The Kingdom of Heaven Must Be Taken By Storm: Assemblage, Essence, and Desiring Matter.

This draft was written a number of years ago for a class on travel literature.  I plan to try to get it formally published at some time, but I suspect that it's going to take a level of revision that will transform it into something remarkably different than this draft.


I initially conceived as writing about Deleuze and Guattari’s essay “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine” in relation to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy as a sort of provocation. There is something incongruous about writing about a set of fantasy novels written for young adults in context of the war machine. The prevocational act can be seen to be implicit in the pop leanings of the entirety of A Thousand Plateaus, and this follows within that trajectory. However the connection is a bit deeper than the desire for some sort of shallow shock appeal. There is a parallel that I find between the work of Pullman and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. That parallel can be found in the lines of force that both works want to both represent (to the extent such a thing is representable) and produce.

The His Dark Materials trilogy comes out of an interesting historical juncture. Coming out of the age of globalization, it finds its primary influence in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, written in the aftermath of the English Civil War, with clear influences from the radical movements of that era. The trilogy draws from two other sources Kleist’s “On the Marionette Theater” and the poetry of William Blake.[1] I want to link this to a certain argument that can be found in Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire.[2] “What is revolutionary in this whole series of philosophical developments stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries is that the powers of creation that had previously been consigned exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth. This is the discovery of the fullness of the plain of immanence.”[3]

This engagement with the past, in this case, the literature of the past, has a direct correlation with Benjamin’s understanding of history. Benjamin argues that “to articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”[4] Negri and Hardt point to a whole series of political and philosophical movements that allow the emergence of an understanding of an immanent power. We must understand that this immanent power was captured to produce the state of things today that of the domination of globally integrated capital, but that it wasn’t the only possibility that was possible within that trajectory.

What becomes clear is that this moment of history ‘flashes’ up at precisely at another moment of indeterminacy. As Hardt and Negri are drawn to the political and philosophical works of the period that fed into the Renaissance, Pullman is feeding off the literature that is produced out of that force. Both point to a conceptualization of both history and power that is not in the thrall of the homogenous, empty time of capitalist sovereignty and secularist thought.

This return (which is not purely a return) to a whole set of metaphors and descriptions linked to the figure of God, allows for the creation of a citadel to launch a critique of the current state of things. When we follow the trajectory of Pullman’s stated antecedents (Milton, Kleist and Blake), we can find a certain relationship with the lines of flight that come out of the history of the class struggle. As Benjamin states, “they manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward that sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.”[5]

We are then offered a redeployment of the literature of the past in order to reconsider the present. This literature explicitly points to the reality of virtuality by positing and exploring a multiplicity of worlds. Instead of a telos that must end in the triumph of capital, we are given an explosive multiplicity of worlds. This reality is an often forbidden knowledge within the societies, either to be suppressed or used for cynical purposes. The conflict between constituent and constituted power is drawn into this expansive map of multiple worlds. One could make a compelling reading of the multiplicity of ways that this explosive power is kept in check by modes of constituted power, but instead I am interested in reading the emphasis that the books put on, which is in the lines of flight. The concept of the ‘war machine’ that Deleuze and Guattari develop in A Thousand Plateaus then becomes an ideal vehicle to explore this.

I am interested in discussing the series in relation to the war machine on three inter-connected themes. The first theme that I want to touch on is that of the mechanism of the war machine. One can make the argument that most of the main social organizations of the book operate on this model; some appropriated by the state, and some not. However, the groups that I am interested in following up on are those that operate on the interstices of society, children, gypsies, and Lord Asriel’s citadel against the kingdom of heaven. From there I want to move into the question of essence. In a sense, this follows up on the question of children. We find the production of an essence as the goal of the children’s war machine. We also get a sense of the problem that is created by a city ruled by children. The last section deals with the question of desiring matter, the rebel angels who are so intent on assaulting the authority. In this, we will be following up on some of the questions brought up by the formation of Lord Asriel’s community and its ambiguities.

As I have earlier posited, the war machine in a multiplicity of ways is the great engine of the narrative of the trilogy. We find war machines flowing throughout the text, from the formations of children, the gypsies, armored bears, etc. These machinic structures act ambiguously in relation to the state apparatus. They cannot be conceived of being innocent of the state apparatus. After all, any number of them are appropriated by the state, the bears, bands of the witches, etc. But even in that act of appropriation, there is an uneasiness in the relationship between the two structures. More significantly, more often than not they act outside of state interests and oppose them. The plot of the books ends in the fusion of these machines against the state under the guise of God, the Father, the Authority.

We open this particular discussion with the war machine that is produced by children. We are initially given a celebratory version of this machine, which we find needs to be problematized later in the book. The particular passage I am interested in looking at shifts the focus of the book from Lyra as an uncomprehending viewer of the politics of adults to the collectivity of children.

Nor was she particularly interested. In many ways Lyra was a barbarian. What she liked best was clambering over the College roofs with Roger, the kitchen boy who was her particular friend, to spit plum stones on the heads of passing Scholars or to hoot like owls outside a window where a tutorial was going on, or racing through the streets, or stealing apples from the market, or waging war. Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was a child’s life in Oxford. Children playing together: how pleasant to see! What could be more innocent and charming?”[6]

We are already introduced to a pair of important ideas within this paragraph. The book is not operating within the universe of the ‘innocence’ of children. The world of innocence is a cover for a world that is as complex and full of conflict as the world of adults. We are operating in a world in which the drive and desire are in full operation. If anything, these drives are more explosive than their adult counterparts. Simultaneously, we are guided to read the complex operations of children on the level of the political through means of analogy.

At the same time, through the character of Lyra we are give an image of the child as ‘barbarian’ and just as often, as ‘savage.’ We find this explicated in the following passage. The linking of children with the primitive has a long standing if not particularly distinguished history within Western thought. We need to acknowledge this lineage in understanding the passage. At the same time, it seems to be indicating a relationship of children in regards to desire.

“That was Lyra’s world and her delight. She was a coarse and greedy little savage, for the most part. But she always had a dim sense that it wasn’t her whole world; that part of her also belonged in the grandeur and ritual of Jordan College; and that somewhere in her life there was a connection with the high world of politics represented by Lord Asriel. All she did with that knowledge was to give herself airs and lord it over the other urchins. It had never occurred to her to find out more.”[7]

Children are controlled by their desires, barely directing the lines of force that are directed through them. This expressed fairly explicitly through the figure of greed. We find that Lyra engages with the world on the premise of greed, although not exclusively so. She is concerned with translating what she encounters into an immediate instrumental advantage for herself. Hence, her relation with Lord Asriel allows her to take on airs, etc. This arises out of a poor sense and development of the capacities of the subject, as well a lack of understanding of the assemblages that the subject is involved in. We find Lyra in this condition, with only the vaguest sense of the political machinery that she is already involved with. In this sense, we find that the desire of children can easily be brought into the gravitational pull of the state, its instrumentality, etc. We find this expressed best in the later descriptions of the mob of children in Cittagazze, the city of children. This element of the war machine of children will be dealt with later.

But lets return to the passage, which pivots the novel from the politics of adults to the world of children. We find very quickly that the proper expression of this world finds itself in warfare. We have already been told that this is deeply alien to the political structures of adults. That is precisely because we are in a different political arena the politics of the band. This puts it outside of the stratiated logic of state logic, into the smooth space of the war machine. As Deleuze and Guattari note, “That is what bands in general, even those engaged in banditry or high-society life, are metamorphoses of a war machine formally distinct from all State apparatuses or their equivalents, which are instead what structure centralized societies.”

In fact, of course, Lyra and her peers were engaged in deadly warfare. There were several wars running at once. The children (young servants, and the children of servants, and Lyra) of one college waged war on those of another. Lyra had once been captured by the children of Gabriel College, and Roger and their friends Hugh Lovat and Simon Parslow had raided the place to rescue her, creeping through the Precentor’s garden and gathering armfuls of small stone-hard plums to throw at the kidnappers. There were twenty-four colleges, which allowed for endless permutations of alliance and betrayal. But the enmity of the colleges was forgotten in a moment when the town children attacked a colleger: then all the collegers banded together and went into battle against the townies. This rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying.

But even this was forgotten when the other enemies threatened. One enemy was perennial: the brickburners’ children, who lived by the claybeds and were despised by collegers and townies alike. Last year Lyra and some townies had made a temporary truce and raided the claybeds, pelting the brickburners’ children with lumps of heavy clay and tipping over the soggy castle they’d built, before rolling them over and over in the clinging substance they lived by until the victors and vanquished alike resembled a flock of shrieking golems.”[8]

We are given a description of a war that very much fits in with the descriptions that Deleuze and Guattari enter into in their description of Go. “But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even: pure strategy… In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from of one point to another: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival.”[9] Energy explodes in all directions, as all permutations of assemblage are explored. One could imagine the structure of alliances being expressed in the throwing of a large grouping of dice, each throw creating a new structure, based on new alliances and affects as the old ones are eviscerated in the throwing of the dice.

In this act, we are given a vision of stasis that is driven by a sort of perpetual motion, very similar to that of the nomad, who travels without a destination. We find that “their rivalry was hundreds of years old, and very deep and satisfying.” The warfare of children is a great engine that produces very little in the way of effects that lie outside of it, and those effects are the minor inconveniences of adult life, broken limbs, windows, bruises, etc. It can be even argued that the machinery of children stays out of the state precisely because of this reason.[10]

If one were to operate within the stratiated logic of state logic, one could make the argument that nothing happens. After all, territory is not taken, cities are not sacked, and both the victors and the vanquished end up in the same condition, as “a flock of shrieking golems.” The warfare of children of course does not act within the logic of chess. It is not directed towards territorial gains, or the destruction of its nemesis, although those may be constructs within a particular game. But to accept this logic is to accept that war is the essence of the war machine. “The pure Idea is not that of the abstract elimination of the adversary but that of a war machine that does not have war as its object and that only entertains a potential or supplementary synthetic relation with war. Thus the nomad war machine does not appear to us the content adequate to the Idea, the invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition of the nomos.”[11] If we avoid that assumption, we can see that this machinery is extremely productive of its constitutive elements.

The first thing that this machine produces is a form of societal organization. Perhaps we need to argue that the band or the gang is the proper organization of children. The children when engaging in modes of self organization consistently place themselves in such a structure, whether this is a matter of the day to day life of Jordan College, the city of children, or the research facilities in the north which captured children for their experiments. We find a similar reading of bands of children, and the formation of the band or the gang in general within the work of Deleuze and Guattari. We are given an example of their war machine against the state within their essay “1227: Treatise on Nomadology—The War Machine.”

This is easily seen in certain band or pack phenomena. For example, in the case of gangs of street children in Bogota, Jacques Meunier cites three different ways in which the leader is prevented from acquiring stable power: the members of the band meet and undertake their theft activity in common, with collective sharing of the loot, but they disperse to eat or sleep separately; also, and especially, each member of the band is paired off with one, two, or three members, so if he has a disagreement with the leader, he will not leave alone but will take along his allies, whose combined departure will threaten to break up the entire gang; finally there is a diffuse age limit, and at about age fifteen a member is inevitably induced to quit the gang.[12]

This structure of organization is based on a whole series of counterpowers, ranging from the ability to disband the structure to the limitations on who can be a member. In effect, these counterpowers continually put the structure of leadership in jeopardy, and make the leader pay attention to the demands and desires of the membership. If there is a form of servitude voluntaire that is to be found here it is on the part of the leader. He only keeps hold of the position of leadership through forms of prestige that are only held through the understanding and acting upon the desires of the group.

But simultaneously, the object of the war machine is not as Deleuze and Guattari point out so eloquently, war. They are instead directed towards producing something immanently within them, new forms of assemblages. We are of course drawing from the notion of the assemblage produced by Deleuze and Guattari. “Assemblages are passional, they are compositions of desire. Desire has nothing to do with a natural or spontaneous determination; there is no desire but assembling, assembled, desire. The rationality, the efficiency, of an assemblage does not exist without the desires that constitute it as much as it constitutes them.”[13] The assemblage both produces the subjects that are engaged in it, as well as being produced by them. The logic of the assemblage escapes out of the liberal/communitarian binary that has haunted certain forms of political thought.

In the case of the children, the assemblages they produce allow for the exploration and expansion of their capacities, the understanding and development of their passions, etc. We need to avoid placing this within a telos of logic; a developmentalist understanding of the subject that place a natural end of the war machine in the normalization of adults. To be certain, more often than not, this process is directed to the production of good subjects of the system, but its essence doesn’t lie there. Instead, we should find it in the ability to understand and control oneself. To place it within a Spinozist framework, they are developing the capacity for freedom. This is what lies at the essence of the war machine of children.

To avoid reading this through a liberal humanist lens, we need to bring out the ‘transindividualist’ implications contained within the notion of assemblage. This concept is developed by Etienne Balibar in order to think through Spinoza’s concept of the multitude. One could say that both Balibar’s concept of ‘transindividuality’ and the concept of the assemblage both are engaged in an understanding of the multitude, and both try to conceptualize communicability outside of the norms of political thought. What I want to bring out explicitly in Balibar’s concept deals with the relationship of subjects to affects. In their reading of Balibar, Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd argue that “relations of communication of affect [which produce the multitude] between human individuals are here subsidiary to the relations of communication between the affects themselves. In this way affective communication is the very concept of ‘the mass’.[14]

In turn we need to understand social arrangements as organizations of affective power. What in turn is accomplished through the play of children is the possibility of creation of these networks, precisely through modes of experimentation with them. One learns how to produce social networks precisely by building social networks. But this is not possible within the limits of coagulated power. Instead we see this formation only possible outside of it. The danger implicit within this project is what causes the agent, par excellence, and the church to come up with ways of disconnecting children from networks of desire. How to remove the capacity of the dust (a manifestation of desire which will be discussed later) to infect the play of children?

To understand what are the full implications of this essence, one can look at what happens with the stoppage of this development. The becoming of childhood is a transitional event, a ‘going under’ to produce something else. So what does it mean to be trapped in that state? This theme is explored in ‘A Children’s World’, the city of Cittegazze, where adults have been driven out of the city and children are left to their own to organize it. The mechanism that keeps this state going are the entities called the specters of indifference, who feed of the substance of the adults of the city. In effect, as the children reach maturity, they are either culled by the spectors or are driven away. The seeming stasis of children in turn becomes a real stasis, as that the conatus or drive of the children is taken away.

The initial comment on the ‘savagery’ or the lack of control over the passions takes on new implications within this situation. We find a society that is driven by superstition and fear, and a society that is ripe for the appropriation of the state apparatus in this situation. This is pushed forwards in the initial conflict between Lyra and Will between the children of the city. They come across the following scene.

Twenty or so children were facing inward in a semicircle at the base of the tower, and some of them had sticks in their hands, and some were throwing stones at whatever they had trapped against the wall. At first Lyra thought it was another child, but coming from inside the semicircle was a horrible high wailing that wasn’t human at all. And all the children were screaming too, in fear as well as hatred.[15]

We find the war machine redirected because the possibility of being anything but a child no longer exists. The circularity of the movement of children becomes literalized, and there is no longer any movement whatsoever. In this language so linked with the fear of the mob, we find ourselves in the space of entrapment. The children are trapped, and in turn, they reenact this entrapment. The scream of the cat, which is to become the sacrificial representation of this entrapment, blurs with the scream of the children. We are given a more explicit example of this deindividualization in a later conflict between Lyra and Will and the children of Ci’gazze. “They weren’t individual children: they were a single mass, like a tide. They surged below him and leaped up in fury, snatching, screaming, spitting, but they couldn’t reach.”[16] We are given another mode of interiorization in this instant. Fear and superstition become a crude form of constituted power that produces and interiorizes a specific body by the act of symbolic exclusion.[17]

But we are pushed farther in this recognition. Up until now we have been given a very privileged gaze on the life of children. One can argue that the possibility of this formation is immanent within children, it can always erupt in the right conditions. This is indicated through a brief conversation between Will and Lyra.

    “They were just crazy,” Lyra said. “They would have killed her. I never have seen kids being like that.”
     “I have,” said will.
     But his face was closed; he didn’t want to talk about it, and she knew better to ask. She knew she wouldn’t even ask the alethiometer.[18]

Will becomes an interesting counterweight to the experiences of Lyra in being an assemblage of children. He has already experienced the sense of exclusion and assault that is created through a sense of otherness. In the need to defend his mother, Will has been left out of the social patterns of children, their play, bonding, etc. He later explains that he could not let anyone see the condition that his mother was in, or the condition of the household. This puts him in the place of the cat, the fetishized object of superstitional fear. In turn, he had to defend himself against its exclusions.

Enough of this. Perhaps we need to move outside of the example of children to understand this directional nature of an assemblage. We are given more than one example of a war machine in the books, after all. The war machine of the gypsies is also directed towards other goals than war itself in its essence. The gypsies operate on the frontiers of the society, migrating cyclically along the river, and this has made them a prime target for the child snatchers of the General Oblation Board. In response, they turn their mobility into a war party. They collect money and supplies from all the families in order to facilitate this goal. In the meetings organized in order to discuss the mission of the war party, one of the mothers asks about punishment of the ‘gobblers’. The response says something significant about the goals of the party and the formation of the war machine in general.

“Nothing will hold my hand, Margaret, save only judgement. If I stay my hand in the North, it will only be to strike the harder in the South. To strike a day too soon is as bad as striking a hundred miles off. To be sure, there’s a warm passion behind what you say. But if you give in to that passion, friends, you’re doing what I have always warned you agin: you’re a placing the satisfaction of your own feelings above the work you have to do. Our work here is first rescue, then punishment. It en’t gratification for upset feelings. Our feelings don’t matter. If we rescue the kids but we can’t punish the Gobblers, we’ve done the main task. But if we aim to punish the Gobblers first and by doing so lose the chance of rescuing the kids, we’ve failed.[19]

We find the goal of the war machine lies in the restoration of the fullness of community, and that if it is distracted from that goal, then it has been a failure. We find that their goal is something other than the destruction of the enemy, which may occur as a supplement, but is not the essence of the mission. The essence of the mission lies in the renewal of both the community of gypsies, and the other communities that had their children stolen from them. This falls in line with something commented in the end of the ‘Treatise on Nomadology’, Deleuze and Guattari note, “if guerilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war are in conformity with the essence, it is because they take war as an object all the more necessary for being merely “supplementary”: they can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else, if only nonorganic social relations.”[20]

The war party of the gypsies then becomes a counterattack against the incorporation of part of them, their children, into a sovereign structure. This becomes part of a longer struggle for the gypsies, as they attempt to continue in their nomadic ways. The theft of children is contiguous with a state that is continually trying to pen them in, take away the right to the commons of the waterway, and incorporate them into the sedentary nature of state society. In turn the gypsies fight to remain on the borders of the state, neither in nor out of them, in a state of indistinction.

In thinking about this struggle to remain in the interstices, I want to circle around and play with around with the demarcation of the word ‘savage.’ We have already been introduced to the word in a troublesome connection with childhood, and slavery to the passions, but we need to relate the ‘barbarian’, the ‘savage’ (the words are use interchangeably) to a certain exteriority. We need to relate this to the other examples we are given of the war machine, the gypsies, the bears, witches, Lord Asriel’s ‘republic of heaven’. All of these machines are defined by the same exteriority in relation to the state. They are at times appropriated by the state, and arrayed in battle against one another by the state, but their essence lies outside of it.

The one formation that we have not discussed as of yet is the war machine that Lord Asriel puts together in order to fight the Authority. This community, which is far more ambiguous, acts as a sort of fusion of the rest of these communities that operate on the frontiers of the state, or in its acts of exclusion. Lord Asriel’s war machine is a fusion of war machines, all of which are built upon something deeply alien to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, the contradictions of their given societies. To grasp this we must turn elsewhere, to the notions that Louis Althusser brings to Marxism.[21] Althusser argues for an overdetermined understanding of the production of a revolutionary rupture. “If this contradiction is to become ‘active’ in the strongest sense, to become a ruptural principle, there must be an accumulation of ‘circumstances’ and ‘currents’ so that whatever their origin and sense…, they ‘fuse’ into a ruptural unity: when they produce the result of the immense majority of the popular masses grouped in an assault on a regime in which it ruling classes are unable to defend.”[22]

Lord Asriel’s project is directed towards pushing constituted power to the point of crisis, and to organize forces to accomplish this. We cannot fully understand the actions of the machine produced by Asriel within Deleuze and Guattari’s terms. He is operating within the world of crisis and contradiction. This makes him a very ambiguous figure in the book, for if he is the one who is willing to create the conditions to confront the authority, the means he uses to do so are frequently ghastly. Still in order to accomplish this, he organizes the formation of the war machine par excellence. We find this description of the citadel he organizes.

And on the rim of the world, where the light was increasing moment by moment, a great mountain range reared at its peaks—jagged spears of black rock, mighty broken slabs, and sawtooth ridges piled in confusion like the wreckage of a universal catastrophe. But on the highest point, which as she looked was touched by the first rays of the morning sun and outlined in brilliance, stood a regular structure: a huge fortress whose battlements were formed of single slabs of basalt half a hill in height, and whose extent was to be measured in flying time.

Beneath this colossal fortress, fires glared and furnaces smoked in the darkness of early dawn and from many miles away Ruta Skadi heard the clang of hammers and the pounding of great mills. And from every direction, she could see more flights of angels winging toward it, and not only angels, but machines too: steel-winged craft gliding like albatrosses, glass cabins under flickering dragonfly wings, droning zeppelins like bumblebees—all making for the fortress that Lord Asriel was building on the mountain at the edge of the world.”[23]

We are brought to all of the elements that fascinate Deleuze and Guattari. The war machine that is constructed by Lord Asriel is linked directed with the notion of metallurgy. The fortress is consumed with the production of weapons, through its mills and its smiths. These subversive and nomadic knowledges are brought together and fused into a new formation. They are transformed into “the shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation. There arise subterranean, aerial, submarine technicians who belong more or less to the world order, but who involuntarily invent and amass virtual charges of knowledge and action that are usable by others, minute but easily acquired for new assemblages.”[24]

We need to make a pivot within our discussion from the question of the war machine, to the question of essence. Obviously, this question of essence has a disastrous history, linked with both a philosophical lineage of Platonism and with the racist and colonialist lineages of Western thought. However I want to use it in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari use it. Brian Massumi makes the following reading of their usage; “The word “essence” should not taken in any Platonic sense. The essence is always of an encounter; it is an event; it is neither stable nor transcendental nor eternal; it is immanent to the dynamic process it expresses and has only an abyssal present infinitely fractured into past and future.”[25] The essence is produced through an engagement of the world, and is immanent to that engagement. Although we will find that there is a degree of parting between Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of this and the concept contained in the books, both are based in this notion of becoming.

To read essence within the act of becoming, it seems valuable to return to the roots of Deleuze’s thought, that is to Spinoza, and more precisely, the Ethics. We find essence connected to the notion of the conatus, which is defined in the third book of the ethics in Proposition 6 and Proposition 7 as, “Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persevere in its being.”[26] We find as essential definition for existence in Spinoza, the attempt to persist in it being. This applies to all of existence; a rock or a bookshelf has this drive as well as living things. This is not the essence of the modes, which are not permanent. The conatus is the essence only for substance, for god, which is eternal. Instead, for the modes, essence is linked to the conatus in another manner. “The endeavor by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its being is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing.”[27] Essence is the way, the expression of the mode’s attempt to continue in being.

As we move into a discussion of the novels, it also should be noted, that it doesn’t literally find its use in the novels. Instead we are introduced to the notion of essence in humans through the concept of the daemon, although we will find this conatus in other forms such as the armor of the bear, and in hidden forms in other worlds.

      “Why do daemons have to settle?” Lyra said. “I want Pantalaimon to be able to change forever. So does he.”
      “Ah, they always have settled, and they always will. That’s part of growing up. There’ll come a time when you’ll be tired of his changing about, and you’ll want a settled kind of form for him.”
      “I never will!”
      “Oh, you will. You’ll want to grow up like all the other girls. Anyway, there’s compensations for a settled form.”
     “What are they?”
     “Knowing what kind of person you are. Take old Belisaria. She’s a seagull, and that means I’m a kind of seagull too. I’m not grand and splendid nor beautiful, but I’m a tough old thing and I can survive anywhere and always find a bit of food and company. That’s worth knowing, that is. And when your daemon settles, you’ll know the sort of person you are.”
    “But suppose your daemon settles in a shape you don’t like?”
    “Well, then, you’re discontented, en’t you? There’s plenty of folk as’d like to have a lion as a daemon and they end up with a poodle. And till they learn to be satisfied with what they are, they’re going to be fretful about it. Waste of feeling, that is.
     But it didn’t feel to Lyra that she would ever grow up.”[28]

We have already been introduced the notion that the conatus of the child is becoming adult. This concept is then linked to the figure of the daemon. The daemon is able to take a multiplicity of forms when a subject is a child, but maturity brings it into one definitive shape. The society that Lyra lives in is a highly stratified one, so the forms that these shapes take are similarly highly regulated. One is given a whole series of examples of this; for instance servants’ daemons usually take the form of dogs. In this sense, the figure of the daemon acts to represent the essence in the manner that subject ‘endeavors to persevere in its being’ via the mode of employment that the subject is involved in.

There is nothing particularly naturalized about the creation of this essence, save for the fact that the notions of class that are naturalized within the society. We are in fact pointed to the fact that people frequently feel dissatisfied with their daemon. This notion of essence is somewhat discordant with Deleuze and Guattari’s, that we have seen is one that is formed in the ‘event’. Instead, the formation of essence retains a sense of coagulation that moves beyond this sense of the event. In this sense, the concept of essence within the book takes on a much more historically determined coarse then in Deleuze and Guattari. Perhaps the best way of phrasing this is that the essence of the daemon is much more willing to reflect the overdetermining and frequently unpleasant elements of history that Deleuze and Guattari are trying to escape.

But the matter of contingency in the form of the essence cannot only be found in children, nor can it be reduced to some form of developmentalism. Perhaps another example can be used to understand the moment of contingency in the formation of an essence. In order to do this; I would like to move our discussion from children to the community of armored bears that are one of the war machines. The conflict can be stated in the following manner. The bears had been living in a nomadic fashion, acting as a form of mercenary war machine for some time. However under the influence of Mrs. Coultier, the bear Iofur Raknison took over the leadership of the community through trickery and began to move it in the direction of producing a human-like community. He wanted the essence of the bear to be reflected in another manner, through a human-like daemon rather than through armor which was the traditional form of reflecting a bear’s essence.

In turn, Iofur begins to transform the ways that bears interact with each other. Introducing the accoutrements of feudal power, in its modes of expressing power, with its tapestries, universities, thrones, etc. Within this transformation, we find the bears at moment of contingency. Neither have the bears transformed into colonized subjects, that is to say into junior forms of humans, nor can they properly speaking, precisely go back to what they were before. Within this moment, Lyra manages to trick Iofur into fighting Iorek for the leadership of the bears. We find a very good description of the implications of this.

“And she was aware that all the other bears were making the comparison too. But Iorek and Iofur were more than just two bears. There were two kinds of beardom opposed here, two futures, two destinies. Iofur had begun to take them in one direction, and Iorek would take them in another, and in the same moment, one future would close forever as the other began to unfold.”[29]

The two bears represented two different ways to react to the interaction with the human community, one that was defined by independence and a linkage with a certain tradition, and the other, which would have put itself in the tutelage of the human community. And yet, neither choice can be read as not being impacted by the engagement with that human community. Iorek in no way stands a pillar of a timeless essence of ‘beardom’ untouched by the human community. He himself had lived and had been tricked by the human community, and he eventually wins his kingdom back precisely through a group of forms of trickery. There are times that he begins to doubt his own goals at times, but the strategies that he puts into place pushes the community of bears into a new direction.

We are then confronted with an conceptualization of essence that while it is not as contingent as what Deleuze and Guattari are theorizing, still is produced within certain contingent frameworks, and is in no sense immutable. If the structure were immutable, after all, there would be no need for the battle; bears would have the same nature throughout time. At the same time, the confrontation closes the door on one alternative, and places the other into a hegemonic position. It is a sense of essence that coagulates out of political struggle, an concept that is neither ephemeral nor essential, rather one that comes out of the force of accumulation and the history of the subject or subjects.

If we have dealt with the issue of essence, “the endeavor by which each thing endeavors to persevere in its being is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing” as Spinoza puts it, we need to deal with the question of substance, that which finds its essence within the persistence of being. We find this figure represented within the figure of the Dust, or the figure of the angels, and I want to place under the category of desiring matter. We see this very eloquently expressed in the books. “Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and the Dust is formed.”[30] We will explore the trajectory that this desiring matter takes within the conflict between constituting and constituted power. We will find that desiring matter is not an originary state, but rather a pole in a struggle in the very direction of the constitution of things.

Before we enter into that discussion, it would perhaps behoove us to discuss the question of representation briefly. After all, one could very reasonably ask the question, how could one represent the unrepresentable? The text itself points us to this fact at a number of points as well. Within the stories of the origins of the mulefa, we are reminded that these are fables, pointing towards modes of transformation. The most significant occurs when the witch Rita Skadi comes into contact with the angels. We are both given a description of what she sees, and the inadequacy of it, from the limitations of her understanding.

“Rita Skadi was four hundred and sixteen years old, with all the pride and knowledge of an adult witch queen. She was wiser by far than any short-lived human, but she had not the slightest idea of how like a child she seemed beside these ancient beings. Nor did she know how far their awareness spread out beyond her like filamentary tentacles to the remotest corners of the universes she had never dreamed of; nor that she saw them as human-formed only because her eyes expected to. If she were to perceive their true form, they would seem more like architecture than organism, like huge structures composed of intelligence and feeling.”[31]

Representation becomes a way of comprehending something that is outside of the possibility of comprehension. While the nature of this power is unrepresentable, it must be placed within this structure of representation in order to allow it to operate within the logic of the narrative, otherwise it would fall into the traps of a certain secularist understanding of power and time. At the same time, we are constantly reminded of this connivance of the narrative, its artificiality and its inadequacy.

So lets follow the narrative of this fable of desiring matter, of constituent power. As I noted before, we need to understand that this constituent power acts as a sort of counterpower, that it has never acted alone in an originary capacity. We are pointed to this in a description of the conflict.

“There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.”[32]

We are given a sense of one pole of the battle, which are linked to a certain project of the enlightenment. The project of “human freedom” is linked intimately with the acquisition of “every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency.” These traits are linked with the increased capacity of the human subject. We can read this within the terms that Deleuze and Guattari operate within, one side that is constantly drawing lines of flight to create new capacities, and one side that is dedicated to the apparatuses of capture to control them. At the same time we find another element in this struggle that links up with Deleuze and Guattari, that is in the matter of origins. They argue against Clastres that one cannot conceive of a time without the state as part of a conflictual structure.

We are compelled to say that there has always been a State, quite perfect, quite complete. The more discoveries archaeologists make, the more empires they uncover. The hypothesis of the Urstaat seems to be verified: “The State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity.” It is hard to imagine primitive societies that would not have been in contact with Imperial States, at the periphery or in poorly controlled areas.[33]

We cannot conceive of a Rousseauean state of nature within this structure. Human history is constituted by these two poles. The State does not constitute a fall from grace, but something that has always defined this conflict. But this history has more specificity that we can find further within the narrative, something beyond a variation on Marx and Engels’ statement at the beginning of the manifesto that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” We are given a history, a narration of the conflict, the struggle later in the story from one of the angels, the dust. This narration no longer operates from the perspective of man, but from the lines of force that go through them.

Balthamos said quietly, “The Authority, God the Creator, the Lord, Yahweh, El, Adonai, the King, the Father, the Almighty—those were all names he gave himself. He was never truly the creator. He was an angel like ourselves—the first angel, true, the most powerful, but he was formed of Dust as we are, and Dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and the Dust is formed. The first angels condensed out of the Dust, and the Authority was the first of all. He told those who came after him that he had created them, but it was a lie. One of those who came later was wiser than he was, and she found out the truth, so he banished her. We serve her still. And the Authority still reigns in the Kingdom, and Metatron is his Regent.[34]

The figure of dust is immediately linked with two important attributes, which can be linked to matter and self-knowledge. As the angel notes in the passage above, “dust is only a name for what happens when matter begins to understand itself. Matter loves matter. It seeks to know more about itself, and the Dust is formed.” We find contained within this formulation, a desire and a drive, and through this we are pointed to a wide and expansive constituent power, one that links matter and spirit. At the same time, this is precisely what produces its opposition in a form of constituted power.

The contestation that comes out of this formula is more than global; it crosses a multiplicity of dimensions. The primary form of contestation has taken place within human evolution and the evolution of other sentient subjects. The dust, or rebel angels, intervened within this evolution to introduce their form of desire into the community. Within Christian mythology, this takes the form of the snake. This act was taken as a form of counterattack, a form of vengeance. We find human desire to be a form of weapon thrown at the form of constituted power.

One recalls the analysis and detail that Deleuze and Guattari give to the creation of weapons within their text. They are interested in responding to and critiquing a particular productivist trope within Marxist thinking. They look to the form of the weapon rather than the tool as the most important form within this desiring economy.

As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential moment. The weapon is ballistic; the very notion of the “problem” is related to the war machine. The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon, potentially or simply metaphorically. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the projective mechanisms they possess; or else they adapt them to other ends. It is true that missile weapons, in the strict sense, are only one kind among others; but even handheld weapons require a usage of the hand and arm different from that required by tools, a projective usage exemplified in the martial arts. The tool, on the other hand, is much more introceptive, introjective: it prepares a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority. Action at a distance exists in both cases, but in one case it is centrifugal and in the other, centripetal. One could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or invented (the counterattack is in fact the precipitating and inventive factor in the war machine, to the extent that it is not simply reducible to a quantitative rivalry or defensive parade).[35]

The weapon is thrown out into the world as a form of direct engagement with it. It is directly linked in with the figure of desire, with the affects. By doing this, it is linked with movement and the transversal of space rather than mediation. It is not designed to bring things into a state of equilibrium, but create a situation of explosive motion. For Deleuze and Guattari, the revolutionary moment doesn’t occur when workers act as such, but when they reformulate themselves in the form of the war machine, when they turn their tools into weapons.

In that case, it would be easy to read that in conjunction of the creation of the subtle knife, the knife that can cut through dimensions, but for the angels, it is clear that the weapon that they have hurled is Lyra, who is to reenact the role of Eve. They transform the tools that they work with, that is to say, with the understanding of matter and desire, and hurl it outward into the universe. In the end, it is not the knife that destroys the authority, but Lyra, who we are reminded by Lord Asriel repeatedly, is quite ordinary. It is not out of transcendent figures that the revolutionary assemblage is made out of, but out of our ordinary desires.

One interesting note to make about the end of the book is despite the apocalypse that is wrought; there is surprisingly little transformation on the level of the political. We have after all, witnessed the death of God, and the destruction of his structure of authority. One sees the return of liberal forces after the encroachment of the forces of reaction. I think that socialist science fiction writer China Mieville’s disappointment in the book can be largely found in this fact. Perhaps, we need to follow in Giorgio Agamben’s argument in The Coming Community, when he quotes from Benjamin’s version of a parable “Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.”[36]

But to be frank, there is something unacceptable in such quietus. Let’s turn to the political community that is formed in this battle. What does it mean that Lord Asriel’s concept of ‘the republic of heaven’ cannot work? Ultimately I want to argue that this is the most ambivalent moments of the books, one that is tied into the notion of essence that is developed in the form off the daemon. There is an initial disappointment in the declaration that the republic of heaven must be created at home. After all, the social structure that Asriel brings together fits surprisingly well with the globalizing world that we are living in today. It produces an assemblage that is based in multiplicity. One feels that the formulation of a ‘republic of heaven” that is to be found at home is a bit parochial in its formulation. It does not deal with the multiplicity that already exists.

At the same time, the community that Lord Asriel produces is steeped in the language of transcendence. Asriel is a figure that could come out of the pages of Percy Shelley’s epic poetry or could fill the role of Milton’s Satan. Revolutionary desire is tied to the figure of the great man, inaccessible and discreet. By critiquing this, we are also pointed to the possibilities of revolutionary desire that can be found in everyday life. After all, the most significant figures we are given in this description are the formations of children and of the gypsies. The weapon, par excellence, is not the subtle knife, a dubious product of mercantile capital, but the ordinary structures of desire and understanding of the world.

In the end, this duality between a parochial localism and a transcendent understanding of the globalism may be the horizon of the book. To move beyond it, we must conceive of both structures as constructed and immanent. This notion pushes against the notions of representation that the book is clearly struggling with. Perhaps we should read it in another way, as a limit figure that must be crossed in the transformation of the world.


[1] See Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 521.
[2] Although a more thorough explication of this argument can be found in Antonio Negri’s book, Insurgencies.
[3] Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 73.
[4] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255
[5] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 255
[6] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 31-32.
[7] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 33
[8] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 32-33.
[9] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 353.
[10] It is also worth noting that the children described in this scenario are not the recipients of any sort of formal education, as that they are the children of servants. Lyra herself is only educated sporadically, taken up temporarily by a scholar here and there only to be dropped. One presumes that they exist within the institution of the family, but this aspect of children’s life is never given to us. The books only give us children in their modes of self-organization, or in their capture by the agents of the General Oblation Board.
[11] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 420
[12] Ibid., 358.
[13] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 399.
[14] Moira Gatens and Gnevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 66
[15] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997), 96.
[16] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997), 204
[17] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993).
[18] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997), 98.
[19] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 122.
[20] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 423
[21] I also think that the figure of Lord Asriel could also be read in the context of much of what Louis Althusser says in his small book on Machiavelli.
[22] Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1996), 99.
[23] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997), 126-7
[24] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 403
[25] Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), 18.
[26] Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 171
[27] Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 171
[28] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 146,147
[29] Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass (New York: Del Rey Books, 1995), 307
[30] Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 32
[31] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997),, 124, 125
[32] Philip Pullman, The Subtle Knife (New York: Del Rey, 1997), 283
[33] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 360
[34] Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 32
[35] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, ed. and trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 395
[36] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 53.

Rethinking Althusser through Spinoza

  Yet another of my earlier papers.  This was my attempt to work through the relationship between Spinoza and Althusser.  I was tempted to hold this back for academic publishing after revision, but frankly the level of rewriting needed would transform it into a completely different essay.  (The paragraphing is particularly problematic.  So here is another moment of intellectual bildung for you to take a look at.  I will be dealing with the question of the union elections in the next couple days.

                Louis Althusser makes an odd remark at the beginning of his book, Machiavelli and Us.  After introuducing a brief ancedote from one of Machiavelli’s works, he makes the following comment about him, “I would not want to make too much of this quip.  But it might serve—after its fashion, and in allegorical mode—to sum up the impression of a philosophical reader confronted with Machiavelli: more specifically, a philosophical reader who wishes to enroll Machiavelli in his own ranks.  He will rapidly have to realize that Machiavelli ‘marches in the opposite direction to that in which he fires’, or fires in the opposite direction from that which one wishes to make him march; or, even worse, that if he certainly does not fire in the line of the march, we do not even know he is firing: he always fires elsewhere.”[1] The line of thought can certainly be seen to circle back to implicate Althusser himself.

            After all, it would seem that many of the brilliant minds of the time had no idea what was to be made of Althusser.  We presented with the image of Althusser as structuralist, apolitical, crypto-Stalinist, etc.  Thinkers ranging from E. P. Thompson, James Scott, to Edward Said seem to be unable to confront his legacy without axe in hand.

            These polemics, whether accurate or not, seem to freeze a critical understanding of Althusser’s ideas rather than facilitate it.  We need to think differently then them.  We need to see the Althusser that “always fires elsewhere.”  We need to see the Althusser that is always, to some extent, speaking in code.  And most significantly, we need to realize that Althusser’s work was not written in an ahistorical void to a universal audience, rather it was directed towards a very specific audience.  Althusser states this rather explicitly within the introduction to English Readers within For Marx,  “As the Introduction shows, this conjuncture is, first, the theoretical and ideological conjuncture in France, more particularly the present conjuncture in the French Communist Party and in French philosophy.  But as well as this particularly French conjuncture, it is also the present ideological and theoretical conjuncture of the international Communist movement.”[2]

            I think that it is clear that in terms of political thinking, For Marx is the more significant of the two canonical works of Althusser.  Certainly one cannot deny the brilliant insights of Reading Capital; however; it is apparent that in many ways it’s position within the political discussions of the day was much less explicit.  For Marx, on the other hand, certainly entered that arena much more directly.  This is fairly obvious from the reaction of the officials of the French Communist Party to essays such as “Contradiction and Overdetermination”.  In this sense, Reading Capital will be touched upon, but the primary sources that will be examined will be For Marx, the Essay in Lenin and Philosophy, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, and Essays in Self-Criticism.  The last work in particular is significant as that it goes back and looks critically at the earlier works and reevaluates them, adding some significant clarifications.

            Before we move into an explicit critical reading of Althusser’s works themselves, perhaps a detour would aid us, using Entienne Balibar’s examination of the historical conjecture of the writing of the Theological-Political Treatise and its reception in his recent book Spinoza and Politics.  Its explicit enemies, the pastors, the reactionary scholars did not only condemn the book, but its translation into Dutch was not completed precisely on the request of Spinoza’s political allies.  Why was this book, “which was written without any “revolutionary intention”, deemed, “not only subversive to Spinoza’s opponents, but more embarrassing than useful to his friends?”[3]

            It is fairly clear that even within the TTP, Spinoza was not only criticizing the old theocratic order but also the new human centered construction of the universe of thinkers such as Descartes. “Spinoza was thus at risk of taking on two adversaries at once, the theologians and the majority of philosophers: the former, because they made their living by speculating rationally on religious objects, thus transforming them into theological objects; and the latter, because they tended to distort philosophy into an anti-religious discourse.”[4]

The freedom that Spinoza embraces is not the one of the ’Freedom Party.’ He certainly has a foot in that world of science and commerce.  He has ties to the society of science, was most likely an unofficial advisor to Johann de Witt, and at one point was involved in trade.  But at the same time, it is clear that Spinoza’s loyalties lied elsewhere.  He does not center his universe around man like his contemporaries.  He isn’t interested in displacing religion within the same maneuver as Descartes.  In effect, he is not interested in engaging within their instrumental reason.

“What is clear, with the benefit of hindsight, is that the philosophical demands made upon Spinoza by those around him brought together three very different kinds of expectation.  Even if these different demands were sometimes made by the same men, they remained fundamentally heterogeneous, corresponding to the imperatives of science, of non-denominational religion and of republican politics.  Not only was Spinoza aware of these various demands, but he displaced each of them in turn, never responding to any of them according to the expectations that lay behind them.”[5]

The bourgeois order is built of the construction of particular interests of particular group presented as the interests and desires of all.  Spinoza tries to achieve what the bourgeoisie attempted and failed.  “These “preachers” denounced not only the theological laxity of the Regents but also their opulent way of life and their stranglehold on public affairs.  In this way, their preaching even came to contain a “democratic” element.”[6]

            There is a clear parallel between this and Althusser’s position within the French Communist Party.  After all, it is clear that it is the Spinoza of the Theological-Political Treatise that is most inspiring to him.  “And no doubt this strategy comforted me in my personal philosophical strategy: to take over the Party from inside it’s own positions… but what pretensions!”[7]  This strange position that Althusser took up for himself, placed him in an odd position in regards to critics within the party.  After all, didn’t Althusser himself sing the praises for Marx, Lenin, and the popular front, but in all cases these were not the same objects that the Party constructed itself under.

            This was no coincidence, and it advantages are spelt out quite elegantly by Althusser himself.

            “In addition, by basing my arguments on Marx, who was after all the founding father of the Communist Party and their official source of inspiration, I acquired a peculiar position of strength.  This made me difficult to attack within the Party when I challenged the official interpretation of Marx which they used to justify their decisions, in other words what was effectively the Party line.  What I did in fact was simply to appeal to Marx’s thought against the various aberrant interpretations, and especially the Soviet ones which served as a source of inspiration to the Party.”[8]

            It was the use of those terms that made it extremely difficult for the critics within the party of Althusser to attack him too intensely.  After all, in order to do so, they would need to read both Althusser and their own work closely, and frankly they were too lazy to do so.  It is not an unreasonable thing to say that Althusser was involved in a party that until Eurocommunism, made the claims of desiring a revolutionary transformation when they clearly did not.  Castroriadis states this well in his writings for Socialism or Barbarism, when he notes that the Communist Parties were not betraying the working class, rather they had done that years ago and were merely serving other class interests.  This is something that Althusser recognizes in his memoirs, but it is not sure if he recognized while in the party.

            There are two moments that really exemplify the differences between Althusser and the party leadership.  The first are the events of May 1968.  Although he was out of town at the time and made initially disparaging remarks towards the revolt, later he understood all to clearly what the party didn’t want or could not understand, that it was at that moment that revolution was possible, and that the party abandoned it completely.  The nature of that recognition came early on, in a letter to a Italian comrade, “May 1968, which saw a general strike of unprecedented proportions, represents the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory of Nazism.”[9]

            The second moment was the debate over the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in 1976.  Both Althusser and Balibar took strong positions in favor of protecting the phrasing within the party’s constitution.  What they foresaw has come all too much to fruition.  The abandonment of the phrase indicated the last, breaths of any possibility of the party representing anything revolutionary at all.

            The abandonment of the phrase was explicitly tied to refusal to see something inherent within revolutionary struggle.  That is, “for Marx, the State apparatuses are not neutral instruments but, in a strong sense, the organic repressive and ideological apparatuses of a class: the ruling class.  In order to guarantee the domination of the working class and its allies, and to prepare for the ‘withering away’ of the State, you cannot avoid attacking the class character of the existing State apparatuses.  That means ‘smashing’ the State.”[10]  The party is abandoning that goal by accepting the notion that the State is already democratic, that it’s to say, they abandoned a Marxist conception of the State for a reformist one.

              There are always theoretical matters imminent within Althusser’s political thought.  Perhaps most explicitly we need to come to grips with the implicit Spinozism contained within Althusser’s writings.  Spinoza is a topic that only gets dealt with explicitly in a few moments within Althusser’s writings, and those moments are some of the least canonized of his works.  For the most part, they bubble up in cryptic asides or can be seen to reside implicitly within the concepts themselves.  Two examples in his non-canonical Essays in Self-Criticism can give us some thought.  “We were guilty of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists.”[11] and commenting on the ‘structuralism’ of Reading Capital, he comments that it is “much more Spinozist than structuralist!”[12]  Perhaps the closest he comes within the canon is remark in Reading Capital that Spinoza is the only philosophical precedent to Marx.  However these moments are rather exceptional.  We need to recognize that Althusser’s works are similar to the Theological-Political Treatise, and not the Ethics.  To extract those thoughts, we need to engage in something similar to what Althusser himself did to the writings of Marx, in effect, to do an Althusserian reading of Althusser.

            This first entails examining Althusser’s critique of the Hegelian ontology that drove so many thinkers forwards.  In a sense this means dispelling Lukacs, but not because somehow he represents all that is wrong within Marxist thought.  After all the two are interested in some of the same questions tied to ontology.  Lukacs represents an explicit Hegelian ontological position.  One that is taken up by others with whom have significantly less understanding of this project.  It seems that in truth are the targets of Althusser’s salvos, not Lukacs who is mentioned once in a footnote.  After all, it is rather John Lewis and his conceptions of Marx’s ‘man’ that preoccupy Althusser for 60 pages.[13]

            More specifically, Althusser’s adversary can be seen as the broad movement of socialist humanism.  The Marx that is the literal inversion of Hegel, the Marx working through Feuerbach’s problematic.  He sees this within the texts that are worshipped by this group.  “But in On the Jewish Question, Hegel’s Philosophy of the State, etc. and even usually in the Holy Family, he is nothing more than an avant-garde Feuerbachian applying an ethical problematic to the understanding of human history.”[14]

            He has a similar impatience with attempts on the part of the dogmatic scholars who want to save Marx from the humanists.  They make a similarly Hegelian gesture in this attempt, “a pseudo-theory of the history of philosophy in the ‘future anterior’ is erected.”[15]  He completely rejects the teleological project that is implicit within that conceptualization.  “It is clear that this discrimination between elements detached from the internal context of the thought expressed and conceived in isolation, is only possible on condition that the reading of these texts is slanted, that is, teleological.  One of the most most clear-headed of this authors in this collection, N. Lapine, expressly recognizes this: ‘This kind of characterization…is, in fact, very eclectic, as it does not answer the question as to how these different elements are combined together in Marx’s world outlook.’  He sees this clearly that this decomposition of a text into what is already materialist and what is still idealist does not preserve its unity, and that this decomposition is induced precisely by reading the early texts through the content of the mature texts.”[16]

            It is clear from this description, what Althusser wants out of an analysis of a system of thought.  He recognizes that the various elements interact with one another to form a whole and that those elements cannot be understood outside of this system properly.  In this case, the humanists, at least, are being honest, by using Marx’s early thought driven by Feuerbach’s problematic systematically, all flaws in tact.  But perhaps this is the mark that we should enter into Althusser’s positive and productive thought rather than his critiques of others.

            Althusser wants to put his conceptualization of Marx’s conceptualization of the world on considerably different grounds.  These grounds were to be quite controversial and radical.  “If the whole is posed as structured, i.e., possessing a type of unity quite different from the type of unity of the spiritual whole, this is no longer the case: not only does it become impossible to think the determination of the elements of a whole by the structure in the categories of analytical and transitive causality, it also becomes impossible to think it in the category of the global expressive causality of a universal inner essence immanent in its phenomenon.  The proposal to think the determination of the elements of a whole by the structure of the whole posed an absolutely new problem in the most theoretically embarrassing circumstances, for there were no philosophical concepts for its resolution.  The only theoretician…[posed] this problem and outline a solution to it was Spinoza.”[17]

            This complex structure of the whole simply puts the Hegelian structure away.[18]   As Althusser points out “a Hegelian contradiction is never really overdetermined, even though it frequently has all the appearances of being so.”[19]  It is the recognition of a whole that is purely built upon its ‘elements’ as Althusser puts it, or the modes of its attributes as Spinoza would put it.  Althusser follows up that rather oblique commentary with something a bit more specific, “There is no longer any original essence, only a ever pre-givenness, however far knowledge delves into its past.  There is no longer any simple unity, only a structured, complex unity.  There is no longer any original simple unity (in any form whatsoever), but instead, the ever-pre-givenness of a structured complex unity.”[20]

            There is an analogous trope within Spinoza in his Proposition 28 of the first book of the Ethics.

            “Every particular thing, or, any thing which is finite and has a determining existence, cannot exist or be determined to operate unless it is determined to existence and operation by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence; and again, the latter cause also cannot exist or be determined to operation unless it is determined to existence and operation by another cause, which is also finite and has a determinate existence, and so on to infinity.”[21]

            It is these finite elements that make up the structured, complex unity of Spinoza’s conceptualization of substance.  One is place in a position where one can only understand the infinite chain of causes in its entirety, but that entirety is made up of nothing but its particulars.

            This line of thought is extremely important in Althusser’s conceptualizations of overdetermination contained within “Contradiction and Overdetermination”.  This concept directly impacts how one conceptualizes the class struggle.  It moves one from the position that posits that the economic is reality to one where this is not the case, where modes interact in different manner.

“We must carry this through to its conclusion and say that this overdetermination does not just refer to apparently unique and aberrant historical situations (Germany, for example), but is universal; the economic dialectic is never active in the pure state in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the Time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic.  From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”[22] 

Those who criticize Althusser for his ‘last instance’ thesis frequently overlook this comment.  It seems that it exists to placate the dogmatic French Communist Party, by replacing a dogma with the dogma is still there despite the fact it has clearly been replaced.  The moment that this element is introduced, any functional sense of ‘economism’’ is gone.  We are left with the sense that the ‘economic’ is an important element in a complex overdetermined structure.

Althusser does not even leave the Russian Revolution out of this process.  The moment that for so many communists was the model to be followed as a recipe for a successful revolution becomes yet another exception in a world that is nothing but exceptions.

“Russia was precisely a result of the intense overdetermination of the basic class contradiction, we should perhaps ask what is exceptional about this ‘exceptional situation’, and whether, like all exceptions, this one does not clarify its rules-is not, unbeknown to the rule, the rule itself.  For after all, are we not always in exceptional situations?  The failure of the 1849 Revolution in Germany German Social-Democratic failure at the beginning of the twentieth century pending the chauvinist betrayal of 1914 was an exception, the failure in 1871 was an exception… exceptions, but with respect to what?  To nothing but the abstract, but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure, simple ‘dialectical’ schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained a memory (or rediscovered the style) of the Hegelian contradiction as such.”[23]

This universe was clearly a disturbing one for those who were weaned upon the notion of the inevitably of the proletarian revolution, and the proletariat as the essential for driving history.  We are instead introduced to a concept of history without a subject or a goal.[24]

This does not mean that there is never a revolutionary situation.  This situation occurs precisely at moments of ‘fusion’.  In this sense, I think that a Definition within the second book of the Ethics can aid us.

“When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitudes are constrained by others in such a way that they are in reciprocal contact with each other, or if they are moved with the same or different degrees of speed in such a way that they communicate their motions to each other in some fixed ratio, we shall say that those bodies are reciprocally united to each other.  We shall also say that all such bodies simultaneously compose one body, i.e. an individual, which is distinguished from others by this union of bodies.”[25]

This ‘union of bodies’ is able to “’fuse’ into a ruptural unity: when they produce the result of the immense majority of the popular masses grouped in an assault on the regime which its ruling classes are unable to defend.”  This concept is built on an “’accumulation’ of contradictions.”  These contradictions come together in way that allows for class strata that would normally have contradictory interests to come together.

Althusser points to Russia as a perfect example of this sort of fusion.  It was influenced by many elements that came together at the time.  The first and most obvious influence was the First World War.  But other influences came into play; there was the impact of the accumulation of contradictions from the revolution of 1905. Also, “A gigantic contradiction between the stage of development of capitalist methods of production (particularly in respect to proletarian concentration: the largest factory in the world at the time was the Putilov works at Petrograd, with 40,000 workers and auxiliaries) and the medieval state of the countryside.  The exacerbation of class struggles throughout the country, not only between exploiter and exploited, but even within the ruling classes themselves (the great feudal proprietors supporting autocratic, militaristic police Tsarism; the lesser nobility involved in constant conspiracy; the big bourgeoisie and the liberal bourgeoisie opposed to the Tsar; the petty bourgeoisie oscillating between conformism and anarchistic ‘leftism’) The detailed course of events added other ‘exceptional’ circumstances, incomprehensible outside the ‘tangle of Russia’s internal and external contradictions.”[26]

This also gives interesting insight into the process of post-revolutionary Russia.  As Althusser points out, if the economy was the reality that produced everything else, simply taking it would solve all the problems.  However, this clearly didn’t occur in the Soviet Union.  Althusser points out Lenin’s concept of ‘survivals.’  These ‘survivals’ show fairly clearly that not everything falls into place when the economy is taken.  Althusser states this in a group of rhetorical questions.  “Can it be reduced to the survival of certain economic structures which the Revolution was unable to destroy with its first degrees: for example, the small-scale production (primarily peasant production in Russia) which so preoccupied Lenin?  Or does it refer as much to other structures, political, ideological structures, etc.: customs, habits, even ‘traditions’ such as the ‘national tradition’ with its specific traits?”[27]

It seems that there is something missing here.  What is never touched on is the issue of Leninist practice in intervening in these situations.  To what extent are the ideas within Lenin’s party the means to the ends of Stalin’s “dictatorship over the proletariat”?  It seems that if one were to register a complaint with Althusser it would precisely be at this point.  However, it seems that there needs to be a little more discussion before we get to that point.  It must be dealt with in the realm of thought and the way that Althusser approaches that subject.

Spinoza operates on a separation of thought and extension.  The section above dealt with the issues of bodies (overdetermined by thought of course) perhaps it is time to move into the arena of thought and theory.  It seems that there are two primary aspects to look at in the context of Althusser’s thought.  The first concerns the notions around Ideology and Ideological practices.  This clearly has an element that is associated with the body, an idea that Foucault will draw out more explicitly with Discipline and Punish.  This undoubtedly makes it a good transition point.  The second deals with a more ‘abstract matter’, the idea of theoretical practices and its relationship to practices more explicitly tied to the body.

            It is this concept of ideology that has an explicit tie to the Theological Political Treatise.  An interesting not in the introduction to that book relates to this discussion.  Spinoza ties ‘despotic statecraft to the need to “hoodwink the subjects… so that men may fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but the highest honor to risk their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant.”[28]  To phrase it slightly different, what are the conditions that need to exist, that individuals prefer the slavery to their freedom.

It seems that this precise concept is the one that Althusser is really grappling with in the essay.  There is a long tradition of dealing with this in certain Marxist circles with the concept of 'false consciousness’.  A tradition that largely stems back to Feuerbach and to some extent, Rousseau’s writings.  It’s this tradition that Althusser is fighting within his essay.  If ideology was merely a trick, if one could lose the image of the sun as being two hundred feet away, because one realized it really wasn’t that distance, than ideology would be a fairly simple issue.  The truth is ideology is something quite substantial, “where men ‘become conscious of their class conflict and ‘fight it out in its religious, ethical, legal, and political forms, etc.”[29] 

            There is a slight difference in the texts, but it is primarily one of the elements that they focus on rather than the substance of those elements.  Spinoza is interested in prophecy.  The prophet is one who rises out of a crisis in ideology to produce a new ideology.  One can almost say that the prophet acts as the epicenter to the crisis.  He creates a whole new set of rules (effects); he does this by tapping into something imminent to the situation, power (potenzas) and the relations of power. But in most cases the prophet suppresses the cause of his creation.  That is to say that their very historical nature is suppressed and they are presented as ahistorical rules to an unchanging universe.

            Althusser, however, focuses on the system as it works, not its moments of crisis and transformation.  Why is this?  One could say that the difference between the two is this. Spinoza writes on the Ideological State Apparatuses centered around the church at its collapse and one is getting only brief inclinations of what the new system will be.  Althusser writes on the school centered Ideological State apparatuses that were at the moment in crisis, but hardly fatally so.

            Althusser captures this sense of what it means to be within the world of ideologies well within his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”.

            “I might add: what thus seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology.  What takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside of it.  That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’.  It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology.  As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing).  Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).” [30]

            To deal in ideology is to deal in effects.  More precisely, it is to deal with a world of particulars that are not placed in their proper perspective within the whole.  It is to deal with the ideas that arise from bodies at a highly inadequate level.  But there is an outside of ideology, that outside occurs when one grasps the whole, the interdependence of the various parts to produce that whole, and the very dependence.  The very notion of ‘science and reality’ is certainly not positivistic and may tie directly into Spinoza’s notion of the third knowledge… the intellectual love of god.

            However this is taking us too far afield.  Althusser is engaged in the second form of knowledge within the essays, the critique of ideology.  He takes the conceptualization of ideology out of the ethereal reaches of an imagined pure thought, and places it imminently within the discursive practices of everyday life.  Schools, the family, etc. act within the whole to produce subjects that work willingly within the system.  One’s whole identity is constructed through these ideologies, which not only effect the ideas in our heads, but give us a whole series of practices to engage in it.

            To circle back to earlier discussions, it is this that the socialist humanists miss out on, that is that the originary ‘man’ that they refer to is already a product of a certain type of production, a reproduction to be more precise.  When they miss this point, it is because they are reproducing the bourgeois conceptualization of the subject.  In fact, his critique of John Lewis is not that different than Spinoza’s of Descartes.  In effect, John Lewis with his concept of man who can ‘transcend’ his circumstances, his history, we are introduced to a sort of man-god.[31] 

            It’s at this point that we need to get back to the troubles mentioned earlier in the text.  There is a second concept involved in the realm of thought.  One that also touches on the questions concerning the body and practice.  This concept has some troubles.

A very interesting concept in Althusser’s toolbox of ideas is the notion of theoretical practice.  This involves a number of important gestures.  The first is pointing out that theory is in itself a practice.  Althusser puts this nicely himself, “So a practice of theory does exist; theory is a specific practice which acts on its own object and ends in its own product: a knowledge.”[32]

So far, so good.  This concept is not so different than Deleuze and Guatteri’s concept of philosophy in What is Philosophy?, i.e. that the purpose of philosophy is the production of concepts.  This is a fairly well known Spinozist trope.  As Spinoza states this, “For example, a circle existing in Nature and the idea of the existing circle, which is also in God, is one and the same thing, which is explained through different attributes.”  This trope is also recognized within Reading Capital.

However, Althusser gets into trouble within two areas.  The first involves the privileging those theoretical practices over other practices.  Althusser is fond of quoting Lenin’s comment, “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice.’ at no point is there the necessary reversal of this thesis.  Althusser in the Essays of Self-Criticism lays out this problem very schematically without even his awareness of its existence.  This scheme begins with the concept of politics being the concentrated for of the economic forum in the last instance, and theory acting as the concentration of the political field in the last instance.[33]

These particular problems are not ones new within Althusser’s thinking; rather they go back to the avant-gardist logic implicit within the Lenin of What is to be Done.  That schematic that is laid out within the Essays of Self Criticism is not that different than the schematic laid out for Lenin’s party hierarchy.  Theoretical practice acts as a clear parallel to the party central committee of Lenin’s scheme.

             This temptation for privileging the mind is one that can also be found at time within Spinoza’s writing, but when push comes to shove, his conception is far more parallelist.  This point is well made in the Corollary to Proposition seven in the second book.

            “It follows from this that God’s power of thinking is the equal of his actual power of doing.  That is, whatever follows formally from the infinite nature of God follows objectively in God from the idea of God, in the same order with the same connection.”[34]

            Spinoza also emphasizes the potential power of the body.  Althusser himself makes reference to this concept within his memoirs.  However, the references that he makes to this trope is in reference to sexuality.  “Later on, I came across a startling prefiguration of Freud’s concept of the libido in this same theory, as well as of the theory of ambivalence… and the opposite of the vitally expansive and joyful conatus of the body and the soul, which were as inseparable as the lips and the teeth.”[35]  This is not an unreasonable and uninteresting reading of the concept, but it doesn’t deal with the way that this concepts of the body can relate to ideas of political praxis, and more specifically an anti-vanguardist concept of political practice.

            It should be noted that this is not a trope that doesn’t trouble Althusser to some extent.  While being fond of the concept of the Leninist party, it is clear that he doesn’t think much of it in practice.[36]  There are even moments when he recognizes the organization efforts of the workers themselves.  “One of our problems is that even when we decide not to underestimate, we end up pretty wide of the mark.  The masses are potentially (potentially: in fact—but no one gives them the means) far ahead of ‘us’.  The whole issue is to know in what sense.  We need to know this is a precise way: exactly what sectors of the ‘masses’ are on the move, where, in what forms (which can be unknown, unexpected, without precedent).”  This is pretty radical stuff, and it is always a part of the way that Althusser thinks.  The trouble is that the statement is domesticated by the next sentence.  “Once this is ‘under control’, the rest is child’s play.”[37]  It isn’t until the memoirs that this avant-gardist tendency is broken, and frankly at that point it is fairly irrelevant.

            This is a fairly serious difficulty within the texts, one that cannot be ignored if one is going to read Althusser politically.  In a sense, this difficulty is the difficulty and crisis of the Leninist Party itself.  It is perhaps because Althusser pushes the Marxist-Leninist form so far that this problematic point becomes so clear.  There is a temptation to create an Althusserianism without Leninism, but this seems to be engaging in the precise operation that Althusser criticizes in others.  Ultimately, this must push us towards a distinct break, but one that his work itself can be seen to point towards.  Perhaps, some of these possibilities lie within Nicos Poulantanza’s final work State, Power, Socialism.

            The last paragraph could be read as a foreclosing of the discussion on Althusser.  It is not meant in that spirit.  Too many people before, and undoubtedly, after this essay, have and will make that gesture.  To do so is a mistake and a serious one if one wants to engage in Marxism in and form or manner.  Those who ignore or dismiss Althusser, do so to their own detriment.

This essay opens up more questions than it closes.  Clearly there is a connection with many of Althusser’s ideas with a certain type of Spinozism.  This can be seen very intimately within the very fundamental concepts themselves.  However, this only sets up a deeper problem, one that requires a reading of Althusser more on the lines of Reading Capital than the essay here which is so strongly tied to the methodology of For Marx.  We see many elements of Spinoza’s epistemological project here.  It’s not a coincidence that the majority of the quotations come from the second book of the Ethics, the only book that is focused on those questions.  This is also true for the Theological-Political Treatise.  But both of those books (the books of epistemology) are built upon the ontological conceptualizations that are in the other books of the Ethics.  Those are the concepts that are truly suppressed in any explicit form whatsoever.  They are there.  They lurk in odd corners of the books such as the relationship of ideology and science, and in Althusser’s conceptualization of science itself.  Drawing out that relationship would allow for a far more radical rereading of Althusser than the one set out here

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[1] Louis Althusser, Machiavelli and Us, ed. Francois Matheron, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 1999), 5.

[2] Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso 1969), 9-10.

[3] Entienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowden (London: Verso, 1998), 4.

[4] Ibid., 8.

[5] Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, 23.

[6] Ibid., 20.

[7] Louis Althusser, “The Only Materialist Tradition, Part I: Spinoza”, in Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, eds., The New Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 11.

Strangely enough, Althusser receives this insight through Spinoza’s use of God in the Ethics, Althusser sees this as a strategic move on the part of Spinoza to infiltrate his enemy’s positions and dynamite them from within.  This is a little suspicious, in that for the most part, the Ethics is not a terribly strategic book in that sense.  However the tactics that Althusser is referring to seem to be much more resonant with the wary and reserved nature of the Theological-Political Treatise.

[8] Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, ed. Oliver Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang, trans. Richard Veasey (New York: The New Press, 1993), 222.

[9] Maria Antonietta Macciocchi and Louis Althusser, Letters from inside the Italian Communist Party to Louis Althusser, trans. Stephen M. Hellman (London: NLB, 1973), 320.

[10]Louis Althusser, “The Historical Significance of the 22^nd Congress”.   Afterward to On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, by Etienne Balibar, trans. Grahame Locke (London: NLB, 1977), 207.

[11] Louis Althusser Essays In Self Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: NLB, 1976), 132

[12] Louis Althusser, Essays In Self Criticism, 126.

[13] Louis Althusser, “Response To John Lewis”, Essays in Self Criticism.

[14] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 46.

[15] Ibid., 54.

[16] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 57-58.

[17] Louis Althusser, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso, 1997), 187.

[18] For now it is enough to include Althusser’s footnote of Marx

                “The latter (the method of those economic systems which move from general notions to concrete ones) is decidedly the correct scientific method.  The concrete is concrete because it is the synthesis of many determinations, and therefore a unity of diversity.  That is why it appears in thought as a process of synthesis, as a result, not as a point of departure…(in scientific method) abstract determinations lead to the reproduction of the concrete via the path of thought…the method which consists of rising from the abstract to the concrete is merely the way thought approximates the concrete and reproduces it as a concrete in thought’ (Marx-Engels, Werke, Berlin, Vol. XIII, pp. 631-2).

               

[19]  Louis Althusser, For Marx, 101.

[20] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 199

[21] Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.H.R. Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 96.

[22] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 113.

[23] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 104.

[24] Both the power and the potentially disturbing nature of this comment are capture well by a comment within the memoirs.       

“I later took from it my ­description of history and of truth as a process without a subject (providing the origin and basis of all meaning) and without end (without any pre-established eschatological destination); for by refusing to believe in the end as an original cause (by a mirroring of the origin and the end), I truly came to think as a materialist.  I employed the following metaphor: an idealist is a man who know which station the train leaves from and also its destination.  He knows it in advance and when he gets on a train, he knows where he is going because the train is taking him there.  The materialist, on the other hand, is a man who gets on to a moving train without knowing either where it is coming or where it is going.”  Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, 217.

[25] Spinoza, Ethics, 128.

[26] Louis Athusser, For Marx, 96

[27] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 114.

[28] Benedictus De Spinoza, A Theological-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1951), 5.

[29] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 11.

[30] Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971)

[31] Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, 42-43.

[32] Louis Althusser, For Marx, 173.

[33] Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, 46-47

[34] Spinoza, Ethics, 118.

[35] Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever, 218.

[36] It should be noted that one of Althusser’s most significant criticisms of the party within the essay on the 22^nd congress was its absence of meaningful democratic practices.  “We must point out that this same Party, which talks at such length and with such generosities about liberties for others, nevertheless remains silent on the question of the present forms and practices of democratic centralism, i.e. on the forms of liberty of Communists in their own Party.” Louis Althusser, “The Historical Significance of the 22^nd Congress”, 198.  

[37]Macciocchi and Althusser, Letters from inside the PCI, 4.