Abstract
The work of Louis Althusser was enormously influential in the 1960s and 1970s, but he is not widely read today. Perhaps this is because, as Warren Montag observes in the opening sentence of this book, Althusser’s status as a philosopher “remains unclear in a way that is not true of his contemporaries and friends, Foucault and Derrida” (1). He was an avowed Marxist, committed to a conception of philosophy as perpetual war in which positions or ideas were both objectives and means of struggle, and in which the front lines between opposing tendencies were drawn within as well as between the texts of adversaries. Montag sets out to resituate Althusser’s work in the “theoretical conjuncture” of French philosophy in the 1960s. While he clearly regards Althusser as a great philosopher who produced work of “extraordinary power,” he does not shy away from drawing attention to the many theoretical conflicts and “countervailing tendencies” that coexist within his work (2). In addition to retracing some of the lines of demarcation that Althusser drew in the work of his contemporaries, Montag seeks to draw further lines within Althusser’s own work, in the effort to “set free those elements that might lead to the ‘recommencement’ of a materialism of the encounter, the only possible materialism from Althusser’s perspective” (10).
He argues that Althusser’s achievements involve three sets of related concepts: “a notion of structure as singularity and as a form of causality entirely immanent in its effects”; an antihumanism that found its strongest expression in the thesis of “the material existence of ideology”; and an (anti)eschatology that involved “an orientation to an event radically outside the apparatuses of domination that will arrive from beyond the present” (11–12). The book is arranged in accordance with these three themes, so that Part I deals with the complex issue of structuralism and Althusser’s claim in his Essays in Self-Criticism that he and his collaborators were never structuralists. Montag draws on a wealth of posthumously published and unpublished material, including correspondence and lecture notes from a seminar devoted to “The Origins of Structuralism” at the École Normale Supérieure in 1962–1963 to corroborate this claim. He uncovers a rich archive of intellectual sources for Althusser’s approach to structuralism, including Montesquieu, Dilthey and Husserl. He shows how an initial enthusiasm for Levi-Strauss’s account of kinship structures and their role in society quickly gave way to a critical appraisal. The formalism, historicism and functionalism implicit in Levi-Strauss’s structural anthropology “lead inescapably back to idealist notions of the totality” (70).
However, as Montag also shows, the discussion of structure in the first edition of Reading Capital replicated the very hermeneutic conception of structure that Althusser had criticized in Levi-Strauss. Pierre Macherey pointed this out in correspondence in 1965. His subsequent discussion of the idea of structure in literary works showed how Althusser conceived of structure as something “latent in as well as anterior to a given text,” thereby endowing the text with a hidden depth that must be recovered through “an operation of interpretation” (83). Althusser’s response, once he came to appreciate Macherey’s criticism, was to suppress several passages from the second edition of Reading Capital in 1968. In effect, two ideas of structure coexisted in this text. Alongside the concept of a structural whole, there was a concept of structure as the conjunction of determinate singularities “both composed of and composing other singularities, even as they possess their own singular, actual essence” (93). Montag argues that this concept was already present, in a practical state, in Althusser’s earlier essays “On the Materialist Dialectic” and “Contradiction and Overdetermination.” However, this only became clearly distinguished from the idealist concept of totality after the exchange with Macherey and another exchange with Deleuze over an early draft of his “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” The conception of structure as a composition of heterogeneous elements drew upon Spinoza’s conception of the “singular essence” or conatus of a thing that Deleuze employed in an essay on Lucretius first published in 1961. This essay formed part of what Montag refers to as “a common culture, a set of texts already familiar to Althusser and his circle” (90). This Spinozist culture was what enabled Althusser to develop the anti-structuralist concept of the whole, even though he failed to distinguish it from the transcendental conception criticized by Macherey.
The development of Althusser’s understanding of structure thus exhibits a recurrent pattern that recurs throughout his thought, namely, “constant engagement with theoretical developments occurring around him; at certain times borrowing from them to think through his arguments, at others taking his distance from them” (105). Montag does his best to defend this as a practice of philosophy that constantly draws lines of demarcation, opposing idealist tendencies and aligning itself with that which advances the cause of materialism. At the same time, he shows how Althusser constantly transformed his positions and sought to modify his published texts. He points out in forensic detail the contradictions and vacillations in Althusser’s texts from one section, paragraph or even sentence to the next. His painstaking reconstructions show how far the novel ideas in his work coexisted alongside contradictory elements of Marxist and humanist orthodoxy.
Nowhere are these tensions more apparent than in his recurrent attempts to outline a theory of ideology, which is the focus of Part II. Montag shows how the 1964 essay that launched the humanism controversy, “Marxism and Humanism,” introduced controversial theses about the ubiquity of ideology and its irreducibility to the contents of individual consciousnesses alongside other theses that present ideology as a system of (inadequate) representations bound up with the lived relation of individuals to the world. Althusser’s use of the terminology of lived relations (le vécu) invoked “the extraordinarily complex and unfinished field of the Lebenswelt as developed in the late Husserl and as refined by followers such as Merleau-Ponty” (113), thereby ensuring that this text remained “haunted” by the very humanism it sought to criticize (117). A similar ambiguity affects the thesis that ideology “interpellates” subjects, which Althusser first introduced in a previously unpublished 1966 text, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse.” This process of interpellation, Montag argues, is all too readily understood as “a (tragic) drama of recognition” (165).
The real breakthrough in Althusser’s theorization of ideology came in his 1970 article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” This problematic text consisted of passages taken from a longer manuscript (the ellipses in the original French publication did not survive in the English translation) that was intended to form part of a manual of Marxism-Leninism destined for nonacademic party members as well as academic readers. This text outlined a conception of ideology that broke decisively with prevailing views, including Althusser’s own earlier definition of ideology in “Marxism and Humanism” as a system of representations endowed with a historical existence and specific function within a given society. Ideology is no longer understood in terms of representations in the minds of individuals but in terms of their material actions, realised in material practices and defined by material ideological apparatuses. Montag argues that this materialist conception of ideology drew upon Spinoza’s insistence that there is no thought apart from the impressions and movements of the body. He refers to a late text by Althusser, “The Only Materialist Tradition,” in which he spells out the Spinozist underpinnings of this conception: the soul and its activity of thought is inseparable from the activity of the body (155). He also notes that this conception of ideology as immanent in bodies and forces raises further problems for the interpellation thesis and indeed for the distinction between the repressive and ideological apparatuses of the state at the beginning of “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
At this point, Montag inverts the axis of Althusser’s engagements with his contemporaries that has dominated his account up to this point and turns to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for the further development of the materialist conception of ideology. He suggests that Foucault’s detailed description of disciplinary practices may be read as an account of the material conditions of the possibility of interpellation, in particular, the production of docile individuals endowed with a consciousness that is an effect and instrument of power (166). Pursuing his own line of demarcation beyond the work of Althusser, Montag argues that the Foucault of Discipline and Punish does not entirely escape the illusions of consciousness. However, he does not discuss Foucault’s later efforts to explore the techniques through which individuals have related to their consciousness and their corporeality, leaving open the question whether his concern with processes by which individuals make themselves subjects of a certain kind might be read as a contribution to a materialist theory of the forms of subjectivity.
Part III focuses on the question of eschatology via a consideration of two more posthumously published essays by Althusser. Montag reads “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” excerpted from a longer text written in 1982–1983, as a reflection on history and the condition of possibility of order. He argues that this text brings to light a concept of the void that recurs throughout Althusser’s oeuvre and that he traces through the history of philosophy from Epicurus and Lucretius to Marx and Heidegger. At this point, Montag suggests, Althusser’s theoretical trajectory converges with that of Derrida, whose reading of Levi-Strauss he had already invoked in an earlier chapter. They share a teleological conception of history in which the future is “not given to us to know” (185). At the same time, alongside the transcendental conception of the void that leads to this theory of messianicity without a messiah, Montag discerns in Althusser’s text another concept of the void, one that is closer to Deleuze’s reading of Lucretius and that offers an alternative to the figure of “an original nothingness that haunts philosophy” (187). This involves the same text by Deleuze that played a key role in Althusser’s escape from structuralism by offering a Spinozistic way to think history as the production of singularities and that points toward “a philosophy of the encounter without the void” (187).
The final chapter pursues the anti-eschatological theme with reference to “The International of Decent Feelings,” a polemical text written in December 1946. This was directed against a disparate group of secular and religious thinkers who, in the aftermath of the war, invoked a messianic fear that the end of humanity was nigh in order to resist the demands of communism. It was submitted to but not published by a Catholic journal and is addressed to fellow Christians in explicitly religious language. Montag comments that this was a text written by an Althusser who could invoke “The Last Judgment” without irony (191) and whose response to the post-war messianism of André Malraux, Albert Camus, Gabriel Marcel, Arthur Koestler and others was to denounce it as sacrilegious and “false prophecy” (206). Despite its explicitly Christian framework, Montag devotes the final chapter to this early text because in it “Althusser has provided all the means necessary for a critique of the eschatology of his final work” (191). Rather than the idea of a future yet to come, Althusser defends here the idea of a relation to another present, a heap of fragments from which the proletariat is “already salvaging the materials to compose their liberation” (208).
At this point, we might wonder whether the lines of demarcation pursued by Montag really do make the case for Althusser’s status as a philosopher on a par with that of contemporaries such as Deleuze, Derrida or Foucault. At best, his reinvented Marxism exemplified the law of uneven development in thought. At worst, it was a rearguard effort that failed to engage in any productive way with the real transformations underway in France and the wider world during the 1960s and 1970s.