Althusser

first chapter here

There was an issue of Yale French Studies entitled 'Depositions of Labour: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labour of Reading' which has some excellent essays in it, but at a slightly more advanced level of complexity.

i) mental (as in psychiatrically ill)

ii) a Stalinist

iii) a purveyor of the most hardline anti-humanist Marxism imaginable.

I am reading the short McLellan book about Marx at the moment. He is dismissive of Althusser, not so much for having false ideas, but for attempting to put his ideas across as a restatement of Marx's when in fact they are a revision.

althusser thought marx was humanist romantic shit b4 his 'epistemological break' in 1848; debord, conversely, thought he todally lost it at the same point (so both more or less accept the 'communist manifesto'. overused words in althusser include 'science', 'rigour', 'humanist'. he was the leading intello of the PCF in the mid-sixties which was run on stalinist lines. he started out in a seminary b4 joining the PCF, which thompson typically makes a lot of.

it ended badly for him.

If I were Derrida I'd be a worried man...

is levi-strauss still alive? surely not...

didn't kno deleuze had died.

Is this a rhetorical question?

Balibar still rocking along, churning out books and articles, somewhere between Laclau and Mouffe and Habermas in the rad. democrat continuum. His book with Wallerstein still gets more attention than I think it deserves. Hirst sadly recently deceased, his stuff on Associative democracy worth looking at for any Brit leftists, although I'm not so sure about Charter 88 with whom he was involved. Hindess now = post-Foucauldian.

Althusser didn't break with the French communist party when many other intellectuals did. PCF official line was pro-Soviet, when many other socialist groups (e.g. Socialisme ou Barbarie (featuring Castoriadis, Lyotard amongst others)) were explicitly anti-Stalinist. Hence calling Althusser Stalinist = lazy way to dismiss his ideas. (sorry Enrique, we've been over this before, but it's now often suggested that Althusser's work evolves over time, and that he goes through at least three phases. You're confuting the first science / ideology with the second (reading).)

1848: easiest way to pigeonhole Marxists = which bits of Marx did they have access to / did they prefer. The rediscovery of Marx's early work was a big influence on early Marcuse, for example, and the rest of what is sometimes called the 'Western Marxist' tradition. Althusser draws on somewhat dodgy idea of 'epistemological break' drawn from a tradition of French history-of-thought writers like Canguilhelm (sp.?) and Bachelard, to make a polemical point: forget the early Marx (more Hegelian, more speculative / idealist) and focus on the 'scientific' later work. How long Althusser stands by this radical position is unclear to me. It has been suggested that the emphasis on 'reading' Capital (2nd phase Althusser? My chronology is wack here) implies continuous and experimental interpretation rather than a dogmatic excavation of its 'truth' or even 'true method'.

'humanism' has quite specific meaning here though, Althusser's target is surely the previous generation of thinkers whose reading of Hegel was heavily anthropological, under the influence of Kojeve. Hence needing to overstate that he is after Marx *not* Hegel.

Hence calling Althusser Stalinist = lazy way to dismiss his ideas

which is true; but the point is that althusser's stalisnism went beyond his ideas, and the PCF had a lamentable history judged in political terms (which is how althusser wd, at least in part, want to be judged). most notoriously the PCF dragged its feet in '68.

notorious latterday marxist error (cheeky redux):
since "ideas-change-minds" = "idealism", which is considered bad, therefore attention to style of address = a mere bourgeois vanity, therefore any-old-how is OK, hence GODAWFUL CLUNKY PROSE WHICH RENDERS COMATOSE AT 8000 PACES, protected by daft indie-style belief that lack of effect/affect/response BY ITSELF demonstrates superior intellectual/political/moral worth

but ultimately the truth of mark s' comments is the reason i can't venture further into the 1 page-per-hour world that is post-something-or-otherian marxism.

mind you, this morning i read a lindsay anderson piece from '57, full of 'human values' yadda, which briefly made me more althusserian than the man himself.

then why were the latterday Marxists bothering to argue anything at all? (Sorry if that's a stupid question. I don't understand this stuff too well.)

(i am v.allergic also to that kind of bullying quasi-left moralism which i suspect u mean: its fashionable dominance in certain eras has surely been a reason why "anti-humanism" etc comes to have such a strong appeal as they close)

(i always liked the labour party formulation btw: "workers by hand and brain")

so these films, like poitier/cassavetes hoe-down 'ten feet tall' and something with anthony perkins and '12 angry men' are better because they lack the 'exhibitionism' of 'rebel' and also see that social problems can be solved.

the directors he's digging were all tv vets -- frankenheim, lumet -- so at the end he says: grebt films -- but they aren't 'cinematic', which makes you wonder what his beef with ray is?????? crazy stuff.

also on an 'if' tip: anthony perkins and cassavetes and poitier are better than clift,. brando and dean because they're not 'egotistical'. right on linz!

"a real one" = "a real one politically"

my mind already flashed "unconscious structured like a language" => structure of "political unconscious" beyond academic "elite"? => cf derrida on freud => yes but cf chomsky on deep structure and political implications

and then there were kalxons and red lights flashing and those spaceship iris-doors started closing like when the core is overloaded and you have to get to the lifepods asap

hrm! i can't start there till i've read lacan (as opposed to glosses in film theory books) nahaha. still, glad i wasn't totally tangential there.

All I remember from having Althusser glossed for me at Goldsmiths = the interpolation of the subject

i think the good rep he still apparently has in eng lit and cultural studs and film theory has something to do with the totem of '1968', ie his project is spuriously related to the still not-very-well understood conflagration that occurred. but if you actually read 'ideology and state apparatuses', his response to may '68, with some idea of the communist party's conduct during same... the picture is not a pretty one.

in 'rip it up and start again' reynolds at least says that the 'althusserian' chic of some of the political bands was totalluy at odds with their 'situationism', but usually the two are sort of lumped in as '60s french theory' of some sort.

I noticed in the other thread that you're not too keen on interpellation. I must admit that I've been more taken with what Zizek has done with it (primarily in How Did Marx Invent The Symptom?) than Althusser's initial formulation.

One quibble point: while Althusser is anti-historical generally, I don't think that the ISA/RSA model is specifically anti-historical - rather it is/was the current set-up by which the ahistorical process (interpellation; the subject's constitution via concrete structures generally) operates. The appearance of overly rigid structuration in this specific instance strikes me as rising as much from Althusser's love of numbered schema and dot points and the like.

the gramsci connection i'm interested in -- fwiw it definitely wasn't althusser who brought him to england. but i like stories about how writers get disseminated.

I think that more recent uses of Lacan are a bit more advanced than this though. for example Zizek (who I use a lot i know, but i'm most familiar with him) says that the "ahistorical" portion (ie. the Real) is not a positive actually existing thing but the inherent failure of complete/successful symbolization in any socio-historical manifestation of the symbolic order - so the "real" of capitalism is vastly different from the "real" of paganism, say.

This is not actually vastly different from D&G!

Of course it goes without saying that Althusser's use of Lacan wasn't terribly sophisticated (TS: Althusser's use of Lacan vs Marcuse's use of Freud)

Was this R*b B*scemi? I can imagine him using that phrase.