Contenu du sommaire : Althusser

In the 1960s and 1970s, Althusser's ideas were disseminated in different intellectual and political spaces in Latin America. In the context of the transformations then taking place in left-wing culture and the social sciences, Althusser's work was drawn upon by Latin American intellectuals in different ways, for their reflection on their own practice and their link with politics. The Latin American reception of Althusser had the particularity of being directed and controlled by Althusser himself and being relayed by a number of intellectuals acting as mediators between Althusser and the region. This article provides an analysis of how Althusser's ideas penetrated different countries in Latin America, examining the specific modalities through which his work was propagated in the region.

This article analyzes the relatively specific political and theoretical motives, in comparison to other countries in the region, accounting for the modes of circulation of Althusser's work in Mexico. It examines its polemical crystallizations in political debates, but also the way it was drawn upon for the renewal of the left-wing intellectual engagement of Marxism in fields to which it had till then remained foreign, in a broad field of human and social sciences, in the philosophy of science or art criticism. Finally, the author re-examines the highly divergent trajectories taken by some of his supporters and critics from the 1990s onwards, following the fall of socialism, whose reverberations profoundly affected Althusserian Marxism, no less than other suffered no less than other versions of Marxism.

This article explores the affinity, which the concepts of over-determination and conjuncture allow us to analyse, between Althusser's work on the question of temporality and the approaches of three key figures of Latin American Marxism in the 1970s : the Argentinians José Aricó and Juan Carlos Portantiero, and the Bolivian René Zavaleta Mercado. It defends the hypothesis that the vantage-point of the periphery confers a particular incisiveness to the theoretical and political implications of the Althusserian problematization of conjuncture, envisaged as an encounter between asynchronous temporalities and the singular configuration of an « exception without norm ». Finally, it examines the question of the relevance of these conceptual montages for the examination of certain features of contemporary Latin American politics.

Starting from an indicative panorama of the Latin American readings of Althusser, the article attempts to identify the source of Che Guevara's questions, raised by the statements in For Marx setting out the thesis of uneven development as a « primitive law » that « suffers no exception ». It goes on to amplify the contradictory implications of a tendency to « transcendantalise » the principle of unevenness as a « discrepancy » inherent in any structure, in Lire le Capital. Althusser thus prefigures gestures which would then come to be recognized as characteristic of post-structuralist « philosophies of difference ». He also testifies to an unequal development within his own thinking between a philosophical refoundation of dialectical materialism and a reactivation – announced but constantly postponed – of historical materialism.

The article identifies four phases, from the 1980s to the present day, in a South Korean reception of Althusser's work, placed under the sign of an aporia. In the context of the « controversy over the nature of Korean social formation » and the attempt to restore Marxism in the 1980s, Althusser was taken up as a « weapon of revolution » rather than as a philosopher representative of « Western Marxism ». His work could however only be appropriated if it was interpreted in a dogmatic Marxist-Leninist way. The author examines the implications of this, from the 1990s onwards, when a trend to the depoliticization of Korean public space got under way. This would provide the context for the taking up of « post-discourses » which would marginalize the Althusserian contribution, until the beginning of the 2010 decade.

This article is devoted to Kojin Karatani, a representative philosopher in contemporary Japan, and to the indirect dialogue between his structuralist and Freudian reading of Capital (developed in 1974 in Marx : the centre of possibility) and the Althusserian theses in For Marx and Reading Capital. Underlining Karatani's emphasis on the internal heterogeneity of capitalist social formation (later developed through the concept of « parallax »), he follows up the implications of his explanation with Althusserian structuralism, both for the Marxist theory of value and the strategic field of possibility of struggles against capitalism.

The article begins with a discussion of the times and places of the marginal reception of Althusser's work in Iran since the 1979 revolution. It goes on to draw on Althusser's programmatic proposals on ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses in order to analyze the mutation of dominant ideologies, which studies exclusively focused on the singularities of official Shiite Islam have underestimated. Since the end of the war against Iraq and the opening to the world market in the 1990s, these new ideological interpellations have materialized the production of an Iranian « neo-liberal subject » and a new « humanist » discourse, where religious ideology has been fused with a psychological positivism, but also with a paradigm of « cultural development » reactivating presuppositions inherited from colonial history.

In this interview conducted on the occasion of the publication of the French edition of the first volume of his monumental biography of Marx, an ongoing enterprise, Michael Heinrich looks back on his own career, in terms both of politics and theory. He also addresses the specific issues he was confronted with in the project to which he has been devoting his work for several years. In the course of the discussion, he positions himself in relation to the other biographies of Marx, pointing to the way his enterprise breaks new ground, not only for the period covered by the first volume (1818-1841), drawing on points which deal with the period immediately following that examined in this first volume. He also emphasizes the importance of his exchanges with scholars from around the world, an experience which transformed his view of Marx's life and work.

The opening of Komintern archives in Moscow in the 1990s led historians to re-examine the links between the organization and communist parties in Latin America. Following in their steps, our intention here is to confront the place of Latin America in the official texts of the Communist International. To do so, the article draws on the other indicators of its actual presence, both in terms of the role played by envoys and the ideological implications and influence it had for the formulation of a number of theoretical and strategic goals or conceptions.

The question of the limits of the realm of the market is now central in the social sciences. The article questions the moral basis for the refusal of the commodification of certain objects. It starts from the study of a type of object (in the physical sense of the term) whose commodification is today largely rejected – the kidney – in order to identify the moral grounds for this rejection. It then develops a parallel between this « moral economy » and the earlier one, that had opposed the rise of the market economy in the era of the industrial revolution, highlighting the similarities.

This article proposes a critical discussion of the category of « abstract domination » for which Moishe Postone provided the most fully-sustained theoretical formulation in Time, labor, and social domination. After rehearsing the different meanings and examining the range of disparate issues involved in the concept, two conclusions are advanced : that the critique of abstract domination loses all explanatory power when disconnected from the analysis of exploitative relations, with the result that the alternative between the critique of class domination and the critique of abstract domination proves to be unfounded ; that the critique of abstract domination is implicitly based on a dualistic and substantialist social ontology, incompatible with the processual orientation of Marxian thought.

This article starts out from the « meta-structural » axiom of an incompressible duality of the primary modes of rational coordination at the social level : market and organization, which thus constitute the two foci of modern class domination. It analyses this dual mediation in Capital, while also pointing to its erasure in the historicist « grand récit » leading from the (capitalist) market to (socialist) organization. Suggesting the enduring theoretical and practical consequences of this erasure in the history of Marxism, the author concludes by coming down on the side of a « common Marxism », whose task is to reconstruct its programmatic coherence by addressing this duality, the relevance of which is indisputable at the economic, sociological, historical and political levels, and which also has implications for the reaffirmation of Marxism as a theory of modern class struggle.