wrobert at uci.edu wrote:
> You might want to pick up some those Althusser
> essays and read them. (Which your reviewer has about as little
> understanding of as you do). If borrowing from Freud terrifies you so
> much (overdetermination is a term appropriated from Freud), you might
> think about looking at Gramsci or Voloshinov, perhaps even Marx.
I pointed recently to an Althusser essay trying to show that Marx's 1869 Preface to the Eighteenth Brumaire demonstrates that Marx's "historical materialism" constitutes the human historical process as a ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s)', i.e. as a process having nothing to do with the development of the "slumbering powers" of individuals which, through this "integral development of every individual producer", eventually makes practicable the actualization of a "goal" - "freedom" (identified with "the development of human powers as an end in itself") - in "the true realm of freedom" (all the ideas in quotes being found in texts from 1867 and after). <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20090223/003228.html
>
Althusser claimed there that the interpretation of the following sentence from the Brumaire as constituting human history as a process with "subjects" and a "goal" was mistaken.
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it out of freely chosen elements (aus freien Stücken), under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances (Umstände) directly encountered (vorgefundene), given by and transmitted from the past."
In support of this claim he pointed to the following text from the Preface.
"I show something quite different (different from the ideology of Hugo and of Proudhon, who both hold the individual Napoleon III to be the [detestable or glorious] cause 'responsible' for the coup d'état), namely how the class struggle (Marx's emphasis) in France created the circumstances (Umstände) and the relations (Verhältnisse) which allowed (ermöglicht) a person (a subject) so mediocre and grotesque to play the role of a hero."
As I showed, however, this text is in fact a sublation of the role Hegel assigns to the "passions" in the development of the human "in itself" - "freedom" - through "an incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers", i.e. it's a text sublating the very ideas Althusser has it rejecting.
In that sublation, Hegel's locating of these "passions" in "World Historical Individuals" - "heros" - such as Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon (the motivation of such individuals being "world-historical" because "a universal principle has lain in its fundamental element") has been replaced by locating them in individuals as members of classes. e.g. in the early capitalists "responsible" for "primitive accumulation" (whose results, Marx claims, are "world-historical").
"The expropriation of the immediate producers was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm>
So "the individual Napoleon III" was not the "cause 'responsible' for the coup d'état" because the "cause 'responsible' for the coup d'état' and for the despotism of "the Bonaparte dynasty" in general was the lack of "enlightenment" - the lack of "integral development" - of "masses" of French peasants whose "relations and forces of production" - particularly the complete lack of "real connections" these involved - fettered such development and substituted "superstition" for "enlightement" and "prejudice" for "judgment" (these contrasts and Marx's relation of them to the lack of real connections and to despotism being a sublation of Kant's account of the "sensus communis" in the Critique of Judgment).
"But let us not misunderstand. The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant; not the peasant who strikes out beyond the condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather one who wants to consolidate his holding; not the countryfolk who in alliance with the towns want to overthrow the old order through their own energies, but on the contrary those who, in solid seclusion within this old order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and favored by the ghost of the Empire. It represents not the enlightenment but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment but his prejudice; not his future but his past; not his modern Cevennes [A peasant uprising in the Cevennes mountains in 1702-1705. — Ed.] but his modern Vendee. [A peasant-backed uprising against the French Revolution in the French province of Vendee, in 1793. — Ed.] " <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th- brumaire/ ch07.htm
>
Ted