Radical Spinoza

It is difficult to overstate the controversial impact of the philosopher Louis Althusser on the western Marxist intellectuals of the 1970s. He began by rejecting the "humanist," Hegelian Marxism that had played such an important role in inspiring the revolutionary uprising of May 1968 in Paris, and, more broadly, the entire New Left of the 1960s, whether in the name of Lukacs, Marcuse, Gramsci, or Jean-Paul Sartre. Instead Althusser attempted to renew the "scientific" dimension of Marxism by purging it of an Hegelian heritage that involved, according to him, such central and ultimately idealist concepts as that of society as an "expressive totality," the proletariat as the subject of history, revolution as the transcendence of alienation, and the historical process as development toward a telos, a consummating end or goal. Proposing instead a rigorous form of "anti-humanism" centered on concepts of society as a articulated totality of complex and heterogenous elements, or "instances," "structural causality" in which the economy is determinate "in the last instance", and history as a process without a subject or goal, Althusser was widely seen as the representative of an ascendent structuralist tendency in European thought that included such thinkers as the linguist Ferdinand de Sasussure, the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. However Althusser himself always rejected the "structuralist" label, and instead identified Spinoza as the primary inspiration for his philosophical revolution in the Essays on Self-Criticism excerpted in the first entry below ("Althusser's Spinoza"). In that rather brief treatment, he claims to have discovered in Spinoza a radically "materialist" approach to philosophical theory, one that rejects the primacy of consciousness and subjectivity as well as teleological causality as a genuine category of knowledge. But above all, Althusser sees in Spinoza's crtique of "inadequate ideas" a forerunner of Marx's critique of ideology as an ensemble of imaginary representations through which people adopt a false and distorted relationship to their real conditions of life. Though Althusser's use of Spinoza lacked scholarly sophistication, it nevertheless initiated the turn to Spinoza that inspired the far more sophisticated and extensive interpretations of a younger generation of radical intellectuals, including Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Pierre Machery, Alexandre Matheron, and Etienne Balibar, coauthor of Reading Capital, probably Althusser's most important book.