The publication of the major philosophical works by Louis Althusser in the mid sixties provoked a wide variation of responses in Europe. In the last issue of nlr, Norman Geras provided a careful account of the general design of Althusser’s system, from For Marx to Reading Capital. Geras subjected this system to a Marxist criticism that focused essentially on the idealism of its conception of science, and hence the inevitable inadequacy of its grasp of the relationship between political theory and class struggle—the complex and vital nexus between the conceptions of historical materialism and the practice of the industrial proletariat which Lenin always insisted was constitutive of the nature of Marxism. Such a critique is based squarely within the classical traditions of revolutionary socialism, from which Althusser’s ‘theoreticism’ is—on his own sub-sequent admission—a visible and definite departure, with specific effects on its links to working-class struggle. In this issue of the review, we publish another critique of Althusser’s work that discusses the same system from a very different perspective. André Glucksmann’s essay, printed below, appeared in Les Temps Modernes in May 1967, footnote1 a year after the original French edition of Lire Le Capital had been released, and a year before the events of May 1968. Its remarkable power of penetration derives, paradoxically, to a large extent from the fact that it is not written from the classical standpoint of revolutionary Marxism, but primarily from within the intellectual tradition of European philosophy that pre-dates Marx. For it is precisely this ‘exogenous’ perspective on Althusser’s writings that illuminates, much more clearly than any other critique of them, certain features of his system which have most puzzled Marxists in their encounter with it. For what appears disconcertingly unfamiliar or even indefinably alien to the corpus of previous Marxist thought, conversely becomes readily intelligible and identifiable when viewed against the background of European metaphysical philosophy, from Aristotle to Kant, and Nietzsche to Heidegger. One of Glucksmann’s basic achievements is to show how close Althusser’s affinities are with his pre-Marxist predecessors, and how intimately his system is related to the ‘high’ tradition of philosophical discourse that forms the inherited medium of instruction in European universities. This is an especially important service, in so far as the novelty of Althusser’s vocabulary, and its loans from other contemporary disciplines, have tended to conceal the homology of many of his concepts with those—not of psychoanalysis or linguistics, so often cited—but of anterior metaphysics.

Glucksmann opens his case against Althusser’s theory by levelling the basic preliminary charge that its classification of all social reality into four different types of ‘production’—economic, political, ideological and theoretical—is arbitrary and empiricist. It is unsupported by any sustained argument or demonstration, and indeed lacks any precise demarcation of the frontiers between the different types of production. footnote2 Moreover, Glucksmann argues, this ‘empiricist’ classificatory schedule is coupled with a ‘transcendentalist’ epistemology. It is well-known that Althusser goes to great lengths to separate the ‘real object’ from the ‘object of knowledge’ in his epistemological theory: the latter is the specific object of theoretical production, and is to be radically distinguished from the different ‘real objects’ of economic, political and ideological production that together otherwise compose a social formation. The connection between the real object and the object of knowledge, which ensures the correspondence of the one to the other—that any given ‘knowledge’ is, in fact, a verity—is called by Althusser the ‘mechanism’ of the ‘knowledge effect’. But it is never explored or explained as such: it remains a purely verbal solution to the central problem of his whole epistemology. Glucksmann, however, in a hawk-eyed examination of the letter of the texts in Lire Le Capital, isolates what he claims to be the secret, implicit answer to it presupposed by Althusser’s theory: nothing less than an underlying categorial correspondence between the order of the world and the nature of thought, that is founded on their common essence as productions. The truth of the practice of theoretical production is thus guaranteed by the ontological ‘conditions’ which it shares with the various historical productions that provide the ‘absolute reference-point’ for its object of knowledge. Glucksmann comments that such a philosophical solution is, in fact, a modern translation of Kant’s transcendental epistemology: ‘production’ need only be rendered (back) into ‘being’, for Althusser’s work to fall into place in the long line of traditional metaphysical systems within Western philosophy, and their specific concerns. Althusser’s theory is thus ‘ventriloquist’ because in it the ostensible duality between knowledge and the real is a disguise: in the puppet of theory, only one voice speaks, the general conjuror of the world, the ‘common essence of production’.