Date: Sun, 23 Apr 1995 18:22:13 -0700 From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org> Subject: ALTHUSSER'S PHILOSOPHY The most recent mini-debate on Althusser must have primed my unconscious to reach for some Althusser last time I needed some toilet reading. (Luckily for me I had enough paper or I might have found another use for the text. Who says there is nothing outside the text?) Anyway, the text for tonight's sermon is Althusser's LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER ESSAYS (Monthly Review Press, 1971.) I must say, reading Althusser reading everybody else is a disconcerting experience, for I remain in suspense waiting to see where he is going, pitting his ingenious explanations against the banality of his assumptions anxious, to see which side is going to win out. So far I have read "Lenin before Hegel", the interview "Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon", and I am now within ten pages of finishing "Lenin and philosophy" (to be finished before the end of this message). I am at the beginning of the section 'Lenin and philosophical practice' after having been regaled with the argument that philosophy has no history because it has no object and never goes anywhere. The whole argument depends on a not particularly well-defined notion of "philosophy" en toto and its progressive replacement by "science", with materialist philosophy being the ally of science within the unscientific terrain of philosophy. Also, "philosophy" doesn't exist until "science" has come into existence, and the former necessarily lags behind the latter. So far the major categories being rigidly distinguished and then related are philosophy, science, the practice of philosophy, and politics or class struggle. Althusser has some ingenious arguments concerning Lenin's _Materialism and Emipirio-Criticism_, and also finds Lenin far superior to Engels as a thinker. Althusser finds Engels lacking as a philosopher, infected with positivism as well as naturphilosophie, still looking for an object for philosophy (p. 58-59). Even dialectics as an object for philosophy is retro, since logic is itself a science and no longer an object for philosophy. Now we come to the section on 'Partisanship in philosophy'. Lenin goes beyond Engels in locating philosophy as politics in theory, as residing somewhere between Science and Politics. Hitherto Philosophy has 'denegated' or suppressed the awareness of its own practice by its theory. Lenin realizes Marx's Thesis 11. Althusser concludes: "Marxism is not a (new) philosophy of praxis, but a (new) practice of philosophy." (p. 68) Perhaps most exasperating is that there is a grain of truth in everything Althusser writes here, but one comes away feeling that somehow the whole subject has been mystified. The last-discussed essay has much more plausibility in it and lacks some of the objectionable features of the others, and as far as this book goes, it seems that the crux of Althusser's arguments must be faced here. Note again these four Althusserian categories: Science, Philosophy, Politics, Philosophical Practice. Tell me what you think of Althusser's delineation and interrelation of these categories, and I'll come back at you later with my analysis. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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