Althusser’s Relation to Hegel: French Hegelianism, Marxism, and Aleatory Materialism

Abstract

This essay concerns the uneasy relationship between Althusser and Hegel that can be observed throughout Althusser’s oeuvre. In the 1960s Althusser pursued a rigorous project and tried to develop a systematic account of philosophy, history, and science from within Marxism—an account that would constitute a theoretical weapon against Hegelian idealism. Althusser’s arguments in For Marx and Reading “Capital” established his presence in French philosophical corners as a Marxist and anti-Hegelian thinker. However, in posthumous publications, Althusser’s relation to Hegel appears far more complicated than his simply being anti-Hegelian. By investigating this relationship from the lens of multiple encounters, this essay carves out two notions that emerged from these encounters, notions that we call “Althusserian”: philosophy as class struggle in theory and history as a process without a subject.

Key Words:

• Aleatory Materialism
• French Hegelianism
• History
• Marxism
• Philosophy

Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank Banu Bargu and Robyn Marasco, as the editors of this special issue, for their valuable comments on various stages of the development of this essay. I would also like to thank Sara Hassani and the Theory Collective at the New School for their insightful feedback. Finally, I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Rethinking Marxism for showing interest in publishing a special issue on Althusser as well as for their feedback on this essay.

Notes

1 One of Althusser’s letters, quoted in Goshgarian (2006, xiv).

2 For those who analyze Althusser’s political thought in terms of radical breaks, see Negri (1996, 51–68) and Matheron (2014).

3 For the continuity between Althusser’s method of reading Hegel in his early texts and his reading of every other thinker, see Montag (2014, 53).

4 For an insightful discussion on this, see Protevi (1999, 581–92).

5 He develops this project further in his next influential book, Logic and Existence.

6 See especially Foucault’s (1971, 235) speech in his inaugural lecture for the appointment at the College de France in 1970.

7 In the original French edition, Matheron (2014, xiii) gathers Althusser’s early works, including his master’s thesis, under the category of “Louis Althusser before Althusser.”

8 Althusser wrote his thesis on Hegel and submitted it to Gaston Bachelard, who, as Althusser (1993, 161) tells in his memoir, perhaps did not read it, or at least not carefully. Here I should also note that Althusser’s early works have been gaining attention in recent years. See Grant (2009, 221–35; 2011), Montag (2013), Peden (2014, chap. 4), and Cesarale (2015).

9 Althusser (1993, 165) explains in The Future Lasts Forever that in the early years of his career as a philosophy teacher he knew little about Spinoza and Hegel. We see Althusser’s emphasis on Spinoza regarding the question of the “void” in his later writings.

10 The “critical” turn in the Enlightenment had mainly two consequences in Germany: one in terms of religion and the other in terms of politics. Regarding religion, faith and Christianity gave way to deism, and along with it the idea that we cannot know beyond our senses. As for politics, Althusser’s Hegel observes the political fragmentation and atomism in Germany as being asymmetrically counterposed by absolute power: that is, a disconnection between citizens and the state (state laws) as well as the separation of individuals from one another. As Althusser (2014, 30) says, in Germany “dead legality confronts illegal life.”

11 Such as Hölderlin “singing of a Greece that is dead and gone” (Althusser 2014, 32).

12 That is, the “necessity of the void,” the alienation of the self from itself to find itself in the other. In other words, the constant search for the consciousness of the self (certainty), to be united with the universal consciousness (truth). This is the “unhappy consciousness” in Hegel’s Phenomenology, which was later taken up by Wahl and Hyppolite. See Baugh (1991).

13 Matheron (2014, 304n1) informs us that this text, written about three years after Althusser’s master’s thesis (1950), was originally given the title “Hegel, Marx, and Hyppolite; or, Academic Revisionism’s Latest Word.” As an anonymously signed paper, it underwent editorial revisions in La Nouvelle Critique, where the title changed and the first paragraph was removed.

14 Hegel’s philosophy established its place in French philosophy only after World War II, although his entrance to France dates before the war. Althusser (2014, 184) links the slow entry of Hegel into France with the exclusionary, chauvinistic character of French philosophy at the time.

15 More than a decade later, Althusser (2011, 143), referring to Kant’s Kampfplatz, describes philosophy as a battleground: “If philosophy is a struggle, and if in this struggle, it is idealist philosophy that is dominant, this inevitably means that dialectical materialist philosophy must itself be constituted in the struggle, and in the course of this struggle, it must gradually win its own positions against the enemy in order to exist, to acquire the existence of a historical force.”

16 Althusser (1976, 141) later dismisses this as part of his self-critique, saying that he was also trapped in theoreticism.

17 I borrow this depiction from Peter Thomas’s (2013, 137–51) discussion on Althusser’s relation to Gramsci.

18 John Lewis comes to mind as one important critic of Althusser’s Marxism. But there were many other authors and scholars who posited strong criticisms against Althusser’s Marxism in general and his “theoretical antihumanism” in particular. For a list of such scholars, see Althusser’s Essays in Self-Criticism, especially the introduction by Grahame Lock (1976, 3–7).

19 For a broader context and presentation of Althusser’s tactical defense of (Marxism’s) theoretical autonomy against “theoretical humanism” and the political conjuncture in France (regarding the PCF, student unions, and leftist factions), see Elliott (2009, 167–78).

20 The purpose of this essay is not to explore or conceptually define aleatory materialism at length but instead to focus on how the Hegel-Althusser relationship plays out in the last stage of Althusser’s thought. But there exists a rich body of literature exploring aleatory materialism. For some insightful discussions of aleatory materialism, see, e.g., Hardy (2014), Read (2002), and Elliott (1998), all published in Rethinking Marxism. See also Montag (2013) and Elliott (2009).

21 Althusser’s example here is Soviet Russia.

22 For an excellent discussion on the relationship of Althusser’s aleatory materialism with aesthetics and politics, see Bargu (2012).

23 For a further discussion on this subject, see Read (2002).

24 For a succinct analysis of the process of primitive accumulation from the aleatory perspective, see Hardy (2013).