Our Ten Philosophical Influences: Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser

Brendan: So, Althusser?

Yunus: Yes, do you want to begin because I think you have a more textual connection to him.

Brendan: Sure. Althusser holds a very crucial, formative place for me, since I read his ISA text early on. Everything I know about him basically comes from that text, which was, and in many ways still is, one of the best articulations of the way ideology functions, of ideology embodied, in the school, the church, etc. It was the first time that I began to think about the production of the subject, and of power not in its explicit form (i.e. its prohibitive form, “don’t do that” , etc) but power as providing the “neutral” frame against which you perceive and understand things, and providing the O-level point for the person you are, become, etc., how you act and become intelligible in society.

Yunus: Yes, I remember being spell-dazed by his description of interpellation and how it “addresses” subjects (gives them a body from which to be addressed) using Moses speaking to the burning bush.

Brendan: I didnt read that example, mine was the cop “you there!” The same idea probably applies, though?

Yunus:

It then emerges that the interpellation of individuals as subjects presupposes the ‘existence’ of a Unique and central Other Subject, in whose Name the religious ideology interpellates all individuals as subjects. All this is clearly written in what is rightly called the Scriptures. ‘And it came to pass at that time that God the Lord (Yahweh) spoke to Moses in the cloud. And the Lord cried to Moses, “Moses!” And Moses replied “It is (really) I! I am Moses thy servant, speak and I shall listen!” And the Lord spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am that I am”’.

God thus defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am that I am’), and he who interpellates his subject, the individual subjected to him by his very interpellation, i.e. the individual named Moses. And Moses, interpellated-called by his Name, having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God, a subject through the Subject and subjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him, and makes his people obey God’s Commandments.

It is in the ISA I read.

Brendan: Yeah, OK, right. A pretty awesome analysis.

Yunus: Yeah. But to be completely honest about me coming to this text, and perhaps the reason this is the example I appreciate so much, it is because I came to Althusser opportunistically. I had begun to be incredibly influenced by Jacques Lacan. The prevailing common-sense is that Lacan and Marx are completely incompatible. And then Althusser comes along and creates this relationship between the two. Allusions to Lacan I think are pretty clear in his speaking of language as a divine space where we are addressed by a big Other.

Brendan: Definitely.

Yunus: Which is not to say I haven’t come back to Althusser and tried to appreciate him on his own terms. Interestingly enough, however, this did not happen until I stumbled upon his memoir “The future last forever.”

On the back of this book is a little blurb that read something like “The perfect companion piece to Foucault’s History of Madness.” I began to read it and the first couple pages are a pretty brutal, meticulous and austere rendering of him strangling his wife. I read the book in one sitting. And what comes across is fascinating, the philosopher of “history as a process without a subject” reveals himself as someone desperately clinging to the idea of a “home.” It is the first time “Home’ as a category/object worthy of philosophical inquiry entered my world.

Brendan: That is interesting. I wouldn’t have guessed that about Althusser.

Yunus: No, no one did. The book has been described as philosophical suicide. Althusser turning himself into the very object he had railed against his whole career. However I don’t see this so simply, as a mere cancellation of his work. After reading the book I scrutinized his work more closely. I am not sure how much of it is interesting and how much of it is relevant. But it definitely inspired me to think about structuralism more critically.

Regardless I think we would be remiss if we didn’t include here Althusser’s claim that the common sense understanding of Marx putting Hegel on his feet is completely wrong. What Marx actually accomplishes is a break with the Hegelian problematic.

Brendan: Maybe, but you can’t just say that!

Yunus: What do you mean?

Brendan: Well, what do you mean, is what I am asking. I think I agree with you (and Althusser) but I want to know what is meant by that last sentence.

Yunus: Well I don’t agree with him completely (I’ve been converted by Zizek, we’ll talk about that more later) but as I understand it Althusser is making the claim that you can’t read Marx as merely materializing the dialectic. He is breaking with it altogether. I believe he draws this conclusion by stating that A) history is a process without a subject, and B) The social field is always overdetermined.

Therefore the very idea that history moves through an Aufhebung of contradiction, even if those contradictions are material (i.e. in the sphere of production) this is still too Hegelian a reading of Marx. Althusser reads Kapital very philosophically. To him Kapital is an analysis of certain shifting categories that produce this process we call history. It is why he is very adamant when he calls Marxism a science. It the science of history. He even equates it with the Copernican Revolution.

Brendan: Yeah, I agree with that completely. When Marx says “I’m turning Hegel on his head,” I think he is probably the first person to deliver a vulgar Marxist interpretation of Marxism, for the reasons you just mentioned. And, even outside, or as a condition of his dialectic of the sphere of production, the fascination, and the Thing which drives the process itself (maybe think about this claim!) is the relentless pursuit of surplus value, which is always committing the existing material, commodities and so forth, to a sort of immediate death, while the future is already contained in a certain spectrality, or literally speculation, contingent upon speculation. But I am not sure of these last comments.

Yunus:I think Zizek might agree with you on this. He states that it is an ironic twist of fate that Hegel came before Marx because Hegel is actually the first great Post-Marxist. The Panlogic absolute knowledge monstrosity that is so often leveled at Hegel is more there in Marx than in Hegel, in his reading.

Brendan: I really like that idea, and instinctively agree with it.

Yunus: I do to. It’s why Marx isn’t on this list. The combination of Althusser’s reading of Marx’s problematic break with Hegel and Zizek’s insistence that Hegel is the first post-Marxist has left me unsure with how to deal with Marx himself. Do we see his value in his insistence of the incommensurability of the political and the economic despite the need to think both simultaneously. I am not sure. I am especially confounded when confronted with Lenin’s contortion of Marxism which, following Zizek, I agree that only in this necessarily deficient re-articulation of Marx does the dialectic correct the vuglar Marxism of Marx himself. All I know is that we (Marxist/Communist) have an obligation to return to Marx with “clear eyes.”

Brendan: Yeah, this is a question to work with, and to put forward hypotheses.

Favorite Text (Brendan)

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

Favorite text (Yunus)

The Future Lasts Forever, Frued and Lacan

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