Notes on Goshgarian’s introduction to Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter.
G. M. Goshgarian’s introduction to the Philosophy of the Encounter places Althusser’s late work in a relationship of relative continuity with what comes before it during Althusser’s life. Goshgarian surveys Althusser’s intellectual work and Party involvement, finding a few persistent themes at the conceptual level and at the level of the positions and actions of the French Communist Party (PCF). Two the main conceptual points are the category of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the polemic against the logic of the accomplished fact, defined as treating the processes of the historical production of some state of affairs in a fashion predicated on the existence of that state of affairs. Both of these enter into Althusser’s attempts to shape the direction of the PCF.
Althusser was a critic of Stalinism and of Eurocommunism, both of which were persistent strains within the PCF. Stalinist Marxism was frequently quite mechanistic and determinist, with the coming of capitalism conceived as necessary, and the dissolution of capitalism into communism also necessary. Althusser’s anti-determinism - the assertion that capitalism could have not happened, and that communism may well not happen - served as an attack at the level of theory against these cherished - and comforting - Stalinist gems. Althusser’s insistence on the dictatorship of the proletariat was functional against Eurocommunism, which, like Stalinism, thought of the state as a neutral body existing above class struggle, rather than as the form of maintenance of the dominance of the dominant class.
These and other elements in the introduction recur throughout the book, being drawn from Althusser’s work. What Goshgarian does not address, however, is Althusser’s continued involvement in the PCF. Why did Althusser stay a member? (See Lukacs, intro to History and Class Consciousness re: his membership in the CP.) Was this the right decision? Did he make compromises in his thought as a result? None of this is addressed, and is related to another absence in the introduction.
While Goshgarian recognizes that late Althusser revised some of his earlier theses - for example, late Althusser conceded that Marx was a Hegelian - he argues for an underlying continuity in Althusser’s thought. Goshgarian makes his case convincingly, demonstrating the presence of the elements of the late work throughout Althusser’s life. This is important in that it makes the case for not treating early Althusser as a dead dog, so to speak. At the same time, given that key early Althusserian theses are revised by the late work, one wants to know how that revision changes the meaning of the early work on the early work’s own terms. This is particularly important given the newness of the late work and the degree to which the early work conditions anglophone reception of Althusser. One wonders, to analogize late Althusser’s claim about Marx, if it might not be that there are two Althussers, one an aleatory materialist nonphilosopher of the nonstate and one an idealist philosopher of the state. These two Althussers would not, of course, relate to each other in simple relation of historical succession and supercession, but rather would form two red threads - or perhaps, a red thread and a white thread - which chart sometimes divergent and sometimes entangled paths throughout the corpus of Althusser’s theoretical life and Party activity.
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Notes on Althusser’s “Letter to Merab Mardashvili”
I don’t know Althusser’s thoughts on feminism, nor do I know much at all about French feminism, but I wonder if Althusser ever heard the slogan “the personal is political.” Althusser’s letter closes with a reflection on “the way the world’s problems get tangled up with personal fantasies” and the relationship between “the shambles the world is in” and “the obsessions of the soul.” (POE, 5.) This is not intended as mere mention of an anecdotal quality to Althusser’s letter and speculation on his personal life. Rather, there is a theoretical question here as to the role of the individual subject acting within a conjuncture. (To some extent, this question is one which Badiou’s inquiries after Althusser pursue.)
For now, I will stay with Althusser’s suggestive remarks on the time of the letter’s writing, January 1978. Althusser’s letter comes approximately two years after the PCF’s 22nd Congress, about which Althusser had strong feelings (see his essay in Balibar’s book on the dictatorship of the proletariat, also Goshgarian’s introduction to POE). Althusser believed the abandonment of the category of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a theoretical and political mistake, hence his feeling of being in battle where the front has been pushed back behind one.
Althusser’s sensation of having the battle now taking place “behind your back” is suggestive. First, there is the implication of loss or failure: “having struggle for a very long time on a front” one finds the front line has been pushed back. Ground has been lost. Second, there is a resonance with Marx’s dictum of people making history but not as they choose, processes taking place behind the back of subjects. (Find reference.) This is the sense in which I read Althusser’s remark that his project of the 1960s had been “to fabricate a little, typically French justification (…) for Marxism’s pretension to being a science.” Presumably this had effects which Althusser did not foresee, just as the PCF’s policies would have effects unforeseen by the leadership. Third, there is the implication of now being behind enemy lines, since one is located in the same place as before, in the trench at was once the front, and the front has now moved. The battle behind your back “is everywhere” at once. (POE 3) If this applies to the PCF’s decisions then in one sense the PCF is the enemy, or the battlefield, or a strategic position now occupied by the enemy. Regardless of the metaphor, it means the Party at the time of Althusser’s writing is not part of the solution.
The letter is written prior to “Marx In His Limits,” and expresses Althusser’s uncertainty prior to the formulation of the arguments in that piece. Althusser states a lack of “enough concrete knowledge” (POE 4) of matters pertaining to world events and organizational matters, as well as a lack of “philosophical culture” adequate to the task of supplementing what he takes as “what doesn’t work in [Marx’s] reasoning” in Capital. (POE 5) This is precisely the task which Althusser sets himself in much of the works in the rest of POE.
He also writes of fatigue and isolation in the face of the above named inadequacies and the tasks they imply. It is easy to read these as personal, having to do with Althusser’s declining mental state, and that is not unreasonable. On the other hand, it is worth looking further into Althusser’s position within the Party and his relationships with individual and organized militants within the PCF, as well as his tensions with the Party’s leadership.
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Notes on “Correspondence about ‘Philosophy and Marxism’” (POE 208-250)
This section consists of several letters from Althusser. One is to a Mauricio Malamud. The rest are to Fernanda Navarro, the interviewer/editor/co-author of “Philosophy and Marxism.”
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Notes on “Letter to Mauricio Malamud” (POE 209-214)
In this letter, the first of several included in the collection under the heading “Correspondence about ‘Philosophy and Marxism’,” Althusser characterizes his and his circle’s work (NOTE: look up characterizations and membership of Althusser’s group[s]). “[M]y little group and I (…) tried to make the works of Marxism, Marxism itself, and (…) the work of Marx himself, readable and thinkable.” (209.) Prior to this making, “it scarcely was” for “it contained contradictions, theoretical dead-ends, misunderstandings, and huge gaps.” Althusser and company “fabricated for Marx (…) the philosophy that he lacked: this rational, coherent philosophy,” one which engaged (flirted, as Althusser puts it) “with the structuralist ideology at work in linguistics, ethnology, the history of philosophy” (210) and one which was “fabricated (…) imaginary” and which “had the one little disadvantage that it, too, was missing from Marx.” (211.) Althusser writes that the benefit of this philosophy was that it allowed the correction and critique of some of Marx’s work. He singles out Marx’s philosophy of history for attack (211).
Notable in this letter is Althusser’s description of a “fusion” (211) of Marxism with the workers’ movement, a phrasing which seems to contradict his remarks elsewhere about Marxism being internal to the workers’ movement (find reference). Althusser depicts a working class and working class movement distinct and autonomous from its representations in the Communist Parties and in Marxist theory. He calls the class/class movement ‘the base’ and writes that “Marxist theory” is not or “not primarily (…) at the base: it was produced in the heads of bourgeois intellectuals’ who had rallied to the cause of the workers’ movement and social revolution. Thus it was produced at a distance from the workers’ movement, initially, and for a long time floated above it” until finally it started “to penetrate parts of the workers’ movement.” (212.)
In this formulation, there is an encounter between parts of the class and Marxism, and presumably between these parts of the class and others. Althusser also suggests that the encounter with Marxism may cease - the hold it takes may cease to take - and that this may not be such a big problem: it may be that “the worker’ movement can be pursued in virtual independence of Marxist theory.” Such a movement “is still forging ahead on its own path, despite its defeats.” (212.) This is a more aleatory account of the Marxism-class relationship than is sometimes suggested elsewhere, and suggests the class may be capable - or rather, that Althusser may be beginning to recognize that the class is capable - of producing its own conditions of encounter, and that the class itself consists of ensembles of atoms and worlds which encounter, take, and dissolve. Althusser also states, with an apologetic parenthical “can you imagine…?”, that previously his ‘little group’ “didn’t really pay any attention” to the workers’ movement” in part because they were confident that “we really could consider the CPs to be the authentic representatives of the revolutionary revolt of the workers, and the authentic representatives of Marxist theory.” Althusser and co were apparently hobbled by their “having waited a long time before attacking the structure of the CPs, or, at any rate [their] own.” (213.) Despite all of this self-criticism, Althusser still holds that the early work has a value, allowing for a better understanding of the workers’ movement and capitalism. Note that in this formulation the philosophy is outside the workers’ movement.
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Notes on “Letters to Fernanda Navarro” (POE 214-250)
Materialism and idealism are twins, born with one clutching the heel of the other. Idealism has been primary in the history of philosophy such that every “pronounced materialism in the history of philosophy” reproduces and thus is idealism. This manifests in a shared insistence on the principle of sufficient reason, “according to which everything that exists (…) is subject to the question of the reason for its existence.” (216.) On my reading, this should not be a denial of the principle of sufficient reason. This might be attempted via asking “what is the reason that everything has a reason?”, a question which the theologically minded can answer more easily than most others, but asking this question moves one onto a terrain which invites answers which are, essentially, theological in nature. (See Benjamin’s remarks on theology as the hidden actor within historical materialism.) Rather, the principle of sufficient reason should not be taken as an excuse for an insistence on inquiry into causal origins and on the efficacy of the results of those types of findings. Aleatory materialism does not engage with and best other positions on the terrain of final causes, origins, and teloi, but rather shifts the field into another terrain where such questions are useless.
Aleatory materialism, then, has a relationship of discontinuity with much received materialism, which it takes as idealism, and it uses the name materialism “with suspicion” since “the word does not give us the thing.” (217.) This applies as well to aleatory materialism as a theoretical practice. Regarding names with suspicion is another way to express the point that we are to “judge a work or a philosophy [not] by its self-conception, but by what it in fact is.” That is to say, “[b]y its acts, its mode of action, (…) the specific mode by which a philosophy acts: by which it acts on ideology, and, by way of those ideologies, on practices.” (221.)
Two questions arise here. First, how does one get at what a philosophy in fact is? The distinction is posed as that between self-conception and reality, but (*ahem*) in reality what one has is a distinction between self-conception and another conception (conception by another self). Essentially, then, aleatory materialism judges other positions not by their own self-conceptions but by aleatory materialism’s conceptions. To say otherwise is to reintroduce the theme of science which is knowable a priori to be nonideological, a conception which is surely subject to being taken at other than its own self-conception and which is of questionable status as aleatory. Second, these quotes suggest that philosophy and thought is not practice. This seems to be just a clumsy wording on Althusser’s part, but one which should be noted so as not to reintroduce error. Theoretical practice is a type of practice. Philosophy must be practice, for it exerts a force upon - act upon - practices via the mediation of ideologies. Ideologies are also practices, since they exert force on other practices. (This is similar to the problematic wherein mind and body are conceived as of one substance, however varied in their instantiation, since mind acts upon body and vice versa.)
“The closer a philosophy comes to the practices - the more it respects them, the more it assists them through the relay of the ideologies - the more it tends toward materialism” in the good - ie the aleatory - sense of materialism.” (221.) (Praxiology?) If I had the Kant chops I’d love to try to compare this with Kant on practical reason and the technical.
Althusser’s approaches Schmitt, writing of “the ‘polemical’ nature of all philosophy (Kant’s Kampfplatz)” (221). “Every philosophy is polemical, [such] that it exists only in a state of theoretical war against another philosophy or philosophical current.” (223.) This is why there is an idealist tendency in received materialism, and, presumably then a materialist tendency in every idealism. “[A]ny philosophy, idealist or materialist, contains its opposite, its enemy: it is by besieging the enemy, by encroaching on him - on his positions - that a philosophy can hope to prevail over its enemy.” When “the adversary’s positons are occupied in this way, it is not surprising that a philosophy should containg - but occupied in its fashion - (…) the adversary’s positions.” (223.) This accounts for nonaleatory moments within aleatory materialism, then. This also figures polemos as encounter (it might be worth looking over Althusser’s remarks on Hobbes again in light of this.) Note that this is the only way philosophy can happen, and that it must relate to others in this way, trying to take their positions. Presumably the occupied positions can also act back upon a philosophy from inside, as a sort of fifth column, as in the case of the idealism within received materialism. This also suggests a possible reading of Schmitt, for whom polemos is similarly primary and originary, in relation to aleatory materialism. Is this origin claim - born within polemos - an aleatory one, though? How does this origin story function in comparison to other origin stories?
On 226 Althusser writes of his “shocking ignorance” of many things, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc, and asserts that rather than hindering him this as actually helped him to write and accomplish what he has. He compares himself with Freud and Einstein (226-227), who made similar remarks. This is very interesting and I like it very much. It suggests another gloss on the ‘ignorant’ in Ranciere’s Ignorant Schoolmaster. If knowledge is taken as a determinate body, ignorance then is a hole or gap in knowledge, an opening within which activity can occur against the constraining uses of solid bodies of knowledge. Ignorance is a void, an opening within which encounter can occur.
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