Althussers Interpretive Interventionalism: Reconsidering Symptomatic Reading

With the exception of a relatively small but recently growing group of scholars who have worked on Althussers theories in the decades after his death in 1990, Althusser is better remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for having strangled his wife in one of many bouts of mental instability from which he suffered throughout his life than for his scholarly achievements. Only few of his contributions, such as his notion of ideology have, at least in some academic circles, withstood the test of time, others such as his method of interpretation have largely been forgotten. However, even at the height of scholarly interest in Althussers work in the late 1960s and 70s, its interpretive method had often been discussed only in passing, if it was discussed at all, and it had almost always been limited to Althussers analyses of Marx texts. This is hardly surprising; for Althusser has developed his method, which is inspired by Marx amongst other thinkers, in part to improve our understanding of Marxs texts, in part to supplement insights that Marx never fully developed. The inaccurate conclusion many scholars draw from this is that his interpretive approach, which he called symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale), is a mere heuristic designed for an interpretation of Marxs texts and that Althusser is not (concerned) with methods of reading, generally.1 However, Althusser himself has insisted on the much broader applicability of his approach and has deployed the latter in his readings of such thinkers as Machiavelli and Rousseau (among many others). Even though some scholars have recently rediscovered Althusser for themselves, having been aided
1

Alison Assiter: Althusser and Feminism. London: Pluto, 1990, p. 17.

by the posthumous publication of material that was previously unavailable to the wider academic community, his method of interpretation and its implementation to Machiavelli continue to be ignored. An attempt to consider and assess his method in its application to Machiavellis The Prince will be made in the chapter that follows. Any such attempt, however, faces sooner rather than later the question whether a Marxian method of interpretation is of any relevance today. Marxian hermeneutics, more than any other method of textual interpretation, has come into disrepute, since Marxian interpreters are said to reduce each text to a passive reflection of its economic context, of viewing the author as determined by the economic mode of production and as representative of his or her class. 2 In short, they are frequently criticized for providing interpretations that are reductive, deterministic, and suffused with grand-narrative privileging of revolutionary class struggle.3 In other words, Marxian hermeneuts allegedly view texts as fully implicated within the society and the economic context in which they were written, thus rejecting the humanist belief that objective truth escapes the political efficacy of established discourses 4 Accordingly, one might ask whether Marxian approaches have not rightly been rejected on the grounds that their readings of texts are reductive and deterministic? And given that their motifs have often been political rather than epistemological, what, if anything, can they teach us at a time, where virtually nobody appears to be a firm believer in Marxism anymore?5 Those are questions that merit serious scholarly attention, but their answers should not be presupposed in advance. Otherwise, there is
2 3

Moyra Haslett: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke, London, 2000, p. 1. Haslett, 2000, p. 2. 4 Goldstein, 1990, p. 26. 5 Most Marxian interpreters, as Haslett has convincingly shown, defend their method not just on epistemological grounds by arguing that it is more comprehensive than alternative approaches, but on the grounds of its political significance, claiming that its emancipatory ideal, transformative aims and materialist perspectives are worthwhile and politically enabling (2000, p. 15).

the danger that when our selection of what is worth investigating is primarily dictated by our current set of beliefs, by what is en vogue, by what generates publications in reputable journals and by what ultimately secures jobs, we are either surrendering to what we think we are expected to believe or bound to (uncritically) affirm a great deal of our previously held beliefs, due to our unwillingness to be challenged by alternative modes of thinking that might not have lost any of their significance after all. Rather than questioning the decision I have taken to include a chapter on Marxian hermeneutics in this thesis, we should therefore ask ourselves what, if anything, can Althussers approach teach us that other methods have not or cannot. My response will be that Althusser, more thoroughly than any other methodologist discussed in this thesis, reflected on the relationship between interpretive-theoretical work, on the one hand, and concrete political practices on the other. So much so that he conceived of interpretations as interventions in those practices; for what Althusser writes about Marx also applies to himself, namely that his philosophical essays do not derive from a merely erudite or speculative investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in a definite conjuncture.6 In this he might be of interest not just to political theorists who pride themselves in emphasizing the political nature of their theorizing, but he might also pose a challenge to proponents of other interpretive methods due to his rejection (for epistemological as well as political reasons) of the traditional relationship between author, text and reader and his materialist understanding of reading as production. Those gains that make scholarly engagement with his method worthwhile do,

Louis Althusser: For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London, New York: Verso, [1965], 2005, p. 9. What this conjuncture consisted of we will discuss in section II. In the Note to the English Edition of the first published translation of Reading Capital Althusser explicitly supports such a reading, when he says that For the conjuncture in which this text was prepared (1965), for its character as a theoreticoideological intervention in that conjuncture, the reader should refer to the presentation, To My English Readers, in For Marx, see Althusser 2009: Preface.

however, come at a price. For many scholars who may find his epistemological diagnoses on textual interpretation convincing, would, in light of the Marxian pills that Althusser offers as treatment, probably seek treatment elsewhere. The same can be said for the implementation of his method. Though Althussers interpretation of Machiavelli offers a fresh (because unusual) perspective on his texts, his readings are of limited purchase, when one tries to divorce them from his Marxian commitments. Those tentative conclusions already indicate what reading I am guilty of 7, one that on the theoretical level shares Althussers claim that ones theoretical and political convictions meet in textual interpretations in the way of a complex, and often conflicting, marriage of ideas that is not based on a one-to-one correspondence, while holding on to the humanist idea that the semantic content of texts should play a significant role in our interpretations, and that texts are not the mere results of a combination of, on the one hand, problematics of which the author is a mere representative, on the other hand, readers who merely produces texts in order to launch their own interventions, thus revealing my own political convictions as a leftleaning liberal. My discussion will be structured as follows. In the first part I will discuss Althussers approach in light of its theoretical and political contexts (section II). I will then assess his approach based on a critical discussion of its conceptual cornerstones, I shall reflect on the presuppositions that inform his interpretive interventionalism and consider debates on hermeneutics as one of Althussers forays (III). Subsequently, I will assess his interpretation of Machiavelli (IV), and draw the chapter to a close by considering the implications of the findings gained throughout the analysis (V).
7

As Althusser put is, since there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of (Louis Althusser, tienne Balibar: Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London, New York: Verso, [1968] 2009, p. 14).