Althusser and Lazarus: Continuity or Rupture?

In 1991, Sylvain Lazarus organized a conference in Paris at the University of Paris 8 to commemorate Louis Althusser, who passed away about six months before. This was somewhat remarkable considering, as Lazarus says in his remarks, he was never an Althusserian or a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). Lazarus’s work appears at odds with Althusser. Lazarus is well known for his emphatic emphasis on singularity and the subjective at the expense of the objective, and he argues that Marxist categories — class, class struggle, revolution, etc. — are obsolete for politics today. Althusser, on the other hand, remained a member of the PCF even after May ‘68, consistently formulated his thought through the framework of Marxism-Leninism, and insisted on the objectivity of history. So why was Lazarus the one to organize this conference? Especially when other notable Althusser students, like Étienne Balibar, also presented? Despite the appearances of an uneasy intellectual relationship, Althusser is a touchstone for Lazarus’s thought.

Althusser features prominently in Lazarus’s work, and he has devoted many essays to him: “Return to Althusser”, from 1983, translated in this issue; Lazarus’ remarks at the conference in 1991; a whole section in Lazarus’ only complete book, Anthropology of the Name¹; and another in 2008 on Althusser’s interpretation of Lenin, titled: “On a New Contemporary Politics and on the Philosophy of Politics of Louis Althusser, Reader of Lenin.”²

Althusser opened the door to a theorization of politics and history that, in many ways, goes beyond Marxism. Althusser’s interventions opened the path to a conception of politics that deviated from certainty, guarantee, and determination. There is no subject of history, only a process without a subject, and this process is ultimately aleatory and proceeds by way of contingent encounters which may or may not fuse together in the tendential articulation of new laws. If every situation is exceptional, as Althusser wrote in 1962, then shouldn’t we incorporate this into how we approach politics? Shouldn’t politics entail the construction of new categories and a new intellectuality to intervene in our own exceptional situation? This is precisely the theory and practice of politics that Lazarus would come to articulate throughout his work. Our objective in this essay is to flesh out the ways in which Lazarus builds on Althusser’s previous interventions.

The Crisis of Marxism

The crisis of Marxism is central to both Althusser and Lazarus. The crisis begins in 1956 with Khrushchev’s secret speech, which shattered the international communist movement. It foreshadowed the Sino-Soviet split while discrediting the official communist parties for militants in the U.S., Italy, and France.³ The discrediting of the official parties formed the backdrop of the organizational pluralization of the sixties. New generations of militants were forced to experiment, whether that was in the forms of student unions, sects, or new “party” formations.⁴

Althusser’s first interventions in the PCF take place in this context. Althusser’s intention was to counter the PCF’s response to the crisis, which was to distance themselves from Stalinism by embracing humanism.⁵ Maurice Thorez, the long-time leader of the PCF, excitedly declared in 1946 that a peaceful transition to socialism was possible. Thus, the official communist movement had already abandoned the dictatorship of the proletariat and the revolutionary road to socialism. The PCF’s embrace of humanism after the Secret Speech was really just a continuation of the reformist status quo that sought to renounce class struggle and revolution. This would be brutally exposed in ‘68.

Althusser deployed a dizzying array of arguments in his interventions against PCF orthodoxy: the epistemological break in Marx between the early, humanist works, and the later, scientific works; the development of theoretical anti-humanism; a theory of history as a process without a subject; and, via his magisterial analysis of the Russian Revolution, the application of overdetermination to explain historical causality.⁶ However, there was a tension at the heart of Althusser’s interventions. Despite levelling intense critiques of Marxism, or Marxism as it had been codified first by Engels and then subsequently by Kautsky and the Second International⁷, he remained within the PCF even after May ‘68. Yet in his effort to produce more coherent conceptions of politics and history, he was already moving beyond Marxism.

Despite Althusser’s advancements, he would consistently lapse back into more orthodox Marxist formulations, particularly in his period of self-criticism in the late sixties.⁸ Yet by the late seventies, the writing was on the wall: the crisis of Marxism arrived and could no longer be avoided. The referents that sustained Marxism were disappearing: the fates of the USSR and China had been sealed, the national liberation movements ceased, and the workers movement was on the path to its destruction. Althusser would announce the crisis in 1977 and began a balance sheet of Marxism as both a theoretical doctrine and a practice of politics in “Marx in His Limits.”

Althusser spent most of the eighties in and out of mental institutions after a traumatic episode where he murdered his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in a manic bipolar episode. Haider and Salar Mohandesi say, “It was a horrifying climax to a lifetime of severe mental illness, punctuated throughout by long-term institutionalization, medication with MAOIs, and electroconvulsive therapy.”⁹ Althusser disappeared from public life, and “from 1982 to 1986, between stays in the mental institution, his political and academic careers finished, Althusser wrote of philosophy in a different register. These late texts worked with a new language: ‘aleatory materialism’ in the place of dialectical and historical materialism.”¹⁰ These texts were continuous with his work of the late seventies, but while retaining reference to Marx, they seemed to suggest a break, or at the very least, a radical modification of historical materialism. As Haider says, to sum up Althusser’s interventions, “Althusser presented a distinct method and practice of social analysis, and a distinct concept of history, represented by terms like overdetermination, conjuncture, structural causality, and the encounter.”¹¹

The Lonely Hour That Never Arrives

Althusser’s best and most famous essay was penned in 1962 for La Pensée: “Contradiction and Overdetermination.”¹² Building on his scandalous thesis of Marx’s epistemological break in “On the Young Marx,” published in 1960, Althusser would deepen his analysis by investigating the difference between Marx and Hegel’s dialectics. If Marx really inverted Hegel, then what did this inversion consist of? Althusser would go on to argue that Marx’s dialectic is radically different from Hegel’s, though the stakes of this were much higher. The heart of the essay is the analysis of the Russian Revolution through the category of overdetermination, which opens the path to an autonomous conception of politics.

Althusser’s concept of overdetermination demonstrates that revolutions are the result of a multiplicity of contradictions that fuse together at the same time to produce an “exceptional” situation. The thrust of his argument is that the Russian Revolution didn’t follow the Marxist schema at all, and it in no way was a result of the basic contradiction between workers and capital. The first communist revolution happened in Russia because it was the weakest link in the imperialist chain. “It had accumulated the largest sum of historical contradictions then possible; for it was at the same time the most backward and the most advanced nation, a gigantic contradiction which its divided ruling classes could neither avoid nor solve.” Russia was thus “pregnant with two revolutions.” Althusser continues:

The whole Marxist revolutionary experience shows that, if the general contradiction (it has already been specified: the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the contradiction between two antagonistic classes) is sufficient to define the situation when revolution is the ‘task of the day’, it cannot of its own simple, direct power induce a ‘revolutionary situation’, nor a fortiori a situation of revolutionary rupture and the triumph of the revolution. 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 (and many of them will necessarily be paradoxically foreign to the revolution in origin and sense, or even its ‘direct opponents’), 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 which its ruling classes are unable to defend. Such a situation presupposes not only the ‘fusion’ of the two basic conditions into a ‘single national crisis’, but each condition considered (abstractly) by itself presupposes the ‘fusion’ of an ‘accumulation’ of contradictions.¹³

The analysis provided here seems to go beyond Marxism by negating the determination of the economic in historical events; this ultimate determination by the economic, in the last instance, is often taken to be the heart of historical materialism. In other words, Althusser absolutely explodes any determining role of the economic in revolutions and politics, and produces an autonomy of the political, which will be picked up by Lazarus in a much different way. The economic, which is represented by the contradiction between capital and labor, disappears from the stage when revolutionary situations unfold. So if economic contradictions really did not have any ultimate determining power in the only communist revolution to actually take place, is this not a refutation of Marxism?

Of course, Althusser would oscillate and claim that the economic was in fact still ultimately determining in the last instance, but as Haider says, “the phrase ‘determination in the last instance’ is conceptually vacuous, its content already ruthlessly destroyed by the concept of overdetermination and immediately undermined by the beautiful and mystifying formulation of the lonely hour which never comes.”¹⁴ If the “lonely hour” of the last instance never really arrives, then on what grounds can we insist on the ultimate determining power of the economic? Haider adds:

It seems almost as though he [Althusser] felt compelled to periodically pause to comfort the reader with unsupported structuralist assertions of determination in the last instance. “We know very well that it is not politics but the economy that is determinant in the last instance,” Althusser wrote there in a blatant inversion of the entire surrounding argument, in which he had just equated class struggle with political struggle and then went on to draw on the pyrotechnic language of “fusion” and “explosion” to explain “political action.”¹⁵

Thus Althusser, while lapsing back into Marxist concepts as he would throughout the sixties, offers an analysis of a political sequence rooted in singularity and the exceptional. As he says of the Russian Revolution, “we should perhaps ask what is exceptional about this ‘exceptional situation’, and whether, like all exceptions, this one does not clarify its rule — is not, unbeknown to the rule, the rule itself. For, after all, are we not always in exceptional situations?”.¹⁶

It’s in this vein that overdetermination can be read as a placeholder concept for the aleatory and sequential. Applying Althusser to himself, we can say that, like Marx, Althusser had to adopt the existing categories of Marxist theoretical culture in order to think what he was trying to develop throughout his work, such as the contingency of history. In his analysis of the Russian Revolution, he was forced to import a concept from a foreign theoretical problematic, psychoanalysis, in order to even conduct his analysis. As he himself says in “On Contradiction and Overdetermination”, “I am not particularly taken by this term overdetermination (borrowed from other disciplines), but I shall use it in the absence of anything better.”¹⁷

If we center the rupture of ‘68, it becomes clear that figures like Badiou, Lazarus, and others all gradually came to think in new categories. The difference with Althusser is that, whether due to his age or external circumstances, he never had the opportunity to produce these new categories that were already present in his older works. They only appear in the form of sketches and experiments, never fully articulated, in Philosophy of the Encounter. The two concepts at the heart of the late Althusser are encounter and fusion. Encounters are random, but when they happen there is an opportunity for a fusion. He uses these categories in his analysis of Marx on the development of capitalism:

The capitalist mode of production arose from the encounter between the owners of money and the proletarian stripped of everything but his labour-power. It so happens that this encounter took place, and took hold, which means that it did not come undone as soon as it came about, but lasted, and became an accomplished fact, the accomplished fact of this encounter, inducing stable relationships and a necessity the study of which yields laws — tendential laws, of course: the laws of the development of the capitalist mode of production (the law of value, the law of exchange, the law of cyclical crises, the law of the crisis and decay of the capitalist mode of production, the law of the passage — transition — to the socialist mode of production under the laws of the class struggle, and so on). What matters about this conception is less the elaboration of laws, hence of an essence, than the aleatory character of the taking-hold of this encounter, which gives rise to an accomplished fact whose laws it is possible to state.¹⁸

He adds that the encounter between owners of money and a class of people stripped of everything but their labor-power also took place in ancient Rome, but this encounter didn’t fuse through the elaboration of tendential laws. Thus capitalism didn’t take hold at that specific moment.

In “Philosophy and Marxism”, which collects excerpts from interviews with Fernanda Navarro from 1984-1987, Althusser is asked about the concept of the aleatory in relation to history. He contrasts two types of history: “the History of the traditional historians, ethnologists, soci­ologists and anthropologists who can talk about ‘laws’ of History because they consider only the accomplished fact of past history”, history as a static object, and another type of history: a “history in the present… a history which is […] living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory.”¹⁹ Althusser connects this to his concept of conjuncture, and says that every conjuncture is singular. He says, “It follows from this that what culminates in materialism… is aleatory materialism, required to think the openness of the world towards the event, the as-yet-unimaginable, and also all living practice, politics included.”²⁰

Lazarus would take all of these arguments a step further without any pretext of remaining within Marxism. He wouldn’t try to renew Marxism from within itself, as Althusser had tried, and he takes the crisis as an entry point for a new conception of politics that is sequential and exceptional. If Marxism never provided a theory of politics, as Althusser himself says, then we must ask if it’s even capable of doing so.²¹ If Marxism is primarily a form of social analysis whose object is the mode of production and its development over time, is it capable of furnishing a theory of politics which seeks to radically negate the existing society via communism? While Marxism’s social analysis lays claim to scienticity, can politics really be thought of through the lens of science? Some Marxists certainly try to by privileging their own historical political sequences. Maoists, for example, believe the categories of Maoism present the most up to date categories for political struggle today. If Marxism presents a science of politics with lessons that can be gleaned from each political sequence, then Maoism’s status as the last proper sequence makes it the form that contemporary militants should adopt — that is until the next world historical revolution yields new categories. Some Marxists may recognize the rarity of politics but do so by propping up a mythological view of parties and revolutions. They might recognize that exceptional situations are the core of a revolution, but seek to universalize and repeat the exceptional situation (of Russia and then China) rather than recognizing its singularity. They think the exceptional situation and the rare event proves that whatever those political actors did must be correct and have universal applicability. They don’t recognize how all political successes are largely contingent, or overdetermined. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in studying them, but it does mean we must come to grips with their singularity.

Althusser’s analysis of the Russian Revolution and the development of aleatory materialism answer an emphatic no to the question of the scienticity of politics. Whatever the scienticity of Marxism as an analytic tool, this does not transform seamlessly into a scienticity of politics. This gap defined much of Althusser’s work. Politics is of the order of the contingent, of the aleatory. Lazarus’s theses on historical modes of politics are premised on this singularity. What happened once will never happen again, and every mode of politics constructs its own intellectual framework (intellectuality).

Lazarus has never written exclusively on the late Althusser, but his 2022 essay, “Timelines: the Two Arcs” invokes the aleatory, although without directly citing Althusser. But it would be astonishing if Lazarus wasn’t familiar with Althusser’s late arguments, especially since he cites “Marxism is a Finite Theory”, published around the same time, in the essay. Lazarus’s argument is that revolutions are aleatory opportunities for a new type of government. Or in other words, that historical revolutions, and the violent modalities they took, were ultimately random. Lazarus therefore says:

In the spring of 1917, Lenin was in Switzerland; he had not yet returned to Russia. In one of his interventions, he said—I quote from memory: “What will happen in Russia? Will the Soviets retain power? Will the bourgeoisie prevail? Will the tsar return?” He adds: “No one knows, and no one can know.” It is on this “no one can know” that I base the category of the aleatory, and what I call non-perspectivism, anti-historicism. If the February Revolution is an accident, what it opens up is obscure, absolutely.²²

For Lazarus, history is clear and politics is obscure.²³ This means that, when looking back at history, it’s relatively easy to understand why things happened. But this ultimately has no predictive value on the future and the possible.

Process Without a Subject

We'll now discuss another key formulation in Althusser’s work. Lazarus himself identifies the infamous Althusserian term “process without a subject” as a crucial moment. Indeed, Althusser’s claim that “history is a process without a subject”, most famously made in his “Reply to John Lewis”, is, for Lazarus “an attempt to break with classist thought.” For Lazarus, classism refers to the conceptual apparatus that’s synonymous with Marxist politics — the apparatus of class, class-party, class struggle, class antagonism, etc. The formulation of history as a process without a subject suggests a break with classist thought because this framework assumes that the working class is the subject of politics. It is therefore difficult to imagine how Lazarus could suggest this, for the “Reply to John Lewis” maintains a fidelity to the language of class struggle and the proletariat. Here we must not make the error of assuming a similarity in terminology implies a similarity in theoretical framework. Althusser is not operating with an orthodox use of these terms. So what is Althusser’s framework, especially when he writes his “Reply to John Lewis”?

To answer this question we need to understand two lines of thought that enable Althusser to formulate his answer. The first begins in For Marx and consists in a simple yet profound point: if we are to read the young Marx’s declarations about man — i.e., humankind — seriously, we must read them as ideological. What does this mean? It means first and foremost that Marx, barely twenty-five years old when he wrote most of his early writings, was the product of his times. Living in the shadow of what Eckart Förster calls the twenty-five years of philosophy²⁴, Marx’s intellectual formation was under the aegis of a philosophical anthropology dedicated to the vicissitudes of the Idea. Or to put it another way, the critical question in those years is: “how does man know the world?”

The impetus of Althusser’s book For Marx is to articulate this idea that the young Marx operates under the aegis of German Idealism. His interest in man and the essence of man are notions imported from his historical circumstances. If we are to see in the young Marx everything already there in the old Marx we are making of Marx a being he cannot possibly be: the only philosopher to never substantially revise his concepts. We must instead be Marxist about the young Marx:

[T]hese principles too presuppose ‘fully developed Marxism’, but not as the truth of its own genesis, rather, as the theory which makes possible an understanding of its own genesis as of any other historical process. Anyway this is the absolute precondition if Marxism is to explain other things than itself: not only its own genesis as something different from itself, but also all the other transformations produced in history including those marked by the practical consequences of the intervention of Marxism in history.²⁵

Of course the fact that something is a historical condition has no bearing on its truth. As Althusser goes on to state, the movement from the ideology of the young Marx to the science of the later Marx passes through an encounter with the world: “this retreat from ideology towards reality comes to coincide with the discovery of a radically new reality of which Marx and Engels could find no echo in the writings of ‘German Philosophy’. In France, Marx discovered the organized working class, in England, Engels discovered developed capitalism and a class struggle obeying its own laws and ignoring philosophy and philosophers.”²⁶ It is the passing through of this moment that will allow Marx to move concretely towards what has come to be seen as an orthodox materialist position, allowing him to write, in the 1859 Contribution “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”²⁷ It is true this formula echoes lines from 1845’s The German Ideology, but Althusser designates such works as transitional — works in which Marx moved towards a more mature theory.

This is the first line of thought: that man — as commonly used — is an ideological construction and that Marx’s thought and Marxism itself is something that develops. The other is Althusser’s notion of the whole. In his essay “Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?”, Althusser articulates his notion of the complex whole in contradistinction to the Hegelian notion of expressive totality. Hegelian totality, according to Althusser, ties everything together: each element is expressive of a simple principle.²⁸ Each piece belongs to every other piece. The circle is a good metaphor for expressive totality because while it does not have a beginning or an end, it has a center. Everything is connected but related back to a single focal point. In For Marx, Althusser will talk about the simple contradiction that governs the Hegelian system of totality, a similar idea is at work when he uses “simple principle” in this later essay.²⁹

Marx, on the other hand, operates with the notion of a complex whole. This is a whole that is structured, but it is structured by an unevenness. The consequences of this structured unevenness Althusser outlines as follows:

It is this interplay, this unevenness, which allows us to understand that something real can happen in a social formation and that through the political class struggle it is possible to get a hold on real history. I made the point in passing: no politics have ever been seen in the world which were inspired by Hegel. For where can you get a hold on the circle when you are caught in the circle?³⁰

Althusser deploys these two ideas against John Lewis. Man is an ideological construction, and if we want to grasp history properly, we need to understand the idea of the complex whole as it applies to the class struggle. First, Althusser admonishes John Lewis for invoking man:

One thing is certain: one cannot begin with man, because that would be to begin with a bourgeois idea of “man”, and because the idea of beginning with man, in other words the idea of an absolute point of departure (= of an "essence") belongs to bourgeois philosophy… Marxism-Leninism cannot start from "man". It starts “from the economically given social period”; and, at the end of its analysis, when it “arrives”, it may find real men. These men are thus the point of arrival of an analysis which starts from the social relations of the existing mode of production, from class relations, and from the class struggle. These men are quite different men from the “man” of bourgeois ideology.³¹

Then Althusser invokes his idea of the complex whole, albeit implicitly:

[I]t is not enough, if you want to understand what is happening in the world, just to look at the exploited classes. You also have to look at the exploiting classes. Better, you have to go beyond the football match idea, the idea of two antagonistic groups of classes, to examine the basis of the existence not only of classes but also of the antagonism between classes: that is, the class struggle. Absolute primacy of the class struggle (Marx, Lenin). Never forget the class struggle (Mao). But beware of idealism! The class struggle does not go on in the air, or on something like a football pitch. It is rooted in the mode of production and exploitation in a given class society. You therefore have to consider the material basis of the class struggle, that is, the material existence of the class struggle. This, in the last instance, is the unity of the relations of production and the productive forces under the relations of production of a given mode of production, in a concrete historical social formation.³²

Social formation, of course, being another word for the complex whole. This is already signaled by Althusser’ use of classes, plural. A mistake or a slip perhaps, but this is doubtful. After all, Althusser will say that it is “the masses who make history” in contradistinction to John Lewis’ “it is men who make history.”³³ In these two passages, two moves have been made. The first is that Althusser has dispelled any concrete predetermined essentialist notion of man as the subject of our investigation. We do not start with men and their struggles, but “the economically given social period.” Which is to say we start with social formations, modes of productions and structures. Second we have to, in our investigation of the complex whole, look at the classes, all of them. The class struggle is not a football pitch: there are no simple, well-defined teams, no referees, and no simple, obvious rules of the game. The uneven structure of the complex whole means that while yes, there is an exploited class, the exact nature of this class cannot be determined in advance. Indeed there may even be more than one exploited class. We may at the end of this investigation find real men at the end of the process, but these men are altered by the specifics of the complex whole, which cannot have a simple principle. To maintain a unifying contradiction that simply states workers versus capitalists is to return to the expressive totality of Hegel.

This is the theoretical inflection underpinning Althusser’s theory. The core story, however, is much more straightforward. The development of the thought of Marx and Engels was dependent on their coming across an organized working class and the class struggle, coming across elements of the social whole in conflict. It was this encounter that helped the development of Marxism as a science. We must understand this simple point as a reversal of much of what passes for orthodox Marxism that maintains that what is being articulated is essentially an essentialist effort: Marx — through sheer philosophical genius, erudition and sufficient rereadings of Hegel — articulates the mode of production, which allows for the identification of the subject of history and the means to achieve freedom from the domination inherent in the capitalist mode of production.³⁴ Yet this does not describe the historical development of Marxism itself. It is only when a subject isn’t assumed, when a process is examined instead, and when one encounters real people engaged in class struggle and their thought that one can develop what Althusser calls a science, by which he means a non-ideological field of knowledge.

This brings us back to one of the first objections Althusser makes to John Lewis. Near the beginning of his essay he writes:

John Lewis, in his article, never for one moment talks about this political history of the Workers' Movement. In For Marx — that is, in 1965 — I was already writing about Stalin, about the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, and about the split in the International Communist Movement. John Lewis, on the other hand, writes as if Stalin had never existed, as if the Twentieth Congress and the split in the International Communist Movement had never occurred, as if May 1968 had never taken place, nor the occupation of Czechoslovakia, nor the war in Ireland. John Lewis is a pure spirit; he prefers not to talk about such concrete things as politics.³⁵

Despite Althusser’s reputation as a grand theoretician of formidable formal stature, Althusser makes clear that his own intervention in Marxism is situated in concrete struggle, just as Marx and Engels’ own development of their theory was. In “Politics and History,” he says something even more peculiar. Having described Marx’s theoretical revolution as opening up the continent of history, Althusser goes on to claim: “The continent [of History] was opened up a hundred years ago. The only people who have ventured into it are militants of the revolutionary class struggle. To our shame, intellectuals do not even suspect the existence of this continent, except to annex and exploit it as a common colony.”³⁶ In Althusser’s metaphors here each scientific discipline has its own continent, opened up by theoretical revolutions. Yet the continent of history remains not only pristine but also unexplored by intellectuals. What could the status be of these ‘militants of the revolutionary class struggle’ and what is it they have found?

Let us pause for a moment. What is the meaning of these interventions? They put forward an anti-essentialist, formalist account of the politics of Marxism. Call it Spinozist if you so wish. The point Althusser is making is that to take Marx seriously is to understand that his framework supposes a complex and overdetermined system, the social formation. Yet because of its uneven nature, the weakest link, the leverage point appears in strange and unusual places. Marx, and Marxism, offers an analytic: the diagnosis of capitalism, understood as a social formation produced by modes of production. Yet taking the theoretical tools used to articulate this concept of capitalism, the social formation is uneven and overdetermined. All of which is to say: there is no clear path from the analytic Marxism provides to Marxist politics.

There is much in Althusser that will cut against this reading. Many papers have no doubt been written trying to “symptomatically” read Althusser against Althusser, just as he did with Marx. The preceding paragraph outlines a discovery that Althusser was at times unwilling to embrace, that the politics of the complex whole can become detached from the analytic that theorizes the social formation. Here we begin to cleave close to Lazarus’ conception of politics, where emancipation is severed from social analysis, where politics is singular and the emphasis is on the fact “people think”, where people is rendered by les gens, the most generic term possible in French for people, indicating a lack of content and a lack of a subject that Althusser was gesturing towards when he suggested that only militants had explored the continent of history or said that it was not men but “the masses” that make history. Or: that history is a process without a subject.

Lazarus on Althusser

As we noted in the introduction, Lazarus’s interpretation of Althusser oscillates between two positions. On the one hand, Lazarus criticizes Althusser for being trapped within classist categories, and argues that he’s unable to register Lenin’s rupture with Marx because he thinks the former through the latter. This ties into a general critique of Althusser for remaining within the PCF even after May ‘68, a common charge directed against him by the younger generation in France. Lazarus argues that Althusser’s thinking of politics through classist categories ultimately amounts to an evacuation of politics. Yet, on the other hand, Lazarus also argues that Althusser opens the thinkability of politics after Stalinism. He says, “Althusser’s enterprise emerges as an attempt, against and after Stalin, to propose a compatibility between politics and Marxism, even if it means overhauling the latter. The problematics of instances and of over-determination is at the centre of this overhaul.”³⁷ So despite Althusser himself remaining trapped within classist categories, Lazarus clearly indicates that he offers a way beyond this. Both positions appear whenever Lazarus has written about Althusser.

To the first position, Lazarus offers the following arguments:

1. Althusser’s theorization of the crisis of Marxism is constrained by his continued membership in the PCF. He says, “Althusser, member of the PCF and thus an organized political figure, is precisely why the question of politics is excluded by Althusser from the theoretical approach. Reflection on the PCF, its history and nature, despite appearances (the situational texts following the 22nd Congress), is not only not addressed by Althusser and his disciples within their theoretical propositions, but is even denied as a central issue, or indeed as an issue at all.”³⁸ For Lazarus, critiques of the PCF can only take place from outside of it.

2. Althusser remains trapped in the categories of Marxism-Leninism, which Lazarus calls a Stalinist creation. These categories include the couplet of dialectical and historical materialism, as well as the Engelsian distinction between economic, political, and ideological struggle.³⁹ Lazarus says the distinction between historical and dialectic materialism is, “a distinction… founded by Stalin, and at the heart of his text Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Now, even in Stalin’s terms, it is a matter of the science of history, for historical materialism, and for the other, dialectical materialism, the philosophy of the party. I would say, in a word, that this distinction coexists with the unthinkability of politics subsumed to the party. Althusser, in his post-Stalinist enterprise, finds himself fettered by a Stalinist category, by a category foundational for Stalin.”⁴⁰ Lazarus argues that by retaining a necessary relationship between politics and history, Althusser ultimately evacuates from the former. He says this is, “An evacuation of the singularity of the historicity of political phenomena, the very essence of which is that they are subjective phenomena, even if this unfolds in an environment where material conditions of existence intervene.”⁴¹ Lazarus further argues this is why Althusser was unable to offer coherent analyses of the events of the sixties.⁴²

3. More specifically, Lazarus argues that Althusser is unable to break with classist thought. When Lazarus articulates his conception of politics in Anthropology of the Name, separation is crucial. Politics is separated from history, from economics, from social analysis and science. This is done to maintain the singularity of politics and the possibility of a politics in interiority. For Lazarus, Althusser does not and cannot commit to this operation of separation.⁴³ Althusser’s notion of overdetermination offers some promise that there will be instances where political action is possible in the social formation, the complex whole. Althusser, however, does not want to abandon the economic thought of Marxism, producing an analysis where “the question of the relationship of instances is resolved either by mechanic expressivity and the aggregation of instances or by their distribution in irreconcilable multiple.”⁴⁴ The first returns us to economic determinism while the second does not resolve the question of what makes politics possible and thus ultimately evacuates politics from the analysis.

4. Lastly, Althusser’s inability to break with classist thought results in an ability to register Lenin’s rupture with Marx. For Lazarus, Althusser thinks Lenin through Marx’s classism, even though Lenin broke with Marx on the question of politics.⁴⁵ By thinking of Marx as the founder of modern politics rather than Lenin, “politics is unthinkable because politics is entirely subsumed under the category of history.”⁴⁶ Lazarus, on the other hand, argues that Lenin is the founder of modern politics. Lenin broke with Marx on the relationship between politics and history by arguing that politics is conditional on consciousness. This consciousness, for Lenin, is a consciousness of an antagonism with the entire political and social order. Revolutionary consciousness is therefore dependent on a break. Alessandro Russo says, “For Lenin, the political existence of workers, their ‘revolutionary consciousness,’ is in no way a reflection of their class station. Rather, it is literally a ‘deviation’ — Lenin’s term — the discontinuity that they manage to establish with their spontaneous social inexistence.”⁴⁷ Thus, “failing to identify Leninism in its own right as an absolutely new and singular politics has the consequence of reflecting Lenin through Marx, of seeing nothing in Lenin but a great Marxist, a continuer of genius.”⁴⁸

Despite all of these critiques of Althusser, Lazarus maintains his significance throughout these essays, both for Althusser’s invocation of the crisis of Marxism and for opening up the thinkability of politics after Stalinism. He offers the following arguments on this position:

1. Althusser himself opened the possibilities for a concept of politics that goes beyond Marxism by trying to untie the question of thought from that of the party. Lazarus says that Althusser “was the first to open to what I call the thinkability of politics, to be sure in totally singular terms, the first trying to argue that politics is thinkable, that it was of the order of thought… the essential point… is that I will call Althusser’s great declaration: politics is of the order of thought, it is necessary to think politics.”⁴⁹ For Lazarus, Stalin’s cult of personality closed the thought of politics.

2. Althusser’s other innovation was to make politics thinkable outside of the category of the party through his categorization of Stalinism as a dogmatism. For Lazarus, “‘Party’ does not establish a rupture in thought, regarding politics and the Stalinist vision of politics. It is the notion of dogmatism which establishes the rupture and periodizes. Now, dogmatism is the fusion of science and ideology under the aegis of the party.”⁵⁰ Lazarus says that politics must be brought out of unthinkability, and the thinkability of politics is to be found in interiority and singularity, rather than in exteriority and in relation to the party/state. Politics was unthinkable under Stalinism because it was subsumed into the party. Lazarus says, “When Althusser does not put the question of the Party at the center of his approach… a formidable opening occurs.”⁵¹

3. This analysis carries into Anthropology of the Name, Lazarus’s only complete book, in 1996. Althusser is clearly a key touchstone for Lazarus even as he attempts to leave him behind. This is clear from the following quote in only the second chapter of Anthropology of the Name: “Althusser represented an attempt to break with classist thought and the subject of class, from the moment he proposed the process without subject and the idea that any problematic of the subject is given as transcendental, that is to say, as idealist. Althusser proposed statements on subjectivity that do not rely on subjects, and he opened to an approach to subjectivity independent of the substratum of groups.”⁵²

Althusser then represents, for Lazarus, a theoretical forebear. In attempting to think through the problems of Marxism, Althusser began to think about the problems of politics, overdetermination and social analysis that mark so much of Lazarus’ work. Yet there were certain actions of separation Althusser would not commit to, which limited how far his analysis could go.

Lazarus picked up the mantle from Althusser and pushed many of these positions to their logical conclusions. This is why Haider connects Althusser, Badiou, and Lazarus in a conceptual triptych where the former opened the way to the latter two. He says, in his interview with Stuart:

The theoretical advances made by Lazarus and Badiou were only made possible by Althusser’s intervention; they are inconceivable without it. This should not be controversial, since after a brief period of exaggerated Maoist denunciation we have an abundance of explicit and theoretically rich affirmations of this line of influence—for example in the 1991 conference on Althusser organized by Lazarus (Badiou’s speech is collected in his Pocket Pantheon). It is simply impossible to understand how Lazarus and Badiou develop the problems of Marxist theory and communist politics without studying Althusser.⁵³

In The Future Lasts Forever, his autobiography, Althusser famously admits that he never seriously read Marx. Long seen as a moment in which Althusser falls on his own sword, this admission is gleefully quoted by his detractors. Yet Althusser’s detractors are always failing to read carefully and to think carefully. We like to read Althusser here as suggesting that us communists have never really read Marx seriously because we have never grappled properly with the emancipatory legacy Marx sets in motion. Althusser took this legacy seriously amidst the emergence of the crisis of Marxism: the Stalinism of the PCF and communist parties; the deterioration of the labor movement; the end of the cultural revolution. Lazarus, too, takes Marx’s emancipatory legacy seriously after the crisis has exploded, the socialist parties have capitulated, and the end of history has been declared.