of ‘civil society’ and the ‘state’), which made it possible for class conflicts to become relatively autonomous and generate a specific ‘consciousness’. By the same token, despite sometimes fruitful encounters and dialogues (for Althusser with Charles Bettelheim; for me, subsequently, with Immanuel Wallerstein), criticism of the Eurocentrism pervading historical Marxism (whether party Marxism, state Marxism or intellectual Marxism) could not be taken to a conclusion, and the teleology inherent in the idea of a European model of world history remained unshaken (de te fabula narratur, Marx had underscored in Capital, virtually addressing the whole world ‘from the wings’).
Second, it meant that the concept of emancipation underlying Althusser’s thought (though rarely formulated as such) remained structurally conceived in terms of a (revolutionary) transformation of the conditions of exploitation of labour in its various forms and degrees. This made capitalism not only a determinate mode of production, but the essential social relation on which all the rest depended. This ruled out regarding other forms of domination as themselves ‘structural’ and deprived the concept of over-determination, just formulated, of much of its analytical function. Hence Althusser’s blindness, in particular, to women’s struggles against patriarchy and sexism (even if some feminists have been able to import into their analysis categories such as ‘interpellation’, fashioned by Althusser in connection with the dominant ideology),8 to say nothing of his vehement repudiation of the student struggles against the disciplinary model of bourgeois education in 1968.
Finally, it meant that, prior to completely displacing the question by inventing the ‘aleatory materialism’ of his last texts (which dispels the very idea of a social formation divided into differentiated instances, each of them contributing in its way to the ‘society effect’), and despite his celebrated declaration in For Marx that ‘the lonely hour of the last instance never comes’, Althusser could not (in fact, would not) accept that the mechanism of the displacement of ‘dominance’ in different historical conjunctures extended to calling into question ‘determination in the last instance’ by the economy. This prevented him from criticizing the economism dominant in state ideology (socialist or liberal) since the nineteenth century as radically as he criticized ‘humanism’ – other than by peremptorily inverting this economism into a utopianism or eschatology of the ‘end of economics’.9
On account of these characteristics, which I am in no way claiming (with the dubious superiority of the survivor) betray weakness of thought or character and have only to be formulated for it to be obvious how to overcome them, at least if one does not wish to abandon conceiving emancipation in terms of social conflict, Althusser (and with him the ‘Althusserians’, of whom I was in a way the most loyal – i.e. the least lucid) therefore remained utterly ‘Marxist’. It might even be said that he made it a point of honour, at a time when so many others were happily declaring either that Marxism had failed completely or that it had never existed in the sense of an honestly defensible intellectual position. And thus (other than in some messianic insights which, strangely enough, aligned him with what other philosophers looked to Marx for when it came reawakening the ‘spectre’ and restoring him to life amid the devastation of the neo-liberal order that succeeded the collapse of ‘real socialism’),10 he entertained an essentially negative image of the way to break the circle of Marxism and anti-Marxism (still very much alive today), which principally consisted in an internal critique of its conceptual economy.
With this summary description of the conjuncture as it appeared to me in 1993, on the basis of my own formation and my experience, I hope to create a better understanding of how I proceeded in my little book, making the most of the constraints imposed by the kind of text it was and the moment of its publication.
On the one hand, I had decided to draw as radical a line of demarcation as possible between the philosophy of Marx – which I conceived as a problematic open to all kinds of transformations, reformulations and extrapolations, whose starting point is not the oblivion of Marx’s words and sentences but their intrinsic vacillation11 – and Marxism – an intellectual and institutional historical phenomenon, circumscribed in time by the end of the historical cycle of organization of the labour movement and class struggle (from the emergence of the social-democratic parties in the late nineteenth century to the collapse of the regimes of ‘real socialism’ in the late twentieth century) and circumscribed in space (not so much by confinement within the borders of Europe as by the exportation from Europe of a certain model of analysis of social struggles and their ‘becoming-conscious’, concomitant of imperialism and opposed to it). There was no question of separating a ‘good Marx’ from a ‘bad Marxism’, to prevent the second contaminating the first, in accordance with a firmly established tradition among Marxists themselves. The point was to vouchsafe the means with which to vary the relations uniting them (in Marx already, for it would be illusory to think he had nothing to do with the constitution of Marxism), and thus to bring out a discrepancy or non-contemporaneity in their relationship which is also a means of analysis and a spur to reflection for us today. But since any Marxism, even of the heterodox variety, basically needs to attribute a certain consistency and completeness to Marx’s thought and, if need be, create it, I had to endeavour instead to present it as essentially multiple, uncertain about its own options and strictly unfinishable – in the hope that this description would help introduce new ‘philosophical workers’ to the successive worksites opened by Marx, which can become inter-linked depending upon the conjuncture (particularly its crises or dramas), but not integrated into an organic whole.
I tried to persuade my publisher to entitle the book The Philosophies of Marx, to signal this internal multiplicity and openness. But he refused (thus depriving me of a certain aesthetic satisfaction but possibly saving me from a misunderstanding), both because he thought that title unintelligible to students and because the same collection featured two books devoted to Marx’s Economics and Marx’s Sociology, respectively.12 This division of labour was not exactly down to me, because I had in mind what (in his preface to the German translation) Frieder Otto Wolf excellently dubs a philosophische Tätigkeit – in other words, a philosophical activity – rather than some self-standing philosophy, whether ‘system’ or ‘method’. I constantly had in mind Foucault’s formula, defining his own activity as ‘philosophical fragments in historical worksites’.13 The two authors cannot be superimposed, but they share a refusal of philosophy as a meta-theoretical precondition and hence the same postulate of the immanence of the philosophical in inquiries and analyses pertaining, if you like, to materialism.
On the other hand, I had decided to try to grasp and explain the speculative question that makes it possible for Marx’s investigations to unfold as alternative openings (from which I constructed the three chapters of my book). I identified this guiding thread with the old issue of the unity (or fusion) of ‘theory’ and ‘practice’. We know that this has its roots in the very origins of Western metaphysics, in the verses by Parmenides asserting that ‘thought and being are the same’ and the Socratic debates about the relationship between two types of philosophy: that which teaches a form of ‘conduct’, ‘way of life’ or manner of ‘self-government’ and that which ‘contemplates’ the eternal verities reflected in the structure of the human soul. But we also know it underwent a radical transformation with the discovery by German idealism that theory’s horizon is the elucidation of the conditions of experience and that the immanent objective of ‘practice’ is transformation of the world. Marx unquestionably belongs to this line of thought. That is why, in the wake of the critical schema for transcending the antithesis between the ‘old materialism’ and ‘idealism’ set out in the Theses on Feuerbach, I often point out today, by way of provocation and to demonstrate the relativity of these terms in context, that Marx is the last great representative of German idealism – more precisely, its activist variant.14 The issue, however, is whether he pertains to it in the form of a consummation and, consequently, a ‘synthesis’ or ‘system’ even more coherent than those of his predecessors (Kant, Fichte, Hegel)
