debates of the sixties and seventies after the publication in 1965 of For Marx and (with Étienne Balibar) Reading Capital (trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1970). At that point he was one of the leading figures of ‘structuralism’, alongside Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Barthes. Acknowledging that Marxism was in crisis, but refusing to attribute the cause of that crisis to mere dogmatization, he undertook a re-reading of Marx. Borrowing the notion of ‘epistemological break’ from historical epistemology (Bachelard), he interpreted the Marxian critique of political economy as a rupture with the theoretical humanism and historicism of idealist philosophies (including Hegel), and as the foundation of a science of history whose central categories are the ‘overdetermined contradiction’ of the mode of production and the ‘structure in dominance’ of social formations. Such a science stands opposed to bourgeois ideology, but at the same time demonstrates the materiality and historical efficacity of ideologies, defined as ‘the imaginary relation of individuals and classes to their conditions of existence’. Just as there is no end of history, so there cannot be any end of ideology. Althusser simultaneously proposed a reevaluation of the Leninist theses on philosophy, which he defined as ‘class struggle in theory’ (Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Books, London, 1971), and he used this to analyse the contradictions between ‘materialist tendencies’ and ‘idealist tendencies’ within scientific practice (Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1974), trans. Warren Montag, Verso, London, 1990). In a later phase, under the influence of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the May 1968 movements, Althusser criticized what he now considered to be the ‘theoreticist deviation’ of his earliest essays, a deviation he attributed to the influence of Spinoza at the expense of dialectics (‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, in Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, New Left Books, London, 1976). Reaffirming the difference between Marxism and humanism, he outlined a general theory of ideology as the ‘interpellation of individuals as subjects’ and as a system of both public and private institutions ensuring the reproduction of social relations (‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (1970), in Essays on Ideology, trans. Ben Brewster, Verso, London, 1984).
An ontology of relations
Here, we must admit, an ‘ontology’ is taking shape. However, for the discussion of the relations between the individual and the genus, it substitutes a programme of enquiry into this multiplicity of relations, which are so many transitions, transferences or passages in which the bond of individuals to the community is formed and dissolved, and which, in its turn, constitutes them. What is most striking in such a perspective is that it establishes a complete reciprocity between these two poles, which cannot exist without one another and are therefore in and of themselves mere abstractions, albeit necessary abstractions for thinking the relation or relationship (Verhältnis).
At this point, speculative as it may seem, we are in fact closer than ever, by a characteristic short-circuit, to the question of politics. Not only are the relations of which we are speaking in fact nothing other than differentiated practices, singular actions of individuals on one another; but this transindividual ontology has at least a resonance with statements like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (often quite wrongly considered an ‘individualist’ text) and, even more, with the practice of revolutionary movements – a practice which never opposes the individual’s self-realization to the interests of the community, and indeed does not even separate these, but always seeks to accomplish the one by accomplishing the other. For, though it is true that only individuals can, in the last analysis, possess rights and formulate demands, the winning of those rights or liberation (even insurrection) is no less necessarily collective.
It will doubtless be objected that this formulation does not describe an existing state of affairs or, even less, a system of institutions, but rather a process (at least as experienced by those taking part in it). But this is exactly what Marx intends. And in these circumstances one can see that the sixth thesis, which identifies the human essence with ‘the ensemble of social relations’, and the third, eighth and eleventh theses, which link all thought to revolutionary practice and change, are, in reality, saying basically the same thing. Let us risk the expression, then, and say that social relations as designated here are nothing but an endless transformation, a ‘permanent revolution’ (the term was doubtless not invented by Marx, but it would play a decisive role in his thinking up to around 1850). For the Marx of March 1845, it is not enough to say with Hegel that ‘the real is rational’ and that the rational, of necessity, becomes reality: one has to say that the only thing which is real or rational is revolution.
Stirner’s objection
What more could one ask? I have said above, however, that Marx could not leave matters there: we now have to understand why this is the case. We should not arrive at such an understanding if we were content merely to show that by substituting practice for the subject, a circle or logical difficulty is generated, or that there is a danger that the notion of essence will be left in a state of disequilibrium, caught between the internal critique of traditional ontology and its dissolution into the multiplicity of concrete investigations of social relations. Without doubt, The German Ideology is a text very close in inspiration to the Theses on Feuerbach and yet it already speaks another language. The formal reasons we have just mentioned are not sufficient to explain this.
I believe there is a very precise conjunctural reason for it, but one which served to bring out a deep-seated problem. Some historians of Marx’s philosophy (particularly Auguste Cornu) have clearly seen this, though many have under-estimated or not been aware of it, mainly because it is usually only the first part of the text that is read. A long tradition has accustomed us to regarding this section (‘A. Concerning Feuerbach’) as a free-standing exposition of ‘historical materialism’, whereas it is essentially a response, and often a difficult one (as readers will have learnt to their cost), to the challenge posed by another theorist. That theorist, the force of whose argument it is now time to gauge, is Max Stirner (the pseudonym of Caspar Schmidt), the author of The Ego and its Own, published at the end of 1844.17 But it was some months later, just after the Theses were written, and on Engels’s insistence, that Marx began to wrestle with that book.
From a theoretical perspective who is Stirner? First of all, he is an anarchist, a defender of the autonomy of society – composed of individuals, all of whom are singular and the ‘owners’ of their bodies, needs and ideas – against the modern State, in which, as he sees it, all domination is concentrated and which has taken over the sacred attributes of power elaborated by the political theology of the Middle Ages. But, above all, Stirner is a radical nominalist: by this we mean that in his view, every ‘generality’, every ‘universal concept’ is a fiction concocted by institutions to dominate (by organizing, classifying, simplifying, if not indeed merely by naming) the only natural reality, i.e. the multiplicity of individuals of whom each is ‘unique of his kind’ (hence Stirner’s essential play on words here, which has in fact a long history: what is proper to each individual is his/her property).
We saw a moment ago that Marx was developing a notion of social relation which, at least in principle, rejected both nominalism and essentialism. But Stirner’s critique poses a formidable challenge to Marx because it is not content merely to target traditional metaphysical ‘non-particulars’ (all of them more or less theological: Being, Substance, the Idea, Reason, Good), but encompasses all universal notions without exception, thereby anticipating certain of Nietzsche’s arguments and what is today known as postmodernism. Stirner wants none of these beliefs, Ideas or ‘meta-narratives’, whether they concern God or Man, Church or State, or Revolution either. And there is, indeed, no logical difference between Christianity, humanity, the people, society, the nation or the proletariat, any more than there is between the rights of man or communism: all these universal notions are indeed abstractions which, from Stirner’s viewpoint, means that they are fictions. And these fictions are used to substitute for individuals and the thought of
