On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.
04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive
04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming
04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality
08.10.2009
Reading Althusser
07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser
06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?
03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo
02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political
17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention
20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation
09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess
11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence
11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting
11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting
07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II
06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside
06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting
05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics
04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process
05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory
11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities
01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille
06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons
05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction
09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified
07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect
04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II
03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?
07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor
08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II
07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker
07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state
09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself
04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics
07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II
06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class
02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III
01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II
30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism
30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II
29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience
06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II
05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law
09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II
08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception
09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II
08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality
At the second seminar meeting on Althusser's legacy, we will discuss the penultimate chapter, A discourse in its place, of Rancière's 1974 book on Althusserian Marxism which Emiliano Battista is translating right now. In this chapter Rancière comments on Althusser's idea of the "class struggle in theory". It is essentially a long and brutal attack on the pretensions of the Parisian Marxist intelligentsia and of the little mandarins of knowledge at the post-May universities of the Vincennes type to being militant while transfering the authority from the master who is supposed to know to the knowledge itself.
The focus of the argument is on the ways in which Althusser proceeds by effacing the site of his discourse, or, better said, the lines that distinguish his discourse (learned, scholarly, academic, PCF bound) and the discourse of the masses. After 1968, Rancière states, it made no sense for any marxist discourse any more to continue to found itself in the principle of its own inner coherence containing in itself the rules of its verification, while rejecting to analyse the relationship between marxist knowledge and proletarian power, and the ways in which a certain type of knowledge is bound to a certain type of discipline of the academic institution or the Party. Rancière poses the question in how far Althusser both adopts this critique and neutralizes it by subsuming it to the practice of philosophy. Annulling the power of the multiple forms of militant struggles that have emerged during the 1960s turns out to be the effaced theoretical function of Althusser's self-criticism of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The text starts by diagnosing how Althusser's critique of Stalinism, his anti-productivism and his Maoism are the very positions through which he supports the Party by deviating from its program, giving the Party a radicalism, the Party permanently negates, and the text ends by showing the deadlock gauche prolétarienne was trapped in:
"There was, however, this idea, which, through May, we inherited from the Cultural Revolution: to abolish the division of labor that separated intellectual from manual labor. Gauche prolétarienne, in particular, undertook to carry out this project. But the abstraction of this project only yields a simple negation. The death of the book is declared, and with it the futility of those struggles that remain closed within bourgeois intellectual apparatuses; intellectuals must either become manual workers or professional revolutionaries. They decide to become proletarians. [...] What we witness then is a reversal, in which the uprising of one class is transformed into the uprising of another class, and in which intellecutals speak in the name of the proletarian. The mechanism of representation is restored, and reduplicated at the level of the relations between organizational powers."
The politico-theoretical perspective Rancière advocates in this text is the multiplication of anticapitalist struggles that has taken place in the 1960s, with which the locations, strategies, and questions, from which one sets out to fight, are equally multiplied. For Rancière, the occupation of the LIP factory by the workers in Besancon in 1973 is paradigmatic for a newly emerging political form of struggle in which the militants themselves offer a coherent disourse about their practises.
With a bit of effort, we can see some of these arguments as foreshadowing Rancière's more recent work.
Emiliano has proposed to read this chapter together with Rancière's brief text "From one month of May to another" that he has written for a Brazilian newspaper in 2002.
- introduced by Emiliano Battista
Rancière: The lesson of Althusser, originally published in France as "La lecon d'Althusser", Gallimard, 1974
For more information on gauche prolétarienne see
http://www.marxists.org/history/france/post-1968/gauche-proletarienne/introduction.htm