Althusser and Spinoza

Peter Thomas Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza
Introduction1
Louis Althusser is chie y remembered today, when he is remembered at all, as the progenitor and leading exponent of structuralist Marxism, a curious hybrid which ourished on the left bank of the Seine in the 1960s and later enjoyed the status of an exotic import in the left-wing Anglophone academy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Structuralist Marxism was regarded as the convergence of two independent conjunctures: on the one hand, the structuralist movement, whose emergence in postResistan ce French in tellectual life seemed to offer the possibility of a powerfully unifying discourse across the ossi ed boundaries of the human and social sciences; and on the other, those currents within Western Marxism which were attempting to renew Marxist theory in the space opened up by the partial thaw of Stalinism following Khrushchevs
1 I would like to thank Gary Maclennan, Paul Jones, Dan ONeill, Martin Thomas, Murray Kane, Melissa White, Ben Jones, Daniel Bensad, John Game and Sebastian Budgen for encouraging remarks and suggestions on a previous version of this paper. Ted Stolze, Gregory Elliott, Geoff Goshgarian, Andr Tosel and Warren Montag did not allow positive references to their own work to blind them to the de ciencies of mine.
Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (71113) Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Also available online www.brill.nl
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secret speech of 1956. Structuralism had been hailed initially as a decisive intellectual advance of potentially epochal dimensions (witness the famous closing lines of Foucaults The Order of Things). But it was almost as quickly relegated to the dustbin of history, granted a lingering half-life as a pedagogical prop used in introducing students to post-structuralism. A similar fate awaited the work of Louis Althusser. The advent of Althussers structuralist reading of Marx and of some of the central categories of Marxist theory seemed, for some at least, the necessary correlate at the level of high theory of the more general structure of feeling and revolutionary optimism now referred to by the title of The Sixties. But the Althusserian moment was soon eclipsed by a combination of international political events, tragedy in the personal life of its protagonist, and most importantly, a radical change in intellectual fashion. As Gregory Elliott notes,
The alliance Althusser had sought in the early 1960s between Marxism and avant-garde French theory unravelled after 1968 as the philosophies of desire and power tributary to May drove high structuralism from the seminar room. Althusserianism was thus doubly compromised as a Marxism and as a structuralism. 2
Having hitched [his] Marxism to structuralisms rising star, it seemed that Althussers thought was condemned to follow it into the archive of failed projects.3 Althusserianism passed into the memories (sometimes with fondness, more often, perhaps, with regret) of those Communists and New-Leftist intellectuals who had ocked to its banner in its heyday, while some of Althussers central texts, particularly the celebrated Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation, subsequently became foundational texts in the post-1960s reformulation of the social sciences and cultural studies.4 There was at least one Marxist theorist, however, for whom the equation of the Althusserian tendency with structuralism was far from self-evident: Louis Althusser himself. In his lments dAutocritique of 1974 (published in English in 1976 in the volume Essays in Self-Criticism), Althusser explicitly
Elliott 1987, p. 282. Elliott 1987, p. 283. 4 The most comprehensive accounts of the fate of Althussers work can be found in Kaplan and Sprinker 1993 and Elliott 1994.
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Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza
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denied that he and his co-workers had been structuralists, and, in their defence, offered an alternative intellectual af liation. He argued:
If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange misunderstanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists . . . with very few exceptions our blessed critics, imbued with conviction and swayed by fashion, never suspected any of this. They took the easy road: it was so simple to join the crowd and shout structuralism! Structuralism was all the rage, and you did not have to read about it in books to be able to talk about it. But you have to read Spinoza and know that he exists: that he still exists today. To recognize him, you must at least have heard of him.5
Gregory Elliott has voiced an obvious objection to this line of defence: Admission of Spinozism does not automatically compel acquittal on the count of structuralism, and it had been apparent some time before Althussers confession.6 Some critics, already enraged by the theoretical anti-humanism of Althussers structuralist Marxism, in which human agency was reduced to mere Trger of the relations of production, seemed to regard Althussers declared admiration for one of the most rigorous determinists of the modern philosophical tradition as merely adding insult to injury. So rather than closing the case against Louis Althusser, his confession of Spinozism instead resulted in his Marxism becoming doubly condemned as both a structuralism and as a Spinozism. Yet, as Montag has noted, it is questionable whether this pronouncement was an accurate remembrance of the forces which shaped the early Althusserian project (speci cally, the texts For Marx and Reading Capital), or was rather, nothing more than a retrospective construction, the very condition of which was a renaissance in French Spinoza studies that took place at the end of the sixties.7 Montag points to the lack of any systematic and textually explicit studies of Spinoza by Althusser and his colleagues in this period, arguing that, even if it is true that the Althusserian school developed in a Spinozistic environment, they nevertheless did not produce any sustained work on
5 6 7
Althusser 1976, p. 132. Elliott 1987, p. 183. Montag 1998, pp. xixii.
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Spinoza, certainly nothing resembling their readings of other philosophers.8 Their interest in Spinoza remained vague and indeterminate during the period when the Althusserian paradigms central features were elaborated, and it was only later, in very different political and intellectual circumstances, that it solidi ed into a de nite line of research. Even then, it was not Althusser who produced an extended study of Spinozas relevance to Marxism (his published comments are limited to a chapter in Essays in Self-Criticism, and several confessional passages from his autobiographical writings), but some of his former students and colleagues (primarily, Balibar and Macherey), as their own development led them in directions not entirely compatible with the austere theoreticism for which the Althusserian moment is remembered. Considerations on Western Marxism Nevertheless, as Montag further notes, Althussers assertion in Elements of Self-Criticism that he, Balibar and Macherey were Spinozists, [was taken by Perry Anderson] as con rmation of his worst suspicions concerning Althussers reliance on pre-Marxist thought.9 Anderson was one of Althussers few, blessed critics who had indeed heard of Spinoza. In fact, in the epigraphs to his celebrated and widely in uential study, Considerations on Western Marxism, Anderson gave pride of place to the following juxtaposition of the views of Lenin and Spinoza on the relationship of philosophy to political practice.
Correct revolutionary theory assumes nal shape only in close connection with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement. LENIN The multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I should ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. SPINOZA10
8 Montag 1998, p. xi. Montags comments should be understood as referring to the exoteric doctrines of Althusser and his circle in this period (though he perhaps underestimates the extent of the Spinozistic elements to be found even in these, particularly Reading Capital). Within the general intellectual environment of this group, Spinoza was an abiding and constant presence. Thanks are due to Gregory Elliott for stressing this point. 9 Montag 1998, p. xi. 10 Anderson 1976, p. ix. The quotation from Lenin is from Left-Wing Communism An Infantile Disorder (Lenin 1950, p. 15); Spinozas is from the preface to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza 1951, p. 11). Several features should be brie y noted here
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As the argument of Considerations on Western Marxism made clear, Spinozas statement was considered by Anderson to be a precursor of the esotericism, litism and removal from politics which he nominated as some of the de ning co-ordinates of Western Marxism as a whole. As he noted, without the slightest hint of irony, the very surplus [of Western Marxist theorists works] above the necessary minimum quotient of verbal complexity was the sign of its divorce from any popular practice.11 The fundamental cause of this development, Anderson argued, had been the experience of Stalinism. With
as a corrective to Andersons implicit suggestion of Spinozas litism and removal from politics. First, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) was a work dedicated to combating the intellectual foundations of superstition (the dominant ideological formation of Spinozas time and place, the Dutch Republic of the 1660s) by means of a scrupulous examination of the meaning and history of scripture. Furthermore, it was an intervention into a hostile political and theological climate (as Spinoza, excommunicated from Amsterdams Jewish community and already regarded with suspicion by the liberal Christianity of the Netherlands, knew only too well), one rapidly moving to the Right as the Calvinist orthodoxy and the House of Orange mobilised a discontented populace against the republic of the liberal mercantile bourgeoisie. Spinozas request that those of like passions with the multitude should not read his book (i.e. the multitude in the Netherlands in the 1660s, who were rallying to the banner of reaction and religious orthodoxy) was less an litist separation of intellectuals from the masses than prudent advice to the orthodox among his contemporaries that they were bound to be offended by his demolition of the misinterpretations upon which their prejudices and rgime of mysti cation were founded. (Signi cantly, despite, or perhaps because of, this conjunctural role of the multitude, the political theory of both the TTP and the later, post-restoration Tractatus Politicus are suffused with an awareness that it is the power and imagination of the multitude which determine the course of political events). Finally, the TTP was also designed, in part, as a secular resolution to the ongoing Averroist controversy concerning the proper relation between philosophy and theology which had marked the emergence of modern Europe from the theocracy of the Middle Ages. Spinoza was appealing to an audience of fellow philosophers, or potential philosophers, to resolve this debate nally in the interests of the autonomy of reason, in much the same way as Lenins Left-Wing Communism was, in part, an appeal to fellow communists to adopt a political outlook appropriate to their own concrete political conditions. The passage in full reads as follows: To the rest of mankind I care not to commend my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion; I am aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear; I recognise that their constancy is mere obstinacy, and that they are led to praise or blame by impulse rather then reason. Therefore the multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. They would gain no good themselves, and might prove a stumbling block to others, whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to Theology, and whom I seek in this work especially to bene t (Spinoza 1951, p. 11). For an excellent discussion of these and related themes, see Tosel 1997, particularly pp. 1506. 11 Anderson 1976, p. 54.
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the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European capitalism after the First World War, the rise of a bureaucratic ruling lite in the Soviet Union and the Stalinisation of the Comintern, the connection of Marxist theory and revolutionary working-class practice, which had characterised historical materialism in its classical phase, was severed. 12 Thereafter, Western Marxist theorists led a shadowy half-life on the edge of the Communist parties, bullied, cajoled and disciplined by the apparatus if they chose to remain within them (often resulting in a self-imposed censorship and increasingly cryptic language), marginalised and isolated from contact with the organisations of the working class if they opted for the role of fellow-traveller or friendly critic. Under these conditions, Western Marxism began increasingly to turn towards both pre- and non-Marxist philosophy, a shift symptomatic of these theorists distance from tasks of direct political organisation (giving their thought an increasingly speculative dimension, tending towards the history of philosophy) and working-class culture (leading them to a closer relationship with contemporary bourgeois culture and theory, rather than proletarian practice). Anderson acknowledged that the turn to pre-Marxist philosophy, in particular, had lled a noticeable gap in the comprehensiveness of historical materialism as an intellectual research programme. Any creative development of Marxist philosophy as such, Anderson noted,
would inevitably have had to move through a reconsideration of the complex cognitive history which Marx himself ignored or bypassed. The existing starting-points within the work of Marx itself were too few and too narrow for this not to be necessary.13
This acknowledgement, however, was accompanied by a cautionary note:

At the same time, the dangers involved in a prolonged recourse to preMarxist philosophical traditions need no emphasis: the overwhelming weight of idealist or religious motifs within them is well enough known. 14
If the explication and supplementation of the works of Marx were required, Anderson seemed to suggest, these resources should be drawn from the
12 13 14
Anderson 1976, p. 92. Anderson 1976, p. 61. Ibid.
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experience of class struggle as it has unfolded since Capital not from the formulations and arguments of philosophers whose thought lay on the wrong side of Marxs Copernican revolution. When he turned to an explicit consideration of Althussers Spinozism, Anderson found it to be a particular manifestation, if not the example par excellence, of this general Western Marxism tendency of turning to pre-Marxist philosophy in order to legitimate, explicate or supplement the philosophy of Marx himself.15 Less philologically explicit than other Western Marxist attempts to read Marx in relation to Hegel, Kant etc., Anderson argued that Althussers engagement with Spinoza was nevertheless substantively the most sweeping retroactive assimilation of all of a pre-Marxist philosophy into Marxism, the most ambitious attempt to construct a prior philosophical descent for Marx, and to develop abruptly new theoretical directions for contemporary Marxism from it.16 In order to support this judgement, Anderson had carefully noted the scattered and often elliptical references to Spinoza in For Marx and Reading Capital, which he here systematised and whose signi cance he brie y assessed. The in uence of Spinoza on Althusser was found to be pervasive. Anderson went so far as to argue that nearly all the novel concepts and accents of Althussers Marxism, apart from those imported from contemporary disciplines, were in fact directly drawn from Spinoza.17 Despite the disclaimer that Althusser had also been in uenced by contemporaneous currents in non-Marxist philosophy and other academic disciplines (those thinkers and thought-forms most often noted by Althussers critics and expositors, such as Bachelard and developments in epistemology and the philosophy of science, Lacans re-reading of Freud and psychoanalysis, and, of course, LviStrauss and the high-structuralist tradition itself), the Spinozistic in uences on Althusser, outlined by Anderson, were, in fact, so comprehensive as to leave very little in the Althusserian system which was not directly drawn, taken straight, faithfully derived from Spinoza. Anderson nominated the six following correspondences between the thought of Althusser and Spinoza:18
Anderson 1976, p. 59. Anderson 1976, pp. 645. 17 Anderson 1976, p. 64. 18 The list of correspondences and supporting references occurs on pp. 645. Unfortunately, space will not permit the full examination and explication which they
16
15
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First, Anderson argued that Althussers categorical distinction between objects of knowledge and real objects was taken straight from Spinozas famous separation of idea and ideatum.19 Second, the Althusserian general essence of production, common to both thought and reality, was regarded as none other than a translation of the Spinozan maxim ordo et connexio idearum rerum idem est, ac ordo et connexio rerum (The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things).20 Third, Anderson detected in Althussers controversial thesis of the selfvalidating procedures of theoretical practice and consequent radical elimination of the philosophical problem of the guarantees of knowledge or truth the in uence of Spinozas dictum veritas norma sui et falsi.21
deserve. Passages additional to those offered by Anderson will also be noted for the interested reader. I have adopted the standard references for passages from the Ethics: D = De nition, P = Proposition, Sch = Scholium, App = Appendix. 19 The relevant passages noted by Anderson are: Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40; Spinoza 1985, p. 12. Also important are EIIP6, EIIP7Sch. 20 Althusser 1977, p. 169; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 216; EIIP7Sch. Althusser s account of the process of abstraction in Marx in fact departs from Spinozas emphasis upon the symmetry of the orders within the attributes. For Althusser, in Reading Capital, thought is a peculiar real system, established on and articulated to the real world of a given historical society (p. 42), but this articulation is one of unevenness rather than identity. Signi cantly, Althusser maintains that Marx goes even further [than Spinoza] and shows that this distinction [between idea and ideatum/ thought-concrete and real-concrete] involves not only these two objects, but also their peculiar production processes (p. 41). See, in particular, the following argument: While the production process of a given real object, a given real-concrete totality (e.g., a given historical nation) takes place entirely in the real and is carried out according to the real order of real genesis (the order of succession of the moments of historical genesis), the production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in knowledge and is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought categories which reproduce the real categories do not occupy the same place as they do in the order of real historical genesis, but quite different places assigned them by their function in the production process of the object of knowledge (p. 41) (Italics in original; underlining mine). This divergence is important for two reasons, which will become clearer later in this argument. First, it refutes Andersons thesis of the identity of the concepts: Althusser himself points out that there is a signi cant difference between his (and Marxs) concept and that of Spinoza. Second, because Althusser clearly posits that Marx himself had already taken over concepts from Spinoza and further developed them (even if unconsciously), it refutes Andersons claim that Althussers deployment of Spinozistic themes was a novel and unwarranted development in Marxist theory. 21 Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 5960, EIIP43Sch. Also relevant are Spinoza 1985, pp. 1819, and the de nition of an adequate idea in EIIDiv.
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Fourth, the central concept of structural causality of a mode of production in Reading Capital was judged to be a secularized version of Spinozas conception of God as a causa immanens.22 Fifth, Anderson argued that Althussers passionate attack on the ideological illusions of immediate experience as opposed to the scienti c knowledge proper to theory alone, and on all notions of men or classes as conscious subjects of history, instead of as involuntary supports of social relations, was an exact reproduction of Spinozas denunciation of experientia vaga as the source of all error, and his remorseless insistence that the archetypal delusion was mens belief that they were in any way free in their volition, when in fact they were permanently governed by laws of which they were unconscious.23 Sixth, and nally, Anderson argued that the implacable determinism, which had led Spinoza to argue that Those who believe that a people, or men divided over public business, can be induced to live by reason alone, are dreaming of the poets golden age or a fairy tale, had been adapted by Althussers infamous thesis that ideology is the very element and atmosphere indispensable [to human societies] historical respiration and life.24
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 1879; EIP18. Althusser 1977, pp. 2325; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180; EIIP35. See also Spinozas discussion of the consequences of human ignorance of the causes of things in EIApp. 24 Althusser 1977, p. 232. Anderson incorrectly attributed the quote from Spinoza to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, rather than to the post-restoration Tractatus Politicus. His failure to contextualise this argument politically and historically allowed him to misrepresent it as a deep pessimism, rather than as an expression of the political realism adopted by Spinoza in a period of reaction. After the fall of the Dutch republic, Spinoza composed the Tractatus Politicus as an attempt to analyse the different forms of government, not as political theorists argued they ought to be, but as they had been realised in concrete forms in human history. The passage in full reads as follows: We showed [in the Ethics] that reason can, indeed, do much to restrain and moderate the passions, but we saw at the same time, that the road, which reason herself points out, is very steep; so that such as persuade themselves, that the multitude or men distracted by politics can ever be induced to live according to the bare dictate of reason, must be dreaming of the poetic golden age, or of a stage-play (Spinoza 1951, p. 289). A full exposition of this passage, and a demonstration that it in fact involves a valorisation of the imagination of the multitude rather than a rationalist dismissal of it, would need to refer to at least the following passages: the origin of inadequate ideas in EIApp, the three kinds of knowledge imagination, reason and intuitive knowledge outlined in EIIP40Sch2, the de nitions of truth and falsity in EIIP41 and EIIP35, the de nition of the object of the idea constituting the human mind as the body in EIIP13 and the supporting proposition EIIP29Sch on
23
22
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Just as Althusser had attempted to read the symptomatic silences of Marxs problematic, it appeared that Anderson had attuned his ear to the faint echoes which resonated throughout Althussers own work.25 With the decline of the popularity of the Althusserian paradigm in the English-speaking leftist academy, which was well noticeable even before the publication of Considerations on Western Marxism, and declining interest in Marxism in general, which was soon to follow (particularly those High Theoreticist variants which claimed a privileged access to a Truth denied to mere lived experience), this assessment became for a long period the accepted account of the nature and content of Althussers Spinozism. Considerations on Western Marxism was one of the rst studies in Anglophone Marxism to identify Althussers Spinozistic inspiration, a conclusion which Anderson repeated in Arguments in English Marxism and in the editorial introduction (ascribed to New Left Review, but presumably written, or contributed to, by Anderson) to Andr Glucksmanns A Ventriloquist Structuralism in the anthology Western Marxism: A Critical Reader.26 It was, and to some extent continues to be, widely in uential on subsequent studies of Althusser within Anglophone Marxism. Critics such as, on the one hand, Steven Smith, and, on the other, E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton and Ellen Meiksins Wood, have either reproduced Andersons arguments almost verbatim with little or no further commentary, as in the former case, or brie y mentioned the importance of Spinoza for Althusser in passing, as in the latter.27 Gregory Elliotts The Detour of Theory contains some suggestive discussions of the Spinoza/Althusser relationship and its relevance to historical materialism,
the minds confused knowledge of the body, and, nally, Spinozas observation that although it was the object of the idea constituting the human mind, no one least of all political theorists has yet determined what the body can do in EIIIP2Sch. The reader interested in the evolution of Spinozas political thought is referred to the book-length studies of Negris The Savage Anomaly and Balibars Spinoza and Politics and Warren Montags Masses, Bodies, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries. Montag has also provided an excellent short and accessible summary of the main themes in his Preface to Balibars Spinoza and Politics. 25 The Althusserian notion of symptomatic reading itself bears an important relation to Spinozas proposals for the unmysti ed interpretation of scripture in Chapter 7 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, pp. 98119. For an extended discussion of this theme, see Montag 1993. 26 Anderson 1980, p. 125; New Left Review 1977, p. 275. 27 Smith 1984, pp. 723; Thompson 1978, p. 201; Eagleton 1991, p. 146; Meiksins Wood 1986, p. 18.
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but his assessment remains ambivalent with regard to the interpretation of Considerations on Western Marxism. Two works stand out against the general current of acceptance of Andersons judgement: Andrew Colliers Scienti c Realism and Socialist Thought provides, among other interesting insights into the enduring relevance of the questions raised by Althusser, a novel treatment of Spinozas theory of composite bodies in relation to the Althusserian theory of structural causality. And Christopher Norris, in one of the longest and most signi cant studies of Althussers af nities with Spinoza (Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory) provides a more sympathetic and nuanced discussion.28 Despite these exceptions, Andersons account of Althussers Spinozism became, due to a combination of his pre-eminence among Anglophone Marxists, the novelty of his study in its time and the characteristic con dence of his presentation, an important pole of reference for several generations of both theoretical and activist Marxists. The fact that it assumed this importance, despite its brevity (scarcely two pages, and those in a study whose main purpose was quite other than an examination of Spinozas relation to Marxism), is an index of how totally marginal Spinoza has been until recently not only to Marxism but to Anglophone intellectual culture as a whole. The purpose of this study is to critically assess Andersons judgement, in the hope that one of the obstacles which presently impedes the more widespread engagement of Anglophone Marxism with the thought of Spinoza will thereby be removed. It also attempts to offer an alternative assessment of the nature of Althussers Spinozism, and in conclusion, to posit some preliminary theses to be used in a future study of contemporary Marxist Spinozisms.
Spinoza and pre-Althusserian Marxism

Recent research, however, has indicated that the three assumptions upon which Andersons analysis rested Spinozas externality to pre-Althusserian Marxism, the notion that Althusser was offering Spinoza as a philosophical ancestor for Marx, and that Althusser had directly transcribed certain central propositions of Spinoza are not as persuasive as was perhaps once thought. Indeed, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance
28
Collier 1989, particularly pp. 8090; Norris 1991, particularly Chapter 1.
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in scholarship and interest in Spinoza, comparable to the Spinozism of German Romanticism and its aftermath, which followed the Pantheismusstreit produced by Jacobis disclosure in 1787 that Lessing had considered himself a Spinozist. Beginning in France in the late 1960s, studies by Marxists such as Macherey, Balibar, Tosel and Negri, and more recently, Montag, have been central to the transformation of the received image of Spinoza as a godintoxicated pantheist.29 In particular, these studies have made clear that Andersons claim that Spinoza had been largely external to pre-Althusserian Marxism can no longer be sustained, for two reasons. First, Marx himself had read Spinoza passionately and had even gone so far as to transcribe passages from Spinoza into his notebooks under the strange title Spinozas Tractatus Theologico Politicus by Karl Marx. Anderson did, of course, acknowledge this engagement, but immediately asserted that despite this, there is little sign that he was ever particularly in uenced by him. Only a handful of references to Spinoza, of the most banal sort, can be found in Marxs work.30 Yet, as Yirmiyahu Yovels treatment in Spinoza and Other Heretics has demonstrated (signi cantly, because Yovel is not a Marxist seeking to justify a Spinozist deviation), Marxs engagement with Spinozistic themes extended beyond his youth and explicit references and became an abiding in uence on the works of his maturity.31 Similarly, Anderson was incorrect to argue that Althusser was the rst signi cant Marxist to be drawn to Spinoza, aside from such gures as Plekhanov, Labriola and even Engels himself.32 As Montag notes,
29 A review of these recent Marxist Spinozisms will appear in a future issue of Historical Materialism. 30 Anderson 1976, p. 64. Among the less banal references by Marx is his ranking of Spinoza as an intensive philosopher , a pure ideal ame of science, and an animating spirit of world-historical developments alongside Aristotle and Hegel (Marx and Engels 1975, p. 496). Also important is Marxs argument in his early Critique of Hegels Doctrine of the State that democracy is the essence of all political constitutions, socialised man as a particular political constitution; it is related to other forms of constitution as a genus to its various species (Marx 1974, p. 88). This is a perspective which remains the foundation of Marxs political views throughout his work, nowhere more so than in Capital, and which bears an important resemblance to Spinozas analysis of the foundation of the different forms of government in the Tractatus Politicus. The point is not to play off one list of references against another. Rather, it is that Andersons brusque dismissal on the basis of explicit references to Spinoza in Marxs major works was issued before a thorough study had been made of both exoteric and esoteric Spinozism in Marxs entire oeuvre. 31 Yovel 1989, Vol. 2. 32 As Montag correctly notes, Anderson followed Colletti (a continental point of
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza a de nitive account of [the history of Marxist detours through Spinoza] remains to be written. In each succeeding period of crisis within Marxism, usually occasioned by a stabilization and expansion of capitalism after an economic and/or political crisis that was hailed as nal, in the 1890s, the 1920s, the 1970s and 1980s, prominent Marxists, many of whom (from Thalheimer to Negri) do not t the pro le of the Western Marxist painted by Anderson, turned to Spinozas philosophy.33
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Second, the presence of explicit references or not do not account for what Pierre Macherey has referred to, in reference to Heidegger, Adorno and Foucault, but undoubtedly with Spinoza in mind, as a thinkers philosophical actuality. Macherey has argued that
One can consider a philosophy to be living or present not only because it constitutes a source of reference or an object of study and re ection but because its problems and some of its concepts, independently of every explicit citation, nonetheless in the absence of their author continue to accompany other forms of thought which, elaborated in new times . . . propose to bring new developments to philosophical re ection.34
In fact, this philosophical actuality of Spinozas thought in certain previous Marxisms, and the belief that Spinoza is an important resource for the contemporary regeneration of Marxism, has been the central argument of recent Marxist Spinozist scholarship, most notably in the studies of Macherey, Balibar, Negri and Montag.
reference for the NLR at the time of the composition of Considerations on Western Marxism) in his down-playing of this tradition (Montag 1998, p. x). The following is Plekhanovs account of his conversation with Engels in 1889 in London: I had the pleasure of spending almost a week in long discussions with him on various practical and theoretical subjects. At one point our discussion turned to philosophy. Engels strongly criticised what Stern rather imprecisely calls the materialism in the philosophy of nature. So for you, I asked him, old Spinoza was right when he said that thought and extension were nothing but two attributes of one and the same substance? Of course, Engels replied, old Spinoza was absolutely right (Colletti 1972, p. 72). 33 Montag 1998, p. ix. 34 Macherey 1998, p. 126.
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Marxs only direct ancestor

Similarly, publications after the composition of Considerations on Western Marxism cast doubt upon the assimilation of Althusser s Spinozism to a general trend in Western Marxism to supplement Marxism with themes drawn from pre-Marxist philosophy. Certainly, the often dramatic, rarely textually speci c (and sometimes contradictory) pronouncements ex cathedra regarding Spinoza in For Marx and Reading Capital seem to suggest that Althusser thought of Spinozas work as a prior vantage-point from which to interpret the meaning of Marxs work itself in much the same way as had been done by previous Western Marxist theorists in relation to Hegel. 35 For instance, in Reading Capital, Althusser elaborated his notion of an historical fact . . . as a fact which causes a mutation in the existing structural relations, as a prelude to his de nition of philosophical events of historical scope as those which cause real mutations in the existing philosophical structural relations, in this case the existing theoretical problematic.36 As a paradigmatic example of such a mutation, he then offered the case of Spinoza. He declared that
Spinozas philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marxs only direct ancestor, from the philosophical standpoint.37
Similarly, in For Marx (in the essay On the Young Marx), Althusser proposed that, rather than sublating Hegel, as much of both classical and Western Marxism had supposed, Marx had instead retreated or returned to real history in order to found a scienti c discourse freed from ideological mysti cation. Althusser drew the conclusion that science (Marxism) was not, therefore, the truth of ideology (philosophy), but, rather, was an alternative thought-form generated by returning to the authentic objects which [were] (logically and historically) prior to the ideology which has re ected them and hemmed them in.38 As a part of his clari cation of this thesis, he then proposed that
science can by no criteria be regarded as the truth of ideology in the Hegelian sense. If we want a historical predecessor to Marx in this respect we
35 36 37 38
Anderson 1976, p. 59. Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102. Ibid. Althusser 1977, p. 77.
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza must appeal to Spinoza rather than Hegel. Spinoza established a relation between the rst and the second kind of knowledge which, in its immediacy (abstracting from the totality in God), presupposed precisely a radical discontinuity. Although the second kind makes possible the understanding of the rst, it is not its truth.39
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Assertions like these, therefore, make Andersons conclusion that behind Althussers general (and rhetorical) assertions about Spinozas relation to Marx was a developed and coherent argument which posited Spinoza, rather than Hegel, as the philosophical ground from which to understand Marx understandable.40 Yet, shortly after Considerations on Western Marxism was written, and shortly before it was published, Althussers lments dAutocritique (1974) appeared, in one of whose chapters Althusser offered a more complex account of his reference to Spinoza. This is not to say that he clari ed the speci c substantive points of agreement or divergence between his thought and Spinozas. As Anderson remarked in a footnote attached to his analysis after this event, Althussers account [of his relation to Spinoza] remains vague and generic, characteristically lacking textual references and speci c correspondences.41 Nor is it to claim that Althusser retracted his claim for the relevance of Spinoza to the understanding of the genesis of Marxism. Even more than the brief comments in Reading Capital and For Marx, the chapter on Spinoza in Essays in Self Criticism makes large claims regarding the af nities of Marx and Spinoza, and attempts to offer further arguments (schematically, and in an undeveloped form) for Spinozas solitary pre guration of Marxs thought. What Althusser did offer in this text, however, and which must surely temper any judgement that he was simply following in a long line of Western Marxist turns to pre-Marxist philosophy in order to legitimate, explicate or supplement the philosophy of Marx himself, was an extended meditation on his encounter with Spinoza, in philosophical, personal and political terms. From this text, it can be seen, in retrospect, that the most signi cant feature of Althussers relation to Spinoza was less the substantive
Althusser 1977, p. 78. Further declarations which seem to endorse Andersons interpretation can be found in Althusser s discussion of the distinction between the object of knowledge and the real object (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40), and the notion of structural causality (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 187). 41 Anderson 1976, p. 66.
39 40
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claims he advanced regarding the af nity of Spinoza and Marx, than the distinctive nature of the method of philosophical reading and activity he claimed had informed this encounter. Rather than an explicator of Capital avant la lettre, what Althusser found in Spinoza was instead a foil to facilitate his understanding of Marxs work and his own works relationship to it.
A detour . . . but with regard to another detour

The rubric under which Althusser placed his engagement with Spinoza was that of a detour, a term he used with a precise philosophical sense and consciousness of its Marxist heritage. Having for years banged our heads against a wall of enigmatic texts and wretched commentaries on them, he remarked about the unresolved dif culty of Marxs mature work, we had to decide to step back and make a detour.42 Two reasons were offered for this decision. First, Hegels thought had itself been founded upon a detour: a detour via Spinoza. Or, rather, Hegel had proposed certain interpretations and solutions to problems posed by Spinoza, which had resulted in the distinctive orientation of his own system, which in turn (suitably inverted and demysti ed) had made possible Marxs critical and materialist dialectic (borrowed from the most speculative chapters of the Great Logic of Absolute Idealism).43 Returning to Spinoza, therefore, provided the opportunity to examine those radical features of Spinozas thought (primarily, its antiteleology and anti-subjectivism) which had been submerged in the Hegelian synthesis, only tentatively to reappear so Althusser argued in the work of Marx. As Althusser stated at one point in his comments, Spinoza allows us to perceive Hegels mistake.44 Thus far, it would appear that Althussers detour via Spinoza was consonant with the Western Marxist urge to seek out a prior philosophical vantage point for the purpose of understanding Marx, though the perceived philosophical lineage on which this was based is such that it cannot easily be rejected as an eclecticism diluting the purity of historical materialism with foreign additions (as, for instance, Timpanaros supplementation of Marx with Leopardi
42 43 44
Althusser 1976, p. 133. Althusser 1976, p. 134. Althusser 1976, p. 137.
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could be considered, although Anderson curiously regarded this case as a possible exception to the Western Marxist tendency he condemned).45 However, Althusser s second reason for this detour decisively departs from the template, and furthermore, seems to me to be a much more signi cant and revealing account of the utility he found in reading Spinoza. For Althusser, a philosophic detour was something more than his own idiosyncratic solution to the general problem encountered by all who had attempted to comprehend Marx: the singularity and complexity of his thought. On the contrary, detours, or steps back, were essential to the practice of philosophy. A philosophy, Althusser argued, only exists in so far as it works out its difference from other philosophies, from those which, by similarity or contrast, help it to sense, perceive and grasp itself, so that it can take up its own positions.46 This description applied to no philosophy more than it did to Marxs, whose own experience in fact formed the inspiration and the model for Althussers theory of a detour. What else did Marx do, Althusser asked, throughout his endless research, but go back to Hegel in order to rid himself of Hegel and to nd his own way, what else but rediscover Hegel in order to distinguish himself from Hegel and to de ne himself?47 To emphasise this point, he further noted that Marx . . . was not content with making a single detour, via Hegel; he also constantly and explicitly, in his insistent use of certain categories, measured himself against Aristotle, that great thinker of the Forms.48 Althusser, therefore, proposed that, in order to understand this dynamic which had animated Marxs own philosophic practice thereby entering into the interior of his thought and becoming capable of developing it further to meet the new challenges which had arisen in the twentieth century it was necessary to mimic (or more generously, reproduce) the philosophic procedures and conditions by and under which it had been originally produced. As Althusser acknowledged, the adoption of this strategy of repetition entailed taking certain risks. Marxs own philosophic detours, particularly via Hegel, had not occurred without a theoretical cost (the coquetting with Hegelian phraseology which Althusser thought had misled subsequent
45 46 47 48
Anderson 1976, pp. 60 & 91. Althusser 1976, p. 133. Ibid. Althusser 1976, pp. 1334.
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Marxists; the continuing re-emergence of Hegelian (ideological) concepts even in Marxs mature work; the always provisional status of the epistemological break Althusser would propose in his later revision of the early theorys messianism). But it would only be possible to determine this cost, to understand the price Marx had had to pay for his detours along with that now risked by the Althusserian school, by ourselves working on these detours. In our subjective history, and in the existing ideological and theoretical conjuncture, this detour became a necessity.49 Thus, the primary reason and motivation for his and his co-workers step back:
We made a detour via Spinoza in order to improve our understanding of Marxs philosophy. To be precise: since Marxs materialism forced us to think out the meaning of the necessary detour via Hegel, we made the detour via Spinoza in order to clarify our understanding of Marxs detour via Hegel. A detour, therefore; but with regard to another detour.50
Ironically, given Althussers reputation as the arch anti-Hegelian of the 1960s (a perception which has become less tenable in recent years, with the publication of his early writings and their deep engagement with and critique of the work of Hegel, rather than like so many others its mere rejection), Althussers account of his detour via Spinoza seems performatively to con rm the most Hegelian of philosophic procedures: the phenomenological attempt to grasp the inner form of previous philosophies, as an element in understanding the organic relationships which composed them, recapitulating in thought and in a condensed form the complex cognitive development which formed the prehistory and conditions of possibility of continuing philosophical practice. Like Hegel, Althusser attempted to ground this phenomenology in history that is, in the actual philosophic forms which had occurred in previous epochs by crafting a dense historical narrative which traced the laborious and impeded emergence of what he proposed were the distinctive features of Marxs thought, a veritable Calvary of Marxist science; but also similarly to Hegel, the importance of this condensed Bildungsroman, viewed phenomenologically, was that it enabled Althussers thought to repeat and internalise the signi cant features of those previous forms, in such a way that he would be able to realise their potentials in his own practice.
49 50
Althusser 1976, p. 134. Ibid.
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A further dimension of the strongly affective, personal and at the same time directly political nature of Althussers reading of Spinoza is revealed by remarks originally written for his autobiography, but only recently published in English as a chapter in The New Spinoza. Althussers admiration for Spinoza as a philosophical strategist is clear; in fact, it is perhaps not exaggerating to say that above and beyond any particular substantive philosophic proposition, what most attracted Althusser to Spinoza was the subtle polemical strategy of the Ethics, a revolutionary philosophical strategy which Althusser curiously compared to Maos theory of guerrilla warfare.51 He said:
What also fascinated me in Spinoza was his philosophical strategy. . . . Spinoza began with God! He began with God, and deep down inside (I believe it, after the entire tradition of his worst enemies) he was (as were da Costa and so many other Portuguese Jews of his time) an atheist. A supreme strategy: he began by taking over the chief stronghold of his adversary, or rather he established himself there as if he were his own adversary, therefore not suspected of being the sworn adversary, and redisposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely around, as one turns around cannons against the fortresss own occupant. . . . Generally this is not the way that a philosopher proceeds: they always oppose from a certain exterior the forces of their theses, which are destined to take over the domain protected and defended by previous theses, which already occupy the terrain.52
Althusser further commented that his interpretation of the conjunctural nature of Spinozas thought had a profound impact upon his conception of the political tasks confronting his own philosophical practice. Spinoza had given one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world had ever seen, by occupying orthodox theological positions so deeply that he had transformed them into their opposite, and by outwitting the theologians on their own ground of rigorous scriptural interpretation.53 Might it not then be possible, Althusser seemed to muse, to effect a similar transformation of the reigning orthodoxy of Stalinism, based as it was upon the near-scriptural status ascribed to certain of Marxs and Engelss texts, and possessing its own distinctive
51 52 53
Althusser 1997, p. 11. Althusser 1997, pp. 1011. Althusser 1976, p. 132.
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hermeneutic of diamat?54 Again, it was not primarily a matter of arguing that Spinoza was Marx without a beard, but, rather, of attempting to draw inspiration from Spinoza in order to confront a set of contemporary problems which seemed, at least to Althusser, to have been pre gured in a previous era, namely, the theological disputes of the late seventeenth century. As Althusser revealingly re ected, no doubt this [Spinozas] strategy comforted me in my personal philosophical and political strategy: to take over the Party from inside its own positions . . . but what pretensions!55 The political implications of these pretensions will shortly be examined. For now, Althussers theory of a philosophic detour should alert us to the possibility that something more dynamic had occurred in his engagement with Spinoza than a mere transcription, as Andersons third assumption suggested. As we have seen, Anderson argued that many of the main features of the Althusserian synthesis were directly drawn, taken straight, faithfully derived from Spinoza.56 This was undoubtedly the most serious element in Andersons characterisation of the nature of Althussers relationship to Spinoza, both in terms of its implicit and unargued assertions and the effects its dismissive brevity have had on subsequent Anglophone Marxist scholarship.57 Implicit in it were two questionable, unargued assertions: rst, the assertion that Althussers Marxism was not in fact his Marxism at all, but, instead, the recycling of the themes of pre-Marxist metaphysics, the direct transposition of Spinozas thought into twentieth-century Western Marxism. In other words, the Althusserian systems origin lay in the thought of Spinoza (and in Andersons unfortunate choice of metaphors, he came close to accusing Althusser of a sometimes-acknowledged plagiarism). Following on from this was the second implicit assertion that the political failings of
54 Althusser suggests such an interpretation in his autobiography, when he links the appeal to Marx to the refusal of orthodoxy. Althusser 1994, p. 222. 55 Althusser 1997, p. 11, see also Althusser 1994, p. 222. 56 Anderson 1976, p. 64. 57 This brevity was perhaps unavoidable in a work whose main concern was with themes other than Althussers Spinozism. Nevertheless, given the seriousness of his assertions particularly that Althusser had directly transcribed elements of Spinozas thought the absence of a full analysis of the nature and signi cance of this relationship remains a glaring omission which Anderson has not recti ed in a separate and more extended study despite asserting that further study would have little dif culty in documenting the real extent and unity of the transposition of Spinozas thought in Althusser s theoretical work (Anderson 1976, p. 66).
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Althussers work could, therefore, be traced to its dependence upon Spinoza, or that Spinoza was, in some suitably indeterminate sense (as in the best of all slanders), responsible for those same failings.58 The rst assertion makes it impossible to think the speci city and conditions of possibility of the Althusserian initiative, and to learn the political lessons which Althussers detour via Spinoza holds for those concerned to restore the Marxist unity of theory and practice; the second gave rise to a tendency to judge the relevance and fertility of Spinoza for Marxism on the basis of the perceived failings or successes of Althussers project. Given Althusserianisms spectacular fall from grace in the late 1970s, the equation, in most instances and except for those previously noted, has been deleterious. Both resulted in Anderson endorsing, unintentionally and against the central thesis of Considerations on Western Marxism,59 a theory of an ahistorical transfer of a philosophical essence
58 This may or may not have been the perspective behind Andersons characterisation of Althusser s use of Spinoza; whatever his doubts about the relevance of Spinozas metaphysics and political theory to twentieth-century Marxism, he has expressed elsewhere admiration for the personal character of Spinoza (Anderson 1980, p. 125). Nevertheless, his choice of metaphors had the predictable unfortunate effects on the reputation of Spinoza among Anglophone Marxists. If Althusser = Spinoza, then one can argue that Spinoza must bear at least some of the responsibility for Althusser s errors as in, for example, the following comment of Simon Clarke. In this conception [the theory of Darstellung outlined in Reading Capital] the economic is permanently present in the political and ideological realms, on the analogy of the presence of the Freudian unconscious in the conscious as the absent presence of a present absence. The economic, like Lacans unconscious, exists only in its effects. The philosophical inspiration for this conception is not Marx but Spinoza. It is only by recourse to the Spinozist conception of the relation between God and Substance, with the economic taking the role of God and the political the role of Substance, that Althusser can nd a place for the economic at all. Since it is only an act of faith that can establish the determination, even in the last instance, of the economic once a secular, bourgeois, conception of society is adopted, it is hardly surprising that Althusser s dominant philosophical inspiration is that of metaphysical theology (Clarke 1980, pp. 845, italics mine). 59 For the central thesis of Considerations on Western Marxism was that Western Marxisms philosophic detour was an effect of a complex political situation whose cause was Stalinism and its reverberations throughout the international communist and working-class movement. Anderson developed this analysis in great detail and across an impressive range of theorists throughout this study. Yet, in his speci c analysis of Althusser s relation to Spinoza, he characterised that relationship in terms which seemed to attribute the failings of the Althusserian system to the derisory effects of reading Spinoza not to the complicated (and compromised) nature of Althussers manoeuvring within the heavily Stalinised PCF (a fact even more noticeable given that Anderson elsewhere has offered one of the more balanced political assessments of Althusser s relationship to Stalinism (Anderson 1980, pp. 10030)). In the absence of these necessary historical considerations, Andersons depiction of the nature of
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from one thinker to another which has little in common with the tradition inaugurated by The German Ideology. A properly Marxist intervention into the eld of the history of ideas cannot be content to posit an essential (or even virtual) identity between different thinkers on the basis of an apparent homology between their concepts. Rather, if there is a remarkable similarity between Althussers and Spinozas concepts, it behoves an historical-materialist study to explain the complex interaction of intellectual, historical, and political causes which produced such an extraordinary event.
The return of the repressed

Warren Montags work is the necessary starting point for developing such an explanation. In a guarded critique of Andersons suggestion that Althusser simply and directly transcribed central elements of Spinozas thought, Montag has sought to demonstrate that, instead, a more determined relationship obtained, one founded not merely in a subjective contingency on Althussers part, but, much more importantly, in the similarity and singularity of the historical circumstances in which these two philosophies were produced. Montag argues that
To speak of the in uence of Spinoza on Althusser is already to grant a conceptual rgime that both thinkers refused. The term in uence does not begin to capture the way in which an important part of Althusser s work is itself Spinozist, constituting a theoretical project profoundly internal to the conceptual space delimited by Spinozas works. Of course, as Althusser himself has said, this taking of positions was never simply the result of a personal choice. It was rather that something of Spinozas theoretical struggle, modi ed by the relationship of theoretical forces that characterised the latter half of the seventeenth century, repeated itself in the theoretical conjuncture of 1960s France. This repetition, or return of the repressed, signalled and continues to signal the existence of a con ict to be analysed. 60
As Montag further argues, this repetition should not be understood in terms of a simple reiteration of concepts. Rather, it was a repetition of conjunctural
Althussers relationship to Spinoza committed the classic error which Spinoza denounced as the source of all errors: mistaking effects for causes. 60 Montag 1993, pp. 512.
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features, or more exactly, the re-emergence of a distinctive philosophical and political terrain, which allowed Althusser to attempt to re-actualise signi cant elements of Spinozas thought. When this situation is acknowledged, Montag argues, the Spinozistic themes in Reading Capital which were incomprehensible to many critics become explicable as
not an interpretation of Spinoza but an intervention in the relationship of forces that governs his text, taking the side of certain hypotheses against others, pushing these hypotheses to extreme conclusions, towards the dismantling of a theoretical apparatus in which the notions of transcendence, immateriality or ideality are dominant. This intervention produces a materialism so thoroughgoing that it remains for Althusser s critics, as for Spinozas three hundred years earlier, illegible and unthinkable. 61
In more recent work, Montag has attempted to specify those features of Spinozas thought which made it amenable to such a re-actualisation or re-deployment. Spinozas works, Montag argues,
constitute a philosophy that never de nitively closes upon itself, that is never strictly identi able with a nite set of propositions or arguments that would allow it to be categorised once and for all as rationalist or even materialist.62
He emphasises that this openness should not be understood as an indeterminacy or ambiguity of Spinozas thought, but, rather, as a function of the central philosophical strategy of the Ethics the operation of the Sive (in Andr Tosels phrase), which was the foundation of Spinozas famous depiction of the one substance as Deus sive Natura. This philosophical slogan, Montag argues, summarizes both the content and the form of Spinozas philosophy in the very fact that it simultaneously af rms and denies that it af rms the radical abolition of transcendence. The rst term is translated into and then displaced by the second. God disappears into nature63 but such a translation and displacement must necessarily always remain provisional. Having abandoned all a priori transcendental guarantees, Spinozas denial of transcendence can only become actual, Montag suggests, when it is
61 62 63
Montag 1993, p. 52. Montag and Stolze (eds.) 1997, p. x. Montag 1999, p. 4.
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linked to the movements of the multitude which themselves seek to reassert their immanent power (potentia) against the Power (potestas) of transcendent authority. The 1960s witnessed such a moment, thus making possible the re-emergence of Spinozistic themes in the Althusserian initiative. When those conditions were eclipsed by the reaction of the 1980s and 1990s, materialist philosophies of immanence such as Althussers and Spinozas necessarily began to once more appear illegible and unthinkable. This interpretation represents a real advance over that proposed in Considerations on Western Marxism. By refusing a rhetoric of origins or in uence and, instead, seeking to comprehend the actuality of Spinozas thought in Althusser, Montag is able to move to a consideration of the substantive problems with which both thinkers attempted to deal, rather than a formalist dismissal of them. In particular, his treatment of Althussers Spinozism is the site of the development of a sophisticated materialist theory of the relations between thought-forms from different eras. In Benjaminian terms, Montags analysis can be said to characterise Althussers Spinozism as a seizing hold of a memory when it ashed up at a moment of danger, the forging of an alliance across the centuries with another thinker who had attempted to remain a heretic in the truth, through which Althusser sought to gain theoretical resources for his attempt to provide an immanent critique of the reigning Stalinist orthodoxy in the PCF and the international Communist movement.64 By emphasising that this alliance was no mere repetition, but a development of a long-neglected materialist anti-transcendentalism, Montag makes it possible to think the positive and politically enabling features of Althussers Spinozism. Nevertheless, it seems to me that, in at least one respect, Montags analysis remains incomplete: namely, it does not open up the space to think that which divides Althusser from Spinoza as much as that which unites them. Attempting
64 Benjamin 1970, p. 257. Althusser s Augustinian commitment to the PCF (and his coquetting with Maoism) necessarily complicated and perhaps compromised the genesis and effects of his critique. To note this political origin is to remember Althusser s work as a concrete intervention into a concrete political conjuncture. This is particularly important given, on the one hand, the still lingering Thompsonian prejudice, perhaps more often thought in the general Marxist culture than stated in scholarly studies, that Althusserianism was little more than Stalinism theorised as ideology; and, on the other, the tendency to treat Althusser s categories as neutral ahistorical techniques to be absorbed into the arsenal of bourgeois social science.
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to think the differences between Althusser and Spinoza (sometimes, as we shall see, within their apparent identity) is equally as important to the reassessment of the Althusserian legacy as is defending his detour via Spinoza from rash charges of heresy. This is because such a consideration allows us to think both the positive and negative consequences of this detour, and, therefore, the lessons it holds for contemporary attempts to reinvigorate historical materialism by means of similar methods. In order to open up this space, and as a rst attempt to theorise one element of Althussers detour, I will therefore propose the following thesis: rather than the direct transcription of Spinozas thought asserted by Anderson, or the continuation and development proposed by Montag, Althussers Spinozism can be characterised as involving a very complicated transposition of the formal structures of Spinozas thought onto the very different content of twentieth-century Marxist politics.65 If this transposition allowed Althusser to make an important contribution to the ongoing development of Marxist theory, it was not achieved, as Althusser knew only too well, without taking certain risks, the price of which was potentially negative political and theoretical consequences. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this thesis I will conclude by comparing two of the central propositions of Spinozas and Althussers thought: Spinozas equation of cause and effect implicit in his notion of God as an immanent cause, and the Althusserian notion of structural causality. If, at rst glance, Althussers notion appears to have sprung fully grown from the head of Spinoza, this apparent similarity conceals deeper, historical and substantive, discrepancies between the two thinkers which can only be comprehended through developing a fully historicised account of the nature of their relationship and their concepts.66
65 Obviously, I am not suggesting that Althusser adopted the infamously dif cult mode of presentation of the Ethics (more geometrico). Rather, I am referring to Althussers redeployment of elements of Spinozas philosophical strategy, primarily, the treatment of the relations between concepts, between concepts and objects, and the ways of transforming both of these. Clearly, this strictly philosophical thesis will require modi cation when it is brought into relation with an explicit consideration of the other elements of Althusser s detour (the historical and the political), which I hope to attempt in a future study. 66 Space will not permit an analysis of the other, formally similar, notions of Althusser and Spinoza which were nominated by Anderson. At least one pair of these, however, should be noted as a fertile eld for further research: Spinozas theory of the imagination and Althussers theory/theories of ideology. (Spinozas theory of the
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Deus sive Natura

Spinoza scandalised the theological establishment of the seventeenth century by asserting that God was the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things. 67 In the place of the transcendent creator of Judeo-Christian orthodoxy, a God (the in nite) conceived of as prior to and external to his creations (the nite), Spinoza posited that there was only one substance (Deus sive Natura), a being absolutely in nite and self-caused (causa sui), consisting of an in nity of attributes68 by which the intellect was able to perceive the essence of substance and modi ed into the different modes which comprised the entities of the nite world. It made no sense to talk of an omniscient, omnipotent, in nite God, as both Jewish and Christian orthodoxy did, if God was then depicted as possessing attributes similar to those of a human: a will, desire, and appetite, all signs of imperfection and limitation. The only solution to this contradiction, Spinoza argued, was to conceive of God as a true instead of false in nite, as an absolutely in nite being of in nite powers, on whom no limitation could be placed. Counterposing the in nite, conceived as an abstraction, to the concreteness of the nite, was the rst (human, all too human) prejudice which needed to be overcome. As Althusser recognised, Spinoza had overturned the theological certainties of his time by pressing their own logic to a conclusion, until they were transformed into
imagination was in fact the subject of some of Althussers most speci c and detailed observations vis--vis his relation to Spinoza, particularly in the essay published in The New Spinoza). A close examination of the relations of similarity and divergence between these theories, and the historical causes for these relations, might help to counter the still widespread prejudice that the Althusserian notion is nothing more than poorly disguised Stalinism. Furthermore, attending to the development of the relationship between imagination and superstition in Spinozas political texts might help to clarify some of the ambiguities which I believe Althusser introduced into his original treatment of the notion of ideology in Marxism and Humanism by his later revisions in the celebrated Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. 67 EIP18. 68 It is important to note that Spinoza does not, as is often supposed, posit only two attributes (thought and extension) of the one substance. As a being absolutely in nite, God necessarily consists of an in nity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and in nite essence (EID6). Only two, thought and extension, are treated in the Ethics, because it is, precisely, an ethics rather than a metaphysics or encyclopaedic system. As Spinoza states in the Preface to Book II, I pass now to explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or the in nite and eternal being not, indeed, all of them . . . but only those that can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human mind and its highest blessedness.
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something quite other than what the orthodoxy intended. Spinoza did not regard himself as an atheist his response to his critics was, in effect, the famous maxim of Epicurus: Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd. But the consequences of what Althusser called Spinozas unparalleled audacity was to prepare the way for a fully secularised conception of the universe, a plane of immanence, in Deleuzes phrase, which could be explained on its own terms and without reference to a beyond which determined and guided it.69 It was this argument, more than any other, which led to the reputation of Spinozism during most of the eighteenth century as a most per dious atheism. In the changed conjuncture of German romanticism and its aftermath, however, a different interpretation of Spinozas Deus sive Natura began to gain ascendancy for Novalis, Spinoza was the God-intoxicated man; for Hegel, the problem with Spinoza was that far from his denying the divine, with him there is too much God.70 Yet Spinozas contemporaries recognised his philosophy for what it was in its own conjuncture: an intervention against the pretensions of the orthodox theology of the time to maintain the in nite as a beyond from which the nite world was derivative and to which it was secondary. If the concept of God encompassed everything, then the term lost all critical force to distinguish between states of corruption and perfection, the nite and the in nite, this world and a beyond distinctions which were absolutely crucial not only for defending the religious orthodoxy of the day but also for maintaining the political status quo. As both Balibar and Negri have recently stressed, this theological critique cannot be separated from its political context: in the seventeenth century, theological disputes were directly political. Deprived of a distinct status, Deus sive Natura soon became merely Natura, a reduction which did not bode well for that other increasingly dominant duality of the period, Monarch sive State. Spinozas critique of traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of God in the Ethics was in fact tied, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to a critique of the foundations of theocratic political institutions in the history of the Jewish people, and, in the Tractatus Politicus, he extended and reworked this perspective into a critique
69 70
Althusser 1997, p. 11. Hegel 1995, p. 282.
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of all political formations which transferred the democratic power of the multitude to a particular individual or class. A further, crucial consequence of this proposition was that it led Spinoza to reject abstract, mysti catory explanations of phenomena, in favour of concrete knowledge of their determinants. If Nature herself is the power of God under another name, and our ignorance of the power of God is coextensive with our ignorance of Nature, it followed that it was absolute folly, therefore, to ascribe an event to the power of God when we know not its natural cause, which is the power of God.71 Phenomena were to be explained according to the order of causation which obtained in one of the in nite attributes, not through reference to an inexplicable and inscrutable divinity who stood outside the order of nature. Spinoza put this thesis to devastating use with regard to the nature and origin of prophecy and miracles in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and, at the same time, inaugurated a materialist tradition of reading (continued in our own time by Althusser and Derrida) which refuses a hermeneutics which would posit a texts conditions of intelligibility as exterior to its own material, discursive existence. Knowledge . . . of the contents of Scripture, Spinoza argued, must be sought from Scripture alone, even as the knowledge of nature is sought from nature, rather than through deference to a supplementary interpretative tradition.72 The foundation of this attempt was to examine Scripture in the light of its history, that is, to produce a rational account of the conditions of production, dissemination and (often) corruption of a text whose historicity had been made incomprehensible by its subsequent elevation to a divinely inspired status in much the same way that rational knowledge of nature and humans within it had been obscured by the notion that the ultimate cause of their being was separate from them.73 In short, Spinozas proposition that Deus sive Natura was self-caused (causa sui) and in nite demanded a rejection of
Spinoza 1951, p. 25. Spinoza 1951, p. 100. 73 Spinoza 1951, p. 101. As Andr Tosel notes, Spinoza thus establishes a parallel between the Bible and Nature, but this analogy does not lend itself to operations of a spiritualist kind. It is not Nature that becomes a text or a book; it is instead texts and the Bible that become Nature, that is, natural objects open to a natural interpretation. It is no longer a question of an analogy but of an explanation (Tosel 1997, p. 159).
72
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all forms of falsifying abstraction, and a search by the intellect for concrete, comprehensible and explicable reasons, considered sub specie aeternitatis.
A cause immanent in its effects . . . in the Spinozist sense of the term

Althussers notion of structural causality is, indeed, formally similar to this Spinozist critique of a transcendental notion of causality. The general coordinates of this notion are well known. While Spinozas immediate point of reference was theology, Althussers was the two theories of causation of the social totality which he argued had dominated previous Marxism. In Reading Capital, he claimed that
classical philosophy . . . had two and only two systems of concepts with which to think effectivity. The mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity [and] the Leibnizian concept of expression. 74
Those traditions within Marxism which he branded as economist had, according to Althusser, conceived of the determination of the superstructure by the base/infrastructure in transitive terms. The crushing of the Left Opposition, the rise of Stalins socialism in one country, and the institution of state-directed production plans had been accompanied by the elevation of a strict notion of economic determinism (based upon a distorted reading of the base and superstructure metaphor) to a centrality and orthodox status it did not possess during the period of classical historical materialism.75 Although Althusser would not have accepted this foregoing narrative at any stage in
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 186. Space does not permit the full argument required by this assertion. Nor will I attempt to arbitrate between those views which see Stalinist economism as a deformation of a more sophisticated pre-Stalinist Marxism (as I do), and those, like the late Althussers, which view it as the posthumous revenge of the Second International (Althusser 1976, p. 89). I will simply note that, despite the bacchanalian fantasies of the anti- and post-Marxist imaginary, a close reading of the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukcs and Gramsci (among others) reveals vulgar economic determinism as less a fundamental tenet of Marxism, than a corruption used to justify the forced labour camp called the USSR and the cretinisation of the international communist movement in the interests of Soviet imperialism a veritable Deus ex Machina called upon to cover up state capitalisms economic, political and moral bankruptcy.
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his philosophical and political evolution, it nevertheless seems to me that his rejection of economism is properly understood as a rejection of one of the central ideological tenets of Stalinism, in favour of a model of causality which acknowledged the much more complex process of determination between the various practices which constituted the social whole. In economism, he argued, the economy was posited as a rst cause which preceded and remained separate from its effects in the determined superstructure, which were then seen as derivative and epiphenomenal. He rejected this notion of social causation as not only mechanistic and transitive, but also as a transcendental notion which, despite its seemingly secular orientation, was secretly modelled on the properly theological conception of a God who exercised his creative powers to bring the nite world into being. On the other hand, just as economism relied upon mechanical i.e. undialectical, pre-Marxist notions, Althusser argued that the alternative notion of expressivism had also resulted in a relapse to a pre-Marxist theory of causation in this instance, a Leibnizian-Hegelian model which posited the determination of the particular by the universal, or an essence of the whole which was expressed in each particular phenomenal form. Some critics have seen in this particular critique a coded attack upon Stalinism similar to that implicit in Althussers rejection of economism.76 Many more have argued that the tendency Althusser had in his sights in this case was, in fact, that of previous Western Marxisms focus upon the notion of totality as an alternative to Stalinist orthodoxy. Althussers characterisation of previous Western Marxisms notion of totality and dismissal of the interpretation of the theory of commodity fetishism which derived from it (particularly as it was developed in the founding text of that tradition, Rei cation and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat, the central essay of Lukcss History and Class Consciousness) is far from uncontentious. However, whether correctly or not, Althusser argued that this expressivist model, although distinct from (transitive) economism, in that it refused the notion of a privileged rst cause outside the order of causation, was nevertheless complicit with economism, insofar as it continued to posit a cause which remained strictly separate from its effects, even as it entered into a dynamic relationship with them.77 He argued that
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See, in particular, Jameson 1981, pp. 378. The difference between transitive-economist and spiritual-expressivist accounts
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza The Hegelian totality is the alienated development of a simple unity, of a simple principle, itself a moment of the development of the Idea: so, strictly speaking, it is the phenomenon, the self-manifestation of this simple principle which persists in all its manifestations, and therefore even in the alienation which prepares its restoration.78
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Althussers theory of Marxs epistemological break with Hegel required him to reject such a model of causation as non-Marxist. His alternative, following certain brief passages in Marx,79 was the notion of structural causality, in which
the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, . . . the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short . . . the structure, which is merely a speci c combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.80
of causation could be characterised in theological terms as the difference between an Hebraic creatio ex nihilo and a neo-Platonic emanation the two great rivals of the early Christian church, which Althusser condemned as inadequate for the comprehension of the distinctly secular object of modern society. At the same time, however, I believe it remains to be determined by future research whether or not the theory of structural causality does not itself run the risk of collapsing back into an emanationist model, and thus whether Andrew Collier is correct to argue that the Spinozian conception of structural causality applied to society is indeed the only foundation of scienti c politics (Collier 1989, p. 83). 78 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 203. See also the following: The Hegelia n totality may be said to be endowed with a unity of a spiritual type in which each element is pars totalis, and in which the visible spheres are merely the alienated and restored unfolding of the said internal principle (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 204). 79 The most signi cant was the following suggestive description from the Grundrisse: In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign every other production and its relations their rank and in uence. It is a general illumination [Beleuchtung] in which all the other colours are plunged and which modi es their special tonalities. It is a special ether which de nes the speci c weight of every existence arising in it (Marx 1973, pp. 1067; quoted in Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 187). It is important to note, as Althusser did, but as some of his followers have not, that, in this instance, Marx was referring to the dominance in different historic periods of speci c forms of economic production i.e. agriculture, industry etc. 80 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 189. Another example of the anti-transcendental dimensions which had informed Althusser s thought can be found in the following: The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structures metonymic causality on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its
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This notion was similar to an expressivist (Hegelian) account of the totality, in that it focused upon the relationship of elements within the whole (rather than the originary moment of economism), but distinct from it, due to its rejection of a uni ed and unifying centre, maintaining its integrity throughout its particular embodiments, and thus producing a symmetrical totality in which the various elements were equivalent to one another as phenomena proceeding from the totalitys essence. In place of such an essence, the notion of structural causality posited the dynamic determination of all elements by each other in a decentred structure of structures (overdetermination), an asymmetrical totality in which one element was dominant in any particular conjuncture. This dominant element was determined by the economy, but, unlike a strictly economist model, the economy was not necessarily itself the dominant element.81 Wary of any collapse back into economism, Althusser had further added, to the continuing perplexity of both his critics and proponents alike, that the lonely hour of the last instance never comes.82 In
effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 1889). Also relevant in this regard is the notion of an authorless theatre developed in Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 193. 81 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 319. 82 Althusser 1977, p. 113. The dif culty of this seemingly contradictory quali cation can, perhaps, be lessened by noting both its conjunctural and substantive import. In terms of the former, it is important to recognise that the notion that the lonely hour of the last instance never comes was an essentially polemical formulation. Having rejected economism, but nevertheless refusing the symmetry of an expressivist model, Althusser s notion assigned the economic the role of determining dominance; and then, in a second move, in order to prevent the surreptitious restoration of economism, he had immediately stressed the complexity of this process of determining dominance, as against the simple, transitive role played by the economy in an economist model. See the following formulation: the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the rst moment to the last, the lonely hour of the last instance never comes (Althusser 1977, p. 113). In substantive terms, if the priority accorded to the economic in the notion of structural causality was less than that posited by economism, it was still required to be more than in an expressivist model of causation. It was less than economism, because the economy determined not the social totality itself but its dominant element at any particular moment. Yet it was also more than expressivism, because Althusser s repudiation of an essence or centre which manifested itself in its various phenomena (and whose self-alienation and self-restoration had been the driving force of the Hegelian totality) required him to locate the totalitys displaced dynamism in one of its elements, namely, the
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Spinozist terms, the economic gured as one of the elements or attributes (alongside ideology, politics, culture etc.) gathered together underneath the umbrella of the one substance of the mode of production (but in asymmetrical relation to those other elements, unlike the symmetry of Spinozas attributes). Or, in phrases more Althusserian: rather than viewing society as being determined by a single element (the economy), or as a self-alienating and self-restoring totality which subsumed its parts within its (spiritual) unity, the Althusserian notion of structural causality posited that society was a decentred structure in dominance, subject to the contradictions, uneven development and overdetermination of each of the relatively autonomous elements within it, and it was this process itself the structural interaction of each of the elements upon each other and upon the whole which was the cause of the social totality. The social totality was an effect of a cause, which was none other than the totalitys own self-production, or, as Althusser sometimes phrased it, an absent cause, discernible only in its effects.83
economic. The unresolved ambiguity of this central feature of Althusser s theory played a not insigni cant role in the unravelling of the Althusserian paradigm, often in the direction of abandoning the claim of the economys role in determining the dominant element of any particular formation, and which then often led to the elimination of the adjective in the phrase relative autonomy to produce the pluralism Althusser explicitly repudiated. See Althusser 1977, pp. 2012. 83 Although this phrase was sometimes used by Althusser in relation to the theory of structural causality, it seems to me to have remained a rhetorical ourish rather than a developed category (for Althusser s own comments on the curious conditions surrounding the production of this concept in the Capital reading group of 19645 at the cole normale suprieure, see Althusser 1994, pp. 2089, 3523). Despite some suggestive remarks in Essays in Self-Criticism and related writings, Althusser failed to clarify the precise nature of the relationship between his notion of an absent cause and Spinozas causa immanens. Many of Althusser s Anglophone commentators, however, present Spinozas idea of the absent cause (Jameson 1981, p. 35: cf. Jay 1984, p. 409) as a verity. It is important to note two points. First, for Spinoza, God is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things (EIP18). He is not an absent cause, but a cause pervasively present throughout its effects. To speak of an absent cause in Spinoza is either to neglect the fact that particular entities are modi cations within the one substance (and therefore that the cause of their being is not separate from them, as the term absent implies), or implicitly to restore a transitive notion of causation, in which a once-present entity is subsequently absent (God as a catalyst who disappears into his creations once the order of causation is set in motion, rather than a prime mover eternally separate). But, for Spinoza, the identity of cause and effect is immediate, eternal and in nite. Second, as Althusser used this phrase, and as his commentators appear to have understood it, it seems to me to involve a con ation of the notion of structural causality (present throughout the social totality, a cause only discernible in its effects [eine Beleuchtung]) with the related but distinct Althusserian notion of a symptomatic reading. Symptomatic readings emphasis on explaining
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In short, just as Spinoza had done, Althusser arraigned his opponents with unjusti ably positing the cause of social phenomena (either the economy or the essence of the social totality) as existing apart from its effects. The notion of structural causality expressed a vision of society as a decentred structure of structures, subject to the overdetermination and uneven development of each of the structures within it, in which (paraphrasing Derrida) there was nothing outside of the social totality that is, no privileged agent or essence which was either prior to, distinct from, or exterior to the society which they produced. Similarly, just as Spinozas refusal to locate the cause of nite entities in an other-worldly beyond enabled him to attempt rationally to understand the interrelationship of parts within the whole, without reference to an unknown and unknowable ultimate guarantee, the notion of structural causality sought to provide explanations for the phenomena of social life according to thoroughly immanent criteria. It was an attempt to grasp the self-productive complexity of society as a totality, without reference to either a prime mover or spiritual essence which stood unaffected outside of that production process.
Partial and limited totalities

Yet, despite these similarities, there remain important differences between Althussers and Spinozas critiques. First, and most obviously, they sought to explain different objects. Spinozas Deus sive Natura, or one substance, encompassed everything under the sun (and some more), as they were always and everywhere, viewed sub specie aeternitatis. The one substance was determined to act by itself alone,84 or, as Spinoza argued in Proposition 17 of Book I of the Ethics, God acts from the laws of his nature alone, and is compelled by no one.85 A social totality, on the other hand, is an ensemble of human practices, and, as such, is an historically speci c formation. Furthermore, it
(rather than resolving or effacing) a texts contradictions, and on the determinant absence (and therefore presence) of certain themes in a thinker s problematic is a genuine case of an absent cause, of a cause absent from its effects, i.e. the texts material form. Structural causalitys absent cause, on the other hand, only makes sense insofar as it is understood as continuing Althusser s polemic against transitive models of social causation. Taken on its own, it contradicts his claim for the presence of the social totalitys cause in the dynamic of its elements interrelationships. 84 EIDvii. 85 EIP17.
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is subject to external determinations, both from previous societies whose formations continue to exert practical force (the weight of all the dead generations), and by the limits placed upon human practices by their interaction with and interpenetration by other natural, non-human, forces. Spinoza rejected the notion that human society was a dominion within a dominion, in which man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature, determined only by himself,86 because he was polemicising against the view that man was an autonomous subject endowed with a will which suspended the laws of nature. Yet there is another, equally Spinozist, sense in which a social totality must be thought of as a totality within a totality. A social totality, or human society, is a limited subset of the genuinely in nite and eternal totality of Natura, i.e. it is a nite modi cation within the one substance, and as such, must be viewed sub specie durationis. As a nite modi cation, it is not suf cient unto itself; it is in another through which it is also conceived,87 and, unlike Spinozas self-caused one substance, its existence is not identical with its essence88 nor is it necessary,89 but historically conditioned and contingent. Stated simply, a social totality is a partial totality, which derives its being from, and whose comprehension therefore requires reference to, another, more inclusive totality. These totalities are not merely different in terms of appearance; they are objects of a qualitatively different type. One is a genuinely in nite totality, in its essence unbounded by any particular determination; the other is, by de nition, restricted to human practices as they are constituted in social formations. In a strict sense, they are incommensurable. Properties discerned in one cannot automatically be attributed to the other, nor can they be explained by reference to the same criteria. This qualitative difference of the totalities which Althusser and Spinoza sought to comprehend produced a second divergence in their thought: the different consequences of their critiques. I have already noted Althussers declared admiration for Spinozas philosophical strategy, and his attempt to draw inspiration from Spinozas polemic with the theologians for his own intervention in debates over the cause of the social totality. I was fascinated by this unparalleled audacity, Althusser wrote of Spinozas transformation
86 87 88 89
EIIIPref. EIDv. EIDi. EIP11.
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of his opponents theses by pressing their own logic to an extreme.90 Just as Spinoza had dissolved cause into effect, the notion of structural causality attempted to abandon a transcendental notion of the social totalitys cause in favour of an account in which there was nothing outside of the social totality. Yet, because of the historical distance separating their critiques, and because these totalities are incommensurable, Althussers employment of formally similar philosophical procedures did not yield the same results. Arguably, in analysing a social totality as if it were of the same type as Spinozas one substance (in effect, con ating these two distinct totalities and the methods of analysis proper to each), the Althusserian notion of structural causality ran the risk of producing effects which, in the speci c conditions of the late twentieth century, were very different from those which Spinozas critique had produced in its own particular conjuncture. I am referring here to the confused knowledges which gured prominently in the decomposition of the original Althusserian moment, and which formed the basis for many of the hostile critiques of Althussers own work, such as Hindess and Hirst or E.P. Thompson. These can not simply be attributed to external determinations, or, in Spinozas terms, unfortuitious encounters: acts of misreading or misinterpretation, renegacy and apostasy of large sections of an erstwhile Marxisant generation, overdetermination by changing political conjunctures.91 They also possessed intellectual conditions of possibility, or, in non-transcendental terms, they were effects whose causes must be searched for among the elements of the original Althusserian synthesis itself. This is not to argue, in Hegelian fashion, that these developments should be regarded as the truth of the Althusserian system. Rather, it is to follow Althusser himself when, in a Spinozist reversal of the Hegelian
Althusser 1997, p. 11. A full account of these confused knowledge s should include not only the well-known move towards a nebulous post-Marxism by some former Althusserians (most notably, Hindess and Hirst, Laclau and Mouffe), nor only the role played by the Althusserian formation in the more general transitional process of Marxism to postmodernism in the academy, but also the fate of the reception of Althusser in the wider intellectual and political culture, particularly as a complex element in the complex and uneven world-wide process of Communist parties de-Stalinisation throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The role of Althusserianism in this last process is a feature which remains under-explored in recent assessments of the Althusserian legacy. An important political discussion of the reception of Althusser s work in Australia and its journey from oppositional political formation to academic orthodoxy can be found in Althofer 1999.
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telos, he argued that the truth of a philosophy lies entirely in its effects.92 If the potentially negative consequences which I shall outline remained only potential in Althussers own work, and are therefore, as Michael Sprinker noted, outcomes for which Althusser cannot be held solely responsible, it remains an historical fact that they were developments which his writings did certainly help to license, whether these were based upon a faithful reading of the original texts or not.93 Two important potential consequences of Spinozas and Althussers critiques can be contrasted in support of this contention that Althussers and Spinozas respective totalities are incommensurable. If they appear to repeat well-known objections to Althussers thought, it is hoped that their theoretical rather than polemical treatment will allow a more balanced judgement and understanding of the causes and effects of both Althussers work and that of his (more or less faithful) followers. Further, it is hoped that they will furnish preliminary theses for future research into the legitimate and illegitimate possible modes of appropriation of Spinoza by contemporary Marxism. First, because Spinozas Deus sive Natura was an in nite totality, its power was not exhausted by enumerating the various phenomena perceivable by the human intellect. In other words, it was not the sum of its parts. Human practices, like all nite entities, were particular nite modi cations of the one substance, conceived through one of its different attributes, dependent upon the one substance for their Being. But Deus sive Naturas integrity and potency derived not from these modi cations, but from itself as the cause of itself [causa sui]. A social totality, on the other hand, does not possess the same type of objectivity, nor the same relationship to the phenomena which occur within it. It possesses no being independent of the particular humans practices which occur within it, nor does it continue to exist, once those practices themselves have ceased to exist in a strict sense, it is the sum total of its parts. To posit a social totality as bearing to its parts the same causal relationship as that of Spinozas one substance to its modi cations risks
92 Althusser 1997, p. 4. Montag makes the same point in relation to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: As Spinoza remarked of Scripture, a text is to be judged sacred or profane, good or evil, not by virtue of what it says, or even its truth, but by its power to move people to mutual love and support. A philosophical work is thus always an intervention in a concrete situation and is to be judged by the effects it produces in this situation. (Montag 1998, p. xi). 93 Sprinker 1995, p. 203.
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effacing this important distinction. It disregards the speci c ontology appropriate to a social totality and establishes it as a natural formation in-and-for-itself, i.e. as possessing a being independent from the human activities which occur within it. This, in effect, was one of the central objections raised by Althussers opponents to his vision of a structure of structures in which humans were the mere Trger of structural determinations. In polemicising against organicist notions of human agency, it seemed to some critics that Althusser had, instead, naturalised the social totality. It was no longer a consequence of human practices, but an objective structure which preceded, determined and existed independently of them. From the emphasis of previous Marxism on the social totality being a Kampfplatz of contradictory class interests, capitalism now seemed to have become a thing, a great Leviathan brooding over a world which could expect no delivery from its potentates rgime. Second, Spinozas refusal to regard the cause of the one substance as separate from its effects (as did the notion a creator) required him to refute the complementary notion that there remained potentials of Gods power yet to be actualised (providence, or a divine plan). Such a notion supposes a limitation upon Gods power, or a de ciency in his being, 94 a situation which is inconceivable for an absolutely in nite being whose essence coincides with his existence.95 Deus sive Natura was already given in its in nity. As Spinoza argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, nature . . . always observes laws and rules which involve eternal necessity and truth, although they may not all be known to us, and therefore she keeps a xed and immutable order.96 It was this proposition which enabled Spinoza to attempt rationally to understand the necessary order of determinations which obtained within the one substance, viewing them as if from the standpoint of eternity [sub specie aeternitatis], rather than by taking refuge in the will of God, that is, the sanctuary of ignorance.97 The attempt to comprehend a social totality, on the
94 EIApp: if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which he lacks. 95 EIDi: By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing. EIP11: God, or a substance consisting of in nite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and in nite essence, necessarily exists. 96 Spinoza 1951, p. 83. 97 EIApp.
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other hand, cannot assume any such plenitude of being. A social totality is necessarily incomplete, subject to further development and transformation by the human practices which comprise it, which may possibly, but not necessarily, involve the realisation of still dormant potentials. Furthermore, because re ection on the forms of human life . . . begins post festum,98 the concept of a social totality must always be provisional. Future social formations, comprising different practices and relationships, may make possible conceptions of the social whole radically at odds with those produced in our own epoch, not only in terms of its content, but also of its structure. This is another way of saying that, because the concept of a social totality is one of those forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective, for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production,99 it necessarily is modelled, in our own time, on the practices of a capitalist mode of production and its social relations. To efface this concrete determinant by analysing the social totality as if it were Spinozas one substance, however, risks positing, as having a validity for social totalities in general, both contents and a structure which are speci c to capitalist social relations and their comprehension in the notion of a (capitalist) social totality. The nite secretly becomes the model for the in nite, in much the same way as Spinoza argued had been done by the notion that the divine possessed the human features of an appetite, will and desire. In effect, these were the charges brought by many of Althussers critics: that he was covertly projecting the historically speci c features of capitalism onto the notion of a social totality in general (particularly in relation to one interpretation of his theory of the eternity of ideology), and that the social totality had become a self-contained, unfractured plane of self-af rming, mutually reinforcing elements and levels to which there was literally no exterior, not even socialism. The bourgeoisie can be overthrown; the ascendancy of structural causality is without term, in the words of Gregory Elliotts succinct summary which left some critics questioning if even the rst possibility would be realised.100
98 99 100
Marx 1976, p. 168. Marx 1976, p. 169. Elliott 1987, pp. 1745.
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Conclusion
The conclusion to be drawn from this brief consideration of the differences between Althusser s and Spinozas critiques is not the restoration of the Andersonian thesis that Marxists must vigilantly guard against the corruption of their creed by foreign elements drawn from pre-Marxian metaphysics. Rather, it is that attempts to reinvigorate contemporary historical materialism by drawing upon elements of previous philosophies (or, equally, the attempt to judge such efforts) will only be successful if they are undertaken with a full and vigilant consciousness of the historical determinateness of thought and philosophy. This is merely to restate a thesis which has always been the foundation of the Marxist approach to the history of ideas, succinctly encapsulated in a maxim of Fredric Jameson: Always historicise! As I have previously noted, one of the distinguishing features of the Marxist Spinozisms subsequent to and in part inspired by Althusser s (such as Machereys, Balibars, Negris, Tosels, Montags and others collected in the volume The New Spinoza) has been precisely such an attempt to produce a more historically satisfying account of our contemporary relation to Spinozas thought. An assessment of these works and their success in avoiding the negative consequences which I have argued accompanied Althussers detour via Spinoza will form the subject of a future study. I have dealt at such length in this study with Andersons judgement of the nature of Althussers Spinozism, however, in order to open the space necessary for a fuller and unprejudiced engagement with these works and Spinozas thought more generally. Given the richness of these works and their exploration of some of the fundamental philosophical concepts of the Marxist tradition, I believe that such an engagement is one of the pressing tasks for Anglophone Marxism, in both its theoretical and activist forms. Whatever the errors or failings in his initial attempt, Althusser should be remembered as the gure who more than any other made these researches possible, which is, nally, to recover another effect or truth of the Althusserian moment as an important resource for the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
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References
Althofer, Jayson 1999, Activist and Theoretical Marxisms: Early Receptions of Althusser in Australia, Overland, 155: 5661. Althusser, Louis 1976, Essays in Self Criticism, London: NLB. Althusser, Louis 1977, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Althusser, Louis 1994, The Future Lasts a Long Time, trans. Richard Veasey, London: Vintage. Althusser, Louis 1997, The Only Materialist Tradition, Part 1: Spinoza, in Montag and Stolze (eds.) 1997. Althusser, Louis and tienne Balibar 1970, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster, London: NLB. Anderson, Perry 1976, Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB. Anderson, Perry 1980, Arguments Within English Marxism, London: Verso. Balibar, tienne 1998, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowden, London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter 1970, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, Glasgow: Fontana. Clarke, Simon, Terry Lovell, et al. (eds.) 1980, One-Dimensional Marxism: Althusser and the Politics of Culture, London: Allison & Busby. Colletti, Lucio 1972, From Rousseau to Lenin, trans. John Merrington and Judith White, London: NLB. Collier, Andrew 1989, Scienti c Realism and Socialist Thought, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Eagleton, Terry 1991, Ideology, London: Verso. Elliott, Gregory 1987, The Detour of Theory, London: Verso. Elliott, Gregory (ed.) 1994, Althusser: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel 1970, The Order of Things, New York: Vintage. Hegel, Georg W.F. 1995, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E.S. Haldane, Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious, London: Methuen. Jay, Martin 1984, Marxism and Totality. Cambridge: Polity. Kaplan, E. Ann and Michael Sprinker (eds.) 1993, The Althusserian Legacy, London: Verso.
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Lenin, Vladimir I. 1950, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, Moscow: Foreign Languages Press. Lenin, Vladimir I.1961, Philosophical Notebooks, Moscow: Foreign Languages Press. Macherey, Pierre 1998, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, edited by Warren Montag, trans. Ted Stolze, London: Verso. Marx, Karl 1973, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl 1974, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl 1976, Capital, Volume I, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1975, Collected Works, Volume 1, London: Lawrence and Wishart. Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1976, The German Ideology, Moscow: Progress Publishers. Montag, Warren 1993, Spinoza and Althusser Against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention?, in Kaplan & Sprinker (eds.) 1993. Montag, Warren 1998, Preface, in Balibar 1998. Montag, Warren 1999, Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries, London, Verso. Montag, Warren & Ted Stolze (eds.) 1997, The New Spinoza, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Negri, Antonio 1991, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinozas Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. New Left Review (eds.) 1977, Western Marxism: A Critical Reader, London: Verso. Norris, Christopher 1991, Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory, Oxford: Blackwell. Smith, Steven B. 1984, Reading Althusser: An Essay on Structural Marxism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Spinoza, Benedict 1951, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, New York: Dover. Spinoza, Benedict 1985, Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Volume 1, Edwin Curley (trans. and ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Peter Thomas Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

This acknowledgement, however, was accompanied by a cautionary note:

Anderson 1976, p. 92. Anderson 1976, p. 61. Ibid.

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Spinoza and pre-Althusserian Marxism

Collier 1989, particularly pp. 8090; Norris 1991, particularly Chapter 1.

Marxs only direct ancestor

A detour . . . but with regard to another detour

Althusser 1976, p. 133. Althusser 1976, p. 134. Althusser 1976, p. 137.

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Althusser 1976, p. 134. Ibid.

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

The return of the repressed

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Deus sive Natura

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Althusser 1997, p. 11. Hegel 1995, p. 282.

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

A cause immanent in its effects . . . in the Spinozist sense of the term

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Partial and limited totalities

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

EIIIPref. EIDv. EIDi. EIP11.

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza

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