A “Struggle Without End”: Althusser’s Interventions
by cominsitu
Viewpoint – Edited by Patrick King
Introduction: Althusser’s Theoretical Experiments | Patrick King
By reading his work as animated by antagonisms and countervailing tendencies – where fundamental concepts are open to translation into different registers – we can detect the nodal points of Althusser’s oeuvre.
Althusser and the Young Marx | Pierre Macherey
The premises of a materialist concept of knowledge, still to be elaborated, can be read in the interstices of Althusser’s article on the Young Marx; they provide its secret drama, and doubtless constitute its most significant and substantial contribution.
Philosophy and Revolution: An Interview With G.M. Goshgarian | G.M. Goshgarian
Althusser’s contribution is to have shown that historical materialism, if it means to justify its claim to be a science of history, can only be the science of the always aleatory encounter known as the class struggle.
Indication as Concept: Spinoza and Althusser | Eva Mancuso
By viewing his theoretical interventions as indications, Althusser signals that he understands them as moments of a larger process: a practice of collective research.
Listening to Reading Capital | William S. Lewis
Audiotapes of Althusser’s 1964-65 seminar on Marx’s Capital will allow for the most accurate genealogy of one of the most important texts in 20th century Marxist philosophy.
Why Should We Read Althusser (Again)? | Alex Demirovic
Just as Marx’s Capital can be read in different ways and its theories brought to bear on different things, so too does Althusser’s Reading Capital offer various lessons.
Althusser and Workerism | Fabrizio Carlino and Andrea Cavazzini
We will only explore certain relations between Althusser and the philosophical formulations of workerism — elaborated by Mario Tronti and Antonio Negri — respectively and from the decidedly limited but nonetheless revealing point of view of the relations between political practice and theoretical practice.
Excerpt from “The Concept of Critique and the Critique of Political Economy” | Jacques Rancière
We are no longer dealing with an anthropological causality referred to the act of a subjectivity, but with a quite new causality which we can call metonymic causality.
Not being a friend of Althusser’s stalino-structuralism, I took a glance on the entry on cominsitu about Althusser, the first of the linked texts says:
“If anything, this emphasis on the contingent and provisional character of relations of force drove Althusser to elaborate a different mode of philosophical practice, as intervention.”(https://viewpointmag.com/2016/07/18/introduction-althussers-theoretical-experiments/)
As it was brilliantly demonstrated in 1968, in the revolutionary situation in France and elsewhere:
“Lastly, the French upheaval of May-June 1968 introduced a further complication, inasmuch as Althusser reacted to it with a deafening silence. It has since been explained that he was ill; also that he was privately critical of the illusions entertained by the students. On Czechoslovakia he has been likewise silent…“
(George Lichtheim, New York Review of Books, January 30; 1969, here: https://thecharnelhouse.org/2016/02/08/althussers-reading-of-marx-in-the-eyes-of-three-contemporaries-george-lichtheim-alain-badiou-and-henri-lefebvre/)
The linked text goes on: „Like Spinoza and Marx before him, for Althusser the ultimate question confronting intellectuals and theorists is the following: what material effects have your works produced?“
Maybe it was not „a different mode of philosophical practice, as intervention“ of Althusser killing his wife Helène in november 1980, carefully omitted by his apologists, but her sudden death was nonetheless a „material effect“ of one of his more practical „works“.
On a more theoretical level there is a critique from Alfred Schmidt, „About Althusser’s structuralist attack on history“ (1974): Die “originäre Problematik” des “Kapitals” Über Althussers strukturalistischen Angriff auf die Geschichte
von Alfred Schmidt (http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0812/010812.html)
Another critique of „structuralist marxism“ from A. Schmidt (1971) in english is here: https://rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/alfred-schmidt-history-and-structure-an-essay-on-hegelian-marxist-and-structuralist-theories-of-history-1971.pdf