Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in by Katja Diefenbach, Visit Amazon's Sara R. Farris Page, search

By Katja Diefenbach, Visit Amazon's Sara R. Farris Page, search results, Learn about Author Central, Sara R. Farris, , Gal Kirn, Peter Thomas

French thinker Louis Pierre Althusser (1918 -1990) helped outline the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. this day, there's a recrudescence of curiosity in his concept, specifically in gentle of his later paintings, released in English as Philosophy of the come upon (Verso, 2006). This has ended in renewed debates at the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, at the occasion as either philosophical thought and political development, and at the nature of politics and the political.

These unique essays by means of top students objective to supply a brand new evaluate of Althusser's suggestion, in particular in terms of modern debates. equipped in 4 sections that signify the most currents in Althusser's scholarship, the e-book discusses materialism and the various formulations of the connection among politics and philosophy, Althusser's interpretations of political thinkers (including Machiavelli, Deleuze and Gramsci), the assets he presents to critique political financial system and politics in post-Marxist idea, and the theorization of ideology and politics.

Encountering Althusser is a groundbreaking source that highlights Althusser's carrying on with relevance to modern radical thought.

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Extra resources for Encountering Althusser: Politics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical Thought

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Marx against Marx, we said. And yet, the reflection now complete, it is about more than that. What Althusser is seeking in Marx is not merely the philosophy in its practical state that Capital The hazards of aleatory materialism 19 would contain in its theory of the capitalist mode of production and its structural causality, and which would contradict the reference to Hegel’s teleological logic. Henceforth it is this theory itself that is submitted to critique as the product of a tenacious metaphysical rationalism and that is purged of that which linked it to the principle of reason.

This relation is the opening of the event [l’ouverture de l’événement], of its recognition 12 Encountering Althusser and of its knowledge; it lowers itself to a relation of experimentation, interminable, beyond all fantasy of definitive domination. ‘Practice is not a substitute for Truth for the purposes of an unshakeable philosophy; on the contrary, it is what shakes philosophy to its foundations; it is that other thing – whether in the form of the “variable cause” of matter or in that of class struggle – which philosophy has never been able to master.

Anticipating itself, the End (the meaning of the world, the meaning of its history, the ultimate purpose of the world and history) projects itself back on to and into the question of the Origin. The question of the Origin of anything whatsoever is always posed as a function of what one imagines to be its end. 22 It is in this context that Althusser refers to the Heideggerian ‘es gibt’ as a ‘unique proposition’ of the materialism of the encounter in its defining feature [sa pointe aiguë] which is a refusal of order – whether it be rational, moral, religious, political or aesthetic.

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