Pocket Pantheon

Figures of Postwar Philosophy

Alain Badiou, David Macey

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786250
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786267
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today's leading political and philosophical minds. Alain Badiou draws on his encounters with this pantheon-his teachers, opponents and allies-to offer unique insights into both the authors and their work. These studies form an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought.

Louis Althusser (1918–1990)

For Louis Althusser, questions of thought had to do with battles, frontlines and the balance of power. The recluse in the rue d’Ulm did not give himself time to meditate, or time to withdraw. There was only time to intervene, and his time was limited, unsettled and hurtling, so to speak, towards an unavoidable precipice. The other time was unlimited but that, alas, was a time of pain.

Because it related to the imperative need for action for which time was running out, the self-image of Althusser’s thought used the military categories of advances and retreats, territorial gains, decisive engagements, strategy and tactics.

We have to begin by asking: what, according to Althusser, was philosophy’s position within the general getting under way [appareillage] of theoretical interventions, within the strategic movements of thought?

It was an important position. The clearest proof is probably that, in Althusser’s view, the origins of the great historical failures of the proletariat lay not in the crude balance of power, but in theoretical deviations. That is, it has to be said, a strong indication of what he was about, and it has two implications. First, a political failure has to be explained, not in terms of the strength of the adversary, but always in terms of the weakness of our own project. There is nothing more to be said about that rule of immanence. Second, that weakness is always, in the last analysis, an intellectual weakness. Politics is therefore determined as a figure of intellectuality, and not as an objective logic of powers. One can only subscribe to that rule of subjective independence.

It must, however, be added that, for Althusser, theoretical deviations in politics are, in the last analysis, philosophical deviations. When, in Lenin and Philosophy, he gives a list of the categories through which these deviations are theorized – economism, evolutionism, voluntarism, humanism, empiricism, dogmatism, and so on – he adds that: ‘Basically, these deviations are philosophical deviations, and were denounced as such by the great workers’ leaders, starting with Engels and Lenin.’¹

For Althusser, philosophy is therefore the intellectual site where the ability to put a name to the successes and failures of revolutionary politics is decided, if not the successes and failures themselves. Philosophy is the immanent agency that gives a name to the avatars of politics.

Althusser’s strategy was therefore always to determine, in each situation, the philosophical act whereby a nominal space could be delineated for the contemporary, or post-Stalinist, crisis within revolutionary politics. That is what he proposed to do from the 1960s onwards by determining the categories of what he called at the time ‘the philosophy of Marx’. The preface to Reading ‘Capital’ has as its title a goal, an orientation, and philosophy is its ideal point. The title is ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’.

Now it so happens that this strategic orientation will encounter and deal with considerable obstacles, and those obstacles gravitate around the very concept of philosophy. As early as 1966, we observe a shift and, at its centre, a self-criticism, at first latent and then explicit. Althusser, who initially assumed that the autonomy of philosophy was in some sense a given, subjects philosophy to increasingly rigorous conditions, so much so that that site of nomination will eventually be prescribed by the very thing it is meant to be naming. As we shall see, the outcome is the central enigma bequeathed us by the work of Althusser: the almost undecidable nature of the relationship between philosophy and politics.

In 1965, Althusser proposes, to use his own words, to ‘read Capital as philosophers’.² That reading is contrasted with two others: those of the economist and the historian. It will be noted that there is no question here of a political reading of Capital. What does his philosophical reading consist in? To read as a philosopher is, he tells us, ‘to question the specific object of a specific discourse, and the specific relationship between this discourse and its object’.³ The categories used here – discourse, object – are basically very similar to those of Foucault, to whom Althusser pays tribute in the same text as it happens. The philosophical investigation is of an epistemological nature. Through the mediation of the categories of discourse and object, it proposes to establish that Capital is ‘the absolute beginning of the history of a science’.

As the argument progresses, however, the objective is defined more broadly. Philosophy, or to be more specific, Marx’s philosophy or philosophy after Marx, appears to be in a position to offer, in the great classical tradition, a doctrine of thought. It is, in substance, a matter of substituting ‘the question of the mechanism of the cognitive appropriation of the real object by means of the object of knowledge’ for ‘the ideological question of guarantees of the possibility of knowledge’.⁴

At this point, two remarks are called for:

•For Althusser, philosophy still exists within the regime of a theory of knowledge. The point is to think the knowledge-effect as such.

•The difference between the philosophy of Marx and received philosophy, which can be said to be dominated by ideological questions, is that it thinks, not guarantees of truth, but the mechanisms of the production of knowledge. With a tension that evokes Spinoza from the outset, the philosophical break outlined here takes us from a problematic of the possibility of knowledge to a problematic of the real process of knowledge. Philosophy exists with respect to a singular real: that of knowledge. The fact is that there is such a thing as knowledge, and such is the ‘there is’ without an origin where philosophy is decided, in the same sense in which Spinoza concludes that we have a true idea. Which means, strictly speaking, that if we do not have a true idea, we will be able neither to find nor to enter into philosophy.

On this basis, it is clear that philosophy, so conceived, exists on the same plane as science. It is virtually the science of the knowledge-effect or, as Althusser will say, the theory of theoretical practice.

What is a practice?

The descriptive framework Althusser outlines for historical existence in general is based upon the multiple, and this is an important insight. This multiple, which is irreducible, is that of practices. Let us say that ‘multiple’ is the name of practices. Or the name of what I call a situation, once we begin to think it in the order of its multiple deployment. To recognize the primacy of practice is, precisely, to accept that ‘all levels of social existence are the site of distinct practices’.⁵ There can be no apprehension of social existence under the sign of essence, or the sign of the One. I owe my liking for lists to Althusser, and to Chinese politics. Lists are proof that we have a firm grip on the multiple and the heterogeneous. The list of practices, as proposed in 1965, is instructive: economic practice, political practice, ideological practice, technical practice, and finally, says Althusser, scientific practice, adding in brackets, as though this were no more than another name for it, or an illuminating synonym, ‘theoretical practice’.

Scientific (or theoretical): this innocent parenthesis, which aligns ‘theoretical’ with ‘scientific’, this minor, transitory punctuation that divides only to unite, is the source of all the subsequent difficulties. For what does this parenthesis welcome into the theoretical, alongside the sciences, if not philosophy in person? The real question is whether philosophy demands a parenthesis, or is in some sense always in parentheses. All Althusser’s efforts are devoted to repunctuating philosophy, to removing it from parentheses, but the blank that is then inscribed in those parentheses can never be completely erased. A little further on, he expressly indicates that ‘theory’, the word in parentheses, gives us a multiplicity: ‘Scientific or theoretical practice [is] itself divisible into several branches (the different sciences, mathematics, philosophy).’⁶ So, three main branches. It will be noted that a distinction is made between mathematics and the sciences in the strict sense, and that mathematics is by that very fact situated in the theoretical gap between the sciences and philosophy. And Althusser has no qualms about claiming that mathematics and philosophy represent what he calls ‘theory, in its “purest” forms’. Note the inverted commas and the affectation of purity.

The kinship between mathematics and philosophy is paradoxical, as Althusser will later denounce formalism as a typically modern deviation within philosophy. He often criticized me for what he called my ‘Pythagorism’, or what he saw as my excessive interpolation of mathematicity into my philosophical argument. As so often happens to the Master’s injunctions when the disciple is stubborn, I simply went on to make things worse for myself. Let us say that, in 1965, the kinship serves as a metaphor for the fact that philosophy, sheltered in a parenthesis, is for Althusser an intellectual site that is homogeneous with the sciences, albeit in a form in which the real object is as absent as it is in pure mathematics.

As we know, Althusser will subsequently make a self-criticism of this whole construct on the grounds that it represents a ‘theoreticist’ deviation. Does this mean that nothing survives of what, in 1965, he claimed to be specific to philosophy? Far from it, in my view. The seeds of all later developments, which contradict the self-criticism, are indeed in the 1965 preface. From the outset, Althusser synthesizes the claims made in For Marx, and recalls that Marx’s foundational gesture created two things, and not just one, in a single break. Marx created a new science – the science of History – and a new philosophy – dialectical materialism. But what are the immediate links between these two dimensions of thought in Marx’s break? Althusser describes them thus: ‘Marx could not possibly have become Marx except by founding a theory of history and a philosophy of the historical distinction between ideology and science.’⁷

This is the source of all the later problems. For rather than being a positive theory of theoretical practice, philosophy looks like a distinction, divorce or delineation. The whole of Marx’s philosophical act is contained with the categories through which it becomes possible to distinguish between science and ideology. Philosophy is already what Althusser will relentlessly define it as, using an expression from Lenin: the ability to draw lines of demarcation within the theoretical. Not so much a section through the theoretical as a severing or division [sectionnement]. Not so much a theoretical discipline as an intervention.

But before this seed can germinate, and before he can succeed in situating philosophy somewhere other than in the lists of the theoretical or in the parenthesis of the theoretical, Althusser must undertake some very complex operations that impact upon the very idea of philosophy, and even more so upon its supposed autonomy.

Essentially, his programme will now be to extirpate philosophy from the parenthesis of the theoretical, which also means this: ceasing for ever to conceive of philosophy as a theory of knowledge and, by the same criterion, ceasing for ever to conceive of it as a history of knowledge. Neither a theory nor a history of the sciences, philosophy is, all things considered, a practice, and yet it is a-historical. This strange alloy of a practical vocation and a tendential eternity will probably never stabilize, but it does at least tell us this: on this point, the entire development of Althusser’s thought is a de-epistemologization of philosophy. And to that extent, and rather than continuing it as so many declarations and commentaries – including his own – would suggest, he sets about destroying the epistemological and historicizing tradition in which French academicism is grounded.

Where the concept of philosophy is concerned, Althusser’s tactical operations are primarily operations of hollowing-out, suppression and negation. In what he describes as its theoreticist version, philosophy is classically defined by its domain of objects, or in other words by the theoretical practices whose mechanisms it studies. If philosophy is not a theory of theoretical practices, what new object allows it to be defined? Althusser’s answer to that question is radical. For his answer is this: none. Philosophy has no real object. It is not thinking about an object.

The immediate implication of this point is that philosophy has no history, because any history is normed by the objectivity of its process. As it has no relationship with any real object whatsoever, philosophy is such that, strictly speaking, nothing happens within it.

This convocation of nothingness, or of emptiness, is in my view essential. The categories of philosophy are indeed empty from the outset, in that they do not designate any real that they can theorize. And that emptiness is not even the emptiness of being whose infinite deployment is investigated by mathematics. For this emptiness is its only positive counterpart: the emptiness of an act, of an operation. The categories of philosophy are empty because their sole function consists in operating on the basis of and in the direction of practices that are already given and which deal with a raw material that is real and that can be situated in historical terms. This is not to say that philosophy is not a cognitive appropriation of singular objects, but to say, rather, that it is a thought-act whose categories function with operational gaps, with intervals that allow it to grasp its objects and to make them real.

That philosophy is of the order of the act and of intervention can be deciphered from its very form. Philosophy does proceed via theses. It is a matter of assertion and neither commentary nor cognitive appropriation. In his 1967 lectures on Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, which were republished in 1974, Althusser announces from the outset that ‘Philosophical propositions are Theses.’⁸ He unhesitatingly adds that such theses are dogmatic theses, and are always organized into systems. The three dimensions of thesis, dogmatism and system express the profound idea that any philosophy is a declaration. The practical function of philosophy is to declare that there are limits to the categorial emptiness of the object. As we shall see, the declarative form allows Althusser to inscribe the philosophical act within what we will call political relations. And it is in any case true that ‘declaration’ is, or must be, a political word.

In Althusser’s dispositif, the great virtue of the affirmative form of philosophy – the thesis of the thesis – is that it rejects any idea of philosophy as question or questioning. Within philosophy itself, it also distances it from all hermeneutic conceptions of philosophy. This is an extremely precious heritage. The idea of philosophy as questioning and openness always paves the way, as we know, for the return of the religious. I use ‘religion’ here to describe the axiom according to which a truth is always a prisoner of the arcana of meaning and a matter for interpretation and exegesis. There is an Althusserian brutality to the concept of philosophy that recalls, in that respect, Nietzsche. Philosophy is affirmative and combative, and it is not a captive of the somewhat viscous delights of deferred interpretation. In terms of philosophy, Althusser maintains the presupposition of atheism, just as others, such as Lacan, maintain it in anti-philosophy. That presupposition can be expressed in just one sentence: truths have no meaning. It follows that philosophy is an act and not an interpretation.

Althusser calls this act in the form of a declaration the tracing of a line of demarcation. Philosophy separates, disconnects, delineates. And it does so within the framework of one of its constituent tendencies, namely materialism and idealism. Philosophy has no history, both because, in terms of its act, it is nothing more than emptiness, and because there can be no history of emptiness or nothingness, and because its act of delineation, or the drawing of a line of demarcation, is simply repeated in the light of its eternal options. The primacy of material objectivity for materialism; the primacy of the idea and the subject for idealism. In 1967, Althusser writes: ‘Philosophy is that strange theoretical site where nothing really happens, nothing but this repetition of nothing.’ And he adds: ‘The intervention of each philosophy is precisely the philosophical nothing whose insistence we have established, since a dividing-line actually is nothing; it is not even a line or drawing, but the simple fact of being divided, i.e. the emptiness of a distance taken.’⁹ And yet, with respect to what and in what external history does philosophy trace its line through the act that constitutes it in the absence of any object? For the fact that philosophy had no object and no history by no means implies that it has no effect. There is, Althusser will say, no such thing as a history of philosophy, but there is such a thing as a history in philosophy. There is a ‘history of the displace...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Overture
• Jacques Lacan
• Georges Canguilhem and Jean Cavaillès
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• Jean Hyppolite
• Louis Althusser
• Jean-François Lyotard
• Gilles Deleuze
• Michel Foucault
• Jacques Derrida
• Jean Borreil
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
• Gilles Châtelet
• Françoise Proust
• Notes
• A Note on the Texts