The Spectre Of Hegel: Early Writings

338 Pages·2014·1.79 MB·English

by  Louis Althusser

This paperback edition published by Verso 2014
First published in English by Verso 1997
© Verso 1997, 2014
Translation © G. M. Goshgarian 1997, 2014
First published as Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Tome I
© Stock/IMEC1994
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-151-0
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v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
Introduction
Preface
1 The International of Decent Feelings (1946)
2 On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel (1947)
Introduction
I Origins of the Concept
II Cognition of the Concept
III Miscognition of the Concept
3 Man, That Night (1947)
4 The Return to Hegel:
The Latest Word in Academic Revisionism (1950)
5 A Matter of Fact (1949)
6 Letter to Jean Lacroix (1949–1950)
7 On Conjugal Obscenity (1951)
Appendix: On Marxism (1953)
Notes
Translator’s Note
The present English text is a translation of approximately the first half
(pp. 7–339) of Louis Althusser, Écrits philosophiques et politiques. Tome I
(Stock/IMEC, 1994), containing comprehensive selections from
Althusser’s published and unpublished texts of 1945–51, together with
an essay entitled ‘On Marxism’, published in two parts in the Revue de
l’enseignement philosophique in 1953. ‘On Marxism’ has been included
because it marks the transition from the ‘early’ to the ‘mature’ Althusser,
outlining a research programme that was to bear fruit in the path-
breaking texts of the 1960s.
The editor’s original French introduction, translated here, was
intended to introduce the whole of Vol. I of the Écrits philosophiques et
politiques, which, as the introduction indicates, also includes a selection
of unpublished texts from the 1970s and 1980s. The French preface,
likewise translated in the present volume, is specifically devoted to the
early writings.
In preparing these texts for publication, the editors have been guided
by a twofold concern for readability and fidelity to the original texts.
The usual emendations of minor slips or faulty punctuation have been
made; occasional interpolations indispensable to a clear understanding
of the text have been enclosed in brackets and placed in the body of the
text. All passages the author has underlined for emphasis are set in
italics; his capitalization has generally been respected. Many of
Althusser’s longer paragraphs – especially in the ‘Letter to Jean Lacroix’
– have, however, been divided.
Author’s notes, marked with an asterisk, have been placed at the foot
of the page, except in the case of the master’s thesis, On Content in the
Thought of G. W. F. Hegel, where they are extensive; here, to avoid
overburdening the page, they have been numbered consecutively
throughout the text and put at the end. The editor’s notes have been
placed at the end of each text, except, again, in the case of the master’s
thesis, where they have been enclosed in brackets and included within
the author’s notes. Variant passages have been given in the notes when
they seemed significant. To avoid placing notes within notes, the
occasional editorial comment on a note has been placed in brackets and
included in the note itself. Translator’s notes are indicated with superior
letters and placed at the foot of the page throughout, except in the
master’s thesis, where they are marked with an asterisk.
Althusser’s bibliographical references have been systematically
retained; errors have been silently emended whenever possible. When
English translations of French or German works cited by Althusser could
be found, the English-language references are given in brackets after the
original reference. In the notes to the master’s thesis on Hegel, the
translator has also, as indicated at the beginning of the notes, provided
references to standard German editions of works by Hegel or Marx
which Althusser cites in French translation.
The translator thanks the following people for practical help,
criticisms, and suggestions: Olivier Corpet, Alexandra Gruebler, Jane
Hindle, Malcolm Imrie, Joseph McCarney, François Matheron, Markar
Melkonian and Sandrine Samson. Special thanks to Gregory Elliott and
Catherine Lesimple.
Introduction
FRANÇOIS MATHERON
‘In full possession of my faculties, I declare you my depositary before all
eternity, that you may bear witness to my act in centuries to come, when
my posthumous works and correspondence with Franca are published.’1
’We do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we
do sometimes publish other people’s … Marx did not publish the famous –
alas – ‘1844 Manuscripts’ on philosophy and political economy … he did
not even publish The German Ideology … though it is a crucially
important text for us (nor did he publish the Theses on Feuerbach, our
alpha and omega).’2
All Althusser lies in the gap between these two strictly
contemporaneous texts; even, indeed, in the gap at the heart of the
second. The thesis about the ‘break’ that was to make him famous was
based on a meticulous study of Marx’s early works: his personal copy of
the 1844 Manuscripts constitutes an impressive archival document in
itself. Yet he sometimes regretted that these works had been published,
occasionally even going so far as to deplore the fact that they had been
written. As to the eventual fate of his own unpublished writings, if it is
impossible to speak of any intention of Althusser’s in this connection, he
was incontestably no stranger to the idea of posthumous publication.
Althusser certainly had sharply mixed feelings about his own work. He
never disavowed his early writings. Thus he authorized the belated
republication in Spanish of ‘A Matter of Fact’,3 a text his French readers
would not get to see. He built up a myth, for those close to him, around
his long letter to Jean Lacroix, but never showed them the letter itself.
On the other hand, he did let a few friends read his diatribe ‘On
Conjugal Obscenity’ in the 1970s, adding a complementary text ‘on the
woman question’ to it in 1978. He kept his master’s thesis on Hegel
secreted away, but felt the need to declare in 1963 that Merleau-Ponty
had wanted to publish it.4 Moreover, not long after the publication of
For Marx and Reading Capital, he invented what might be called texts
with semi-public status, which he had typed and mimeographed by a
secretary at the École normale supérieure for wide distribution to those
around him. These texts had so powerful an impact that the criticisms
Jacques Rancière later levelled at him5 were largely based on one of
them, written in 1965: ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice, and Theoretical
Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle’, a text still unavailable in
France, though it was published in Latin America.6 Althusser was
likewise not averse to publishing anonymous texts, a practice he had
already experimented with in the early 1950s, and resorted to again,
rather successfully, in 1966, when he published an unsigned article
entitled ‘On the Cultural Revolution’ in Cahiers marxistes-léninistes (nos
13–14). Finally, his projects to publish certain texts came so close to
realization that it is no exaggeration to say that his publicly
acknowledged work was several times on the point of moving in a
direction utterly different from the one history tells us it ultimately did –
for better or for worse.
Known for his brief, incisive texts, Althusser nevertheless wrote two
manuals on Marxism-Leninism7 and another two on philosophy for non-
philosophers,8 and it was only at the last moment that he withdrew a
book announced in a note to his ‘Preface to Capital Volume One’:9 ‘cf. A
Revolutionary Science: Introduction to Book I of Capital, Éditions Maspero,
Paris, 1969’. What is more, he several times refused to send the page
proofs of a text to the printer after he had corrected them. Thus French
readers never had an opportunity to read ‘The Historical Task of Marxist
Philosophy’, though this work saw partial publication in Hungarian10
after being commissioned, and then declined, by the Soviet journal
Voprossi Filosofi in 1967; a paste-up found in Althusser’s archives
indicates that it had been slated for publication in his collection Théorie.
Similarly, the fifth ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, which was to have
been published in the Revue de l’enseignement philosophique in 1968 or
1969, well before the other four, ultimately went unpublished, and was
not included in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists in
1974.11 If Althusser does not seem to have regretted the fact that these
texts did not appear in print, the same cannot be said of his ‘Machiavelli
and Us’ (written between 1972 and 1976), as is shown by a letter of 28
May 1986 to his Mexican publisher Arnaldo Ofrila Reynal, director of
the publishing house Siglo XXI.12 It is certainly strange to note the
imbalance between the nine, often short, books Althusser published in
French in his lifetime, and the thousands of pages discovered in his
archives – including the typescripts of some ten books, many of them
containing instructions for the printer. It is even stranger that his
voluminous correspondence, all the more complete in that he generally
kept copies of his own letters, contains virtually no mention of his
reasons for abandoning any of his publication plans. His illness, the
exacerbated attention he paid to the political conjuncture, and the often
contradictory advice he received from friends he asked to read his texts
all have something to do with this reluctance to publish; but we are
doubtless also entitled to see in it the mark of the aleatory.*
The present volume offers a selection of texts drawn from Althusser’s
prolific output. It was put together on principles that are by definition
subjective. We have privileged texts which, in subject-matter, style, or
content, diverge from the already well-known books and essays; hence
we have given relatively small space to writings that tend merely to ring
changes on familiar themes. Moreover, out of a concern for readability,
we have opted to leave out the manuals on Marxism and philosophy.13
Often written in a style that pays heavy tribute to the notion Althusser
then had of the demands of the theoretical conjuncture, these manuals
have ironically not stood the test of time as well as earlier works.
Finally, although the two volumes of the Écrits philosophiques et politiques
are made up almost exclusively of hitherto unpublished material, a wish
to offer the reader coherent groupings of texts has led us to reprint a few
already published essays, which are either completely unknown or else
have gone largely unnoticed.
The first [French] volume has been organized chronologically; the
organizing principle of the second is essentially thematic. We could
hardly have broken up the group of texts on art, or those on the history
of philosophy which Althusser wrote for courses he gave in different
periods; accordingly, these texts appear in the second volume. On the
other hand, the early writings, whatever their themes, must be read
together: though it would have been possible to group the 1947 master’s
thesis on Hegel with the writings on the history of philosophy, the other
texts of the period shed a great deal more light on it.
The internal organization of this first volume rests on a very simple
principle. A political-philosophical subject named ‘Althusser’ emerged in
the course of the 1960s, becoming, with the publication of For Marx and
Reading Capital in 1965, one of the major poles of reference of
intellectual life in France and elsewhere. A product, like many others in
Gaullist France, of converging factors that seemingly had as little to do
with one another as the advent of structuralism, the rediscovery of
epistemology, the highly problematic repercussions of de-Stalinization
on the French Communist Party, the Sino-Soviet split, the emergence of
the student movement, and, let us not forget, the Catholic past and very
special psychological make-up of an individual ensconced in an École
normale supérieure that was forced to invent new strategies to compete
successfully with other institutions, this subject would, as such,
disappear during the events of May 1968. The philosopher’s celebrity
remained intact, and there was no sudden drop in his theoretical
production. But the world had changed; certain ruptures had been
consummated. Althusser served notice of his new situation by
publishing, for the first time, an article in L’Humanité, the main organ of
the French Communist Party.14 If there had indubitably been an
Althusserian school before this date, it had now practically ceased to
exist.
The object of the present [French] volume is to introduce readers to,
or, at least, afford them an opportunity to become better acquainted
with, Althusser’s output in the years preceding and following the 1960s;†
the general contours of his development in the 1960s are already
familiar. Althusser’s early works, written between 1946 and 1951 by a
subject still in the process of emerging, undeniably correspond to a
precise moment in his evolution, one marked by a double transition:
from Hegel to Marx and from Catholicism to Communism. These texts
make up the first part of the present volume [entitled, in the original
French edition, ‘Louis Althusser before Althusser’]. As to the 1970s, they
were extremely problematic years. Althusser was still a figure to be
reckoned with; his writings were cited more frequently than ever, at
least in the first half of the decade, and he was publishing texts