History as Project, Critique as Movement: Notes on the Specific Difference in Marx's Critique

Abstract

This article investigates the Marxian critique as a part of contemporary emancipatory project. After a detailed discussion about Althusser's contribution and legacy, the second part of the article discusses the difference between Marxian critique and the philosophical tradition and argues that the Marxian critique cannot be properly understood without taking into account its emancipatory objective and its specific methodology that the article conceptualizes as “projective historicization.”

Keywords:

• Marx
• Hegel
• Althusser
• communization
• history
• emancipation

Notes on Contributor

Dariush M. Doust has been working as a professor of art theory at the Academy of Arts in Sweden and a research fellow at Uppsala University and a docent affiliated with the Department of History of Ideas, University of Goteborg, Sweden. Currently, he works as a guest professor in philosophy at the School of Philosophy and Sociology in Beijing Normal University. He has written extensively on diverse topics in radical philosophy, critical theories, contemporary art theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Most recently, he has published the work “Dix thèses sur anti-philosophie (Ten theses on anti-philosophy)” in the volume Acte révolutionnaire, acte analytique (Revolutionary Act, Analytical Act) (Paris, France).

Notes

¹The essay was originally published in the journal La Penséein 1970. It is in fact extracted from a posthumously published manuscript titled Sur la Reproduction (Althusser 1995). As the title already suggests the main preoccupation of the author is a theory of reproduction. See also Jason Barker (forthcoming).

²In spite of much nuanced critique of the significance attributed to the concept of Nature in the traditional accounts of German romanticism, this philosophical and artistic movement is not fully understood unless the notion of organic totality is taken into account, for a further discussion see Fredrick C. Beiser (2003, 23–56).

³The term over-determination is borrowed from Freud. A discussion about the implications of Althusser's immanent philosophy is beyond the scope of this article. For a more detailed discussion of the problems inherent in Althusser's immanentism, see Fourtounis (2005).

⁴ Critique of Pure Reason takes up the function of desire as a force inherent in Reason. Ideas have a regulative function at the transcendental level, but what regulates ideas, unites them at a higher level, is practical reason. That is why Kant starts from the question of desire in The Critique of Practical Reason. See the chapter “Transcendental Doctrine of Method” in Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1996, A 805/B 833) and for the notion of desire, see Kant (1996, A 796/B 824).

⁵Categories of understanding stand in relation to an objective purposiveness that is telos of Nature. In the third Critique, Kant's argument is that aesthetic judgment cannot uphold such a purposive relation towards objects at the level of its content but that the judgment as a faculty itself is purposive (Kant 2000, §5:189). This rose is beautiful doesn't contain cognitive information about the rose but the possibility of such a judgement of taste, its validity as such, testifies to a higher purposiveness. That is why the third Critique is about the power of judgement itself, because the purposiveness is to be found in this power itself. Kant can therefore establish universality based on the unity of the world. Thus, the second part of the third Critique treats teleology. Intuition/imagination (einbildung) and representation (Vorstellung) have a central operative role in this distinction between two forms of purposiveness (see Cassirer 1981; Deleuze 1963).