Resumen:El presente escrito recorre algunos de los momentos centrales de la producción teórica de Louis Althusser a los fines de señalar un eje con el que abordar la continuidad de su obra: el ...rechazo a la contradicción tal y como es planteada por Hegel. Este rechazo lo conduce a impugnar que las contradicciones que fundan el orden social produzcan en su propio seno las figuras que la superarán. A estos fines, se recorren las premisas fundamentales del estructuralismo, del concepto de proceso sin sujeto ni fines y del materialismo aleatorio, propuesta que resume la perspectiva de los escritos últimos de Althusser.
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.
RESUMO Este artigo pretende introduzir o conceito de “interpelação fantasmagórica”. O esforço teórico se inspira nos conceitos de “fantasmagoria”, de Walter Benjamin, e de “interpelação ideológica”, ...de Louis Althusser. A proposta é aliar suas respectivas filosofias em processo a seus materialismos “antropológico” e “aleatório”, a fim de fazer uma análise sociopolítica da estética capitalista de hoje, tal como ela aparece na arquitetura pós-moderna e no design da vida cotidiana. Trata-se também de abrir novas perspectivas de resistências a normatividade do imaginário consumista com uma interpretação crítica das criações culturais (teatro, cinema...) que, conforme a inspiração dos autores, pode desvelar um novo sujeito capaz de surgir na cena da história.
A major rethinking of the Marxian tradition, one based not on fixed things but on the inextricable interrelation between the material world and our language for it.On the Nature of Marx's ...Thingstraces to Marx's earliest writings on the Epicurean tradition a subterranean, Lucretian practice that Lezra calls necrophilological translation. "Translation" here is extensively used, and covers practices that put different natural and national languages into relation, often across periods; but also practices or mechanisms internal to each language. Obscured by later critical attention to the contradictory lexicons-of fetishism and of chrematistics-thatCapitaluses to describe how value accrues to commodities, and by the dialectical approach that's framed Marx's work since Engels sought to marry it to the natural philosophy of his time, necrophilological translation has a troubling, definitive influence in Marx's thought and in his wake. It entails a radical revision of what countsastranslation, and wholly new ways of imagining what an "object" is; "matter;" "value;" "sovereignty;" "mediation;" and "number." InOn the Nature of Marx's Thingsa materialism "of the encounter," as recent criticism in the vein of the late Althusser calls it, encounters Marxological value-form theory; the development of so-calleddivisiblesovereignty in post-Schmittian political philosophy; Meillassoux's critique of correlationism; the resurgence of humanism in object-oriented-ontologies; and philosophies of translation and untranslatability in debt to Quine, Cassin, and Derrida. Marx through Lucretius; through Spinoza'smarranismo; through his translators. Freud's account of the agency of the unconscious, through Schiller'sDon Karlos;Adorno's exilic antihumanism, against Said's cosmopolitan humanism; the absolutization of what is not-one, in Badiou, Meillassoux and Freud through Donne and Neruda: "Lezra," writes Vittorio Morfino in his preface, "transfers all of the power of the Althusserian encounter into his conception of translation: translation is never simple, and in every translation a multiplicity of mediations come into play, without which these mediations would be guaranteed by atelos."Lezra's previous book reached a wider audience in literature, cultural studies, and political philosophy and has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.Since the publication of Greenblatt's bestsellingThe Swerve, the humanities has been marked by a "Lucretian turn," and this is the first book to take seriously the young Marx's indebtedness to Lucretius, as a resource for reimagining Marxist thought and politics.
In an argument first published in 1996, Richard Wolff showed that Marxist epistemology could be strengthened by introducing the Althusserian concept of overdetermination and elements of the Hegelian ...dialectic. While this essay wholeheartedly agrees with Wolff's work toward a reflexive Marxism, it finds his proposed reinsertion of Hegelian philosophy into Marxism problematic and argues that an alternative to Hegelianism can be found in Althusser's arguments for aleatory materialism. Highlighting the importance of "chance" events, aleatory materialism contains the same epistemological reflexivity that Wolff finds in Hegel's dialectic yet provides a stronger supporting ontology for Marxist theory. Aleatory materialism supports Marxist epistemology by detailing arguments for historical conjunctures that contain both overdetermined contradictions and situated causality. From this perspective, it becomes possible to argue that epistemology can contain both theoretical analysis of contradictions and concrete analysis. This allows for complexity without abstraction and specificity without reductionism or essentialism.
Recent debates in philosophy and critical theory have focused on a renewed concern with the work of Martin Heidegger. Thus, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson have all debated the nature ...of Heidegger's legacy, albeit with differing assessments of his continuing relevance for an emancipatory critical discourse. This essay begins by exploring the thesis that there are at least two possible appropriations of Heidegger's work. One is derived from the existentialist phenomenology of the early Heidegger and is exemplified by the recently published collection of Herbert Marcuse's essays entitled Heideggerian Marxism; the other foregrounds a "posthumanist" Heidegger and culminates in the "aleatory materialism" of the later, "post-Marxist" Louis Althusser. After examining the differentiated nature of Heidegger's philosophical legacy for Marxism, the essay focuses on the more "local" level of aesthetic theory in his essay "The Origin of the Work of Art," which provides the basis for a "re-ontologization" of aesthetics, emphasizing the role of art as a "dynamic of human activity."
This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the ...thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability (in French and English) of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law (
2012
), will take up.
The other of class Parker, Andrew
Rethinking Marxism,
20/1/1/, Letnik:
17, Številka:
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Journal Article
Recenzirano
Class and Its Others is a landmark collection of adventurous and often surprising essays that move well beyond what have become the shibboleths of antiessentialism to imagining new objects and ...discourses of class analysis. But how much aleatoriness can materialism absorb and still remain ... materialist? Is the economic any less "itself" when conceived as an "entry point" rather than a ground? Can a specifically Marxist understanding of class survive an encounter with forms of otherness that may not be its own?
This chapter and the next focus on the writings of Percy Shelley in order to examine social history as an ontogenetic and biopoetic force. Reading, anew, a poem that has been the touchstone of ...critical arguments about the relation between life, matter, language, and history in Romantic poetics, this chapter argues that Shelley’s The Triumph of Life mobilizes Lucretian materialist poetics to articulate the way personal bodies produce and integrate passages of historical time. Against the influential de Manian view that the poem’s “disfigured” faces allegorize the linguistic violence inherent in figuration as a function of reparative reading, the chapter focuses on the neglected final “Vision” in the poem that ceases to construe prosopopoeia as a principally verbal or cognitive process at all. Instead, Shelley adapts De rerum natura to cast personal senescence as the unintended work of multitudes, depicting wrinkling faces as mutable registers of the “living air” of a post-Napoleonic interval. Here The Triumph presses toward a biology and epistemology of senescence that, like Walter Benjamin’s “weak messianism,” refutes the triumphalist narrative vitalist life science shared with post-Waterloo historiography.
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