Logical Continuity Behind Formal Break:A Study On Althusser And Althusserianism

This dissertation is a study on the relationship between the French Marxist philosopher Althusser and Althusserianism.As an important representative of Western Marxism,Althusser is a familiar figure in the field of the Chinese Marxist academia.The formulated tags such as Structuralist Marxism and Scientist Marxism,together with the"theoretical anti-humanist discourse" built up by the concepts of problematic,symptomatic reading,and the epistematical break,seem to bring our study on Althusser to a common ground of conceptualization.The current study,based on Althusser’s unpublished or newly published post-humorous manuscripts,texts,notes,correspondences,and relevant studies,attempts to reveal an Althusser who has been absent in the Chinese context.This is an Althusser who had interactive dialogues with his contemporary philosophers and thinkers,including Levi-Strauss,Bachelard,Canguilhem,Lacan,Foucault,Derrida,and so on,and who through these interactions tried to reconstruct a Marxist discourse.At the same time,this dissertation is also devoted to the study of Althusserianism,which was constituted by Althusser’s outstanding students,with their rich and complicated theoretical and political practices.By doing so,the author intends to differentiate an unfamiliar Althusser that is not completely equal to Althusserianism.This dissertation is composed of three parts:an introduction,one part on Althusser and another part on Althusserianism.In the Introduction,the author tells a story of Althusser and Foucault’s common friend Jacques Martin,a talented and promising philosopher,who due to serious syndromes of schizophrenia destroyed all his manuscripts before committed suicide.By Martin’s specific way of existence,the author intends to explain the special object of this study on text interpretation and historical analysis:the absence of works.If what determines the meaning of certain work is not the given content told by the words or designed by the author’s intention,then,the researcher’s job to interpret or to analyze becomes the contemporary theoretical construction taking the absence as its fundamental object.What is absent from the apparent layer of texts could be the meaning of certain concept lost in the process of translation between different languages,the forgotten background or genealogical sources,or the neglected connections between different thinkers and their different lines of questioning.By taking the absence as its object,a new theoretical discourse is expected to be produced.This is not only the approach this current study takes,and,at the same time,it also corresponds to the way the rationalist tradition of 20th century French philosophy follows up till now.This rationalist tradition is both the analytical object and the theoretical reference of this study,and it does not only include Althusser and Althusserianism,and also includes the important French thinkers of the same time,such as Levi-Strauss,Bachelard,Canguilhem,Lacan,Foucault,Derrida,and even include the most active and critical thinkers today,i.e.Badiou and Ranciere who were both Althusser’s once star students and the co-contributors of Althusserianism,and Zizek who was Althusser’s most passionate student Miller’s studentIn the first part,the author discusses the pre-Althusserianist Althusser and his theoretical formation during 1960-1964.The first part is composed of three chapters.Chapter One presents Althusser’s primitive theoretical formation on the topic of"the young Marx" during 1960-1961.By recovering several lost concepts in the process of translation into Chinese,such as ideology,ideological field,deformation,logic of emergence,the author tries to reconstruct Althusser’s“Marxist theoretical principles on ideology",which consists of three principles:the problematic of ideology,the ideological field and the real history.In this first theoretical formulation,Althusser already started to have initial reflections on phenomenology,history of science,epistemology and structuralism represented in Levi-Strauss’ anthropology and Lacan’s psychoanalysis.The real history,which is the conceptual basis of his first theoretical formation at the time,will soon turn into the positivism Althusser criticizes fiercely later.Chapter Two,taking two most important articles in For Marx,"Contradiction and Overdetermination"(1962)and "On the Materialist Dialectic"(1963),as its visible text interpretation object,and the absent theoretical conjuncture as its concrete analytical object,intends to reconstruct Althusser’s readings of Marxist science of history and Marxist philosophy of history in his reflections on structuralism(Levi-Strauss on social levels and instances and Lacan’s symbolic construction in psychoanalysis)and the French epistemology developed by the research in the history of science.Chapter Three,following the outline of Althusser’s seminar on“Origins of Structuralism"(1962-1963),examines Althusser’s relationship with structuralism.By presenting Althusser’s genealogical examination in the history of philosophy,the prehistory from Montesquieu to Dilthey,by way of Husserl,towards Levi-Strauss,the author tries to show that Althusser’s breakthrough of the traditional limits of the so-called structuralism.By including the newly defined epistemology by the studies in the history of science(especially the work done by Canguilhem and Foucault)into the problematic of structuralism,Althusser found a way to traverse the structuralist impasse of the synchronic not being able to explain history,the diachronic.Through a comparison with the real "Structural Marxism" developed by Lucien Sebag in his 1964 book Marxisme et structuralisme,the author intends to prove that Althusser is not a"structuralist" in its widely and simply defined way.In the second part,the author tells the theoretical and political practices of Althusserianism during 1964-1968 and elaborates on the alterity relationship between Althusser and Althusserianism:different from,and at the same time also defined and identified by this other.The author divides student contributors of Althusserianism into three different groups:the orthodox Althusserians,represented by Balibar and Macherey;the theoretical pro-Lacanian Althusserians,represented by Miller and Badiou;the political activist Althusserians,represented by Linhart.Besides,there is another group that does not belong to any of these above divisions,of the middles who did not have a clear position and rode on the fence and kept looking on,whose representative is RanciereIn Chapter Four,the three groups of Althusserian students in its conflicts and breaking splits brought Althusserianism to its peak of development before 1968 May.After May,they found each other gathered again at the same starting point of leftist theoretical discourse interrupted by the historical event.The dual reflective and critical distance Althusser had intentionally remained,in politics the distance with the French Communist Party,and in theory with the ever-powerful theoretical revolution of structuralism,was demised by Althusserians’ passionate and ambitious activities.Althusser’s theoretical formation was developed into two irreconcilable extremes:theoretically it became the formalism saying the same analytical language with mathematics and linguistics;politically it led to the fanatical Maoism,which was directly against the official position held by French Communist Party.Althusser together with his most loyal orthodox students,chose to stay in the Communist Party,most of time kept silent and occationally pronounced some unnoticible spells and self-criticism.Chapter Five interprets "Action of Structure",the article conceived by three of Althusser’s students,Miller,Milner and Duroux.This text is not only the first theoretical manifesto of Lacan-Althusserianism,and it is also the absent theoretical and conceptual reference of Reading Capital.The concepts they formed wherein,the utopic point and the structural causality,together with the inclusion of a certain idea of subjectivity into structure,provide us the keys to understand the relationship between Althusser and Althusserianism.Chapter Six aims at an analysis of Althusser’s most mature theoretical formations in Reading Capital.The author attempts to construct Marx’s reading of Marxist theory of history through three key concepts,denegation,Darstellung and Gliederung,which are altogether absent in the Chinese translation.In the end,the analysis will lead to its conclusion that this Marxist philosopher who takes Marxist historical materialism as his theoretical foundation,is the Althusser whom his talented and passionate students were not be able to fully understand but instead formalized and distorted in their profound but diverted extremes.