Louis Althusser - Philosophy for Non-Philosophers

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How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy, Louis Althusser

Being and Event, Alain Badiou

Conditions, Alain Badiou

Infinite Thought, Alain Badiou

Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou

Theoretical Writings, Alain Badiou

Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou

Key Writings, Henri Bergson

Lines of Flight, Flix Guattari

Principles of Non-Philosophy, Franois Laruelle

From Communism to Capitalism, Michel Henry

Seeing the Invisible, Michel Henry

After Finitude, Quentin Meillassoux

Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

The Five Senses, Michel Serres

Statues, Michel Serres

Rome, Michel Serres

Geometry, Michel Serres

Leibniz on God and Religion: A Reader, edited by Lloyd Strickland

Art and Fear, Paul Virilio

Negative Horizon, Paul Virilio

Althussers Lesson, Jacques Rancire

Chronicles of Consensual Times, Jacques Rancire

Dissensus, Jacques Rancire

The Lost Thread, Jacques Rancire

Politics of Aesthetics, Jacques Rancire

Of Habit, Flix Ravaisson

For their help and support, G. M. Goshgarian thanks Jackie pain, Sandrine Ferr, Paul Garapon, Christine Gardon, Franois Matheron, Peter Schttler, Tzuchien Tho, Jean Touzot, Fabienne Trvisan, Laurie Tuller, Maria Vldulescu , Yu Shan, the Editorial Board of Dcalages: An Althusser Studies Journal, and the director, Nathalie Lger, and staff of the Institut Mmoires de ldition contemporaine.

Readers whose knowledge of Althusser derives primarily from the texts published during his lifetime (and perhaps the more well-known posthumous works such as Machiavelli and Us and The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter) will no doubt find Philosophy for Non-Philosophers perplexing. The problem is not its content, that is, the arguments and concepts Althusser advances there: nearly all can be found in previously published work. It is instead the works form, or perhaps genre, that will surprise readers, the fact that Althusser chose to address an audience consisting of non-philosophers, that is, not simply specialists from other academic disciplines, but more importantly a mass audience outside the academic world. The nature (and breadth) of this audience makes it different in kind from a text like Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (published in 1974 but based on the lectures that Althusser delivered at his seminar in 1967) (Althusser 1974) which was addressed to scientists who were non-philosophers, not in the sense that they did not practice philosophy, but because they did so without knowing that they did so, that is, spontaneously. There Althusser seeks to make visible the tendency among scientists irrespective of their field, to accept as simple and obvious what are in fact complex notions imposed on scientists by a (general, not individual) forgetting of the historical determination of philosophical concepts.

In contrast, the genre represented by Philosophy for Non-Philosophers requires, above all, the simplification of complex arguments, that is, a reduction of the actual written form of these arguments to what is regarded (but by whom and by what means?) as essential, extracting it from the accidental and contingent that envelopes and perhaps conceals it. Because it is essential, it can be explained and communicated through examples drawn from everyday life and in this way understood by everyone. It is this assumption that will allow Althusser, otherwise known as a difficult, even obscure, thinker, to speak (or to think he is speaking) directly to the people in a language that can be understood by those (the vast majority) who have neither the leisure nor the training to read Aristotle or Kant or, for that matter, Althussers own texts.

This last example should give us pause: is the project of Philosophy for Non-Philosophers based on the presupposition, articulated by many of his critics, but never explicitly stated by Althusser himself, that the conceptual density and discursive complexity of his earlier works, even the way Althusser practices philosophy in and through them, is in some sense inessential and unnecessary, constituting a baroque exterior that by calling attention to itself only serves to obscure the otherwise clear and distinct ideas that might be in principle communicated to any rational individual? It is useful to recall at this point that Althusser wrote his Matrise on the notion of content in the works of Hegel, who insisted that to understand form in its determinate existence is to grasp it as the self-understanding of content and not as something applied to it from the exterior (Althusser 1997). The critiques of Althussers mode of exposition and even his style assume that in philosophy and in theory more generally a given form may be applied indifferently and indeterminately (that is, determined in the last instance by authorial choice alone) to any content, which would imply, in turn, that the meaning of a text like From Capital to Marxs Philosophy (Part I of Reading Capital) (Althusser, 1970, 1169) existed outside of and prior to its textual incarnation and could have been be expressed in different, more common, words. To sustain such a notion, however, would be to reject the very arguments of the text itself and to place Althusser in the paradoxical position of restating (in different, simpler, words and phrases) the argument that arguments always appear in a singular, non-repeatable forms from which they cannot be separated. Has Althusser come to occupy this paradoxical space in order to write a work like Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, and, if so, how did he arrive there and what are the consequences of this occupation?

Written (or rather put into final or quasi-final form) in 197880, the time of the crisis of Marxism in general and the crisis of Althussers Marxism in particular, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers embodies the contradictory movements of this precise moment. In part, it is a presentation of Althussers previously stated positions on philosophy (although not all of them, and without any attempt to account for the incompatibilities between the different phases in the development of his thought). But it also exhibits an imitation or mimicry of the affects, and the discourses consubstantial with these affects, of some of Althussers most hostile critics, as if their critiques had been internalized and the collective rejection of Althussers corpus incorporated into the fabric of the text. The result was a kind of theoretical stalemate that prevented Philosophy for Non-Philosophers from advancing beyond its starting point. Althussers decision not to publish the manuscript certainly represented in some way an intuition, however dim, that the work was a kind of unstable compromise formation that accumulated within itself contradictions of both form and content. These contradictions, however, cannot be explained by Althussers worsening psychological state alone; they must also be understood in relation to the conjuncture in which he sought to intervene, as the inescapable effects of an increasingly unfavourable relation of forces. It was this that made the project of speaking directly to the popular masses about philosophy and Marxism appear to Althusser simultaneously urgent and impossible.