Althusser’s Gramscian Debt: On Reading Out Loud

Abstract

This essay measures Louis Althusser’s debt to Antonio Gramsci in light of his general theory of reading and his reflections on the science, philosophy, and politics of Marxism. It considers their respective approaches to reading, highlighting the differences between a “philosophical reading” in Althusser’s sense and a “political reading” in the spirit of Gramsci. Further, it considers how some of Althusser’s key concepts—ideology, the state, conjuncture, utopian realism—are elaborated through a critical engagement with Gramsci’s political thought.

Key Words:

• Louis Althusser
• Critique
• Antonio Gramsci
• Politics
• Reading

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Yves Winter for their comments on this essay, and also for the countless conversations that were its inspiration. My thanks, also, to Banu Bargu, the editors of Rethinking Marxism, and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback.

Notes

1 The scholarly literature on Althusser’s relationship to Spinoza is vast and growing. My understanding of Spinoza and his influence on the circle that formed around Althusser in the 1960s comes from the work of Pierre Macherey and Warren Montag.

2 This is not to say that Althusser’s obscure hermeneutics are “Left Straussian”—a term that probably concedes too much to the cult of Leo Strauss and grants his esoteric form of interpretation a monopoly on “close reading.” Indeed, Althusser’s reading practice becomes clearer when set against historicism and esotericism. Unlike Quentin Skinner, Althusser uses the language of conjuncture, not context, and this difference is important for how it politicizes history and the historical situation. Unlike Strauss, Althusser rejects the idea of a hidden and eternal teaching transmitted between the lines of a text on the basis that it is reliant upon a subjectivist view of authorship and a thick theory of authorial intentionality. What is more, Straussians read for what’s said between the lines of a text while Althusser urges a reading practice that listens for silence and learns how to hear what “sounds hollow” in a work (Althusser and Balibar, 1997, 30). Still, there are some surprising affinities in their methods and proximity in their positions. Miguel Vatter (2014, 23) calls it an “irony” of intellectual history, but it might also point to deeper theoretical connections, especially to their mutual investment in philosophy as a distinct practice and a defined tradition.

3 Reading “Capital” is itself the transcription of talks prepared and delivered for Althusser’s 1964–5 seminar on Marx’s Capital at the École Normale Supériore. The recordings are preserved in the Althusser archives at L’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine in Caen, France. For a good introduction to these recordings, see William S. Lewis’s (2016) “Listening to Reading ‘Capital.’”

4 This is a constant theme in Althusser’s writings and personal correspondences. See, for instance, the letter to his psychoanalyst René Diatkine, who he encourages to clarify publicly his stance on Jacques Lacan. Here is Althusser (1996, 38): “As long as you have not openly, publicly, objectively, and demonstratively, that is, theoretically clarified your dealings with him—and to clarify one’s dealing with someone means to begin by acknowledging what one owes to him—he will have a ‘hold’ on you, and with that hold, he prevents you simultaneously from being theoretically free and advancing in theoretical research.” Seen in the context of his advice to his analyst, Althusser's writing is also limited by his unacknowledged debts, and his entire corpus is an uneven and ambivalent effort to break free of Gramsci’s hold.

5 And probably not “we” who have barely read Marx, and never, says Althusser, according to his own lessons about reading.

6 For a very different reading of credit and debt in Capital, see Ivan Ascher’s (2016) Portfolio Society.

7 The almost biblical approach to Capital that dominated the Althusserian circle gets simultaneously repeated and repudiated by a strand of Italian Marxism that takes its political and theoretical lessons from the Grundrisse (see Negri 1991). The intellectual-historical and political-theoretical connections between Reading “Capital” and Antonio Negri’s Marx beyond Marx are beyond my scope here, in that autonomia was in many ways a rejection of Gramsci and his influence on the development of Italian Marxism. Still, Negri’s approach to the Grundrisse models another reading practice that might be usefully considered in connection with Gramsci and Althusser. And Negri’s (1999) theory of constituent power could be taken to continue in a venerable tradition of “Machiavellian Marxism” established by Gramsci.

8 Althusser’s metaphor of “discovery”—which invokes an image of scientific breakthrough but also of colonial conquest and domination—demands its own critical interrogation. A “decolonial” reading of Althusser would be further complicated by his relationship to French Maoism and the “cultural” critique of the bourgeois state. It strikes me that decolonial theory confronts a difficult and complicated case with Althusser: precisely the sort of encounter that might push this theory beyond the tired binaries and fantasies of innocence that can derail it and toward an account of its politics and its political intervention in the present conjuncture.

9 Gramsci remarks extensively on the aims and methods of the social sciences. He also offers theoretical justification for a movement beyond descriptive social science toward prescriptive and predictive arguments. He shares with Althusser a critique of positivist sociology, but he devotes considerably more attention to detailing the opposition between “political science” and “sociology.” Read in a certain way, Gramsci’s reflections on the social sciences underscore Althusser’s neglect of the specific relationship that the sciences establish with politics. Althusser faults Gramsci for neglecting the relationship between science and philosophy, but this begs the question concerning science and politics—and concerning the prospects of a Marxist political science.

10 Margaret Leslie’s defense of anachronism, against Skinner’s historicism, draws explicitly from Gramsci and claims him as a source for interpretive methods in political theory. I am persuaded by Leslie’s critique of Skinner and also believe that anachronism is a defensible hermeneutic practice, though I am not sure the term captures Gramsci’s encounter with Machiavelli very well. Indeed, it may be Gramsci’s historicism—his contextualist approach to The Prince—that proffers a radical alternative to Skinner and a dialectical critique of conventional historicist methods. I would argue that it is only by placing The Prince in its historical conjuncture that Gramsci is able to read Machiavelli’s authorship out of its context. The Gramscian conjuncture is the critical reworking of a concept of context, not an anachronistic assault on context. I see residues of the Gramscian idea of conjuncture in Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo’s (2016, 15–20) recent defense of the primacy of “situation” in historical criticism, which I also see as a radical alternative to a Skinnerian handling of the historicity of ideas.

11 It may be said that there is no real tension between these terms. McKenzie Wark (2014), for instance, has argued that utopia is “the most realist genre” and that the utopian might be taken for a “figure of what is actual” as opposed to the unreal or imagined as ideal. Sheldon Wolin’s (2001, 339–64) extraordinary book on Tocqueville shows how political realism and political utopianism are, in fact, cut from the same cloth. Still, I think it makes sense to hold these terms simultaneously apart and together in accounting for the Gramscian-Althusserian position, for reasons having to do with the “double vision” they draw out of Machiavelli, between the perspective of the people and that of the Prince.

12 In this respect, my argument goes beyond that of Ross Speer (2016), who emphasizes the “Machiavellian Marxism” in Althusser and Gramsci but doesn’t much discuss how an encounter with Gramsci structures the whole of Althusser’s theoretical oeuvre.

13 This strikes me as a serious misreading of Gramsci. The violence of the state is quite prominent, for instance, in his reflections on the “Southern Question.”

14 Though on this point readers should recall that it is Gramsci, much more than Althusser, who suffered at the hands of a repressive state apparatus. Gramsci was imprisoned for his politics. Althusser was hospitalized for having strangled his wife.

15 “Reproductive Force” is an intentionally ambiguous formulation, which aims to preserve what is distinctive about the Gramscian-Althusserian theory of the state.

16 For a different account, grounded in Machiavelli’s political thought, see Yves Winter (2018).

17 I take this to be at least part of what’s at stake in the striking fact that a police officer—the figuration of repressive state authority par excellence—is also the emblem of interpellation. An ordinary police hailing is meant to illustrate the conditions under which an individual becomes a subject, meaning that this “physical conversion” is at once repressive and reproductive and, indeed, that the repressive powers of the state envelop the entire structure of ideology.

18 This is a conceit that still dominates certain parts of the righteous Left, one that says Trumpism is essentially no different than Reaganism.

19 This is a point that Wolin (2001) also makes, in connection with Montesquieu, and it seems to me the appropriate beginning of a general theory of political literacy.

20 Dante is also key to William Clare Roberts’s (2016) reading of Marx’s political theory, though, surprisingly, he does not discuss Gramsci, for whom Dante was a constant point of reference.

21 He understood the Italian situation to be quite different in this respect from the French and the German, the former marked by “the absence of relations between the upper classes and the people” and in this way closer to Slavic countries (Gramsci 1992b, 115). But even that comparison could only go so far, to the extent that Italy wrestled with its own peculiar paradox, that of being “a country that is simultaneously very young and very old (like Lao-tzu who was 80 years at birth)” (72).

22 I see Peter Thomas’s (2011) work as a powerful response to that invitation. His is arguably the most ambitious and successful effort to reconstruct the Notebooks as a philosophical system—a philosophy of noncontemporaneity, a theory of the “integral State,” and with these, an almost metaphysical rendering of hegemony. But this effort also seems curiously contrary to Gramsci’s core problematic and procedure. Gramsci gets pushed back onto Althusserian terrain, as Fabio Frosini (2014) has argued, but on behalf of a “Gramscian moment” cast in a metaphysical theory of time. For me, it is one of the virtues of Althusser’s early critique to recognize that Gramsci detests any Marxism that “slides” or “slips” back into metaphysics, a permanent temptation and the proper polemical object of his “philosophy of praxis.”