°Taking place, taking hold
A successful encounter, one that is not brief, but lasts, never guarantees that it will continue to last tomorrow rather than come undone. Just as it might have not taken place, it may no longer take place. […] In other words, nothing ever guarantees that the reality of the accomplished fact is the guarantee of its durability. Quite the opposite is true: every accomplished fact […] like all the necessity and reason we can derive from it, is only a provisional encounter, and since every encounter is provisional even when it lasts, there is no eternity in the “laws” of any world or any state.
History here is nothing but the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about. Simply, one day new hands will have to be dealt out, and the dice thrown again onto the empty table.”
- Althusser, “Le Courant Souterrain du Matérialisme de la Rencontre” (1994).
hi Angela,
Interesting stuff. I know next to nil about Althusser. How does the late aleatory stuff stand in relation to the earlier stuff? Much of this stuff doesn’t seem all that far from the ‘Open Marxism’ around Holloway, Bonefeld, et al, who (I think) were/would be kind of hostile to Althusser.
take care,
Nate
Nate [January 30, 2006 @ 4:10 pm]
I think it was more than apparent in Althusser’s other writings, if oftentimes obscured by his fear of committing heresy and his reluctance to leave the CPF. But it was there for anyone who cared to read Althusser and not, say, piles of rubbish like EP Thompson’s hack job.
I’ve always liked both Althusser and the ‘Open Marxism’ writers like Holloway and Bonefeld, quite a lot. I don’t partake in the hostility, which I think is a little too unsophisticated for me, too driven by the disciplinarity of the academy, as well as by a certain understanding of politics, and the notion of ‘camps’.
I see no difference between Althusser’s insistence that intellect follows movement and the ‘Open Marxism’ insistence on the same. For me, they’ve always been more similar than opposed, at least on the questions that I find interesting.
There are aspects of both I don’t much care for, and which are kind of related to the above. Althusser’s theory of reading is, I think, brilliant, and it’s not all that distant from the kinds of readings that John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld do. If I can put it like this, it’s their understandings of writing that I find most problematic. Althusser was afraid of committing heresy, so he gets obscure, codes. Holloway and Bonefeld do this too, at times - the gesture of fidelity to Marxism, a more authentic reading of Marx, and so on.
This strikes me as superstitious (in a Spinozian sense) - Althusser’s circling around ’science’ and Holloway’s subjectivism. Both of which seem to be routinely undermined in their respective writings. So, at times, the differences between them seem to me to be results of expediencies: sometimes by conjunctures which are so different as to render any abstract (as in academic) debate between the two a bit like biblical, dehistoricised exercises; and sometimes by a simple reluctance to be clear about what’s at stake, or to put oneself and one’s relation to a perceived ‘community of readers’ (whether the PCF or Anglo-American leftists) at stake.
s0metim3s [January 31, 2006 @ 2:49 pm]
Hi Angela,
Thanks for this little quote, I really like it a lot. I’m guessing you did the translation, but do you know if it happens to be available anywhere in English? I’m monolingual at the moment, but I’m looking to start reading some Althusser. Any suggestions on where to start?
Thanks,
Keith
Keith [February 1, 2006 @ 7:50 am]
Keith, there are fragments of Althusser’s later writings all over the place, but in cited fragments. For fuller texts in English, you might try:
The essay, “The Only Materialist Tradition”, in The New Spinoza, eds. Warren Montag and Ted Stolz (1997)
And the book, Machiavelli and Us (1999)
And while Reading Capital has many problems, I still think it’s very much worth reading. Don’t skip the intro, and imagine yourself in France at the time, with a PCF enamoured of Hegelian Marxism, and all that might be thought around the time of 1968, when it was published. Same goes for Essays on Ideology. I don’t think Derrida, Negri, Foucault and many, many others are quite legible without reading Althusser - even if their writings go in different directions, or are at odds with Althusser’s, it would be difficult to think of them without the Althusserian moment, as it were.
s0metim3s [February 1, 2006 @ 10:53 am]
I’ve always read Althusser far too straightforwardly to actually be able to finish any of his books. If, as you say, it’s code, then maybe I should have more patience. What would you recommend in the decoding department?
The Althusserians in anthropology - Hindes and Hirst - were quite interesting, but try as I may, I can’t see what the hell they got from Alhusser that they couldn’t have gotten from Marx and Levi-Strauss. It was a dead end anyway, and I don’t think Hindess believes much of that stuff still.
I don’t have much time for humanist western marxism ™, with its annoying delusions about Gramsci and so on, but Althusser struck me as essentially a Stalinist, an unintentionally comic stern disciplinarian and very much in the project of reaffirming marxism as science. He also strikes me as one of the worst writers I have ever read, incapable of writing a coherent paragraph. I must admit chuckling when I read that sort of stuff, but maybe I am an idiot for it.
TCO [February 1, 2006 @ 11:33 am]
I don’t want to suggest that it’s always coded, but to the extent that Althusser makes such a big deal out of the notions of conjuncture, theoretical practice, intervention, and ‘class struggle in theory’, then one has to read it as such. I’m trying to think of an text on the PCFof the time, but can’t offhand.
I’ll always recommend The Althusserian Legacy (eds, Kaplan and Sprinker), but also Depositions, the Yale French Studies n88, 1995.
I think the High Althusserians (Hindess, Hirst, Hussain, Cutler) were a little too formal for me.
And I never really understood why Althusser might be regarded as a Stalinist - though I do recall a moment a long time ago, when some trot saw me with Reading Capital and loudly denounced me as a Stalinist in the uni caf. I don’t understand the accusation, but I suspect it had much to do with something stupid Callinicos wrote rather than any of them having read Althusser. Anyway, strangely enough, given EP Thompson’s tantrum about ‘Althusserianism’, the most sustained ‘Althusserian’ moment in AU consisted of people working in the area of history, sans the historicism.
Factional trivia aside, I should be fair and note that I actually think Althusser was quite ambivalent about ’science’, and increasingly so. There was a moment in France when the philosophy of science was a big topic, Canguilhem, Bachelard, et al. Also, his early writings seem to be very much a struggle with (and sometimes for) Hegel, which he is better known for having spent a lot of time refuting in Reading Capital and later works.
s0metim3s [February 1, 2006 @ 1:56 pm]
Translations of some of Althusser’s late work is coming out this spring, published by Verso.
The relevant url is: http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/a-titles/althusser_encounter.shtml
ernst mach [February 3, 2006 @ 5:38 am]
Or autumn, for those of us in the Southern Hemisphere. I’m still wondering how to surmount the currency difference, though.
Also, the Borderlands edition on Althusser should be up in mid-February.
s0metim3s [February 3, 2006 @ 10:43 am]
hi Angela,
Thanks for all this. I have to believe someone somewhere can swing a review copy for you. Maybe David at Borderlands has a connection?
take care,
Nate
Nate [February 4, 2006 @ 3:35 pm]
Hi Angela,
the borderlands issue is indeed up, see my url. The Althusser volume is being heavily discounted by Amazon, US$10 less than list, if that helps. I don’t know if I can get a review copy for you through Verso, they haven’t been real compliant in the past, but maybe Geoff can get one from them for us … Will ask when the time comes. I will probably just buy it from Amazon rather than go through the whole thing of doing a review. Between Augusto and myself in the new borderlands issue I think we give a good idea of what it contains. The Morfino lexicon in borderlands should be a standard point of reference from now on.
The table of contents I have is as follows:
Introduction (G.M. Goshgarian, translator - very important)
Marx in his Limits 1
Letter to Merab Mardashvili 168
The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter 175
Correspondence about ‘Philosophy and Marxism’ 224
Philosophy and Marxism 275
Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher 324
Index 326
Of these ‘Marx in his Limits’ (1978) & ‘The Underground Current’ are most interesting in my view. I’ve read all of them - indeed, I have the whole book in word file, but I’ve promised Geoff that I wouldn’t share them with anyone, partly because they were not the final versions, and partly because it’s important that Verso sells copies of the book, so that Geoff might twist their arm to publish a translation of Sur la reproduction and other volumes, especially some materials that as yet has not even appeared in French (on these see his intro when it appears later this year). Sorry to not be able to distribute it, but I think my intro gives some idea of where Geoff is coming from at least, and Augusto gives a pretty good summary of Althusser’s most important theses in the volume.
David McInerney [March 8, 2006 @ 9:43 pm]