Peter Thomas
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza
Introduction
1
Louis Althusser is chiey remembered today, when
he is remembered at all, as the progenitor and
leading exponent of structuralist Marxism, a curious
hybrid which ourished on the left bank of the
Seine in the 1960s and later enjoyed the status of an
exotic import in the left-wing Anglophone academy
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Structuralist
Marxism was regarded as the convergence of two
independent ‘conjunctures’: on the one hand, the
‘structuralist’ movement, whose emergence in post-
Resistan ce French in tellectual life seemed to
offer the possibility of a powerfully unifying dis-
course across the ossied boundaries of the human
and social sciences; and on the other, those currents
within Western Marxism which were attempting to
renew Marxist theory in the space opened up by the
partial thaw of Stalinism following Khrushchev’s
Historical Materialism, volume 10:3 (71–113)
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1
I would like to thank Gary Maclennan, Paul Jones, Dan O’Neill, Martin Thomas,
Murray Kane, Melissa White, Ben Jones, Daniel Bensaïd, John Game and Sebastian
Budgen for encouraging remarks and suggestions on a previous version of this paper.
Ted Stolze, Gregory Elliott, Geoff Goshgarian, André Tosel and Warren Montag did
not allow positive references to their own work to blind them to the deciencies
of mine.
‘secret speech’ of 1956. Structuralism had been hailed initially as a decisive
intellectual advance of potentially epochal dimensions (witness the famous
closing lines of Foucault’s The Order of Things). But it was almost as quickly
relegated to the dustbin of history, granted a lingering half-life as a pedagogical
prop used in introducing students to post-structuralism. A similar fate awaited
the work of Louis Althusser. The advent of Althusser’s ‘structuralist’ reading
of Marx and of some of the central categories of Marxist theory seemed, for
some at least, the necessary correlate at the level of high theory of the more
general structure of feeling and revolutionary optimism now referred to by
the title of ‘The Sixties’. But the Althusserian moment was soon eclipsed by
a combination of international political events, tragedy in the personal life of
its protagonist, and most importantly, a radical change in intellectual fashion.
As Gregory Elliott notes,
The alliance Althusser had sought in the early 1960s between Marxism and
avant-garde French theory unravelled after 1968 as the philosophies of desire
and power tributary to May drove high structuralism from the seminar
room. Althusserianism was thus doubly compromised – as a Marxism and
as a structuralism.
2
Having ‘hitched [his] Marxism to structuralism’s rising star’, it seemed that
Althusser’s thought was condemned to follow it into the archive of failed
projects.
3
Althusserianism passed into the memories (sometimes with fond-
ness, more often, perhaps, with regret) of those Communists and New-Leftist
intellectuals who had ocked to its banner in its heyday, while some of
Althusser’s central texts, particularly the celebrated ‘Ideology and Ideological
State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’, subsequently became
foundational texts in the post-1960s reformulation of the social sciences and
cultural studies.
4
There was at least one Marxist theorist, however, for whom the equation
of the Althusserian tendency with structuralism was far from self-evident:
Louis Althusser himself. In his Éléments d’Autocritique of 1974 (published in
English in 1976 in the volume Essays in Self-Criticism), Althusser explicitly
72 Peter Thomas
2
Elliott 1987, p. 282.
3
Elliott 1987, p. 283.
4
The most comprehensive accounts of the fate of Althusser’s work can be found
in Kaplan and Sprinker 1993 and Elliott 1994.
denied that he and his co-workers had been structuralists, and, in their defence,
offered an alternative intellectual afliation. He argued:
If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed
to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange mis-
understanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty
of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists . . . with
very few exceptions our blessed critics, imbued with conviction and swayed
by fashion, never suspected any of this. They took the easy road: it was so
simple to join the crowd and shout ‘structuralism’! Structuralism was all
the rage, and you did not have to read about it in books to be able to talk
about it. But you have to read Spinoza and know that he exists: that he still
exists today. To recognize him, you must at least have heard of him.
5
Gregory Elliott has voiced an obvious objection to this line of defence:
‘Admission of Spinozism does not automatically compel acquittal on the
count of structuralism, and it had been apparent some time before Althusser’s
confession’.
6
Some critics, already enraged by the theoretical anti-humanism
of Althusser’s structuralist Marxism, in which human agency was reduced
to mere Träger of the relations of production, seemed to regard Althusser’s
declared admiration for one of the most rigorous determinists of the modern
philosophical tradition as merely adding insult to injury. So rather than
closing the case against Louis Althusser, his confession of Spinozism instead
resulted in his Marxism becoming doubly condemned – as both a struc-
turalism and as a Spinozism.
Yet, as Montag has noted, it is questionable whether this pronouncement
was an accurate remembrance of the forces which shaped the early Althusserian
project (specically, the texts For Marx and Reading Capital), or was rather,
‘nothing more than a retrospective construction, the very condition of which
was a renaissance in French Spinoza studies that took place at the end of the
sixties’.
7
Montag points to the lack of any systematic and textually explicit
studies of Spinoza by Althusser and his colleagues in this period, arguing
that, even if it is true that the Althusserian school developed in a Spinozistic
environment, ‘they nevertheless did not produce any sustained work on
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 73
5
Althusser 1976, p. 132.
6
Elliott 1987, p. 183.
7
Montag 1998, pp. xi–xii.
Spinoza, certainly nothing resembling their “readings” of other philosophers’.
8
Their interest in Spinoza remained vague and indeterminate during the period
when the Althusserian paradigm’s central features were elaborated, and it
was only later, in very different political and intellectual circumstances, that
it solidied into a denite line of research. Even then, it was not Althusser
who produced an extended study of Spinoza’s relevance to Marxism (his
published comments are limited to a chapter in Essays in Self-Criticism, and
several confessional passages from his autobiographical writings), but some
of his former students and colleagues (primarily, Balibar and Macherey), as
their own development led them in directions not entirely compatible with
the austere theoreticism for which the Althusserian moment is remembered.
Considerations on Western Marxism
Nevertheless, as Montag further notes, ‘Althusser’s assertion in Elements of
Self-Criticism that he, Balibar and Macherey “were Spinozists”, [was taken by
Perry Anderson] as conrmation of his worst suspicions concerning Althusser’s
reliance on pre-Marxist thought’.
9
Anderson was one of Althusser’s few,
blessed critics who had indeed heard of Spinoza. In fact, in the epigraphs to
his celebrated and widely inuential study, Considerations on Western Marxism,
Anderson gave pride of place to the following juxtaposition of the views of
Lenin and Spinoza on the relationship of philosophy to political practice.
Correct revolutionary theory assumes nal shape only in close connection
with the practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement.
LENIN
The multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I should
ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect
it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont. SPINOZA
10
74 Peter Thomas
8
Montag 1998, p. xi. Montag’s comments should be understood as referring to
the exoteric doctrines of Althusser and his circle in this period (though he perhaps
underestimates the extent of the Spinozistic elements to be found even in these,
particularly Reading Capital). Within the general intellectual environment of this
group, Spinoza was an abiding and constant presence. Thanks are due to Gregory
Elliott for stressing this point.
9
Montag 1998, p. xi.
10
Anderson 1976, p. ix. The quotation from Lenin is from Left-Wing Communism –
An Infantile Disorder (Lenin 1950, p. 15); Spinoza’s is from the preface to the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (Spinoza 1951, p. 11). Several features should be briey noted here
As the argument of Considerations on Western Marxism made clear, Spinoza’s
statement was considered by Anderson to be a precursor of the esotericism,
élitism and removal from politics which he nominated as some of the dening
co-ordinates of Western Marxism as a whole. As he noted, without the slight-
est hint of irony, the ‘very surplus [of Western Marxist theorists’ works]
above the necessary minimum quotient of verbal complexity was the sign
of its divorce from any popular practice’.
11
The fundamental cause of this
development, Anderson argued, had been the experience of Stalinism. With
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 75
as a corrective to Anderson’s implicit suggestion of Spinoza’s élitism and removal
from politics. First, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) was a work dedicated to
combating the intellectual foundations of superstition (the dominant ideological
formation of Spinoza’s time and place, the Dutch Republic of the 1660s) by means of
a scrupulous examination of the meaning and history of scripture. Furthermore,
it was an intervention into a hostile political and theological climate (as Spinoza,
excommunicated from Amsterdam’s Jewish community and already regarded with
suspicion by the ‘liberal’ Christianity of the Netherlands, knew only too well), one
rapidly moving to the Right as the Calvinist orthodoxy and the House of Orange
mobilised a discontented populace against the republic of the liberal mercantile
bourgeoisie. Spinoza’s request that ‘those of like passions with the multitude’ should
not read his book (i.e. the multitude in the Netherlands in the 1660s, who were
rallying to the banner of reaction and religious orthodoxy) was less an élitist separa-
tion of intellectuals from ‘the masses’ than prudent advice to the orthodox among
his contemporaries that they were bound to be offended by his demolition of the
misinterpretations upon which their prejudices and régime of mystication were
founded. (Signicantly, despite, or perhaps because of, this ‘conjunctural’ role of the
multitude, the political theory of both the TTP and the later, post-restoration Tractatus
Politicus are suffused with an awareness that it is the power and imagination of
the multitude which determine the course of political events). Finally, the TTP was
also designed, in part, as a secular resolution to the ongoing Averroist controversy
concerning the proper relation between philosophy and theology which had marked
the emergence of modern Europe from the theocracy of the Middle Ages. Spinoza
was appealing to an audience of fellow philosophers, or potential philosophers, to
resolve this debate nally in the interests of the autonomy of reason, in much the
same way as Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism was, in part, an appeal to fellow communists
to adopt a political outlook appropriate to their own concrete political conditions.
The passage in full reads as follows: ‘To the rest of mankind I care not to commend
my treatise, for I cannot expect that it contains anything to please them: I know
how deeply rooted are the prejudices embraced under the name of religion; I am
aware that in the mind of the masses superstition is no less deeply rooted than fear;
I recognise that their constancy is mere obstinacy, and that they are led to praise
or blame by impulse rather then reason. Therefore the multitude, and those of
like passions with the multitude, I ask not to read my book; nay, I would rather that
they should utterly neglect it, than that they should misinterpret it after their wont.
They would gain no good themselves, and might prove a stumbling block to others,
whose philosophy is hampered by the belief that Reason is a mere handmaid to
Theology, and whom I seek in this work especially to benet’ (Spinoza 1951, p. 11).
For an excellent discussion of these and related themes, see Tosel 1997, particularly
pp. 150–6.
11
Anderson 1976, p. 54.
‘the failure of proletarian revolutions in the advanced zones of European
capitalism after the First World War’, the rise of a bureaucratic ruling élite
in the Soviet Union and the Stalinisation of the Comintern, the connection
of Marxist theory and revolutionary working-class practice, which had
characterised historical materialism in its classical phase, was severed.
12
Thereafter, Western Marxist theorists led a shadowy half-life on the edge of
the Communist parties, bullied, cajoled and disciplined by the apparatus
if they chose to remain within them (often resulting in a self-imposed
censorship and increasingly cryptic language), marginalised and isolated
from contact with the organisations of the working class if they opted for the
role of fellow-traveller or ‘friendly’ critic. Under these conditions, Western
Marxism began increasingly to turn towards both pre- and non-Marxist
philosophy, a shift symptomatic of these theorists’ distance from tasks of
direct political organisation (giving their thought an increasingly speculative
dimension, tending towards the history of philosophy) and working-class
culture (leading them to a closer relationship with contemporary bourgeois
culture and theory, rather than proletarian practice).
Anderson acknowledged that the turn to pre-Marxist philosophy, in par-
ticular, had lled a noticeable gap in the comprehensiveness of historical
materialism as an intellectual research programme. ‘Any creative development
of Marxist philosophy as such’, Anderson noted,
would inevitably have had to move through a reconsideration of the
complex cognitive history which Marx himself ignored or bypassed. The
existing starting-points within the work of Marx itself were too few and too
narrow for this not to be necessary.
13
This acknowledgement, however, was accompanied by a cautionary note:
At the same time, the dangers involved in a prolonged recourse to pre-
Marxist philosophical traditions need no emphasis: the overwhelming weight
of idealist or religious motifs within them is well enough known.
14
If the explication and supplementation of the works of Marx were required,
Anderson seemed to suggest, these resources should be drawn from the
76 Peter Thomas
12
Anderson 1976, p. 92.
13
Anderson 1976, p. 61.
14
Ibid.
experience of class struggle as it has unfolded since Capital – not from the
formulations and arguments of philosophers whose thought lay on the wrong
side of Marx’s ‘Copernican revolution’.
When he turned to an explicit consideration of Althusser’s Spinozism,
Anderson found it to be a particular manifestation, if not the example par
excellence, of this general Western Marxism tendency of turning to pre-Marxist
philosophy in order ‘to legitimate, explicate or supplement the philosophy
of Marx himself’.
15
‘Less philologically explicit’ than other Western Marxist
attempts to read Marx in relation to Hegel, Kant etc., Anderson argued that
Althusser’s engagement with Spinoza was nevertheless ‘substantively the
most sweeping retroactive assimilation of all of a pre-Marxist philosophy into
Marxism’, ‘the most ambitious attempt to construct a prior philosophical
descent for Marx, and to develop abruptly new theoretical directions for
contemporary Marxism from it’.
16
In order to support this judgement, Anderson had carefully noted the
scattered and often elliptical references to Spinoza in For Marx and Reading
Capital, which he here systematised and whose signicance he briey assessed.
The inuence of Spinoza on Althusser was found to be pervasive. Anderson
went so far as to argue that ‘nearly all the novel concepts and accents of
Althusser’s Marxism, apart from those imported from contemporary disci-
plines, were in fact directly drawn from Spinoza’.
17
Despite the disclaimer
that Althusser had also been inuenced by contemporaneous currents in
non-Marxist philosophy and other academic disciplines (those thinkers and
thought-forms most often noted by Althusser’s critics and expositors, such
as Bachelard and developments in epistemology and the philosophy of
science, Lacan’s re-reading of Freud and psychoanalysis, and, of course, Lévi-
Strauss and the high-structuralist tradition itself), the Spinozistic inuences
on Althusser, outlined by Anderson, were, in fact, so comprehensive as to
leave very little in the Althusserian system which was not ‘directly drawn’,
‘taken straight’, ‘faithfully derived’ from Spinoza. Anderson nominated the
six following correspondences between the thought of Althusser and Spinoza:
18
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 77
15
Anderson 1976, p. 59.
16
Anderson 1976, pp. 64–5.
17
Anderson 1976, p. 64.
18
The list of correspondences and supporting references occurs on pp. 64–5.
Unfortunately, space will not permit the full examination and explication which they
First, Anderson argued that Althusser’s ‘categorical distinction between
“objects of knowledge” and “real objects” was taken straight from Spinoza’s
famous separation of idea and ideatum’.
19
Second, ‘the Althusserian “general essence of production”, common to both
thought and reality’, was regarded as ‘none other than a translation of the
Spinozan maxim ordo et connexio idearum rerum idem est, ac ordo et connexio
rerum (“The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and
connection of things”)’.
20
Third, Anderson detected in Althusser’s controversial thesis of the self-
validating procedures of theoretical practice and consequent ‘radical elimi-
nation of the philosophical problem of the guarantees of knowledge or truth’
the inuence of ‘Spinoza’s dictum veritas norma sui et falsi’.
21
78 Peter Thomas
deserve. Passages additional to those offered by Anderson will also be noted for the
interested reader. I have adopted the standard references for passages from the Ethics:
D = Denition, P = Proposition, Sch = Scholium, App = Appendix.
19
The relevant passages noted by Anderson are: Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40;
Spinoza 1985, p. 12. Also important are EIIP6, EIIP7Sch.
20
Althusser 1977, p. 169; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 216; EIIP7Sch. Althusser ’s
account of the process of abstraction in Marx in fact departs from Spinoza’s empha-
sis upon the symmetry of the orders within the attributes. For Althusser, in Reading
Capital, ‘“thought” is a peculiar real system, established on and articulated to the
real world of a given historical society’ (p. 42), but this articulation is one of uneven-
ness rather than identity. Signicantly, Althusser maintains that ‘Marx goes even
further [than Spinoza] and shows that this distinction [between idea and ideatum/
thought-concrete and real-concrete] involves not only these two objects, but also their
peculiar production processes’ (p. 41). See, in particular, the following argument:
‘While the production process of a given real object, a given real-concrete totality (e.g.,
a given historical nation) takes place entirely in the real and is carried out according
to the real order of real genesis (the order of succession of the moments of historical
genesis), the production process of the object of knowledge takes place entirely in
knowledge and is carried out according to a different order, in which the thought
categories which “reproduce” the real categories do not occupy the same place as they
do in the order of real historical genesis, but quite different places assigned them by
their function in the production process of the object of knowledge’ (p. 41) (Italics
in original; underlining mine). This divergence is important for two reasons, which
will become clearer later in this argument. First, it refutes Anderson’s thesis of the
identity of the concepts: Althusser himself points out that there is a signicant
difference between his (and Marx’s) concept and that of Spinoza. Second, because
Althusser clearly posits that Marx himself had already taken over concepts from
Spinoza and further developed them (even if unconsciously), it refutes Anderson’s
claim that Althusser’s deployment of Spinozistic themes was a novel and unwar-
ranted development in Marxist theory.
21
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 59–60, EIIP43Sch. Also relevant are Spinoza 1985,
pp. 18–19, and the denition of an adequate idea in EIIDiv.
Fourth, ‘the central concept of ‘structural causality’ of a mode of produc-
tion in Reading Capital’ was judged to be ‘a secularized version of Spinoza’s
conception of God as a causa immanens’.
22
Fifth, Anderson argued that ‘Althusser’s passionate attack on the ideolog-
ical illusions of immediate experience as opposed to the scientic knowledge
proper to theory alone, and on all notions of men or classes as conscious
subjects of history, instead of as involuntary “supports” of social relations,
was an exact reproduction of Spinoza’s denunciation of experientia vaga
as the source of all error, and his remorseless insistence that the archetypal
delusion was men’s belief that they were in any way free in their volition,
when in fact they were permanently governed by laws of which they were
unconscious’.
23
Sixth, and nally, Anderson argued that the ‘implacable determinism’,
which had led Spinoza to argue that ‘Those who believe that a people, or
men divided over public business, can be induced to live by reason alone,
are dreaming of the poet’s golden age or a fairy tale’, had been adapted by
Althusser’s infamous thesis that ideology is ‘the very element and atmosphere
indispensable [to human societies’] historical respiration and life’.
24
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 79
22
Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 187–9; EIP18.
23
Althusser 1977, pp. 232–5; Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 180; EIIP35. See also
Spinoza’s discussion of the consequences of human ignorance of the causes of things
in EIApp.
24
Althusser 1977, p. 232. Anderson incorrectly attributed the quote from Spinoza
to the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, rather than to the post-restoration Tractatus Politicus.
His failure to contextualise this argument politically and historically allowed him
to misrepresent it as a deep pessimism, rather than as an expression of the political
realism adopted by Spinoza in a period of reaction. After the fall of the Dutch repub-
lic, Spinoza composed the Tractatus Politicus as an attempt to analyse the different
forms of government, not as political theorists argued they ought to be, but as they
had been realised in concrete forms in human history. The passage in full reads
as follows: ‘We showed [in the Ethics] that reason can, indeed, do much to restrain
and moderate the passions, but we saw at the same time, that the road, which
reason herself points out, is very steep; so that such as persuade themselves, that the
multitude or men distracted by politics can ever be induced to live according to the
bare dictate of reason, must be dreaming of the poetic golden age, or of a stage-play’
(Spinoza 1951, p. 289). A full exposition of this passage, and a demonstration that
it in fact involves a valorisation of the imagination of the multitude rather than
a rationalist dismissal of it, would need to refer to at least the following passages:
the origin of inadequate ideas in EIApp, the three kinds of knowledge – imagination,
reason and intuitive knowledge – outlined in EIIP40Sch2, the denitions of truth and
falsity in EIIP41 and EIIP35, the denition of ‘the object of the idea constituting the
human mind’ as ‘the body’ in EIIP13 and the supporting proposition EIIP29Sch on
Just as Althusser had attempted to read the ‘symptomatic silences’ of Marx’s
‘problematic’, it appeared that Anderson had attuned his ear to the faint
echoes which resonated throughout Althusser’s own work.
25
With the decline
of the popularity of the Althusserian paradigm in the English-speaking leftist
academy, which was well noticeable even before the publication of Considerations
on Western Marxism, and declining interest in Marxism in general, which
was soon to follow (particularly those ‘High Theoreticist’ variants which
claimed a privileged access to a ‘Truth’ denied to mere ‘lived experience’),
this assessment became for a long period the accepted account of the nature
and content of Althusser’s Spinozism.
Considerations on Western Marxism was one of the rst studies in Anglophone
Marxism to identify Althusser’s Spinozistic inspiration, a conclusion which
Anderson repeated in Arguments in English Marxism and in the editorial intro-
duction (ascribed to New Left Review, but presumably written, or contributed
to, by Anderson) to André Glucksmann’s ‘A Ventriloquist Structuralism’ in
the anthology Western Marxism: A Critical Reader.
26
It was, and to some extent
continues to be, widely inuential on subsequent studies of Althusser within
Anglophone Marxism. Critics such as, on the one hand, Steven Smith, and,
on the other, E.P. Thompson, Terry Eagleton and Ellen Meiksins Wood, have
either reproduced Anderson’s arguments almost verbatim with little or
no further commentary, as in the former case, or briey mentioned the
importance of Spinoza for Althusser in passing, as in the latter.
27
Gregory
Elliott’s The Detour of Theory contains some suggestive discussions of the
Spinoza/Althusser relationship and its relevance to historical materialism,
80 Peter Thomas
the mind’s confused knowledge of the body, and, nally, Spinoza’s observation that
although it was ‘the object of the idea constituting the human mind’, ‘no one’ – least
of all political theorists – ‘has yet determined what the body can do’ in EIIIP2Sch.
The reader interested in the evolution of Spinoza’s political thought is referred to the
book-length studies of Negri’s The Savage Anomaly and Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics
and Warren Montag’s Masses, Bodies, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries. Montag
has also provided an excellent short and accessible summary of the main themes in
his Preface to Balibar’s Spinoza and Politics.
25
The Althusserian notion of symptomatic reading itself bears an important
relation to Spinoza’s proposals for the unmystied interpretation of scripture in Chapter
7 of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, pp. 98–119. For an extended discussion of this
theme, see Montag 1993.
26
Anderson 1980, p. 125; New Left Review 1977, p. 275.
27
Smith 1984, pp. 72–3; Thompson 1978, p. 201; Eagleton 1991, p. 146; Meiksins
Wood 1986, p. 18.
but his assessment remains ambivalent with regard to the interpretation of
Considerations on Western Marxism. Two works stand out against the general
current of acceptance of Anderson’s judgement: Andrew Collier’s Scientic
Realism and Socialist Thought provides, among other interesting insights
into the enduring relevance of the questions raised by Althusser, a novel
treatment of Spinoza’s theory of composite bodies in relation to the Althusserian
theory of structural causality. And Christopher Norris, in one of the longest
and most signicant studies of Althusser’s afnities with Spinoza (Spinoza
and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory) provides a more sympathetic and
nuanced discussion.
28
Despite these exceptions, Anderson’s account of
Althusser’s Spinozism became, due to a combination of his pre-eminence
among Anglophone Marxists, the novelty of his study in its time and the
characteristic condence of his presentation, an important pole of reference
for several generations of both theoretical and activist Marxists. The fact that
it assumed this importance, despite its brevity (scarcely two pages, and those
in a study whose main purpose was quite other than an examination of
Spinoza’s relation to Marxism), is an index of how totally marginal Spinoza
has been until recently not only to Marxism but to Anglophone intellectual
culture as a whole. The purpose of this study is to critically assess Anderson’s
judgement, in the hope that one of the obstacles which presently impedes
the more widespread engagement of Anglophone Marxism with the thought
of Spinoza will thereby be removed. It also attempts to offer an alternative
assessment of the nature of Althusser’s Spinozism, and in conclusion, to posit
some preliminary theses to be used in a future study of contemporary Marxist
Spinozisms.
Spinoza and pre-Althusserian Marxism
Recent research, however, has indicated that the three assumptions upon
which Anderson’s analysis rested – Spinoza’s externality to pre-Althusserian
Marxism, the notion that Althusser was offering Spinoza as a philosophical
ancestor for Marx, and that Althusser had directly transcribed certain cen-
tral propositions of Spinoza – are not as persuasive as was perhaps once
thought. Indeed, the last thirty years have witnessed a veritable renaissance
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 81
28
Collier 1989, particularly pp. 80–90; Norris 1991, particularly Chapter 1.
in scholarship and interest in Spinoza, comparable to the Spinozism of
German Romanticism and its aftermath, which followed the Pantheismusstreit
produced by Jacobi’s disclosure in 1787 that Lessing had considered himself
a Spinozist. Beginning in France in the late 1960s, studies by Marxists such
as Macherey, Balibar, Tosel and Negri, and more recently, Montag, have been
central to the transformation of the received image of Spinoza as a god-
intoxicated pantheist.
29
In particular, these studies have made clear that
Anderson’s claim that Spinoza had been largely external to pre-Althusserian
Marxism can no longer be sustained, for two reasons. First, Marx himself had
read Spinoza passionately and had even gone so far as to transcribe passages
from Spinoza into his notebooks under the strange title ‘Spinoza’s Tractatus
Theologico Politicus by Karl Marx’. Anderson did, of course, acknowledge
this engagement, but immediately asserted that despite this, ‘there is little
sign that he was ever particularly inuenced by him. Only a handful of
references to Spinoza, of the most banal sort, can be found in Marx’s work’.
30
Yet, as Yirmiyahu Yovel’s treatment in Spinoza and Other Heretics has demon-
strated (signicantly, because Yovel is not a Marxist seeking to justify a
Spinozist ‘deviation’), Marx’s engagement with Spinozistic themes extended
beyond his youth and explicit references and became an abiding inuence
on the works of his ‘maturity’.
31
Similarly, Anderson was incorrect to argue
that Althusser was the rst signicant Marxist to be drawn to Spinoza, aside
from such gures as Plekhanov, Labriola and even Engels himself.
32
As Montag
notes,
82 Peter Thomas
29
A review of these recent Marxist Spinozisms will appear in a future issue of
Historical Materialism.
30
Anderson 1976, p. 64. Among the less banal references by Marx is his ranking
of Spinoza as an ‘intensive philosopher ’, ‘a pure ideal ame of science’, and an
‘animating spirit of world-historical developments’ alongside Aristotle and Hegel
(Marx and Engels 1975, p. 496). Also important is Marx’s argument in his early Critique
of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State that ‘democracy is the essence of all political constitutions,
socialised man as a particular political constitution; it is related to other forms of
constitution as a genus to its various species’ (Marx 1974, p. 88). This is a perspec-
tive which remains the foundation of Marx’s political views throughout his work,
nowhere more so than in Capital, and which bears an important resemblance to
Spinoza’s analysis of the foundation of the different forms of government in the
Tractatus Politicus. The point is not to play off one list of references against another.
Rather, it is that Anderson’s brusque dismissal on the basis of explicit references to
Spinoza in Marx’s major works was issued before a thorough study had been made
of both ‘exoteric’ and ‘esoteric’ Spinozism in Marx’s entire oeuvre.
31
Yovel 1989, Vol. 2.
32
As Montag correctly notes, Anderson followed Colletti (a continental point of
a denitive account of [the history of Marxist detours through Spinoza]
remains to be written. In each succeeding period of crisis within Marxism,
usually occasioned by a stabilization and expansion of capitalism after an
economic and/or political crisis that was hailed as ‘nal’, in the 1890s, the
1920s, the 1970s and 1980s, prominent Marxists, many of whom (from
Thalheimer to Negri) do not t the prole of the Western Marxist painted
by Anderson, turned to Spinoza’s philosophy.
33
Second, the presence of explicit references or not do not account for what
Pierre Macherey has referred to, in reference to Heidegger, Adorno and
Foucault, but undoubtedly with Spinoza in mind, as a thinker’s ‘philosophical
actuality’. Macherey has argued that
One can consider a philosophy to be living or present not only because
it constitutes a source of reference or an object of study and reection
but because its problems and some of its concepts, independently of
every explicit citation, nonetheless in the absence of their author continue
to accompany other forms of thought which, elaborated in new times . . .
propose to bring new developments to philosophical reection.
34
In fact, this ‘philosophical actuality’ of Spinoza’s thought in certain previous
Marxisms, and the belief that Spinoza is an important resource for the
contemporary regeneration of Marxism, has been the central argument of
recent Marxist Spinozist scholarship, most notably in the studies of Macherey,
Balibar, Negri and Montag.
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 83
reference for the NLR at the time of the composition of Considerations on Western
Marxism) in his down-playing of this tradition (Montag 1998, p. x). The following
is Plekhanov’s account of his conversation with Engels in 1889 in London: ‘I had
the pleasure of spending almost a week in long discussions with him on various
practical and theoretical subjects. At one point our discussion turned to philosophy.
Engels strongly criticised what Stern rather imprecisely calls the “materialism in the
philosophy of nature”. “So for you”, I asked him, “old Spinoza was right when he
said that thought and extension were nothing but two attributes of one and the same
substance?” “Of course”, Engels replied, “old Spinoza was absolutely right” ’ (Colletti
1972, p. 72).
33
Montag 1998, p. ix.
34
Macherey 1998, p. 126.
‘Marx’s only direct ancestor’
Similarly, publications after the composition of Considerations on Western
Marxism cast doubt upon the assimilation of Althusser ’s Spinozism to a
general trend in Western Marxism to supplement Marxism with themes drawn
from pre-Marxist philosophy. Certainly, the often dramatic, rarely textually
specic (and sometimes contradictory) pronouncements ex cathedra regard-
ing Spinoza in For Marx and Reading Capital seem to suggest that Althusser
thought of Spinoza’s work as ‘a prior vantage-point from which to interpret
the meaning of Marx’s work itself’ in much the same way as had been done
by previous Western Marxist theorists in relation to Hegel.
35
For instance,
in Reading Capital, Althusser elaborated his notion of an ‘historical fact . . . as
a fact which causes a mutation in the existing structural relations’, as a prelude
to his denition of ‘philosophical events of historical scope’ as those ‘which cause
real mutations in the existing philosophical structural relations, in this case
the existing theoretical problematic’.
36
As a paradigmatic example of such a
mutation, he then offered the case of Spinoza. He declared that
Spinoza’s philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution
in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution
of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marx’s only direct ances-
tor, from the philosophical standpoint.
37
Similarly, in For Marx (in the essay ‘On the Young Marx’), Althusser proposed
that, rather than sublating Hegel, as much of both classical and Western
Marxism had supposed, Marx had instead ‘retreated’ or ‘returned’ to real his-
tory in order to found a scientic discourse freed from ideological mystication.
Althusser drew the conclusion that science (Marxism) was not, therefore, the
‘truth’ of ideology (philosophy), but, rather, was an alternative thought-form
generated by returning to ‘the authentic objects which [were] (logically and
historically) prior to the ideology which has reected them and hemmed
them in’.
38
As a part of his clarication of this thesis, he then proposed that
science can by no criteria be regarded as the truth of ideology in the Hegelian
sense. If we want a historical predecessor to Marx in this respect we
84 Peter Thomas
35
Anderson 1976, p. 59.
36
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 102.
37
Ibid.
38
Althusser 1977, p. 77.
must appeal to Spinoza rather than Hegel. Spinoza established a relation
between the rst and the second kind of knowledge which, in its immedi-
acy (abstracting from the totality in God), presupposed precisely a radical
discontinuity. Although the second kind makes possible the understanding
of the rst, it is not its truth.
39
Assertions like these, therefore, make Anderson’s conclusion – that behind
Althusser’s general (and rhetorical) assertions about Spinoza’s relation to
Marx was a developed and coherent argument which posited Spinoza, rather
than Hegel, as the philosophical ground from which to understand Marx –
understandable.
40
Yet, shortly after Considerations on Western Marxism was
written, and shortly before it was published, Althusser’s Éléments d’Autocritique
(1974) appeared, in one of whose chapters Althusser offered a more complex
account of his reference to Spinoza. This is not to say that he claried the
specic substantive points of agreement or divergence between his thought
and Spinoza’s. As Anderson remarked in a footnote attached to his analysis
after this event, Althusser’s ‘account [of his relation to Spinoza] remains vague
and generic, characteristically lacking textual references and specic corre-
spondences’.
41
Nor is it to claim that Althusser retracted his claim for the
relevance of Spinoza to the understanding of the genesis of Marxism. Even
more than the brief comments in Reading Capital and For Marx, the chapter
on Spinoza in Essays in Self Criticism makes large claims regarding the afnities
of Marx and Spinoza, and attempts to offer further arguments (schematically,
and in an undeveloped form) for Spinoza’s solitary preguration of Marx’s
thought. What Althusser did offer in this text, however, and which must
surely temper any judgement that he was simply following in a long line
of Western Marxist turns to pre-Marxist philosophy in order to ‘legitimate,
explicate or supplement the philosophy of Marx himself’, was an extended
meditation on his encounter with Spinoza, in philosophical, personal and
political terms. From this text, it can be seen, in retrospect, that the most
signicant feature of Althusser’s relation to Spinoza was less the substantive
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 85
39
Althusser 1977, p. 78.
40
Further declarations which seem to endorse Anderson’s interpretation can be
found in Althusser ’s discussion of the distinction between the object of knowledge
and the real object (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 40), and the notion of structural
causality (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 187).
41
Anderson 1976, p. 66.
claims he advanced regarding the afnity of Spinoza and Marx, than the
distinctive nature of the method of philosophical reading and activity he
claimed had informed this encounter. Rather than an explicator of Capital
avant la lettre, what Althusser found in Spinoza was instead a foil to facilitate
his understanding of Marx’s work and his own work’s relationship to it.
‘A detour . . . but with regard to another detour’
The rubric under which Althusser placed his engagement with Spinoza
was that of a detour, a term he used with a precise philosophical sense and
consciousness of its Marxist heritage. ‘Having for years banged our heads
against a wall of enigmatic texts and wretched commentaries on them’, he
remarked about the unresolved difculty of Marx’s mature work, ‘we had to
decide to step back and make a detour’.
42
Two reasons were offered for this
decision. First, Hegel’s thought had itself been founded upon a detour: a
detour via Spinoza. Or, rather, Hegel had proposed certain interpretations
and solutions to problems posed by Spinoza, which had resulted in the
distinctive orientation of his own system, which in turn (suitably ‘inverted’
and ‘demystied’) had made possible Marx’s critical and materialist dialectic
(‘borrowed from the “most speculative” chapters of the Great Logic of Absolute
Idealism’).
43
Returning to Spinoza, therefore, provided the opportunity to
examine those radical features of Spinoza’s thought (primarily, its anti-
teleology and anti-subjectivism) which had been submerged in the Hegelian
synthesis, only tentatively to reappear – so Althusser argued – in the work
of Marx. As Althusser stated at one point in his comments, ‘Spinoza allows
us to perceive Hegel’s mistake’.
44
Thus far, it would appear that Althusser’s detour via Spinoza was consonant
with the Western Marxist urge to seek out a prior philosophical vantage point
for the purpose of understanding Marx, though the perceived philosophical
lineage on which this was based is such that it cannot easily be rejected
as an eclecticism diluting the purity of historical materialism with foreign
additions (as, for instance, Timpanaro’s supplementation of Marx with Leopardi
86 Peter Thomas
42
Althusser 1976, p. 133.
43
Althusser 1976, p. 134.
44
Althusser 1976, p. 137.
could be considered, although Anderson curiously regarded this case as a
possible exception to the Western Marxist tendency he condemned).
45
However,
Althusser ’s second reason for this detour decisively departs from the
template, and furthermore, seems to me to be a much more signicant and
revealing account of the utility he found in reading Spinoza. For Althusser,
a philosophic detour was something more than his own idiosyncratic
solution to the general problem encountered by all who had attempted to
comprehend Marx: the singularity and complexity of his thought. On the
contrary, detours, or steps back, were essential to the practice of philosophy.
A philosophy, Althusser argued, ‘only exists in so far as it “works out”
its difference from other philosophies, from those which, by similarity or
contrast, help it to sense, perceive and grasp itself, so that it can take up its
own positions’.
46
This description applied to no philosophy more than it
did to Marx’s, whose own experience in fact formed the inspiration and the
model for Althusser’s theory of a detour. ‘What else did Marx do’, Althusser
asked, ‘throughout his endless research, but go back to Hegel in order to
rid himself of Hegel and to nd his own way, what else but rediscover
Hegel in order to distinguish himself from Hegel and to dene himself?’
47
To
emphasise this point, he further noted that ‘Marx . . . was not content with
making a single detour, via Hegel; he also constantly and explicitly, in his
insistent use of certain categories, measured himself against Aristotle, ‘that
great thinker of the Forms’.
48
Althusser, therefore, proposed that, in order to understand this dynamic
which had animated Marx’s own philosophic practice – thereby entering into
the interior of his thought and becoming capable of developing it further
to meet the new challenges which had arisen in the twentieth century – it
was necessary to mimic (or more generously, reproduce) the philosophic
procedures and conditions by and under which it had been originally pro-
duced. As Althusser acknowledged, the adoption of this strategy of repetition
entailed taking certain risks. Marx’s own philosophic detours, particularly
via Hegel, had not occurred without a theoretical cost (the coquetting with
Hegelian phraseology which Althusser thought had misled subsequent
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 87
45
Anderson 1976, pp. 60 & 91.
46
Althusser 1976, p. 133.
47
Ibid.
48
Althusser 1976, pp. 133–4.
Marxists; the continuing re-emergence of Hegelian (ideological) concepts even
in Marx’s mature work; the always provisional status of the epistemological
break Althusser would propose in his later revision of the early theory’s
messianism). But it would only be possible to determine this cost, to under-
stand the price Marx had had to pay for his detours along with that now
risked by the Althusserian school, ‘by ourselves working on these detours’.
‘In our subjective history, and in the existing ideological and theoretical
conjuncture, this detour became a necessity’.
49
Thus, the primary reason and
motivation for his and his co-workers’ ‘step back’:
We made a detour via Spinoza in order to improve our understanding of
Marx’s philosophy. To be precise: since Marx’s materialism forced us to think
out the meaning of the necessary detour via Hegel, we made the detour via
Spinoza in order to clarify our understanding of Marx’s detour via Hegel. A detour,
therefore; but with regard to another detour.
50
Ironically, given Althusser’s reputation as the arch anti-Hegelian of the 1960s
(a perception which has become less tenable in recent years, with the publi-
cation of his early writings and their deep engagement with and critique of
the work of Hegel, rather than – like so many others – its mere rejection),
Althusser’s account of his detour via Spinoza seems performatively to conrm
the most Hegelian of philosophic procedures: the phenomenological attempt
to grasp the inner form of previous philosophies, as an element in under-
standing the organic relationships which composed them, recapitulating in
thought and in a condensed form the complex cognitive development which
formed the prehistory and conditions of possibility of continuing philosophical
practice. Like Hegel, Althusser attempted to ground this phenomenology
in history – that is, in the actual philosophic forms which had occurred in
previous epochs – by crafting a dense historical narrative which traced the
laborious and impeded emergence of what he proposed were the distinctive
features of Marx’s thought, a veritable Calvary of Marxist science; but also
similarly to Hegel, the importance of this condensed Bildungsroman, viewed
phenomenologically, was that it enabled Althusser’s thought to repeat and
internalise the signicant features of those previous forms, in such a way that
he would be able to realise their potentials in his own practice.
88 Peter Thomas
49
Althusser 1976, p. 134.
50
Ibid.
A further dimension of the strongly affective, personal and at the same
time directly political nature of Althusser’s reading of Spinoza is revealed by
remarks originally written for his autobiography, but only recently published
in English as a chapter in The New Spinoza. Althusser’s admiration for Spinoza
as a philosophical strategist is clear; in fact, it is perhaps not exaggerating
to say that above and beyond any particular substantive philosophic propo-
sition, what most attracted Althusser to Spinoza was the subtle polemical
strategy of the Ethics, a ‘revolutionary philosophical strategy’ which Althusser
curiously compared to Mao’s theory of guerrilla warfare.
51
He said:
What also fascinated me in Spinoza was his philosophical strategy. . . .
Spinoza began with God! He began with God, and deep down inside
(I believe it, after the entire tradition of his worst enemies) he was (as were
da Costa and so many other Portuguese Jews of his time) an atheist.
A supreme strategy: he began by taking over the chief stronghold of his
adversary, or rather he established himself there as if he were his own
adversary, therefore not suspected of being the sworn adversary, and re-
disposed the theoretical fortress in such a way as to turn it completely
around, as one turns around cannons against the fortress’s own occupant. . . .
Generally this is not the way that a philosopher proceeds: they always
oppose from a certain exterior the forces of their theses, which are destined
to take over the domain protected and defended by previous theses, which
already occupy the terrain.
52
Althusser further commented that his interpretation of the conjunctural
nature of Spinoza’s thought had a profound impact upon his conception of
the political tasks confronting his own philosophical practice. Spinoza had
given ‘one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world had ever seen’, by
occupying orthodox theological positions so deeply that he had transformed
them into their opposite, and by outwitting the theologians on their own
ground of rigorous scriptural interpretation.
53
Might it not then be possible,
Althusser seemed to muse, to effect a similar transformation of the reigning
orthodoxy of Stalinism, based as it was upon the near-scriptural status ascribed
to certain of Marx’s and Engels’s texts, and possessing its own distinctive
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 89
51
Althusser 1997, p. 11.
52
Althusser 1997, pp. 10–11.
53
Althusser 1976, p. 132.
hermeneutic of ‘diamat’?
54
Again, it was not primarily a matter of arguing
that Spinoza was ‘Marx without a beard’, but, rather, of attempting to draw
inspiration from Spinoza in order to confront a set of contemporary problems
which seemed, at least to Althusser, to have been pregured in a previous
era, namely, the theological disputes of the late seventeenth century. As
Althusser revealingly reected, ‘no doubt this [Spinoza’s] strategy comforted
me in my personal philosophical and political strategy: to take over the Party
from inside its own positions . . . but what pretensions!’
55
The political implications of these pretensions will shortly be examined.
For now, Althusser’s theory of a philosophic detour should alert us to the
possibility that something more dynamic had occurred in his engagement
with Spinoza than a mere transcription, as Anderson’s third assumption
suggested. As we have seen, Anderson argued that many of the main fea-
tures of the Althusserian synthesis were ‘directly drawn’, ‘taken straight’,
‘faithfully derived’ from Spinoza.
56
This was undoubtedly the most serious
element in Anderson’s characterisation of the nature of Althusser’s relation-
ship to Spinoza, both in terms of its implicit and unargued assertions and
the effects its dismissive brevity have had on subsequent Anglophone Marxist
scholarship.
57
Implicit in it were two questionable, unargued assertions: rst,
the assertion that Althusser’s Marxism was not in fact his Marxism at all,
but, instead, the recycling of the themes of pre-Marxist metaphysics, the direct
transposition of Spinoza’s thought into twentieth-century Western Marx-
ism. In other words, the Althusserian system’s origin lay in the thought of
Spinoza (and in Anderson’s unfortunate choice of metaphors, he came close
to accusing Althusser of a sometimes-acknowledged plagiarism). Following
on from this was the second implicit assertion that the political failings of
90 Peter Thomas
54
Althusser suggests such an interpretation in his autobiography, when he links
the appeal to Marx to the refusal of orthodoxy. Althusser 1994, p. 222.
55
Althusser 1997, p. 11, see also Althusser 1994, p. 222.
56
Anderson 1976, p. 64.
57
This brevity was perhaps unavoidable in a work whose main concern was with
themes other than Althusser’s Spinozism. Nevertheless, given the seriousness of his
assertions – particularly that Althusser had directly transcribed elements of Spinoza’s
thought – the absence of a full analysis of the nature and signicance of this rela-
tionship remains a glaring omission which Anderson has not rectied in a separate
and more extended study – despite asserting that ‘further study would have little
difculty in documenting’ the real extent and unity of the transposition of Spinoza’s
thought in Althusser ’s theoretical work (Anderson 1976, p. 66).
Althusser’s work could, therefore, be traced to its dependence upon Spinoza,
or that Spinoza was, in some suitably indeterminate sense (as in the best of
all slanders), ‘responsible’ for those same failings.
58
The rst assertion makes
it impossible to think the specicity and conditions of possibility of the
Althusserian initiative, and to learn the political lessons which Althusser’s
detour via Spinoza holds for those concerned to restore the Marxist unity of
theory and practice; the second gave rise to a tendency to judge the relevance
and fertility of Spinoza for Marxism on the basis of the perceived failings or
successes of Althusser’s project. Given Althusserianism’s spectacular fall from
grace in the late 1970s, the equation, in most instances and except for those
previously noted, has been deleterious. Both resulted in Anderson endors-
ing, unintentionally and against the central thesis of Considerations on Western
Marxism,
59
a theory of an ahistorical transfer of a philosophical essence
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 91
58
This may or may not have been the perspective behind Anderson’s characteri-
sation of Althusser ’s use of Spinoza; whatever his doubts about the relevance of
Spinoza’s metaphysics and political theory to twentieth-century Marxism, he has
expressed elsewhere admiration for the personal character of Spinoza (Anderson 1980,
p. 125). Nevertheless, his choice of metaphors had the predictable unfortunate effects
on the reputation of Spinoza among Anglophone Marxists. If Althusser = Spinoza,
then one can argue that Spinoza must bear at least some of the responsibility for
Althusser ’s errors as in, for example, the following comment of Simon Clarke. ‘In
this conception [the theory of Darstellung outlined in Reading Capital] the economic is
permanently present in the political and ideological realms, on the analogy of the
presence of the Freudian unconscious in the conscious as the “absent presence of a
present absence”. The economic, like Lacan’s unconscious, exists only in its effects. The
philosophical inspiration for this conception is not Marx but Spinoza. It is only by recourse
to the Spinozist conception of the relation between God and Substance, with the eco-
nomic taking the role of God and the political the role of Substance, that Althusser can nd
a place for the economic at all. Since it is only an act of faith that can establish the
determination, even in the last instance, of the economic once a secular, bourgeois,
conception of society is adopted, it is hardly surprising that Althusser ’s dominant
philosophical inspiration is that of metaphysical theology’ (Clarke 1980, pp. 84–5,
italics mine).
59
For the central thesis of Considerations on Western Marxism was that Western
Marxism’s philosophic detour was an effect of a complex political situation whose
cause was Stalinism and its reverberations throughout the international communist
and working-class movement. Anderson developed this analysis in great detail
and across an impressive range of theorists throughout this study. Yet, in his specic
analysis of Althusser ’s relation to Spinoza, he characterised that relationship in terms
which seemed to attribute the failings of the Althusserian system to the derisory effects
of reading Spinoza – not to the complicated (and compromised) nature of Althusser’s
manoeuvring within the heavily Stalinised PCF (a fact even more noticeable given
that Anderson elsewhere has offered one of the more balanced political assessments
of Althusser ’s relationship to Stalinism (Anderson 1980, pp. 100–30)). In the absence
of these necessary historical considerations, Anderson’s depiction of the nature of
from one thinker to another which has little in common with the tradition
inaugurated by The German Ideology. A properly Marxist intervention into
the eld of the history of ideas cannot be content to posit an essential (or
even virtual) identity between different thinkers on the basis of an apparent
homology between their concepts. Rather, if there is a remarkable similarity
between Althusser’s and Spinoza’s concepts, it behoves an historical-mate-
rialist study to explain the complex interaction of intellectual, historical, and
political causes which produced such an extraordinary event.
The return of the repressed
Warren Montag’s work is the necessary starting point for developing such
an explanation. In a guarded critique of Anderson’s suggestion that Althusser
simply and directly transcribed central elements of Spinoza’s thought, Montag
has sought to demonstrate that, instead, a more determined relationship
obtained, one founded not merely in a subjective contingency on Althusser’s
part, but, much more importantly, in the similarity – and singularity – of the
historical circumstances in which these two philosophies were produced.
Montag argues that
To speak of the inuence of Spinoza on Althusser is already to grant a
conceptual régime that both thinkers refused. The term ‘inuence’ does not
begin to capture the way in which an important part of Althusser ’s work
is itself Spinozist, constituting a theoretical project profoundly internal to
the conceptual space delimited by Spinoza’s works. Of course, as Althusser
himself has said, this taking of positions was never simply the result of
a personal choice. It was rather that something of Spinoza’s theoretical
struggle, modied by the relationship of theoretical forces that characterised
the latter half of the seventeenth century, repeated itself in the theoretical
conjuncture of 1960s France. This repetition, or return of the repressed,
signalled and continues to signal the existence of a conict to be analysed.
60
As Montag further argues, this repetition should not be understood in terms
of a simple reiteration of concepts. Rather, it was a repetition of conjunctural
92 Peter Thomas
Althusser’s relationship to Spinoza committed the classic error which Spinoza denounced
as the source of all errors: mistaking effects for causes.
60
Montag 1993, pp. 51–2.
features, or more exactly, the re-emergence of a distinctive philosophical and
political terrain, which allowed Althusser to attempt to ‘re-actualise’ signicant
elements of Spinoza’s thought. When this situation is acknowledged, Montag
argues, the Spinozistic themes in Reading Capital which were incomprehen-
sible to many critics become explicable as
not an interpretation of Spinoza but an intervention in the relationship
of forces that governs his text, taking the side of certain hypotheses against
others, pushing these hypotheses to extreme conclusions, towards the
dismantling of a theoretical apparatus in which the notions of transcen-
dence, immateriality or ideality are dominant. This intervention produces
a materialism so thoroughgoing that it remains for Althusser ’s critics, as for
Spinoza’s three hundred years earlier, illegible and unthinkable.
61
In more recent work, Montag has attempted to specify those features of
Spinoza’s thought which made it amenable to such a ‘re-actualisation’ or
‘re-deployment’. ‘Spinoza’s works’, Montag argues,
constitute a philosophy that never denitively closes upon itself, that is
never strictly identiable with a nite set of propositions or arguments that
would allow it to be categorised once and for all as ‘rationalist’ or even
‘materialist’.
62
He emphasises that this ‘openness’ should not be understood as an indeter-
minacy or ambiguity of Spinoza’s thought, but, rather, as a function of the
central philosophical strategy of the Ethics – the operation of the Sive (in André
Tosel’s phrase), which was the foundation of Spinoza’s famous depiction of
the one substance as Deus sive Natura. ‘This philosophical slogan’, Montag
argues, ‘summarizes both the content and the form of Spinoza’s philosophy
in the very fact that it simultaneously afrms and denies that it afrms
the radical abolition of transcendence’. ‘The rst term is translated into and
then displaced by the second. God disappears into nature’
63
– but such a
translation and displacement must necessarily always remain provisional.
Having abandoned all a priori transcendental guarantees, Spinoza’s denial
of transcendence can only become ‘actual’, Montag suggests, when it is
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 93
61
Montag 1993, p. 52.
62
Montag and Stolze (eds.) 1997, p. x.
63
Montag 1999, p. 4.
linked to the movements of the multitude which themselves seek to reassert
their immanent power (potentia) against the Power (potestas) of transcendent
authority. The 1960s witnessed such a moment, thus making possible the
re-emergence of Spinozistic themes in the Althusserian initiative. When those
conditions were eclipsed by the reaction of the 1980s and 1990s, materialist
philosophies of immanence such as Althusser’s and Spinoza’s necessarily
began to once more appear ‘illegible and unthinkable’.
This interpretation represents a real advance over that proposed in Con-
siderations on Western Marxism. By refusing a rhetoric of ‘origins’ or ‘inuence’
and, instead, seeking to comprehend the ‘actuality’ of Spinoza’s thought
in Althusser, Montag is able to move to a consideration of the substantive
problems with which both thinkers attempted to deal, rather than a formal-
ist dismissal of them. In particular, his treatment of Althusser’s Spinozism
is the site of the development of a sophisticated materialist theory of the
relations between thought-forms from different eras. In Benjaminian terms,
Montag’s analysis can be said to characterise Althusser’s Spinozism as a
seizing ‘hold of a memory’ when it ashed up at ‘a moment of danger’, the
forging of an alliance across the centuries with another thinker who had
attempted to remain a ‘heretic in the truth’, through which Althusser sought
to gain theoretical resources for his attempt to provide an immanent critique
of the reigning Stalinist orthodoxy in the PCF and the international Communist
movement.
64
By emphasising that this alliance was no mere repetition, but a
development of a long-neglected materialist anti-transcendentalism, Montag
makes it possible to think the positive and politically enabling features of
Althusser’s Spinozism.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that, in at least one respect, Montag’s analysis
remains incomplete: namely, it does not open up the space to think that which
divides Althusser from Spinoza as much as that which unites them. Attempting
94 Peter Thomas
64
Benjamin 1970, p. 257. Althusser ’s Augustinian commitment to the PCF (and
his coquetting with Maoism) necessarily complicated and perhaps compromised
the genesis and effects of his critique. To note this political origin is to remember
Althusser ’s work as a concrete intervention into a concrete political conjuncture. This
is particularly important given, on the one hand, the still lingering Thompsonian
prejudice, perhaps more often thought in the general Marxist culture than stated in
scholarly studies, that Althusserianism was little more than Stalinism theorised as
ideology; and, on the other, the tendency to treat Althusser ’s categories as neutral
ahistorical techniques to be absorbed into the arsenal of bourgeois social science.
to think the differences between Althusser and Spinoza (sometimes, as we
shall see, within their apparent identity) is equally as important to the reassess-
ment of the Althusserian legacy as is defending his detour via Spinoza from
rash charges of heresy. This is because such a consideration allows us to think
both the positive and negative consequences of this detour, and, therefore,
the lessons it holds for contemporary attempts to reinvigorate historical mate-
rialism by means of similar methods. In order to open up this space, and as
a rst attempt to theorise one element of Althusser’s detour, I will therefore
propose the following thesis: rather than the direct transcription of Spinoza’s
thought asserted by Anderson, or the continuation and development pro-
posed by Montag, Althusser’s Spinozism can be characterised as involving
a very complicated transposition of the formal structures of Spinoza’s thought
onto the very different content of twentieth-century Marxist politics.
65
If this
transposition allowed Althusser to make an important contribution to the
ongoing development of Marxist theory, it was not achieved, as Althusser
knew only too well, without taking certain risks, the price of which was
potentially negative political and theoretical consequences. In order to demon-
strate the feasibility of this thesis I will conclude by comparing two of
the central propositions of Spinoza’s and Althusser’s thought: Spinoza’s
equation of cause and effect implicit in his notion of God as an immanent
cause, and the Althusserian notion of ‘structural causality’. If, at rst glance,
Althusser’s notion appears to have sprung fully grown from the head of
Spinoza, this apparent similarity conceals deeper, historical and substantive,
discrepancies between the two thinkers which can only be comprehended
through developing a fully historicised account of the nature of their rela-
tionship and their concepts.
66
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 95
65
Obviously, I am not suggesting that Althusser adopted the infamously difcult
mode of presentation of the Ethics (more geometrico). Rather, I am referring to Althusser’s
redeployment of elements of Spinoza’s philosophical strategy, primarily, the treatment
of the relations between concepts, between concepts and objects, and the ways of
transforming both of these. Clearly, this strictly philosophical thesis will require
modication when it is brought into relation with an explicit consideration of the
other elements of Althusser ’s detour (the historical and the political), which I hope
to attempt in a future study.
66
Space will not permit an analysis of the other, formally similar, notions of
Althusser and Spinoza which were nominated by Anderson. At least one pair of these,
however, should be noted as a fertile eld for further research: Spinoza’s theory of
the imagination and Althusser’s theory/theories of ideology. (Spinoza’s theory of the
Deus sive Natura
Spinoza scandalised the theological establishment of the seventeenth cen-
tury by asserting that God was ‘the immanent, not the transitive, cause of
all things’.
67
In the place of the transcendent creator of Judeo-Christian
orthodoxy, a God (the innite) conceived of as prior to and external to his
creations (the nite), Spinoza posited that there was only one substance (Deus
sive Natura), a being absolutely innite and self-caused (causa sui), consisting
of an innity of attributes
68
– by which the intellect was able to perceive
the essence of substance – and modied into the different modes which
comprised the entities of the nite world. It made no sense to talk of an
omniscient, omnipotent, innite God, as both Jewish and Christian ortho-
doxy did, if God was then depicted as possessing attributes similar to those of
a human: a will, desire, and appetite, all signs of imperfection and limitation.
The only solution to this contradiction, Spinoza argued, was to conceive of
God as a true instead of false innite, as an absolutely innite being of innite
powers, on whom no limitation could be placed. Counterposing the innite,
conceived as an abstraction, to the concreteness of the nite, was the rst
(human, all too human) prejudice which needed to be overcome. As Althusser
recognised, Spinoza had overturned the theological certainties of his time by
pressing their own logic to a conclusion, until they were transformed into
96 Peter Thomas
imagination was in fact the subject of some of Althusser’s most specic and detailed
observations vis-à-vis his relation to Spinoza, particularly in the essay published in
The New Spinoza). A close examination of the relations of similarity and divergence
between these theories, and the historical causes for these relations, might help to
counter the still widespread prejudice that the Althusserian notion is nothing more
than poorly disguised Stalinism. Furthermore, attending to the development of the
relationship between imagination and superstition in Spinoza’s political texts might
help to clarify some of the ambiguities which I believe Althusser introduced into his
original treatment of the notion of ideology in ‘Marxism and Humanism’ by his later
revisions in the celebrated ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’.
67
EIP18.
68
It is important to note that Spinoza does not, as is often supposed, posit only
two attributes (thought and extension) of the one substance. As a ‘being absolutely
innite’, God necessarily consists of ‘an innity of attributes, of which each one
expresses an eternal and innite essence’ (EID6). Only two, thought and extension,
are treated in the Ethics, because it is, precisely, an ethics rather than a metaphysics
or encyclopaedic system. As Spinoza states in the Preface to Book II, ‘I pass now to
explaining those things which must necessarily follow from the essence of God, or
the innite and eternal being – not, indeed, all of them . . . but only those that
can lead us, by the hand, as it were, to the knowledge of the human mind and its
highest blessedness.’
something quite other than what the orthodoxy intended. Spinoza did not
regard himself as an atheist – his response to his critics was, in effect, the
famous maxim of Epicurus: ‘Impiety does not consist in destroying the gods
of the crowd but rather in ascribing to the gods the ideas of the crowd’. But
the consequences of what Althusser called Spinoza’s ‘unparalleled audacity’
was to prepare the way for a fully secularised conception of the universe,
a plane of immanence, in Deleuze’s phrase, which could be explained on
its own terms and without reference to a beyond which determined and
guided it.
69
It was this argument, more than any other, which led to the reputation
of Spinozism during most of the eighteenth century as a most perdious
atheism. In the changed conjuncture of German romanticism and its after-
math, however, a different interpretation of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura began
to gain ascendancy – for Novalis, Spinoza was the God-intoxicated man; for
Hegel, the problem with Spinoza was that far from his denying the divine,
‘with him there is too much God’.
70
Yet Spinoza’s contemporaries recognised
his philosophy for what it was in its own conjuncture: an intervention against
the pretensions of the orthodox theology of the time to maintain the innite
as a beyond from which the nite world was derivative and to which it was
secondary. If the concept of God encompassed everything, then the term lost
all critical force to distinguish between states of corruption and perfection,
the nite and the innite, this world and a beyond – distinctions which were
absolutely crucial not only for defending the religious orthodoxy of the day
but also for maintaining the political status quo. As both Balibar and Negri
have recently stressed, this theological critique cannot be separated from its
political context: in the seventeenth century, theological disputes were directly
political. Deprived of a distinct status, Deus sive Natura soon became merely
Natura, a reduction which did not bode well for that other increasingly
dominant duality of the period, Monarch sive State. Spinoza’s critique of
traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of God in the Ethics was in fact tied,
in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, to a critique of the foundations of theo-
cratic political institutions in the history of the Jewish people, and, in the
Tractatus Politicus, he extended and reworked this perspective into a critique
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 97
69
Althusser 1997, p. 11.
70
Hegel 1995, p. 282.
of all political formations which transferred the democratic power of the
multitude to a particular individual or class.
A further, crucial consequence of this proposition was that it led Spinoza
to reject abstract, mysticatory explanations of phenomena, in favour of
concrete knowledge of their determinants. If ‘Nature herself is the power
of God under another name, and our ignorance of the power of God is co-
extensive with our ignorance of Nature’, it followed that it was ‘absolute
folly, therefore, to ascribe an event to the power of God when we know
not its natural cause, which is the power of God’.
71
Phenomena were to be
explained according to the order of causation which obtained in one of the
innite attributes, not through reference to an inexplicable and inscrutable
divinity who stood outside the order of nature. Spinoza put this thesis to
devastating use with regard to the nature and origin of prophecy and mira-
cles in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, and, at the same time, inaugurated
a materialist tradition of reading (continued in our own time by Althusser
and Derrida) which refuses a hermeneutics which would posit a text’s con-
ditions of intelligibility as exterior to its own material, discursive existence.
‘Knowledge . . . of the contents of Scripture,’ Spinoza argued, ‘must be sought
from Scripture alone, even as the knowledge of nature is sought from nature’,
rather than through deference to a supplementary interpretative tradition.
72
The foundation of this attempt was to examine Scripture ‘in the light of its
history’, that is, to produce a rational account of the conditions of produc-
tion, dissemination and (often) corruption of a text whose historicity had
been made incomprehensible by its subsequent elevation to a divinely inspired
status – in much the same way that rational knowledge of nature and humans
within it had been obscured by the notion that the ultimate cause of their
being was separate from them.
73
In short, Spinoza’s proposition that Deus
sive Natura was self-caused (causa sui) and innite demanded a rejection of
98 Peter Thomas
71
Spinoza 1951, p. 25.
72
Spinoza 1951, p. 100.
73
Spinoza 1951, p. 101. As André Tosel notes, ‘Spinoza thus establishes a parallel
between the Bible and Nature, but this analogy does not lend itself to operations
of a spiritualist kind. It is not Nature that becomes a text or a book; it is instead
texts and the Bible that become Nature, that is, natural objects open to a natural
interpretation. It is no longer a question of an analogy but of an explanation’ (Tosel
1997, p. 159).
all forms of falsifying abstraction, and a search by the intellect for concrete,
comprehensible and explicable reasons, considered sub specie aeternitatis.
‘A cause immanent in its effects . . . in the Spinozist sense
of the term’
Althusser’s notion of structural causality is, indeed, formally similar to this
Spinozist critique of a transcendental notion of causality. The general co-
ordinates of this notion are well known. While Spinoza’s immediate point of
reference was theology, Althusser’s was the two theories of causation of the
social totality which he argued had dominated previous Marxism. In Reading
Capital, he claimed that
classical philosophy . . . had two and only two systems of concepts with
which to think effectivity. The mechanistic system, Cartesian in origin, which
reduced causality to a transitive and analytical effectivity [and] the Leibnizian
concept of expression.
74
Those traditions within Marxism which he branded as ‘economist’ had, accord-
ing to Althusser, conceived of the determination of the superstructure by the
base/infrastructure in transitive terms. The crushing of the Left Opposition,
the rise of Stalin’s socialism in one country, and the institution of state-directed
production plans had been accompanied by the elevation of a strict notion
of economic determinism (based upon a distorted reading of the base and
superstructure metaphor) to a centrality and orthodox status it did not
possess during the period of classical historical materialism.
75
Although
Althusser would not have accepted this foregoing narrative at any stage in
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 99
74
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 186.
75
Space does not permit the full argument required by this assertion. Nor will I
attempt to arbitrate between those views which see Stalinist economism as a defor-
mation of a more sophisticated pre-Stalinist Marxism (as I do), and those, like the late
Althusser’s, which view it as the ‘posthumous revenge of the Second International’
(Althusser 1976, p. 89). I will simply note that, despite the bacchanalian fantasies of
the anti- and post-Marxist imaginary, a close reading of the texts of Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács and Gramsci (among others) reveals vulgar
economic determinism as less a fundamental tenet of Marxism, than a corruption
used to justify the forced labour camp called the USSR and the cretinisation of the
international communist movement in the interests of Soviet imperialism – a verita-
ble Deus ex Machina called upon to cover up state capitalism’s economic, political and
moral bankruptcy.
his philosophical and political evolution, it nevertheless seems to me that his
rejection of ‘economism’ is properly understood as a rejection of one of the
central ideological tenets of Stalinism, in favour of a model of causality which
acknowledged the much more complex process of determination between
the various practices which constituted the social whole. In economism, he
argued, the economy was posited as a rst cause which preceded and remained
separate from its effects in the determined superstructure, which were
then seen as derivative and epiphenomenal. He rejected this notion of social
causation as not only mechanistic and transitive, but also as a transcenden-
tal notion which, despite its seemingly secular orientation, was secretly
modelled on the properly theological conception of a God who exercised his
creative powers to bring the nite world into being.
On the other hand, just as economism relied upon mechanical – i.e. undi-
alectical, pre-Marxist – notions, Althusser argued that the alternative notion
of ‘expressivism’ had also resulted in a relapse to a pre-Marxist theory of
causation – in this instance, a Leibnizian-Hegelian model which posited the
determination of the particular by the universal, or an essence of the whole
which was expressed in each particular phenomenal form. Some critics
have seen in this particular critique a coded attack upon Stalinism similar
to that implicit in Althusser’s rejection of ‘economism’.
76
Many more have
argued that the tendency Althusser had in his sights in this case was, in fact,
that of previous Western Marxism’s focus upon the notion of totality as an
alternative to Stalinist orthodoxy. Althusser’s characterisation of previous
Western Marxism’s notion of totality and dismissal of the interpretation of
the theory of commodity fetishism which derived from it (particularly as
it was developed in the founding text of that tradition, ‘Reication and
the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat’, the central essay of Lukács’s
History and Class Consciousness) is far from uncontentious. However, whether
correctly or not, Althusser argued that this expressivist model, although
distinct from (transitive) economism, in that it refused the notion of a privi-
leged rst cause outside the order of causation, was nevertheless complicit
with economism, insofar as it continued to posit a cause which remained
strictly separate from its effects, even as it entered into a dynamic relation-
ship with them.
77
He argued that
100 Peter Thomas
76
See, in particular, Jameson 1981, pp. 37–8.
77
The difference between transitive-economist and spiritual-expressivist accounts
The Hegelian totality is the alienated development of a simple unity, of
a simple principle, itself a moment of the development of the Idea: so,
strictly speaking, it is the phenomenon, the self-manifestation of this
simple principle which persists in all its manifestations, and therefore
even in the alienation which prepares its restoration.
78
Althusser’s theory of Marx’s epistemological break with Hegel required
him to reject such a model of causation as non-Marxist. His alternative,
following certain brief passages in Marx,
79
was the notion of structural
causality, in which
the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects
in the Spinozist sense of the term, . . . the whole existence of the structure
consists of its effects, in short . . . the structure, which is merely a specic
combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects.
80
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 101
of causation could be characterised in theological terms as the difference between
an Hebraic creatio ex nihilo and a neo-Platonic emanation – the two great rivals of
the early Christian church, which Althusser condemned as inadequate for the
comprehension of the distinctly secular object of modern society. At the same time,
however, I believe it remains to be determined by future research whether or not the
theory of structural causality does not itself run the risk of collapsing back into an
emanationist model, and thus whether Andrew Collier is correct to argue that ‘the
Spinozian conception of structural causality applied to society’ is indeed the only
foundation of ‘scientic politics’ (Collier 1989, p. 83).
78
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 203. See also the following: ‘The Hegelia n
totality may be said to be endowed with a unity of a “spiritual” type in which each
element is pars totalis, and in which the visible spheres are merely the alienated and
restored unfolding of the said internal principle’ (Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 204).
79
The most signicant was the following suggestive description from the Grundrisse:
‘In all forms of society it is a determinate production and its relations which assign
every other production and its relations their rank and inuence. It is a general
illumination [Beleuchtung] in which all the other colours are plunged and which
modies their special tonalities. It is a special ether which denes the specic weight
of every existence arising in it’ (Marx 1973, pp. 106–7; quoted in Althusser and Balibar
1970, p. 187). It is important to note, as Althusser did, but as some of his followers
have not, that, in this instance, Marx was referring to the dominance in different
historic periods of specic forms of economic production i.e. agriculture, industry etc.
80
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 189. Another example of the anti-transcendental
dimensions which had informed Althusser ’s thought can be found in the following:
The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which
comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on
them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the
cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects is not the fault of
the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the
contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its
This notion was similar to an expressivist (Hegelian) account of the totality,
in that it focused upon the relationship of elements within the whole (rather
than the originary moment of economism), but distinct from it, due to its
rejection of a unied and unifying centre, maintaining its integrity through-
out its particular embodiments, and thus producing a symmetrical totality
in which the various elements were equivalent to one another as phenomena
proceeding from the totality’s essence. In place of such an essence, the notion
of structural causality posited the dynamic determination of all elements by
each other in a decentred ‘structure of structures’ (overdetermination), an
asymmetrical totality in which one element was dominant in any particular
conjuncture. This dominant element was determined by the economy, but,
unlike a strictly economist model, the economy was not necessarily itself the
dominant element.
81
Wary of any collapse back into economism, Althusser
had further added, to the continuing perplexity of both his critics and pro-
ponents alike, that ‘the lonely hour of the last instance never comes’.
82
In
102 Peter Thomas
effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are
not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to
imprint its mark. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 188–9).
Also relevant in this regard is the notion of an ‘authorless theatre’ developed in
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 193.
81
Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 319.
82
Althusser 1977, p. 113. The difculty of this seemingly contradictory qualication
can, perhaps, be lessened by noting both its conjunctural and substantive import. In
terms of the former, it is important to recognise that the notion that ‘the lonely hour
of the last instance never comes’ was an essentially polemical formulation. Having
rejected economism, but nevertheless refusing the symmetry of an expressivist model,
Althusser ’s notion assigned the economic the role of ‘determining dominance’; and
then, in a second move, in order to prevent the surreptitious restoration of econom-
ism, he had immediately stressed the complexity of this process of ‘determining
dominance’, as against the simple, transitive role played by the economy in an
economist model. See the following formulation: ‘the economic dialectic is never active
in the pure state; in History, these instances, the superstructures, etc. – are never seen
to step respectfully aside when their work is done or, when the time comes, as his
pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the
royal road of the Dialectic. From the rst moment to the last, the lonely hour of
the last instance never comes’ (Althusser 1977, p. 113). In substantive terms, if the
priority accorded to the economic in the notion of structural causality was less than
that posited by economism, it was still required to be more than in an expressivist
model of causation. It was less than economism, because the economy determined
not the social totality itself but its dominant element at any particular moment. Yet it
was also more than expressivism, because Althusser ’s repudiation of an essence or
centre which manifested itself in its various phenomena (and whose self-alienation
and self-restoration had been the driving force of the Hegelian totality) required him
to locate the totality’s displaced dynamism in one of its elements, namely, the
Spinozist terms, the economic gured as one of the elements or ‘attributes’
(alongside ideology, politics, culture etc.) gathered together underneath
the umbrella of the ‘one substance’ of the mode of production (but in asym-
metrical relation to those other elements, unlike the symmetry of Spinoza’s
attributes). Or, in phrases more Althusserian: rather than viewing society as
being determined by a single element (the economy), or as a self-alienating
and self-restoring totality which subsumed its parts within its (spiritual) unity,
the Althusserian notion of structural causality posited that society was a
decentred structure in dominance, subject to the contradictions, uneven
development and overdetermination of each of the relatively autonomous
elements within it, and it was this process itself – the structural interaction
of each of the elements upon each other and upon the whole – which was
the cause of the social totality. The social totality was an effect of a cause,
which was none other than the totality’s own self-production, or, as Althusser
sometimes phrased it, an ‘absent cause’, discernible only in its effects.
83
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 103
economic. The unresolved ambiguity of this central feature of Althusser ’s theory
played a not insignicant role in the unravelling of the Althusserian paradigm, often
in the direction of abandoning the claim of the economy’s role in determining
the dominant element of any particular formation, and which then often led to
the elimination of the adjective in the phrase ‘relative autonomy’ to produce the
‘pluralism’ Althusser explicitly repudiated. See Althusser 1977, pp. 201–2.
83
Although this phrase was sometimes used by Althusser in relation to the theory
of structural causality, it seems to me to have remained a rhetorical ourish rather
than a developed category (for Althusser ’s own comments on the curious conditions
surrounding the production of this concept in the Capital reading group of 1964–5
at the École normale supérieure, see Althusser 1994, pp. 208–9, 352–3). Despite some
suggestive remarks in Essays in Self-Criticism and related writings, Althusser failed
to clarify the precise nature of the relationship between his notion of an ‘absent
cause’ and Spinoza’s causa immanens. Many of Althusser ’s Anglophone commenta-
tors, however, present ‘Spinoza’s idea of the “absent cause”’ (Jameson 1981, p. 35: cf.
Jay 1984, p. 409) as a verity. It is important to note two points. First, for Spinoza, ‘God
is the immanent, not the transitive, cause of all things’ (EIP18). He is not an absent
cause, but a cause pervasively present throughout its effects. To speak of an absent
cause in Spinoza is either to neglect the fact that particular entities are modications
within the one substance (and therefore that the cause of their being is not separate
from them, as the term ‘absent’ implies), or implicitly to restore a transitive notion of
causation, in which a once-present entity is subsequently absent (God as a catalyst
who disappears into his creations once the order of causation is set in motion, rather
than a prime mover eternally separate). But, for Spinoza, the identity of cause and
effect is immediate, eternal and innite. Second, as Althusser used this phrase, and
as his commentators appear to have understood it, it seems to me to involve a conation
of the notion of structural causality (present throughout the social totality, a cause
only discernible in its effects [eine Beleuchtung]) with the related but distinct Althusserian
notion of a ‘symptomatic reading’. Symptomatic reading’s emphasis on explaining
In short, just as Spinoza had done, Althusser arraigned his opponents with
unjustiably positing the cause of social phenomena (either the economy or
the essence of the social totality) as existing apart from its effects. The notion
of structural causality expressed a vision of society as a decentred structure
of structures, subject to the overdetermination and uneven development of
each of the structures within it, in which (paraphrasing Derrida) ‘there was
nothing outside of the social totality’ – that is, no privileged agent or essence
which was either prior to, distinct from, or exterior to the society which
they produced. Similarly, just as Spinoza’s refusal to locate the cause of nite
entities in an other-worldly beyond enabled him to attempt rationally to
understand the interrelationship of parts within the whole, without reference
to an unknown and unknowable ultimate guarantee, the notion of structural
causality sought to provide explanations for the phenomena of social life
according to thoroughly immanent criteria. It was an attempt to grasp the
self-productive complexity of society as a totality, without reference to either
a prime mover or spiritual essence which stood unaffected outside of that
production process.
Partial and limited totalities
Yet, despite these similarities, there remain important differences between
Althusser’s and Spinoza’s critiques. First, and most obviously, they sought
to explain different objects. Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, or one substance,
encompassed everything under the sun (and some more), as they were always
and everywhere, viewed sub specie aeternitatis. The one substance was ‘deter-
mined to act by itself alone’,
84
or, as Spinoza argued in Proposition 17 of Book
I of the Ethics, ‘God acts from the laws of his nature alone, and is compelled
by no one’.
85
A social totality, on the other hand, is an ensemble of human
practices, and, as such, is an historically specic formation. Furthermore, it
104 Peter Thomas
(rather than resolving or effacing) a text’s contradictions, and on the determinant
absence (and therefore presence) of certain themes in a thinker ’s problematic is a
genuine case of an ‘absent cause’, of a cause absent from its effects, i.e. the text’s
material form. Structural causality’s ‘absent cause’, on the other hand, only makes
sense insofar as it is understood as continuing Althusser ’s polemic against transitive
models of social causation. Taken on its own, it contradicts his claim for the presence
of the social totality’s cause in the dynamic of its elements’ interrelationships.
84
EIDvii.
85
EIP17.
is subject to external determinations, both from previous societies whose
formations continue to exert practical force (‘the weight of all the dead
generations’), and by the limits placed upon human practices by their inter-
action with and interpenetration by other natural, non-human, forces. Spinoza
rejected the notion that human society was a ‘dominion within a dominion’,
in which ‘man disturbs, rather than follows, the order of Nature’, ‘determined
only by himself’,
86
because he was polemicising against the view that man
was an autonomous subject endowed with a will which suspended the
laws of nature. Yet there is another, equally Spinozist, sense in which a social
totality must be thought of as a ‘totality within a totality’. A social totality,
or human society, is a limited subset of the genuinely innite and eternal
totality of Natura, i.e. it is a nite modication within the one substance, and
as such, must be viewed sub specie durationis. As a nite modication, it is
not sufcient unto itself; it ‘is in another through which it is also conceived’,
87
and, unlike Spinoza’s self-caused one substance, its existence is not identical
with its essence
88
nor is it necessary,
89
but historically conditioned and con-
tingent. Stated simply, a social totality is a partial totality, which derives
its being from, and whose comprehension therefore requires reference
to, another, more inclusive totality. These totalities are not merely different
in terms of appearance; they are objects of a qualitatively different type. One
is a genuinely innite totality, in its essence unbounded by any particular
determination; the other is, by denition, restricted to human practices as
they are constituted in social formations. In a strict sense, they are incom-
mensurable. Properties discerned in one cannot automatically be attributed
to the other, nor can they be explained by reference to the same criteria.
This qualitative difference of the totalities – which Althusser and Spinoza
sought to comprehend – produced a second divergence in their thought: the
different consequences of their critiques. I have already noted Althusser’s
declared admiration for Spinoza’s philosophical strategy, and his attempt to
draw inspiration from Spinoza’s polemic with the theologians for his own
intervention in debates over the cause of the social totality. ‘I was fascinated
by this unparalleled audacity’, Althusser wrote of Spinoza’s transformation
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 105
86
EIIIPref.
87
EIDv.
88
EIDi.
89
EIP11.
of his opponents’ theses by pressing their own logic to an extreme.
90
Just as
Spinoza had dissolved cause into effect, the notion of structural causality
attempted to abandon a transcendental notion of the social totality’s cause
in favour of an account in which there was nothing outside of the social
totality. Yet, because of the historical distance separating their critiques, and
because these totalities are incommensurable, Althusser’s employment of
formally similar philosophical procedures did not yield the same results.
Arguably, in analysing a social totality as if it were of the same type as
Spinoza’s one substance (in effect, conating these two distinct totalities
and the methods of analysis proper to each), the Althusserian notion of
structural causality ran the risk of producing effects which, in the specic
conditions of the late twentieth century, were very different from those
which Spinoza’s critique had produced in its own particular conjuncture. I
am referring here to the ‘confused knowledges’ which gured prominently
in the decomposition of the original Althusserian moment, and which formed
the basis for many of the hostile critiques of Althusser’s own work, such as
Hindess and Hirst or E.P. Thompson. These can not simply be attributed to
external determinations, or, in Spinoza’s terms, ‘unfortuitious encounters’:
acts of misreading or misinterpretation, renegacy and apostasy of large
sections of an erstwhile Marxisant generation, overdetermination by chang-
ing political conjunctures.
91
They also possessed intellectual conditions of
possibility, or, in non-transcendental terms, they were effects whose causes
must be searched for among the elements of the original Althusserian syn-
thesis itself. This is not to argue, in Hegelian fashion, that these developments
should be regarded as the ‘truth of’ the Althusserian system. Rather, it is
to follow Althusser himself when, in a Spinozist reversal of the Hegelian
106 Peter Thomas
90
Althusser 1997, p. 11.
91
A full account of these confused knowledge s should include not only the
well-known move towards a nebulous post-Marxism by some former Althusserians
(most notably, Hindess and Hirst, Laclau and Mouffe), nor only the role played by
the Althusserian formation in the more general transitional process of Marxism
to postmodernism in the academy, but also the fate of the reception of Althusser in
the wider intellectual and political culture, particularly as a complex element in the
complex and uneven world-wide process of Communist parties’ de-Stalinisation
throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The role of Althusserianism in this last pro-
cess is a feature which remains under-explored in recent assessments of the Althus-
serian legacy. An important political discussion of the reception of Althusser ’s
work in Australia and its journey from oppositional political formation to academic
orthodoxy can be found in Althofer 1999.
telos, he argued that ‘the truth of a philosophy lies entirely in its effects’.
92
If
the potentially negative consequences which I shall outline remained only
potential in Althusser’s own work, and are therefore, as Michael Sprinker
noted, ‘outcomes for which Althusser cannot be held solely responsible’, it
remains an historical fact that they were developments which ‘his writings
did certainly help to license’, whether these were based upon a faithful read-
ing of the original texts or not.
93
Two important potential consequences
of Spinoza’s and Althusser’s critiques can be contrasted in support of this
contention that Althusser’s and Spinoza’s respective totalities are incom-
mensurable. If they appear to repeat well-known objections to Althusser’s
thought, it is hoped that their ‘theoretical’ rather than ‘polemical’ treatment
will allow a more balanced judgement and understanding of the causes
and effects of both Althusser’s work and that of his (more or less faithful)
followers. Further, it is hoped that they will furnish preliminary theses
for future research into the legitimate and illegitimate possible modes of
appropriation of Spinoza by contemporary Marxism.
First, because Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura was an innite totality, its power
was not exhausted by enumerating the various phenomena perceivable by
the human intellect. In other words, it was not the sum of its parts. Human
practices, like all nite entities, were particular nite modications of the one
substance, conceived through one of its different attributes, dependent upon
the one substance for their Being. But Deus sive Natura’s integrity and potency
derived not from these modications, but from itself as the cause of itself
[causa sui]. A social totality, on the other hand, does not possess the same
type of objectivity, nor the same relationship to the phenomena which occur
within it. It possesses no being independent of the particular humans prac-
tices which occur within it, nor does it continue to exist, once those practices
themselves have ceased to exist – in a strict sense, it is the sum total of
its parts. To posit a social totality as bearing to its parts the same causal
relationship as that of Spinoza’s one substance to its modications risks
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 107
92
Althusser 1997, p. 4. Montag makes the same point in relation to the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus: ‘As Spinoza remarked of Scripture, a text is to be judged sacred
or profane, good or evil, not by virtue of what it says, or even its truth, but by
its power to move people to mutual love and support. A philosophical work is
thus always an intervention in a concrete situation and is to be judged by the effects
it produces in this situation.’ (Montag 1998, p. xi).
93
Sprinker 1995, p. 203.
effacing this important distinction. It disregards the specic ontology
appropriate to a social totality and establishes it as a natural formation
in-and-for-itself, i.e. as possessing a being independent from the human activ-
ities which occur within it. This, in effect, was one of the central objections
raised by Althusser’s opponents to his vision of a structure of structures in
which humans were the mere Träger of structural determinations. In polemi-
cising against ‘organicist’ notions of human agency, it seemed to some critics
that Althusser had, instead, naturalised the social totality. It was no longer a
consequence of human practices, but an objective structure which preceded,
determined and existed independently of them. From the emphasis of pre-
vious Marxism on the social totality being a Kampfplatz of contradictory class
interests, capitalism now seemed to have become a thing, a great Leviathan
brooding over a world which could expect no delivery from its potentate’s
régime.
Second, Spinoza’s refusal to regard the cause of the one substance as
separate from its effects (as did the notion a creator) required him to refute
the complementary notion that there remained potentials of God’s power
yet to be actualised (providence, or a divine plan). Such a notion supposes
a limitation upon God’s power, or a deciency in his being,
94
a situation which
is inconceivable for an absolutely innite being whose essence coincides with
his existence.
95
Deus sive Natura was already given in its innity. As Spinoza
argued in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, ‘nature . . . always observes laws
and rules which involve eternal necessity and truth, although they may not
all be known to us, and therefore she keeps a xed and immutable order’.
96
It was this proposition which enabled Spinoza to attempt rationally to under-
stand the necessary order of determinations which obtained within the
one substance, viewing them as if from the standpoint of eternity [sub specie
aeternitatis], rather than by taking ‘refuge in the will of God, that is, the
sanctuary of ignorance’.
97
The attempt to comprehend a social totality, on the
108 Peter Thomas
94
EIApp: ‘if God acts for the sake of an end, he necessarily wants something which
he lacks’.
95
EIDi: ‘By cause of itself I understand that whose essence involves existence, or
that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing.’ EIP11: ‘God, or a substance
consisting of innite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and innite essence,
necessarily exists.’
96
Spinoza 1951, p. 83.
97
EIApp.
other hand, cannot assume any such plenitude of being. A social totality is
necessarily incomplete, subject to further development and transformation
by the human practices which comprise it, which may possibly, but not
necessarily, involve the realisation of still dormant potentials. Furthermore,
because ‘reection on the forms of human life . . . begins post festum’,
98
the
concept of a social totality must always be provisional. Future social forma-
tions, comprising different practices and relationships, may make possible
conceptions of the social whole radically at odds with those produced in our
own epoch, not only in terms of its content, but also of its structure. This is
another way of saying that, because the concept of a social totality is one
of those ‘forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective,
for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined
mode of social production’,
99
it necessarily is modelled, in our own time,
on the practices of a capitalist mode of production and its social relations.
To efface this concrete determinant by analysing the social totality as if it
were Spinoza’s one substance, however, risks positing, as having a validity
for social totalities in general, both contents and a structure which are specic
to capitalist social relations and their comprehension in the notion of a
(capitalist) social totality. The nite secretly becomes the model for the innite,
in much the same way as Spinoza argued had been done by the notion that
the divine possessed the human features of an appetite, will and desire. In
effect, these were the charges brought by many of Althusser’s critics: that
he was covertly projecting the historically specic features of capitalism
onto the notion of a social totality in general (particularly in relation to one
interpretation of his theory of the eternity of ideology), and that the social
totality had become a self-contained, unfractured plane of self-afrming,
mutually reinforcing elements and levels to which there was literally
no exterior, not even socialism. ‘The bourgeoisie can be overthrown; the
ascendancy of structural causality is without term’, in the words of Gregory
Elliott’s succinct summary – which left some critics questioning if even the
rst possibility would be realised.
100
Philosophical Strategies: Althusser and Spinoza 109
98
Marx 1976, p. 168.
99
Marx 1976, p. 169.
100
Elliott 1987, pp. 174–5.
Conclusion
The conclusion to be drawn from this brief consideration of the differences
between Althusser ’s and Spinoza’s critiques is not the restoration of the
Andersonian thesis that Marxists must vigilantly guard against the corruption
of their creed by foreign elements drawn from pre-Marxian metaphysics.
Rather, it is that attempts to reinvigorate contemporary historical material-
ism by drawing upon elements of previous philosophies (or, equally, the
attempt to judge such efforts) will only be successful if they are undertaken
with a full and vigilant consciousness of the historical determinateness of
thought and philosophy. This is merely to restate a thesis which has always
been the foundation of the Marxist approach to the history of ideas, succinctly
encapsulated in a maxim of Fredric Jameson: ‘Always historicise!’
As I have previously noted, one of the distinguishing features of the Marxist
Spinozisms subsequent to and in part inspired by Althusser ’s (such as
Macherey’s, Balibar’s, Negri’s, Tosel’s, Montag’s and others collected in the
volume The New Spinoza) has been precisely such an attempt to produce a
more historically satisfying account of our contemporary relation to Spinoza’s
thought. An assessment of these works and their success in avoiding the
negative consequences which I have argued accompanied Althusser’s detour
via Spinoza will form the subject of a future study. I have dealt at such
length in this study with Anderson’s judgement of the nature of Althusser’s
Spinozism, however, in order to open the space necessary for a fuller and
unprejudiced engagement with these works and Spinoza’s thought more
generally. Given the richness of these works and their exploration of some
of the fundamental philosophical concepts of the Marxist tradition, I believe
that such an engagement is one of the pressing tasks for Anglophone Marxism,
in both its theoretical and activist forms. Whatever the errors or failings in
his initial attempt, Althusser should be remembered as the gure who more
than any other made these researches possible, which is, nally, to recover
another ‘effect’ or ‘truth’ of the Althusserian moment as an important resource
for the contemporary revitalisation of Marxism.
110 Peter Thomas
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