Scribd Logo
Unggah

Selamat datang di Scribd!

  • Althusser Reading Capital

    Diunggah oleh

    Michael Litwack
    36 tayangan29 halaman
    Reading Capital

    Judul Asli

    Althusser Reading Capital

    Hak Cipta

    © © All Rights Reserved

    Format Tersedia

    PDF atau baca online dari Scribd

    Apakah menurut Anda dokumen ini bermanfaat?

    Apakah konten ini tidak pantas?

    Laporkan Dokumen Ini
    Reading Capital

    Hak Cipta:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Unduh sebagai PDF atau baca online dari Scribd
    Tandai sebagai konten tidak pantas
    36 tayangan29 halaman

    Althusser Reading Capital

    Diunggah oleh

    Michael Litwack
    Reading Capital

    Hak Cipta:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Unduh sebagai PDF atau baca online dari Scribd
    Tandai sebagai konten tidak pantas
    dari 29
    Vous Arians, Moding Copith s fark. as The following papers were delivered in the course of seminar on Capital E ents in the systematic framework of a single discourse could have tried to make a finished work out of them. But are what they hhave been, we prefer to the living, Engels, Kausky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Stalin, Gramsci, the leaders of the workers’ and opponents: philosophers, economists, chapters, orto the schemes of simple reproduction and reproduction on an enlarged scale, before coming down from the arid table-lands and plateaus find in new-born the experience ofa reading; and so that he in turn will be dragged in the wake of this frst reading into a second one which will take us sil further. But as there is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must say what reading we are guilty of Capital as economists, as pose Capital the question of | definition without a diference, we posed Cay fc diference both of its object and of its discourse ~ asking ourselves a ech step in our reading, what distinguishes the object of Capita! not only from the objec of classea! {and even modern) political economy, but also from the object of Mares Early Works, in particular from the object hhence what distinguishes the discourse of Ci of classical economics, but also from the p of the Young Marx. | To have read Capital as economists would have mea reading it while posing the question of the economic content and value ofits analyses and ~ schemes, hence comparing its disco outside it, without questioning that object itself. To have read Capital as historians would have meant reading it while posing the question of the relation between its historical analyses and a historical object already defined outside it, without questioning that object itself/To have read Cupital as with an object already defined , From ‘Capital’ to Marx's Philosophy 15 the question of its methods of ex- once again without questioning. of knowledge. ‘one ideological product among ot ns of the Jewish Question and the 18, nntinuation or even culmination of classical “oy Aéoes Capital constitute ind method? Does Capi event, 2 theoretical I economy-and the ‘return a knowledge of its own pre both classical economics and the philosophical uch are the implications of the epistemological fall, the discovery of and training in the meaning tence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading - the 6 faces, their ‘absences of works’AAnd contrary to al to a : pect. what, in theory. It is certainly no accdk ions which reigned on high 0 , far from making metaphor using literally. To break with the religious myth of read a jin which each part is pars cotalis! inhabit in person) to be the 3 P Hegel, for the last time and on the terrain ‘makes a written discourse the immediate transparency of 2ssembled all he complementary religious myths of the v a ree ee ee speaking in the sequences of a discourse; of the Truth The first man ever to have posed the problem of reading, and in conse~ rol of ices hak bas Ws ope that weal this aco, fa quence, of writing, was Spinoza, and he was also the fist man in the wor ‘speech of the Truth which to have proposed both a theory of history and a philosophy of the opacity person. Need I add that once we have broken the immediate. With him, for the first time ever, a man linked together iy beeween Logos and Being; between the | Li we owe this rele, which has revluoniaed our resing of Fred Naranigent and lucid ~ and for many years lated ~ there efor. erween the essence of things and its reading; ~ the radical novelty of what Jacques Lacan has given us is beginning tops ‘which the men of a still fragile age] ces against the precariousness of sd Ladd that, once we 7 ies, last becomes possible? < SS From ‘Capital’ to Mars's Philosophy 19 4 ary + to a new practice of reading, us with a new theory of r rodigious reader is much less important farx fet the need to fill out his text by readi his opponents sty Which made Fecognize his debts (alas, ke knew what a debt was), but reasons deeply rooted in the theoretical conditions of his work of discovery. So Marx reads out loud to u5, wor only in tie Theories 9 book which remains essentially sc Quesnay, he reads Smit ith, he ort himself with what is corzect ‘what is false in w y say — ‘sum, to-atsafe himself with respect to the acknowledged masters of Political Economy. However, but transparency itself - the sin of blindness belonging by right-to vision as auch as the virtue of clear-sightedness ~ to the ee of man, But as one is the) reading - or rather a reading principles. grid, in which Smich’s text is seen through Mare’s, pr merely a summary of concordances and discordances, ‘Smith discovered and what he missed, of his merits and 5 failings, of his presences and absences. In fact, this reading is a retrospective theoretical ith could not se or understand appears eg ined by the dual and conjoint only as radical omission. Certain ofthese omissions do refer to others, and et in oly. "1 the latter to a primary omission ~ but even this reduction restricts us to the observation of presences and absences. As for the omissions themselves, this reading does not provide reasons for them, since the observation of them destroys them: the continuity of Smith's discourse which are invisible (to iscourse shows the lacunae in ith) beneath the apparent con~ Two volumes out of three ranslated into English and published by Lawrence and Wishart, the necessity of the obscure field of the invisible, as a necessary effect of the structure of the visible field. But in order to make what T mean by this more comprehensi leave this abrupe of the questio labour and its value, with the relation of this value to the values how is this price de a -telations of demand and supply explained, 0 the 4 of all other commodities, nothing but the oscillations of the mark ve of below a certain figure. If demand and su variation in prices they produce ceases, but then the effec supply ceases, too. At the moment when demand and average price, the Physiocrats’ ‘necessary price’ — Adam Smit price’ ean, with labour, as with all other commodities, be thas expressed in mon sold for precisely what our real problem, the problem that exists im and is actual identity ofthis organic confusion of non-vision in vision, in this observation of non-vision, or of oversight, fve are no lon a reading of classical economics through the grid of Marx the accidental prices mined this value by non-vision with its vision. We are there- fore dealing with our problem in its,quce state, defined in a single domain, Without any regression to infinity. To understand this cal identity of non-vision and vision within vision is ose our problem . . Visible and ® Referenes to Capital Volume One are given Sst Roys French translation i the three Paka lames ofthe Eatons Sociales version (T,T.M,T.ll) ad then tthe Engsh tres Of solving it. lation of Moore and Aveling in one volume publsed by Lawrence and Wishart (¥ References to Volumes Two and Thee are given t the English translation oly (Ve VoL tt. EO ASE itself designates in itself these points of 6 . © How, therefore, is this iden Let us reread our text care economics asked happened. Classi in the Preface to on-vision and vision in vision possible? the course of the questions class defended in the text where casa should be written as follows: ‘Th fe uterance of the concept of labour power, tion, which the as yet for “about? wat isthe reproduction of abou be pods the ye “unposed question, which the as yet un-asked- for another atthe end of the answ a of bartonc he oc ce goods for the mi production of ar pov’ and questi peed ar Slows ‘oct sth ole of ‘labour power ? the whole sentence. If we suppt blinks ~ we are merely reconstituting a sentence which, ¢ unstable index of the possible production of a new. of which this problem is only one symptomatic m his Preface ro Volume Two of Copia ny @hlogistic chemistry, or of surplus value classical economics, contains the wherewithal not only to modify the old /~ have of knowledge, we must abandon the ‘mirror myths of immediate vision and reading, and conceive knowledge a a production. duction of a new latent questior Through the lau xy conditions of szistence, which lie in the conditions ofits production. It i literally no longer the eye (the mind’s h x corresponding change of horizon. They raise a crucial point which enables u | to escape from the psychological reduction of the ‘oversight? or unwitting at stake in the production of this new problem tained anittingly in the his emerged among other, alrea }guest at a family reunion; > + tansformation_of the entire terrain and | background a ion, which are very embarrassed by hing to say bork that height of vision comes fom the ee, and thai at defines the visible also defines the invisible as the field of the problematic that defines andv lem is merely a particular index of a possible critica transformation and of a possible latent mutation which affect the reality of sith here, but which wil be ostined a the end of thi introduction eson = not provide him, concept with which necessary absence in the first presupposes the st is articulated with the» he way peculiar to theoretical ue here), we find the necessity and gs simultaneously, In the papers you are about to read, and which do not escape the law I have pronounced ~ assuming that they have some claim to be treate, for i meaning -[ve have sequence our relation to Marx from Marx's relation to ‘Smith, is the following radical difference: whereas in his text Smith pro- duces an answer which not only does not answer any of the immediately Preceding questions, but does not even answer any other question he Posed anywhere in his work; (with Marx, on the contrary, when he does hap= pen to formulate an answer mitfout a question, witha litle patience and perspi~ cacity we can find rhe question itself eitemere, twenty of one hundred pages farther on, with respect to some other object, enveloped in some other matter, or, on occasion, in Engels’s immediate comments on Marx, for as flashes of profound inspiration.#® And if, a Ihave dared suggest, ilosophy, ‘recan hope for other gains from it in the theory of history itself. A concep ir Mars, 7) Bat recent, See that Mare used the very expression ‘beoreccal problematic, Here again, the qu ‘seonsiuted out ofits abence in one precise oor sat Peeirn| nd white somewhere ese in his work, 'ss question, I managed to reconstruct this guerton laboriously, by showing thatthe “a we e unknown of a hat it leaves out, struggle isin practice to fll into the ‘versgh’ of not seeing thatthe pl vxe are given in which to read Marx's philosopt = his though, but absent from hi. 1 in a different century that much water has flowed under the bridge and that our problems are no longer the c This then is the guilt offour philosophical reading of Ca sccording to the rules ofa readi i i on toat al costs if we hope to estat gnizing the infinite extent contained within its ing flashes which break the night of pl sophical anthropology with the fleeting snap ofa new world glimpsed through the retinal image of the old. Nor, finally, at least insofar a their immediate y 0). Fe in be found in the few quivering senten the Works of is to deceive oneself ions indispensable to the growth of a radically ropes dela rupture’, Zt Nowele Critique, Pais, May 1965; p. Theses on Feverbach remarkably a to minates everything, and is nothing ost acute consciousness of sciemtifcity id and i what we have been given, and wh rks, some produced by the theoretical practice of a science (with ode of produetion and ia all i fruits of revouonary juestion whose active answer they ‘The question forged outof the first ans anew, and suitable for a od of other works: today, Capit {here polices of a5 function of this ing or the merely ‘generalizing’ reading which ften reduced to, but which, beneath the word ic. of his differential specificiry, wrpened from this first reading of , first{other readings of sharpenings, and then readings This reading was in principle a dual reading, the result of a different, comatic’ reading, which introduced into a question an answer given t0 ‘vas only possible to pose tothe practical politcal Lenin gives us of the conditions for ity of the Marxist di of its gues newiy liberated countries advancing towards socilism,T have left these ‘another place in the Marxist works at our disposal, precisely the answer in ‘assical philosophical texts so late deliberately for the simple reason that before the definition of the essential principles of Marxist philosop © For Mars, pp 164. before managing to establish the indispensable minimum for the + cacepton of knoledge on which Bur {J must ask the reader's indul alone proved, I must neve jon which underlies the prescribed religious readi conception, and one which to all appearances cipiricism a5 well 25. ought define the essential principles ofthe theoretical problematic which underlies it(The erp sone of a PI a es knowledge as such, asa function of th be the knowledge. t process of knowledge les in fat in an operation-of the subject called abstraction. To know is to abstract from the real object its * * So tong at epiricm is undertd inthis generic sense ci posible ro acepe te ‘elaionship between knowledge and real history in eighweath cencury ideology. Ny 7 result is nothing but the pure and perfect real essence, but rather faite sense: removing the covering, a3 1 from the fruit, the veil from the git), the ete] Iam not looking in these concrete examples for the origin of this structure™ I cite them as a number of mirror-images losophies of vision have reflected their complacency. Do and the inessential. Which gives us t result: Knowledge (which is ‘merely the essential essence) is really contained in the real as one of its parts, inessential part. Knowledge: its sole func ion which thinks the knowledge the inessential — by spe of that real object itself as a real part of the real object to be known. This essential real (by a 5, sievi part may be called essential, internal, hidden and hence invisible it 7 art of the real whict ‘essence, itself real. Which gives us a second result: the abstracti and all its scouring procedures are merely proced ne part FD in the extracted part, every trace of their the part of the real they were intended to However, something of the ‘eality of this elimination wi but not at all as one might expect, in the result of this exitence, precisely the existence of its kno [peal or writen concepral discourse which prononess in the form of a message, hence what represents that knowiedge Performed outside the object ~ being the deed of an active subject), is ‘completely incr ure of the real object, in the form of the inessential and the essence, between surfuce and d inside Knowledge is therefore already really it has to know, in the Torm of the respective dise iowledge is completely and realy present the ral part called the essence, but also its distinction and respective posit between the two parts of the real object, of which one (the inesse outer part which conceal and envelop the other (he essence or innet part} This incexment of knowledge, conceived as a real part of the real abject, the real structure ofthe real object, is what constitutes the specific problematic the empiricist conception of knowledge. Once this has been firmly grasped ts concept, we can draw some important conclusions which wil naturally 80 beyond what this conception say, since it will give usa confession of what Xt does while denegating it. I cannot deal with the minor conclusions here, but they are easily developed, part here they i of the visible and the invisible, a foretaste of whose importance can be devected here. only want to note in passing thatthe categories of empiricism are atthe heart of the problematic of classical philosophy; of this problematic even in its variants, including the their denegrations, can give a projected history of philosophy Principle for the construction of its concept during this period], a avowed by the eighteenth century from Locke to Condi Present in Hegelian philosophy, however paradoxical and that Marx, for the reasons we are analysing, had to seit to think the lack of a concept whose effects he had produced nevertheless, to formu late the (absent) question, ie. that concepe, which he had answered never. theless in the analysis of Capical; that(this problematic has survived the wear it received from its twisting and distortion by Marx who transformed it in fat, although he still used its terms (appearance and essence, outside and inside, inner essence of things, real and apparent ‘Movement, etc.);) thatfve find it at work in many passages of Engels and Lenin, who found 4 motive for its use in the ideological parrying was required beneath the enem “terrain, fist of all by turning against him his his ideological arguments and concepts Tonly want to insist on one particular point: the play om words on which this conception is based and which involves the concept ‘ra! Tn fact, it well as the ofthe operation of knowledge — we have just seen thatthe object as well as dpe of oreo in inten fom tere je, Knowledge ef which it proposes to produce, are posed and thought as belonging by right to the real structure of the real object, For the empiricist conception of it provides us wi Sens rhe cet fm a thery mde mh pe is is at from us, but closer Thave shovn is utterly foreign to Marx. More distant from us, to Marx, in Feuerbach and the Works of the Break (The Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology), it will help us understand the perpetual play on the words ‘real’ and ‘concrete’ on which is based a w1 wana meat fering from today.3¥ But I shall not take this ee eenare ry un a tant tn dee "Th ei eros f Plies Chis dsfndments dle poche gel depend on the ideological function of the unciiied concept ofthe ‘concrete iden Polte's proclamation of the arrival of ‘oncrete psychology? was neve ‘orks, al the vue ofthe term ‘concrete! was infact exhausted i is rte it ever founding the sligitest amount of Enowedge ‘hich only exist in the ‘abstraction ‘oni novice snd olay sv, ety ne ‘ria sadn same puy en wed be fond nal be rr Mrs wh ing ° or postive’ humanism 38 tefer themacives to the Early Works, invoking ‘el, ‘concrete or ‘posi na ‘the theoretical bass of is work, They do have excuses, cis ue: ll Marss own expres From ‘Capital’ to Mars treordiarily sich critical path: I shall leave these eects to the play om hich produced them, and thet refutation to the growing vigilance of our time. I'am interested in the play on words it This play on words plays on a difference it f deepening itself att la gee Ja of thought hich 4s a spiritual thougit recapitulating itself 2 i Y (Grundrise der Kri concrete (gestig Konkretes) (Grandrisse de Bain 955, p 2). This cnfson hich 7 absolute idealism of history, isin principle simp! < h hepbt of cpne nm, (Marx defends the distinction berween the real object (the real-concrete the ead (Kopf p. 22) an the object of knowledge, a product of the thought which produces if as bite) which is quit clearly distinct from the real objectIn the denegtion, there is no longer more than one objet: the real object. Hence we are sithic cur rights in concluding tat the true play on words has deceived usa tore sl abjec » peveaived- contre: (aGlicy ‘support (Trager), the word whi its ambiguous seat. The true the production process of a given re: : bj eS the real and is cared xy on words is not a play on the wor which is its mask, but on the {ego Soe Roce aii) nies pe (Ghe order of succession of the word ‘abject’ [It is not the word ‘real’ needs to be interrogated in out according to the real order en spaces ofthe objec of ase connexion with the murder, but the word ‘objet’; the diferente of the cdtialy i knceldgs and cared Ga according to a“ ma oi = be produced to deliver it from the fraudulent unity trick a cibiphe Gtegeed which Sepsis? teed ceupy the same place as they doin the order of ral hist- trie genesis ces assigned them by thei fenton in " the production knowledge.) oe - cf Let us look closely at all these themes for a moment. ‘This sets us off on a path which was opened for inost without our know- (iVhen Marx tels us that the production process of knowledge, and hence ledge, T think, for we have not really considered it, by two Philosphers in | ° iit of its object, as distinct from the real object which ic is Bistory: Spinoza and Mars. Against what should really be called the vent to appropriate in the ‘mode’ of knowledge takes place ent i dogmatic empiricism of Cartesian idealism, Spinoz warmed us thatthe objet 'n the ‘hea’ or in thought, he i aot for one second fling into ani = of Knowledge or essence was in itself absolutely distince and diferent from of consciousness, mind or thought, for the ‘shougit’ we are discussing the real objec, for, to repeat his famous aphorism, the ewo objects must not {s not a faculty of a transcendental subject or absolute consciousness con- bs confused: the idea ofthe circle, which isthe objet of knowledge must not fronted by th be confused with the circle, which isthe ree! objet. nthe third chapter of che 1857 Introduction, Marx took up this principle as forcefully as possible. though human individuals are its agent This thought \ \ stituted system of an apparatus of cought, founded on | fhe ceed fhe Heglan confsion which fence the rel object, sed alae saa nd sel reais dnd bythe steno with the object of knowledge, the real process with the knowledge process: real conditions which make it, if I dare use the phrase, a determinat — ‘Heel fll ita the iacion of cancisng she real (das Reale) atthe teva of of palittion ol Voowdadgea.'ha sac te cvtared by

    Anda mungkin juga menyukai