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The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today
The publication of Reading Capital —by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière—in 1965 marked a key intervention in Marxist philosophy and critical theory, bringing forth a stunning array of concepts that continue to inspire philosophical reflection of the highest magnitude. The Concept in Crisis reconsiders the volume’s reading of Marx and renews its call for a critique of capitalism and culture for the twenty-first century. The contributors—who include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, and Fernanda Navarro—interrogate Althusser's contributions in particular within the context of what is surely the most famous collective reading of Marx ever undertaken. Among other topics, they offer a symptomatic critique of Althusser; consider his writing as a materialist production of knowledge; analyze the volume’s conceptualization of value and crisis; examine how leftist Latin American leaders like Che Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos engaged with Althusser and Reading Capital ; and draw out the volume's implications and use for feminist theory and praxis. Retrieving the inspiration that drove Althusser's reinterpretation of Marx, The Concept in Crisis explains why Reading Capital 's revolutionary inflection retains its critical appeal, prompting readers to reconsider Marx's relevance in an era of neoliberal capitalism.
Contributors. Emily Apter, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Adrian Johnston, Warren Montag, Fernanda Navarro, Nick Nesbitt, Knox Peden, Nina Power, Robert J. C. Young
Contributors. Emily Apter, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Bruno Bosteels, Adrian Johnston, Warren Montag, Fernanda Navarro, Nick Nesbitt, Knox Peden, Nina Power, Robert J. C. Young
- GenresPhilosophy
328 pages, Paperback
Published August 4, 2017
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June 30, 2021
Vive la Crise!
FERNANDA NAVARRO
“Now the beast is everywhere; it is global, with no fixed address.”
“I am not limiting it to Marxism but extending it to a major crisis: the global crisis of today, that of capitalism—in its neoliberal stage—and its effects, in order to finally close the circle that intends to give meaning to these pages. I will retain, however, Althusser’s interpretation of the word crisis as not necessarily meaning chaos or death but also catharsis, renaissance, or transformation.”
“Many of us—philosophy teachers and students—in this part of the American continent had concluded that, after 1970, it was impossible to approach Marx or to conceive Marxism in a pre-Althusserian manner”
“The simple fact was that Althusser could not be ignored”
“The fact is he provoked passionate, polemic discussions that went beyond the normal academic tone reserved for philosophers, from Mexico to Argentina, where his writings were studied intensively from 1967 to 1978, along with his recent revival in many countries.”
“There were also those who regarded the last period in Althusser’s life as a turning point in his philosophical writings.”
“I asked him how he explained the fact that among the authors he mentioned as having influenced him there was not one Marxist thinker.”
“It is simply because what has been done with philosophy in the USSR in recent decades is absolutely appalling. The poverty of theoretical concepts held by socialist realism and dialectical materialism simply proves the surrender of intelligence, whereas the authors to whom I refer to not only allow us to think but also open new ways of thinking. We must remember, he added, that what is important is not the object of reflection but the mode of reflection.”
* Althusser
“But Althusser, in the end, especially after the results of J. Bidet’s research published in his book Que faire du Capital?, recognized that Marx never totally liberated himself from Hegel, but did so only tendentially, since he remained within the same framework of idealism. Even so, he acknowledged that Marx had moved toward a different domain, the scientific, in which he had founded historical materialism”
“the late Althusser considered aleatory materialism a possible philosophy for Marxism”
“It is a Materialism of the Encounter that follows the line of Epicurus—with the image of a disorderly fall of atoms through a vacuum, causing their free encounter or ‘clinamen’ in order to ‘make a new world possible.’ ”
* Althusser
“He added that this materialism does not call for any subject but posits rather a process without a subject, referring to Machiavelli, Hobbes, the second Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and to their respective categories: limit, margin, void, lack of center, and freedom. Aleatory materialism is thus a materialism of chance, of contingency, not in the sense of an absence of necessity but in the sense of necessity conceived as a devenir, a becoming necessary for contingent encounters.”
“For our author, aleatory materialism represents the highest point of materialism because of the compelling impulse it has to open the world to “the event,” l’événement, to all living practices, including politics, in an unpredictable way, modifying all fixed premises and data”
“What Does Althusser Mean by Interstices?
These refer to the social and popular movements and struggles of marginalized, oppressed people that have emerged all over the world, such as the pacifist, ecological, feminist, gay, student, Indian, and immigrant movements, bringing some hope with their different ways of functioning and organizing, with no intention of instituting new pyramids with dominating structures. These movements, he added, have followed the line of Rosa Luxemburg and not that of Lenin”
“Everything in this world is in a constant, unpredictable flow. If we want to give an image of this we must go back to Heraclitus or Epicurus. Yet if we want to give a more recent image of it we must follow Deleuze in order to avoid Descartes’ hierarchical representation of the world as a tree but rather as a rhizome: Deleuze’s horizontal root. Yet I still prefer Marx’s image: “The gods exist in the interstices of the world of Epicurus. In the same way that mercantile relations existed already in the interstices of the slave world.”
* Althusser
“The proletariat is found in the margins of bourgeois society. The question now is to ‘place the margins in the center.’ ”
* Althusser
“In order to open theses interstices that announce a more just society, we must to learn—from and with the people—a language in which they may recognize themselves … thus ending up in a new conception of a real materialist and aleatory history.”
* Althusser
“In order to change the world, from its basis, we must think differently, speak differently, in order to act differently and conceive the horizon of our actions in a different manner, in order to reach and propose a different conception of history: materialist and aleatory.”
* Althusser
“To think in an international liberation movement would be utopian. The most we can conceive of is an International Center of Ideological Convergence for Liberation, capable of unifying alternative and revolutionary movements that are appearing everywhere, searching a new strategy and new practices and principles as well as communitarian forms with transversal relations. A Center of Information without the pretention of directing or taking decisions, since this belongs to the militants of each region or country: in short, a Center of/for Encounters where the interchange of ideas, positions, and experiences can take place. This will first come true in the Third World countries. He considered this the possibility of a truly materialist and aleatory history.”
* Althusser
“In 1994, four years after Althusser’s death, an unexpected interstice with an alternative way of organizing and expressing a total refusal to integrate to the capitalist values and ways of life—appeared in my country, Mexico, in the southern state of Chiapas, as if our visionary author had had an intuition of its possibility when he stressed the fact that if this ever happened, it would be in the Third World. Its name is the Zapatista movement.”
“In February 1995, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, one of the leading figures of the Zapatista Movement, the only mestizo (not 100 percent Indian) who was assigned to lead the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)—as well as the role of their translator or “voice,” turned out to be an Althusserian philosopher”
“He had actually studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and his thesis had been on Althusser’s ideological state apparatus, with specific attention to education.”
“This gave place to a ruthless military invasion, followed by his persecution in the southeastern jungle. Soldiers committed terrible atrocities against the people in the Zapatista liberated zones. There are many Mexicans, throughout the country, who are Zapatistas. Those who supported them clandestinely, those who fed them, and those who kept their secret—these people suffered. There are videos that show the army’s cruelty and destructiveness”
“In Mexico City, within one week there were three huge demonstrations ending up at the main Central Square, or Zócalo (which holds some 120,000 people), filled with people yelling: “Todos somos Marcos [We are all Marcos].” “If you want to apprehend Marcos you must put us all in jail and you will never have enough jails for us.”
“All this pressure made the government decide to order the withdrawal of troops from the Zapatista area, but not from the state of Chiapas. To this date, they have never been free of military aggressions, due mainly to their triumph in recuperating their original territory, necessary to obtain their complete autonomy, which they finally did achieve in 2003!”
“To return to that day: January 1, 1994, marked the time when the armed uprising and their “¡Ya basta! [Enough!]” was heard all over the country, precisely when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico was to be signed, announcing—in spite of their discourse—more poverty, inequality, and injustice in my country, only strengthening capitalist principles. Needless to say, this shook all Mexico … and beyond.”
“From then on, carrying their weapons without using them, they have confronted the war against the State and against the destructive capitalist war machine in a new way. This is how they are resisting globalization from their remote corner, without pretending to be a model or an example to be followed:”
“The place of ethics, as in Althusser, is fundamental and goes hand in hand with politics as well as in their daily communitarian life.”
“It was in 2003 that they finally achieved their autonomy and made an unprecedented step: having started as an army, at this date the EZLN handed their leadership over to their civilian population.”
“An army, having a vertical hierarchical structure,” they explained, “cannot be democratic. How can we then claim democracy as one of our main goals and practices?”
“How does the JBG function? Once being elected by the community, they must follow the following principles: their posts must be rotating (each three years), revocable, and obliged to render accounts of their tasks and duties, thus fulfilling the three main principles. But there is yet a higher level of authority: the Assembly. A lesson to our actual governments around the civilized world!”
“there are only subjects in their grammar, no objects at all. Why? Because for them everything is alive. Not only human beings but also animals and vegetables, stones and mountains! This entails important consequences that prove that they go far beyond an anthropocentric conception to achieve a true biocentricism”
“They have a completely different conception of nature, considering it their Mother Earth, a conception that excludes private property. They work the land collectively”
“I cannot end this essay without touching one key concept that stands out in the Zapatistas’ way of thinking and acting: the reformulation/resignification of the concept of power. What did they mean when, in 1994, they took up arms and at the same time made it clear that their aim was not to seize power?—a statement that enflamed political parties both from the Left as well as from the Right. “What on earth can one do without power?” they asked”
“At the same time this position evoked the admiration of many who were looking beyond the traditional political spectrum. They understood that it meant a different way of relating to power.”
“The only virtue of power is that, in the end, it inevitably produces a revolution against itself.”
* Marcos
“History has taught us that even in the outstanding cases when tyranny or dictatorships were overthrown by revolutionary liberating forces, disillusionment sooner or later followed when the basic principles of justice and freedom, which led the struggle, begin to decay”
“our people taught us that it was not a matter of substituting a domination with another domination; that we should convince, not conquer by vanquishing and destroying”
* Marcos
“In fact they consider that there are other kinds of democracy, not only the representative electoral one, such as the participative and communitarian form, where the word “we” stands out over the word “I.” “Our democracy does not fit in the ballots,” they declared, after having discussed it and decided everything in our Assemblies, “where everyone has the right and obligation to speak and be heard.”
“Many times they have tried. But due to the strong determination and the values they have built in their autonomous self-government, education, and health service as well as the status of women, they have resisted, giving hope to many Mexicans and all those who have visited them from abroad.”
“Today, twenty years later, there still are many active solidarity committees in many countries that keep returning to their events in Chiapas or elsewhere.”
“Zapatiste” is being organized by Paris VIII University, to which I was invited. Despite our government’s interests in wiping the Zapatistas off our map, they have not been able to do it. This, however, has not stopped the governing class from continuous, violent aggressions with regard to the recuperated territories, without which they could not be autonomous, autonomy being the key to building new human relations and values and to making their famous slogan true: “We want to build a world that holds (includes) many worlds”
“Despite this injustice they answered back with another lesson, far from falling to the provocation of those in power. They kept an unexpected, disciplined, peaceful attitude in saying
“We don’t want vengeance, we want justice.”
“My conclusion is that for a considerable part of our population, this interstice has become an alternative that provides us with some oxygen and hope, and not only rage! How far, then, can we say that this hidden Mexican interstice has actually escaped the Hydra of capitalism, giving many of us the hope that a more human society is possible, even if it as yet exists only at a micro scale?”
“These organized minorities or interstices that give place to ‘possibility’ as a category, coexist already at a micro-scale and are working on an alternative platform, seeking a different kind of politics that may allow different kinds of human practice and human relations, while sharing a common goal: to build a more just society, free from ideological manipulation, misery and oppression.”
* Althusser
“Considering what I have stressed above and given his visionary approach couldn’t we have enough grounds to announce a different crisis today, in order to repeat, with Althusser, “Vive la Crise!,” both in the sense of chaos and catastrophe—since capitalism still prevails—but also in that other meaning, in favor of a new revival or transformation—given that multiple interstices have intertwined within the capitalist/neoliberal stage”
“In closing, we can agree with Derrida’s words at Althusser’s funeral: “His work is valuable because it bears witness and takes risks.” What he never knew was how far—in those widespread geographies along the globe—his ideas have landed and germinated.”
FERNANDA NAVARRO
“Now the beast is everywhere; it is global, with no fixed address.”
“I am not limiting it to Marxism but extending it to a major crisis: the global crisis of today, that of capitalism—in its neoliberal stage—and its effects, in order to finally close the circle that intends to give meaning to these pages. I will retain, however, Althusser’s interpretation of the word crisis as not necessarily meaning chaos or death but also catharsis, renaissance, or transformation.”
“Many of us—philosophy teachers and students—in this part of the American continent had concluded that, after 1970, it was impossible to approach Marx or to conceive Marxism in a pre-Althusserian manner”
“The simple fact was that Althusser could not be ignored”
“The fact is he provoked passionate, polemic discussions that went beyond the normal academic tone reserved for philosophers, from Mexico to Argentina, where his writings were studied intensively from 1967 to 1978, along with his recent revival in many countries.”
“There were also those who regarded the last period in Althusser’s life as a turning point in his philosophical writings.”
“I asked him how he explained the fact that among the authors he mentioned as having influenced him there was not one Marxist thinker.”
“It is simply because what has been done with philosophy in the USSR in recent decades is absolutely appalling. The poverty of theoretical concepts held by socialist realism and dialectical materialism simply proves the surrender of intelligence, whereas the authors to whom I refer to not only allow us to think but also open new ways of thinking. We must remember, he added, that what is important is not the object of reflection but the mode of reflection.”
* Althusser
“But Althusser, in the end, especially after the results of J. Bidet’s research published in his book Que faire du Capital?, recognized that Marx never totally liberated himself from Hegel, but did so only tendentially, since he remained within the same framework of idealism. Even so, he acknowledged that Marx had moved toward a different domain, the scientific, in which he had founded historical materialism”
“the late Althusser considered aleatory materialism a possible philosophy for Marxism”
“It is a Materialism of the Encounter that follows the line of Epicurus—with the image of a disorderly fall of atoms through a vacuum, causing their free encounter or ‘clinamen’ in order to ‘make a new world possible.’ ”
* Althusser
“He added that this materialism does not call for any subject but posits rather a process without a subject, referring to Machiavelli, Hobbes, the second Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger and to their respective categories: limit, margin, void, lack of center, and freedom. Aleatory materialism is thus a materialism of chance, of contingency, not in the sense of an absence of necessity but in the sense of necessity conceived as a devenir, a becoming necessary for contingent encounters.”
“For our author, aleatory materialism represents the highest point of materialism because of the compelling impulse it has to open the world to “the event,” l’événement, to all living practices, including politics, in an unpredictable way, modifying all fixed premises and data”
“What Does Althusser Mean by Interstices?
These refer to the social and popular movements and struggles of marginalized, oppressed people that have emerged all over the world, such as the pacifist, ecological, feminist, gay, student, Indian, and immigrant movements, bringing some hope with their different ways of functioning and organizing, with no intention of instituting new pyramids with dominating structures. These movements, he added, have followed the line of Rosa Luxemburg and not that of Lenin”
“Everything in this world is in a constant, unpredictable flow. If we want to give an image of this we must go back to Heraclitus or Epicurus. Yet if we want to give a more recent image of it we must follow Deleuze in order to avoid Descartes’ hierarchical representation of the world as a tree but rather as a rhizome: Deleuze’s horizontal root. Yet I still prefer Marx’s image: “The gods exist in the interstices of the world of Epicurus. In the same way that mercantile relations existed already in the interstices of the slave world.”
* Althusser
“The proletariat is found in the margins of bourgeois society. The question now is to ‘place the margins in the center.’ ”
* Althusser
“In order to open theses interstices that announce a more just society, we must to learn—from and with the people—a language in which they may recognize themselves … thus ending up in a new conception of a real materialist and aleatory history.”
* Althusser
“In order to change the world, from its basis, we must think differently, speak differently, in order to act differently and conceive the horizon of our actions in a different manner, in order to reach and propose a different conception of history: materialist and aleatory.”
* Althusser
“To think in an international liberation movement would be utopian. The most we can conceive of is an International Center of Ideological Convergence for Liberation, capable of unifying alternative and revolutionary movements that are appearing everywhere, searching a new strategy and new practices and principles as well as communitarian forms with transversal relations. A Center of Information without the pretention of directing or taking decisions, since this belongs to the militants of each region or country: in short, a Center of/for Encounters where the interchange of ideas, positions, and experiences can take place. This will first come true in the Third World countries. He considered this the possibility of a truly materialist and aleatory history.”
* Althusser
“In 1994, four years after Althusser’s death, an unexpected interstice with an alternative way of organizing and expressing a total refusal to integrate to the capitalist values and ways of life—appeared in my country, Mexico, in the southern state of Chiapas, as if our visionary author had had an intuition of its possibility when he stressed the fact that if this ever happened, it would be in the Third World. Its name is the Zapatista movement.”
“In February 1995, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, one of the leading figures of the Zapatista Movement, the only mestizo (not 100 percent Indian) who was assigned to lead the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)—as well as the role of their translator or “voice,” turned out to be an Althusserian philosopher”
“He had actually studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and his thesis had been on Althusser’s ideological state apparatus, with specific attention to education.”
“This gave place to a ruthless military invasion, followed by his persecution in the southeastern jungle. Soldiers committed terrible atrocities against the people in the Zapatista liberated zones. There are many Mexicans, throughout the country, who are Zapatistas. Those who supported them clandestinely, those who fed them, and those who kept their secret—these people suffered. There are videos that show the army’s cruelty and destructiveness”
“In Mexico City, within one week there were three huge demonstrations ending up at the main Central Square, or Zócalo (which holds some 120,000 people), filled with people yelling: “Todos somos Marcos [We are all Marcos].” “If you want to apprehend Marcos you must put us all in jail and you will never have enough jails for us.”
“All this pressure made the government decide to order the withdrawal of troops from the Zapatista area, but not from the state of Chiapas. To this date, they have never been free of military aggressions, due mainly to their triumph in recuperating their original territory, necessary to obtain their complete autonomy, which they finally did achieve in 2003!”
“To return to that day: January 1, 1994, marked the time when the armed uprising and their “¡Ya basta! [Enough!]” was heard all over the country, precisely when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the United States, and Mexico was to be signed, announcing—in spite of their discourse—more poverty, inequality, and injustice in my country, only strengthening capitalist principles. Needless to say, this shook all Mexico … and beyond.”
“From then on, carrying their weapons without using them, they have confronted the war against the State and against the destructive capitalist war machine in a new way. This is how they are resisting globalization from their remote corner, without pretending to be a model or an example to be followed:”
“The place of ethics, as in Althusser, is fundamental and goes hand in hand with politics as well as in their daily communitarian life.”
“It was in 2003 that they finally achieved their autonomy and made an unprecedented step: having started as an army, at this date the EZLN handed their leadership over to their civilian population.”
“An army, having a vertical hierarchical structure,” they explained, “cannot be democratic. How can we then claim democracy as one of our main goals and practices?”
“How does the JBG function? Once being elected by the community, they must follow the following principles: their posts must be rotating (each three years), revocable, and obliged to render accounts of their tasks and duties, thus fulfilling the three main principles. But there is yet a higher level of authority: the Assembly. A lesson to our actual governments around the civilized world!”
“there are only subjects in their grammar, no objects at all. Why? Because for them everything is alive. Not only human beings but also animals and vegetables, stones and mountains! This entails important consequences that prove that they go far beyond an anthropocentric conception to achieve a true biocentricism”
“They have a completely different conception of nature, considering it their Mother Earth, a conception that excludes private property. They work the land collectively”
“I cannot end this essay without touching one key concept that stands out in the Zapatistas’ way of thinking and acting: the reformulation/resignification of the concept of power. What did they mean when, in 1994, they took up arms and at the same time made it clear that their aim was not to seize power?—a statement that enflamed political parties both from the Left as well as from the Right. “What on earth can one do without power?” they asked”
“At the same time this position evoked the admiration of many who were looking beyond the traditional political spectrum. They understood that it meant a different way of relating to power.”
“The only virtue of power is that, in the end, it inevitably produces a revolution against itself.”
* Marcos
“History has taught us that even in the outstanding cases when tyranny or dictatorships were overthrown by revolutionary liberating forces, disillusionment sooner or later followed when the basic principles of justice and freedom, which led the struggle, begin to decay”
“our people taught us that it was not a matter of substituting a domination with another domination; that we should convince, not conquer by vanquishing and destroying”
* Marcos
“In fact they consider that there are other kinds of democracy, not only the representative electoral one, such as the participative and communitarian form, where the word “we” stands out over the word “I.” “Our democracy does not fit in the ballots,” they declared, after having discussed it and decided everything in our Assemblies, “where everyone has the right and obligation to speak and be heard.”
“Many times they have tried. But due to the strong determination and the values they have built in their autonomous self-government, education, and health service as well as the status of women, they have resisted, giving hope to many Mexicans and all those who have visited them from abroad.”
“Today, twenty years later, there still are many active solidarity committees in many countries that keep returning to their events in Chiapas or elsewhere.”
“Zapatiste” is being organized by Paris VIII University, to which I was invited. Despite our government’s interests in wiping the Zapatistas off our map, they have not been able to do it. This, however, has not stopped the governing class from continuous, violent aggressions with regard to the recuperated territories, without which they could not be autonomous, autonomy being the key to building new human relations and values and to making their famous slogan true: “We want to build a world that holds (includes) many worlds”
“Despite this injustice they answered back with another lesson, far from falling to the provocation of those in power. They kept an unexpected, disciplined, peaceful attitude in saying
“We don’t want vengeance, we want justice.”
“My conclusion is that for a considerable part of our population, this interstice has become an alternative that provides us with some oxygen and hope, and not only rage! How far, then, can we say that this hidden Mexican interstice has actually escaped the Hydra of capitalism, giving many of us the hope that a more human society is possible, even if it as yet exists only at a micro scale?”
“These organized minorities or interstices that give place to ‘possibility’ as a category, coexist already at a micro-scale and are working on an alternative platform, seeking a different kind of politics that may allow different kinds of human practice and human relations, while sharing a common goal: to build a more just society, free from ideological manipulation, misery and oppression.”
* Althusser
“Considering what I have stressed above and given his visionary approach couldn’t we have enough grounds to announce a different crisis today, in order to repeat, with Althusser, “Vive la Crise!,” both in the sense of chaos and catastrophe—since capitalism still prevails—but also in that other meaning, in favor of a new revival or transformation—given that multiple interstices have intertwined within the capitalist/neoliberal stage”
“In closing, we can agree with Derrida’s words at Althusser’s funeral: “His work is valuable because it bears witness and takes risks.” What he never knew was how far—in those widespread geographies along the globe—his ideas have landed and germinated.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2018
Contemporary scholars of Marxism and philosophy takes on Althusser's reading of Marx's Capital. Informative and fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews