Is capitalism dead?1 If corporate persons like McDonald’s or Walmart – nodal points for the global enclosure and commodification of working class food, the most basic necessity – could reveal their thoughts in a language with which we are familiar, they would surely shrug their shoulders and reply with a hearty laugh that such reports of the death of capitalism have been greatly exaggerated.2 This book proceeds from the contrary presupposition that we still do, in fact, live in the capitalist social form as Marx defined it over a century and a half ago. This is so despite the many real and consequential transformations to its functioning since that time. It may well be the case, for example, that social domination is no longer primarily determined through ownership of the means of production, but instead via the control of information. It is most certainly the case that there now exist novel, technological procedures for the extraction of surplus information from individual workers and consumers, procedures that may allow for the tendential subsumption of all activity within an information-based political economy.3
However much importance one grants to such increasingly-familiar claims, the insufficiency of trying prove this assertion with the criteria inherited from traditional, Stalinist Marxism – whether ownership of the means of production, the nature of class antagonism and the forces of production, or the dominant mode of production (as opposed to Marx’s more capacious category of social form) – is patent.4 Instead, the question of capitalism’s continued existence and the specific limits governing this singular social form should simply be measured by the minimal, true idea of its nature that we always already possess.
We, subjects of capital across the planet, do indeed have a true – if minimal and inadequate – idea of what capitalism is, an idea Marx formulated as the starting point for his critique of political economy, a minimal, materialist definition of the form of appearance of the capitalist social form as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’, as what I would rephrase as the general, tendential commodification of all things and relations of value.5
On the opening page of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s magnificent proletarian novel Compère Général Soleil, his protagonist Hilarion wanders ‘naked’ in the night, possessing nothing but his bodily suffering and visions, driven ‘crazy’ from hunger.6 For a succulent breakfast of corn boullie d’acassan, he cries out, ‘you’d cut off your finger!’ Instead, lying in the dark, Hilarion has only his cutting hunger for company: ‘His gut. His stomach where his guts were marching like a twisted knot of snakes’. This is the ravenous hunger that drives Hilarion to crime, to steal in the night, to end up in jail, the jail that will unexpectedly be his salvation from this misery, through his encounter with his cellmate Roumel, who holds out to him the promise of communism.
Among the questions Alexis’s narrative of hunger and social injustice forces us to ask is this one: is it the case, in fact, that we no longer live in a social form in which it makes sense, when one is driven mad with starvation as is Hilarion, either to steal a wallet (which one cannot eat) or to set off in desperate search of a job that pays wages (which one also cannot eat)? The simple answer is that it makes sense only in a social form (which we call capitalism) in which the means of survival, food and shelter take the monetary form of commodities, and, captured by capitalist property relations, remain otherwise unavailable; a social form in which food, as a commodity, can only be obtained by those without accumulated wealth through monetary exchange for another commodity (labour power); a social form in which a dispossessed proletarian class remains subject to primitive accumulation, subject to the dispossession of the traditional property holdings of the rural moun andeyò, unable to respond to hunger in the most obvious way: to farm the land.7
Ellen Meiksins Wood argued compellingly that it is the general enclosure and commodification of biological necessities – above all food and shelter – that historically initiates the capitalist social form, in the sense that it is this transformation alone that forces formerly feudal subjects, on pain of death by exposure or starvation, to agree to the sale of their labour power to capital.8 While Marx’s monetary labour theory of value presupposes the general, as opposed to specific and limited, commodification of all things and relations, Wood argues that the commodification of food is nonetheless the crucial factor that forces the sale of labour power, the only commodity, Marx shows, that can produce and accumulate surplus value.9
We can, however, repurpose the historicist argument of Wood’s Political Marxism to indicate as well a general limit of the capitalist social form, in the sense of its endpoint, beyond which some other social form would exist: when it is no longer the case that we require a general equivalent – whether paper, metal coin, or its onscreen cipher – to purchase commodified food and shelter and other commodities essential to life, then, and despite all the intervening, subsidiary modifications to its functioning, capital will be a thing of the past, and something else, whether communism or catastrophe, will have replaced it. The social production, distribution, and exchange of food and shelter, in this view, thus indicates more than a mere transhistorical human right; in addition, it constitutes a specific neuralgic point at which the capitalist social form finds both its weakest links and real limit.
To theorise such limits, this book remains faithful to Althusser’s rejection of a general, even universal concept of practice as such, to investigate instead the singular category of Marx’s theoretical practice, developing a position I will call political epistemology.10 While the political stakes of the adequacy or inadequacy of knowledge are no doubt immediately familiar and compelling in this age of fake news, gaslighting, and Trumpist populism, to grasp the limits of capitalism more specifically, to know, in other words, when, how, and under what conditions we might exit from the capitalist social form, requires the deployment of a politics of epistemology in the specific sense in which French philosophy implemented the concept in the twentieth century.11
Épistémologie must in this sense be defined in distinction from both the Kantianism of German Erkenntnistheorie and the English ‘epistemology’, the latter two indicating broadly general, psychologistic theories of knowledge and the processes governing the objectification of phenomena, including the acts of mental objectification and their transcendental conditions performed by a knowing subject.12 In French, these are instead indicated by the more general term gnoséologie.13 In contrast, André Lalande’s concise definition in the Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie – not incidentally the reference work Althusser himself repeatedly turned to – defines épistémologie as the critique of the principles governing the sciences, which in the case of Marx would of course include the science of political economy.14
Lire le Capital was above all and most obviously such an epistemological intervention meant to change how we read Marx’s Capital, in order more adequately to conceptualise the capitalist social form. Yet the secondary literature on Reading Capital has tended to address the many concepts Althusser introduced only in the context of Marxist philosophy in general, ignoring the specific object of the book’s intervention. Kaplan and Sprinker’s The Althusserian Legacy, for example, contains not a single reference to Capital; and while Diefenbach, Farris, Kirn, and Thomas’s Encountering Althusser contains many passing nominal references to Capital, Michele Cangiani’s chapter ‘Althusser and Political Economy’ in that volume is the lone exception that, in its explicit engagement with Marx’s critique of political economy, proves the rule of this general tendency. On a more personal note, when in 2017 I edited a volume dedicated to assessing the legacy of Reading Capital, I was quite surprised when not one of the distinguished contributions to that volume elected to discuss the reading of Marx’s Capital after Althusser.15 This is to say that while there continues to be no shortage of readers of both Capital and Althusser, few and far between are those who since 1965 have pursued the epistemological project of Reading Capital.
In contrast to this long-standing disregard for the specificity of Reading Capital’s object, when reading Capital with (and beyond) Althusser, epistemology becomes political in the preliminary but consequential sense that Marx’s theoretical practice, in its capacity to produce adequate – as opposed to merely imaginary or ideological – knowledge of the real complexity of the capitalist social form, consequently produces subjects of that knowledge.16
To read Capital in the terms Althusser first proposed, refusing ontological guarantees, presuppositions, and imaginary assertions of monism and totality, is to assume only the single presupposition that initiates Marx’s demonstration: that we, subjects of capital, always already have a true idea of the nature of capitalism – a minimal, raw, merely apparent idea, but a true one nonetheless: that the capitalist social form is characterised by the accumulation of commodities and the generalisation of their exchange.17 From this single, immanent starting point, in media res, a beginning determined not ontologically, but in materialist fashion by Marx’s previous analytical enquiry, Capital develops a demonstration of the real complexity of this social form as an open, general system of law-governed causality without totality, what Marx called the ‘law of motion’ of capitalism, and Althusser, its systemic structural causality.
To develop this political epistemology of the limits of capital, Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians analyses the theory of a materialist dialectic as it is developed in the writings of Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou, focusing on their singular analyses of Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital and Spinoza’s Ethics.18 My argument flatly rejects the imaginary figure of Reading Capital as a ‘theoreticist’ relic, to focus attention precisely on the long-overlooked yet radically anti-Hegelian epistemological claims of Reading Capital: that, in Althusser’s words, ‘in Capital we find an apodictic [i.e., logically certain] arrangement of the concepts in the form of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis’.19 While artful readers to this day seek to extract a Hegelian, negative dialectical logical kernel from the core of Capital (as in the ‘Systematic Dialectics’ of Geert Reuten, Tony Smith, and Chris Arthur), furthermore presuming without demonstration that Capital constitutes a totality (whether real or merely logical), this book critically rejects this imaginary figuration. Instead, Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic remains faithful to Althusser’s essential identification of Marx’s synthetic, materialist dialectic, a dialectic excluding totality, negation, and contradiction, its ‘apodictic’ demonstration deploying the Spinozist creative power of the real in its immanent, ‘structural’ causality, whether that power is grasped in the attribute of thought or material extension.20
Never a systematic thinker, Althusser was instead a semeur d’idées, and it has been left to his readers to test and deploy those manifold ideas as to their degree of creative productivity. It is certainly the case that Althusser does not explicitly link Marx’s ‘apodictic’ method to Spinoza in Reading Capital, nor even say the first word about what actually makes Marx’s demonstration ‘apodictic’ (the latter task falling in part to Pierre Macherey in his long-forgotten chapter for Reading Capital). Instead, I will take him at his word – ‘Nous étions spinoziste’, he famously declared of the Reading Capital collective, and again, publicly declaring to colleagues in 1967, ‘Je suis spinoziste’21 – and follow Vittorio Morfino’s injunction to ‘go beyond Althusser, but with Althusser’, to show that when systematically developed, Althusser’s undemonstrated claim for the Spinozist ‘apodicticity’ of Capital is in fact correct.22
While a thinker of polemical genius, Althusser – unlike Spinoza, Marx, Macherey, or Badiou – never developed his countless insights into systematic, large-scale works on the model of Ethica or Capital, but instead sought continuously to refuse all reassuring guarantees of knowledge and desired to sustain theoretical practice in a state of perpetual enquiry, critique, and questioning. As such, his thought seems in hindsight destined never to have produced the affect Spinoza called beatitude, and instead fitfully to signify and elicit, à ses risques et perils, the distressing yet simultaneously exhilarating positions of both uncompromising desire and apprehension before the absence of the law that Lacan called anxiety (l’angoisse).23
If, as Tracey McNuty has suggested, ‘anxiety is the affect that responds to the desire of the Other’,24 the aggressive resistance this uncompromising desire tends to provoke (think for example of Freud’s Moses, Robespierre, or more recently Jean-Bertrand Aristide) can tell us much about the ongoing demonisation of Althusser. Equally, it can help to explain Althusser’s own initial, uncompromising theoretical intervention (as the Other of Marxist philosophy) as well as his own subsequent theoretical anxiety to the point of self-destruction in his relation to the proletarian Other. Like Moses, Robespierre, and Freud before him, Althusser desired ruthlessly to destroy an existing god and clergy and to construct a new, impossible object for his people: in Althusser’s case, these were the god that was ‘Man’ for Marxist humanism, along with the Party who represented Him; the object he sought to produce, a fully adequate construction of Marx’s philosophy, shorn of all phantasmatic Hegelian guarantees of monist totality and the Absolute. The price he paid for this uncompromising intervention is well-known.
Althusser, intensive and singular reader of Spinoza and Marx, without reserve pushed Spinozist thought to its furthest limit, a point where substance is understood not as Absolute Subject, as an imaginary Abwermechanism (defence) against the anxiety of not knowing, nor as reified monism (Plekhanov), indeed, not as a thing at all. Instead, Althusser’s esoteric, unpublished writings show that he decisively redefines substance as the infinite order of causal connection within a contingent historical field (the capitalist social form), an order existing only in the immanent immediacy of its situated effects – though I will argue that this order can be made to nonexist through acts of theoretical formalisation such as the modes of schematic formalisation Marx introduces into later drafts of Capital.
It is precisely here, I will argue, at this limit-reading of Spinoza, that Althusser’s intuition of a Marx-Spinoza co-determination manifests its decisive originality: if the logic of capital is not a whole, not a substantial thing to be reified as an imaginary monist totality, it is nonetheless the case that this structure can be made to nonexist, produced in the attribute of thought, in other words, as what Spinoza calls a nonexistent thing.25 This, then, is the ultimate tendency of Marx’s original process of exposition in Capital that Althusser’s intuition first began fitfully to construct in Reading Capital and that this book pursues: the theoretical production, as a science of causality, of the structure of capital as nonexistent, atemporal thing, as the eternal, formalisable laws of its tendencies.
Althusser’s militant refusal to speculate on the ontological foundations of science in his published works, however, pushes his Spinozist thought, as a theory of contingent structural causality without (monist) substance, to the brink of relativist pluralism; the theoreticist position of Reading Capital, in other words, was not wrongheaded, as Althusser’s admirers and detractors alike have so often claimed, but, on the contrary, insufficiently theoreticist. Remaining faithful to the Althusserian refusal to regress to a neo-Hegelian monism of the One, Pierre Macherey and Alain Badiou instead have proceeded in two directions in the wake of Reading Capital, to more adequately develop Althusserian theoreticism. Macherey, on the one hand, systematically demonstrates the coherence and accuracy to the letter of the Althusserian limit-conception of Spinozist substance as causality without monism in his massive, five-volume exposition, Introduction à l’Ethique de Spinoza. To read Capital with Macherey, then, will require demonstrating the fundamental nature of Marx’s demonstration as a Spinozist science of ramified, systemic causality without totality.
Badiou, in contrast, develops in the three volumes of Being and Event an axiomatic epistemology, one that can rigorously initiate apodictic demonstrations of the logic of a given, purely immanent world (such as the capitalist social form) without recourse to imaginary, speculative foundations or the totality of the One. This orientation will require reading Capital as a science or logic of causes whose apodicticity arises not from a speculative foundation or guarantee, but from a minimally axiomatic beginning – a minimal yet absolutely true idea we already possess of the nature of capitalism – the necessity of which starting point arises from Marx’s prior materialist enquiry into the critique of political economy.
To do so, I argue that while the explicit engagement of these Althusserian thinkers with Marx’s process of exposition in Capital remained largely limited to the pages of Reading Capital (and in the case of Badiou’s massive oeuvre is to this day virtually nonexistent), after 1968 this theoretical intervention remained insistent, to adopt instead the more abstract form of a general theory of positive, materialist dialectic. The movement of the book’s argument is thus twofold: to follow the exposition of this theory of a materialist dialectic in the wake of Reading Capital across sites including Althusser’s unpublished archive, Macherey’s Hegel or Spinoza and five-volume exposition of Spinoza’s Ethics, and Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, on the one hand, while simultaneously, at each step, bringing this general theory of materialist dialectic to bear anew on the reading of Capital itself.
When Althusser asserted the ‘apodictic’ nature of Marx’s demonstration in Capital, he was essentially asking what gives the capitalist social form its binding nature in the absence of all ontological presuppositions and epistemological guarantees of subject-object correspondence.26 The Spinozist answer he suggested is that we are capable of apprehending one and the same capitalist social form via two attributes, thought and extension, without substance – when correctly understood not as thing but as the immanent, infinite order of a historically contingent causality – offering an extrinsic ground or guarantee to this knowledge, which instead comes to depend only upon the adequacy of its construction, verum index sui et falsi.
In the empirical attribute of temporal extension, that of our lived, sensuous experience of the capitalist real, that compulsion is immediately and violently apparent in the form of the lived, daily experience of commodity fetishism – as the compulsion of all subjects of capital to sell as a matter of survival the commodity that is our labour power; to then work for monetary remuneration, in order to realise continuous and unending increases in surplus value for capital, etc.
As such, however, as mere empirical, sensuous experience, the veiled, fetishistic nature of this compulsion is nonetheless not adequately understood, even by the classical political economists who were the object of Marx’s critique. This would instead require that the binding nature of the capitalist social form be demonstrated in the attribute of thought, as an apodictic logical exposition; and this not as a mere formalist exercise, but as a science of causes in the mode of a materialist critique of political economy. This demonstration, in other words, must begin not from a concept such as value, or from some merely formal axiom, but from our initial, minimal, but nonetheless true idea of capitalism, which is to say from ‘the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society[:] the commodity’.27 Only then does Marx proceed to produce and deploy, from the first sentence of Capital, his world-historical array of original concepts that cohere to convey, in the attribute of thought, the logically binding nature of this necessity.
In the book’s Introduction, I refuse the ideological dummy of so-called ‘theoreticism’ to argue for the crucial, long-overlooked importance of Althusser’s uncompromising epistemological propositions in his introduction to Reading Capital. While upholding Althusser’s intervention, this critique simultaneously identifies a series of theoretical impediments to the arguments of For Marx and Reading Capital (figurative nominalism, dualistic treatment of the attributes thought and the real), impediments that in fact are shown to dissolve when considered in light of Althusser’s esoteric, unpublished writings. I then turn in Chapter 2 to Pierre Macherey’s theory of materialist dialectic, first examining his little-discussed yet decisively original contribution to Reading Capital on Marx’s process of exposition, to then engage his subsequent works (Theory of Literary Production, Hegel or Spinoza, ‘En matérialiste’, Introduction à l’Ethique). I show that each of these substantive contributions to a theory of materialist dialectic can serve to illuminate crucial aspects of Marx’s process of demonstration in Capital, beyond the brief indications of Macherey’s precocious 1965 contribution to Reading Capital.
In the book’s central chapter, I redirect these theoretical materials to systematically investigate Marx’s additive synthetic dialectic in the text of Capital itself. I demonstrate that Marx’s cumulative revisions to Capital tend to eliminate the logical categories of totality (Totalität), the reflections of determination (Reflexionsbestimmungen), aufhebung, and contradiction from its exposition of the essential nature of capitalism. Instead, I show that Marx’s modifications serve to increasingly develop and implement a positive, additive synthetic dialectic as the categorial demonstration of the necessary forms of appearance and relation of the capitalist social form, the real construction of this nonexistent thing, the idea of the laws of its tendencies. In contrast to previous analyses of Spinoza’s influence on the young Marx that have uniformly addressed its political and critical content, through a close reading of Chapters 1 and 11 of the first volume of Capital, I argue for the decisive importance of Marx’s 1841 reading of Spinoza for the epistemological project of Capital. This analysis confirms Althusser’s proposition of Marx’s objective, tendential development after 1857 (as an ongoing epistemological transition rather than evental ‘break’) of a non-Hegelian, additive synthetic dialectic – and this despite what Marx might consciously have continued to believe to the end of his days about his imaginary, lived relation to Hegel.
Chapters 4 and 5 turn to the philosophy of Alain Badiou, to argue that despite his non-engagement with Marx’s Capital, the development of an axiomatic philosophy in Being and Event, and of a ‘science of appearance’ in Logics of Worlds can and should be brought to bear on Capital itself, toward the construction of a theoretically consistent understanding of the capitalist social form as an object of thought. In Chapter 3 I thus turn to Badiou’s theory of the necessity of an axiomatic theoretical foundation for apodictic discourse – underscoring in the process the crucial importance of Bernard Bolzano for Badiou’s argument – to interpret Marx and Spinoza’s starting points in Capital and Ethics. In Chapter 4, I argue that Badiou has in fact fulfilled to some real extent the project Althusser first called for in his 1947 thesis, i.e., to read Capital as a theory of the ‘transcendental’ structural determinations of the capitalist social form, Badiou objectively displacing and refiguring Althusser’s initial, undeveloped claim that ‘Capital is our transcendental analytic’.28 I thus take Badiou’s ‘science of appearance’ to indicate, in Marx’s terms, the science of the necessary forms of appearance of all things of value (commodities) in the capitalist social form, the logic, that is to say, of our world.
Wark 2019.
Walmart made $ 11.68B profit and McDonalds $ 6.88B profit in 2023 (Forbes “The Global 2000”, June 8, 2023).
Wark 2019, pp. 5, 11, 48.
Wark 2019, p. 41.
‘The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an “immense collection of commodities” ’ (Marx 1976, p. 125).
Alexis 1955/1982, pp. 8, 10, 11, my translation. All further translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Nesbitt 2022, p. 265.
Wood 2002.
On Capital as a monetary labour theory of value, see Murray 2017.
The corollary being that this is not a book about political practice, Marxist or otherwise. Even less will the reader find a rehearsal of the debates over Althusserianism from the 1970s. So, for instance, the short-lived British journal Theoretical Practice (1971–73), which mounted one of the rare defences of Althusserian theoreticism, published virtually no articles on Marx’s theoretical practice in Capital (the topic of this book). The sole exception to this disinterest in the journal’s seven issues is Athar Hussain’s ‘Marx’s “Notes on Adolph Wagner”: An Introduction’, which underscores the importance of this late text for Marx’s method of demonstration in Capital (Hussain 1972). Otherwise, the journal focused almost exclusively on debates regarding the relation of Althusser and Balibar’s theoretical practice to Marxist-Leninist politics, the editors insisting that the journal’s ‘philosophical practice is a political and partisan practice, [… a] political intervention in politics from the position of a politics, Marxism-Leninism’ (Theoretical Practice 1971, p. 2). I will discuss in Chapter 1 the journal’s spirited defence of Althusser’s theory of theoretical practice against what its editors saw as the revisionism of Althusser’s post-1967 redefinition of philosophy. Thanks to Panagiotis Sotiris for kindly sharing his manuscript ‘The Strange Fate of British Althusserianism: The Theoretical Practice Group’. I discuss Althusser’s concept of theoretical practice in this book’s Conclusion.
In redeploying here Althusser’s concept of theoretical practice, I am indebted to Alain Badiou’s probing critique of the concept in his article ‘The Althusserian Definition of Theory.’ I agree in particular with his critique of the latent psychologism inherent in Althusser’s text – theoretical practice as, in Althusser’s words, ‘a process that takes place entirely within thought’ (cited at Nesbitt 2017: 26). The threat Badiou identifies of a return of idealism in Althusser’s absolute distinction between thought and the Real is no doubt the price Althusser pays for refusing to identify Spinozist Substance as the materialist unity of the attributes of thought and extension, as I will discuss below.
This is the case for example with Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour: though subtitled A Critique of Epistemology [zur Epistemologie der abendländischen Geschichte], it is explicitly a phenomenological critique of ‘the socially necessary forms of thinking of an epoch’ (2021, p. 4).
Cassin 2014, ‘Epistemology’, p. 274.
Here is Lalande: L’Épistémologie ‘designates the philosophy of the sciences, but in a quite precise sense. It is neither the specific study of various scientific methods, which is the object of la Méthodologie, and pertains to Logic. Nor is it a synthesis or conjectural anticipation of scientific laws …. It is instead, essentially, the critical study of the principles, hypotheses, and results of the various sciences, destined to determine their logical (as opposed to psychological [i.e., as opposed to a theory of knowledge or Erkenntnistheorie]) origin, their value, and their objective scope’. Lalande 1996, p. 293.
Nesbitt 2017. Robert J.C. Young’s chapter in that volume does briefly review the complex publication history of the first volume of Capital in its implications for the concept of symptomatic reading, but without engaging an explicit reading of Marx’s text per se (Young 2017, pp. 36–9).
This is the general thesis Jean Matthys argues in Althusser lecteur de Spinoza: Genèse et enjeux d’une éthico-politique de la théorie (Matthys 2023, p. 343).
In the 1975 ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’, Althusser underlines the crucial importance of the Spinozist presupposition Habemus enim ideam veram for the entirety of a theoretical position dedicated to the rejection of any and all a priori methodological guarantees: ‘Que veut dire en substance Spinoza, quand il écrit la phrase célèbre : “Habemus enim ideam veram ?” … C’est en effet parce que, et seulement parce que nous détenons une idée vraie, que nous pouvons en produire d’autres, selon sa norme. … C’est un fait, que nous la détenons (habemus), et de quoi que ce soit que ce fait soit le résultat, il inscrit d’avance toute théorie de la connaissance … sous la dépendance du fait de la connaissance détenue. Par là toutes questions d’Origine, de Sujet ou de Droit de la connaissance, qui soutiennent les théories de la connaissance sont récusées’ (Althusser 1998a, p. 218). Althusser refers to the Emendation of the Intellect, where Spinoza writes: ‘A true idea (for we do have a true idea) is something different from its object (ideatum). A circle is one thing, the idea of a circle another. For the idea of a circle is not something having a circumference and a centre, as is a circle, nor is the idea of a body itself a body’.
The relative neglect of Etienne Balibar’s writings in this book is not due to any disinterest in Marx’s masterpiece following Balibar’s initial contribution to Reading Capital. To the contrary, and in contrast to both Macherey and Badiou, Balibar has continued to reaffirm the necessity of reading Capital as an unending task: ‘Are we still, will we always be, “reading Capital”? No doubt; and we are beginning to understand that, as with every truly great theoretical oeuvre (Hegel’s, for example), our task is by its nature endless because the meaning we are looking for can only be found at the point where questions formulated on the basis of current events (or even current emergencies) encounter contradictions that, in latent fashion, haunt the writing of the text that we have to set back in motion’. That said, Balibar’s interest in Marx remains primarily and explicitly political, to the neglect of the epistemological problems of reading Capital that this book will explore: ‘The goal I am pursuing [in rereading Capital], however, is not (if it ever was) purely epistemological. I am trying to shed light on the thorny question of the various conceptions of politics, their irreducible plurality, and the choices they dictate’. Balibar 2015a, p. 205, translation modified. Thanks to Josef Fulka for reminding me of Balibar’s masterful and penetrating analysis of the final section of Capital in the third chapter of Violence and Civility.
Althusser et al. 2015, p. 51 (henceforth RC).
Macherey has said of the Althusserian project in which he participated that ‘Spinoza was that which, for us, bridged epistemology and politics: by returning to theoretical practice its consequential reality [poids de réalité], insofar as it made of it an order of reality unto itself. It seemed to us by that token to open perspectives for practical investment, the dynamic of thought simultaneously acting in reality’ (Macherey 1999, p. 24).
Althusser 1974. In his correspondence with Franca Madonia, Althusser describes Spinoza as ‘mon unique maître’, and again as ‘le plus grand [philosophe] de tous, à mes yeux’. Althusser 1998b, pp. 528, 579.
Morfino 2022, p. 86.
Lacan 2016. See McNulty 2009. Spinoza was the decisive formative thinker for Lacan, who discovered him at the age of 14, at which point ‘he hung a diagram on the wall of his bedroom that depicted the structure of the Ethics with the aid of colored arrows’ (Roudinesco 1995, p. 11). Spinoza then became the central conceptual reference for Lacan’s 1932 thesis, at which point the Ethics offered him the means to formulate a monist materialist intervention in psychology based on the traditional ‘parallelist’ reading of the Spinozist attributes. Subsequently, for example in the 1962–63 seminar Anxiety, Lacan’s position, while no longer explicitly citing Spinoza, would reject the monist phantasy of an epistemological whole in terms doubtless attractive for Althusser, to argue instead that ‘logic henceforth has the essentially precarious function of condemning the real to eternally stumble [trébucher] within the impossible’ (Lacan 2016, p. 78, translation modified).
McNulty 2009, p. 7.
EIIP8.
Thanks to Laurence Hemming for posing the question to me in this form.
‘Wovon ich ausgehe, ist die einfachste gesellschaftliche Form, worin sich das Arbeitsprodukt in der jetzigen Gesellschaft darstellt, und dies ist die “Ware” ’. Marx 1879.
Cited in Estop 2021, p. 113.