1
Multiple Returns: Althusser on Hegel
A Paper Presented to the Marx and Philosophy Society, 5 March 2005
John Grant
Department of Politics, Queen Mary, University of London
j.a.grant@qmul.ac.uk or jgrant45@hotmail.com
**Please note that this paper is a Draft Only. It may only be quoted or redistributed
with the consent of the author.
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Introduction
Louis Althusser’s legacy is characterized by its multiple returns. This includes the
numerous returns he made to his own work, elaborating and refining it, as well as the
multiple engagements made by those who have read Althusser over the past forty years.
During the 1960s Althusser engaged in theoretical battle with representatives of
Hegelian and existential Marxism. Althusser targeted luminaries of the intellectual left such
as Herbert Marcuse and Jean-Paul Sartre for their theoretical humanism, which relied on a
concept of the subject that he found untenable. Althusser wanted to show that the real
subjects of Marxism were structural processes, and therefore not anthopomorphic. His
project of constructing a ‘scientific Marxism’ relied on using the concepts, according to him,
that Marx developed as a way of understanding the real historical development of social
formations as a process without a subject.
It is far too easy, however, to confine Althusser to an anti-Hegelian position. While
allowing that he generally assumes such a stance, I want to show that Althusser’s relationship
with Hegel is more nuanced than is often acknowledged. Examining these shifting positions
allows me to identify the ways in which Althusser requires Hegel, and how his work remains
infused with a certain Hegelian logic. Specifically, I will attempt to show how the category
of the subject remains useful politically and epistemologically, albeit in ways that must
account for Althusser’s anti-humanist and anti-empiricist critique. Althusser’s rejection of
the subject, and the subject-object relationship that helps structure dialectical movement, I
will argue, is one of the reasons why his conceptualization of the Marxist dialectic fails to
account for political struggle, and is therefore insufficient for the requirements of
transformative social critique.
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I - Althusser’s Early Work on Hegel
While studying under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Althusser produced an essay called
“On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel,”1 which reveals a sympathetic disposition
toward Hegel. Because it was written in 1947, well before his mature work, it cannot be
awarded sufficient authority to overturn those later writings. What makes this text useful is
that it allows us to trace the changes that took place in Althusser’s understanding of Hegel.
To do this I’m going to run through the position Althusser takes in this text on three
important concepts: mediation, negativity, and what I call ‘the ends’ of the dialectic.
The notion of immediate knowledge is incoherent for Hegel. The opening dialectic in
the Phenomenology shows that even knowledge of the senses is mediated by subjectivity,
language, and pre-existing thought categories, or concepts. Althusser describes this aspect of
Hegel’s dialectic in the following way:
Such is the lesson of the Phenomenology: the given content is destroyed in the very
act by which I seek to take possession of it, but it does not elude me qua content, it
eludes me only qua given.2
If trying to identify something as given robs it of that very status, the concept of origin is
equally untenable in Hegel’s dialectic. Instead of an origin, or origins, the dialectic contains
points of mediation that are always-already in process. To put it simply, mediation tells us
that there is always a intermediate or connecting link between two things.
Althusser is also aware in this early text that negativity plays an important role for
1
Louis Althusser, “On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel,” in The Spectre of Hegel, trans. G.M
Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997), 36-169. In lieu of a formal bibliography complete information will
provided for each source the first time it is noted.
2
L.A., The Spectre of Hegel, 66.
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Hegel, going so far as to describe Hegel’s dialectic as “the concept of negativity.”3 Althusser
highlights the productive and positive element in negativity, which as part of the Aufhebung4
preserves what has been negated. Unfortunately, most of Althusser’s emphasis falls on the
ability of negativity to preserve, which links it to a one-sided account of Hegelian negation.
Althusser claims the following: “To say that the Self is its own mediation comes down to
showing that negativity is the soul of the whole. Indeed, the totality constitutes itself by
means of negativity, which is supersession of the supersession, that is, negation of the
negation.”5 I think this conflates negativity with negation, which are separate processes.
Determinate negation is a very precise process for Hegel whereby a particular category of
thought or mode of consciousness is negated by its own internal contradictions. This
negation results in the formation of a new category that is analytically distinct from the
previous one, though still dependent on it. Negation relies on a strict rhythm between the
negative and positive that maintains a clear set of conceptual boundaries and identities.
Negativity, on the other hand, both produces and challenges this type of conceptual
dichotomy by overflowing and disrupting any notion of absolute identity. As part of Hegel’s
dialectic, the instability caused by negativity in turn requires a type of thinking and
conceptualization that is never finished, and therefore can never be closed off.
3
Ibid., 115.
4
The Aufhebung is, of course, a technical term for Hegel, denoting a process whereby the
contradictions internal to a particular stage of consciousness lead to its demise, yet the truth content of that stage
is integrated or preserved in the following stage.
5
L.A., The Spectre of Hegel, 88. See p.115 for a similar statement. Althusser prefers using negation of
the negation, or supersession, instead of Aufhebung.
5
Although Althusser does not make explicit the links between negativity and his views
on ‘the ends’ of the dialectic, it is still apparent that negativity plays a prominent role.
Althusser says that the potential unity of truth and reality is the “profoundest idea”6 in the
6
L.A., The Spectre of Hegel, 143.
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Phenomenology, but does not think this unity is possible. Since the world can never be
accurately reflected in thought, “We are therefore condemned to a certain dualism between
truth and reality.”7 The dialectic cannot culminate in anything that would signal the
resolution of this dualism because it is “. . . neither a rule nor fixed laws, because the object
and its measure vary over the course of the process.”8 Indeed, the dialectic is always in
process. Thus Hegel’s dialectic seems suspended between, on the one hand, a supposed
culmination where truth and reality are understood to be identical, and on the other, a process
that by its very nature cannot be completed. As Adorno puts it, “. . . Hegel’s formulations,
which neither can be nor are intended to be conclusive, nevertheless sound as though they
were.”9
Perhaps it comes as little surprise, then, that in reference to Hegel’s valorization of the
Prussian State in Elements of the Philosophy of Right10, Althusser rejects the notion that it
represents the highest form of political organization possible. Significantly, he argues that
“We were unable to locate the reason for this inconsistency in [Hegel’s philosophical]
system; it must, then, lie outside it.”11 For Althusser, the inconsistency found in Hegel’s
7
Ibid., 152.
8
Ibid., 113. Quotation slightly amended.
9
Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (London: The MIT Press,
1994), 109.
10
G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991).
11
L.A., The Spectre of Hegel, 141. Quotation slightly amended.
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Philosophy of Right is not a result of his philosophical system, but his desire to maintain it in
spite of all contradiction.12 Although I’m not interested in this aspect of Hegel’s thought in
this paper, it does show that Althusser remains somewhat ambiguous about the actual
categories of Hegel’s dialectic. At this point he prefers to simply counterpose idealism to
materialism.
For now it is sufficient to restate what Althusser is able to identify in Hegel: first,
Hegel’s understanding of mediation prevents content from being established as given. This
also appears to invalidate a concept of origin. Second, negativity is identified as the driving
force of Hegel’s dialectic, but Althusser ends up conflating it with the negation of the
negation. Third, Althusser believes that the errors in Hegel’s political and social thought are
more the result of his reticence to jeopardize his philosophy, rather than the actual
philosophical categories he employs.
II - Althusser’s Later Work on Hegel and Marx
Althusser’s early work considered Hegel’s merits apart from a strictly Marxist
problematic, whereas the commitment of his mature work to establishing a scientific Marxist
philosophy meant that Hegel could only be properly understood and utilized within a Marxist
framework.
In For Marx and Reading Capital (1965), Althusser intends to show how Hegel’s
dialectic provides little philosophical value. He now vigorously contends that Hegel’s
dialectical concepts are directly responsible for its content. Even Marx’s solution of inverting
the dialectic so that it dealt with the material world rather than consciousness is inadequate.
12
L.A., The Spectre of Hegel, 145-8 especially.
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Such a move merely produces what Althusser calls an “idealist anthropology.”13 To escape
from this requires a complete break with Hegel.
If we clearly perceive the intimate and close relation that the Hegelian structure of the
dialectic has with Hegel’s ‘world outlook’, that is, with his speculative philosophy,
this ‘world outlook’ cannot really be cast aside without our being obliged to transform
profoundly the structures of that dialectic.14
It is necessary to specify exactly which structures of the Hegelian dialectic Althusser wanted
to transform. The Aufhebung is a predictable target, and Althusser highlights how it was only
through a retreat from this process that Marx freed himself from speculative German
philosophy to concentrate on real history.15 No amount of emphasis on the element of
rupture in the Aufhebung can overcome the fact that, for Althusser, this occurs within a
process of preservation. If one is to grasp Marx, or comprehend the fluctuations of the real, it
is necessary, Althusser says,
to adopt instead a logic of actual experience and real emergence, one that would put
an end to the illusions of ideological immanence; in short, to adopt a logic of the
irruption of real history in ideology
13
Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
Penguin Books, 1969), 89. Hereafter I will refer to this text as FM, and specify the essay in question. See also,
with Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1970). Marx’s claim, in the
Afterward of the Second German Edition of Capital Volume One, is: “With him [Hegel] it [the dialectic] is
standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the
mystical shell.” See The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd Ed. (London: W.W. Norton and
Company, 1978), 302.
14
L.A., FM, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 104. Italics in original translation.
15
L.A., FM, “On the Young Marx,” 76. As Althusser points out, a concern for the labour movement
could never come out of speculative-idealist philosophy.
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itself . . . 16
In other words, Althusser is arguing that because the Aufhebung ultimately preserves all that
has been negated, Hegel’s dialectic cannot account for real, material experience, or the
discontinuities of the political.
If Althusser critiques the inclusivity and continuity that preservation allows in the
dialectic, he also identifies how contradiction functions in an exclusive way for Hegel.
Althusser argues that because any social formation is both determining of and determined by
the plurality of elements that constitute it, “it might be called overdetermined in its
principle.”17 For now I’ll just make a basic distinction between an overdetermined
contradiction and a ‘simple’ one. Overdetermination implies that at any given moment the
social formation is characterized by multiple contradictions that are themselves the result of a
multitude of different constituent elements (or at least more than two). The distinguishing
feature of this complexity is a “structure in dominance” that assumes the principal role in
organizing and articulating the specific form of any social whole.18 A simple contradiction,
in contrast, is a process involving just a single pair of opposites.
The whole of the Hegelian dialectic is here, that is, it is completely dependent on the
radical presupposition of a simple original unity which develops within itself by
16
Ibid., 82. ‘On the Young Marx’ Italics in original translation. It is also worth noting that in this essay
(p.78n) Althusser identifies to Spinoza as a more logical predecessor to Marx in terms of arguing for
discontinuities in the development of knowledge. Althusser would later acknowledge the extent of his own debt
to Spinoza.
17
L.A., FM, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 101.
18
Ibid., “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 200-202.
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virtue of its negativity, and throughout its development only ever restores the original
simplicity and unity in an every more ‘concrete’ totality.19
This passage holds a number of implications. Althusser has again conflated the notion of
negativity with the conceptual process of preservation, when one of negativity’s most striking
features is that it permanently undermines any possibility of an unmediated unity or identity.
Nonetheless, he seems to have identified a contradiction in Hegel where his dialectic appears
to require a simple original unity (in the form of an unalienated consciousness) even though
any original starting point where unity may have existed is unavailable, as I discussed above
in relation to Althusser’s early work.20
Related to this idea of complex and simple contradiction is Althusser’s desire to
distinguish the Hegelian “totality” from the Marxist “whole.” In his book on Althusser, Alex
Callinicos puts in this way. The Marxist dialectic is a “unity of opposites,” meaning that
society, or the whole, is an amalgamation of contradictory structures. On the other hand, the
Hegelian dialectic is an “identity of opposites,” which is brought about by “the abolition of
the determinations that constitute them.”21 (I will note that Callinicos does not use any
textual evidence to support this claim, and I will come back to it later.)
The next section continues to examine what Althusser disliked about Hegel, but by
looking more at what made Marx’s dialectic so important for him.
19
Ibid., “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 197.
20
Of course, it is always the case that someone must start somewhere. But there is a difference
between choosing a place to begin and justifying that choice, and positing an absolute Origin in an ontological
or metaphysical sense.
21
Alex Callinicos, Althusser’s Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976), 44.
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III -Marx’s Difference
12
What Althusser calls the structure in dominance is “the most profound characteristic of
the Marxist dialectic.”22 It is responsible for the uneven and overdetermined development of
the structures that constitute the social whole, which is the “specific difference of a Marxist
contradiction.”23 In any social formation the economy is the dominant structure, although,
famously, it is only dominant “in the last instance.”24 This feature of the dialectic is not only a
reality for Althusser, but is required in order to avoid what he saw as the relativism of
explanatory pluralism.25 If the economy is only dominant in the last instance, this means that
it is possible for a different structure to be dominant at any other instance, albeit for economic
reasons. Althusser goes so far as to claim that, “From the first moment to the last, the lonely
hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”26 This is what invests overdetermination with such
theoretical importance. At any given moment the structures that make up the social whole
constitute a complex unity, which is governed by a specific structure in dominance. The
productivity of overdetermination rests in the notion that the specific shape of a social
formation is constantly developing (in response to the dominant structure). For the theorist,
this requires a perpetual return to the specific moment of conjuncture in order to articulate its
form.
22
L.A., FM, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” 206.
23
Ibid., 217.
24
Ibid., 215.
25
L.A., RC, 99.
26
L.A., FM, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 113.
13
This concern with structures cannot be understood apart from Althusser’s rejection of
humanism and the category of the subject, which he identifies as another major difference
between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics.27 The following quotation explains why
Althusser accuses humanism of being an ideological concept.
“When I say that the concept of humanism is an ideological concept (not a scientific
one), I mean that while it really does designate a set of existing relations, unlike a
scientific concept, it does not provide the means of knowing them.”28
The subject of humanist thought is ideological, for Althusser, because it is constitutive. In
other words, it acts as if all its thoughts and actions resulted from its own conscious intentions.
This subject imagines that its relationship to its conditions of existence is shaped, first and
foremost, by its ability to make unrestricted personal choices. Further, humanist notions of the
subject necessarily rely on some idea of human essence, from which we are usually estranged
or alienated. This last part is the basis on which Marx’s early work is often judged. Of
course, Althusser’s well-known claim is that there is an epistemological break in Marx’s work
around 1845 (and The German Ideology, specifically) that signalled the end of his flirtations
with the humanist anthropology of Hegel and Feuerbach.29 Althusser thinks that when it
27
Elsewhere, Althusser at length lists the new concepts Marx used, such as the mode of production, and
relations of production. Although they distinguish the Marxist dialectic from the Hegelian one, they do not find
their opposite, as it were, in Hegel. See ESC, 108-9.
28
L.A., FM, “Marxism and Humanism,” 223.
29
I am not going to comment in any length on Althusser’s claim, which inspired so much literature that
there is little left to say on this matter. While I think that there is a general shift in Marx’s work away from
humanism and toward his ‘scientific’ notion of historical materialism, I disagree with the notion of a break. To
my mind, Marx’s later work - especially Capital - lacks a certain political urgency once it is divorced from the
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comes to understanding social relations and change, the individual, or the category of the
subject, is an inadequate unit of analysis compared with, say, classes, or the mode and
relations of production. While the subject is determined, the latter categories and processes
are determining. Thus, political, economic, and historical change, must be thought as a
process without a subject.
Althusser provocatively writes that Marx’s “theoretical anti-humanism” constitutes a
philosophical revolution. “It is impossible to know anything about men except on the
precondition that the philosophical (theoretical) myth of man is reduced to ashes.”30 This is
the direct political implication for the dialectic. Althusser also rejects the category of the
subject in an epistemological sense. Because he thinks of the socio-political field as a series
of objects, any claim to knowledge must be posed “. . . in terms which exclude any recourse to
the ideological solution contained in the ideological characters Subject and Object.”31 This is
essentially a critique of empiricism, which for Althusser is based on an implicit harmony or
identity between subject and object. Contrary to his earlier endorsements of mediation,
ethical underpinnings of alienation. This is not to say that alienation is a concept we cannot go without, but that
it is one that Marx could not go without. For a strong set of arguments against Althusser’s position, see Norman
Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983).
30
L.A., FM, “Marxism and Humanism.” 229. It is interesting to note that although it has become much
more common to cite Foucault’s attack on the notion of Man in The Order of Things, Althusser’s essay was
published two years prior to Foucault’s work. I should also note the point made by Martin Heidegger, that a
theoretical rejection of humanism “does not mean that such thinking aligns itself against the humane and
advocates the inhuman, that it promotes the inhumane and deprecates the dignity of man.” See “Letter on
Humanism,” in Basic Writings (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), 233.
31
L.A., RC, 55.
15
Althusser is now hostile to any counter-argument that there is always a mediating term or
element that displaces the simple subject-object dichotomy and its apparent unity. Instead, he
critiques what he calls the “magical role” of mediation, which creates a false unity between
theoretical concepts with material reality. Such a unity would violate his earlier claim that
truth cannot be reconciled with reality.32
The list of differences between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectic has become a long
one. The latter is uniquely characterized by the following: a complex set of overdetermined
contradictions; a structure in dominance that is determined, in the last instance, by the
economy; the uneven development of contradictions; a form of theoretical anti-humanism that
rejects the concepts of the subject, origin, essence, and mediation; a committed resistance to
the teleology associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Aufhebung and negativity; and the
concept of a process without a subject (this will be discussed more later). What I want to do
now is investigate whether Althusser is in fact closer to some of Hegel’s positions than it
would seem.
IV - Althusser on Hegel and Marx: Ambiguities
Just before his famous statement in Capital that Hegel is standing on his head and
needs to be turned right side up, Marx also writes how the “mystification that the dialectic
suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general
form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner.”33 Althusser says that “Marx
32
To make his point, Althusser liked to remind people that the concept of sugar does not taste sweet.
33
Marx, Capital, Vol.1, Marx-Engels Reader, 302.
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transformed the Hegelian dialectic, but he owed Hegel a crucial gift: the idea of the
dialectic.”34 This is from the essay “Marx’s Relation to Hegel” (Jan 1968), which is where
Althusser’s hard line against Hegel starts to soften. Althusser says Hegel provides the “idea of
the dialectic”; Marx says he provides its “general form of working.” I’m not sure if these are
equivalent, and, as we’ll see, Althusser will end up giving more ground to Hegel on this.
I want to go back now to the point Alex Callinicos made, but which I think is equally
true of Althusser: that was the distinction between Marxist “unity of opposites” and the
Hegelian “identity of opposites.” And I want to challenge this by looking at an example of
Hegel’s logic, which I think has some striking affinities with Althusser. To quote Hegel from
his Science of Logic:
The beginning is not pure nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed;
therefore being, too, is already contained in the beginning. The beginning, therefore,
contains both, being and nothing, is the unity of being and nothing.35
Stopping here would give the impression that, pace Callinicos, Hegel eliminates any
distinctions between being and nothing, producing absolute identity between them. But Hegel
continues to make a crucial conceptual addition. “The analysis of the beginning would thus
yield the notion of the unity of being and nothing - or, in a more reflected form, the unity of
34
L.A., Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1977), 174. Italics in original.
Hereafter PH. Also see L.A., “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza,” In The New Spinoza
(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997), 4.
35
1989), 73.
Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V.Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International,
17
differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness, or the identity of identity and non-identity.”36
While the Marxist dialectic is supposedly a unity of opposites compared with the Hegelian
identity of opposites, Hegel upsets this argument by using both formulations. For Hegel, the
dialectical process of becoming is an “immanent synthesis of being and nothing,”37 which
nonetheless contains its negative, or its opposite. This moment of becoming holds being and
nothing together without denying their mutual difference, in other words, without denying the
contradictions that will help drive the dialectic.
A similar type of process appears to take place in Althusser’s conceptualization of
overdetermination, where social structures combine to produce the unity of a social whole that
is nonetheless contradictory. In order to understand how this occurs, we must make concrete
determinations that determine, on the one hand, the true relations between certain structures.
On the other hand, the relations established by this quasi-essentialist moment are contradicted
(shown to be unsustainable) once further determinations involving other structural relations
are made. An overdetermined understanding of the social whole resists any permanent closure
by always negating the particular determinations on which it depends, doing so, as Richard
Wolff puts it, “. . . in a rather classic Hegelian rhythm.”38 The continuous movement that
defines overdeterminist explanation relies on a dialectical logic where each moment is both
36
Hegel, Science of Logic, 74.
37
Ibid., 96.
38
Richard Wolff, “Althusser and Hegel: Making Marxist Explanations Antiessentialist and Dialectical,”
In Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory (London: University Press of New England, 1996),
156.
18
true and false.
If Althusser’s notion of overdetermination shares affinities with the rhythm of Hegel’s
dialectic, I think it is necessary to re-problematize Althusser’s criticism of negativity. Marx
claimed that “The outstanding thing in Hegel’s Phenomenology and its final outcome - that is,
the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle - is thus first that Hegel
conceives of the self-genesis of man as a process . . .”39 Althusser goes so far as to say that
“Marx owes Hegel this decisive philosophical category, process.”40 Note the change in
Althusser’s language within this one essay: Hegel has not merely provided the idea of the
dialectic, but a decisive philosophical category. And that category - process - cannot be
thought without the idea of negativity. It is negativity that undermines the possibility of the
given or the origin, or indeed of any stable category of being. Etienne Balibar makes it clear
how the radical openness of negativity is crucial to Althusser’s own project. “The question [of
negativity] is important because, from Hegel onward, this notion was a criterion of
demarcation between dialectics and positivism . . .” He continues, “Without such a concept,
there is no real possibility of formulating structural antagonism as something irreconcilable,
rooted in the experience of the unbearable and taking the forms of a “radical” resistance.”41
Balibar’s comment about the experience of the unbearable is reminiscent of Marx’s claim in
The German Ideology, that a revolution requires an “intolerable power” against which men
39
Marx, 1844 Manuscripts, Marx-Engels Reader, 112
40
L.A., PH, 181. Italics in original.
41
Etienne Balibar, “Totality, Causality, and Explanation,” in Postmodern Materialism and the Future of
Marxist Theory (London: University Press of New England, 1996), 118-19.
19
act.42 Negativity, then, characterizes the movements of irreconcilable structural antagonisms
(negativity permanently resists closure) as well as the consciousness of those who resist their
unbearable formation (negativity maintains space for oppositional consciousness and subject
formation). Ironically, as Althusser moved further away from his early work which had been
somewhat more amenable to negativity, he came to dismiss negativity just as he required its
movements and radical openness the most.
The turns Althusser takes endorsing and rejecting elements of Hegel’s thought makes
an assessment of his work more difficult. However, these alternative accounts invite our
return to make new interventions. And nowhere else is this more evident than with the
category of the subject.
V - Interrogating the Subject
I have already explicated how Althusser’s anti-humanism rejects the idea of a
constitutive subject that directs the course of history.43 In reference to Hegel, this antihumanism leads to this important claim. If we can think of Hegel without the category of
alienation, or without the teleological negation of the negation, we are left the idea that . . .
42
Marx, The German Ideology, Marx-Engels Reader, 161. The intolerable power Marx is referring to
here is estrangement, which is reflected in the propertyless conditions of the masses.
43
See, for example, Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: NLB,
1976), 94-95. Hereafter referred to as ESC.
20
history is a process without a subject. I think I can affirm: this category of a process
without a subject, which must of course be torn from the grip of the Hegelian
teleology, undoubtedly represents the greatest theoretical debt linking Marx to Hegel. 44
This quotation mirrors one part of how I think the Phenomenology should be read, where
individual consciousness is merely a vehicle for the categories of thought as they unfold. For
Althusser, this would be equivalent to the objective, impersonal logic of social structures. But
my claim is that this was an incomplete reading, one that does not account for the subtleties of
Hegel’s dialectic. I think there is a embodied, sensuous, labouring subject in the
Phenomenology, that experiences the processes of thought, and is sometimes even positioned
by these processes so that its intervention can occur (such as in the process of labour) which
sustains the radical openness of the dialectic by making its outcome undecidable. My position
is that it is possible to engage in a more productive interrogation of thinkers like Hegel and
Marx (and certainly Althusser himself) by substituting for the structuralist category of a
process without a subject, an existential sense of a subject in process.
The idea of a subject in process rests on two general claims, which are meant to show
how subjects are situated and produced, precisely because their production is - or can be contradictory. 1) The subject is embedded in processes mainly outside of its control; 2) the
subject is in process, which is to say that its state of being is one of permanent becoming. The
processes to which I refer are configured by a field of structural determinants, power effects,
and language, for example. But that field is a contradictory one, unable to proscribe precisely
where, within the limits it sets, the stress of subjects will fall. This concept of a subject in
process maintains the room to account for what type of subject is produced not only when
ideology succeeds, but when it fails (e.g., when there is no longer correspondence between
44
L.A., PH, 182-3. Italics in original.
21
subjection and qualification).45 The result is a subject that is produced by a social context (and
therefore is not primordial or constitutive) that contains spaces for resistance against that
context. History, then, is a process that produces subjects that are sometimes able to act
contrary to structural determinants.
If Hegel’s dialectic is not characterized by one specific type of process (if it is more
than just a something structural), the implication - contra Althusser’s claim - is that the
concept of a process without a subject cannot be the greatest theoretical debt linking Hegel
and Marx. I am not denying, as Althusser stresses, that the relations of production, and social
and political relations, are also subjects. One of the greatest legacies of Marx and Althusser is
to keep us from falling into a liberal trap where the subject is equated solely with humans, and
the individual in particular, which then becomes its primary unit of analysis. But this does not
mean that the relations of production are the quote “true ‘subjects’,”46 over and against say,
certain power effects, certain social groups, or even the individual. Just as Althusser uses
overdetermination to make the point that in any specific social conjuncture, social structures
are reorganized along dominant and subordinate lines, it could be argued that at any given
moment a certain type of subject might find itself in a dominant position within the social
45
I refer to ideology here because the point I am making can be seen most vividly in Althusser’s essay
on ideology. The logic of so-called Ideological State Apparatuses (and social processes more generally - at least
implicitly) is presented as uniform, indeed almost monolithic. There is no recognition (until the postscript added
later on) that the various interpellations made by ISAs can come into conflict with one another. See L.A.,
“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 85-126.
46
L.A., RC, 180.
22
whole. Despite granting objective dominance to the economy’s role in the constitution of
social relations, Althusser’s hope for radical social change at some point will require the
subjective intervention of a popular uprising. Structures do not, after all, take to the streets.
Indeed, there is no decisive evidence to suggest that the working class takes to the streets,
either. Having abandoned the subject to history, Althusser’s insistence that, “Everything
depends, in the last instance, not on techniques but on militants, on their class consciousness,
on their devotion, and on their courage,”47 makes for an awkward set of positions.
Rethinking some of Althusser’s rigid positions on Hegel, and the category of the
subject, leads back to Althusser’s own reworking of the dialectic. Do the categories he
introduces allow for a rigorous social criticism? Can he account for the possibility, or
impossibility, of social transformation? Since one of Hegel’s greatest attributes was to
demonstrate his dialectic, is Althusser able to do the same?
VI - Back to Althusser’s Dialectic
There is, I think, an unreconcilable difference between structuralism and dialectics. To
the extent that structuralism is a determinism, it cannot account for differences between
structures and what they produce. That is, while dialectics identifies the precise contradiction
between the identities of the particular and the general, structuralism sees the particular as a
simple reflection of the general. To posit an unmediated, or uncontradictory identity between
the two, is to rule out dialectics.
Some of Althusser’s final work goes a long way to overturning the impression that he
47
L.A., Positions, quoted in Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on
Anti-Humanism, trans. Mary H.S. Cattani (Amherst, Mass: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990).
23
is a structuralist.48 Nonetheless, there are times when his work is so burdened by its attention
to structures that there seems to be room for little else. Concepts such as overdetermination,
structure in dominance, and uneven development, certainly require us to reconsider our
understanding of how the social whole is constituted. What remains absent in Althusser’s
work is an actual demonstration of how these concepts function together.49 This is not a
serious problem if such a demonstration could be made. However, I think the reason why
Althusser never demonstrated his dialectic is because it was immobilized by the very
structuralist categories he used to release it from conceptual determinism. The idea of a
structure in dominance allows for conceptualizing the uneven development of structural
contradictions. How is a dominant structure established? Althusser’s answer, if it can be
called one, is to posit the economy as the determining structure ‘in the last instance,’ even
though that moment supposedly never comes. This sleight of hand allows him to avoid
conceptual pluralism, as well as the determinism that would result if the last instance ever
arrived. But if the last instance never comes, then it is no longer possible for the economy to
be determinant. Assuming the last instance can occur, then any appeal to the overdetermined
conditions of a social whole loses its force. Overdetermined conditions would then rest on the
existence of one simple determination: the economy. The last instance ends up being
indistinguishable from the first instance, or any other, since any determinant structure other
48
See ESC, 126-131 for Althusser’s denial that he was ever a structuralist.
49
This, along with his charge that Althusser falls prey to structuralism, is one of the few helpful insights
in E.P. Thompson’s bombastic polemic in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Merlin Press,
1978).
24
than the economy is in debt to it for this status. Further, Althusser cannot explain the
positional dominance of the economy by referring to any particular configuration of the social
whole because it exists for him as a trans-historical fact.50 This a priori causal factor produces
a deterministic understanding of how the social is constituted. The result for social critique is
that the possibility of a dialectics has been written out because the source of all contradictions
has been determined in advance.
Althusser later admitted how in For Marx and Reading Capital, he had succumbed to
‘theoreticism’: “[the] primacy of theory over practice; one-sided insistence on theory; but
more precisely: speculative-rationalism.”51 This suggests that the composition of
structuralism left questions of political struggle - specifically class struggle - behind.
Theoretical questions ended up eliminating the most important political questions. To put it
another way - and here I’ll conclude - there is a high price to pay for jettisoning the subject:
epistemologically, it eliminates the space for a detailed analysis of contradiction between the
general and the particular. Politically, it eliminates the ability to conceptualize the experience
of the subject, its possible resistance, and the possibility of social transformation that just
might come with it.
50
Althusser does discuss how the feudal and capitalist modes of production have different ruling
ideological state apparatuses, but still does not explain why the economy plays the dominant determining role.
See L.A., “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” esp. 100-106.
51
L.A., ESC, 124n. ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’
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