Fateful rendez vous

Fateful rendezvous

The young Althusser

Gregory Elliott

I enclose...a picture of the Dijon railwaymen which appeared in L'Humanité... I hope that people, observing the calm strength and dignity of these men, will not one day say of us that `the philosopher missed his rendezvous with the railwaymen'.
Louis Althusser, letter to Jean Lacroix, 1949-50

Reviewing the English translation of Althusser's `confessions' in these pages three years ago, David Macey noted that `[t]he death of the philosopher has led to a resurrection of his writings.' In addition to L'Avenir dure longtemps (1992), the `posthumous edition' at that stage contained a prison journal and a collection on psychoanalysis. Together with the first instalment of Yann Moulier Boutang's comprehensive biography, these disclosed the existence of a hitherto unknown Althusser. Since then, a further six volumes have appeared; more are in preparation. If only because they exceed in quantity the material released during their author's lifetime - a rough estimate indicates some three thousand pages as against approximately two thousand - it will take considerable critical effort to acquire an adequate perspective on them, and begin the reassessment of Althusser to which Macey alludes.

Meanwhile, an Anglophone readership must await the halting, uneven process of partial translation. To date, a mere fraction of the new material has been made available in English: a careless version of the autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, from Chatto & Windus in 1993; and an attractive selection from the Écrits sur la psychanalyse by Columbia University Press this year.

To these can now be added Verso's excellent collection of the `early writings', extracted from the first volume of the Écrits philosophiques et politiques published in France in 1994, and rounded off by a transitional text `On Marxism' dating from 1953. Many of its virtues derive from the meticulous scholarship of the original editor, Francois Matheron, whose introductory materials offer invaluable guidance to the uninitiated.

Others are attributable to Geoffrey Goshgarian, who has not only produced an admirable rendition of some intractable French, but appended bibliographical information well beyond the call of translational duty. Cavils aside, The Spectre of Hegel is the finest edition of Althusser in English.

What does it reveal? Conventionally, Althusser's career has been periodized into three main phases, spanning the years 1960-78, from the elaboration, via the revision, to the destruction of `structural' Marxism. At the very least, this requires supplementation by another two periods of reflection and production - one antecedent, the other subsequent, to the standard chronology.

The former is a pre-Althusserian moment, circa 1945-51, comprising texts which remained unpublished or inaccessible until the 1990s. If the fragmentary character of the last writings makes it hard to identify the philosopher's ultimate destination, these allow us to fix his postwar point of departure with greater confidence. The intellectual `biography' of Marx outlined in For Marx and Reading Capital was, it transpires, something in the nature of an `autobiography'. The work of the mature Althusser conducted a tacit settlement of accounts with his own erstwhile philosophical consciousness; the critique of Hegelian Marxism mounted therein was a conjoint autocritique of the young Althusser. One result, as we read The Spectre of Hegel, is an intermittent sense of déjà lu. Not for nothing did Althusser remark in a review of the newly translated Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1962: `even our own experience should remind us that it is possible to be "Communist" without being "Marxist".