Althusser’s contribution is to have shown that historical materialism, if it means to justify its claim to be a science of history, can only be the science of the always aleatory encounter known as the class struggle.
By viewing his theoretical interventions as indications, Althusser signals that he understands them as moments of a larger process: a practice of collective research.
The premises of a materialist concept of knowledge, still to be elaborated, can be read in the interstices of Althusser’s article on the Young Marx; they provide its secret drama, and doubtless constitute its most significant and substantial contribution.
The most pressing problem for me is knowing whether publishing is a means of revolutionary activity.
I only crossed the authors’ paths, I was a little like a sponge absorbing something and then letting it out again. As it happened, I provided some format for their work – but nothing more.
This is what interests me, more than ever, in the books that I publish: not the empty gesture of an isolated individual, but the outcome of a long collective process that opens onto another.
Easily one of the most important French editors and publishers of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, François Maspero helped shape an entire intellectual terrain.
This article first appeared as “François Maspero, éditeur (p)artisan,” in Contretemps, n°13 (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2005), 100-108. The life of François Maspero unfolded through writing: by turns, reader, bookseller, publisher, then translator, and today writer. 1 Grandson of Egyptologist Gaston Maspero and son of the sinologist Henri Maspero, who died at Buchenwald, he is a man who illustrates in his… Read more →
It may not be enough to find new answers to the old question of what is the “organizing principle” connecting patriarchy and capitalism. We may have to pose completely new questions.
If we are truly committed to a rigorous and unifying theory of capital, we must consider the possibility that race and gender are as logically necessary as class is to the capitalist mode of production.
Viewpoint Magazine