ALTHUSSER: POLITICS AND DIALECTIC

Aleš Mendiževec

Althusser's Politics: Between Lenin and Machiavelli

In the mid-1970s, Louis Althusser declared a crisis of Marxism. Yet this did not, and likely still does not, surprise anyone, as he did so at a time when the decline of Communism was already evident. More surprising is that Althusser remained an active communist: he continued as a member of the French Communist Party and remained a Marxist (even as he increasingly acknowledged that his own version of it was “imaginary”). He launched a full-blown critique of the established Party-form while continuing to insist on Lenin’s concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. At the same time, and more quietly, he turned to Machiavelli in an effort to develop a new theory of political practice. But how new is this theory – and this politics? More precisely, in what way does it intervene in Lenin’s ideas on revolutionary practice?

Ozren Pupovac

Althusser’s Three Movements of the Dialectic: Structure, Cut, Fusion

Being deprived of the central role of negativity, the dialectic in Althusser remains heir to its Hegelian counterpart through its specific recourse to the figure of the subject-object – the dissolution of the divide between thought and being. And yet, there are three movements here, the entire problem being precisely that of their unity: the dialectic of structure allowing for the dialecticisation the object, rendering intelligible complex, heterogeneous and irreducibly multiple determinations, the incessantly shifting “things” that history is made of – that which Lenin called “conjunctures”; the dialectic of the concept, on its part, with the recurrence of coupure or cut, allowing for incessant reconfigurations of thought, where the progressive purification of representative contents of concepts, and their increasing systematization, allows for a capture of singularities; the dialectic of fusion, finally, aiming to seize not only the constant tension between concept and object, between theory and practice in their common trajectory at the very heart of the revolutionary process, but also the active role of political subjectivity – the inventiveness of mass politics – in its incessant conquest of political autonomy outside of forms of domination by capital and the state. If the unity of the three movements is already difficult to grasp, the true problem is whether the entire schema remains consistent, once Althusser starts questioning the party-form and affirming the insituability of politics with regard to any objective determinations of the concept.