Emancipating Open Marxism: E.V. Ilyenkov’s Post-Cartesian Anti-Dualism Alex Levant

Evald Vasilyevich Ilyenkov has had immeasurably more influence on Soviet and post-Soviet theory than on theory in the West. Despite being ‘intellectually mobbed’,1 prevented from travelling abroad and even- tually from teaching, leading to his premature death, his impact has been profound. Ilyenkov is widely rec- ognised as the most influential Soviet-Marxist philoso- pher in the post-Stalin period. In the West, however, despite the availability of some of his work in English translation, his impact has been marginal. To date, only one major book on Ilyenkov has been written in English. One of the principal objectives of this volume has been to help bring the full weight of his work into dialogue with theoretical problems in the West. Despite sharing certain features with Western Marxism, Ilyenkov has been largely excluded from that tradition. In fact, his work illuminates the subter- ranean world of ‘creative Soviet Marxism’, which does not neatly fit into either Western Marxism or Soviet Marxism. However, in addition to helping us recon- sider certain hidden remainders that have been left out of our intellectual histories, he also offers insights that are germane to current theoretical issues in the West. Ilyenkov’s work should be of particular interest to contemporary theorists who position themselves through a critique of postmodern relativism on the one hand, but who are equally critical of positivistic

1. Oittinen 2000, p. 16. 184 • Alex Levant truth-claims on the other. Although writing in a different context, Ilyenkov’s work has many affinities with contemporary anti-postmodernists such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. However, unlike Žižek, Ilyenkov argues for a post-Cartesian­ subject based upon a Marxist reading of Spinoza’s concept of the thinking body.2 Like Badiou, he is critical of the fixation on language in phenomenological and post-structural thought, and also shares the view that subjectivity is not an inherently human trait, but rather is the product of a social process. However, his position on science would be much closer to someone like John Holloway than Badiou.3 There are also some interesting common elements with Walter Benjamin.4 While all of these connections are worth exploring (and will likely be explored as his work becomes more readily available in English), in this chapter I aim specifically to bring Ilyenkov’s thought to bear on a set of debates about structure and agency that developed in the journal Open Marxism between 1992 and 1995. I focus on Holloway’s contribution to these debates – an important contemporary philosopher in the Western Marxist tradition whose book Change the World without Taking Power has been quite influential and the subject of much debate.5 In addition to Holloway, a broad range of theorists inhabits the theoretical space of Open Marxism, including Werner Bonefeld, Simon Clarke and Tony Negri. Reminiscent of Ilyenkov’s critique of Diamat, its primary objective is to ‘emancipate’ Marxism from ‘the massive dead weight of positivist and ­scientistic/ economistic strata’,6 what it called a ‘Marxism of structures’.7 What unites them is a project of a certain type of renewal of the Marxist tradition. At the heart of the matter is the question of the power of practice. We know from Marx that we make our history, but not in conditions of our own choos- ing. At issue is the relationship of practice to these conditions. The way this relationship is understood marks the defining line between Open Marxism and its other (‘closed Marxism’), which stands accused of fetishising these conditions and hence limiting the full power of human activity, which ‘accepts the horizons

2. ‘This book thus endeavors to reassert the Cartesian subject’ (Žižek 1999, p. xxiv). ‘There are not two different and originally contrary objects of investigation – body and thought – but only one single object, which is the thinking body [which] does not consist of two Cartesian halves – “thought lacking a body” and a “body lacking thought” . . . It is not a special “soul”, installed by God in the human body as in a temporary residence, that thinks, but the body of man itself ’; Ilyenkov 1974, pp. 31–2. 3. ‘Badiou’s “knowledge” is closer to (a positivist notion of) science’; Žižek 1999, p. 147. 4. Levant 2011b. 5. For instance, see Hearse 2007. 6. Bonefeld et al. 1995, p. 1. 7. Bonefeld et al. 1992a, p. x.