Posts tagged ‘Louis Althusser’
Is it simple to be a Spinozist in philosophy?
Althusser and Deleuze
by Katja Diefenbach / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Article
At strategic points in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser introduces Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause as the decisive concept that is absent from Marx’s discourse. [1] For the Althusser of 1965, Spinoza’s model of causality is the great missing link in Marx’s thought, a philosophical omission and lacuna of symptomatic force. …
The necessity of contingency
Rereading Althusser on structural causality
by Stefano Pippa / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Article
Among the concepts proposed by Althusser in the course of his famous symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital, structural causality plays a central role. Extrapolated from Marx’s writings via a detour through the philosophy of Spinoza, it came to represent the concept in which Althusser summed up ‘Marx’s immense theoretical revolution’. [1] …
Race, real estate and real abstraction
by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Article, Dossier, Property, Power, Law
The crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption into the everyday lives of millions of a panoply of ominous …
Anti-Revolutionary Republicanism
Claude Lefort’s Machiavelli
by Knox Peden / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article
Amidst the enthusiasm marking the five hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s composition of The Prince in 1513, there is one recent publication that risks being overlooked. Last year saw the belated appearance in English of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort’s most substantial work, his 1972 doctoral thesis: Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel. This volume, abridged …
A precarious dialogue
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Left
by Maria Kakogianni and Jacques Rancière / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Dossier, Interview, The Greek Symptom
Maria Kakogianni It seems to me that we are in an intermediary situation today. The period of the great renunciation of the revolutionary past, and of the ‘end of History’, seems to be giving way to a new sequence of popular struggles (the Arab Spring, Los Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, etc.). But, within this new sequence, …
178 Reviews
Books Reviewed: Massimilliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence Louis Althusser, Cours sur Rousseau McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Curious Times and Everyday Life of the Situationist International Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy Julie Stephens, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care Routledge, Security Studies: New Titles and Key Backlist, 2012 After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May-15 July 2012
by Harry Harootunian, David Cunningham, Andrew McGettigan, Yotam Feldman, Ben Watson, Stefano Pippa, Jessica Elaine Reilly, Alison Stone, Mark Neocleous and Alex Dubilet / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Reviews
An introduction to Alain Badiou’s ‘The autonomy of the aesthetic process’
by Bruno Bosteels / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Article
See Alain Badiou, ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (in the same issue)
More than everything
Žižek's Badiouian Hegel
by Peter Osborne / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013) / Article
There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1
Allow me to be that figure (for now anyway), …
Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon
by Pierre Macherey / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012) / Article
The text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he puts forward the thesis of the individual’s interpellation as subject, is no doubt one of his most innovative, but it is also particularly disconcerting: its exposition, in exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses and brute force, winds up …
The patient cannot last long
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
by Stephane Douailler / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
The presence on our bookshelves of such texts as Louis Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis and Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson immediately invites the readers who pick them up to ask themselves what might be at play between titles that so readily mix, miss or specify the genres – if there are any – through which a text …
Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
by Bruno Bosteels / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the …
Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
by Nathan Brown / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weakness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of …
Student problems (1964)
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy (with an introduction by Warren Montag)
by Louis Althusser / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of …
From the Archive: Rancière, Althusser and Ideology
by Radical Philosophy / 2011 / Web Content
The first English translation of Jacques Rancière’s 1969 essay ‘On the Theory of Ideology’ (drafted for an anthology on Althusser published in Argentina) was published in Radical Philosophy 7 (Spring 1974). This translation was based on the French version that first appeared in 1973, and included Rancière’s Afterword and the self-critical footnotes, indicating his reservations …
The gender apparatus
Torture and national manhood in the US ‘war on terror’
by Bonnie Mann / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask …
Theory (Madness of)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)
by Francois Cusset / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain …
Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)
by Étienne Balibar / RP 165 (Jan/Feb 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains …
Necro-economics
Adam Smith and death in the life of the universal
by Warren Montag / RP 134 (Nov/Dec 2005) / Article
Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire …
125 Reviews
by Martin Ryle, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Esther Leslie, Lorenzo Chiesa, Darren Ambrose, Lucy OMeara and Liam O’Ruairc / RP 125 (May/Jun 2004) / Reviews
Gilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder Verna V. Gehring, ed., War after September 11 Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder Martin Ryle
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Charity …
124 Reviews
by Nina Power, Michael Vaughan, John Kraniauskas, Mark Neocleous, Ian Patterson and Chris Arthur / RP 124 (Mar/Apr 2004) / Reviews
Louis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogue Nina Power
Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism Michael Vaughan
Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State John Kraniauskas
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered Mark Neocleous
Ben Watson, Shitkicks and Doughballs Ian Patterson
Bertell Ollman, …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Is it simple to be a Spinozist in philosophy?
Althusser and Deleuzeby Katja Diefenbach / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Article
At strategic points in Reading Capital, Louis Althusser introduces Spinoza’s idea of an immanent cause as the decisive concept that is absent from Marx’s discourse. [1] For the Althusser of 1965, Spinoza’s model of causality is the great missing link in Marx’s thought, a philosophical omission and lacuna of symptomatic force. …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
The necessity of contingency
Rereading Althusser on structural causalityby Stefano Pippa / RP 199 (Sept/Oct 2016) / Article
Among the concepts proposed by Althusser in the course of his famous symptomatic reading of Marx’s Capital, structural causality plays a central role. Extrapolated from Marx’s writings via a detour through the philosophy of Spinoza, it came to represent the concept in which Althusser summed up ‘Marx’s immense theoretical revolution’. [1] …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Race, real estate and real abstraction
by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano / RP 194 (Nov/Dec 2015) / Article, Dossier, Property, Power, LawThe crises and mutations of contemporary capitalism have rendered palpable Marx’s observation according to which in bourgeois modernity human beings are ‘ruled by abstractions’. [1] The processes of financialization animating the dynamics of the 2007–8 crisis involved the violent irruption into the everyday lives of millions of a panoply of ominous …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Anti-Revolutionary Republicanism
Claude Lefort’s Machiavelliby Knox Peden / RP 182 (Nov/Dec 2013) / Article
Amidst the enthusiasm marking the five hundredth anniversary of Machiavelli’s composition of The Prince in 1513, there is one recent publication that risks being overlooked. Last year saw the belated appearance in English of the French political philosopher Claude Lefort’s most substantial work, his 1972 doctoral thesis: Le travail de l’œuvre Machiavel. This volume, abridged …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
A precarious dialogue
Dossier: The Greek Symptom: Debt, Crisis and the Crisis of the Leftby Maria Kakogianni and Jacques Rancière / RP 181 (Sept/Oct 2013) / Dossier, Interview, The Greek Symptom
Maria Kakogianni It seems to me that we are in an intermediary situation today. The period of the great renunciation of the revolutionary past, and of the ‘end of History’, seems to be giving way to a new sequence of popular struggles (the Arab Spring, Los Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, etc.). But, within this new sequence, …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
178 Reviews
Books Reviewed: Massimilliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza Kevin B. Anderson and Russell Rockwell, eds, The Dunayevskaya–Marcuse–Fromm Correspondence Louis Althusser, Cours sur Rousseau McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Curious Times and Everyday Life of the Situationist International Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectacular Capitalism: Guy Debord and the Practice of Radical Philosophy Julie Stephens, Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory and Care Routledge, Security Studies: New Titles and Key Backlist, 2012 After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, BAK, Utrecht, 20 May-15 July 2012by Harry Harootunian, David Cunningham, Andrew McGettigan, Yotam Feldman, Ben Watson, Stefano Pippa, Jessica Elaine Reilly, Alison Stone, Mark Neocleous and Alex Dubilet / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / Reviews
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
An introduction to Alain Badiou’s ‘The autonomy of the aesthetic process’
by Bruno Bosteels / RP 178 (Mar/Apr 2013) / ArticleSee Alain Badiou, ‘The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process’ (in the same issue)
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
More than everything
Žižek's Badiouian Hegelby Peter Osborne / RP 177 (Jan/Feb 2013) / Article
There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although no one has actually read them page by page… a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. Slavoj Žižek1
Allow me to be that figure (for now anyway), …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Figures of interpellation in Althusser and Fanon
by Pierre Macherey / RP 173 (May/Jun 2012) / ArticleThe text that Althusser published in 1970 under the title ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, where he puts forward the thesis of the individual’s interpellation as subject, is no doubt one of his most innovative, but it is also particularly disconcerting: its exposition, in exploiting a rhetoric that combines ellipses and brute force, winds up …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
The patient cannot last long
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversyby Stephane Douailler / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
The presence on our bookshelves of such texts as Louis Althusser’s Reply to John Lewis and Jacques Rancière’s Althusser’s Lesson immediately invites the readers who pick them up to ask themselves what might be at play between titles that so readily mix, miss or specify the genres – if there are any – through which a text …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Reviewing Rancière. Or, the persistence of discrepancies
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversyby Bruno Bosteels / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
In the nearly four decades since its original publication, Althusser’s Lesson has acquired a certain mythical aura as the dark precursor of things to come. Even with the wealth of translations of Jacques Rancière’s work that have been published at an increasingly feverish pace over the past few years in the wake of the …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Red years: Althusser’s lesson, Rancière’s error and the real movement of history
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversyby Nathan Brown / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
The dissolution of the organizational forms which are created by the movement, and which disappear when the movement ends, does not reflect the weakness of the movement, but rather its strength. The time of false battles is over. The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Student problems (1964)
Dossier: The Althusser–Rancière Controversy (with an introduction by Warren Montag)by Louis Althusser / RP 170 (Nov/Dec 2011) / Article, Dossier, The Althusser–Rancière Controversy
What are the theoretical principles of Marxism that should and can come into play in the scientific analysis of the university milieu to which students, along with teachers, research workers and administrators, belong?* Essentially, the Marxist concepts of the technical and social divisions of labour. Marx applied these principles in the analysis of …
From the Archive: Rancière, Althusser and Ideology
by Radical Philosophy / 2011 / Web ContentThe first English translation of Jacques Rancière’s 1969 essay ‘On the Theory of Ideology’ (drafted for an anthology on Althusser published in Argentina) was published in Radical Philosophy 7 (Spring 1974). This translation was based on the French version that first appeared in 1973, and included Rancière’s Afterword and the self-critical footnotes, indicating his reservations …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
The gender apparatus
Torture and national manhood in the US ‘war on terror’by Bonnie Mann / RP 168 (Jul/Aug 2011) / Article
Feminist protest against US torture practices, including outcries over the use of sex, sexuality and sexual identity in the torture of prisoners at US detention sites from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib, have understandably tended to focus on what the abuse destroys – the victim and his or her community. Here, though, I ask …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Theory (Madness of)
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (2)by Francois Cusset / RP 167 (May/Jun 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
Forty years or so after it initially rose as a rather new name for a rather new thing, theory is still an obtruse signifier, troubling and floating, requiring we go back to basics. Theory as we most often understand it today is the name given by the English-speaking intellectual community to a certain …
Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?
From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)by Étienne Balibar / RP 165 (Jan/Feb 2011) / Article, Dossier, From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought
It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
Necro-economics
Adam Smith and death in the life of the universalby Warren Montag / RP 134 (Nov/Dec 2005) / Article
Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire …
125 Reviews
by Martin Ryle, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Esther Leslie, Lorenzo Chiesa, Darren Ambrose, Lucy OMeara and Liam O’Ruairc / RP 125 (May/Jun 2004) / ReviewsGilbert Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms: September 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder Verna V. Gehring, ed., War after September 11 Stanley Hauerwas and Frank Lentricchia, eds, Dissent from the Homeland: Essays after September 11 Alain Joxe, Empire of Disorder Martin Ryle
Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth Jean-Jacques Lecercle
Charity …
![Item accessible to subscribers or available for single purchase](http://web.archive.org./web/20161112180202im_/http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/frankfurt/images/locked.gif)
124 Reviews
by Nina Power, Michael Vaughan, John Kraniauskas, Mark Neocleous, Ian Patterson and Chris Arthur / RP 124 (Mar/Apr 2004) / ReviewsLouis Althusser, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings Martin Halliwell and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/Anti-Humanist Dialogue Nina Power
Leonard Lawlor, The Challenge of Bergsonism Michael Vaughan
Mark Neocleous, Imagining the State John Kraniauskas
Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered Mark Neocleous
Ben Watson, Shitkicks and Doughballs Ian Patterson
Bertell Ollman, …