Reading Capital Research Articles

Marx and Paci on the Question of Appearances (Or, Reading Capital as a Phenomenology)

The following essay argues that Marx’s method of critique, conception of science, and mode of presentation in Capital are all phenomenological in the sense first articulated by Enzo Paci in The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man. In Capital, Marx places the phenomenological problem of appearances at the centre of his criticism of political economy. His analysis begins with the way in which things typically present themselves in a capitalist society, but this is merely the starting point for a systematic critique which tries to reveal the innerconnections and exploitative social relations hidden beneath those estranged outward appearances. Marx presumed that this phenomenological approach was the most appropriate method for demystifying the ‘naturalized’ semblance of the capitalist economy. According to Paci’s reading of Capital, the task of Marxian critique is to show these superficial appearances for what they really are: i.e., reflections of the reified reality of modern life.

Rehearsal with the Elite from the Front Row

Abstract The performance Capital by Ivica Buljan, which was conceived while reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, is a presentation of the work process by a group of young actresses and actors who try to reflect the contemporary paradigm of capital. From a directorial perspective, this is not a wilful aestheticisation of the chosen texts, which we read as a sign of the sincerity of the artists’ collective effort. Although the explanatory approach and the burden of the dramatic form hinder effective expression of personal stances on the chosen topic, the created material can serve as a solid ground for an eventual upgrade of this study production, which could bring about a more pronounced engagement or performance of the discourse – out of itself.

Book Review: Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Vol. 1 The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People, Vol. 2 by Jacques Rancière

Jacques Ranciere Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double, Vol. 1, Verso, London, 2011; pp. 239, 9781844676972, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Jacques Ranciere The Intellectual and His People: Staging the People, Vol. 2, Verso, London, 2012; 177 pp: 9781844678600, 19.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Within these two volumes by Jacques Ranciere are compiled a dozen or so essays from 1975-85, most published originally in the journal Les Revoltes Logiques. This was a journal headed up by Ranciere at the Centre de Recherche des Ideologies de la Revolte. The essays marked his movement away from an earlier influence under Althusser, with whom he collaborated in Reading Capital (1965), and a movement toward the post-68 critiques of structuralist Marxism. These essays thus begin a 'critical stance toward Marxist dogmatism' in these terms (Volume 1:8), and a process of profound reappraisal of Marxist fundamentals, particularly regarding class. In particular, the articles are an attempt to understand why the movements of '68 were such a failure, and second, to understand and counter the consequent coagulation of disillusionment and cynical resentment on the part of the frustrated 'intellectuals' towards a proletariat that had infuriatingly failed to stick to the dialectical script of historical materialism. Fundamentally, Ranciere begins here an argument he lays out more explicitly in the Emancipated Spectator (2011b: 32), in which he counters the charge (now axiomatic) that the signs of '68 have been appropriated by capital. The take-home message from this now dominant attitude being that we should all accept the futility of class struggle in the face of capitalism's mighty adaptability and assimilability (Volume 2: 42). Instead, for Ranciere our frustrated cynicism stems from a persistent and compulsive return to a highly problematic positionality as intellectuals, thinkers, artists, etc. This positionality is that of the intellectual--whether radical or cynical--who says to some objectivated and auto-generated other, 'Here is the reality that you cannot and wish not to see'. In the 19th and 20th centuries, intellectuals in Marxist and socially critical movements have constituted the proletarian class as just such a auto-generated 'other'. However, in his line of thinking, this does not mean that critical theory has failed or become irrelevant, or that it is epistemologically passe. Ranciere reasons that today's cynical apologetics regarding the futility of class struggle through critique is mobilised out of exactly the same assumptions and modes as the critical theory that such cynics deem superannuated (201 lb: 29). Though the 'message' today is different--cynical, rather than critical --it is the failure to break out of the same 'positionality' that is the common characteristic and common problem. This presentation shows us how the enduring validity of the emancipatory struggle is wrongly discredited, and that emancipatory critique itself still has life in it, but only if we can desist from the compulsion to resume the discursive positionality defined above. The title of the volumes plays on a pun between the ostensible contents, which revolve around historical instances of theatrical production, spectacle, and dramatisation, on the one hand, and Ranciere's theoretical argument regarding 'the distribution of the sensible' in the political aesthetics of oligarchic capitalism, on the other. Evidently, Ranciere wishes these essays to contribute to a 'staging of the people'. He is attempting to counter the positionality of the intellectuals through the kind of historical scholarly practice attempted in these essays. Therefore, together the two volumes do not construct a systematic argument. As a collection of thematically and critically related articles, the effect is rather to meander contemplatively through a variety of empirically vital and textual settings: from the California Gold Rush through 19th Century French theatre to the trade unions of Vichy. …

Read Capital: The First Sentence

Contrary to received opinion, Marx’s analysis inCapitaldoes not start from the commodity, it starts from wealth. This has enormous theoretical and political implications.

„Anders denken, anders sprechen“

Originally published in 1965, Reading Capital is a landmark of radical theory. Previously only available in a highly abridged form, the publishing house Westfälisches Dampfboot and the translator Frieder O. Wolf make an unabridged edition available in German for the first time and restores original chapters by Roger Establet and Pierre Macherey. Louis Althusser and his scholars interpret Marx’s analysis as a revolutionary break—the basis of a completely new science. Demirovi? opens in his review essay the discussion about Reading capital. He refers not only the history of reception of misunderstanding and repression but also underlines why the contributions in Reading Capital underachieve the critical-marxian theory of capitalist social formation.

Althusser and Italy: A Two-Fold Challenge to Gramsci and Della Volpe

During the 1960s, the “exchange” between Louis Althusser and Italian Marxist philosophers developed around the theme of the autonomy of Marxism. Harmony between the theories of Althusser and Galvano Della Volpe (and his students) was short-lived, and there was a definitive break around the relationship between science and ideology. The chief intermediary for introducing Althusser's thought to Italy was Cesare Luporini, a philosopher and an active member of the Italian Communist Party who brought For Marx and Reading Capital to Italy. Althusser's grappling with Gramsci was constant, and after the critiques of historicist Marxism, the author of Prison Notebooks came to hold influence over the French philosopher with regard to political matters. As Althusser's thought developed, considerable weight was also held by the reading, mediated by Gramsci, of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, which consolidated his relationship with Italian political and philosophical culture. Althusser managed to catch a glimpse of the philosophical significance of the Gramscian conception of reality as relations of forces (the philosophy of praxis) beyond the historicist and humanist schema within which he had enclosed Gramsci in Reading Capital. But his reading of Machiavelli would develop in the direction of so-called aleatory materialism, also because to Althusser (for deeply-held political reasons: his attachment to classism and to the division of the world into two adversarial camps), the Gramscian category of hegemony would always remain extraneous.

Reading Capital with Being and Time

This essay argues for reading Marx's Capital with Heidegger's Being and Time (and vice versa). Yet how might we do so? Being and Time is, after all, typically seen to be an anti-Marxist book. This paper elucidates three areas where reading these books together illuminates our understanding of each, first discussing Marx's value theory in light of Heidegger's conception of ontological difference and then examining each book's treatment of subjectivity. The essay ends by comparing the two books' political conclusions.

John Locke in the Twenty-First Century

John Locke in the Twenty-First CenturyEtienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, translated by Warren Montag and Introduced by Stella Sandford (London/Brooklyn: Verso, 2013)Poor Descartes. The seventeenth-century French tried to naturalize the mind by doubting everything and restarting from what he thought was unarguable: I think, therefore I am. The mind was a thinking substance with innate a priori ideas, while the body was a separate extended substance whose senses supplied us with less reliable a posteriori ideas. Since the Cartesian cogito began in an individual mind, the problem immediately arose as to how to connect that interiority to an exteriority: its own body and a world of other minds and bodies. So, while Descartes is credited for starting a modern psychology incorporating a conscious self, he is blamed for generating modern dualism and a corresponding state of alienation between mind and body, subject and object-a breach every subsequent philosophical innovation has addressed one way or another. An early effort was that of British empiricist John Locke, who declared the mind a tabula rasa; our ideas were all acquired a posteriori through lived impressions.Locke is also known as the architect of the liberal revolution that substituted an atomistic individualism and bourgeois property rights for divinely ordained land-based feudal aristocracy. Nonetheless, in Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness, Marxist Etienne Balibar has now withdrawn credit from Descartes for conceiving our modern notion of consciousness and a rationalist psychology, to instead bestow it on Locke! Balibar justifies his ironic choice in an intriguing analysis of Locke's discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Of Identity and Diversity, Book II, xxvii, 1694 edition). Balibar's essay is sixteen years old, but has now been translated into English by theorist Warren Montag and ably introduced by British philosopher Stella Sandford. The book contains a new preface and significant appendices, including a detailed Philosophical and Philological Glossary and a second essay on Spinoza and Locke.We attend particularly closely not only since Balibar is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Universite de Paris X and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine, but because he is embedded in the critical post-structuralist pantheon as co-author with Louis Althusser of Reading Capital (1965) and, like Althusser and Montag, a distinguished Spinoza scholar. The other rationalist, Spinoza, born in 1632, the same year as Locke, had argued in the opposite direction when answering Cartesian dualism: the universe was one Substance Absolutely Infinite conceived as either mental or material and incorporating everything. He called it God or Nature and defined our chaotic emotions as bodily affects resulting from our situations within this larger matrix. In the essay on Spinoza and Locke, Balibar suggests that after Descartes, psychology had two radical naturalistic possibilities: Spinoza's rationalistic materialism or Locke's rationalistic empiricism.Balibar's further purpose is to find points of contact between the Anglophone and Continental philosophic traditions in response to the rift that developed after the Second World War between European critical philosophy (phenomenological, existentialist, and Marxist), which allows for theoretical questions of Being, desire, and political engagement, and the analytic school (positivist, empirical, emphasizing the use of symbolic logic). Despite the latter's important sources in 1920s Middle Europe, the two strands developed independently with little crossover and much alienation. Analytics dominated in Britain and America during the Cold War, but the critical theorists ascended in Europe after 1968. …

David T. Johnson & Maiko Tagusari, Reading Capital Punishment in Japan from Worldwide View

David T. Johnson & Maiko Tagusari, Reading Capital Punishment in Japan from Worldwide View

Marx's Vampires: An Althusserian Critique

Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vampire metaphor is limited to accentuating the excessive and predatory nature of capitalist accumulation. Against the predominant view, this essay argues that the standard reading of Marx's vampire metaphor implicitly endows the category of “living labor” or the “worker” with a transcendent rather than immanent ontology. Drawing predominantly from Louis Althusser's reading of Marx in Reading Capital, this essay argues that interpreting Marx's vampire metaphor as representing the concept of value—or surplus-value more specifically—avoids the problematic tendency to reify living labor by underscoring the immanent and totalizing character of Marx's critique of capital.

The adventure of French philosophy

The perfect companion piece to Badiou's Pocket Pantheon, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the moment in contemporary philosophy. From the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser's canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital to the scathing critiques of the potato fascism in Gills Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and the grand politics of Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau's The Angel; from talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy to reviews of the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, Badiou reveals the exceptionally rich and varied adventure that is French philosophy.

Against the Period

This essay returns to part 2, chapter 4 of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar’s landmark text Reading Capital to interrogate some of the historiographical concepts upon which literary studies continues to rely, especially that of the period. Althusser’s profound critique of the period remains cogent, this article argues, for a field in which individual events and texts and large-scale social and political formations are often bound together by no framework other than their putative belonging to one and the same block of time—that is, a period. Aiming to reform this concept in order to institute a more complex historiography, Althusser invents a version of what came to be known simply as “theory.” (Théorie was the name of Althusser’s series at Maspero, in which Reading Capital and many of his subsequent works appeared.) Thus, while this essay, on the one hand, discloses the limits of Althusser’s own practice of theory (in its ambivalent relation to structuralism), it concludes, on the other, that no genuine reworking is possible of the historical horizon we all presuppose, apart from the revival of theory or one of its avatars or successors. As in Althusser’s example, theory’s task, as yet unfulfilled, is to recast thought and knowledge’s relation to time and history.

Money's doubles: reading, fiction and finance capital

This article reads the ambivalence of the doubles that populate Martin Amis' novel Money through the doubles that money itself possesses: specifically the divergence between what have come to be thought of as financial and industrial forms of capital. The form of Amis' novel, I suggest, offers itself as a metaphorical critique of these divided forms, one that seeks to interrupt the deferred logic that has constructed what he has described as money's ‘tacit conspiracy’. Amis's novel can thus be read as an intervention in the very logic that has prevented the disastrous implications of finance capitalism's ascendancy from being realised.

History and the Traumatic Narrative of Desire and Enjoyment in Althusser

According to the common image of Althusser that circulates today, my title names everything that is missing from his work. For decades, he has mainly been known--and dismissed--for his allegedly puritanical and sterile project, principally in For Marx and Reading Capital, to elaborate theoretically rigorous Marxist science. Where in such an undertaking to attain correctness is there room for anything as referentially particular as history, as literary as narrative, or as emotionally fraught as trauma, desire, and enjoyment? Yet I contend that while these things are certainly not at the center of his theory, they are nonetheless crucial to it. Of all these topics, Althusser's relationship to history has received the most attention and generated the most controversy. His pronouncement in Reading that Marxism Is Not Historicism has often been taken to evince hostility to historical studies as whole. (1) Yet what Althusser attacks is not the study of history as such or its relevance to Marxism, but the concept of homogeneous, linear time that underlies many diverse ways of doing (2) Indeed, Althusser's critique of historicism in this special sense is also call for new historiography that would rethink historical time explicitly as function of the structure of the whole uneven social formation. (3) The importance of history to Althusser can be seen in the fact that he not only credits Marx with founding history as science, he also insists in the liminal texts of For Marx that his philosophical essays do not derive from merely erudite or speculative investigation. They are, simultaneously, interventions in definite conjuncture; Each the result of special occasion, these pieces are none the less products of the same epoch and the same history. (4) But despite this emphasis on conjunctural pressures, Althusser never delineates them very fully in his theoretical corpus, which lacks the fully elaborated historical case studies that abound in Marx. Even in the autobiographical The Future Lasts Forever, he coyly withholds any discussion of such matters, referring the reader instead to his published writings, which he then declares do not treat history inadequately: I know you are waiting for me to talk about philosophy, politics, my position within the Party, and my books, how they were received; to reveal those who liked them and those who were implacably opposed to them. But I do not intend to discuss these totally objective matters in systematic manner because the information is available to anyone who does not have it already, just by reading what I have written (a vast number of books published in many different countries.) You can however rest assured that I only ever trot out the same old themes which can be counted on the fingers of one hand. (5) To large extent, Althusser in his own practice replaces history as commonly understood with the history of the production of knowledge, attributing to Marx the claim that it takes place entirely in knowledge, in the 'head' or in 'thought.' (6) This claim is at work in surprising way in the theory of symptomatic reading, where even what is problematic in relation to knowledge is made to serve it, for symptomatic reading poses the inadequate concepts, borrowings from other theories or metaphorical formulations Althusser calls symptoms, in the texts of Marx and the Marxist tradition as sites for further conceptual work: a science only progresses, i.e., lives, by the extreme attention it pays to points where it is theoretically fragile. (7) Nor does ideology, which Althusser characterizes as unconscious, escape this extreme and cognitive fix. What Alex Callinicos wittily dubs the epistemological blues that pervade For Marx and Reading Capital consist precisely in making ideology problem of knowledge. Even after Althusser redefines ideology in more material terms as actions inserted into practices . …

Prehistoric Modes of Textual Production, or, Books Begat by Other Books

It all happened a long time ago. In 1975 a very serious book arrived from London. It was entitled Precapitalist Modes of Production, and its authors were Barry Hindess and Paul Q Hirst. It was hard work, though we were steeled for it by long hours spent with Althusser and Reading Capital as well as by reading Capital. No sooner had we finished this book, and puddled sideways through the accompanying journal Theoretical Practice, than another book arrived. It was called Mode of Production and Social Formation, and it was an autocritique of the first-mentioned book. There were invisible arrows in all this, and they pointed to Foucault rather than to Althusser, even if one of our authors was to follow that turn via political theory (Hindess) and the other, something more recognizably historicist (Hirst). As texts begat more texts (as medieval mice grew from moist cheesecloth) there were soon two more texts, these called Marx’s “Capital” and Capitalism Today, and involving two more authors, Cutler and Hussain. In this article, I revisit this remarkable experience, hoping that our guest of honor might help throw light on this moment.

Introduction to “Under the Dome: The Ethics and Politics of Reading Capital”

Each generation discovers, and produces, its own reading of Marx's Capital. In my introduction to the symposium “Under the Dome: The Ethics and Politics of Reading Capital,” I explain how a group of students at the University of Notre Dame organized a reading group on Capital and then wrote essays on what new ideas they found, in relation to their ongoing research projects.

Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form

This article returns to the question “what is it to read?” through two texts: Louis Althusser's Reading Capital (1965) and The Way We Read Now, a special issue of Representations (2009). Rooney analyzes the issue's introduction, Sharon Marcus's and Stephen Best's “Surface Reading,” examining its accounts of description and “minimal critical agency” and its skepticism concerning radical freedom and the interpretative heroics of literary analysis from the point of view of Althusser's radically different account of reading as a “guilty” practice, one marked by productivity and the contingency of “surprise.” The author argues that the surface method of “critical description,” which seeks to “indicate what a text says about itself” and to describe what it makes “evident, perceptible, apprehensible,” fails when Marcus and Best describe Althusser's text but overlook the fact that his lecture symptomale sharply critiques the metaphor of depth and cautiously deploys a metaphor of terrain. This article proposes that from an Althusserian perspective, the metaphors of surface and depth as they appear in “Surface Reading” are twin brothers, two sides of a coin. Whether in the form of the religious myth of immediate, surface reading or the empiricist conception of the text as veiled truth, these approaches proclaim their critical “innocence” and disavow the metalanguages that bring the textual surface into view. Rooney argues that the figure of terrain enables a reading that confesses its mediating power, while conceding that it moves in a field not of its own making.

The Late Althusser: Materialism of the Encounter or Philosophy of Nothing?

The ‘late Althusser,’ above all the posthumously published ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,’ is often regarded as a ‘break’ with his earlier work. The late works are read as a rejection of the ‘determinism’ supposedly characteristic of such texts as For Marx and Reading Capital. This essay seeks to show in contrast that a ‘materialism of the encounter’ is at work in the early texts, and that what is new in the late works is a return to a philosophy of origins, of an originary void as the guarantee that all that exists will pass away. There is thus a Messianism which remains the unthought residue of the late Althusser and which calls for analysis.

Abstracts: Reading & writing

Abstracts: Reading & writing

The complexities of reading capital in two Puerto Rican families

ABSTRACTSTwo case studies of adult GED (General Education Diploma) students and their kindergarten‐aged children are presented. The construct of “capital,” as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), is applied specifically to the children's and adults' reading practices. These case studies are analyzed in terms of various forms of official “reading capital” and locally valued reading and schooling practices. The results suggest that children and families possess rich resources that are often ignored, devalued, or denied in schools. The findings of this study challenge the applicability of Bourdieu's description of capital to local communities.Se presentan dos estudios de caso de estudiantes adultos del GED y sus hijos en edad de asistir al preescolar. El concepto de “capital”, como lo describe Pierre Bourdieu (1986), se aplicó específicamente a las prácticas de lectura de los niños y los adultos. Estos estudios de caso se analizan en términos de varias formas de “capital de lectura” oficial y prácticas de lectura y escolaridad valoradas localmente. Los resultados sugieren que los niños y las familias poseen ricos recursos que a menudo se ignoran, devalúan o niegan en las escuelas. Los hallazgos de este estudio presentan un desafío a la validez de aplicar la descripción de capital de Bourdieu a las comunidades locales.Zwei Untersuchungsstudien von Studenten der Erwachsenenausbildung GED (General Education Development) und ihren im Kindergartenalter befindlichen Kindern werden vorgestellt. Der Begriff von „Kapital,” wie durch Pierre Bourdieu (1986) beschrieben, ist bewußt auf Lesepraktiken von Kindern und Erwachsenen angewandt. Diese Untersuchungsstudien sind in Begriffen verschiedener Formen offiziellen „Lesekapitals” analysiert und in Lese‐ und Unterrichtspraktiken lokal geschätzt. Die Resultate lassen vermuten, dass Kinder und Familien reichliche Ressourcen besitzen, die in Schulen oft ignoriert, abgewertet oder vorenthalten werden. Die Erkenntnisse dieser Studie fordern die Anwendbarkeit von Bourdieus Beschreibung von Kapital für ortsgebundene Gemeinschaften heraus.Ce texte présente deux études de cas portant sur des adultes préparant le diplôme de GED (Développement général en éducation) et leurs enfants d'âge préscolaire. Le concept de « capital », tel qu'énoncé par Pierre Bourdieu (1986), est appliqué spécifiquement aux pratiques de lecture des enfants et des adultes. Ces études de cas sont analysées en fonction des différentes formes du « capital lecture » officiel, de la lecture telle qu'elle est valorisée localement, et des practiques scolaires. Les résultats suggèrent que les enfants et les familles possèdent des ressources qui sont souvent ignorées, dévaluées ou niées au sein l'école. Les résultats de cette étude constituent un défi pour l'applicabilité de la description du capital de Bourdieu à des communautés locales.