Marxism and Historicism

Abstract

onslaughts on these three concepts have rarely been mounted. Still, the work of the Tel Quel group, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and others, presupposes this polemic at the same time that it contributes locally to this or that aspect of it; while the most systematic statement of the repudiation of historicism has been made by Foucault (in The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge), and the most systematic statement of the repudiation of interpretation is expressed in the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari. All of these statements, however, presuppose a more basic master text, namely, Althusser's Reading Capital, which, owing to its explicitly Marxist framework, is probably less familiar to American readers than other texts in French theory today. Althusser's attacks on Marxist historicism and on classical hermeneutics (which he calls expressive causality) are therefore basic reference points in what follows, even if we cannot here engage Althusser's fundamental work directly.' As for interpretation, I can only assert here what I will argue more systematically in another place,2 namely, the semantic priority of Marxist interpretation over the other interpretive codes which are its rivals in the theoretical marketplace today. If indeed one construes interpretation as a rewriting operation, then all of the various critical methods or positions may be grasped as positing, either explicitly or implicitly, some ultimate privileged interpretive code in terms of which the cultural object is allegorically rewritten: such codes have taken the various forms of language or communication (in structuralism), desire (as for some Freudianisms but also some post-Marxisms), anxiety and freedom (in classical existentialism), temporality (for phenomenology), collective archetypes (in Jungianism or myth criticism), various forms of ethics or psychological humanism (in crit