La Découverte, and my colleague at the University of Paris I, Jean-Paul Piriou, an economist and trade unionist no longer with us, who founded the ‘Repères’ collection to help educate students in the social and human sciences in a spirit critical of reigning orthodoxies and uninhibited by disciplinary boundaries. Obviously, the publisher’s idea was that these titles, written so far as possible in an accessible style, without jargon but also without over-simplification, might prove of interest to a wider readership. Twenty years later, I think it can be said that those objectives have pretty much been achieved, both in the Francophone world (where the book has been reprinted several times) and abroad (where several translations are still in print). So I do not regret the effort I devoted in a few weeks of intensive work to assembling and summarizing, in a strictly limited space, what I believed I had learned over thirty years about the ‘objects’ of Marx’s philosophical thinking and its modalities and problems. The endeavour seems to have enabled various groups of readers, whether beginners or not, to enter Marx’s intellectual universe from a particular angle, supplying them with the wherewithal to discuss his relevance. It also allowed me to formulate some interpretative keys which I had been researching for a long time, comparing them with those of other readers who were my contemporaries.1
But twenty years is a long time. The world has changed the social world which Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach demanded should be ‘changed’, not merely ‘interpreted’. I myself (to say nothing of other philosophers of my generation) have changed. Would I write this little book in the same way today? Such, in sum, is the question posed to me by Frieder Otto Wolf in the name of future readers of this book in the German-speaking world, and which might just as readily (or so I believe) be put by French or English readers.
The answer, obviously, is no: I would not write it in the same way. But the answer is also that I am not convinced I would be able to produce such a synthesis today, although I have not stopped going back to Marx’s texts since the 1990s: to test their efficacy in dealing with various current philosophical and political issues (in no particular order we might cite the economy of violence and the ambivalence of its effects, the changes in subjectivity and the capacity for action induced by capitalist globalization, the internal conflicts of universalism, the administrative and ideological function of borders, the prospects for trans-national citizenship, the crisis of European secularism and its French variant, laïcité, etc.); and, in return, to examine the potential which such issues might lead us to discover in the thought of the author of the Communist Manifesto and Capital. I could of course proceed to numerous additions and corrections, but the likely upshot would be a much greater dispersion of themes and problems and today, unlike in 1993, I could probably not construct a guiding thread that makes it possible to connect them for the purposes of a single question.
Yet far from believing that the ‘forcing’ I engaged in is meaningless, I am tempted to think that it involves a kind of necessity, at the intersection of a major historical turning point and an experience of collective philosophical composition with which I was closely associated. And since I am wholly persuaded that the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ utilization of philosophers must always contain a self-critical dimension (even a self-deconstructive one, as Derrida would say) which demands an awareness of their own historicity, I shall today take the risk of asserting that an understanding of this ‘encounter’ from yesterday is one of the conditions for our thinking tomorrow, ‘with and against Marx’. I must therefore say a word about it – and to that end must ask readers to use their imagination to take themselves back to the start of the 1990s, especially in Europe. (I shall return in a moment to the implications of such Eurocentrism.)
It might very simply be said that what collapsed then, with the sudden democratic revolutions in the countries of ‘real socialism’ under Soviet hegemony, was the very idea of social revolution, and that what began to emerge was the highly problematic character (in Europe and beyond) of the ‘virtuous circle’ wherein a combination of market economy and liberal parliamentarism supposedly ensured the transformation of politics into its opposite: what was just beginning to be referred to as ‘good governance’.2 In a way, this change of perspective was a trompe-l’oeil, because it was based on a strict inversion of the discourse of revolution, without any real analysis of the history of socialism or the transformation of capitalism (and their interaction). But it also contains an injunction to rethink the categories of the philosophy of history which in the West, from the onset of modernity, made it possible to conjoin ideas of progress, emancipation and revolution, giving rise to various right-wing or left-wing ‘grand narratives’. (Among them, in speculative terms, the ‘dialectical’ narrative of progress via the ‘power of the negative’, or by the conversion of violence into social institutions and formations, is unquestionably one of the most effective.)3 Those, like me, who share the hope for emancipation contained in the idea of communism (and who – let us confess it here – still share it, though without any illusions about it answering to some historical necessity or containing in and of itself any guarantee of its correct application), should be particularly sensitive to this injunction. If they wish to be philosophers, they need to understand, theoretically and historically, what blocked Marxism’s capacity for self-criticism (and, in practice, what rendered inoperative or doomed to disaster all attempts at a ‘revolution in the revolution’, to quote the phrase coined by Régis Debray à propos the Cuban Revolution at its outset, but which also applies to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or at least the idea behind it, and the ‘Prague Spring’).4 But they would also need to determine whether, in the family complex constituted by the teleologies of historical progress in the bourgeois era (Turgot, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Spencer, etc.), Marxism contains a specific difference, even an irreducible difference, guaranteeing it an enduring critical role beyond the ‘decline in the idea of progress’ (Georges Canguilhem).5
Was ‘Althusserian’ Marxism, to which from the time of the texts written with Althusser in the 1960s (Lire le Capital)6 I sought to contribute as best I could, well placed to confront such questions and their philosophical implications? Yes and no.
Yes, because like other major twentieth-century Marxists such as Benjamin or Bloch (and, it should be said, in almost complete ignorance of their contributions: aside from Marx, Engels and the major classical philosophers, plus Freud, his principal interlocutors were Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Gramsci, Brecht and Lukács), what Althusser (and we along with him) sought in his recasting of the ‘concept of history’, and his attempts to construct a ‘topography’ for historical materialism (organizing different ‘practices’ within one and the same over-determined causality), was essentially a way of wresting the historicity of class struggles from linearity, predetermination or prophecy, so as to restore to it its character of unpredictable eventfulness and perpetual ‘beginning’.
Yes, again, because, at the cost of numerous oscillations and contradictions, its stubborn use of the concept of science, relating it to an analysis of the objectivity of social relations and ‘concrete’ historical situations, tended decreasingly to apply to Marx a pre-existing model of scientificity (be it axiomatizable mathesis, the ‘applied rationalism’ of the experimental sciences, or what Foucault called the structuralist counter-sciences: linguistics, psychoanalysis and anthropology), and increasingly to transform the concept of science by incorporating in the knowledge process, in a reflexive but open or even aporetic fashion, the very conflictuality that it sought to explain. This was also a way of continuing the Leninist idea of a ‘party science’, except that partisanship now no longer contained any a priori criterion of truth or correctness.7
But no, because Althusser quite deliberately remained a Marxist – heterodox on some points and very orthodox, even dogmatic, on others. This had various, possibly connected consequences. First of all, it meant, obviously, that he had no intention of giving up on the reality of class struggles in the economy, society and history (which remains, I believe, one of the least contestable strong points of Marxist discourse and its critical capacity vis-à-vis the dominant ideologies), but
