In this chapter, I turn to Pierre Machereyâs theory of a materialist dialectic, a project that can be said to unite his work from his initial contribution to Reading Capital into the present. I will first discuss Machereyâs reading of the first five pages of Marxâs Capital in his brief but decisive contribution to Reading Capital. I will then turn to his 1966 book A Theory of Literary Production, to argue that it cogently summarises the materialist critique of Reading Capital as a general theory of the materialist production of the textual object in the form of thought as opposed to its extensive, empirical reality on the page. My discussion will then turn to Machereyâs subsequent development of a theory of materialist dialectic in works such as Hegel or Spinoza, the essay âEn matérialisteâ, and Machereyâs extraordinary, five-volume, line by line explication of Spinozaâs Ethics. The latter, a major work that as of this writing remains untranslated into English, offers in my view not only a masterful explication of Spinozaâs dauntingly complex and original philosophical masterpiece; its extensive commentary itself constitutes, I will argue, an original theoretical intervention that can serve systematically to articulate the theory of positive, materialist dialectic that Macherey initially proposes in his earlier works.
1 Reading Capitalâs Materialist Dialectic
Pierre Machereyâs brilliant and long-overlooked contribution to Lire le Capital, âA propos du processus dâexposition du Capitalâ, is a treasure of theoretical investigation revealed anew by the republication of the complete volume of Reading Capital.1 Machereyâs precocious genius in these pages pushes Althusserâs Spinozist epistemology to its most extreme and rigorous formulation imaginable. The object of Machereyâs brief chapter is to investigate Marxâs conception and practice âof the scientific expositionâ of his principal concepts in the initial five pages of Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1, section 1.2 In its modest pretensions to closely read these five pages of text, the essay expands on the form of the scholastic explication de texte that every French normalien is trained to master by the âcaïmansâ such as Althusser who prepared them for the rigorous agrégation. Machereyâs brief exposé nonetheless brings a discerning precision to bear upon the opening lines of Capital, to draw a series of analytical divisions between the concepts with which Marx begins his critique of political economy: wealth (la richesse/Reichtum), the commodity (la marchandise/Ware), the commodityâs two essential aspects or attributes, its use-value and exchange-value, and, finally, value itself (la valeur/Wert).
If the first of these, wealth, is only fleetingly presented in the opening sentence of Capital (âThe wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an âimmense collection of commoditiesââ¯â), Macherey argues that this is due to its extreme conceptual poverty. Wealth, in this reading, is a reductively empirical category, the general form of appearance that any and all things take on as objects of value in any given social form whatsoever. This form of appearance of any object of wealth per se is âthe empirical mode of existence of the thingâ, says Macherey, âits manner of appearing, showing itself, manifesting itselfâ.3 In contrast to value, a much richer concept that, above all, âdoes not show itself, does not appearâ, wealth is âempirically very thin [maigre]: transparentâ.4
The concept of wealth serves to initiate the conceptual analysis of Capital primarily, Macherey argues, as a âreminderâ, in its capacity to refer back to the origins of classical economy, to its arbitrary and precritical status in Smith and Ricardo. Consequently, this implies for Macherey two key points that he will develop intensively. First, that the array of concepts Marx deploys in Capital are not equal: wealth is an impoverished, âsterileâ, concept, referring merely to the empirical form of appearance of things, a form fully inadequate to its essential nature as commodity.5 âWealthâ is never anything more than the empirical definition Marx gives it: âa mass of commoditiesâ. In contrast, the endpoint of Machereyâs exposition, value, is a rich concept, one that will require the entire, incomplete exposition of Capital volumes IâIII to elaborate. Secondly, however, Macherey argues that wealth, for all its superficiality and brevity of appearance in Marxâs analysis, is nonetheless purely a concept. Wealth can never be confused with any of its empirical manifestations; it is and remains purely a concept.
Machereyâs analysis attends closely to the logical components and operators he identifies in the opening pages of Capital. These constitute what he terms âintermediariesâ, the âinstruments of rationalityâ that allow for the construction of a rigorous demonstration. Machereyâs assertion that the various concepts laid out in these opening lines of Capital are fundamentally and necessarily heterogeneous is a point his own demonstration will sustain and develop step by step; the notion of conceptual heterogeneity constitutes, moreover, âone of the fundamental conditions of scientific rigourâ. The system of Marxâs concepts, and the system of rational operators more generally, in this view, consists of various components that do not coexist âon one and the same level of intelligibilityâ, but which instead inhabit multiple, incommensurable planes.6
This assertion next leads Macherey to consider the relations of heterogeneity between the four concepts under consideration: the âempirical formâ of wealth, the contradictory pair of âfactorsâ of the commodity that are use-value and exchange-value, and, finally, the purely relational concept of value. If use-value, like wealth, remains tied to the empirical, but grasped as âthe notion of a thingâ rather than via its sensuous existence, exchange-value in contrast only exists as a relation between commodities.7 This dual nature of the commodity, as both thing and relation, is for Macherey a primary contradiction or aporia of capital that is not âresolvedâ in a Hegelian Aufhebung, but which is instead âsuppressedâ.8 This contradiction between use-value and exchange-value exists, furthermore, purely at the level of Marxâs concepts, and leads to âa break in the treatment of these concepts ⦠and in no way refers to a real process ⦠The concepts that sustain the scientific exposition are not of the same kindâ.9
Adhering to Althusserâs principled rejection of empiricism described in the previous chapter, Machereyâs analysis furthermore rejects phenomenological experience as a basis for Marxâs demonstration. Value, in this view, is a category invisible to immediate experience of the commodity in its phenomenological appearance. Value, in Machereyâs reading, is to be located neither on the surface of phenomena (in their appearance as use-values), nor in their empirical relation to one another (as exchange-values); but for all that, nor can value be said to lie hidden within the depths of that relation, to stand revealed in a moment of Hegelian Aufhebung. Instead, the concept of value exists in a relation of âruptureâ to commodities given their dual aspects as use-values and exchange-values. âThe paradox of the analysis of exchange is that value is neither in the terms of exchange, nor in their relation. Value is not given, or revealed [dégagée], or displayed [mise en évidence]: it is constructed as conceptâ.10 The object that is value âis more hidden than revealedâ in the act of exchange.
Thus the necessity for Marxâs categorial, âscientificâ critique of political economy: âWithout the rigor of scientific exposition, which alone is able to produce knowledge, the concept of value would have no meaning: that is to say, it would not existâ.11 The aporetic structure of the commodity, its dual nature, thus leads to the heart of Machereyâs analysis. Macherey identifies in the relation between two equivalent commodities, in the system of market exchange, the determinant condition of a concept devoid of all empiricism. To approach value itself, he writes, âthe analysis must no longer be conducted in terms of experienceâ. Instead, the concept of a relation of exchange, Macherey provocatively asserts, has no empirical content.12 Unlike wealth or the commodity, value, the concept of the measure allowing for the exchange-based equality of empirically nonidentical commodities, is purely and only that, a concept. Like any other concept, it is real but nonexistent, a reality in the attribute of thought alone, rather than the empirical attribute of sensuous extension.
The conceptual relation that is value, Macherey continues, poses the equality of two commodities as a formula, a = b; it is, in other words, âdefined as a relation of expressionâ.13 Unlike the qualitative, empirical relation of two use-values standing side by side in the market, the relation of exchange-value is characterised by the extinction of all qualities. Fungibility is thus more precisely represented as a purely quantitative schematisation, as the expression of relative value: âax = by (a is so much of b)â.14
It is this schematic reduction of the commodity form to a purely quantitative relation that then definitively displaces Machereyâs analysis in its final step, to enjoin the concept of value itself: Marxâs ânew analysis [now addressing of the concept of value] begins with a decisive choice: the refusal to study the exchange relation as a qualitative relation, to only consider it in its quantitative contentâ.15 It is this pure conceptualisation, then, that will finally allow for the adequate (initial) construction of the concept of value, as âthe structure of the relationâ of exchange itself.16
The heterogeneous, nondialectical series of logical steps Macherey identifies in Marxâs exposition then suddenly culminates in a parenthetical gesture of pure conceptual abstraction, momentarily abstracting, that is, from Marxâs exposition itself to articulate a purely axiomatic statement regarding the nature of conceptual formalisation. It is possible, Macherey provisionally concludes from this exposition, to âformulate a general rule: ⦠to compare objects non-empirically, it is necessary as a preliminary to determine the general form of this measurement ⦠It is not possible to make a relation of expression say what it expresses if it is examined only in its empirical realityâ.17 The concept expressing the nature of any relation whatsoever is of a different nature, âanother kindâ, than empirical experience. âTo know what a relation expressesâ, Macherey concludes, âit is also necessary, even first of all, to know what is expressing itâ.18
Machereyâs demonstration advances not via a logic of the negation of negation, but rather through a series of quantum-like leaps from one discrete, bounded concept to another, each shown to occupy a singular, heterogeneous orbital.19 Machereyâs analysis to this point has traced the systematic elimination of all empirical qualities (of wealth, and the use-value aspect of commodities) in the analytical passage to exchange-value and then value, arguing in Spinozist terms that just as âthe area of a triangle is not in itself triangular; in the same way too, the notion of value is not exchangeableâ.20
At this culminating point in Machereyâs demonstration, however, the previously abandoned notion of quality suddenly returns, now, however, residing in a state of pure nonempirical conceptuality, a state in which âthe notion of value qualifies commodities as the notion of area qualifies areasâ. In contrast to the merely sensuous nature of wealth, it is abstract labour, a purely relational, nonempirical notion, that now constitutes âa new qualityâ, the substance of value itself.21 As Macherey quotes Marx, to conclude his brief conceptual exposition of these pages from Capital, âthere remains only a qualityâ, the abstract, nonquantifiable concept of the substance of value.22 The logic is implacable and unyielding, the density of Machereyâs argument in these seven pages formidable, brilliant, original, in itself as daunting as the five introductory pages of Capital it theorises, its Cavaillèsian rigour constituting a culminating and bravura theoretical gesture of Lire le Capital in its totality.
2 A Theoretical Prolegomenon to the Materialist Analysis of Texts
Pierre Machereyâs next work, A Theory of Literary Production, might seem, to all appearances, a mere work of literary criticism, familiar in its genre, modest in its intentions, a study in which, after a somewhat lengthy methodological introduction, Macherey proceeds to offer a number of âmaterialistâ analyses of works ranging from Leninâs comments on Tolstoy to Jules Verne, Jorge Luis Borges, and Defoeâs Robinson Crusoe. Such a view, however, would profoundly misrepresent the enormous scope and compass of the bookâs epistemological implications. Instead, the achievement of A Theory of Literary Production is far more sweeping than the analysis of a handful of classic novels; Macherey, in this, his first book, in point of fact puts forward a generic protocol for the materialist analysis of textual, symbolic objects of all types, a compellingly original analytical practice for the critique of discourse as such, a procedure that can then, in the next chapter, illuminate Marxâs process of exposition in Capital, moving beyond Machereyâs all-too-brief propositions in his contribution to Reading Capital.
It will surprise none of his readers that materialism in Machereyâs understanding receives a comprehensively Spinozist inflection. While Macherey only mentions Spinoza nine times in Theory of Literary Production, and then only in passing, Warren Montag has shown the degree to which Spinozaâs epistemology â inflected through a series of intensive exchanges with Althusser from 1961 onward â underwrites and founds an encompassing philosophico-critical project.23 Indeed, it is now clear, given the trajectory of Machereyâs research, that from his initial, precocious contribution to Reading Capital in 1965, through his explosive and highly influential critique of Hegelâs misreadings of Spinoza in Hegel or Spinoza (1979), and culminating in his extraordinarily meticulous, systematic, and original interpretation of Spinozaâs Ethics across five volumes and over a thousand pages, Macherey has synthetically redeployed Spinoza to articulate a comprehensive theory of materialist analysis, one that fully takes into account and builds upon the classic Althusserian critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, totality, and negative-Hegelian dialectics.
3 Textual Production in a Materialist Mode
A Theory of Literary Production initiates its materialist critique via a threefold proscription: against empiricism, against hermeneutics, against expressive totality. Each of these protocols resonates in consonance with Althusserâs critical introduction to Reading Capital published the year before (discussed in the previous chapter). Each of these proscriptions can in turn be traced to the subterranean influence of Spinoza on the thought of Althusser and his students, an influence to be explicated and further elaborated in Machereyâs later works.
Against empiricism. If the study of literature traditionally attends to an empirically accessible domain or field, Macherey rejects this ânecessarily insufficientâ orientation to argue instead that critical analysis, properly understood, entails in every case the novel construction of its object of analysis: âRational investigation bears directly upon objects that have no prior existence, but are instead producedâ.24 This is the materialist lesson Althusser had drawn from Marxâs crucial 1857 methodological introduction to the Grundrisse notebooks, where Marx rejects Adam Smithâs empiricist, representational method to assert instead a properly materialist, productionist epistemology.25 If Smith famously asserts the universally observable nature of human economic comportment as a âpropensity to truck, barter, and exchangeâ, such an assertion constitutes the abstract, merely conceptual representation and generalisation of an empirically observable series.26 Against the inadequacy of Smithâs method of mere empiricist representation, flawed in its derivation of general knowledge from immediate, sensuous impressions, Marx â and Althusser and Macherey in his wake â asserts the autonomy of conceptual production, the reproduction (as opposed to representation) of the real object as what Marx calls a âthought-concreteâ (Gedankenkonkretum).27
Macherey redeploys this fundamental assertion of Reading Capital in the opening pages of A Theory of Literary Production. Never the mere exposition or translation of a latent, hidden meaning, adequate knowledge of a text requires the incipient production of an analytical discourse, an object necessarily distinct from that initial text itself.28 This analysis will furthermore have as its content not the description of an authorial intention, but the presentation of the âlaws of productionâ of the text in question, the synthetic elaboration of the conditions of its situated necessity: âTo know the conditions of a process: this is the true programme of a theoretical investigationâ.29 Such an inquiry will refuse the mere description of a product (for transmission, for consumption); instead, it will formulate the universal and necessary âlaws of literary productionâ, a general science of the causes governing textual fabrication, a process that is distinctly Spinozist in its affirmation of necessity and an adequate knowledge of the common, universal notions of textual production, that precede the further articulation of the singular essence of any given discursive object.30
Against textual hermeneutics. From the critique of empiricism necessarily follows a refusal of any hermeneutic that would seek to reveal the hidden truth lying latent within a text: âIt is not enough to unfold the line of the text to discover the message inscribed there, for this inscription would be that of an empirical factâ.31 Textual interpretation â understood as the revelation of an immanent meaning (sens), as the true, concealed content of a text that would take form in critical discourse â inherently relies on an ideology of depth. Immanent critique constitutes, in this view, an empiricism of the factic text in its putative self-sufficiency; in its place, Macherey calls for adequate knowledge to be derived from the text, but as its analytic supplement: neither the translation of an immanent content nor its comprehension as a normative act of judgement indexified to an objectified truth, instead, âanalysis can hope to articulate the necessity determining the textual objectâ.32
Macherey associates such a procedure with a weakened form of analysis. If in so-called structural analysis (Machereyâs example is Roland Barthes) there occurs a certain minimal fabrication of âthe object of an analysisâ, this nonetheless remains an empirically derived, immanent criticism, one that understands the text as the utilitarian carrier of an encoded message, âits value lying in the specific information that it transmitsâ.33 This interpretive rendering of a message encrypted within the depths of the text requires a mere act of translation to render its truth visible, decoded into the language of structuralism, reduced into the form of a totalised structure of meaning âdeposited in the interior of the workâ.34
Warren Montag has argued that in place of this structuralist hermeneutic, the materialism of the textual object that Macherey calls for, on the model of Spinozaâs critique in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, considers âwriting, as a part of nature in its materiality, as irreducible to anything outside of itself, no longer secondary in relation to that which it represents or expresses, a repetition of something posited as primaryâ.35 This materialism of the textual object, rejecting the hermeneutics of depth, attends to the pure textual surface in its fully present materiality: âThe work hides nothing, it holds no secret: it is fully legible, offered to view, given upâ.36
Any and every discursive text â and this emphatically includes Capital, as I will argue in the next chapter â is thus for Macherey fundamentally incomplete, contradictory, and devoid of a coherent totality, a given whole whose immanent meaning could be simply decoded and translated via the revelatory logos of the critical operation. Macherey rejects any notion of the consistent unity of a text, affirming instead its necessary âincompleteness and informityâ.37 Analysis, in this view, consists not in revelation but in the production, as an object of thought, of the discursive object in its internal décalage, this uneven textual network of forces âcorrespondingâ to the work without constituting its mere reflection.38 Criticism devoted to the workâs specious totality remains in this view mere interpretation, the rendition of a principle that would conjure the coherence of any such totality, the nominal identity of its unity, the reason underwriting its harmony.39
4 On the Inadequacy of the Structuralist Combinatory
These critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, and totality necessarily culminate in Machereyâs comprehensive rejection of the notion of structure as totality.40 In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey systematically deploys the critique of Claude Lévi-Straussâs structuralism that had been patiently elaborated in Althusserâs seminar and subsequent exchanges between the two since 1961. Warren Montag has described in revelatory detail the complex articulations of this critique, in which, most notably, it is Macherey, Althusserâs astonishingly precocious student, who identifies the contradictions in the masterâs presentation of the concept of structure in Reading Capital.41
Elements of this critique of structuralism were first elaborated in Althusserâs 1962â63 seminar on structuralism (in which Macherey participated), and in Althusserâs 1963 essay âOn the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Originsâ, collected in For Marx; there then ensued an exchange of letters between Althusser and Macherey at the moment of the publication of the Reading Capital seminar in 1965 and again in 1966; and Althusser returned to the problem in his essay âOn Feuerbachâ from 1967. As Montag shows, the results of this discussion, marked by Althusserâs self-contradictions, flashes of insight, backtracking, and self-censorship, never amounts to a coherent, totalised presentation of its object. After tracing an unpredictably inflected âprehistoryâ of structuralism, from Edmund Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey through Georges Canguilhem, Tran Duc Thao, and Jacques Derrida, Montag focuses in particular on Althusserâs twofold rejection of Lévi-Straussâs structuralist method, as simultaneously comprising a transcendental idealism and empiricist functionalism.
For Lévi-Strauss, Althusser argues in the 1962 seminar, the universal ban on incest identified by structural anthropology functions as a transhistorical, transcendental category that grounds human identity in its singular manifestations across time and space, determining the various possible kinship combinations (thus its description as a âcombinatoryâ), in which the system of all possible kinship structures remains ultimately grounded by âthe structure of the human mindâ.42 Through the manifold historical variations of this combinatory, humans produce social forms in exhaustive divergence, but in accord with a limiting structural determination of which they are unaware. This amounts to the imputation on Lévi-Straussâs part of a social unconscious, one that remains, in Althusserâs biting critique, âstill a form of subjectivism that endows âsocietyâ with the form of existence of a subject having intentions and objectivesâ.43 This unconscious structure, hidden beneath the manifest content of social comportments, requires Lévi-Strauss to decode hermeneutically its form of constraint as the identity of infinite variation across time.
Structural anthropology thus manages to articulate a transcendental idealism â the hidden nature of which requires hermeneutical elaboration â to which Lévi-Strauss appends in uneasy tension an even less satisfactory empiricist functionalism. The latter, wholly inadequate, functionalist explanation of the role of kinship becomes necessary for Lévi-Strauss, Althusser observes, insofar as the transcendental structural combinatory can only identify the admissibility of any given kinship combination within the compass of an ungrounded series of otherwise arbitrary combinations. What the combinatory remains unable to explain is the causal necessity governing any specific instantiation, âwhyâ, in Althusserâs summary rejection, âit is that this reality and no other has become and therefore is realâ.44 To address this problem, Lévi-Strauss merely appends to the combinatory model a weak functionalism, referring the variety of empirical kinship systems to the putative survival needs of any given empirical group.45
In contrast to the Spinozist imperative to explain ends always by their necessary causes, kinship structures are thus for Lévi-Strauss to be comprehended and justified by the ends they serve. Althusser summarily rejects such an imaginary explanation of the unconscious structuration of society as the mere imputation of a spurious intentionality to a subject: in this case, neither God nor Man, but instead Structure.46 The problem structural anthropology remains unable to address is precisely that to which Spinozaâs epistemological undertaking addresses its labours: to know adequately what constitutes the necessity governing any singular essence, without recourse to a transcendental formalism of the combinatory.
To adequately grasp the necessity governing a text thus constitutes the challenge Pierre Macherey puts to a rightly conceived theory of literary production. Althusser was never able to fully articulate a theory of structural causality, but instead only managed to address his own theoretical hesitations and inconsistencies regarding the concept through the mere suppression of problematic passages in the second, 1968 edition of Reading Capital, passages that Macherey had initially brought to Althusserâs attention in their correspondence of 1965â66.47 In contrast, A Theory of Literary Production articulates a systematic critique of the concept of structure: rather than merely rejecting the term outright, Macherey distinguishes inadequate conceptions of structure â dependent upon notions of coherency, totality, functionalism, depth, and hermeneutic translation â from its more adequate conceptualisation.
This more adequate understanding of structure is for Macherey to be indexified to (1) the Spinozist distinction between the work as an object of theoretical (structural) knowledge and that same work understood empirically, under the attribute of its material extension (as a tangible book one takes in hand to read); (2) the necessary affirmation of structure qualified as the infinite incompletion of any set without totality;48 (3) adequate understanding of such a notion of structure without recourse to a hermeneutics of revelation, affirming instead the immanent materiality of the text in its manifest articulations; and consequently, (4) an unremitting faithfulness to writing, taken in its immediate, necessary materiality, irreducible to any inherent, hidden meaning or intention.
Such are the propositions Macherey deploys in his discussion of structure in A Theory of Literary Production. If the concept of structure allows for comprehension of the âtype of necessity from which the work derivesâ, this necessity can refer neither to a unity derived from the putative productive intention of an author nor the formalist unification of the work via a transcendental theory of totality.49 Structure is not to be discovered, as a bounded totality latent within the hidden depths of the work, but is instead constituted in the very absence of a coherent totality of meaning, in the productive décalage and âreal complexityâ of the constructed thought object.50 Analysis â truly adequate, materialist analysis of an object of knowledge â can in this view only refer to âthe constitution of a structureâ, the interpretive act of structuration (structurer) as the demonstrative deployment of elements, a process that paradoxically constructs the object of knowledge in its infinite incompletion, as an âabsenceâ (of the whole).51 Such an absence will attend to this incoherence, to the gaps and contradictions of a text, as what Althusser had famously termed in Reading Capital a âsymptomatic [symptomale] readingâ.52
5 Toward a Materialist Analysis of Form
In his 2006 afterword to the fortieth anniversary edition of A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey distils the question that, in hindsight, compelled the bookâs original intervention in 1966: âHow was it possible to be simultaneously a materialist and a formalist?â53 To this point, I have largely attended to this question, addressing the bookâs critiques of empiricism, hermeneutics, and totality, culminating in Machereyâs critical diremption of inadequate from adequate notions of structure, while leaving what is for me a key, unaddressed problem of materialism itself in suspense.
It can seem immediately, intuitively obvious that Macherey, in accord with Althusser and his fellow Althusserian Ãtienne Balibar, practices a âmaterialistâ form of analysis (in a materialist way, as the title of the 1998 Verso collection of Machereyâs essays puts it), and that, moreover, this practice is in some way consonant with that of those thinkers Macherey has repeatedly addressed, those whom Althusser called âthe only materialist traditionâ: Lucretius, Spinoza, and Marx.54 To be sure, Althusser famously asserted that in the texts composing Reading Capital, if âwe were never structuralistsâ, this is because âwe were Spinozistsâ, and in fact he further specifies that this entailed rejecting the ârelation of adequacy between mind and thing, in the Aristotelean traditionâ.55 In the absence of a more explicit critique of the concept of materialist analysis, however (and this is even more the case for Althusser himself), we are left to construct such a concept from the diverse (Spinozist, Marxian) materials of Machereyâs many analyses addressed to other, related problems.56 What then is the relation between materialist critique, and the Althusserian proscription of monist materialism (described in the previous chapter), in which imputation of motive matter, as Althusser argues in his unpublished notes on a conversation with Stanislas Breton, constitutes one more form of transcendental idealism? More specifically, how are we to conceive a properly materialist analysis, given the various Althusserian proscriptions described above against empiricism, idealism, functionalism, the hermeneutics of depth, and totality, critiques that, as we have seen, Macherey wholly subscribes to and even further clarifies in A Theory of Literary Production?
6 Against Materialism, en matérialiste
Macherey will in fact address this problem in his 1981 essay âEn matérialisteâ, to distinguish categorically between the process of materialist critique as the science of causes and all forms of materialism.57 There he argues that all materialisms, including the Marxist construct âdialectical materialismâ, are âtheories of matterâ to be rejected as such in their inherent idealism (in positing matter as transcendent prime mover). Macherey does not argue this point in sustained fashion, but instead punctually invokes Engelsâs attempt to elaborate a âgeneral theory of movementâ, the failure of which (âthis path led him nowhere, ⦠abandoning it in incompletionâ) serves to indicate in abbreviated fashion the impossibility of a coherent doctrine of materialism: âEngelsâs aborted attempt has produced an essential consequence: it is henceforth no longer possible to be a materialistâ.58
In place of any and all doctrines of materialism, Macherey asserts in contrast the necessity of a properly âmaterialist dialectic, which must necessarily culminate in a refutation of materialism as suchâ.59 Materialist critique, then, necessarily takes the form not of the positive doctrine representing the object of philosophy â since for Macherey like Althusser, philosophy has no preexisting object â but instead takes the form of an intervention within a field of thought; not a representation of reality, materialist critique constructs instead a critical orientation within the attribute of thought: âNeither doctrine, theory, nor knowledge [savoir], but a mode of intervention, ⦠the philosophical field apprehended in the concrete complexity of its internal conflictsâ. Materialist critique, in this view, is materialist in the sense of a real intervention, an âobjective practice of interventionâ within the domain or attribute in which it operates.60 Macherey draws the full implications of this materialist position, in which the critique of the real as a science of necessity that intervenes to displace and weaken the hold of ideology, given sufficient force, can serve to produce a new disposition of potentia. It necessarily enacts this operation within the attribute of thought, âwithout having to find beyond itself [au-dehors] the instruments and criteria that could allow it to test [éprouver] and measure its power, its capacity effectively to act in the terrain of reality which it has never leftâ.61
7 Reading Capital as a Theory of Literary Production
In the wake of his key contribution to Reading Capital, Macherey has in his published work only occasionally returned to the analysis of Marxâs magnum opus, most notably and extensively in the talk he gave on 13 July 1967, at Cérisy-la-Salle during the conference âLe centenaire du Capitalâ.62 Machereyâs discussion of the object of analysis in Capital in both these texts (as is the case in A Theory of Literary Production) closely follows the series of imperatives first presented in Reading Capital and reiterated in Theory: Macherey argues that Marxâs epistemological procedure in Capital constitutes the refusal of empiricism, idealism, hermeneutics, communication, genesis, and transcendental notions of totality.
To read Capital adequately, âto escape from the empiricist myth of readingâ, requires, Macherey reiterates, a âtheoretical reading, constructing at each step its novelty, elaborating its principles. Reading so conceived is a theoretical practice: it produces in effect an effect [en effet un effet] of knowledgeâ.63 The result of such a reading of Capital will be, he argues, an adequate understanding of the âsystematicâ nature of Marxâs work, an âorganisation that depends upon the laws of theoretical rigorâ. That said, the rigorous theoretical organisation of Capital that Macherey identifies in this talk, as he had in his earlier chapter from Reading Capital, by no means implies that Capital forms a coherent totality; on the contrary, Capital, like the literary works that constituted the object of Theory, is subject to âa strict incompletion [inachèvement]â, an incompletion that calls upon its reader to âdevelop the logic proper toâ Capital.64 Machereyâs critique of the notion of totality in Capital is uncompromising: âWe can even sayâ, Macherey continues, âthat the enterprise of a total or âtotalisingâ reading is ideological in its essence: it lies at the root [au principe] of all revisionisms, which are absolute by vocation â¦. A scientific text can only be taken up on the condition of being continued: a closed, repetitive reading is itself an ideological readingâ.65 Macherey then continues in this vein to reiterate various subsidiary themes from Theory of Literary Production, here applied to the reading of Capital, including the critique of all commentary, and the mere aesthetic delectation of texts.66
As Althusser had before him in the passages of Reading Capital discussed above, Macherey reiterates the constructed, nonempiricist nature of the object of thought.67 Macherey furthermore rigorously adheres to Althusserâs primary distinction between the constructed object of analysis (Marxâs Gedankenkonkretum) and reference to the ârealâ, substantial order of being. It is in this sense then that Macherey will assert that âthe real [le réel] subsists outside of thought and preexists it. This difference between the real and the thought [le pensé] must be understood so as to avoid expression in a new form of empiricism that would conclude that thought is the emanation or mechanical reproduction of the realâ.68
While this last point constitutes a further reiteration of the anti-empiricism of Theory of Literary Production and Reading Capital, Macherey suddenly injects a properly Spinozist clarification of this critique, a point crucially missing, I argued in the previous chapter, from Althusserâs dualist presentation in Reading Capital. Not only must an adequate reading of Capital reject all empiricism, Macherey reminds his listeners in terms that echo those of the 1965 essay âA propos de la ruptureâ cited above, now addressed explicitly to Capital itself: it must further refuse all forms of neo-Cartesian dualism, drawn between thought and a material order of extension in the sense of two distinct substances: âNor can it [scientific discourse] constitute a dualism in which thought is exterior to the real, such that it would be necessary to think the coexistence of two independent ordersâ.
At the same time, it (scientific discourse) must bear some clear distinction from the material order. If âscience is the science of the realâ, it involves no mere âtranspositionâ or elaboration of a reflective, âallegorical objectâ. Science involves âthe institution of another form of reality. It is the production of a new real that is the thought real [le réel pensé] ⦠The thought real is not the real considered from another point of view, the interpreted real; it is the real transformedâ.69 While Macherey here reiterates Spinozaâs distinction between the real and the idea of the real, the terms of Machereyâs rejection of Cartesian dualism already point forward to his further discussion of Spinozaâs concept of the attributes in Hegel or Spinoza, along with its further development and interpretation in his systematic and powerful critique of so-called parallelism and the proper understanding of the famous proposition 7 of Ethics II, âThe order and connection of ideas is the same thing as the order and connection of thingsâ (Ordo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio rerum).
8 Materialism in a Spinozist Way
The initial Althusserian formulation of a materialist dialectic lies, I wish to argue, immediately at hand in the texts of esoteric texts of high âAlthusserianismâ of 1965â67: the âNotes on Discourseâ (discussed in the previous chapter), and Machereyâs lesser-known âA propos de la ruptureâ and âLire Le capitalâ.70 In essence, and to reiterate and further develop the position of the previous chapter, this is to claim that Althusserâs famous general proposition in Reading Capital on the subterranean Spinozism of philosophy (Spinozaâs âradical revolution was the object of a massive historical repression. ⦠The history of philosophyâs repressed Spinozism thus unfolded as a subterranean historyâ) holds true for Althusserian epistemology itself, in which Spinozist thought functions as an occasionally acknowledged but never adequately explicated theoretical foundation.
In the wake of their combined Spinozist critiques of the subject-object logic of empiricism, of expressive totality, and of the functionalist combinatory of structuralism, for Althusser, Macherey, and Balibar and in contrast to the imprecision of many Hegelian readers of Capital, in the Spinozist epistemology that avowedly underlies their various analyses of Capital, there is in fact no substantial distinction to be made between the constructed, a posteriori âobjectâ of materialist analysis and that of analysis itself.71
The pseudo-problem of an object that materialist analysis would represent is an inadequate, imaginary fabulation, once one accepts instead that substance is indivisible, that the infinite attributes constitute, immediately, the expression of substance and its infinite modes as the determinations of those attributes, and that, above all, the order of ideas is one and the same thing as the order of things (âOrdo, et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio rerumâ). To conceive of materialist analysis in terms of a substantial distinction and representational correlation between analysis and its object is, from a Spinozist perspective, inadmissible; it is to reintroduce precisely the Cartesian dualism of substances (between extension and the intellect) that Spinoza systematically criticises.
Judging by his powerful (private) critiques of Althusserâs presentation of the concept of structural causality in the first edition of Reading Capital, Macherey seems to have developed a reading of Spinoza even more rigorous and systematic than Althusserâs by 1965 at the latest, a reading that clearly determines the theoretical propositions of A Theory of Literary Production.72 It is only in his writings since Hegel or Spinoza, however, that Macherey has fully explicated the interpretation of Spinoza that can retrospectively be said to determine the epistemology of the high-Althusserian texts of 1965â67. In Hegel or Spinoza, and above all in the second volume of his explication of the Ethics, Macherey reads Spinozaâs demonstration of the formal structure or order of the attributes to constitute the singular essence of a materialist critique of the real.
Rejecting point by point the Hegelian misreading of Spinoza in Hegel or Spinoza, Macherey affirms that, for Spinoza, the following propositions hold true:
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The (infinite) attributes of substance cannot consist in a linear and countable or ordinal sequence (i.e., the attribute of thought, plus the attribute of extension, plus all the other infinite attributes). âThe unity of substance is thus not an arithmetic unity â¦, an empty form of the One â¦. It is this infinitely diverse reality that comprises all its attributes and that expresses itself in their infinity â¦. One can no more count substance than one can count its attributes, at least if one renounces the point of view of imagination â¦. To say that there is a single substance is to speak from the imagination that can only consider the absolute negatively, from nothingness, that is, from the part of the possible, which it envelopsâ.73
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That the attributes do not coexist in ordinal relation implies in turn that they do not consist of elements defining one another as a totality through their negative relation. âIf all the attributes together belong to substance, constituting its being,74 they do not coexist within it as parts that would adjust to each other to finally compose the total system. If this were so, the attributes would define themselves in relation to each other through their reciprocal lackâ.75
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This further implies that substance itself cannot be divided up into its various (infinite) attributes, but is instead indivisible. âTo think the infinite, whether it be in the attribute (in a kind) or in substance (absolutely), is to exclude any notion of divisibility; substance is entirely complete in each of its attributes (because it is identical to them), just as, moreover, all extension is in each drop of water or all thought is in each idea â¦. The infinite is not a number; this is why it evades all division. Indivisible substance is not the sum of all its attributesâ.76
From these propositions Macherey then concludes that the relation of the attributes is one of unitary (rather than comparative, negative) identity: âAs an attribute of substance, thought is identical to everything and therefore has nothing above it, but the sequence through which it is realised poses, at the same time, its absolute equality with all other forms in which substance is also expressed, and these are infinite in numberâ.77
We then come to what must count among Machereyâs most radical interventions in the field of thought, his seemingly scholastic reading of Spinozaâs proposition EIIP7. The so-called parallelism of the attributes (a term that Spinoza never uses in any of his writings, and which Macherey attributes to Leibniz), Macherey shows conclusively, is quite simply âinadmissibleâ. This must be the case, Macherey argues, if one reads the wording of proposition EII7 attentively: in the statement âOrdo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio rerumâ, Spinoza identifies the order and connection of ideas as not the same as the order of physical bodies in extension, but rather the same as that of âthingsâ (rerum), of all things without distinction, including, of course, ideas themselves: âThe word things [res] absolutely does not, in a restrictive way, designate the modes of the attribute of extension, but the modes of all the attributes, whatever they are, including thought itself â¦. This is one and the same order, one and the same connectionâ.78
Macherey will subsequently, in his magisterial explication of Book II of the Ethics, further develop and refine this absolutely decisive critique of the notion of âparallelismâ, to affirm in its place the more adequate understanding of the relation of the order of the attributes as a complex unity.79 To do so, Macherey first repeats his assertion from Hegel or Spinoza summarised above, to the effect that Ethics IIP7 must refer to the substantial coherence (as opposed to a parallel identity) of the order of ideas and the order of things, further specifying this assertion, based first on grammatical and then apodictic determinations.
Grammatically, in the phrase âOrdo et connexio idearum idem est, ac ordo, et connexio rerumâ, the masculine/neutral adjective idem cannot be argued to apply to the feminine connexio. The phrase âis the same asâ (idem est ac) therefore cannot be said to apply to a (âparallelâ) relation between two âindependent sets [ensembles]â, but instead qualifies a single substantial order as identical to itself. From this, Macherey concludes that the proper translation of Spinozaâs proposition should be âThe order and connection of ideas is the same thing as the order and connection of thingsâ.80
This assertion finds its immediate confirmation in the demonstration of proposition 7, which points to its axiomatic basis in the initial axiom 4 of de Deo, the meaning of which is eminently clear: ideas are subject to a single, identical order that holds for all things.81 In sum, Macherey concludes,
Proposition 7 of de Mente does not affirm the extrinsic identity between two systems of order and connection facing each other, one of which would be the order of ideas and the other that of things bestowing on these ideas their objects, these things being themselves identified unilaterally as bodies. Instead, proposition 7 proposes that the order and connection inheres in its proper, intrinsic constitution to that by which all things in general are governed [soumises], and from which nothing distinguishes it.82
For Spinoza, in Machereyâs reading, the order of causality of ideas is literally âthe same thingâ as the order and causality of all things, including ideas; there is, in other words, only one order and causality of things, which can be differentially apprehended through an infinite number of attributes, insofar as those attributes are in fact different means by âwhich the intellect perceives substanceâ (though humans only have access to two, thought and extension).83 To argue otherwise in the sense of a âparallelismâ, Macherey insists, would be to reinstate a Cartesian dualism of thought and extension taken as distinct substances (precisely as Althusser had done in Reading Capital via the imperfect distinction between thought and the real): âThe âparallelistâ reading of proposition 7 reinscribes the Spinozist doctrine in a dualist perspective, explaining all of nature through the relation of extended substance and thought substanceâ.84
9 On Telling Stories
In contrast to Machereyâs minute attention to the letter of Spinozaâs text, Althusser offers little concrete analysis of Spinozaâs formulations, but instead proposes at various moments a number of laconic, even enigmatic, one-line definitions of materialism.85 It is thus possible to orchestrate, in counterpoint to Machereyâs attention to Spinozaâs demonstrations, the suggestive promise of Althusserâs allusive materialist critique. It would take a volume in itself to address Althusserâs various reiterations and critiques of the related problems of historical and dialectical materialism, of the materialist turns in Marxâs philosophy, of the relation of materials of production to the capitalist mode of production, and the like. The âaleatory materialismâ of Althusserâs final period poses similarly complex problems of interpretation beyond the scope of this chapter, which we might sum up in saying that in turning to Lucretius and Democritus in his now-famous 1982 essay, Althusser distances himself on crucial points from the Spinozist materialism of the 1960s and 70s with which I am here concerned, and even more decisively from Machereyâs categorical rejection of all doctrines of materialism and corresponding attention to the explication of Spinozist text as a materialist critique.86
Leaving aside the circularity of the definition Althusser offers in lecture 3 of Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (the âmaterialist characterâ of science is characterised, as to its object, by âan external object with a material existenceâ) along with other definitions that merely equate materialism with an adequate scientific practice,87 in The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser offers the following definition of materialism: ââ¯âNot to indulge in storytellingâ still remains for me the one and only definition of materialismâ.88 Though Althusser makes no mention of Spinoza in this passage, âto resort to mere storytellingâ neatly encapsulates the principal assertion of Spinozaâs appendix to Ethics I, upon which many of the arguments of this book are grounded: that reasoning inadequately from effects to causes is the basis of imaginary, ideological thinking. Materialism, in contrast, would thus implicitly seek always to argue from the adequate understanding of causes to the effects they produce.
In his 1985 text âThe Only Materialist Traditionâ, Althusser proposes another enigmatic yet even more auspicious definition of materialism: âNominalism is not the royal road to materialism but the only possible materialismâ.89 Here again, it lies far beyond the scope of this chapter to distinguish Althusserâs flat assertion that nominalism is âthe only possible materialismâ from the innumerable accreted historical senses of nominalism, from the diverse critiques of universals and abstract objects as well as corresponding assertions of the reality of particular objects and of concrete objects. Instead, I propose merely to summarise the Spinozist construct Althusserâs assertion is meant to encapsulate.
In the third section of âThe Only Materialist Traditionâ, in which this definition of materialism appears, Althusser â in the course of a broad reflection on the centrality of Spinoza to his thinking â turns to his interpretation of Spinozaâs third genre (genus) of knowledge, the âintuitive science [scientiam intiutivam]â that Spinoza characterises as âthe adequate knowledge of the essence of things [adaequatam cognitionem essentiae rerum]â.90 In Althusserâs usage in this passage, the term ânominalismsâ (in the plural) refers precisely to such singular essences of things, things comprehended as âsingularitiesâ. Such singularities are to be distinguished from Spinozaâs second genre of mere common or abstract universal notions (notiones communes), such as motion and rest taken as universal characteristics of all bodies in extension; these are explicitly, for Althusser, âgeneric and not âgeneralâ constantsâ. In Althusserâs reading, Spinozaâs invention of an adequate materialist (ânominalistâ) knowledge is thus held to encompass his discovery of âgeneric constants or invariants ⦠which arise in the existence of singular âcasesââ¯â. Equally, it is their genericity as constants of any singular case that allows for what Althusser revealingly calls, in clinical terms with psychoanalytic resonance, their âtreatmentâ, as distinct from any empirical or experimental verification.91
If a common notion or law would constitute an abstract or general universal, the constant arising in a given instance (a symptom in the analysand or patient, for example) allows for the adequate analysis and treatment of that case in its ânominalistâ singularity: no universal treatment is proper for the singularity of every case, and yet the analyst must construct an adequate knowledge of its causes and not be misled by mere surface impressions (the manifest content of the dream, say, or the visibility of bodily symptoms) that threaten to be inadequately attributed to imaginary causes. Such attention to constants, moreover, holds in Althusserâs view for any singular being, for example a people (the Jews, in Spinozaâs analysis in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) or what Althusser calls a âsocial singularityâ (the critique of the capitalist social form in Marx, or political revolution for Lenin).92
Following this elaboration, along with a brief excursus on the TTP and Spinozaâs âphilosophical strategyâ of âtaking over the chief stronghold of the adversaryâ,93 Althusser then concludes his presentation with the affirmation of Spinozaâs materialist ânominalismâ quoted above. The attribute ânominalistâ thus redeploys the critique of transcendentals that Althusser and Macherey had articulated in their parsing of Lévi-Straussâs structuralism in the 1960s, discussed above: âWithout ever sketching a transcendental genesis of meaning, truth, or the conditions of possibility of every truth, ⦠[Spinoza] established himself within the factuality of a simple claim: âWe have a true ideaââ¯â.94 The ânominalistâ materialist thus passes beyond the universal generality of common notions, of transcendental guarantees (such as Lévi-Straussâs kinship order or discourse in Gilles Deleuzeâs problematic definition of structuralism) to articulate instead the generic necessity determining any singular essence.95
This final step then brings Althusser to define, in eminently clear and distinct terms, the fundamental Spinozist proposition that should be seen retrospectively to constitute the essential order of Althusser and Machereyâs epistemology in their works from 1965â67: âThis factual nominalism was rediscovered â and with what genius! â in the famous distinction ⦠between the ideatum and the idea, between the thing and its concept, between the dog that barks and the concept of the dog, which does not bark, between the circle that is round, and the idea of the circle, which is not round, and so onâ.96
What Althusser names his ânominalistâ materialism in this late, 1985 text might indeed be more properly termed an axiomatic, substantialist materialist critique. For the proposition that the order of ideas and of things is the same thing is indeed an axiomatic proposition for Spinoza: its ground lies not in the apodictic, synthetic demonstration of proposition 7 in Ethics II, but instead in the initial axiomatic foundation of Spinozaâs entire system. It is in precisely this sense that proposition EII7 explicitly refers the reader back to Ethics I, axiom 4.
It is axioms 4, 5, and 6 of Ethics I that together constitute the fundamental epistemological order of an inherent, necessary identity between the two orders or attributes of thought and extension. While axioms 3â5 of Ethics I affirm the necessary structure of causality under both the attributes of extension and the intellect, it is axiom 6 that draws these together to affirm that the true idea âmust be in conformity with its ideate [debet cum suo ideato convenire]â.97 Machereyâs interpretation of this key axiom bears citing in whole, as it is this statement that arguably should be taken to summarise the entire epistemological apparatus of Althusserâs and Machereyâs thought:
This axiom [EIAx6] takes up in a new perspective the general teaching [enseignement] from the initial definitions and axioms [of Ethics I]: as the thing is, so it is conceived, as well as the inverse: as the thing is conceived, insofar as this is a true knowledge, so it is, necessarily. For every idea in the intellect, insofar as it is true, that is to say, ⦠well formed â since all ideas are true in the intellect that understands them, and at the same moment relates them to the ideate to which they are in a relation of conformity â there necessarily corresponds a content given in reality.98
This position founds for Macherey a substance-based materialist critique, in which the ârealâ â an indeterminate, reflexively deployed category in Althusserâs contribution to Reading Capital99 â stands plainly revealed in Machereyâs explication as neither mere sensuous materiality (empiricist, imagination-based materialism) nor transcendentally finite totality (idealism); materialist critique as the science of necessity constructs, in the attribute of thought, substance itself, the infinite dynamic of the causa sui as âthe process within which substance determines itself through the âessencesâ that constitute itâ.100 This substance-based materialist critique affirms that
thought reality and extended reality coincide in the absolute being of substance, where they are only distinguished by the intellect. ⦠There is just as much materiality, no more nor less, in reality envisaged from the perspective [angle] of the mental as when envisaged from the perspective of the bodily. ⦠Mental reality is a reality unto itself [une réalité à part entière], whose elements, ideas, are materially existing things, no less consistent, in their own order, than those that materially compose extended nature.101
10 The Persistent Problem of the Attributes
I have dwelled on Machereyâs critique of the so-called âparallelismâ of the attributes in part because what Macherey calls the âproblem of the attributesâ is perhaps as actual as ever. In a recent text on âThe Althusserian Definition of Theoryâ, Alain Badiou identifies in Althusserâs âIntroductionâ to Reading Capital what he, Badiou, reads as an explicit reference to, and rejection by Althusser of a Spinozist âparallelismâ inhering between the thought-concrete [Gedankenkonkretum] and the real.102 Jean Matthys has made the same claim â i.e., that âAlthusser goes so far as to oppose a central point of Spinozist doctrine: the âparallelismâ of the attributesâ â arguing that this so-called âparallelismâ, this supposedly âcentral pointâ of Spinozaâs thought which is claimed by Matthys to lie âat the heart of the entire Spinozist doctrineâ, despite being a term he never uses (it being the invention of Leibniz), constitutes a âresurgence of an idealist tendency in Spinozaâ. This is the case, Matthys argues, insofar as the concept of the unity of substance, what Matthys calls âthis monismâ (and âparallelismâ is indeed a monist concept), stands as the guarantee that assures the identity of the order and connection of the attributes.103 I wish to argue, against both Badiou and Matthys, that when carefully read, Althusserâs claim (âThe production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought categories which âreproduceâ the real categories do not occupy the same place as they do in the order of real historical genesisâ)104 is an eminently Spinozist position, one that implies not a rejection of Spinoza, but its clarification, as a theory of finite, contingent structural causality without a priori ontological guarantee.
Initially, Badiou flatly and problematically affirms the identity of the Althusserian ârealâ with Spinozaâs substance: Althusserâs is for Badiou âa Spinozist visionâ in which âwe have the real ⦠understood as the Spinozist substance, that is, the totality of what existsâ. This seems a blatant misreading of both Spinoza and Althusser. There are in any world both actually existing singular things and nonexistent things (such as eternal, atemporal ideas), a distinction Spinoza clearly develops in Propositions 8 and 9 of Ethics II. Althusserâs ârealâ, absent any definition, I am arguing, indicates not merely Badiouâs âtotality of what existsâ but the set of all things, existent and nonexistent, in a given world. To equate Spinozaâs substance, however, with âthe totality of what existsâ makes even less sense, since Spinoza defines substance not as an actually existing thing or even all things, but only as âthat which is in itself and is conceived through itselfâ; Althusser himself avoids the term âsubstanceâ, given the termâs reifying, monist implication as an emanant source and guarantee of the order of being, and refers in its place only to âstructural causalityâ.
Immediately following this statement, moreover, Badiou appears to relapse into the very Hegelian dualist misreading of Spinoza that Macherey criticises in Hegel or Spinoza, referring not to an infinity of attributes in the Spinozist system, but only two: âThere exist two attributes within the totality: thinking and what is not thinkingâ, which, in Althusserâs case, Badiou figures as âthe knowledge-object, completely inside thinking, and the real-object, completely inside the realâ. Badiou, as did Hegel, thus reverts to the Cartesian dualism that Spinoza was at such pains to reject.105 Badiou immediately disqualifies this dualist position, however, asserting that these two attributes are in fact for Althusser ânot the reproduction of a metaphysical dualism, but simply two attributes of the same generality ⦠the expression of the same orderâ.106 Badiou nonetheless seeks to make a distinction between Althusser and Spinoza, where none in fact exists: âFor Althusser [unlike Badiouâs Spinoza, the reader is led to assume], there is no isomorphism, no parallelism, no relationship point by point between the two [attributes]â.107 The problem here is double: Badiou wrongly adheres to the philosophical commonplace of Spinozist âparallelismâ of the attributes, and thus misinterprets Althusserâs real and explicit rejection of parallelism as a rejection of Spinozism. This stands in contrast to Machereyâs immanent and more authoritative reading, which rejects the commonplace of Spinozist âparallelismâ as both a literal misreading of Spinozaâs text and the extraneous attribution of a term and concept, parallelism, that Spinoza himself never uses.108
Badiouâs text thus becomes problematic in its specious distinction between Spinozaâs solution to the relation of the attributes and that of Althusser in Reading Capital. Here is Badiou: â[For Spinoza] there is no difference [between the attributes], in some sense; they belong to the same order, but the same order is expressed, is symbolised in two different forms. So there is no real problem of the relationship between the idea and the thing: the idea and the thing are in the same general orderâ. The confusion thus arises from Badiouâs assertion that Althusser refuses the âSpinozistâ solution of âparallelismâ.109
Badiou bases this claim for Althusserâs rejection of âparallelismâ on a specific passage in Reading Capital, a passage Badiou cites with introjected commentary and in ellipsis: âThe production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge [and so, Badiou interjects, completely within thinking] and is carried out according to a different order ⦠which is different from the real order of real genesis [⦠that organises] the process of production of a given real objectâ.110 This is a passage that comprises, Badiou affirms, âa categorical refusal of the Spinozist solution in which the two attributes are attributes of the same orderâ.111
In Badiouâs reading of Althusser, the latter rejects the Spinozist substantial identity of the order of the attributes: âFor Spinoza, this problem does not exist ⦠because there is in fact no relationship between the two, because they are of the same substance. But, for Althusser, the order is not the same, so there is in fact a real difficultyâ.112 Here the real question is whether or not for Spinoza, like Althusser, the âorderâ of the attributes is nonidentical. Rather than pursuing an immanent critique of Spinozaâs text,113 Badiouâs deus ex machina solution to this putative problem is surprising, to say the least: âIt is a difficulty, the solution of which is for Kant âschematismâ, ⦠precisely the mechanism by which the formal organisation of the categories of knowledge are related to the external existence, which we cannot know, of the worldâ.114 Badiou proceeds to suggest an awkward admixture of Spinoza and Kant in his reading of Althusser to resolve a (nonexistent) problem: âa mixture of the immanent Spinozist vision of two attributes of the same real with this Kantian schematism. There is only one real: it is not an ontological dualism, but instead we find two attributes of the same substance but without parallelism, without identity of the orderâ.115
What Badiou here speciously presents as Althusserâs rejection of Spinozaâs âparallelistâ position (âwe find two attributes of the same substance but without parallelism, without identity of the orderâ) is precisely that which Machereyâs literal, grammatical reading of EIIP7 has shown to be its actual proposition: the attributes are not to be reified any more than substance. They are not two things that can be compared point by point for their isomorphism, but are âthat which the intellect perceivesâ of substance (causality), remaining purely and eternally heterogeneous: the concept of a circle is not round. How a neo-Kantian schematism would mediate âtwo attributes of the same substance but without parallelismâ remains unclear in this brief, ambiguous closing section of Badiouâs (oral) text.116 What is immediately striking, however, is that Badiou, in spontaneously reverting to a dualist understanding of the Spinozist attributes, suddenly requires a Kantian solution to a problem (the âparallelistâ dualism of the attributes) that Spinoza himself has criticised and superseded. The âmaterialist schematismâ that Badiou calls for is already rendered superfluous by Spinozaâs own understanding of the attributes.
Analogous to his argument that Spinoza has already pre-empted Hegelâs various critiques, Macherey himself appears already to have anticipated Badiouâs recourse to Kant in Hegel or Spinoza. âThrough his critique of Cartesianismâ, Macherey writes in Hegel or Spinoza, âSpinoza invalidates, in advance, a Kantian type of problematic of knowledge, posed in terms of the relationship of subject and object or form and contentâ, precisely the binary relationship that it is the conceptual mission of Kantian âschematismâ to mediate.117 Badiouâs importation of the Kantian schemata as deus ex machina in fact reintroduces the Cartesian dualism of subject and object â what Althusser had provocatively termed âthe latent dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealismâ â that Spinozaâs thought renders inoperative.118
Badiou takes Althusser at his word (âThe production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge [⦠an order] which is different from the real order of real genesisâ) without questioning what the phrase âthe real order of real genesisâ might mean. Judging from his initial claim (i.e., that Althusserâs âreal [indicates] the Spinozist substance, that is, the totality of what existsâ), Badiou appears to assume that for Althusser the order of the real indicates not the intellectâs apprehension of things via the attribute of sensuous, temporal extension but substance itself, (mis)understood as a determinate thing: as âthe order of the realâ.
It is worth citing Althusserâs proposition in whole, rather than Badiouâs truncated version, because Althusser clearly bases his assertion of the heterogeneity of order not on the causal order of being qua being, but rather on the historical, factual, sensuous existence of actually existing things, apprehended in temporally determined extension:
While the production process of a given real object, a given real-concrete totality (e.g., a given historical nation) takes place entirely in the real and is carried out according to the real order of real genesis (the order of succession of the moments of historical genesis), the production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought categories which âreproduceâ the real categories do not occupy the same place as they do in the order of real historical genesis, but quite different places assigned them by their function in the production process of the object of knowledge.119
Althusser in this passage predominantly uses the adjectival form of ârealâ, such that the term ârealâ here clearly refers to factual, temporal events sensuously apprehended (through what Spinoza calls the attribute of extension). The question is thus whether Spinoza, like Althusser, asserts that the intellectâs apprehension of things through the attribute of sensuous extension indicates a different order (rather than an isomorphic, âparallelismâ of reified attributes) compared to its apprehension of the causal order of things via the attribute of thought. It is perfectly obvious that for Spinoza, as for Althusser, the adequacy, and thus the order of things will be utterly heterogeneous between the two attributes.
One immediately thinks of Spinozaâs example of the falling tile in the Appendix to Ethics I: it is simply impossible, Spinoza asserts, for the finite human mind adequately to understand the causality that determines the temporal, historical crash (or miss) of a given stone on a given day on a given passer-byâs head, simply because the chain of causes is infinite, even in this minimal, simplest example of a âhistoricalâ event (and the âproduction processâ of, in Althusserâs example, âa given historical nationâ would of course be infinitely more complex than that single tile). But why did the wind blow, and the stone fall that day, and the man pass at that time? âAnd so they will go on and on, asking the causes of causes, until you take refuge in the will of God â that is, the sanctuary of ignoranceâ. Any and all causal explanations of historical, temporal real things, what Spinoza calls actually existing singular things,120 are necessarily and inevitably inadequate, the attribution of imaginary causes and ends.
In contrast, the universal and eternal ideas the intellect can construct of nonexistent things,121 for example the common notion of the laws of gravity, along with the singular idea the intellect can construct of the fall of that stone as singularity within the parameters of those general laws (its weight, speed, wind speed, angle of striking the passer-byâs head, etc.) will not explain why that stone fell on that day on that head (one â inadequate and imaginary â causal sequence) but how that singular event conformed to the general laws of gravity, replacing the variables in the Newtonian formula with constants.
Badiou and Jean Matthys seem to assume that Althusser is making a general statement regarding the universal structure of causality, when in fact it is quite clear from his statement that he is contrasting the temporal forms of appearance of actually existing things (âthe order of succession of the moments of historical genesisâ), with a thought construct. The former, Spinoza argues, will always take an inadequate form due to the nature of empirical sense impressions, while the latter can be constructed adequately, without this implying that this construction refer to the ontological, infinite nature of causality as such. In fact, and despite his initial lapses in Reading Capital into an invocation of the social âwholeâ (which Macherey rightly criticised), Althusser almost entirely avoids grandiose ontological statements on the nature of being, categorically rejecting such idealism, for example in the unpublished text Philosophy for Non-philosophers: âIt is inordinately pretentious of idealist philosophy to claim to âseeâ the whole, âthinkâ the whole, or aspire to âtotalisationâ. What gives philosophy this superhuman power?â122
In his truncated citation, Badiou does not cite Althusserâs key qualifying phrase that supports the interpretation that Althusser is limiting his claim to that of the order of actually existing singular things in their sensuous, temporal existence: it is precisely âthe order of real historical genesisâ which is said by Althusser to bear a different order from that of the adequately constructed thought-concrete. Althusserâs example of such a âreal historical genesisâ â which again Badiou does not cite â is, precisely, âa given real-concrete totality (e.g., a given historical nation)â, in other words, a phenomenal, temporal actually existing, singular (historical) thing. In the passage Badiou (partially) cites, it seems clear enough that the term ârealâ refers to the phenomenal order of appearance of historical events as the intellect grasps them via the attribute of extension, an order that is necessarily perceived in a manner limited and qualified not only by the finite nature of human experience but above all by the inadequacy of imaginary, ideological modes of thought.
This interpretation of Althusserâs admittedly ambiguous text is nonetheless confirmed quite plainly in Althusserâs critique of historicism. Only a few pages before the passage Badiou cites, Althusser argues that the order of âhistorical genesisâ, necessarily suffers from the fetishistic inscription of âthe illusion of an immediate readingâ, a necessarily symptomatic and compromised reading of the fetishised document â whether the Bible, in Spinozaâs critique that Althusser here refers to, or the fetishisation of the archival document in historicist discourse more generally. Althusser moreover explicitly indicates Spinoza as the originator of this critique of the fetishisation of the historical document: Spinoza was âthe first in the world to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity of the immediateâ.123
Spinozaâs critique of representation â in the final proposition 49 of Ethics book II, de Mente â ultimately implicates, in Machereyâs reading, the entire sensuous order of images and words (as diverse, arbitrary and conventional signifiers), an order necessarily subject to the confusion of the imagination. In contrast, the necessity of the idea remains defined by the materialist order of the intellect, in its necessity absolutely distinct from that of mere sonorous and imagistic extension. Here is Macherey:
Ideas are themselves things, mental things, which ⦠are not a sort of doubling of reality, as are [for Spinoza] representations, images, signs, and words. ⦠By affirming that images and words are products of bodily extension, and nothing more, Spinoza does not wish to say that they have more reality or even materiality than ideas; rather ⦠they are things of an entirely different order. ⦠This is why ideas are not reducible to representations of things, as images and signs are, because, as ideas, they bear a potential for reality and activity that is conditioned by the position they maintain in the order of thought.124
In sum, historicist discourse, in its empiricist reference to the attribute of temporal extension, necessarily lacks the means to an adequate analysis of the âstructure of structuresâ determining the phenomenal events that documentary history merely registers. It must necessarily remain, in this view, inadequate to the presentation of the causal necessity determining these empirical events, no matter how finely rendered its representations of the archive.
Both Spinoza and Althusser assert the absolute heterogeneity of the attributes; the attribute indicates not a thing (the order of extension) that can be compared with another thing (the order of thought), but nonidentical ways the intellect apprehends a single causal order. As such, it is perfectly clear that for both Spinoza and Althusser, apprehension of the real via the attribute of extension will be eminently inferior (and thus nonidentical to) its adequate apprehension via the attribute of thought.
To take an example close to Marxâs critique of capital, the causal, temporal narrative of an act of simple exchange, of, say, buying an apple at market, will take a radically different form whether apprehended via temporal, sensuous experience or common notions. The former, empirical apprehension provides only an overwhelming mashup of sense impressions: I see the apple on the stand; I automatically reach in my pocket for a coin; I touch and smell the apple and feel the coin in my hand; the seller gives me a look for handling his merchandise; I feel shame and anger and hunger and resentment; I reflexively hand over the coin and take the apple and bite into it, tasting its tartness, etc., etc., in an infinite complex of phenomenal impressions, causes, and affects that are factually real, but inadequately understood.
In contrast, Marxâs analysis of the capitalist social form might tell me that at the level of common notions, in a society governed by general commodification, the coin in my pocket is the necessary general equivalent form of value that commands the exchange of things of value, adequately explaining how it comes to be the case that handing over a piece of metal causes the seller to hand me the apple; that the commodification of food and other necessities as ongoing primitive accumulation enforces via the threat of starvation the social command that all subjects of capital sell their labour power to capital in order to have that coin in their pocket in the first place; etc.
Furthermore, at the level of an intuitive science of the singularity of this situation, I might conclude that the cause of the sellerâs resentment is not my touching the apple but the socially enforced sale of his own labour power, which required him to arrive at the market in early morning freezing temperatures to pay for his own necessities in order not to starve, etc. The point again, is that a single, complex order of causality â substance as ordo et connexio â will be apprehended in radically heterogeneous forms depending on the attribute in question.
At the more abstract level of a grand historical narrative, Althusser argues that it is Marx who relays the Spinozist invention of ideology critique, bringing its force to bear upon the determinant social structure of modernity, capitalism:
Only from history as thought, the theory of history, was it possible to account for the historical religion of reading: by discovering that the history of men, which survives in Books, is however not a text written on the pages of a Book, discovering that the truth of history cannot be read in its manifest discourse, because the text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.125
To take an example from Capital, a temporal narrative representing the historical development of an entity such as the universal equivalent, money, no matter how detailed its discursive, archive-based representation, remains incapable of adequately conceptualising and presenting the categorial necessity governing this genesis, unlike Marxâs logical, categorial presentation of its crucial function in a commodity-based society.126 The point is that it is only when the objectâs categorial necessity is adequately understood that the phenomenal, historical forms that that category takes on (in the case of money, as wages, as prices, as profits, and all the subsidiary forms and instances of its appearance) can be adequately understood in their identity with the concept of that category.
In Part IV of Reading Capital, âThe Object of Capitalâ, Althusser describes just such a distinction, that of âthe Marxist wholeâ as a complex of heterogeneous orders:
the Marxist whole ⦠is a whole whose unity ⦠is constituted by a certain type of complexity, the unity of a structured whole containing what can be called levels or instances which are distinct and ârelatively autonomousâ, and co-exist within this complex structural unity, articulated with one another according to specific determinations.127
This is precisely the heterogeneity inhering between the subjective, sensuous perception of the flow of linear, homogenous time (what Althusser calls variously âthe historianâs empiricist practice [and the] ideological conception of historical timeâ128) on the one hand, and the conceptual order of the categorial presentation of capital on the other, the very heterogeneity Spinoza criticises between the inadequacy of apprehension of phenomena via temporal extension and that of common notions and intuitive science.
My point is that this heterogeneity obtains only when considering actually existing things from the distinct perspectives or attributes of sensuous human perception and thought; understood from the materialist perspective of infinite substance, contra Badiou, there is only one single order of causes, for Althusser as for Spinoza. Althusser clearly summarises this conclusion (in a passage Badiou notably ignores):
The fact that each of these times and each of these histories is relatively autonomous does not make them so many domains which are independent of the whole: the specificity of each of these times and of each of these histories â in other words, their relative autonomy and independence â is based on a certain type of articulation in the whole, and therefore on a certain type of dependence with respect to the whole â¦. The synchronic is eternity in Spinozaâs sense, or the adequate knowledge of a complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexity.129
Lacking this ultimate identity of the order of the thought-object and the order of the real adequately understood as structural causality, the capitalist real as the necessity of its âstructure of structuresâ, beyond its various ideological, heterogeneous forms of appearance â as Badiou reads Althusser, that is to say â there would be no point to Marxâs project of a materialist critique of political economy, and the three volumes of Capital would constitute a mere idealist exercise in the imagining of a hypothetical form of social existence.130
The point, then, is that while the mere historical forms of appearance of social life under capitalism do indeed follow an entirely different order from the adequately developed thought-concrete that is Capital, as a materialist critique, Marxâs analysis nonetheless ultimately allows for the comprehension of the essential nature of capitalism as a causal structure existing only in its effects, as one and the same order, one and the same thing, as a âstructure of structuresâ, whether grasped conceptually or in the necessity of its historical manifestations. This is not to read a multiplicity of orders against the measure of âa single ideological base timeâ, nor necessarily to agree with Althusser that that structure need be hierarchically âfixed in the last instance by the level or instance of the economyâ, nor especially that the capitalist social form constitutes a single whole or totality, but, rather, to hold those diverse attributes of Marxâs categories to the measure of the atemporal presentation of the absolute, what Althusser rightly and unequivocally calls âeternity in Spinozaâs senseâ.131 Badiouâs dualist reading of Althusser, in contrast, would return Reading Capital to the Cartesian, Kantian dualist idealism it categorically abhors.
11 Reading Capital in a Materialist Way
In anticipation of my analysis in the next chapter of Marxâs process of exposition in Capital as a positive, materialist dialectic, I wish briefly to indicate in conclusion a few of the implications Machereyâs Spinozist materialism continues to hold for a reading of Marxâs Capital itself. To be sure, Reading Capital long ago brought to bear upon Marxâs masterwork, both explicitly and silently, a multitude of the varied implications of the Spinozist critique; it must be said, however, that in its wake, Spinozist readings of Capital remain exceedingly rare. In light of Machereyâs subsequent extensive and infinitesimal articulation of a Spinozist, materialist protocol for textual critique, a great many other implications of Spinozism nonetheless remain to be developed in contemporary readings of Capital, a field that remains, for all its insight and vibrancy, overwhelmingly determined by a negative dialectical and even Hegelian horizon. Let me briefly indicate just three of these possible paths for reading Capital in a Spinozist way, which will lead directly to the analysis of following chapter:
1. In his 1965 contribution to Reading Capital, Macherey already discerns in Capital what he will subsequently, in Hegel or Spinoza, name a âpositive [Spinozist] dialecticâ. In this long-overlooked yet insightful treatment of Marxâs initial exposition of his concepts, Macherey argues that the movement of Marxâs demonstration is governed by a number of logical âintermediariesâ, mediations that allow for a rigorous, apodictic demonstration of the initial characteristics of the value-form in a demonstration that develops synthetically rather than via dialectical Aufhebung.
Macherey argues in particular for the fundamental heterogeneity of concepts such as wealth, use-value, and value, a heterogeneity that itself constitutes âone of the fundamental conditions of scientific rigorâ (RCÂ 188). The relations between what Marx calls the various âfactorsâ of the commodity and the movement of Marxâs exposition occasion no procedure of dialectical Aufhebung, Macherey argues, but Marxâs demonstration instead proceeds in a series of synthetic ârupturesâ or leaps from one order to the next following the analytical exhaustion of each concept.
It is only in 1979, however, that Macherey will explicitly theorise this dialectic without negation in the closing pages of Hegel or Spinoza. Macherey there identifies in Spinoza a dialectic without subject, teleology, or negation. This invocation of a positive, Spinozist dialectic puts in its place the logical subject and its function of grounding all true propositions: âWhat Spinoza refuses to think is the dialectic in a subject, which is exactly what Hegel does. [Spinoza] poses the problem of a dialectic of substance, that is, a materialist dialectic that does not presuppose its completion in its initial conditions through the means of a necessarily ideal teleologyâ.132 In this manner, Spinoza limits the principle of contradiction and its grounding in the subject to existences and not essences. As such, Macherey concludes, Spinozaâs âtheory of the subjectâ pertains above all to the constitution of bodies in extension.133 This limitation, moreover, holds for all bodies as such, not merely the human body, Spinozaâs privileged example.
A Spinozist limitation of negative dialectic to existences can therefore serve to ground a materialist analysis of the (actually existing) body of capital, an analysis that starkly contrasts with all Hegelian idealism (Capital is no mere reorientation of the Hegelian dialectic placed âon its feetâ), an analysis in which contradiction is strictly limited to the phenomenal features of the social forms constituting the body of capital in its existence (in the form of actually existing contradictions, between given forces and means of production, in the struggle over the working day or the violent imposition of primitive accumulation, and the like), while the essential nature of this social form (including the crucial confrontational relation between capital and the proletarian owners of labour power) will be adequately known by the intellect only as a thought-concrete without negation.134 In this view, human social relations bear no inner, essential drive toward their culmination in capitalism, as the imaginary doctrines of liberalism and neoliberalism would have us believe. Instead, as Marx first argued in his presentation of so-called primitive accumulation, and Ellen Meiksins Wood has further insisted, the historical body of capitalism is composed through a fundamental and renewed system of constraint based upon the methodical dispossession of the means of production and reproduction of the working class, to form a proletariat in the precise sense Marx gives the term, through the existential, juridical, and regulated compulsion of human bodies to compose themselves, in real subsumption, as subjects of the valorisation of value under capitalism.135
2. A positive dialectic, such as Macherey already discerns in the opening pages of Capital in 1965 and subsequently articulates in Hegel or Spinoza, requires for its adequate conceptualisation the synthetic mode of presentation that Spinoza upholds (more geometrico) against the Cartesian defence and deployment of an analytic analysis. While Althusser defends Marxâs 1857 epistemological distinction between the thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum) and the ârealâ in Spinozist terms, a Spinozist synthetic mode of presentation arguably determines Capital to an even greater and unsuspected degree, and furthermore comes to displace the initial Hegelian negative dialectical formulations of the Grundrisse in the actual drafts of Capital after 1861, as I will argue in detail in the next chapter.
The Spinozist, positive dialectic that Macherey identifies in the most theoretically developed arguments in Capital136 implies that Marxâs increasing tendency to deployment of a âpositiveâ dialectic throughout his manuscripts tends to displace the less adequate, negative, contradiction-based Hegelian dialectical structure still visible in the earlier drafts of Capital.137 A contradiction-based dialectic is in this view inherently inadequate for the comprehension of the essential nature of capital, and moreover tends, in traditional, Left Ricardian readings of Marx (on the model of Alexandre Kojève) to represent this nature in the humanist form of subject-based, Hegelian conflicts â the struggle between proletariat and capitalist, between forces and relations of production, or, as a philosophy of praxis, that of a productive, conscious human subject whose intentionality transforms and humanises nature.138 Such a negative dialectic describes the development of the whole and its Aufhebung in a process guaranteed by the rationality of a subject, whether human, logical, or absolute. As Macherey first indicated in Reading Capital, Marxâs Gedankenkonkretum â the unfinished work-in-progress we know as the three volumes of Capital â contains a fundamental, if largely invisible, synthetic mode of presentation of its claims.139 The identification of various moments of a synthetic demonstration in Marxâs argument remains crucial for more adequate construction of theoretical protocols for the reading of Capital.
3. Capital should be read in light of the Spinozist epistemology of the three forms of knowledge: (1) imaginary; (2) via general or common notions; and as Althusser reminds us, (3) in light of eternity, as âthe adequate knowledge of a complex object by the adequate knowledge of its complexityâ.140 Each of these modes of understanding has in turn its element of truth and necessity, though only the third is fully adequate to the comprehension of its object.
An example of Marxâs deployment of the imaginary occurs, for example, in his famous image of the âlanguage of commoditiesâ:
Everything our analysis of the value of commodities previously told us is repeated by the linen itself, as soon as it enters into association with another commodity, the coat. Only it reveals its thoughts in a language with which it alone is familiar, the language of commodities. In order to tell us that labour creates its own value in its abstract quality of being human labour, it says that the coat, insofar as it counts as its equal, i.e. is value, consists of the same labour as it does itselfâ.141
Marx here supplements the synthetic analysis of the structure of capital as a social form (the object of chapter 1 prior to the appearance of this passage) with an imaginary figure, that of two animated commodities, a length of linen and a coat, in an image that bears its own measure of truth and even necessity. Marx seems to be telling his reader that the abstraction that is value must be thought not only as concept but also vividly imagined, in the form of an animated manifestation in the concrete materiality that is the human symbolic order. This dreamlike dimension of Marxâs critique is indeed one necessary aspect of the object of Marxâs materialist analysis. Fredric Jameson has in this sense identified the more general repetition of what he terms âfigural demonstrationâ as central to the stylistic apparatus of Capital, a rhetorical process to which Marx repeatedly resorts in the attempt to represent to his reader the immaterial, real substance of surplus value, abstract labour (in the above example), or in another example Jameson develops, in the sense of the figuration of âseparationâ that occurs in Marxâs analysis of primitive accumulation.142
A second order of demonstration inherent in Capital, the one that I will focus on in the next chapter, is its presentation of a structure of general notions or categories, as what Marx calls the âvalue-formâ, an order that, grasped in the complexity of its general articulation, constitutes the âstructureâ of capital in the Spinozist sense of the synchronic that Althusser indicates.143 Marxâs construction of this structure produces a general, universal exposition of the laws of the tendencies of capitalist valorisation, accumulation, and reproduction.
Finally, Machereyâs thought demonstrates â with no contradiction in terms whatsoever â that an adequately materialist analysis requires above all that we learn to read Capital from the perspective of the eternity of the singular nature of its object. Such a reading might take many forms; for this reader of Capital, it seems essential to take into account, for example, the full development of Marxâs founding epistemological distinction between the production of surplus value as a total mass and its subsequent distribution among many individual capitals in the manifest form of profit via competition, such as Fred Moseley has systematically argued. While Marx famously defines abstract labour as the substance of surplus value (âThe labour that forms the substance of value is equal human labour, the expenditure of identical human labour-powerâ), we might further say with Moseley that surplus value, as distinct from material wealth, itself forms the general substance of capital.144
In this view, Marx abstracts from the temporal existence of production and the phenomenology of individual labourers and capitalists, to present, at every level of the increasing degrees of concretion that characterise his analysis in Capital, a monetary analysis that might rightly be characterised via the eternity of the concept (in the sense that Spinoza speaks of the adequate concept of the triangle145): âMoneyâ, Moseley writes, âis derived in the very first chapter (Section 3) of Volume I, as the necessary form of appearance of abstract labour, and from then on Marxâs theory is about quantities of money that represent, and thus are determined by, quantities of labour timeâ.146
This in turn entails â as Moseley demonstrates in detail across Marxâs innumerable manuscripts â that Capital is constructed at two levels of determination: first, an initial determination of the production of a total mass of surplus volume (its âsubstanceâ), and subsequently, in analytical terms, via the determination of the distribution of that mass of value among competing individual capitals.147 Marxâs presentation, repeatedly invoking individual processes and factors of production, is admittedly confusing on this point; Moseley convincingly argues, however, that âMarxâs theory in Volume I is about the total capital and the total surplus-value produced in the economy as a whole, [even though] the theory is [necessarily] illustrated in terms of an individual capital and even a single, solitary worker â¦. Individual capitals are not analysed as separate and distinct real capitals, but rather as representatives and âaliquot partsâ of the total social capitalâ.148 As Marx himself writes, âIn capitalist production [i.e., in Volume I], each capital is assumed to be a unit, an aliquot part of the total capitalâ.149 Here again, following Moseleyâs analysis, we see the necessary inherence of all three forms of knowledge in the adequate presentation of Marxâs object, even including in his apodictic, synthetic analysis the imaginary figure of the âsingle, solitary workerâ.
Attention to the capacious brilliance of Pierre Machereyâs thought, from Reading Capital and A Theory of Literary Production to his five-volume explication of Spinozaâs Ethics, necessarily draws the reader onward to interrogate the general nature of materialist critique, such as Macherey has developed that notion across the broad expanse of a life of theoretical analysis. No mere didactic exposition of the Spinozist system, the writings of Pierre Macherey as a whole construct for contemporary thought the adequate notion of a veritably materialist analysis of the conceptual system of knowledge, both in its immediate forms of appearance as a symbolic system and in the eternity of its singular concepts. Such, one might rightfully conclude, is the nature of Machereyâs theoretical project: to grasp the eternal in a materialist way. It is this imperative, in turn, that will in the next chapter guide my analysis of Marxâs development of a positive dialectic adequate to his world-historical critique of the capitalist social form.
To be sure, the second edition of Lire le Capital that appeared in two volumes in 1968, comprised only of Althusser and Balibarâs texts (and which served for the various international translations of the book), was eventually completed in 1973 with a third and fourth volume, containing the original contributions of Rancière (Vol. III) and Macherey and Establet (Vol. IV). That said, even among Francophone readers, who save a few specialists can be said to have actually read that obscure fourth volume in the waning years of Althusserianism in the 1970s?
Macherey has offered a surprisingly modest, even resentful disavowal of his contribution to Lire le Capital: âWhen, with fifty yearsâ distance, I reread [my] contribution, I see all of its imperfections. ⦠When, subsequently, I was addressed as a âcoauthorâ of Reading Capital, I could not prevent myself feeling a certain malaise â¦. In reality, Reading Capital has only one author: it is Althusser who, when he constructed this book on the basis of the working documents [we] provided him with, made a work unto itself, for which he himself bears responsibilityâ (Lasowski 2016, pp. 176â7).
RC, p. 191.
RC, p. 192.
RC, p. 190.
RC, p. 188.
RC, p. 194. This key point, first elaborated by Macherey in 1965, will undergo intensive development by Michael Heinrich in his close reading of the first seven chapters of Capital: âWhy canât we grasp value-objectivity in a single commodityâ, Heinrich asks? âThis is due to the social character of the substance of value, which was emphasised in the first subsection [of Capital]. The substance of value, abstract labour, is not inherent to a single commodity, but rather held in common by two commodities that are exchanged. ⦠The table can only become an expression of equal human labour through exchange, when confronting other commodities. Then the various particular and individual acts of labour are reduced to equal human labour. From this âpurely socialâ character of value-objectivity, Marx says that it follows âself-evidentlyâ that âit can only appear in the social relation between commodity and commodityâ (1976: 139). ⦠Commodities have value-objectivity only in the social relation of one commodity to another â which is why it first comes to light here. Prior to and outside of this relation, they are mere use-values: they are on the way to becoming commodities, but far from being commodities. When Marx speaks of the value of a single commodity (or its magnitude of value), he always presupposes a value-relation to another commodity, of which the individual commodity is a partâ. Heinrich 2021, pp. 93â5.
RC, p. 195.
RC, p. 196. In the next chapter I will argue against Macherey that Marxâs presentation of the concepts of use-value and exchange-value is in no sense based upon a logic of contradiction [Widerspruch], but that the two are simply factual aspects or attributes of the commodity that coexist in âoppositionâ [Gegensatz] without contradiction.
RC, p. 203, original emphasis.
RC, p. 205, translation modified, italics in original.
âIn experience, it is possible to conceive that two things stand alongside the other, that they are juxtaposed (like commodities in wealth). But they do not explicitly tolerate any relation; from the standpoint of experience, between two things and one thing there is a quantitative difference, but absolutely no qualitative differenceâ (RC, p. 200).
Ibid.
I will present a more complex and developed version of this position first asserted by Macherey, in my analysis in the next chapter of Marxâs introduction of a formula to schematise the Law of the Rate and Mass of Surplus Value that is the object of Chapter 11 in Royâs 1875 French translation of Capital.
RC, p. 200.
RC, p. 201.
RC, p. 201. Here too, I will argue in the next chapter that Marx rigorously and systematically adheres to this proposition of Machereyâs above all in Chapter 11 of Capital.
RC, p. 201.
In this sense, Machereyâs precociously original analysis already points forward in 1965 to Althusserâs assertion in his late writings (described in the previous chapter) that Marxâs process of exposition proceeds in its demonstration through the successive âpositioningâ [position] of concepts, as opposed to their negative dialectical (âHegelianâ) aufhebung. Instead, Althusser will argue, Marxâs order of exposition is no mere (structuralist/formalist) combinatory, but in fact derives its materialist necessity from the priority of Marxâs preliminary enquiries (Grundrisse, etc.) to the drafting of Capital.
RC, p. 205.
âAs mere thingsâ, Macherey writes, âobjects are differentiated by their uses, i.e. their irreducibility. If this character is set aside then at the same time as their empirical qualities disappear, there appears, not their quantitative aspect, but another quality (of a quite different nature: not directly observable): ⦠It will be precisely value whose substance it will then be possible to determineâ (RC, p. 206).
RC, p. 206.
Montag 2013; Montag 1998.
Macherey 2006, p. 6, translation modified, my emphasis.
âMarx defends the distinction between the real object (the real-concrete or the real totality, which âretains its autonomous existence outside the head (Kopf) just as beforeâ), and the object of knowledge, a product of the thought which produces it in itself as a thought-concrete (Gedankenkonkretum), as a thought-totality (Gedankentotalität), i.e., as a thought-object, absolutely distinct from the real-object, the real-concreteâ. RC, p. 41. See also Marx 1973, p. 101.
Adam Smith 1974, p. 11. See above, p. 29.
RC, p. 41. âHowever far back we ascend, into the past of a branch of knowledge, we are never dealing with a âpureâ sensuous intuition or mere ârepresentationâ, but with an always-already complex raw material, a structure of âintuitionâ or ârepresentationâ which combines together in a peculiar âVerbindungâ sensuous, technical, and ideological elements; that therefore knowledge never, as empiricism desperately demands it should, confronts a pure object which is then identical to the real object of which knowledge aimed to produce precisely ⦠the knowledgeâ. RC, p. 43, emphasis in original. Similarly, in âOn the Materialist Dialecticâ, Althusser writes, in terms that directly invoke the epistemology of Jean Cavaillès and Gaston Bachelard, that âa science never works on an existence whose essence is pure immediacy and singularity (âsensationsâ of âindividualsâ) ⦠A science always works on existing conceptsâ. Althusser 2005, p. 184.
Macherey 2006, p. 6.
Macherey 2006, pp. 8, 10, translation modified.
Macherey 2006, p. 13.
Macherey 2006, p. 85, translation modified.
Macherey 2006, p. 87.
Macherey 2006, p. 158, translation modified.
Macherey 2006, p. 159, translation modified.
Montag 1999, p. 5.
Macherey 2006, p. 111.
Macherey 2006, p. 88, translation modified.
Macherey 2006, p. 89.
Macherey 2006, p. 170.
Machereyâs critique of totality will prove essential in my critique of Chris Arthurâs reading of Capital in the following chapter.
Montag 2013, Chapters 3â5.
Lévi-Strauss, cited in Montag 2013, p. 68.
Cited in Montag 2013, p. 69.
Cited in Montag 2013, p. 68.
Montag 2013, p. 69.
In the famous appendix to Ethics I (a key text, moreover, for Althusserâs appropriation of Spinoza), Spinozaâs example of such faulty reasoning from empirical effect backward to an imaginary cause is that of a tile falling from a roof, which, in striking a passerby, is (necessarily but inadequately) attributed to a vindictive deity by the imagination of the observer of this empirical event. âNatureâ, Spinoza trenchantly retorts, âhas no end prescribed to it [naturam finem nullum sibi praefixum habere] and all final causes are but figments of the human imagination â¦. The doctrine of final causes turns Nature completely upside down, for it regards as an effect that which is in fact a cause, and vice versaâ. Spinoza, Ethics I, App., translation modified. See also Machereyâs insightfully detailed explication of this passage in the final section of his analysis of Ethics I in Introduction à lâÃthique de Spinoza. La première partie: La nature des choses (1998, pp. 205â70).
Montag 2013, Chapter 5.
In Hegel or Spinoza, Macherey cites Gilles Deleuzeâs lapidary formulation of this key proposition of a Spinozist materialist dialectic without totality: âNature as the production of the diverse can only be an infinite sum, that is, a sum that does not totalise its own elementsâ. Macherey 2011, p. 195, quoted in Montag 2013, p. 187. Althusser will in fact take on (without explicit attribution) Machereyâs critique of the notion of totality in the 1976 Essays in Self-Criticism, where he writes that âSpinoza served us as a (sometimes direct, sometimes very indirect) reference: in his effort to grasp ⦠a Whole without closure, which is only the active relation between its partsâ. Quoted in Morfino 2015, p. 93n11.
Macherey 2006, pp. 45, 55, translation modified.
Macherey 2006, p. 114.
Macherey 2006, p. 168.
See RC, p. 26. See also Young 2017, pp. 35â48.
Macherey 2006, p. 362.
See Althusser 1997, pp. 3â20. Macherey notes the crucial influence of Lucretius in Spinozaâs elaboration of the appendix to Ethics I. Macherey 1997, p. 238.
Althusser 1976, pp. 132, 137, quoted in Morfino 2015, pp. 2, 4.
In La philosophie de Marx (2014, p. 98), Ãtienne Balibar observes in passing that in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, âMarxâs materialism has nothing to do with a reference to matter [but is instead] a strange âmaterialism without matterââ¯â. Alberto Toscano has extrapolated on Balibarâs suggestive comment in relation to Sohn-Rethel and I.I. Rubinâs analysis of the value form, proposing that Marxâs subsequent analysis of the capitalist social form of value constitutes precisely such a materialism, one in which, as Marx famously comments in Capital, ânot an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as valuesâ. Toscano 2014. See Marx 1976, p. 138.
Macherey 1999, pp. 87â113.
Macherey 1999, p. 88.
Macherey 1999, p. 88.
Macherey 1999, p. 89.
Macherey 1999, p. 96.
Macherey 2012. Machereyâs 13 July talk was followed immediately by that of Ãtienne Balibar, titled âLa Science du âCapitalââ¯â, both of which are immediately followed in the published version of the proceedings by some thirty pages of rich and often polemical discussion with the other members of the colloquium. Thanks to Ãtienne Balibar for calling my attention to this volume.
Macherey 2012, p. 54.
Macherey 2012, p. 55.
Macherey 2012, pp. 57, 61.
Macherey 2012, p. 60.
âScientific discourse has been produced as a new reality â¦. Knowledge is a reflection only of itselfâ. Macherey 2012, p. 61.
Macherey 2012, p. 55.
Macherey 2012, p. 64. my emphasis. Macherey is emphatic in his elaboration of this point in the ensuing discussion: âA science is defined by an object that is constructed according to a definition â not [empirically] by an object given by reality [la réalité] â and by functional rules â¦. The object of Capital is an object constructed theoretically, and this is precisely why Capital is not a formal system. If we were to read it as a closed system, this would constitute an interpretive reading, a repetition and reprisal of a completed system â¦. Marx did not record [in Capital] the theoretical results spontaneously issued from a historical âexperienceââ¯â (Macherey 2012, pp. 92, 93).
Under this category of high Althusserianism I would include not only the published volumes For Marx, Reading Capital, A Theory of Literary Production, and Macherey and Balibarâs contributions to the Cérisy colloquium âLe centennaire du Capitalâ, but also the various exchanges of the Groupe Spinoza and related texts such as Althusserâs 1966 âSur Lévi-Straussâ in Althusser 1994. On the Groupe Spinoza, Alain Badiou has reflected: âThe Groupe Spinoza was a group composed by Althusser, with some friends of Althusser, all reading Capital practically, engaged in the project to write a sort of synthesis of our epistemological convictions. The idea was to produce a fundamental book concerning theory: concerning what theory is, what constitutes an epistemological rupture and so on; to propose something like an educational book concerning all these sorts of themes. All that was destroyed by 1968 and, after that, by very strong political differences and strugglesâ. Badiou 2017, p. 25.
As Althusser famously wrote in the 1972 Essays in Self-Criticism, âIf we were never structuralists, we can now explain why: ⦠we were guilty of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists [nous avons été spinozistes]â. Quoted in Morfino 2015, p. 2. Vittorio Morfino points to the decisive influence Spinoza brought to bear on Althusserâs 1965 reading of Capital: âThe reference to Spinoza ⦠is fundamental with respect to three decisive questions in the Althusserian re-reading of Marxism: the process of knowledge, structural causality, and ideologyâ. Morfino 2015, pp. 2â3. For an outstanding, often critical and always informative recent example of the ongoing effort to read Capital as a palimpsest of Hegelâs Logic, see Moseley and Smith 2015.
Montag 2013, Chapter 5.
Macherey 2011, pp. 99, 104.
EIP10S.
Macherey 2011, p. 100.
Ibid.
Macherey 2011, p. 74.
Macherey 2011, p. 106, emphasis in original.
Macherey 1997, pp. 71â81. I insist on this development in Machereyâs 1997 volume, which as of this writing is, like the other four volumes in the series, unavailable in English translation. Not only does it constitute the most developed explication of Machereyâs substantialist, Spinozist materialist critique, but, moreover, the 400-plus pages of this crucial second volume of his explication are currently out of print even in the French original. All translations from this volume are mine.
Macherey 1997, p. 71. Machereyâs analysis of this famous proposition of the Ethics strongly resonates with that of Martial Geroult. See Peden 2014, p. 158.
Macherey 1997, p. 72.
Macherey 1997, p. 73.
EID4. Read 2007, p. 511.
Macherey continues to drive his grammatical point home: âFor this [parallelist] reading to be possible would require that, in the enunciation of the proposition, not only would the neutral singular idem [thing] have to be replaced by the masculine plural iidem sunt, but also that the term corporum [bodies] be implicitly substituted for the term rerumâ. Macherey 1997, p. 72.
As Vittorio Morfino notes, âThe works published in [Althusserâs] lifetime include only a handful of brief references to Spinoza â none longer than a paragraph. And neither his extensive posthumous work nor his archived writings [with two exceptions Morfino notes] contain texts dedicated to Spinozaâ. Morfino 2022, p. 82.
One striking example of this incongruity is Althusserâs assertion in âThe Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounterâ (1982) that âfor Spinoza, the object of philosophy is the voidâ. This is not simply a âparadoxical thesisâ, as Althusser observes; it is quite simply antithetical to Spinozaâs explicit and extensive critique of the concept of the void in Book I of the Ethics. The free-floating associations of Althusserâs argument culminate weakly in the metaphorical (rather than ontological) conclusion that Spinoza asserted âthe void that is philosophy itselfâ. Althusser 2006, p. 178, italics in original. In fact, Macherey shows that Spinoza, reaffirming Descartesâs critique, decisively rejects the atomism of the Ancients as fully inadequate, imaginary representation, to explicitly affirm instead that âmatter is everywhere the same [materia ubique eadem est] in its substantial principleâ. Macherey 1998, p. 124. âCorporeal substanceâ, Spinoza writes unambiguously, âcan be conceived only as infinite, one, and indivisibleâ (41 EIP15Sch). Macherey consequently reads these passages in proposition 15 of Book I and its Scholium as âthe affirmation of a plenitude [of substance] leaving no place for void, absence, or negativity â¦. Substance is thought reality in the intense intimacy of its self-relation ⦠such that nothing else, not even nothingness ⦠can disturb its infinite positivity â¦. To conceive of extension as constituted of distinct parts is to deny its infinityâ. In contrast to the Ancientsâ imaginary depiction of atoms in a void, âonly the intellectâ, Macherey concludes, âis apt [en mesure] to understand that the materiality of extended substance is given at once as an indivisible totalityâ. Macherey 1998, pp. 128, 129. Althusserâs related, imagistic redeployment of the thesis of the parallelism of the attributes in âMaterialism of the Encounterâ â which Althusser claims âfall in the empty space of their determinationâ (Althusser 2006, p. 177) â repeats the philosophical commonplace of so-called parallelism that Macherey subjects to such extensive and compelling critique in both Hegel or Spinoza (ch. 3) and his analysis of proposition 7 of Ethics II, discussed above.
Althusser 1990, p. 135. In Reading Capital, following Lenin, Althusser affirms that âIn the expression âhistorical materialismâ, âmaterialismâ means no more than science, and the expression is strictly synonymous with that of âscience of historyââ¯â (RC, p. 360). Althusser will reiterate this definition, for example in âLenin and Philosophyâ: âHistorical materialism thus means: science of historyâ, and again, in modified form, in âLenin before Hegelâ, where he refers to âthe materialist thesis of the material existence and of the objectivity of scientific knowledgeâ. Althusser 2001, pp. 23, 83.
Althusser 1993b, p. 221.
Althusser 1997b, p. 10.
EIIP40S2.
The constants diagnosed in any singularity âdo not constitute the object of a will to verification in an abstract renewable experimental dispositive, as in physics or chemistry, but whose repetitive insistence permits us to mark the form of singularity in presence and, therefore, its treatmentâ. Althusser 1997b, p. 8.
Ibid.
Althusser 1997b, p. 10.
Althusser 1997b, pp. 10â11.
On Althusser and Machereyâs critique of Deleuzeâs famous text, see Montag 2013, pp. 96â100.
Althusser 1997b, p. 11.
EIAx6.
Macherey 1998, p. 61, my translation.
RC, p. 41.
Macherey 2012, p. 91.
Macherey 1997, p. 5.
Badiou 2017, pp. 21â34.
Matthys 2023, pp. 281â4.
RC, p. 41.
In The Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel, to ground his accusation of Cartesianism in the Spinozist system, voices an astounding misrepresentation. Here is Hegel: âSpinozaâs philosophy is the objectification of that of Descartes, in the form of absolute truth. The elemental thought of Spinozaâs idealism is this. What is true is quite simply the one substance, whose attributes are thought and extension. ⦠What comes second after substance is the attributes. ⦠Substance has only two attributes, Thought and Extensionâ (Hegel, cited in Macherey 2011, pp. 82â3). Even the most casual reader of Spinoza must be shocked at this extraordinary omission by close readers such as Hegel and Badiou, since Spinoza affirms unambiguously and repeatedly that substance is comprised not of two but of an infinity of attributes (EIP11), of which humans perceive only two, thought and extension.
Badiou 2017, p. 32.
Ibid.
This is the case, with even less ambiguity, in the more recent Immanance des vérités: âPour Spinoza, ⦠les relations de causalité entre les choses matérielles immanentes à lâattribut étendue sont identiques â isomorphes â aux relations de causalité entre les choses idéelles immanentes à lâattribut pensée. ⦠On voit bien quâici la structure des attributs est ce qui atteste, par isomorphie, lâidentité invariable et suprême de la Substance.â Badiou 2018b, p. 377.
Badiou 2017, p. 32.
Badiou 2017, p. 41, my emphasis.
Badiou 2017, p. 33.
Ibid.
EIIP7.
Badiou 2017, p. 33.
Ibid.
The text originates from a talk Badiou presented at Princeton University, 6Â December 2013, at the conference âReading Capital Todayâ.
âIf for Spinozaâ, Macherey continues, âthe attributes are forms or kinds of being, or natures, or even essences, they are certainly not forms in opposition to a content, any more than they are predicates in opposition to a subject, or abstract categories in opposition to a concrete reality that would remain outside themâ (2011, p. 86).
RC, p. 40.
RC, p. 41, my emphasis of the passages Badiou suppresses.
EIIP8.
EIIP9.
Althusser 2016, p. 68.
RC, p. 15.
Macherey 1997, p. 392, emphasis added; see also Macherey 1994, p. 85.
RC, p. 15, my emphasis.
Jacques Bidet shows more generally in this fashion how Marxâs famous critique of the fetishism of commodities in Volume I is systematically deployed at the level of the various forms of appearance of capital in Volume 3, and that this development constitutes, in other words, not merely a critique of ideological illusions (though it is of course that too), but, in truly Spinozist fashion, a âtheory of ideologyâ that adequately renders the necessity of these very forms of appearance for the system itself: âThis is the very project of a theory of ideology: to show what forms of consciousness are implied in the practice of its agents, in relation to the function they occupy in the system that has been progressively definedâ in the course of the first two volumes of Capital (2005, p. 198, emphasis in original).
RC, p. 244.
RC, pp. 242, 244.
RC, pp. 247, 255. âThe structure of the whole is articulated as the structure of an organic hierarchised whole ⦠governed by the order of a dominant structureâ (RC, p. 245; LC, p. 282). Macherey, as discussed above, will privately critique Althusserâs references to the âwholeâ as superfluous and misleading, in terms that he then systematically formulates, as noted above, in A Theory of Literary Production.
This is the mistaken empiricist/idealist position Engels adopts in his review of Marxâs 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where he writes that âThe logical method of approach ⦠is indeed nothing but the historical method, only stripped of the historical form and of interfering contingencies. ⦠Its further progress will be simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the course of historyâ (cited in van der Linden and Hubman 2019, p. 4, my emphasis). Althusser summarises Engelsâs empiricist epistemology in the following terms: âEngels applies to the concepts of the theory of history a coefficient of mobility borrowed directly from the concrete empirical sequence (from the ideology of history), transposing the âreal-concreteâ into the âthought-concreteâ and the historical as real change into the concept itselfâ (RC, p. 263; LC, p. 304). It should be noted that though Engels does not seem to have ever read the notebooks comprising the Grundrisse, including Marxâs now-famous methodological introduction, Marx was elsewhere perfectly clear about this question in passages Engels knew intimately, such as the 1873 Postface to the second edition of Volume 1 (Marx 1976, p. 102).
RC, pp. 244, 252.
Macherey 2011, p. 170.
Macherey 2011, p. 175.
âIn response to [Hegelâs] finalist conception that abstractly summarises an infinite sequence of determinations in the fiction of a unique intention, we must substitute an integrally causal explanation, one that does not take into account anything but the external relations of bodiesâ. Macherey 2011, p. 177.
âEach part of the [Spinozist] bodyâ, Macherey writes, âbelongs to this global form that is the body taken in its entirety, not according to its own essence, but in light of this external liaison, whose transitive necessity is one of constraint, which holds together all the elements â¦. The reason for this harmony is not found in an obscure predetermination of singular essences that inclines them to converge all together toward a unique essence (an ideal nature) but in the transitive relationship of determination that constrains them, provisionally, to associateâ. Macherey 2011, p. 177, my emphasis. See Wood 2002 [1999]. On Marxâs various definitions of the proletariat, see Nesbitt 2022.
Chapter 1 of Volume 1 is undoubtedly the section that Marx rewrote more than any other, from the closing pages of the Grundrisse through the various drafts and editions, to Marxâs final 1881 notes on his further intended revisions to volume I. On the latter, see Heinrich 2012, pp. 92â3; and also Heinrich 2021.
See the following chapter, as well as Bidet 2005, pp. 132â95.
See Kojève 1980. Among the key theoretical distinctions Marx analyses in the opening pages of Capital (in pure abstraction from prices, capital, and the human owners of commodities themselves) is that between the production of wealth (in the form of use-values), exchange-value, and value itself (RC, pp. 188â93). These fundamental categorial determinations not only delineate Marxâs decisive break with Ricardian value theory (Marx was not a Left Ricardian) but remained as well a distinction generally overlooked by the productivist orientation of traditional, Leninist Marxism. On the concept of Left Ricardianism â that is, the failure clearly to distinguish wealth from value and the consequent promotion of the redistribution of that wealth rather than the overcoming of the capitalist mode of production â see Murray 2002, pp. 250â2.
Jacques Bidet has insightfully identified crucial moments of what I am calling after Macherey a positive dialectic in Capital. Implicitly developing Machereyâs precocious, Althusserian identification of various nondialectical conceptual leaps in the opening pages of Capital, Bidet points to the crucial movement from the concept of the commodity to that of capital in Marxâs exposition (from part 1 to part 2, chs. 4â6) â a passage âdevoid of dialectical continuity, genesis, deduction, or transition â between the presentation, that is to say, of CâMâC and that of MâCâM.â Bidet describes this as an âisolated interventionâ at this crucial axial moment of Marxâs argument, one in which contradiction (the apparent impossibility that the exchange of equal values can nonetheless produce surplus value) is not a matter of essence, but ideological existence, a merely apparent contradiction that in fact shrivels away in the face of Marxâs synthetic presentation of the concept of surplus value and valorisation in chapter 6. Bidet 2006, pp. 160â2.
RC, p. 255.
Marx 1976, p. 143.
Jameson 2014, pp. 31, 81â93.
Marx 1976, Chapter 1.3, âThe Value-Formâ; RC, p. 255.
Marx 1976, p. 129. âThe most essential common property of all capitals [i.e., its âsubstanceâ] ⦠is the production of surplus-valueâ. Moseley 2017, p. 43. I bring this theoretical perspective to bear upon the concept of capitalist slavery in Nesbitt 2022.
âFrom the nature of a triangle it follows from eternity to eternity that its three angles are equal to two right anglesâ. EIP17S. It should be noted in the context of this argument, that to indicate the movement of Capital from the abstract to the concrete is to grasp the âconcreteâ not as the abandonment of an abstract conceptual order for that of an empiricist, sensuous concretion but to invoke instead the meaning of âconcreteâ closest to the Latin concrescere, indicating the cohesion or growing together of parts into a complex mass, compound, or composite (always remaining in the attribute of thought). Compare Bidet 2005, p. 174.
Moseley 2017, p. 9.
âThe total amount of surplus-value must be determined prior to its division into individual partsâ. Marx, quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46.
Moseley 2017, pp. 45â6.
Quoted in Moseley 2017, p. 46, Moseleyâs insertion.