, Lancashire Peter Thomas, Amsterdam VOLUME 13 Althusser The Detour of Theory by Gregory Elliott BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2006 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Elliott, Gregory. Althusser : the detour of theory / by Gregory Elliott. p. cm. — (Historical materialism book series, ISSN 1570–1522 ; v. 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15337-0 ISBN-10: 90-04-15337-3 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Althusser, Louis. I. Title. B2430.A474E55 2006 335.4'11092–dc22 2006049063 ISSN 1570-1522 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15337 0 ISBN-10: 90 04 15337 3 © Copyright 2006 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS To Louis Althusser Let us do him the duty, which is the duty of every historian, of taking him not at his word, but at his work. Contents Preface to the Second Edition ...................................................................... ix Foreword .......................................................................................................... xiii Chapter One The Moment of Althusser .............................................. 1 Chapter Two A Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism ........ 55 Chapter Three Returning to Marx? A Reconstruction of Historical Materialism ...................................................................... 99 Chapter Four The Time of Theory, The Time of Politics .................. 167 Chapter Five Questions of Stalinism .................................................... 225 Chapter Six The Eclipse of Althusserianism .................................... 255 Conclusion: Unfinished History .................................................................. 301 Postscript: The Necessity of Contingency .................................................. 317 References ........................................................................................................ 373 Bibliography of the Published Writings of Louis Althusser .................. 387 Index ................................................................................................................ 405 Preface to the Second Edition ‘Never apologise, never explain’, runs a familiar adage. The appearance of a second edition of Althusser: The Detour of Theory close on two decades after it was originally published calls for a few words of explanation and apology alike. Released by Verso in 1987 as the revised version of a doctoral thesis, and possibly aided by the impending twentieth anniversary of May ’68, the book attracted a fair amount of generally positive attention. Of the twenty-five or so reviews that I am aware of, while most derived from the UK and the US, others hailed from as far afield as India and Australia. (As I only learnt ten or more years later, the text even received the – backhanded – compliment of a pirate translation in South Korea.) Notwithstanding the numerous local and general criticisms directed at it – to some of which I shall return – The Detour of Theory was not infrequently welcomed as the fullest account to date in English of Althusser’s philosophico-political career in the 1960s and 1970s. For whatever reason, long after it became out of date (not to mention print), it would seem to retain that reputation, thus one hopes rendering republication of more than merely antiquarian interest. Although gratified by initial reception and residual reputation, I have never been misled by them. On the one hand, they actually attest to the marked decline in interest in, and output on, Althusser’s work from the turn of the 1970s, other than as a historical reference-point in some areas. On the other, in the 1987 Foreword, I had myself underscored the incompleteness and imperfections of my study, looking forward to remedial action by others. With the gradual emergence of a posthumous edition of Althusser’s writings from 1992 onwards, which soon dwarfed in quantity if not quality what had been published in his lifetime, the need for a new synthesis, rendering these pages redundant, became increasingly apparent. After 1987, I continued to work intermittently on Althusser, whether as editor, author, or translator; and, for some years, projected a comprehensive x • Preface to the Second Edition intellectual biography, taking the story back to the 1940s and up to the 1980s, which I began to read for in 1995–6. A combination of factors led me to desist. Of these, the most salient was a sense that the undertaking lay beyond my powers – that it was indeed, as anticipated in 1987, ‘another story, for a different teller’. For a start, there was the sheer size of the task, which would have necessitated investigating the mass of unpublished material held at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, as well as mastering the new primary and secondary published literature (in all the main European languages – and others besides). As if this was not sufficient deterrent, it would have involved revisiting in depth and detail a whole range of topics – Hegelianism or Communism, Spinozism or (post)structuralism – on which (as I am acutely conscious and as readers will soon see for themselves) I all too often pronounced en méconnaissance de cause, with the misplaced confidence of youth. Finally, better qualified candidates for the endeavour were duly entering the lists, with a much surer grasp of intellectual terrain onto which I had ventured more or less ill-equipped. As for The Detour of Theory itself, I readily concede the justice of some of the detailed charges levelled at it, whether they concern indulging in the leftist myth of May ’68, inaccurate tracking of Althusser’s attitude towards Eurocommunism, or levity in discussing Maoism.1 Others I find less compelling – for example, cavilling at the attempt to periodise Althusser’s thinking (which seems to me premised on a philosophical subtlety not obviously serviceable to an intellectual historian).2 Above all, however, the underlying problem with the text below was identified at the time by at least two reviewers, Joseph McCarney and Peter Osborne.3 Probing the category of ‘anti-anti- Althusserianism’ in which I had encapsulated my critical orientation, the latter suggested that ‘[It]is not . so easy to be “anti-anti-Althusserian” without being for Althusser’.4 Quite: the problem of the appropriate historical evaluative criteria to employ was badly posed, and falsely solved, by counterposing the 1 The first was pressed in a personal communication by Jean-Jacques Lecercle; the second, likewise in a personal communication, by Geoffrey Goshgarian; the third by McCarney 1989. 2 See Matheron 2001, p. 382, n. 23. 3 See McCarney 1989 and Osborne 1989. 4 Osborne 1989, p. 44. Preface to the Second Edition • xi overarching emancipatory effects of Althusser’s intervention to the various misdirections in his reconstruction of historical materialism. Implicit in this modus operandi was a certain – broadly Deutscherite – conception of Marxism, index falsi as it were, in the light of which I declared for and/or against Althusser on any particular point, from the sublime to the ridiculous (say: V.I. Lenin to B.-H. Lévy). Following the geopolitical earthquake of 1989–91, and in the utterly changed context of the present, what remained an unresolved issue twenty years ago constitutes a profound enigma to me today, revolving around not only what to be for and against in Althusser and how, but the whys and wherefores of the very operation. My misreading of Althusser’s political stance in the second half of the 1970s helps illustrate the wider dilemma. For while it would require me to rectify my exposition, I would now want to reverse my assessment, on the point at issue. In 1987 I construed Althusser as gravitating towards ‘left Eurocommunism’ in the debates in the French Communist Party over the dictatorship of the proletariat; and reproved this departure from Leninism. Were I rewriting the book today, while registering remaining ambiguities likely to have occasioned his immediate expulsion from the Comintern in Lenin’s day, I would regret Althusser’s failure to break out of a disabling orthodoxy. It may safely be left to others to judge whether this is tantamount to peremptory inconsistency. Meanwhile, insofar as it has awakened me from a dogmatic anti-Hegelian slumber, recent acquaintance with the stimulating work of various Italian Marxists – in particular, Domenico Losurdo and Costanzo Preve – has only served to exacerbate the problem. In any event, varying Gramsci’s dictum that ‘to write the history of a party means nothing less than to write the general history of a country from a monographic viewpoint’,5
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