academia abstract althussers interpretive interventionalism

7/27/2019 Academia Abstract Althussers Interpretive Interventionalism

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Althussers Interpretive Interventionalism: Reconsidering

Symptomatic Reading

With the exception of a relatively small but recently growing group of scholars who

have worked on Althussers theories in the decades after his death in 1990, Althusser

is better remembered today, when he is remembered at all, for having strangled his

wife in one of many bouts of mental instability from which he suffered throughout his

life than for his scholarly achievements. Only few of his contributions, such as his

notion of ideology have, at least in some academic circles, withstood the test of

time, others such as his method of interpretation have largely been forgotten.

However, even at the height of scholarly interest in Althussers work in the late 1960s

and 70s, its interpretive method had often been discussed only in passing, if it was

discussed at all, and it had almost always been limited to Althussers analyses of

Marx texts.

This is hardly surprising; for Althusser has developed his method, which is

inspired by Marx amongst other thinkers, in part to improve our understanding of

Marxs texts, in part to supplement insights that Marx never fully developed. The

inaccurate conclusion many scholars draw from this is that his interpretive approach,

which he called symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale), is a mere heuristic

designed for an interpretation of Marxs texts and that Althusser is not (concerned)

with methods of reading, generally.1 However, Althusser himself has insisted on the

much broader applicability of his approach and has deployed the latter in his readings

of such thinkers as Machiavelli and Rousseau (among many others). Even though

some scholars have recently rediscovered Althusser for themselves, having been aided

1 Alison Assiter: Althusser and Feminism. London: Pluto, 1990, p. 17.


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by the posthumous publication of material that was previously unavailable to the

wider academic community, his method of interpretation and its implementation to

Machiavelli continue to be ignored. An attempt to consider and assess his method in

its application to Machiavellis The Prince will be made in the chapter that follows.

Any such attempt, however, faces sooner rather than later the question whether a

Marxian method of interpretation is of any relevance today. Marxian hermeneutics,

more than any other method of textual interpretation, has come into disrepute, since

Marxian interpreters are said to reduce each text to a passive reflection of its

economic context, of viewing the author as determined by the economic mode of

production and as representative of his or her class.2 In short, they are frequently

criticized for providing interpretations that are reductive, deterministic, and suffused

with grand-narrative privileging of revolutionary class struggle.3 In other words,

Marxian hermeneuts allegedly view texts as fully implicated within the society and

the economic context in which they were written, thus rejecting the humanist belief

that objective truth escapes the political efficacy of established discourses4

Accordingly, one might ask whether Marxian approaches have not rightly been

rejected on the grounds that their readings of texts are reductive and deterministic?

And given that their motifs have often been political rather than epistemological,

what, if anything, can they teach us at a time, where virtually nobody appears to be a

firm believer in Marxism anymore?5 Those are questions that merit serious scholarly

attention, but their answers should not be presupposed in advance. Otherwise, there is

2 Moyra Haslett: Marxist Literary and Cultural Theories. Houndmills, Basingstoke, London, 2000, p. 1.3 Haslett, 2000, p. 2.4 Goldstein, 1990, p. 26.5 Most Marxian interpreters, as Haslett has convincingly shown, defend their method not just onepistemological grounds by arguing that it is more comprehensive than alternative approaches, but on

the grounds of its political significance, claiming that its emancipatory ideal, transformative aims andmaterialist perspectives are worthwhile and politically enabling (2000, p. 15).


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the danger that when our selection of what is worth investigating is primarily dictated

by our current set of beliefs, by what is en vogue, by what generates publications in

reputable journals and by what ultimately secures jobs, we are either surrendering to

what we think we are expected to believe or bound to (uncritically) affirm a great deal

of our previously held beliefs, due to our unwillingness to be challenged by

alternative modes of thinking that might not have lost any of their significance after

all. Rather than questioning the decision I have taken to include a chapter on Marxian

hermeneutics in this thesis, we should therefore ask ourselves what, if anything, can

Althussers approach teach us that other methods have not or cannot.

My response will be that Althusser, more thoroughly than any other

methodologist discussed in this thesis, reflected on the relationship between

interpretive-theoretical work, on the one hand, and concrete political practices on the

other. So much so that he conceived of interpretations as interventions in those

practices; for what Althusser writes about Marx also applies to himself, namely that

his philosophical essays do not derive from a merely erudite or speculative

investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in a definite conjuncture.6 In

this he might be of interest not just to political theorists who pride themselves in

emphasizing the political nature of their theorizing, but he might also pose a

challenge to proponents of other interpretive methods due to his rejection (for

epistemological as well as political reasons) of the traditional relationship between

author, text and reader and his materialist understanding of reading as production.

Those gains that make scholarly engagement with his method worthwhile do,

6 Louis Althusser: For Marx. Trans. Ben Brewster. London, New York: Verso, [1965], 2005, p. 9.What this conjuncture consisted of we will discuss in section II. In the Note to the English Edition ofthe first published translation ofReading CapitalAlthusser explicitly supports such a reading, when he

says that For the conjuncture in which this text was prepared (1965), for its character as a theoretico-ideological intervention in that conjuncture, the reader should refer to the presentation, To MyEnglish Readers, inFor Marx, see Althusser 2009: Preface.


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however, come at a price. For many scholars who may find his epistemological

diagnoses on textual interpretation convincing, would, in light of the Marxian pills

that Althusser offers as treatment, probably seek treatment elsewhere. The same can

be said for the implementation of his method. Though Althussers interpretation of

Machiavelli offers a fresh (because unusual) perspective on his texts, his readings are

of limited purchase, when one tries to divorce them from his Marxian commitments.

Those tentative conclusions already indicate what reading I am guilty of 7, one that

on the theoretical level shares Althussers claim that ones theoretical and political

convictions meet in textual interpretations in the way of a complex, and often

conflicting, marriage of ideas that is not based on a one-to-one correspondence, while

holding on to the humanist idea that the semantic content of texts should play a

significant role in our interpretations, and that texts are not the mere results of a

combination of, on the one hand, problematics of which the author is a mere

representative, on the other hand, readers who merely produces texts in order to

launch their own interventions, thus revealing my own political convictions as a left-

leaning liberal.

My discussion will be structured as follows. In the first part I will discuss

Althussers approach in light of its theoretical and political contexts (section II). I will

then assess his approach based on a critical discussion of its conceptual cornerstones,

I shall reflect on the presuppositions that inform his interpretive interventionalism and

consider debates on hermeneutics as one of Althussers forays (III). Subsequently, I

will assess his interpretation of Machiavelli (IV), and draw the chapter to a close by

considering the implications of the findings gained throughout the analysis (V).

7 As Althusser put is, since there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading

we are guilty of (Louis Althusser, tienne Balibar: Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster. London,New York: Verso, [1968] 2009, p. 14).

academia abstract althussers interpretive interventionalism

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