'for a nobody starting with nothing and from nowhere in particular'

Machiavelli was a later discovery, and in my view he went a lot further than
Marx on a number of issues, for example in trying to conceive the conditions and
kinds of political action in its pure form, that is to say at the conceptual level. What
struck me again was the radical manner in which he took into account the
aleatory nature of every conjuncture. In addition, he revealed that what was
needed, if Italian national unity was to be achieved, was for a nobody starting
with nothing and from nowhere in particular, but outside the framework of
an established State, to bring together the fragmented elements of a divided
country, without any preconceived notion of unity which might have been
formulated in terms of existing political concepts (all of which were bad).We
have not yet, I believe, explored all the implications of this piece of political
thinking, the first of its kind and sadly without sequel. - Louis Althusser

Academic philosophy cannot tolerate Lenin

Academic philosophy cannot tolerate Lenin (or Marx for the matter) for
two reasons, which are really one and the same. On the one hand, it cannot
bear the idea that it might have something to learn from politics and from
a politician. And on the other hand, it cannot bear the idea that philosophy
might be the object of a theory, i.e. of an objective knowledge. - Louis Althusser

Clint Eastwood and Aleatory Materialism

In a two-page note he wrote in 1986 titled ‘Portrait du philosophe matérialiste’,
Althusser refers to the unknown, perhaps even outlaw, hero of
American Westerns typical of the popular culture of his own era, someone who
jumps on to a moving train without knowing whence it comes or where it is
going, then gets off at a small station and heads for the saloon to quench his
thirst:

Saloon, beer, whiskey. ‘Where d’ya hail from, bud?’ ‘From a long way off.’
‘Where ya headed?’ ‘Dunno!’ ‘Might have some work for ya.’ ‘Okay’.

The hero in the Westerns is the figure of an aleatory materialist, who does not
know the beginning or goal of his long journey. He is, nevertheless, a positive hero,
not a villain, even if the hero is an outlaw. In the town he gains the trust
of the people, reluctantly fastens the sheriff’s badge on his chest, presents his
own unique interpretation of the law, curbs the villains and schemers who
have terrorised the town, returns order for the time being and then disappears
into the sunset of the desert without knowing how long his good fortune
will continue or whether he will soon be killed by a bullet or arrow in some
skirmish.

Nobody or nothing forces the hero to jump on to that particular train nor to
get off at that particular station, nor to take on the job of the sheriff. The hero is
not a cavalry officer who merely obeys the orders of his superiors, nor is he a
city dweller or someone representing the federal state, as perhaps the previous
sheriff was, but who was unable to fulfill his legal duties.
- Mikko Lahtinen, Politics and Philosophy 'Althusser’s Aleatory Machiavelli', p.178

Interview: Balibar and Macherey - James H. Kavanagh and Thomas E. Lewis (Diacrtitics Vol 12, 1982, pp. 26-52)

pp.50-1 (Literary production)


MACHEREY:It is not a science of literature all by itself. From the outset, we refused to respond to the question: "What is literature?"

BALIBAR: But in a certain sense, we could not avoid at some moment acting as if we were giving such a response.

MACHEREY: No. On this point, I think we remained consistent. And all those who were working against us in similar fields at the time, they all raised again the question 'What is literature?,"and proposed their answers. Look at Sollers.

KAVANACH: Do you prefer the question: How can we construct a science of the literary text?

MACHEREY: Yes, but that is not at all the same question. And it is not a science of the literary text as such, as an isolated and autonomous phenomenon.

LEWIS: How would you characterize the productive analysis of literary texts?

MACHEREY: But what does one do when one speaks of literaryt exts? Are texts literary in themselves, by their own intrinsic characteristics, which distinguish them from non-literary texts? I think one must say that a text is literary because it is recognized as such, at a certain moment, under certain conditions. It may not have been so recognized before, and it may not be after. I did a lot of work on Jules Verne, at a time when no one spoke of him; now he has become an author, and everyone does his or her book on Jules Verne. He has been returned to "French Literature"; he is explained in class. But when I worked on him, he was not even a minor author; this was not "Literature."

KAVANAGH: Are texts ideological in themselves? Are there certain intrinsic characteristics that define them as ideological? MACHEREY:Ideology is present in texts as a material from which they are constructed. In this sense, it is something internal.

BALIBAR: It's ideology that is not being defined clearly. You are playing with two meanings. There is a spontaneous, idealist aspect of the term ideology, which appears again for political reasons at this moment- a period of defense of the rights of man against "systems of ideology," meaning the world of ideas more or less directly and consciously tied to politics. This sense of the term implies at once, in a contradictory fashion, something profoundly illusory and weak, and something extremely dangerous and powerful, because it holds men and women in an oppressive society. The meaning of the term ideology that we have tried to use from Marx, in the way Althusser began to specify it, was, from the beginning, totally different from this.

Lenin and Philosophy

After all, this French academic philosophy, profoundly religious, spiritualist and reactionary one hundred and fifty years ago, then in the best of cases conservative, finally belatedly liberal and 'personalist', this philosophy which magnificently ignored Hegel, Marx and Freud, this academic philosophy which only seriously began to read Kant, then Hegel and Husserl, and even to discover the existence of Frege and Russell a few decades ago, and sometimes less, why should it have concerned itself with this Bolshevik, revolutionary, and politician, Lenin?
Besides the overwhelming class pressures on its strictly philosophical traditions, besides the condemnation by its most 'liberal' spirits of 'Lenin's unthinkable pre-critical philosophical thought', the French philosophy which we have inherited has lived in the conviction that it can have nothing philosophical to learn either from a politician or from politics. To give just one example, it was only a little while ago that a few French academic philosophers first turned to the study of the great theoreticians of political philosophy, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Grotius, Locke and even Rousseau, 'our' Rousseau. Only thirty years earlier, these authors were abandoned to literary critics and jurists as left-overs.
　
But French academic philosophy was not mistaken in its radical refusal to learn anything from politicians and politics, and therefore from Lenin. Everything which touches


page 30
on politics may be fatal to philosophy, for philosophy lives on politics.
Of course, it cannot be said that, if academic philosophy has ever read him, Lenin did not more than repay it in kind, 'leaving it the change'! Listen to him in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, invoking Dietzgen, the German proletarian who Marx and Engels said had discovered 'dialectical materialism ' 'all by himself', as an auto-didact, because he was a proletarian militant:
'Graduated flunkeys ', who with their talk of 'ideal blessings ' stultify the people by their tortuous 'idealism ' -- that is J. Dietzgen's opinion of the professors of philosophy. 'Just as the antipodes of the good God is the devil, so the professorial priest had his opposite pole in the materialist .' The materialist theory of knowledge is 'a universal weapon against religious belief ', and not only against the 'notorious, formal and common religion of the priests, but also against the most refined, elevated professorial religion of muddled idealists '. Dietzgen was ready to prefer 'religious honesty ' to the 'half-heartedness ' of free-thinking professors, for 'there a system prevails ', there we find integral people, people who do not separate theory from practice. For the Herr Professors 'philosophy is not a science, but a means of defence against Social-Democracy '. 'Those who call themselves philosophers -- professors and university lecturers -- are, despite their apparent free-thinking, more or less immersed in superstition and mysticism . . . and in relation to Social-Democracy constitute a single . . . reactionary mass .' 'Now, in order to follow the true path, without being led astray by an the religious and philosophical gibberish, it is necessary to study the falsest of all false paths (der Holzweg der Holzwege ), philosophy ' (Materialism and Empirio-criticism, Collected Works, Moscow, 1962, Vol. 14, pp. 340-41).[3]
Ruthless though it is, this text also manages to distinguish between 'free-thinkers' and 'integral people', even when they are religious, who have a 'system' which is not just speculative but inscribed in their practice. It is also lucid:

page 31
it is no accident that it ends with an astonishing phrase of Dietzgen's, which Lenin quotes: we need to follow a true path; but in order to follow a true path it is necessary to study philosophy, which is 'the falsest of all
　
false paths ' (der Holzweg-der Holzwege). Which means, to speak plainly, that there can be no true path (sc. in the sciences, but above all in politics) without a study, and, eventually a theory of philosophy as a false path.

In the last resort, and more important than all the reasons I have just evoked, this is undoubtedly why Lenin is intolerable to academic philosophy, and, to avoid hurting anyone, to the vast majority of philosophers, if not to all philosophers, whether academic or otherwise. He is, or has been on one occasion or another, philosophically intolerable to everyone (and obviously I also mean myself). Intolerable, basically, because despite all they may say about the pre-critical character of his philosophy and the summary aspect of some of his categories, philosophers feel and know that this is not the real question. They feel and know that Lenin is profoundly indifferent to their objections. He is indifferent first, because he foresaw them long ago. Lenin said himself: I am not a philosopher, I am badly prepared in this domain (Letter to Gorky, 7 February 1908). Lenin said: I know that my formulations and definitions are vague, unpolished; I know that philosophers are going to accuse my materialism of being 'metaphysical'. But he adds: that is not the question. Not only do I not 'philosophize' with their philosophy, I do not 'philosophize' like them at all. Their way of 'philosophizing' is to expend fortunes of intelligence and subtlety for no other purpose than to ruminate in philosophy. Whereas I treat philosophy differently, I practise it, as Marx intended, in obedience to what it is. That is why I believe I am a 'dialectical materialist'.

Notes: Gregory Elliot ‘Althusser: The Detour of Theory’

P.58 (pdf 82) - 8 Sep 2010

Marxist philosophy was dialectical materialism, the science of the laws of nature and thought. Applied to society, it became historical materialism, the science of the laws of social development.
Two adjustments were made: the negation of the negation was restored to the corpus of dialectical materialism; the Asiatic mode of production to that of historical materialism.

P.66 (pdf 91)

According to this historicism, just as scientific socialism was the theoretical expression of a class subject, so the natural sciences were bourgeois ideology –bourgeois sciences which would be abolished together with the capitalist mode of production. Contrariwise, as the theoretical expression of the ‘universal’ class of capitalist society – the proletariat – Marxism could attain to a genuine understanding of the social totality, which, according to these philosophies of praxis, was the creation and expression of humanity (of whose alienation and disalienation history was the unfolding drama). Thus, for Lukács, Marxism was the self-consciousness of the proletariat, itself the subject-object of history which would redeem all humanity in the act of emancipating itself. And ‘orthodoxy’ ‘refer[red] exclusively to method’ – the dialectical method inherited from Hegel and now restricted, contra Engels, to ‘the realms of history and society’. A ‘proletarian science’, historical materialism ‘completed the programme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, even though at the cost of the destruction of his system’.

P. 154 (pdf 179) 11 Sep Lacanian Real – Reality

The target of Althusser’s theory of ideology was the supposed messianism involved in the postulate of a disalienation with the advent of communism, a society whose deepest ‘laws of motion’ would be transparent to the consciousness of its members in an ‘end of ideology’. For Althusser, this was a chimera. He impugned any theory of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ as itself ideological, on two grounds. First, it implied the possibility of a true consciousness, whereas, epistemologically, consciousness was non-veridical by definition. Secondly, it circumscribed the social space and underestimated the objective power of ideology. For Althusser, ideology is an ‘objective reality . . . independent of the subjectivity of the individuals who are subject to it’, a system of representations dominated by a ‘false conception of the world’. Men are ‘ideological animals’. They need representations of the world and their relations to it in order to function as social agents. Ideology provides the requisite representation (which can be more or less conscious/unconscious, untheorised/theorised). Analytically a relative autonomous superstructural level of society, in reality ideology is a ‘cement . . . sliding into all the parts of the [social] edifice’. It ‘permeates’ all human activities and practices, governing the ‘lived’ relations of individuals to the ensemble of their ‘conditions of existence’. Indeed, ‘[i]deology is so much present in all their acts and deeds that it is indistinguishable from their “lived “experience”’.

P.160 (pdf 185)

the path which was opened up to men by the great revolutionary thinkers, theoreticians and politicians, the great materialist thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by knowledge of the laws of their slavery, and that the ‘realization’ of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them – Althusser , ‘Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract’ (1966)
P.169 (pdf 194) 15 Sep

…at his ‘trial’ on 30 November 1963, Althusser finessed his critics by adopting the tactic of distinguishing between the ‘theoretical value’ of Mao’s concepts in On Contradiction and their utilisation by the CPC in the current conjuncture to sanction false political positions. His accusers, he retorted, were guilty of a ‘theoretical pragmatism’ inverse but akin to that of the Chinese, impugning genuine theory as a result of its conjunctural exploitation. Althusser upheld the authentically Marxist nature of Mao’s theses on contradiction, but abjured their deformation at the CPC’s hands, affirming the correctness of the PCF’s own international line.5 This did the trick – for the time being at least.

P.175 (pdf 200) Althusser (unsigned) – ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1966)

Is it impossible for it to regress to
capitalism?

Do we not already possess an example of this phenomenon: Yugoslavia?

Can a socialist country, then, not retain – even for a considerable period of time – the, or at least some, external forms of socialism (economic, political), whilst imparting to them a quite different economic, political, and ideological content (the mechanism of capitalist restoration), and allowing itself to be progressively neutralised and utilised politically, then dominated economically,
by imperialism?

P.190 (pdf 215)

If philosophy is the class struggle in theory, then for a Marxist philosopher to philosophise is to fight the good fight; philosophy, to borrow the title of Althusser’s interview, is a revolutionary weapon. Marxist philosophers may no longer be quite the illuminati they once were. But they can now flatter themselves that their desks have been turned into barricades (Brecht), the seminar room into a place d’armes.

P.198 (pdf 222) 16 Sep

The new orthodoxy, presented as the epitome of Marxist-Leninist rectitude, was set out at greatest length in the short Reply to John Lewis, via a juxtaposition of the respective theses of Lewis and his critic. To Lewis’s proposition that ‘it is man who makes history’, Althusser counterposes the dictum: ‘It is the masses who make history.’ Against the British Communist’s notion that ‘Man makes history by “transcending” history’ is set the scientific precept: ‘The class struggle is the motor of history.’

P.199 (pdf 223)

‘The class struggle does not go in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production in a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation. This materiality, in the last instance, is at the same time the ‘base’ . . . of the class struggle, and its material existence; because exploitation takes place in production, and it is exploitation which
is at the root of the antagonism between classes and the class struggle . . . all the forms of the class struggle are rooted in economic class struggle. It is on this condition that the revolutionary thesis of the primacy of the class struggle is a materialist one. When that is clear, the question of the ‘subject’ of history disappears. History is an immense natural-human system in movement, and the motor of history is class struggle. History is a process, and a process without a subject.’
- Althusser
P.231 (pdf 256) 18 Sep

‘If we look back over our whole history of the last forty years or more, it seems to me that . . . the only historically existing (left) ‘critique’ of the fundamentals of the ‘Stalinian deviation’ to be found . . . is a concrete critique, one which exists in the facts, in the struggle, in the line, in the practices, their principles and their forms, of the Chinese Revolution. A silent critique, which speaks through its actions, the result of the political and ideological struggles of the Revolution, from the Long March to the Cultural Revolution and its results. A critique from afar. A critique from ‘behind the scenes’. To be looked at more closely, to be interpreted. A contradictory critique, moreover – if only because of the disproportion between acts and texts. Whatever you like: but a critique from which one can learn, which can help us to test our hypotheses, that is, help us to see our own history more clearly. . . .’ – Althusser, 1976

Theoretical Practice #27: An Althusserian Prison Break

We were behind barbed wire, watched over by guards and subjected to the vexations of roll-calls, searches, fatigues. We were hungry…

I never seriously thought of escaping… On the other hand, I dreamed up a way of escaping to which I subsequently gave a great deal of thought.

Having noticed that the Germans alerted all the police and troops within a very wide radius once they realised one of us had escaped, which usually resulted in the capture of the daring individual concerned, I decided the surest way of escaping would be to let them believe someone had escaped, wait until the general alert was over which never lasted more than three or four weeks, and then escape after that. What I therefore had to do was disappear from the camp (I must have had a vocation for ‘disappearing’!), and let them think I had gone, before actually have escape, but simply disappear, in other words hide within the camp itself (which was not impossible) and only then vanish into thin air, when all the measures adopted for the alert had been dropped (three weeks later). In essence I had found a way of escaping the camp without actually leaving and of remaining a prisoner in order to escape! Though I perfected my plan, I did not carry it out, but simply pride myself on the fact that I had found ‘the solution’. Having proved that I could do it, there was no need to out it into practice. I have often thought since that the ‘solution’ came from deep within me, combining a fear of danger and the absolute need for security to produce a fictitious act of bravery. If my friend Rancière had known about his ‘episode’ when he reproached me at a much later date for criticising the Communist Party in order to remain within, I believe it would have given him food for thought.

P. 108 The Future Lasts Forever - L. Althusser