One divides into two

Pierre Macherey

(1976)

According to Lenin, the principal, if not the only aspect of dialectics is the “splitting of

the one in two”, that is to say, the struggle of contraries that is also their identity or their unity. In

his “response to John Lewis”, Althusser develops this idea through the formula of the “primacy

of contradiction over the contraries” (my translation) that he illustrates by the example of class

struggle: this is not brought about through a confrontation between groups that preexisted, as

independent entities, to their confrontation; but we need to say the inverse, that “it is class

struggle that constitutes the division of classes.” (my translation), in the sense where one can say

that it’s the movement of contradiction that engenders the contraries. One divides into two. What

does this really mean?

One divides into two, this might mean the following: first the One (Being, Logos, Subject,

anything we like) that exists in itself and for itself, and then its division. One produces its little

children and as in all processes of filiation, it produces them to resemble itself as close as is

possible: the little Ones, the beautiful children, different from each other, or even opposed to one

another, as we might see in the best families; with an ingratitude produced by nature or by will,

they enter into conflict, by separating themselves from that which engendered them, from their

“author”; but for this same reason, they remain however faithful to their first nature: they remain

“Ones”, which, in turn, preexisted their division etc.

What does this history tell us? Its meaning rests on a very peculiar interpretation of the “itself”,

the “se”, in the French of the formula “un se divise en deux” (lit: one divides itself into two): the

“itself” designates a “self”, an essence, a fundamental principle that makes being what it is. It is

indeed that which it is, identical to itself, centered on itself, closed in on itself, and it is defined by

this original appropriation of what it is, which constitutes its first nature. This determination is

fundamental; because it can be applied to all “ones”, big and small, to which, cutting across their

differences and their mutual battles [différends], it gives the condition and the guarantee of their

unity. Thus, One exists first in this warm intimacy, complicity, of itself to itself, which defines its

being-“One”. We might also say that the One is in itself its proper subject: it is in a way the

Unique and its property [The Ego and its own – Stirner]. And it results that the One, identical to

itself, satisfies itself by being what it is, and cares above all for remaining such; at least it cares

that it does not assume its identity under the figure of Worry, of Nostalgia, of Desire: but this

constitution, which its interpreters might project on it, should allow it to lead the battles through

which will finally return it back to itself.

What follows after this? Mystery! One divides, it engages in a route marked out by challenges

and renouncings, an ontological passion, where it exposes itself and explodes in a promethean

division. A grandiose epic, let us note, which is specifically enveloped in darkness, because in

this darkness we perceive its true colours: that which is original is often veiled and draped in the

ignorance of those who profess it. But through the episodes of this drama the essential remains

preserved: the One realizes “itself” through “its” division; what the One poses in this difference –

which is never but a difference to itself – is itself. We see then that a suffering is also a promise:

the One is not lost, apart from in itself, in order to find itself better. “You would not be looking

for me if you had not already found me.” Thus it is already found since in fact it never left its

“self”. Its history should be read in reverse, moving backwards, since it directs itself towards an

end which was given at its own beginning. One, which is its own subject, is also its own end, the

two are reconciled into One.

In this perspective, the One is at the same time first and last. It is first because it is last: all this

movement, this trouble of becoming which moves the world, is the oblique path by which that

which should be is accomplished, so that what is apparently separate realizes itself by returning

to unity. This is why the One is last because it is also first: those who think that things are

delayed in their arrangement, those who think that we do not see yet the beginning of the

announced reconciliation, to all these impatient people, the beautiful history of the One teaches

the virtues, and perhaps also the pleasure of waiting: it would not really be such, it would not

really be One or Oneness, if it were easy, if it were without labour, if it were for right away and

not for tomorrow. But we find consolation in saying that tomorrow, if it is not today, it might as

well have been yesterday, since its promise had already been given at the start, at the beginning

of the beginning.

Applied to class struggle, this ideal schema permits to describe the history of the alienation of

Man, as such which unfolds itself within the horizon of an integral humanism. The division of

society into classes is thus presented as secondary in relation to the primordial existence of this

One that is Humanity, this being which is sufficient to itself and which reaches its liberty through

its existence which is the realization its essence, struggling thus towards this complete

appropriation of its nature that qualifies the Unique: alienation is nothing but the momentary loss

of this original unity, its division between distinct and irreconcilable terms. On the one hand, the

history of humanity tells of the fall of human essence, but also, via the dialectical confrontation

of given forces, it prophesizes the reconstitution of the primordial unity, provisorily lost in the

world of contingency. The end of history, from where history receives its own meaning,

coincides then with its beginning: it does nothing but liberate a power of being which is already

completely constituted, which it realises on the basis of the promise which is already given and

ceaselessly renewed. On the other hand, the contradiction of classes appears, with respect to the

first unity of which it had been detached, as simple difference, an inequality: thus to speak of

inequality which reigns among people, it is by hypothesis to envision the possibility of evaluating

this inequality with respect to a single and homogenous norm of evaluation, by determining the

interval which differentiates between the more and the less, the interval that puts in scale the

degrees of realisation of the human principle (which is in itself intangible), and thus decides

about the fundamental right for man to be himself. Inequality between men: it is the

quantitatively substantial and measurable distinction that separates the rich and the poor, the

strong and the weak.

Alienation and inequality: these categories conceal the real determinations of exploitation. They

bring them under a single form, through which the slave, the serf, the proletariat are confused, as

figures of a same essence which is circumstantially diversified, a divided essence, a suffering,

lost Humanity, which has lost its “being”, which is separated from nature. The material history of

men, such that it is drawn from the determination of different modes of production, is thus

occulted: between the exploitation of the slave and that of the proletariat, it seems possible to

establish an analogy; while in fact, – but the history of alienation cannot tell this, since it is

something that one does not “tell” –, these are two incommensurable situations: on one hand the

exploitation of the proletarian presupposes freedom (economic, political, juridical), a merciless

freedom that toss him into the labour market, where he “freely” negotiates the only merchandise

which he properly masters, his labour power; and, on the other hand, the slave, who is by

definition deprived of this freedom, that which makes him precisely a slave, in contrast to the

proletarian: for in order that the proletarian might appear, we need to have precisely the slave

“freed” from his slavery.

An integral humanism signifies the erasure of material contradictions in history, a history

[histoire] which, transfigured, becomes thus a true myth, a “story” [“histoire”] [in French

“histoire” means both story and history – N.o.T.], that is to say, a fable. These contradictions are

absorbed into a single form where they are erased; they are explained in relation to a nature or an

essence, of which they express at the same time the memory and a promise. In the social class,

the humanist will see the indices of a lesser or bigger conformity to the lost or occulted essence;

in the history of class struggle, he will look for the premises of a force of progress that windingly

advances toward its goal, sometimes by walking backwards. In this perspective, class struggle

becomes something occasional, something of the order of the event: it is reduced to a succession

of episodes through which it should already be possible to read the outcome of the intrigue, that

is to say, the final act with which the contradictions are going to resolve themselves and

disappear. Class struggle is thus also a transitory form: its truth resides in the element in which it

is accomplished. We can understand that in these conditions material contradictions of history are

erased, they are divided into these contrary terms which are the opposed classes, these distinct

entities which confront each other here and there; they absorb themselves in the fundamental

unity of which they were nothing but a partial and temporary emanation. Humanism and

economism develop this hypothesis up till the end: leave man be, leave productive forces be, let

history be…, the developments, by definition “impetuous”, the movement, by definition

“irresistible”, of these natural fluxes, (fluxes coming from entities that exist first completely in

themselves, before their circumstantial partition), and the division which is artificially and

temporarily imposed on them, take care, by their own impetus, to realize the final objectives of

liberation, in always making constantly closer the resolution of the objective contradictions of

history. And they also promise us a better future that we might not see but which is at least – it’s

promised! – , guaranteed.

This prophetic conception of history is evidently an illusion; by speculating on the origins and the

ends, it masks the effective reality of social conflicts with the help of systematically constructed

fictions; it hides the objective character of the struggle that in fact conditions the historical

existence of classes and which has nothing to do with metaphysics, with a division of an essence,

because it has at its base exploitation (which is economic and ideological) of productive labour.

Against the myths that we were just evoking, we need to assert the idea that class struggle is

absolutely primary, that is to say, that it does not proceed from the division of an original

essence. But here, we should really pay attention, and understand that the meaning of the words

changes completely: if class struggle is primary, it is not in the sense of an origin which would

also be at the same time an end, or the promise of an end, but it is rather the absence of origin and

thus the absence of end. Class struggle is not another origin of history: it is every contrary to an

origin. Why? Because it is a cause which does not exist elsewhere than in its effects, in its

concrete manifestations, in the forms of its effectuation; it does not constitute a general and

separate principle, valid in itself, that one can piously pluck at the rosary of facts which illustrate

it; class struggle is the historical law of development, coinciding with the production of its

material forms, which condition the effective becoming of its process. History is its own process,

and that is why there is no place for looking for an external principle of explanation. Class

struggle is neither an origin, nor a final end, but a material determination of history, of which it

weaves the entire fabric, the fabric being the history of class societies. It should not be said that

class struggle is anterior to classes, no more that it should be said that the classes are anterior to

class struggle. What is in question here is a primacy which is not explained as a relation of

anteriority, and that is why it is not told in the manner of a myth, on the basis of an imaginary

chronology.

One divides into two then, what does this mean? The difficulty consists here to draw two ideas at

once. On the one hand, the operation of division that is announced in the expression “one divides

into two” does not correspond to the act of a mechanical separation, in which the one would pre-

exist either its division or its parts; but neither is the inverse: because in fact, the one is itself

nothing other than the process of its division that defines the totality of its nature. On the other

hand, the elements that this division isolates should not be considered as independent entities

derived from the totality from which they would have been detached as parts; on the contrary,

they represent indissociable aspects, the extreme sides of a unique process to which they belong.

This means neither that they complete each other in the sense of a mechanical adjustment, nor

that they form together a whole, a totality coherent and sufficient, in a manner of an organism of

which the functions balance themselves so in order to reach or endure towards the realization of

the common end. Thinking the unity of a contradiction has nothing to do with thinking the unity

of a whole seized in its completeness and its effective and ideal coherence. What is then a

totality? It is either a sum, whose elements add up so in order to reach a positive result where

their differences are purely and simply removed, cancelled: they do not count. Or it is rather a

harmonic combination, a set of tendencies, sketched out or fine tuned, which, in entering into

correlation and concurrence, finish by fusing into a system of global organization, that may or

may not reach its end (an end which this organization encounters as a final term or which drives

it as a virtual limit) and where it is definitively accomplished. It is the fulfilled promise of a unity

(an effectively realized totality) or a indefinitely delayed promise (a movement of totalization the

possibility of which remains permanently open), but which in all the cases can be thought in

function of this internal tension which confers cohesion to itself, and which is once again a

mythical figure, a figure of the One. This category of totality, regardless of the interpretation

which is given of it, always suggests a certain power of indetermination, wherever it is located,

because it refers to the representation of a state, possible or real, in which all the determinations

that it gathers might disappear or become indistinct, either by being eliminated or by being

intentionally fused. The famous “laws” of dialectic, from which “dialectical materialism” takes

its justification as a form of knowledge, as a fully-constituted field of research, seem to be

invented in order to represent the figure of such a totality, which is clearly a metaphysical

essence.

What is then the unity of the contraries? First, the fact that the contraries are indissociable: then,

that they are the product of one or many contradictions; it is, finally, and only at the end, or as a

consequence, that they are “identical”. In effect, the identity of the contraries can be thought in a

consistent way only under the condition of two characters that we just enounced: their

indissociability, and their a priori insertion in the process of their division, from which they

derive all their reality. In a draft dedicated to the dialectic, composed in 1915, on the margin of

his lecture of the Science of Logic of Hegel, Lenin writes, “The identity of contraries, their

“unity”, one might say which more precision, even if the distinction of the terms identity and

unity might not be particularly essential here. In a sense, both are correct….”. “In a sense”,

identity is the same thing as unity, but in only one sense, thus not completely, because one is

“maybe more exact” than the other. What is it then that differentiates identity and unity, if the

difference between them is so thin? The answer is found in what follows in the text: “the identity

of contraries… is the recognition (the discovery) of opposed, mutually exclusive contrary

tendencies in all the phenomena of nature (as well as those of spirit and those of society)”. The

identity of contraries, this is also their mutual exclusion: it is not given by and in their reunion,

their addition, or in their fusion, but through their division. The identity of contraries is then not

the originary identity of an essence that affirms itself a priori in its relation with itself; it is this

singular “unity” which makes so that a contrary never exists in itself or for itself without the

existence of “its” contrary not being immediately implied, in an intrinsic, and not in an extrinsic

way. We might also say that identity is nothing more than difference.

It is in this sense that one should understand what Lenin also calls in the same text the “self

movement” of the dialectic processes: they do not have an independent source and their

unfolding, given either by the supremacy of the whole over the parts, or by the pre-existence of

the parts over the whole. This is why we can say that these processes develop in themselves and

by themselves, without being mechanically determined by external “factors” or “circumstances”.

But this relation to itself, the interiority of these self movements, that simply designates the

primacy of contradiction over the contraries, does not neither correspond to an independent

development of a stand-alone contradiction, that would be itself, as such, a specific – and thus

relatively unconditioned – entity, as a plant that we can make grow in a single pot: in fact it

implies in its unfolding the integrating process of many contradictions, of an infinity of

contradictions. This integration process of an infinity of contradiction is a relation which is

intrinsic in itself and that, following the concept that Althusser drew from a reading of Lenin,

“overdetermines” all concrete situations, and confers to them their concrete character of real

situations, overdetermined set of contradictions imbricated one into another.

Understood in this sense, the dialectic should allow us to think in a more specific way the relation

between the universal and the singular. The principle of unity of contraries applies for all

phenomena without exception, for all concrete situations, as Lenin says in the text that was

invoked above: it works as a “universal” principle that conditions the development of material

reality considered in sum, of which it constitutes the sole and unique “law”. But what is it that

guarantees the universality of this principle, that is to say, the fact that it applies to all reality

without exception (which is the condition of its universality)? The fact is – and this is why it is

necessary to be clear on what we mean with the status of “principle” that we accord to the unity

of the contraries – that this principle doesn’t “apply” in the proper sense of the term, as an already

available law whose existence might be declared independently of the condition of its realization

or application: we should rather say that this principle coincides with the singular and

inexhaustible diversity of the different material processes of which it constitutes the only

common characteristic, these processes having finally nothing in common but the fact of having

nothing at all in common, except for the fact of realizing themselves via some peculiar conditions

that determine them in a specific manner.

In this sense, contradiction, just as materiality, is the form, or the universal condition of existence

of that which is, only as much as it effectively acts in reality by determining it. The notion of

determination is essential to understand how contradiction acts: contradiction acts always in

determined forms, certo ac determinato modo, as Spinoza would write; far from melting together,

absorbing, uniting the processes that constitutes the movement of this reality in a unique global

totality (unified by the relation that these processes have with the whole, that might be itself

defined by the intermediary of the unique property of being submitted to the “same” game of

contradiction – a game which, in fact, from a material point of view, is the same only if it is

always different), contradiction, on the contrary, distinguishes them, specifies them, determines

them, in assigning to them their singularly diverse or diversely singular character. If one really

wants to state this principle in a general way, one should say that contradiction develops in forms

that are always necessarily unequal, in the figure of fundamental inequality to itself.

It is again in this sense that in the same draft of 1915 on dialectics, Lenin extends the thesis of the

unity of contraries to the relation between the particular and the general, and writes: “thus the

contraries (the particular is the contrary of the general) are identical: the particular does not exist

other than in its link to the general. The general does not exist other than in the particular, by the

particular. All particular is (in one way or another) general. All general is (a bit or a side or an

essence) of the particular…”. To speak of the universality of contradiction and of the specific

character of contradiction, is finally to say one and the same thing. Contradiction is universal

only because it is always and everywhere realized in determinate forms and under determinate

conditions: its universality consists in its specificity; in each process it displays at the same time

and interdependently its generality and its singularity. Universality, in the sense of the dialectic,

that is to say, in the sense of materialism (because dialectics and materialism are one and same

thing), is not reducible to the affirmation of the essential unity of a totality independent and

closed on itself or reaching toward its accomplishment; on the contrary, it permanently opens to

the unlimited self movement of material reality, whose processes have their causes and their

determination in themselves, in the sense of an overdetermination that, always and everywhere,

singularizes them and specifies them by conditioning them. We can say that Spinoza means

exactly this when he affirms that nature is at the same time naturing and natured, cause or

principle realized and differentiated in its effects, effects which are the infinite processes of its

auto-realization.

One divides into two: this formula expresses indissociably the struggle and the unity of

contraries. The unity of contraries is not given anywhere else than in their struggle. Does this

mean that the struggle is first and original? This would reintroduce a metaphysics of

contradiction, that denies its materiality. Does this then mean that a resolution of contradictions

(in the sense of their definitive resolution), is at the same time unthinkable and impossible,

because the struggle is eternal in this sense that it is always reborn in itself? If we always find

again and again the dialectic of contraries, it is because the dialectic never assumes the same

forms. The solution of contradictions is possible only in a relative way, i.e. in the set of

conditions that have shaped and developed such contradictions: this is clearly what Marx wanted

to say when he advanced that humanity poses only problems that it can solve, which means that

humanity can solve them only in the way that it had posed them, in the form in which it

recognizes and formulates them: not in an absolute but in a relative and historical way. In this

sense, the dialectic of contraries takes place only on the horizon of the provisory, that is to say, on

the horizon of history. The universality of contradiction does not mean that the gathering and the

definitive fusion of contraries in a coherent reality, in a “one”. Let us cite one last time the text of

Lenin; “Unity (coincidence, identity, equivalence) of contraries is conditional, temporal,

transitional. The struggle between contraries that are mutually excluding is absolute just as

development and movement are absolute”. One divides into two: this finally means that the

whole is nothing but process, that in reality there are always and everywhere nothing but

processes and their movements, and that these can disappear only with reality itself.

Additional comments by Macherey (1999)

…I have tried accordingly to seize in another way the idea of the struggle of two rival

tendencies [idealism and materialism] in philosophy, by representing it in the light of the

dialectical thesis of the unity of contraries which was completely developed in the passages of

“One divides into two”: this article preceded the study dedicated to the struggle of tendencies in

philosophy and gave it its bases. I was thus led to affirm, on these grounds, that the two

tendencies in fact make one, precisely because of the non-reciprocity of the positions to which

they correspond; from here follows the paradox: “Idealism never exists without there being a

minimum of materialism, its intimate cause, its secret, which always corrodes it to a certain

degree”. In the original manuscript from which the article was extracted, this analysis was placed

under the title: “The unity of materialism and idealism”.

This was a manner of saying that if idealism is the negation of materialism, the inverse is not

true: materialism, which is primary in relation to idealism, is not the negation of idealism. This

idea was also developed in the following form: there is a “materialist fact”, but there is not an

idealist fact, and this is the key to the relation between the two. “Idealism is nothing but another

form of materialism, a perverse and excessive, inverse, expression of the fundamental materialist

fact”. Idealism, in other words, always conceals materialism, and the question here, at the same

time, is knowing whether materialism has a need to express itself in a certain element of idealism.

Evidently, the notion of a “materialist fact”, enounced as such, is far from being clear: one should

go further and explain also that within this “fact” (fait) there is also “doing” (faire), in the sense

of a practice in its perpetual becoming, and not an “accomplished fact” or “done everything”

(tout fait), in the sense of an a priori given which serves once and for all as a ground for all the

diverse enterprises of philosophical thought. And, staying on the threshold of such a necessary

explanation, I became myself a witness, through an untenable blindness, to the aporias of

materialism, having identified materialism with a doctrinal construction forced to being on the

plane of its own initial principles or foundations, with the latter supposedly being rooted in the

reality of which they constituted some sort of direct emanation. But, entering by myself in the

game of contradictions, whose proper logic I tried to reflect upon, I could not affirm this less, in

the sense in which I would come to precisely the opposite of this kind of reification of the

materialist position: “In philosophy, there is no revelation, there is no good new materialist who

can re-establish the fundamental fact in its truth, and who can suppress the idealist appearances”.

I thus assumed a certain distance towards naturalism, in the last instance of feuerbachian

inspiration, which had marked, and to a certain degree vitiated, the notion of a “materialist fact”.

The result of such a viewpoint was to reinstate the relation between materialism and idealism as

one of content and form, considered both in their constitutive inequality and their inseparability.

One can of course raise doubts about the summary character of this analogy, which sets free a

really abstract conception of the philosophical tendencies and of their relation. But without

having the least obtained, following such a path, some theoretical effects the least of which one

can say that they did not fall back on the line of orthodox Marxism. Writing that “if it should

denounce relentlessly the return of an idealist position in philosophy, and also within itself,

materialism should take care not to put all the “idealists” in the same basket, to confuse them

through the method of a hotchpotch”, and that “idealism and materialism do not have two

independent, distinct, histories, but proceed from one and the same history”, I tried to reflect on

the proper historicity of philosophy, and not to make it violently return to a framework defined by

a rigid and simplistic schema.

Considering them [philosophical texts] as conjunctural representatives of the state of relation of

the tendencies in the struggle, what I proposed, in stating that “knowing a philosophy, means

recognising, and measuring, within it a certain relation between the fundamental tendencies”, I

thought in the sense of a desystematisation of their interpretation, and I discover here the

elements of an active dynamic, or even operative, whose terms cannot be fixed in a definitive

manner. In other words, to consider a philosophy from a materialist point of view, “in a

materialist way”, meant to discern within it the symptoms of class struggle in philosophy: thus,

not to give a reductive lecture of it, which would consist of an interpretation one-sidedly

materialist, but to consider it as a certain determinate compromise between idealism and

materialism, a compromise realised in the form of a more or less stable precipitate. From this

point of view, to understand philosophical doctrines, this did not involve anymore throwing upon

them an exterior view, but presumed in a certain way taking part in the movement which was

recognised to animate them from within: “Here, it’s a matter of conceiving philosophical

doctrines not as achieved systems, but as process, as elements of a movement of transformation

(“passage”), which we have to follow while amplifying it, or whilst giving it a new orientation”.

It thus wasn’t a matter of developing, from a purely theoretical point of view, a new hermeneutic

of understanding, but, whilst taking philosophy, and the experience of thought in general, as a

field of forces, to approach it in a practical perspective, as long as philosophy itself is before all a

practice, even if this practice takes the form of a practice of theory, a theoretical practice.

“A materialist reading, a “left” reading, this means also, and first of all, a dialectical reading. Not

a reading which conserves, but a reading which transforms. Not a reading which recognises or

recovers a forgotten or hidden fact, but a reading which produces new theses, impossible,

unthinkable, before they would be explicitly formulated”. In writing these lines, if I didn’t foresee

it, I had in mind a certain way of conceiving philosophical practice which would preoccupy it in

all my later reasonings, and continues to do so also today.

In the background of this speculation stood again Spinoza, who gave a real rooting to the concept

of practice, and in this allowed to think the real itself as practice, or, as a dynamic of

transformation which finds in itself, or which produces during the course of its accomplishment,

its own conditions of possibility. This corresponded to a proper perspective of a materialist

dialectic, which I thus interpreted in the development dedicated to “One divides into two”:

“Universality, in the sense of the dialectic, that is, in the sense of materialism, because the

dialectic and materialism are one and the same thing, never comes down to the affirmation of the

essential unity of a totality which is independent and closed in itself, or tends towards its own

accomplishment; but is permanently opened towards the limitless self-movement of material

reality, whose processes have their causes and their determination in themselves, in the sense of

an overdetermination that, always and everywhere, singularize them and specifies them by

conditioning them. We can say that Spinoza means exactly this when he affirms that nature is at

the same time naturing and natured, cause or principle realized and differentiated in its effects,

effects which are the infinite processes of its auto-realization”. This way of reading Spinoza

could be considered as abusive from an academic point of view: but it sought precisely to

distinguish itself from such a point of view attempting to make Spinoza’s thought work beyond

the closure imposed by its own historically constituted doctrinal effects. This work of theoretical

fermentation led to an idea of a dynamic of transformation which is applied simultaneously to the

real and to thought, to the world and to philosophy, the latter, finally, being identical with the

former, because it shares with it the logic of a same “doing”, a same practice. Thus, doing

philosophy, this meant nothing but taking part in such “doing”, in which practice of philosophy

whose bases are the same ones which condition the process of self-transformation of reality.