Recent Italian translations of Althusserian texts on aleatory materialism
Augusto Illuminati
Translated by Arianna Bove, this essay first appeared in Borderlands special edition on Althusser; thanks to the author and editors for permission to publish it here. Edited for G-O by EE 10 Sep, 2005.
A series of texts by Louis Althusser from the 1970s and 1980s has been recently translated into Italian from the �crits philosophiques et politiques I, Paris 1994 and published in a complete Althusserian series edited by Maria Turchetto, first for the publishing house of Unicopli and then for Mimesis. Several Italian authors (Fabio Frosini, Fabio Raimondi, Filippo Del Lucchese, Vittorio Morfino) have also recently published works on Machiavelli and Spinoza that are strongly influenced by the Althusserian interpretation. These publications have put the presence of the French thinker back on the agenda and in particular the core themes that go under the name of aleatory materialism or materialism of the encounter.
Louis Althusser’s writings from the 1980s coincide
with a very delicate period in his biography, and in their repetitive
and fragmentary nature, suffer from the scant control the author
exercised over his late production. Nonetheless, they take the most
innovative element of his thought to extreme levels, and are today
perfectly in synch with the historical conjuncture and (hopefully
productive) crisis of communist intellectuals and movements. The
reflections presented in On Aleatory Materialism
(Milano, Unicopli, 2000, edited by Vittorio Morfino and Luca Pinzolo,
with an introduction by Stanislas Breton) correspond to the lack of
foundations of a revolutionary project, and coincide with the greatest
opening up of possibilities, rather than with the cogent necessity of
old models.
If not now, after the forced abandonment of any dialectical
providentialism, when can Machiavelli’s lesson on fortune be better
learnt?
There are two moments of great awareness of the casual necessity of the
revolution: at the apex of success and in the abyss of desperation. A
day earlier was too soon, a day later too late – as Lenin said of the
7th of November, immediately seizing the revolutionary opportunity as
the result of unique and contingent circumstances, the loss of which
would have been irrecoverable for decades. Given a discouraging series
of defeats, or worse, of break-ups, the situation today is reversed.
But the awareness of an imperceptible [sic] fluctuation and of the
irrecuperability of the opportunity is equally alive. The instability
of the movements that have joined the badly defeated Bolshevik and
social democratic parties, and that rhythmically fluctuate between the
crest and the trough of the big waves, is also adequate to the means of
organisation and mobilisation of the aleatory character of historical
events.
The secret philosophy of the encounter runs from Epicurus to Marx in contraposition to every philosophy of essence, logos, origin and telos, of the rational, whether moral-religious or aesthetic Order, it rejects the Whole in favour of dissemination and disorder, it thinks of origin as nothingness and shapeless, ‘it catches a running train’ and, with strong arms, jumps on the wagon that runs from eternity like Heraclitus’ water, without knowing where it comes from and where it’s going. Through the Althusserian image we see in the materialist philosopher almost an IWW activist who travels through America to trigger off strikes, hiding from the cops and beating the industrial centres and mine pits along the railway…
The genealogy of aleatorism starts with atomism goes through Machiavelli (cfr. University lectures of 1962 and 1972 translated in Italian for Manifestolibri under the title of Machiavelli and us, Roma, 1999) and Spinoza – who rejects any transcendental reassurance from practice and knowledge - even through a certain Hegel who circularly cancels the subject and the end in their process, through Nietzsche - the herald of the predominance of deviation on a linear path, of residue over origin - and it culminates in Deleuze and Derrida, with the understanding of limit as the absolute condition of each action and thought. All is repeated and only exists in differential repetition. Deconstruction concludes that the ‘void is philosophy itself’, its infinite possibility with no obligation or attractions. Like history, it is the factual result of a combination of elements, effect without cause, born of the occasional encounter of virtue and fortune.
Marx and Engels’s place in this current of materialism is far more problematic in Pour Marx and Lire le Capital. A relatively more compact positing of the problem can be found in the unpublished Marx dans ses limites (1978), recently translated into Italian and edited by Fabio Raimondi (Marx nei suoi limiti , Mimesis, collana “Althusseriana”, Milano 2004). The text is incomplete and refers to previous texts that are explicitly mentioned in the work, in particular those on the ideological state apparatus. It also contains anticipations of a later project on a subterranean history of aleatory materialism. In the previous two years Althusser had publicly and decisively intervened on two occasions and definitively, though late, broken his ties with the PCF. One was during a lecture at La Sorbonne on the 16th of December 1976, presented to French young communists; the other was during a debate organised by the radical newspaper Il Manifesto in Venice on the 11-13th of November 1977, to which followed the publication of the important essay Marxism as ‘finite’ theory in the newspaper dated April 4th, 1978. During these years the analysis of Machiavelli (and of solitude!) is drawn and with the late 80s approach, paralleled by the tragic murder of his wife and two clinical internments. Contemporary analyses of Machiavelli and Marx have a profound significance. They deal with the question, raised by the Florentine, of how to develop a political action on the basis of a situation of decadence and corruption, of taking initiative whilst counting on nothing and occupying the place of the impossible, and operating on a rupture that connects novelty and beginning. What we need for the regeneration of Marxism and communism is a practical theory that thinks the unthinkable again and takes into account the aleatory character of history. Politics has become unthinkable because it has been swallowed up in the mortal grip between party and state. Marx is not without responsibility for this, in that his limits inhibited the development of a theory that did not rely on the (reversed) mechanism of alienation and fetishism – a Hegelian heritage aggravated by the persistent illusion that Feuerbach [sic] signals its reversal and materialist realisation.
In the cited 1978 essay, Althusser rigorously develops the premise of class struggle as a process without a subject, which entails that no single intellectual (Marx or Engels for instance) or collective intellectual (the Party) can impose revolutionary ideas, of which he/she is supposedly the original author, over it. In other words, it is unthinkable that anyone can apply an idea from the outside, personal or impersonal, on a conflictual dynamic as a possible solution to it. We are at the antipode of the degenerative phenomenon that led Kautsky and Lenin, with opposing intentions, to place revolutionary consciousness outside of the working class, thus abandoning it to mere economism. This is another example of that separation between knowing and not knowing, between managers and subordinates, which is the essence of any class power or of universal history as the history of the victorious, as Walter Benjamin would have said. The reactionary mythology of the party was not Marx’s; however, it recalls the subjectivist historicism of the Thesen �ber Feuerbach, still entrenched in that Fichtian-Feuerbachian orientation that he tried to correct. The anticipated return to ‘things in themselves’ was a ‘delirious but interesting philosophy of history’, still innocent but later capable of producing poisonous fruits. Things got worse when Engels legitimated the continuity with previous traditions - through the infamous theory of the three sources of Marxism: German philosophy; British political economy; and French socialism – a reassuring genealogy that blurs ruptures and subversions, reducing the three mentioned threads respectively to dialectical materialism, scientism and philosophy of history. Hence the recurring Marxian problem of breaking the illusion of an Origin and a correlative End or Meaning of history is in place and doubles the yearning for transparency in an ordered succession of modes of production and their progressive evolution through the exhaustion of their productive forces and shifts to the successive mode.
The decisive turning point, as shown by the critical, reticent and failing stance of 1875 against the Gotha program, lies in the difficulty for theory to deal with the issue of the state and for practice to manage the relationship with the first party-form: German social democracy. In this respect, it is important to note Althusser’s reformulation of the ‘separate’ character of the state, which, rather than a mere reflection of the process of alienation (as in the writings of the young Marx), is a ‘machine’, as in the political writings between 1852 Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Napoleon and the experience of the Commune in 1871. How is it a machine and how is it separate? It is separate from class struggle as a means of external control over it, it is not traversed by it more than marginally, yet is ready to intervene in order to maintain the system of exploitation and eventually to lead a class struggle within the dominant class, to avoid divisions and repress the sectors that threaten to weaken it (see De Gaulle against P�tain or Roosvelt’s New Deal at a time of social crisis). [The state] is a machine in so far as it transform an energy (the violent force of the ruling class) into another energy (the exercise of ‘legal’ power through a body of loyal functionaries, whatever their class) with the aim of ensuring the material conditions of reproduction that allow for the perpetuation and evolution of relations of production and exploitation: the shortening of the working day; public works to contain unemployment levels; the keeping of public order; and a whole range of ‘police’ actions – from repression to biopolitics. The differential of class struggle is transformed by the state into right, laws and norms – in other words, governmentality. Any hypothesis of a state above the classes (as a neutral arbiter) and any illusion of investing class struggle in the state are thus rigorously rejected, as are the pretences of autonomy of the political that had become common currency in the pseudo-Althusserian hyper politicist wing of the Italian PC at the time (see the journal Political Laboratory). Moreover, there is a sharper separation between the category of politics and those of state and party-state; historical innovation belongs to the former and here the contraposition of politique (conflictual initiative, inclusion of the excluded) and police (reformist governmentality) is anticipated. The former Althusserian Jacques Ranci�re will expertly argue this in his La M�sentente (1995).
The 1982 essay Sur la pens�e marxiste (translated in Italian as part of Sul materialismo aleatorio) looks back on the young Engels of Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, as the author of a philosophy without concept nor contradiction, alien to any apologies for a praxis defined as the subjective production of a Subject. Bad philosophical residues and dialectical equivocation pertained to many chapters of Das Kapital, and to a greater extent in the Antid�hring, whilst Engels’ original realism triumphed in the chapter on primitive accumulation of Kapital [sic] and in the Randglossen zu Adolph Wagners Lehrbuch der politischen �konomie (1879-1880), where the contradiction between use value and exchange value disappears with the negation of negation. There is a Marx who conceives of the mode of production as the aleatory encounter of the owner of money and the proletarian deprived of everything; this encounter has taken place and produced an accomplished fact that can be described through the laws of tendency after the event. But there is also a Marx who imagines this combination essentially as necessary a priori, as a structure that generates its elements in order to reproduce itself. Individual stories no longer fluctuate in history as atoms in a void and the bourgeoisie is destined to decompose the feudal mode of production in order to generate one anew, etc. (Le courant souterrain du mat�rialisme de la rencontre, 1982). Only the former Marx is useful to us in the age of globalisation, of dematerialisation and flexibility of labour (which were all greatly anticipated by an essay of 1985). Althusser acutely intuits the shift from traditional politics to ideology, the primacy assumed by economic automation (an anarchic economy indeed), the employment of showmen on the scene of a circus politics: Reagan in the US then; Berlusconi in Italy now. The conclusion is rather sceptical: we find some elements of critique, but no overall strategic prospects or anything that can forecast the future and found a new principality.
We could mistrust an aleatorism still too anchored to the effectiveness of the negative, to the mystical void that prevails on any formalism like nothingness on any form (cfr. Le courant). However, the method is fertile at a time when a new diagram of relations between language, labour and politics posits the question of an alternative between communism and the power of control and exploitation again as a non dialectical alternative determined by an encounter of elements, and on that basis by the subjectivation of new figures of class struggle. In other words, dialectics is not conciliatory and is founded on an unequal and overdetermined contradiction that constantly reproduces its own conditions of existence through the contradiction itself. Althusser’s return to Machiavelli’s notion of ‘chance’ and his reflections on the relation between virtue and fortune obviously leads him to assume the primacy of the relation between things over their intimate essence and that of aleatory materialism over any theology or teleology of the Cause. It thus becomes impossible to predict an end and an origin with respect to the event. From this perspective the most innovative category elaborated by the Italian thinkers of operaismo, which found a popular expression at the international level in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s diptych Empire and Multitude, is notoriously unsatisfactory. Such ideology risks slipping into the dialectical illusion of an inevitably positive outcome of the dis-measure created between the power of cooperation of the multitude and the imperial institutions of control (despite episodes of war and barbaric regressions). But what guarantees the positivity of the multitude and its inevitable seizure of a power reduced to the parasitic surface of the social power of cooperation?
The power of the multitude certainly exceeds structural relations and institutional representation, but not to the extent that, like Christ, it can bear on itself the whole weight of redemption, of a second creation from nothingness. The dis-measure of the multitude is, so to speak, lateral rather than preordained; it is neither omnipotent nor does it stand above the course of the world. Its conflictual nature is never resolved in absolute democracy and even less so in a fusion. It can only be an ‘idle’ community. It is not a subject, even though it produces subjectivity and praxis. Typically, it is praxis without a subject that alone allows for a reversibility of individual bodies and social practices, of singularity and transindividuality and builds provisory collective subjectivities. The lack of the subject coincides with the moment of impotence that makes this omnipotence – denied by the facts – problematic and paves the way for a wise and careful examination of internal inconsistencies, negative factors, and links to the imperial and capitalist command.
The risk is falling into the dialectical temptation of reversing imperial homogeneity into multitudinal homogeneity, swinging between the pretence of an accomplished victory that only needs perfecting, and the epochal delusion that awaits around the corner at the first difficulty faced by the movement. The recourse to imperial war crumbles any assumed homogeneity like the two world wars denied Kautsky’s prediction of ultra imperialism. The effective subjectivation of the cooperative collective labourer has very tortuous itinerary, and promises of non violence, the demure seduction of the voluntary sector and entrepreneurial self-valorisation will not contribute to it; even less the rhetoric of nomadism.
The lack of a Marxist theory of organisation of class struggle – which Althusser pointed out in Venice in 1977 – and the age of politics as the oblivion of politics, following the humorous paraphrasing of Badiou in the famous Heideggerian formula, converge in the denunciation of the statalisation of revolution and party, of their substantial failure after a brief and despicable historical realisation.
The suggestive element in Althusser is his definition of Marxism as a finite and limited theory, i.e. solely relative to the overcoming of capitalism, and more generally a non teleological theory open to the flaws of aleatorism. Perhaps Badiou goes a step further: democracy is the positioning of the particular under the law of the universality of political will, the conjunction between singular and political situations that follows from an egalitarian prescription, the lack of which causes the return of the manifestations of a state particularism that creates exceptions and subaltern categories. Democratic politics creates spaces for emancipation from the community and from the state and keeps declaring the impossibility of non-egalitarian statements. It relies on the latest injustice to cure it, beyond any mass programme or feature, and is wary of the insidiousness of institutional subordination inherent to any subversive initiative. Let us recognise that in this way the Marxian link between exclusion and inter-modal class – i.e. the capability of shifting from one to another mode of production – is weakened. However plausibly defined as another term for labour-force more than the biopolitical aspect of human kind, the multitude has no coherence and its role remains far from that of the Marxian industrial proletariat. The loss of a latent providential design is one and the same as the loss of an all-rounded socio-economic profile. However, theory cannot afford to regret the loss of a gone reality, it should rather engage in decomposing and negating the present one.
Augusto Illuminati, Universit� di Urbino
Translator’s notes:
(1) The published English translation actually is ‘The world is
everything that is the case’, L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus
logico-philosophicus, London: Routlegde, 1998. The Italian reads: ‘il
mondo � tutto ci� che accade’.
(2) Illuminati writes: ‘Il mondo � tutto ci� che (ac)cade, � tutto ci�
di cui il � il caso, caduta, occorrenza, casualit�).
