Kautzer Review of Geoff Pfeifer, The New Materialism: Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek, Human Studies, DOI 10.1007/s10746-016-9378-4 (Feb, 2016) (original) (raw)
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Underdetermined post-Marxism: insights of Althusser's quest
To what extent, if at all, does Louis Althusser’s innovative use of Freud’s concept of ‘overdetermination’ contribute both to the reworking of Marxist political theory, and to the development of a viable materialist analysis of the social and political world? This paper elaborates and evaluates the theoretical writings of Althusser and Laclau and Mouffe, set within a critical contextualization and appraisal of Marx, Hegel, and Freud and Lacan’s development of psychoanalytical theory. Through a subtle and detailed account of Althusser’s “deconstruction” and reworking of the materialist dialectic, this paper shows that Althusser’s objectives were both to separate Marx’s understanding of the dialectic from Hegel’s and to criticize economistic and mechanistic variants of historical materialism. Yet, paradoxically, his efforts were unsuccessful in seeking to conserve the basic assumptions and parameters of the Marxist paradigm. Nonetheless, the concept of “overdetermination” as developed in For Marx makes possible a richer and more flexible kind of materialist social and political analysis.
Encountering Althusser. Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought
2013
French philosopher Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped define the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. Today, there is a recrudescence of interest in his thought, especially in light of his later work, published in English as Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). This has led to renewed debates on the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, on the event as both philosophical concept and political construction, and on the nature of politics and the political. These original essays by leading scholars aim to provide a new assessment of Althusser's thought, especially in relation to contemporary debates. Organized in four sections that represent the main currents in Althusser's scholarship, the book discusses materialism and the different formulations of the relationship between politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the resources he provides to critique political economy and politics in post-Marxist thought, and the theorization of ideology and politics. Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking resource that highlights Althusser's continuing relevance to contemporary radical thought. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/encountering-althusser-9781441146366/#sthash.qsXzSemE.dpuf
Post-Marxism After Althusser: A Critique Of The Alternatives
2009
This dissertation provides a particular Marxian class analytical political economy critique of post-Marxism. The dissertation demonstrates the ways in which different positions within post-Marxism continue to essentialize the conceptualizations of class and capitalist economy. What distinguishes this dissertation from other dominant critiques of post-Marxism is the anti-essentialist epistemological and ontological position it adopts. By adopting an anti-essentialist epistemological position the dissertation is able to demonstrate the discontinuities and continuities between post-Marxism and the Marxian tradition. The dissertation does this by reading the heterogeneous and disparate post-Marxian approaches as so many different ways to "resolve" the central tension of the Althusserian mode of production debate of the 1960s and 1970s: The tension between the desire to think <em>the overdetermination of social reproduction and transformation</em> and the effort to ...
The recent publication of Althusser’s 1972 course on Rousseau and of his important manuscript, from the second half of the 1970s, on the Initiation to Philosophy for non-philosophers, along with other texts already published from the same period, such as Machiavelli and Us, the ‘Transformation of Philosophy’ lecture and the texts on the crisis of Marxism, offers us the possibility to retrace Althusser’s confrontation with the question of a new and highly original materialist practice of philosophy as a parallel process with this attempt towards a left critique of the many shortcomings of the communist movement in a period of strategic crisis. These texts help us realize that the materialism of the encounter should not associated only with the posthumously published texts from the 1980s, but, in contrast, should be viewed as an integral part of Althusser’s theoretical and political endeavor after this beginning of his self-criticism in the second half of the 1960s. Consequently, the materialism of the encounter, the radical refusal of any teleology and the quest for a practice of philosophy that will liberate the social and political practices of the subaltern classes, the virtual forms of communism emerging the margins and interstices of capitalism, are all integral aspects of Althusser’s attempt to rethink the politics of social emancipation and communism.