On Overdetermination and Althusser: Our Response to Silverman and Park

Abstract

We respond to critical comment directed at our understanding of overdetermination and our argument that Althusser fell into economic determinism despite also offering a way out of it. Our first response reviews what the concept of overdetermination is and what it implies. On that basis, we argue that the first critic's claim of “prediction” is logically impossible. Our second response explains why we still think that a tension arises in Althusser's work between formulating a notion of overdetermination that in effect rules out any form of causal determination in the last instance and yet affirming economic determination in the last instance. On that basis, we criticize and reject the second critic's claim that Althusser escaped this tension between offered nondeterminist and determinist positions.

Keywords:

• Overdetermination
• Louis Althusser
• Prediction
• Existing-in-Change
• Determinisms

Notes

¹We agree with Silverman that reference to and use of Nietzsche is useful in arguing for overdetermination. That we did not do so in Knowledge and Class had more to do with our central purpose there: namely, to argue against determinisms and for overdetermination within the Marxian tradition. We were more concerned with analyzing the writings of Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, Althusser, and so forth than non-Marxian writers. Richard Rorty did receive prominence because we read his 1979 book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature after writing our first article, in 1982, rejecting economic determinism (see Resnick and Wolff 2006). We then were struck and encouraged by the parallel search for antiessentialism both within and without the Marxian tradition. While Rorty focused only on the latter, we saw a similar struggle within Marxism, and that was what we tried to argue later in our 1987 book. David Ruccio and Jack Amariglio (2003) do give the writings of Nietzsche a prominent place in their brilliantly insightful analysis of modern economic reasoning.