If
one had to single out two favorite themes in Althusser, the first
would certainly be reading and the second and very closely related
one would be structural causality. Reading Capital, first the title
of a seminar which took place 50 years ago, then of a seminal
collective book, makes reading a name for philosophy, or at least for
some particular practice of philosophy. One can safely assume that
from the very beginning, reading has been for Althusser the core
practice of his own philosophy. But reading is problematic, it is not
a simple and transparent act as assumed by a naive consciousness.
Reading involves a stage and several actors. There is a text, an
author and a reader. According to a naive reading of reading, reading
would be about recognizing the thought of an author in his text. Two
subjects would then be involved in reading: the writer and the
reader.
In
this scheme, reading becomes interpreting a revelation, just as a
believer interprets a Holy Script, be it the Bible or Quran or even
Marx's Capital. As Marx discovered the mystical and theological
dimension of such common things as commodities, Althusser exposed the
religious character of a common daily practice like reading. In this
naive, commonsensical context, reading becomes an hermeneutical
practice, a practice of interpretation based on the “hermeneutical
circle” by which a text is interpreted through the projection of
the reader's preconceptions, which takes the form of the “natural”
supposition of an author to the text. If I can understand a text,
it's because the text has been written by another subject whose
intention I can discover in and through his text. Sigmund Freud
described this circle in The Future of an illusion as the main
structure of religious discourse, according to which the Script was
supposed true, because its truth is revealed by God and we know it
has been revealed by God through the text of the Script itself 1.
Religion, like any other discourse based on revelation, just begs the
question.
Althusser
will challenge this both mystical and naive conception in his
introduction to Reading Capital, titled “From Capital to Marx's
Philosophy”. Althusser’s criticism of reading as revelation will
be inaugural for his epoch, but at the same time it inscribes itself
in a tradition in the margins of philosophy including Freud and
Lacan, Nietzsche, but also and most importantly, Spinoza. In this
short talk, we will limit us to Spinoza. This is not only the result
of a lack of time, but tries to highlight the strategical importance
of Spinoza for Althusser and, conversely, of Althusser for the
Spinoza “renaissance” taking place in the French thought of the
late sixties and the seventies and still the the drive for many
important philosophical and social researches.
According
to a traditional interpretation, Spinoza has a particular relation
with writing. Leo Strauss presented us Spinoza as a master of the art
of writing between the lines, as a clandestine writer who like
Maimonides or the author of the book Cuzary dissimulated a
rationalist thought wrapping it in a theological language. Contrary
to this assumption, Althusser will present us Spinoza more as a
reader than as a writer. There is a huge difference between a reader
and a writer: both indeed engage with texts, but the latter is
supposed to produce a new text, to be a creator, while the former has
to act on an already existing text. The writer is consequently
considered as a free subject expressing his thoughts in a text, while
the reader would rather be constrained by the existing text he is
facing. For Althusser, the position of the reader will prevail upon
the position of the writer. The materialist philosopher, like the
reader is always already confronted with a structured and complex
reality: the text. There is for the reader, contrary to the writer,
no white page in which to inscribe a novel text, but always an
already written page. Every act of writing begins from an already
existing text, even though this fact is seldom recognized. We write a
text from an already existing text, reading it and, by reading,
modifying it.
As
Althusser assumed in all his works, the question of the beginning of
philosophy cannot simply be answered like in Aristotle by a mere
reference to the “astonishment” of a subject before reality.
There is never a pure and originary consciousness facing reality, but
a reading and already written body, an affected body, marked by
signifiers and affirming its own power in a text. Does this text have
a meaning once you don't presume it is originated in an author seen
as its absolute beginning? What is for a text to have a meaning?
Althusser
will try to answer these questions through a reference to Spinoza. As
we know, Spinoza was declared by Althusser in Reading Capital
“Marx's only philosophical predecessor”, moreover and more
precisely, we know from Althusser's own account of a conversation
with Waldeck Rochet, the then secretary general of the Pcf, that
Althusser compared Spinoza's Theologico-political treatise with
Marx's Capital: according to this analogy, the TTP would be Spinoza's
Capital 2. This means that, conversely, Capital would be Marx's TTP!
A book, like the TTP, practicing interpretation and reading and
involving some theory of interpretation and reading. This assumption
becomes very productive, since it gives us a clue to what kind of
practice of theory and more specifically of philosophy is involved in
a book like Capital which presents itself as a Critique, namely the
Critique of political economy as its subtitle goes. In some way, this
Critique has something to do with Kant’s Critique, but also, and
more relevantly, with Spinoza’s historico-critical method of
interpretation.
We
assume here, basing ourselves on some unpublished notes by Althusser
on the TTP, that Althusser identified as very close methods the one
used by Spinoza in TTP and the method Marx uses in Capital. Both are
based on the same assumption: no subject must be supposed to the
text, the text should consequently be taken as a natural
reality, not bearing a given meaning in itself, but capable of being
known by a human intellect through its properties. Texts, like any
other parts of nature, have no particular complicity with men, they
don’t “speak” to men, they are not made for men to know their
meaning, just as teeth are not made to eat or fish or birds to be
eaten and in general nothing in nature acts according to a finality.
Althusser
will explain in a short text how he understands Spinoza's main thesis
on the interpretation of the Holy Script. Chapter VII of the TTP,
states that the Script should be interpreted by itself. In this it
compares the Holy Script to Nature, that is to a whole without any
exteriority. Knowing Nature is not about trying to guess it's
supposed meaning, but producing it from the very materiality of its
elements, observing and comparing them in order to get some common
properties, the base of common notions. The same holds for the
signifiers composing the text. No living prophet, no ecclesiastical
tradition, no transcendent God will reveal us the truth of the text,
we have hence to produce a knowledge about the meaning of the text
through our own means. Texts, like Nature itself are taken by Spinoza
to be dumb to man’s desire of knowledge.
Althusser
will compare this vision of the Holy Script as the analogon of Nature
in Spinoza with the "lived world" of an intentional
consciousness:
“(crucial
and linked to the principle of explaining the Script only through
itself. Taking it as an immanent whole, an imaginary whole having a
meaning, like any other imagination, without putting the problem of
its cause...like something “lived” in the immanent sense of
lived. Intentional analysis of an essence. The same topic will be
taken by Feuerbach. The problem of its causal, or mechanic or
transcendent causes is not put here.” (Louis Althusser, archive
IMEC, ALT2-A60-08)
By
stating this, he is assimilating the imaginary knowledge of the
Script to ideology, seen as the “lived world” or the world as we
live it. Ideology is not an error on the world, a false
consciousness, but the very fact that we see our relation to the
world as based on a consciousness 4. Ideology is the world, but our
world, the world as we see an experience it. To be sure, a
consciousness is a closure of the individual as a knowing reality in
a set of imaginary representations, that is on representations based
on the passiveness of the individual in front of other individuals
which affect him. In ideology, we don't consequently know the world
as it is, but as it affects us. Certainly, every knowledge takes its
departure from this initial passiveness, but for Spinoza,
consciousness and passiveness are not the last world. There is more,
there also exists an adequate knowledge, the one based on the
individual's own intellectual capacities, which are able to seize
common nations inside the very realm of imagination.
This
means that an intellect -the power to know and to produce knowledge
of a human mind- can discover, better, can produce, in the Holy
Script which is a corpus of imaginary signifiers, common notions. And
it does, since Spinoza is able to single out some very simple
teachings of the Script, which can be known by imagination, but also
by reason. Justice and charity are then singled out from the text of
the Script as its main teachings. Not only these teachings are
extracted from the Script, but also a simple system of theology, an
universal doctrine, supporting the imperatives of justice and
charity. The same lessons learned through reason in the Ethics, are
learned from imagination in the Script.
The
work of the TTP on the Script is the same work human intellect does
on any other imaginary material, namely on any other category of
signifiers, like for instance, the ones of scholastics and cartesian
philosophy in the Ethics. If one is aware of the fact that reason
proceeds from and through imaginary representations, it is easy to
understand how closely related the TTP and the Ethics are.
Imagination is not the other of reason, but its element, the matter
from which reason proceeds and evolves and which always remains,
being the witness of our insurmountable finiteness. Imagination is
consequently not a lower, false degree of knowledge, but human
condition itself. That's what Althusser will incorporate in his
theory of ideology in which ideology is not described as vulgar
marxism does as a false consciousness, but as consciousness in
general, as the insuperable relatively passive condition of a finite
mode of an infinite nature.
There
is however a difference between Spinoza's main works. It consists in
the fact that the TTP has as its main goal not only to produce
rational truth from an imaginary material and to develop by this a
philosophy, but to operate a reverse engineering of ideology. That's
what Althusser will explain in another short note:
“
Spinoza: Draft of a theory of ideology the other way around: 1)
taking into account the whole of the Script in order to draw its
meaning from it, 2) explaining this meaning through the opinions of
their authors -ot their public. The other way round has only to do
with the fact that this meaning come from God and that God Himself is
submitted in his revelation to the theory of the conditions of
ideology.”1
In
TTP, God, instead of being supposed the subject and the author of the
Script is himself submitted to the theory of ideology and appears as
an effect of the text conceived as an overdetermined reality. The
text is, to be sure, no isolated reality, since it is included in a
material world which produced it and still bears it and in which it,
in turn, produces its own effects.
Since
ideology is a positive reality, the result of a chain of causal
processes in nature, it can be described in its working, for
instance, as a useful method to produce obedience to the law of a
sovereign through the affects of fear and hope. What explains the
functioning of a society or a political system is never human reason.
A society and a government are based on human passions. Every
political or social regime is a historically overdetermined
combination of such passions. There is no idea in Spinoza of an ideal
rational regime like the republican government in Kant. Only the
interplay of passions, sad or joyful, makes a regime more or less
favourable to reason, but no political regime can be rational in
itself, since real men are much more led by imagination and passions
than through reason.
The
solid anchorage of human reason in imagination and of human practice
in passion is the point of departure of a non evaluative theory of
imagination/ideology. Imagination and passions are no sins or defects
of nature, but actual dimensions of it. Better than any other marxist
thinker, Antonio Gramsci understood this deep continuity of
imagination and reason when stating that every man is a philosopher.
Nevertheless,this didn't mean, as Althusser would underline in
Reading Capital that reason is the truth contained in imagination,
but that reason has to be produced from imagination. Once we assume
that imagination -or ideology- is our human condition, we can act
upon it as we act upon any other natural reality. Actually we must
know any other natural reality from ideology, from the very passive
knowledge we necessarily have as affected individuals. To be sure,
this knowledge is never immediate nor spontaneous, but the result of
the labour of the human intellect, of our own power or activity as
knowing individuals.
Through
this theory of imagination-ideology, Althusser, on the footsteps of
Spinoza, will debunk any theologico-political legitimacy of political
power. No power, be it the power of a religious hierarchy or the
power of a political leadership is based on a revealed truth. Truth
is never revealed, but produced. This production, based as it is in a
work on a stuff available to everybody cannot be monopolized by a
caste, but must remain a process open to the public. Every attempt to
go counter to this dynamic of public production of the truth based on
the common of men has resulted in obscurantism and political
catastrophe.