°Althusser and us
The much-awaited edition of Borderlands on Althusser is up and about. For the moment, here are the two fragments that David McInerney opens his editorial with:
Marx has bequeathed Marxists (cruelly instructed by the counter-experience of Stalinist ontology) an especially difficult undertaking. Just as he left the worker’s movement with the task of inventing new forms of “commune” that would convert the State into something superfluous, so Marx left Marxist philosophers with the task of inventing new forms of philosophical intervention to hasten the end of bourgeois hegemony. In sum: the task of inventing a new practice of philosophy.
— Louis Althusser, 1976
The secret philosophy of the encounter … “catches a moving train” and, with strong arms, jumps on the wagon that runs from eternity like Heraclitus’ water, without knowing where it comes from and where it’s going. Through Althusser’s image we see in the materialist philosopher almost an IWW activist who travels through America to trigger off strikes, hiding from the cops and beating the industrial centres and mine pits along the railway…
— Augusto Illuminati, 2005.
Which might give the reader some idea of what is at stake in the formulation of “Althusser and us”. Illuminati’s recollection of the figure of the Hobo Agitator is, I think, particularly lovely. Go read it.
thanks for this–I have to write something on Althusser in about 6 weeks so this might come in quite handy!
Jodi [March 9, 2006 @ 7:42 am]