Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Historical Materialism Book Series)

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Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Historical Materialism Book Series)

Gregory Elliott

Language: English

Pages: 412

ISBN: 1608460274

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


 

First published in 1987, Althusser, The Detour of Theory was widely received as the fullest account of its subject to date. Drawing on a wide range of hitherto untranslated material, it examined the political and intellectual contexts of Althusser’s ‘return to Marx’ in the mid-1960s; analysed the novel character of the Marxism developed in his major works; charted their author’s subsequent evolution, from his self-criticism to the proclamation of a ‘crisis of Marxism’; and concluded with a balance-sheet of Althusser’s contribution to historical materialism. ?For this second edition, Gregory Elliott has added a substantial postscript in which he surveys the posthumous edition of the French philosopher’s work published in the 1990s, from the early writings of the 1940s through to the late texts of the 1980s, relating the unknown Althusser revealed by them to the familiar figure of For Marx and Reading Capital, together with a comprehensive bibliography of Althusser’s oeuvre.
Gregory Elliott was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he completed his D.Phil. on Louis Althusser in 1985. An independent translator and writer, his books include Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (1998). His most recent translation is Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism(2006)..

 

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Explanation of the appropriation of the non-theoretical real object by the conceptually constructed object of knowledge was offered, effectively divorcing theory from any extra-theoretical reference, thereby undermining the proposition that concept construction was the royal road to science. The failure to establish a plausible relation between theory and (the rest of) reality means that conceptual elaboration is the via regia only to more of the same. Theory-dependent knowledge of the real world.

By an additional twist to the Althusserian conjuring-trick, ‘Leninism’ and ‘Marxism-Leninism’ were identified with plain Marxism and vindicated by its reflected epistemological lustre. Arguably, Althusser ’s reading was theoretically because politically culpable. Althusser’s co-option of Bachelardian epistemology misfired, precluding attainment of his goal – validation of a scientific theoretical revolution. He could sustain the postulate only through the licence offered by the concept of a.

1970, pp. 188, 193; see also p. 29. 160 • Chapter Three in the last instance, which cannot ward off a functionalist pluralism; or (ii) to endow social formations with such consistency (modes of production generate their own ‘conditions of existence’) that their reproduction as unities is ensured, their transformation theoretically unthinkable – the severest of structuralisms (or Spinozisms). (Indicative of both, perhaps, was that the Russian Revolution as analysed by Althusser verged on being.

Disseminated (the paedagogical relationship) than ‘the quality of the knowledge itself ’. For the vocation of Marxist intellectuals was ‘to discover new scientific knowledge capable of illuminating and criticizing the overwhelming ideological illusions in which everyone is imprisoned’.7 The real locus of class division in the university was not inequitable relations between teachers and students, but the content of the teaching – the division of the knowledge taught into science and ideology. This.

Representatives of the Communist and workers’ parties concluded with a final declaration which endorsed the positions proposed by the CPSU (rather than assenting to Mao’s reflections on ‘paper tigers’), although it included the Chinese thesis that ‘revisionism’ or ‘right-wing opportunism’ was the main danger facing international Communism. In December 1960, after a conference of 81 parties in Moscow, the Chinese delegation again signed a joint statement celebrating the ‘unity of the socialist.

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