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First published by Verso 1998This edition Verso 1998Translation Ted Stolze 1998Introduction Warren Montag 1998All rights reserved

The rights of Pierre Macherey, Warren Monta g and Ted Stolze to be identifiedt respectively as the author, editor and translator of this work have been asserted byt;\ them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

ersoUK: 6 Meard Street, London WIV 3HRUSA: 180 Varick Street, New York NY 10014-4606Verso is the imprint ofNew Left Books

ISBN 1-85984-949- 0British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataA catalog record for this book is available from the Library of CongressTypeset by SetSystems, Saffron Walden, EssexPrinted by Biddies Ltd, King s Lynn and Guildford

ontents

AcknowledgmentsNotes on Abbreviations and Original Sources viiixI Introduction by Warren ontag 1n n a Materialist WaySoutenance2 Philosophy as Operation3 For a Theory of Literary Reproduction

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ll Philosophyaf jranfaise4 The Hegelian Lure: Lacan as Reader of Hegel5 t the Sources of Histoire de f folie A Rectification andits Limits6 Foucault: Ethics and Subjectivity7 From Canguilhe m to Canguilhe m by Way of Foucault

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N Spinoza8 Deleuze in Spinoza9 Spinoza s Philosophical Actuality (Heidegger, Adorno,Foucault)1 Spinoza, the End of History, and the Ruse of Reason

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V ppendix (1964)11 Georges Canguilhe m s Philosophy of Science:Epistemology and History of Science

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BibliographyIndex 189195


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cknowledgments

t.

I would like to thank Michael Sprinker for his tireless advocacy of thisproject and for his useful advice, and Steve Cox and Jane Hindle forcareful editorial work. lowe a debt to all those with whom I havediscussed this project over the years: Peter Wissokur, Geoffrey Goshgar-ian, Etienne Balibar, Ted Stolze and Gregory Elliott. Without the gener-osity of M Olivier Carpet and the informed assistance of Matheron, both of the Institut Memoires de l Edition Contemporaine inwhich the Fonds Althusser are held, I could never have written thepreface I did Finally, of course, I must thank Pierre Macherey himselffor sharing so much in so many ways.arren ontag

r


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' ,-, ,Uk

otes on bbreviationsand Original Sources

Throughout this collection we have used the following standard abbrevi-ations for Spinoza s writings:M Metaphysical Thoughts (Cogitata metaphysica)

E Ethics (Ethica)App AppendixAx AxiomCorollaryDef DefinitionDef. Aff. Definition of AffectD DemonstrationExp ExplanationLem LemmaP PropositionPost PostulatePref PrefaceS ScholiumNote: A comma within a citation from the Ethics means and ; forinstance, the abbreviat ion E VP20D, S indicates that b oth the Dem-onstration and the Scholium of Proposition 20 of Ethics, part V arebeing cited.

Ep Letter (Epistola)V Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being (KorteVerhandeUng)

PPC Descartes's Principles o Philosophy (Principia PhilosophiaeCartesianae)TdlE Treatise on the Emmendation o the Intellect (Tractatus deIntellectus Emendatione)


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Several years ago, Pierre Macherey wrote a column for the journal Futurnterieur entitled Chronicles of a Dinosaur. t is not difficult to guesswhy he would choose such a title. Known primarily as a student ordisciple of Louis Althusser, whose text, Theory of Literary Productionrepresented, in the words of m ny commentators, the doctrine of nAlthusseria n literary criticism, it s no wonder that thirty years afterthe publication of his first book, nd t least twenty years after theAlthusseri an moment passed, Macherey could refer to himself as adinosaur. After all, is he not a survivo r of the structuralis t epoch, thetextual monuments of which are regarded by contemporary readers ascuriosities, as puzzling in their complexity as the simultaneously strangend familiar skeletons exhibited in a museum of natural history? And ithe label of structuralist were not enough to qualify his work for a placein the museum of extinct theories, theories tha t could no longer lead anyother than a posthumous existence as embalmed corpses whose spirit

h d long since fled, there is, of course, the matter of his Marxism, orrather his structural Marxism the rise nd fall of whi ch w s recountedyears ago. f Macherey could describe himself as a dinosaur in France,where he has published seven books nd more than fifty essays sincePour une theorie de la production litteraire appeared in 1966, wh t might weexpect in the Anglophone world where, until last year, TheoryLiterary Production was his only translated work (apart from a few essays,all of which d ted from the Sixties nd Seventies)?Of course, no matter how we m y protest the inaccuracy of thereception of Macherey's work, in particular, the routine reduction of hiswriting to structuralism, structural Marxism or even Althusserian-ism, categories which function less as taxonomic markers th n as formsof denunciation, it cannot be ignored. This reception is neither purelysubjective, consisting of inadequate ideas in the minds of readers, normere error, which might be dissipated through a confrontation with


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INTRODUCTIONMacherey's practice of philosophy as of Spinoza's and accounts for hissustained interest in his contemporaries, i.e., his fellow dinosaurs whosenames even in the US and Britain, not to speak of France, appear todenote a way of thinking whose day has come and gone: Lacan, Foucaultand Deleuze, to name only them. n opposition to the crude historicismcommon to a certain postmodern sensibility and its most bitteradversary, liberalism, Macherey rejects the implicit comparison of phil-osophy to the human individual whose life has a beginning, a middleand an end. On the contrary, the meaning of a philosophy, to borrow aphrase from Derrida, is originally deferred, activated only later, evenmuch later, by an encounter with other philosophies, as well scientifictheories, literary wor ks etc. No philosophy is closed upon itself, immuredin a fortress built from its dogmas, logical or anthropological; it mustthink by means of other philosophies, it becomes what it is throughthem. Macherey is among the few to recognize that thought is dependenton a dialogue that necessarily exists, in which it participates whether itwants to or not, and often without knowing it. He has thus never ceasedto attempt to understand the historical conditions of possibility of hisown thought, the place it occupies in the disposition of social forcesexternal as well as internal to philosophy. And, as Macherey suggests inhis extraordinary outenance (the formal defence of his oeuvre withwhich we have chosen to begin this collection), nothing less is requiredof one who would practise philosophy in a materialist way.

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=============1=============outenance25 ay 1991)

How should one present a group-we might even say a jumble-ofdivergent works so as to replace them in the framework of a course ofstudy truly deserving the name-and here the singular should carry allits weight-of a work? To begin, I must say that this dispersion reallytestifies to the way in which a process of investigation has unfolded,through an accumulation of incidents rather than with a spirit ofcontinuity, without any truly premeditated idea at the beginning, with-out an already traced plan which would have conferred on its outcomethe equilibrium of an organized architecture, in the manner of themethodical staging of a polyptych, with its central subject, organizedharmony, frontal arrangement, the composed and measured putting intoperspective of its elements. I must admit it, then: the works I presenthere I did not pursue systematically but obliquely and in isolation,uncertain of what would have been required to unite them, and even, fora time, relatively indifferent to the possibility of such a connection.However, it seems to me that given the point of development at whichthey have arrived today, these works can be defended, sustained, byarguments permitting a kind of order to be derived from them. An orderthat, without having been precisely formulated from the beginning,might finally be sketched, according to a necessity whose movement,mOre object ive than subjective, would thus have partly escaped me. Isn ttrue order always a hidden order? t is on the basis of this interpretationthat I now justify proposing a presentation of it which should itself haveonly a provisional value, corresponding not only to the state of thequestions I have tackled, with their relative degree of development, butalso their delays, their lacunae, indeed their inconsistencies or obscuri-ties, in which I would hope to show, at the same time as symptoms ofincompleteness, the necessity of new investigations.Three series of questions have successively preoccupied me, withoutanyone of them replacing or preventing me from returning to the others;


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The egelian LureLacan as Reader o egel

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Hegel is a lure. 1 This formula appears in several places in Lacan and isfound, for example, in "Position de l'inconscient," first presented in aconference at Bonneval in 1960, published in 1964 and reprinted in theEcrits in 1966: at that moment it was a question of the claims andprejudices of general psychology, the dominant ideology in which theactivity of the training of psychoanalysts was included; the " centralerror" of this psychology is to "take the phenomenon of consciousness asunitary,":; whi le from the standpoint of the science Freud inaugurated"everything shows on the contrary the distribution of consciousness,heterotopic and erratic at every level, no matter how its texture isordered."3 n order to achieve its preventative and demystifying effects,Lacan's teaching calls upon and uses for its own didactic purposes acertain number of philosophical references in its attack on the spon-taneous philosophy of the scientists who reduce the psychoanalyst to theordinary status of a psychologist and thus seek to depose the uncon-scious: among the most important of these references is Hegel. Does thismean that this speculative doctrine is valuable as an introduction topsychoanalysis and that, behind the pedagogical function it has beencalled on to serve, the doctrine possesses, in a general way, an intrinsi-cally scientific meaning, homogeneous with analysis itself in its dualtheoretical and practical dimension in so far as this doctrine, unlike anyother mode of investigation, accedes to the "position of the unconscious"?Here, Lacan takes care to formulate a clear reservation:

Our use of Hegel's phenomenology does not imply any allegiance to his systembut uses it to counter the evidences of identification. Further, Hegelian prop-ositions, even taken in context are always conducive to saying something Other[Autre chose]. Something Other that repairs the link in fantasmatic synthesiseven as it preserves the effectof denouncing the lures of identification. t is ourown ufhebung that transforms Hegel's, his own lure, in a moment that reveals,not the steps ofan ideal progress but the avatars of a lack.'


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=============8=============eleuze in pinoza


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n important part of Deleuze's o uvr is devoted to the reading ofphilosophers: the Stoics, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, etc.. But a rather singular position in this list would be assigned to Spinoza,owing to the philosophical interest that corresponds to him:R

It was on Spinoza that I worked the most seriously according to the norms ofthe history of philosophy but he more than any other gave me the feeling ofa gust of air from behind each time you read him, of a witch's broom whichhe makes you mount. We have not yet begun to understand Spinoza, and Imyself no more than others.'

One cannot say that Deleuze is a historian of philosophy, given that hismethod keeps such a distance from disciplinary divisions and by thisfact ignores such artificial dilemmas as those of explanation and under-standing, and commentary and interpretation. For Deleuze, when hepresents Spinoza's thought, the fact of analysing with the greatestprecision the text in which it is advanced, by showing how this text iscomposed and manages to state what it has to say, does not at all excludean evaluation of its speculative content, from the point of view of atheoretical investigation conce rning not only an historical past, in relationwith something that has been thought, and could no longer be thoughtexcept in the past. Rather, it also coincides with the effort of a thought inthe present, recreating the act through which this thought is realized inthe very person who reads it.Rather than rethinking him, in a way Deleuze sets out to think Spinoza,or to think in Spinoza, by establishing himself in the midst of thespeculative surroundings, of the living element in which the totality ofthis o uvr develops, the latter not being reducible to a doctrinal combi-nation, to a system. Instead of taking a philosophy, Spinoza's, as it is,or as it is supposed to be, and giving it a description which is in principleobjective and exhaustive of its discourse from a static point of view, it is


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158 N A MATERIALIST WAYsince the problems of absolute Spirit must not be confused with theproblems o f objective Spirit even if they can no longer be completelyseparated.

n this point on the basis of premisses that appear fundamentallydifferent Spinoza and Hegel reach conclusions that seem quite cIose ajudgement confirmed by the fact that they are identically opposed tocontractarian theories of right. For both reason must ruse with right thatis reason simultaneously uses right as an instrument in its struggle to

VAppendix 1964)


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secure the conditions of an authentically free life and also takes right asit already is so as to readjust its functioning so that their respectiveinterests may be brought into agreement and human existence may quitesimply become livable. Yet this process depends neither on intentionsnor even on the acts of any individual or group of individuals who bythemselves or for themselves would decide what is good for everyoneelse and who by the same token without even managing to suppressright would only bring right back to the conditions of its nativeirrationality. Spinoza and Hegel agree then on this fundamental point:right is a process wit hout a subject.

Notes1. Hegel 1991 22.2. Cornte 1975 54.3. Hegel 1965a XV 293.4. Hegel 1965b 107.

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============11============Georges Canguilhem sPhilosophy of Science:Epistemology and History


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of Science

Presentation y Louis AlthusserThe article you are about to read provides the first systematic overviewof the works of Georges Canguilhem. The name of this philosopher andhistorian of the Sciences, Director of the lnstitut de l Histoire des Sciencesof the University of Paris, is well known to all those who, in philosophyand in the sciences, are interested in n w research in the field ofEpistemology and the History of Science. Canguilhem s name and workwill soon know a much larger audience. t is fitting that the journalfounded by Langevin should receive the first serious study that has beendevoted to him in France.Epistemology (or philosophy of science), History of Science. Thesedisciplines are not new. Why speak of new research, and what radicalnovelty is to be expected from a way of thinking which already has avery long past and a considerable number of works to its credit? Isn tevery scientist interested, being naturally a little curious, in the history ofhis science; doesn t every scientist present, even in a simple form, certainfundamental questions about the raison d ttre of the problems, conceptsand methods of his science, philosophical (epistemological) questionsabout his own science? Don t there exist some excellent, quite erudite,works on the history of each science, and, for example, haven t themathematicians themselves who, under the collective name of Bourbaki/have signed the greatest mathematical work of the last twenty years,been careful to provide, in all their works, an historical note prior to thetreatment of all problems? Regarding the philosophy of science, it arisesat the origins of philosophy: from Plato to Hussed and Lenin (inMaterialism and Empirio-criticism), by way of Cartesian philosophy,eighteenth-century rationalist philosophy, Kant, Hegel and Marx, thephilosophy of science is much more than one part of philosophy amongothers: it is philosophy s essential part, to the extent that, at least since


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Adorno, Theodor et al. 1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology.Trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby. New York, NY: Harper and Row.Althusser, Louis. 1976. Essays in Self-Criticism. Trans. Grahame Lock.London: New Left Books.Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar. 1970. Reading Capital. Trans. BenBrewster. London: New Left Books.. 1995 . Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, tome n Paris: Stock/IMEC.Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis,IN: Hackett Publishing Company.Audo uard, Xavier. 1959. Pourqu oi Hegel? Lettre au Dr. Charles Duranden reponse a sa question par Xavier Audouard. La Psychanalyse 5,235-56.Bergson, Hemi. 1946. Philosophical Intuition. In The Creative Mind,126-52. Trans. MabelleL Andison. New York: Philosophical Library.Borges, Jorge Luis. 1993. Ficciones. Edited by Anthony Kerrigan. NewYork, NY: Knopf.Canguilhem, Georges. 1943. Essai sur quelques problemes concernant enormal et e pathologique. Publications de la Faculte des Lettres del'Universite de Strasbourg, Fascicule 100. Clermont-Ferrand: Impri-merie La Montaigne.1947. Note sur la situation faite a la philosophie biologique enFrance. Revue de metaphysique et de morale 52,322-32.1952. La connaissance de la vie. Paris: Hachette.1955. La formation du concept de rejlexe aux XVIl et XVIII" siecles.Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

1957. Sur une epistemologie concordataire. In Hommage aGastonBachelard: Etudes de philosophie et d'histoire des sciences, 3-12. Ed.G. Bouligand et al. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.1958a. Pathologie et physiologie de la thyrolde au XIX siecle.Thafi s 9, 77-97


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Adorno 126, 130-34 passimalienation 74, 75, 84-94 passimAlthusser 4-13 passim 27,161Aristotle 28, 29Artaud86Audouard65author 12, 44-8 passim 106, 108, 126Bach 49Bachelard 108, 163, 164, 184Bacon 123Balibar 4Balzac 22Barthes 6Bataille 74Beneviste 58Bergson 21, 119, 120Bernard 109Bertolazzi 7Bichat 112, 113Bonald 2Borges 47, 48, 108Boulez 103Bourbaki 161Brecht 7Brunschwicg 177Canguilhem 4, 27,108-14 passim 161

163-7 passim 169, 171-80 passim 183184Cavailles 163Celine49Chrysippus 48civil society 157civilized state 146civil power 148Comte 21, 22,142,143,163,167

concept (formation of) 170-74 passim 178179 181-84 passimHegelian concept of the history of

philosophy 126importance in science 184Spinozist concept of conatus 109

Condillac 24Condorcet 21,162,164Cousin 20, 21d'Alembert 162, 164Dante 45de Biran 2de Cervantes 47, 48de Tracy 21Deleuze 7, 14,24,98,101,102,119-24

passimDerrida 11, 14Descartes 105, 126, 161,162,170,171, 174dialectic of the positive 13

positivism 63, 83, 90, 94, 109,110,129-32passim 137, 142, 163dialecticHegelian 25,33,56,57,59,62-70passim74, 126, 138, 150Lacan's critique of Hegel (Hegel'sdialectic) 55, 59, 60, 62, 63, 73

Diderot 162, 164Dilthey4Diogenes Laertius 48Dreyfus 86, 101DuBois Reymond 168,170Durkheim 2Eagleton 10Engels 4, 5ethics vs. morality) 96-8 passim 101, 104,107, 127, 132, 133


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