Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 18:47:16 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jon Beasley-Murray <jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: M-I: How much Marx had Althusser read?


In the introduction to _The Future Lasts a Long Time_, Douglas Johnson 
says: "When reading [the book] one should not forget that Althusser was a 
*normalien* [graduate of the Ecole Normale; A also taught there 
practically--if not all--his working life]. . . .  one should not take 
his suggestion that, as a philospher, he was a fraud, too seriously.  The 
*normalien* despises the man who works all the time (in *normalien* slang 
he is called a *chiadeur*) and it is common to claim to have passed one's 
examinations brilliantly without doing any work.  To state that one 
became a renowned expert on Marx without having read the whol *oeuvre* is 
in this tradition.  There are other examples."  (xvii).

I happen to be reading a book on the French Grandes Ecoles right now 
(Bourdieu's _The State Nobility_, which I highly recommend), and an odd 
lot they are--if not that much more so than the US Ivy League, or British 
public schools and Oxbridge.  Still, I think it's true that we need to 
read Althusser (and other French thinkers) very much with an 
understanding of this strange academic context.

On the other question, that of the break, a couple of points:

i. Like Paul, I think the notion of a break is important, and I am 
interested in how Althusser deals with it.  This (as I was trying to 
suggest) is where agency enters Althusser's work, and I think he poses 
some important questions here.

ii. Yes, like Jerry suggests, the way he describes this break concretely 
in relation to Marx's work becomes increasingly silly--the absolute, 
heroic division doesn't hold up.  

iii. this notion of the heroism of the break is, I think, part of 
Althusser's *modernism* above all, and it also determined by the context 
of the Cuban and similar national liberation movements.  An interesting 
book in this regard is Santiago Colas' _Postmodernity in Latin America_, 
which examines the notion of the "leap" (similar, I think, to an 
Althusserian heroic break) in Julio Cortazar's _Rayuela_.

iv. But Althusser's notion of the break, however, was never simply 
mental--"in Marx's head"--as Hugh puts it.  No, again I think he is 
working towards a conception of the conditions for the *social* break 
>from conventional ideologies and ways of thinking.  Again, I'll recommend 
his essay on Bertolazzi and Brecht on this topic.

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons


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