By Gordon Hull
The last couple of times (first, second), I have been setting up Althusser’s Marx as the background to Focuault’s invocation of Marx as an “instaurateur” in his “What is an Author.” Today, I want to finish that project by noting three additional moments in Althusser’s reading that indicate that he is not treating Marx as an “Author,” at least not straightforwardly. (a) Marx’s self-consciousness is irrelevant to the reading (“it is essential to avoid any concession tot the impression made on us by the Young Marx’s writings and any acceptance of his own consciousness of himself” (For Marx [=FM] 74). (b) In accounting for Marx’s emergence in the context of German idealism, Althusser defers to Marx’s own account of why “this prodigious layer of ideology” existed at that time and place. The reason – Germany was unable “either to realize national unity or bourgeois revolution” (FM 75) was basically exogenous to philosophy, but it made the subject position of German philosophers possible and intelligible. (c) Althusser rejects any implication of a Romantic author thesis; even an author like Marx who invents new worlds “must have absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves” (FM 85).
The resulting Marx is well on his way to being an “instaurateur” in the sense Foucault seems to be giving the term. In a footnote to to his review of the anthology on the Young Marx, Althusser makes the Galileo comparison, putting Marx in the same category as Galileo (recall Foucault separates them):
“Of course, like any other scientific discipline, Marxism did not stop at Marx any more than physics stopped at Galileo who founded it. Like any other scientific discipline, Marxism developed even in Marx’s own lifetime. New discoveries were made possible by Marx’s basic discovery. It would be very rash to believe that everything has been said” (FM 63, n27).
This is a footnote, and the sense that Althusser is liminal is perhaps evidenced precisely by the inclusion of the more “scientific” description of Marx in a text that pushes against that reading, but only as a note outside the main body of argument. It is as if Althusser needed to acknowledge and even affirm a theory of Marx and Marxism that his own argumentation was undermining. Althusser finds an ambivalence in Engels on economic determinism, which he says relies on a bourgeois account of individual will. Here we see a similar ambivalence in Althusser, on the status of "science" when applied to Marxism.
At the end of the introduction to For Marx, Althusser arrives at the language that Foucault uses in “Author” to describe Marx as an instaurateur. Of the critical effort in reading Marx in a way that is not just an “immediate reading [lecture immédiate]” and thereby avoids the “false evidence [fausses évidences]” of either Marx’s early, ideological writings or that of the “apparently familiar concepts of the works of the break,” Althusser writes:
“This work which is essential to a reading of Marx is, in the strict sense, at the same time, the work of a theoretical elaboration of Marxist philosophy …. This theory which alone makes possible an authentic reading of Marx’s writings, a reading which is both epistemological and historical, this theory is in fact nothing other than Marxist philosophy itself” (FM 39, trans. revised slightly / Pour Marx 31-2).
Further help in understanding Althusser’s point derives from his language of “immediacy” in labeling the disfavored strategy, as it ironically recalls Hegel: what one wants at all costs to avoid is going back to Marx in a way that does not take one’s own subject position into account, that does not relate the act of reading to what is read. That is the Hegelian point; but this is also Althusser, and so avoiding immediacy doesn’t look like the Phenomenology of Spirit: we need to abandon the Hegelian account of supersession (FM 115-16), which means that when we read we need to think in terms of “overdetermination.” At the very least, that means that successive readings of Marx need to avoid the tendency to find the same thing every time, or “anticipations” of where one is now or (Althusser says this is the same thing: FM 115) a “memory” of it. In other words, on Marxian terms, it ought to be impossible to draw anything like a straight line from Marx to today through the mechanical application of Marxian words.
In an appendix to “Contradiction,” Althusser gives some further indication of what this better praxis of reading would look like, beyond the general point that Marx’s early works need to be carefully cabined for their residual humanism. There, he takes on a letter from Engels on last-instance determinism (which had also been the focus of the main part of the essay, just not this aspect of it). Of it, he says that Engels’ “theoretical solution to the problem of the basis for the determination ‘in the last instance’ by the economy is, in fact, independent of the Marxist theses that Engels was counter-posing to ‘economist’ dogmatism” (FM 117). Specifically, Engels ends up relying on a concept of individual will that is both a residuum of bourgeois ideology and unable to explain how those wills come to be what they are (FM 124-5). The better “Marxist explanation” with which Engels also flirts, gestures to “those determinations which are at once both general and concrete, viz., social circumstances and economic circumstances” (FM 123). This doesn’t work in Engels’ framing, but it is better than what Engels attempts, because in that attempt he “is merely a philosopher” (FM 127).
In other words, one wants a structural explanation, not one based on subjectivity. Who else ends up with an explanation based on subjectivity? Sartre, who “basing himself on Engels’ ‘question’” (FM 125), “also tries to find a philosophical basis for the epistemological concepts of historical materialism” (FM 127, referring to Critique of Dialectical Reason). Of course, it is this "philosophical" reliance on humanist individualism to which Foucault also objects when he quips of Critique of Dialectical Reason that it is "the magnificent and pathetic effort of a man of the 19th century to think the 20th century. Sartre is the last Hegelian, and I will say, even the last Marxist ” ("L'homme est-il mort?" D&E, 2 vol. set, I, 570). In Althusser's case, one might equally refer here to Althusser’s earlier, less sophisticated (but more surprising!) comparison of Lenin and Husserl (sic!). Referring to Lenin’s emphasis on “the bounds of the epistemological” question, Althusser interjects:
“Does Lenin’s emphasis … not justify a transcendental reflection à la Kant? More; is the analysis of what we have called the ‘implications of practice’ not reminiscent of an ‘analysis of essence’ of the Husserlian kind (an explanation of scientific ‘praxis’ as constitution; objectivity as an ‘intentional’ structure)? …. Were not the struggle against dogmatism, the concern to provide a foundation for, and so save, the objectivity of the natural sciences, and the ‘description’ of scientific practice and its ‘claims’ among his major concerns? Manifestly. Husserl’s disciples could have found an echo of their doctrine in certain of Lenin’s formulations taken out of context” (Spectre of Hegel, 273-4).
Of course the answer to this question is no, but it is interesting for the genealogy of 1960s theory that opposes Hegel, Sartre and phenomenology all at once, all for being too interested in question of humanism, the subject, and whatever idealism those interests entail:
“It is nonetheless clear that Lenin’s analysis is not an ‘analysis of essence’ which refers us to its ideal conditions of possibility, or even, from foundation to foundation, to an original intention. Practice, which, for Marxism, is the source and criterion of all truth, and ‘envelops’ the epistemological question, does not provide a de jure foundation or the materialist thesis in the idealist sense of the term. The fact of practice points back, not to an originary legitimation, but to its own real genesis” (Spectre of Hegel, 274).
(side point: the blurring between humanism and phenomenology is intentional and consistent; in the “Young Marx” essay, Althusser pointedly cites Feuerbach’s desire to “dissipate all ideology and return to ‘the things themselves,’ to ‘unveil existence.'” Lest anybody miss the Husserl comparison, he adds the German “zur Sache selbst”).
In sum, on the Althusserian interpretation, to read Marx correctly is to change Marx and to change oneself, even as one is working within the space of Marx’s texts. By comparison, in “Author,” Foucault says: “To phrase it very schematically: the work of initiators of discursivity is not situated in the space that science defines; rather, it is the science or the discursivity which refers back to their work as primary coordinates” (116).
Next time I’ll be back to Foucault.
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