Louis Althusser (edited by Francois Matheron, translated by G. M. Goshgarian): The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings.

Louis Althusser (edited by Francois Matheron, translated by G. M. Goshgarian) The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings Verso, London, 2003, lxii + 318 pp. ISBN: 1-85984-408-1 (pbk) 15 [pounds sterling]

Although E. P. Thompson has not been alone in objecting to the work of Louis Althusser, it is nonetheless within his excoriating critique in The Poverty of Theory (1978) that one witnesses a prolonged attack on the perceived errors of the French intellectual's abstract structuralism. Althusser's epistemological approach was criticised, in that work, for its conflation of the 'empirical mode' of epistemological practice with the rather different ideological formation of 'empiricism' linked to positivism and its variants across the sciences. Hence Thompson's castigation of Althusser as a member of the 'bourgeois lumpen-intelligentsia', which broke intellectuality from practical experience. The results of this break are at least twofold: first, a method of theoreticism that succumbed to 'the kangaroo factor'--a procession of gigantic theoretical bounds through conceptual elements, without prolonged empirical engagement before bounding off into further theory. Second, it produced a theoreticism that indulged in 'generic ogreism': a procession of theoretical contestation without revealing direct interlocutors, which were frequently obscured in the undergrowth of the forest of 'bourgeois ideology' (Thompson, 1978: 316-17).

This book is a collection of Louis Althusser's essays written after the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital, between June 1966 and July 1967. In many ways, the essays are a direct and precise response to the charge of theoreticism, or the distantiation of theory from practice, that had been laid against Althusser. They thus display conscious attempts to recover the practical relation between theory and ideological class struggle. They are also deeply embedded in their own moment of struggle, set against the backdrop of political opposition within the Parti Communiste Francais (PCF) and its adoption of Marxist humanism; Althusser's involvement with dissidents in the Union des Etudiantes Communistes (UEC); and events in the wake of the Sino-Soviet dispute and the Cultural Revolution in China. It is these events that led Althusser to yield to the argument that politics shapes philosophy. 'The primacy of philosophy today', he argues, 'is therefore the contemporary form of the primacy of class struggle at the heart of the political nature of philosophy' (p. 217). Thus, on the basis of self-criticism, Althusser takes account of himself in these essays, through discussion of Levi-Strauss and the charge of structuralism; through analysis of Feuerbach and the humanist proclivities dominating circles within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the PCF, including its shift towards a parliamentary transition to socialism; through a critique of Lacan that draws together issues of historical materialism and psychoanalysis; and through his analysis of Marx's 'epistemological break' from the theoretical humanism of Feuerbach to develop the method of historical materialism. These themes and much more are covered across six essays: 'The philosophical conjuncture and Marxist theoretical research' (1966), 'On Levi-Strauss' (1966), 'Three notes on the theory of discourses' (1966), 'On Feuerbach' (1967), 'The historical task of Marxist philosophy' (1967), and 'The humanist controversy' (1967). Given the breadth of content of these essays, the remainder of this review is given to highlighting one major theme from each that might have wide appeal.

The categories employed in 'The philosophical conjuncture' seem to bear an elasticity, to use a term from E. P. Thompson, that gives them relevance beyond their synchronic moment of structured time. Distinctions are made here between a 'religious spiritualism'--associated with the Church, its theologians and its ideologues--that carries forward a reactionary spiritualist philosophy weighing heavy on contemporary politics, and a "critical rationalist idealism'. The latter is associated with Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Husserl as well as with Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur (Front number 1), and was seen to be in crisis due to the undermining of the critical-idealist problematic by the work of Levi-Strauss and Sartre, based on readings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (Front number 2). This mapping of the terrain of the philosophical juncture somewhat obviates E. P. Thompson's concern about producing arguments 'without any faces', or 'ogreism', given that a clear materialist problematic is outlined here, subtended with 'strategic questions' for the field of Marxist philosophy (dialectical materialism) and history (historical materialism). These range from the theory of structural causality, the theory of ideology and the theory of subjectification, to the theory of social classes, the theory of state apparatuses and the theory of political practice.

In 'On Levi-Strauss', questions are drawn on issues of ideology and the understanding of the forms of social formations. Significant here is Althusser's notion of the 'cross-effects' induced by the combination of modes of production and their superstructural instances, whereby a dominant mode of production exists in a social formation coeval with superstructural instances that derive from a prior subordinate mode of production (p. 23). By way of illustration, Althusser argues that the form of the Prussian state in the mid-nineteenth century, including its superstructural arrangements, was induced by the feudal mode of production, although this form was becoming subordinate in the economy to the capitalist mode of production. The notion of cross-effects thus lends relevance to the task of understanding the combined and uneven development of the historical sociology of modern state formation. Not least is the point that the function of relations of production is not taken up in the same way across different state-societies, and that the political and ideological instances of such conditions of state formation include different elements, relations and forms as a result of such 'cross-effects'. As Althusser states, 'the political does not always take the form of the state!' (pp. 28-9). These are important insights into the paradoxical effects of the combination of modes of production at the level of the state and the political, albeit that there are problems with Althusser's reading of history, in terms of its conflating pre-capitalist absolutist and modern forms of sovereignty by assuming one major shift from feudalism to capitalism (see Teschke, 2003).

Attention is cast differently, in 'Three notes', to issues of theory-building, with Althusser drawing a distinction between 'general theory' and the 'regional theories' that depend on it. Thus, historical materialism is seen as the general theory of which the theory of the capitalist mode of production, the theory of the political and politics, and the theory of the ideological are regional theories. The general theory of the signifier (historical materialism) therefore defines the possible effects of the signified (discourse), in terms of the subject-function of ideology. The three 'notes' further develop Althusser's reflections on the subject of ideology and the theory of interpellation as outlined in 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses' (Althusser, 1971: 121-73). What emerges here, though, is a theory of interpellation sketched as a critique of Lacan, with the signifiers of language held as morphemes consisting, in the first instance, as phonemes (p. 63). Discourse is seen as the product of a twofold articulation (phonemes-morphemes) that produces the subject-function or unconscious-effect characteristic of ideological practices. For Althusser, 'it is ideology which performs the function of designating the subject (in general) ... it must interpellate it as subject' (p. 51).What is obscured here, though, is the problem of the genesis of the 'unconscious'. Althusser is aware that if the unconscious is treated as if it were a discourse, then the objection could be made that what is lost are the drives, the libido, the death instinct that produce such discourses. Yet, almost in anticipation of the theoretical stances of later discourse, Althusser argues that matters such as the libido are far from external, anterior or transcendent to forms of discourse, but are rather the effect of discourse in the first place (pp. 69-74).Thus he anticipates Laclau and Mouffe's similar position that an 'external' world to thought is not denied within discourse theory, while making the assertion that objects cannot be constituted as such outside any discursive condition of emergence (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985: 84-5). Naturally, though, to claim that everything is within the discursive remains an open controversy; not least given E. P. Thompson's (1978: 395, n. 148) accusation that Laclau himself 'remains a kangaroo', albeit 'one who settles for longer periods ... before he bounds off into the theoretical elements.'

The essay 'On Feuerbach' examines the subject matter of the history of religion and the history of philosophy, evident in Ludwig Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1843) and extended in modern philosophy through intermediaries such as Nietzsche. The main interest here is the subject-object speculary relation of God and man, and Feuerbach's theory of religion as a discourse that exercises domination over philosophy. For Althusser, Feuerbach retreats into a conception of the self that absolves him of having an adequate theory of history through which alienation of the self is produced (p. 104). Feuerbach's interest in religion is also weakened by a focus on the signification immanent in the propositions and institutions of Christianity, with a view to disclosing such signification, rather than the class function of the structures of religion and the moral ideology of religion linked to its institutions and political interests (pp. 115-16, 133). By extension, Althusser holds that the Feuerbachian concept of the speculary subject-object relation reappears in Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The Theses on Feuerbach, and The German Ideology, in the form of the relation between subject (producer) and object (product). It is only after the 1844 Manuscripts that Marx makes a transition from the consideration of politics to economics; from humanism to capital. Although he is a subtle commentator, the problem with Althusser here is that the substantial basis of his argument is derivative, and largely dependent on a repetition of Marx. It takes him seventy pages to arrive at the same conclusion as The German Ideology that 'as far as Feuerbach is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history, he is not a materialist' (Marx & Engels 1976: 47). Overlooking the pre-eminence of such writings may lead one to invest too much in these Althusserian insights.

The primacy of politics is again affirmed in 'The historical task' through the union of theory and practice, so that every political practice is recognised to contain a philosophy, and every philosophy to contain a practical signification. Hence 'it is by definition the responsibility of philosophy to ensure the primacy of politics in theory' by avoiding theoreticism, and by remaining engaged with the class struggle (p. 208). Once more, this translates into the motif of strategic tasks. Strategic Task number I is the defence of Marxist philosophy against the ideological distortions of bourgeois ideology and humanist idealism. Strategic Task number 2 is the development of historical materialism in the pursuit of a number of goals: a rigorous theory of social classes; various forms of the capitalist state and state power; the theory of ideology; the transition of pre-capitalist social formations within which the political and the ideological play a role; and consideration of notions of structural causality. The links here to For Marx and Reading Capital, in extending the notion of 'overdetermination' meaning the effect of the conjunction of different determinations should be clear.

Finally, 'The humanist controversy' develops a fuller examination of Feuerbach's humanism, described as a 'petty-bourgeois ideology dissatisfied with Prussian despotism and the imposture of established religion' (p. 243). The 1844 Manuscripts are highlighted for their extension of Feuerbachian theory in that they shift the 'Essence of Man to the Essence of his objects as objectification of his Essence', a speculary relation dominating the theory of alienated labour (pp. 248-9). Reference, in the Theses on Feuerbach, to the human essence constituted through the ensemble of social relations also tends to obscure more than it reveals, by posing the problem of individuality and the need for a theory of society and history (p. 254). However, these tendencies disappear in Capital, to be replaced by analysis of the structure of social formations and the conditions for the production (and reproduction of the conditions of production) of the material means of human existence (pp. 263-4). It is Marx's 'epistemological break' after 1844-5 that marks the shift from a humanism indulgent to the trans-historical subject of Man to the general theory of historical materialism: the theory of the mobilisation and socialisation of labour-power in the labour process existent in social formations and the social structures of production and reproduction.

It is open to debate whether readers will agree with G. M. Goshgarian's contention, in his otherwise skilful introduction to this collection of essays, that the labour of repetition Althusser engages in, by tracing Marx's insights and significantly the break with Feuer-bach, actually paves the way for major innovation (p. liii). It is also rather indulgent to draw a direct com-parison between Marx's 'episte-mological break' from the trans-historical humanist category of Man in 1844-5, and Althusser's 'episte-mological break' from the trans-historical category of Theory in 1966-7 (p. lv). However, these essays undoubtedly contain major contri-butions to Marxist philosophy and historical materialism, on issues germane to theorising processes of state formation; social classes and state power; the relationship between the ideological, the political and the economic; and the role of philosophy at the heart of class struggle and politics. This is not to say, however, that there are no problems with Al-thusser's own circulatory positions. Hobsbawm writes that this type of analysis 'finds it difficult, if not impossible, to get outside the formal structure of Marx's thought'. There-fore, one can 'still feel uneasy about his apparent dismissal of any exterior criterion of practice such as historical development, past or future' (Hobsbawm, 1999: 178). The contro-versies, humanist or otherwise, are thus set to continue.

References

Althusser, L. (1971) 'Ideology and ideological state apparatuses: Notes towards an investigation' [1969], in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New Left Books) London.

Hobsbawm, E. (1999) 'The structure of capital' [1966], in E. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (Abacus Edition) London.

Laclau, E. & C. Mouffe (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (Verso) London.

Marx, K. & F. Engels (1976) The German Ideology [1845-6], in K. Marx & F. Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (Lawrence & Wishart) London.

Teschke, B. (2003) The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics and the Making of Modern International Relations (Verso) London.

Thompson, E. P. (1978) The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (Merlin Press) London.