9

Althussers last encounter: Gramsci

Peter D. Thomas

A subterranean current

n his final texts, Louis Althusser nominated a repressed and almost completely unknown
materialist tradition in the history of philosophy to which he signalled his intention to affiliate
his final philosophical thoughts.1 He described this tradition as the underground current of the
materialism of the encounter: it included, among others, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza and
Hobbes, the Rousseau of the second discourse, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida.2 It is in relation
to these thinkers that the so-called late Althussers philosophy has often been discussed
in the years of its initial reception, as commentators have sought to reconstruct a coherent
tendency, if not system, from largely posthumously published texts.3 Yet there is a strong
case to be made that these philosophical passions were, in the last instance, overdetermined
by another more directly political problematic, not always visible in the letter of Althussers
texts but discernable everywhere in its effects upon them: namely, Althussers encounter
with Gramsci. More than any other figure in the Marxist tradition except for its founders (and
arguably, even more than Engels), Gramsci was Althussers persistent agonist, the other
major interlocutor of Marx with whom, above all others, he repeatedly felt the need to settle
accounts.4 On numerous occasions in different phases of his development, Althusser returned
to Gramsci in order to gain new resources and perspectives in changed conjunctures. Thus, his
famous reflections on the wake of May 1968, partially published in English as Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses, offered an Althusserian translation of the Gramscian notion of
a hegemonic apparatus;5 during the debates in the PCF in the mid to late 1970s on the thesis
of the dictatorship of the proletariat and in the later Crisis of Marxism announced by Althusser
himself, Gramsci, and a particular Eurocommunist interpretation of Gramscis concept of
hegemony, were continually interrogated in a series of texts; the remarkable Marx in his
limits, which may be regarded as Althussers last political will and testament, tellingly breaks
off in the middle of a discussion of Gramscis theory of the state and the autonomy of politics.6
At the foundation of this encounter, or at least one of its first significant, textually explicit
traces, lies the chapter Marxism is not an historicism of Reading Capital. The central theoretical
propositions of this chapter defined what came to be known as classical Althusserianism.
Given the importance accorded to the critique of Gramsci here, as representative of a theoretical

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problematic that went far beyond him to include most initiatives in Western Marxism, it would
not be inaccurate to regard Reading Capital, viewed from a certain perspective, as an attempt
at an Anti-Gramsci, or at least as the conscious negation of the theoretical and political consequences of certain supposedly Gramscian theses. Above all, Althusser attacked Gramscis
proposal that the philosophy of praxis was the absolute historicism (read by Althusser with
the indefinite rather than definite article).7 Fundamentally, Althusser argued, the philosophy of
praxis involved a relapse into a pre-Marxist, expressivist notion of the social totality, founded
upon a conception of the temporal present as an essentially unified and coherent presence
of Geist, expressed and omnipresent in all of its component parts. The temporal present itself
was grasped as merely an essential section [coupe dessence], [a] vertical break in historical
time ... such that all the elements of the whole revealed by this section are in an immediate
relationship with one another, a relationship that immediately expresses their internal essence
... which thus become immediately legible in them.8
Given its fame and influence, there is little need to rehearse Althussers full argument here.
What is particularly interesting for the purposes of this study is the nature of the relation that
Althusser argues links Gramscis absolute historicism to Hegels absolute knowledge. For
the Althusser of Reading Capital, both Gramsci and Hegel posit an integral and expressive
relationship between temporality and philosophy, whereas a properly Marxist concept of
philosophy should rigorously refuse its reduction to mere temporal trace. He argued that
If Marxism is an absolute historicism, it is because it historicizes even what was peculiarly
the theoretical and practical negation of history for Hegelian historicism: the end of history,
the unsurpassable present of Absolute Knowledge ... There is no longer any privileged
present in which the totality becomes visible and legible in an essential section, in which
consciousness and science coincide. The fact that there is no Absolute Knowledge which
is what makes the historicism absolute means that Absolute Knowledge itself is historicized. If there is no longer any privileged present, all presents are privileged to the same
degree. It follows that historical time possesses in each of its presents a structure which
allows each present the essential section of contemporaneity ... Hence the project of
thinking Marxism as an (absolute) historicism automatically unleashes a logically necessary
chain reaction which tends to reduce and flatten out the Marxist totality into a variation of
the Hegelian totality.9
Most damagingly, it also tended to reduce the distinction between Marxism, in its scientific
dimensions, and other conceptions of the world. According to Althusser, Gramsci had not
understood the importance of the early Althusserian distinction between science and ideology
for the constitution of a genuinely Marxist philosophy. Emerging from an epistemological
rupture with a previous ideological problematic, the qualitatively new science of historical
materialism laid the foundation for the elaboration of a qualitatively new philosophy (dialectical materialism), which would be capable of defending the scientific from the (ever-present)
threat of the return of the (superannuated but still effective) ideological.10 Gramsci, having
failed to acknowledge this distinction, and having furthermore reduced science to a mere
superstructure or a historical category which ultimately [reduced] science to history as its
essence,11 could not do more than think the relationship between Marxist scientific theory
and real history according to the model of a relationship of direct expression.12 Marxist theory

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was thus unable to be distinguished from the history from which it organically emerged.13 The
specificity of Marxism its unique triangular articulation of politics, philosophy and science
was annulled. The theory of history was collapsed into real history, the object of knowledge
was confused with the real object, and dialectical materialism disappeared into historical
materialism.14 Unwittingly, Gramsci had thus reduced Marxist philosophy to a mere reflection
of its time, structurally homologous with any other organic ideology, according to the proposition that nothing can run ahead of its time,15 Althussers not entirely accurate gloss on
Hegels oft-misquoted proposition that philosophy is its own time comprehended in thoughts
[Gedanken].16 The present, Althusser argued, in both Hegel and, following him, in Gramsci,
constitutes the absolute horizon of all knowing.17

An almost completely unknown materialist tradition

This critique stimulated a wide-ranging debate, not least of all in the Italian and French
Communist Parties.18 In its turn, it gave rise to a more detailed philological engagement with
the Prison Notebooks, resulting in the revision (for example, Christine Buci-Glucksmann) or
substantial correction (for example, Andr Tosel and Wolfgang Fritz Haug, among others) of
Althussers theses and judgments.19 Nevertheless, the image of Gramsci presented in Reading
Capital won, and continues to enjoy, wide assent, to different extents in the different national
Marxist theoretical cultures. Its success does not consist primarily in the continuing authority
of specific classical Althusserian theses (many of which were soon amended, substantially
modified or even abandoned by Althusser himself). Rather, it can be viewed in a widespread
acceptance of Althussers characterisation and assessment of Gramscis position as a strong
form of a weak historicism, and its concomitant marginalisation in contemporary philosophical
debates. Given Gramscis prominent presence in so many other fields of scholarly enquiry,
from cultural and literary studies, linguistics and anthropology to sociology, political science
and history, the minor role played by the Prison Notebooks in both Marxist and non-Marxist
philosophical discussions today is particularly conspicuous. In this sense, Althussers offensive
achieved its primary objective.
Despite the sophistication and influence of Althussers critique, however, recent philological
work founded on Gerratanas 1975 critical edition of the Prison Notebooks has demonstrated
the extent to which it ascribes positions to Gramsci that are not to be found in his texts.20 In
particular, Gramscis notion of the philosophy of praxis as the absolute historicism does not
reduce Marxism to a mere expression of the Hegelian matrix from which, in part, it emerged.
On the contrary, with this critical appropriation of this central Crocean term, Gramsci aimed
to indicate precisely the historical and theoretical distance that separated Marxs thought
both from Hegels and from that of his latter-day imitators. This characterisation was founded
upon an historical analysis of historicism as both philosophical doctrine and political current
in the long nineteenth century; Marxism was posited as the absolute form of this tradition
not according to a model of absolute knowledge, in which it would function as a finally
attained consciousness of history which, qua consciousness, allows the present to be fully
contemporaneous with and transparent to itself, but rather in the sense that it represented a
possible resolution of the contradictions of the previous historicist tradition. Rather than the

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Hegelianising, emanationist model of the social totality presented by Althusser, Gramscis

complex identification of philosophy and history, under the aegis of politics, instead presupposes an anti-essentialist theory of translatability and the necessary non-contemporaneity of
the present. In turn, this gives rise to a definition of philosophy not as the expression of an
essence (the temporal and logical priority of which would guarantee the unity of the presents
manifold expressions, including pre-eminently its philosophical realisation), but as a
particularly intense form of organisation and potentially, transformation of this constitutive
heterogeneity.
Influenced by his university studies in historical linguistics, and stimulated above all by
Lenins reflections on the difficulty of translating the language of the Russian Revolution into
the languages of Western Europe,21 Gramsci expands the concept of translation beyond strictly
linguistic phenomena to embrace a much wider range of social practices. The famous couplets
of the Prison Notebooks East and West, civil society and political society, the national and
international, war of position and war of manoeuvre are all thought in terms of productive
mutual transposition between different registers. Translatability also gradually comes to
assume the status of a central organising perspective of Gramscis philosophical reflections in
the Prison Notebooks, indicating a relational and thus anti-essentialist methodology of philosophical research.22 For Gramsci, the relationship between philosophy, politics and history was
not to be thought in terms of a hierarchy of casual relations, but in terms of their dialectical
interpenetration, each comprehending the others in their own particular modes. Above all, the
notion of translatability is central to Gramscis notion of the relationship of theory and practice,
which he posits not as a simple unity of theory and practice (such a unity being premised upon
their prior and continuing distinction), but as the process of their active identification through
the intensification of relations of translation. Theory and practice thus come to be immanent
to each other through a process of progressive experimentation, as the practical dimensions
of theory, as a form of highly mediated organisation, encounter the theoretical dimensions of
emergent practices, conceived as new forms of organisation in nuce.
This perspective also provided Gramsci with the outlines of a decentred conception of social
formations that can legitimately be regarded as both a precursor and alternative formulation
of the key Althusserian concept of overdetermination. Translation, in this perspective, is an
eminently political practice, in the sense of a transformative instance of constitutive relationality that cannot be reduced to a process of originary or retrospective unification. Grasped
in its fullest sense, it involves the construction of lines of communication between different
practices whose relations are not premised either on interiority, in the sense of an identical
essence or an Ursprache immanently present in all, or on exteriority, in which discrete
essences confront each other in subject-object relations. For all of their similarity, however,
there remains a significant difference between the Gramscian and Althusserian formulations: while the economic continued to occupy a central position in the early Althussers
conception of regions of a social formation (and thus provided a functional, if not essential,
founding instance), Gramsci instead emphasises the transformative relationality of politics as
the decisive point of mediation of practices that are comprehended, not in spatial terms, but in
their historical movement, without origin or goal, as intensifications of relations of domination
and subalternity.
Due in large part to this emphasis upon the primacy of difference, nothing could be further
from the native temper of Gramscis thought than the notion of an essential section, an

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expressivist totality, or an homogenous present contemporaneous with itself. Althussers

mistake here may have been to have lazily assumed, perhaps prompted by the hearsay he
later admitted had overdetermined his reading of Gramsci, that the Prison Notebooks had
uncritically taken over precisely this element of Croces thought that they are at such pains to
refute.23 For Croce, the present is truly and necessarily identical with itself, contemporaneous
in all the component parts of an omnipresent Spirito that contains (synchronic) distinctions but
not (diachronic) real differences. Croces Spirito unlike at least one version of Hegels Geist,
which depends upon precisely that which it is not can tolerate nothing exterior to itself.24
Croces thought, unlike Gramscis, presupposes a conception of the present as an essential
section; indeed, the Althusserian concept of an essential section seems almost designed
to capture precisely the difference between Croces ostensibly immanentist reform of
Hegelianism and Gramscis emphasis upon the dimensions of Hegelianism (especially for its
attempt to overcome the traditional conceptions of idealism and materialism) that could
be re-proposed in a more strongly non-metaphysical and political register.25
In reality, Gramsci conducted an unrelenting struggle against Croces diluted absolute
historicism, arguing that its metaphysical residues were not incidental or contingent but
constituted the metaphysical hard core of his research programme.26 Gramsci pursued this
critique on two fronts: on the one hand, he argued that Croces history of freedom was
a tendentious history of the present written from the standpoint of the victors, a history
according to plan [storia a disegno], ably disguised;27 on the other hand, he pointed to the
unbridgeable abyss between Croces categories and the history they claimed to comprehend.
His thought remained speculative, and in this sense Gramsci could argue that the speculative
residue of theology and metaphysics in Croces thought is not a residue, it is a whole, it is
the entire method of philosophising, and for it any affirmation of historicism is vain, because
it is a case of speculative historicism, of the concept of history and not of history.28
In Gramscis positive alternative to this neo-idealist conception, however, the present is
necessarily non-identical with itself, composed of numerous times that do not coincide but
are constituted by their relational difference. Rather than expressive of an essence equally
present in all practices, the present for Gramsci is precisely an ensemble of those practices in
their different temporalities, struggling to assert their primacy and thus to articulate the present
as an achieved rather than originary unity. This notion of the constitutive non-contemporaneity
of the present is one of the fundamental themes of the Prison Notebooks. It is explored in
a variety of forms, ranging from the complexity of composite bodies on a mass scale to the
molecular composition of personal identity and individuality. One of the central forms in which
this dislocation is played out occurs at the level of the constitution of the person [la persona]
trapped in a condition of subalternity to statal forms of organisation, stability and regulation
the Gramscian alternative to a theory of the subject, whether derived from a philosophy of
consciousness or regarded as the necessary foundation for political agency. Such a bizarrely
composed personality contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced
science, prejudices from all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future
philosophy which will be that of a human race united the world over.29 Compiling an inventory
of the infinity of traces of the historical process that constitute such an incoherent present is
the starting point for elaborating a critical knowledge that would be capable, not of mastering
these contradictions in an act of self-consciousness,30 but of positing itself as an element of
contradiction.31

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For Gramsci, language itself gives ample evidence of the fractured nature of historical
time, insofar as its constitutively metaphorical nature reveals layers or sediments of different
historical experiences sitting together in an uncomfortable modus vivendi: current language
is metaphorical with respect to the meanings and ideological content that words have had in
previous periods of civilisation ... Language changes with the transformation of the entire civilisation, through the emergence of new classes in the culture, through the hegemony exercised
by one national language on others etc, and takes up precisely metaphorical words of previous
civilisations and cultures.32 Similarly, dialects and national languages confront each other
not in hierarchical relations of degeneration or purity but as performative indices of different
tempos of historical development, ultimately linked to the conditions of political subalternity or
hegemonic direction that shape the communities of their practitioners.33
The present of individual nation-states is similarly fractured, in the relations between urban
centres and rural peripheries (one role of which is to provide the metropolitan present with an
image of its past, giving rise to and being played out in the temporal dislocations of national
presents of internal migration). On an international level, the hegemonic relationships between
different national formations consign some social formations to the past times of others.
Gramscis most famous characterisation of the underdeveloped East in comparison to the
advanced West, which he derived from Lenin and Trotskys reflections on the success of the
Russian Revolution and the failures of revolutions in the West, has sometimes been read as
presupposing a normative and progressivist notion of capitalist development, or even an ideal
type of the modern state absent in an exceptional Orient.34 In reality, however, the distinction
here between East and West, and their unification within a world system, is analytic rather than
substantive; it allows us to grasp the fact that the tempo and efficacy of imperialist expansion
itself progressively imposes an essential unity on the disparity of different national historical
experiences.
Above all, the non-contemporaneity of the present in Gramsci is a function and symptomatic
index of the struggle between classes. The present, as the time of class struggle, is necessarily and essentially out of joint, fractured by the differential times of different class projects.
Once again, in this conception, difference rather than unity is primary. Far from presupposing
it, Gramsci demonstrates that the notion of a unified present is not objectively nor immediately
given, but rather, is a function of the social and political hegemony of one social group seeking
to impose its own present as an insurpassable horizon for all other social groups. Concretised
via the hegemonic apparatuses that organise, ratify and stabilise the social relations of the
established order, this present does indeed come to constitute an absolute horizon, not
simply of knowing, but also, and more decisively, of the possibilities of action. Insofar as we
can talk of a unified present or contemporaneity in Gramsci, it only emerges tendentially, as
the function of a classs hegemonic project that has progressed to the constitution of its own
form of political society, as the organising instance of the associations of civil society that it
interpellates or more precisely, subjugates as its subaltern raw material. There is thus an
ongoing and always incomplete struggle to unify any present, to produce a contemporaneity or coincidence of times that aims to efface its reality as a Kampfplatz of contradictions
that are not simply conceptual, but realised in the form of opposed interests of social groups.
A unified present is inessential appearance, the contingent image the ruling class crafts of
its own project embodied in statal institutions, viewed from the perspective of the eternity it
claims to embody.

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Yet there is a struggle between two hegemonies, always, Gramsci famously wrote.35 There
are always (at least) two class projects that attempt to mobilise, in the case of the subaltern
strata, or (dis)organise, in the case of the ruling group, disparate class forces on the terrain of
the civil society of the (bourgeois) integral State, in order to secure their ratification in the institutions of political society. The time of the one denies the full presence of the other. To adopt
an opposition proposed by Alberto Burgio, the time of already constituted political power for
Gramsci is the time of duration, the development of an inert time, mere quantity adequately
measured in chronological terms ... an empty time. The time of the subaltern classes, on
the other hand, initially condemned to endure such duration, is fractured by the possibility of
another present. Gramsci is here not very far from the Jetztzeit of Benjamins Theses on the
Philosophy of History. When the subaltern classes set out to make history or to constitute
[their own] epoch, they rupture this continuum, shattering its linearity and filling up this
empty time with an event (an ensemble of events) that modifies the rhythm, the intensity,
the meaning itself of historical movement, imparting to it an acceleration and determining its
progress.36 In this possible present and this possible future we encounter the possibility
not of a supposedly genuine contemporaneity, understood as a synchronisation of different
times, but of an interweaving of an ensemble of temporalities in non-hierarchical relations of
translation in a regulated society, Gramscis version of the notion of a non-state state.37
Far from comprehending philosophy as the spiritualist expression of an essence that is
also legible in other practices, Gramsci defines it in similarly political terms, as an instance of
organisation or transformation.38 Unlike Croces qualitative distinction between philosophy and
ideology, and unlike the early Althussers assertion of the incommensurability of the scientific,
proper to Marxist philosophy, and the ideological, the organic expression of its time, Gramsci
argues that the distinction is quantitative, rather than qualitative. In one of the richest passages
in the Prison Notebooks, he argues that philosophy is the conception of the world that represents the intellectual and moral life (catharsis of a determinate practical life) of an entire social
group conceived in movement and thus seen not only in its current and immediate interests,
but also in its future and mediated interests. On the other hand, Gramsci here defines ideology
as any particular conception of groups inside the class that propose to help in the resolution
of immediate and circumscribed problems.39 Neither of these formulations can be interpreted
as positing a direct expression of an unified, self-present essence, since both are mediated
by the organisation of interests of classes and class fractions. Ideology is not conceived, as
the early and arguably even later Althusser would have it, as organic to its age, as emerging
from it in a direct and immediate fashion.40 Rather, it represents a particular partial aspect
of it (instrumental resolution of immediate problems of a class, as they are understood by
a limited strata of its leadership). In this perspective, philosophy is an even more artificial
moment of any particular present in comparison to ideology, because it is only achieved
through complex processes of mediation of both present and absent elements, ranging from
historical assessment, to analysis of the concrete conjuncture, to prevision of the future in the
form of a project and programme.41 Rather than anchored in the strictly a-historical realm of the
scientific, philosophy in this Gramscian perspective is distinguished from ideology insofar as it
is fully elaborated in the dialectical relations of organisation (political society) and association
(civil society) in the integral State. One of the roles of all philosophy hitherto has been not
only to ratify and reflect such a violently unified present, functioning as its ideal complement,
but also actively to organise it, albeit at a high level of institutional and conceptual mediation,

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as a conception of the world. As Gramsci formulated in an early phase of his carceral project,
what is politics for the productive class becomes rationality for the intellectual class;42 or
to use the remarkably Gramscian words of the later Althusser, philosophy functions as a form
of unification of the dominant ideology.43

Hidden and minor structures

Was Althussers misguided critique therefore merely a case of overweening pride going before
a fall, of polemical excess? Althusser himself admitted to being unsure of the fairness of his
critique (albeit only privately, in a letter to his Italian translator Franca Madonia, from the period
when he was completing Reading Capital), suggesting a fundamental theoretical uncertainty
hiding behind the rhetorical bravura of his adopted public persona.44 Was it thus merely a case
of bad philology, perhaps necessarily but no less culpably in a period before the publication
of Gerratanas critical edition of the Prison Notebooks (1975)? Or were there reasons internal
to the early Althussers own project, even and especially in its polemical excess, that led him
to focus on the theme of contemporaneity and to assert that Gramscis philosophy of praxis
was haunted by essentialist reductions? In this case, it would almost be as if one Althusser
was acting out a (self-)critique of another Althusser, one Althusser projecting the positions of
another Althusser onto his most significant Marxist other: an esoteric against an exoteric
Althusser, to adopt a Straussian distinction; the Althusser who had entered the party as a
militant intent upon reforming it, versus the public persona of the theoretician he adopted
to pursue his Spinozist strategy of occupying the partys theoretical strongholds from within
in order to destroy them;45 For Marx versus Reading Capital, or even, within the former work,
the author of Contradiction and Overdetermination versus On the Materialist Dialectic;
the time of political intervention, versus the duration of the mode of production; in short, as
Balibar has suggested (and problematised), Althusser the practitioner of an intervention into
the (philosophical, political) conjuncture versus Althusser the Theorist of structure.46 In other
words, would the early Althussers critique of Gramsci amount to a case of a bad conscience
expunged through transference?
Such an explanation would be in accord with an influential tendency in recent Althusser
scholarship, which emphasises the constitutive tensions, if not contradictions, of the original
Althusserian synthesis. According to this perspective, one of the consequences of the early
Althussers and colleagues flirtation with structuralist terminology had been the subordination of conjuncture to structure, or the transformation of the open terrain of class struggle
into a stable, self-affirming system. Structure, following this reading, would be understood as
an essential section in which all of the elements of the whole are immediately present. In
its turn, overdetermination would then become the mere influence of all elements upon each
other, or in the terms Gramsci adopted from Gentilian terminology to describe Croces system,
a mere constellation of distinctions, producing the pluralism Althusser elsewhere explicitly
repudiated.47 Structure would thus signify the closing in upon and within itself of a selfreferential articulation of elements, posited in a synchronic contemporaneity. It would become
unable to accommodate the political moment that is, the conjuncture as the distinctive
dimension in which a given empty time of the state is ruptured by the epoch-making intervention of the popular classes which alone could open it. In other words, conjuncture, a

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central concept of Althussers early project, threatened to turn into a minor structure or, in the
terms Gramsci expropriated from Croce and turned against the Neapolitan philosopher himself,
a hidden-structure God.48
These risks remained ambivalent in the early work of Althusser and his colleagues,
constituted as it was by a tension between the (at least) two Althussers, between the two
tendencies or temporalities that had crystallised in the Althusserian Moment.49 Arguably, it was
only in later self-styled Althusserianisms and the stereotypes fashioned by their critics that the
most damaging (and metaphysical) of their consequences were realised, in a caricature of the
much richer conception of the social whole that lay behind Althussers admittedly potentially
misleading theoreticist rhetoric.50 Nevertheless, a series of critical remarks and caveats in
For Marx and Reading Capital show that Althusser was well aware of these temptations and
attempted to work against them, without for all of that being able to eliminate them entirely.

From the class struggle in theory to a

new practice of philosophy
It was only with Althussers self-critiques of the late 1960s and early 1970s that a potential
alternative to this theoreticist deviation began to take concrete shape. According to some
commentators, in the course of these self-critiques, Althusser progressively destroyed the
theses he had constructed,51 eventually dismantling the conceptual scaffolding on which
his earlier project had been built. In particular, Marxist philosophy is no longer conceived in
Althussers later texts as the guardian of scientificity, at a remove from politics itself; on the
contrary, it is now characterised in directly political terms, as class struggle in the field of
theory. Significantly, however, while developing this self-critique, Althusser does not explicitly
revisit or retract the critique of Gramsci in which those theoreticist positions had first been
worked out; rather, revealingly, he largely implicitly shifts his objections from the directly philosophical (historicism) to the political terrain (the theory of the state presented as Gramscian
by Italian Eurocommunists in this period in particular).
Althussers political or even politicist orientation intensified throughout the 1970s; by the
time of Marx in his limits in 1978, and arguably even more so in his attempted systematisation
in the 1980s of earlier meditations on a materialism of the rain, the swerve, the encounter,
the take [prise],52 it crystallised into what is arguably an entirely new project. Those elements
that remained, such as the negation of all forms of teleology, the attempt to destabilise
the traditional conception of the relationship of contingency and necessity, or the central
concept of overdetermination, have led one significant contemporary reading to stress the
substantive continuities in Althussers development.53 This interpretation has reacted against
an earlier interpretation that arose immediately following the posthumous publication of the
writings of Althussers solitude, which suggested that aleatory materialism (only one of the
late Althussers designations for his thought, and perhaps the least accurate)54 represented
a Kehre in Althussers thinking.55 This potentially productive perspective, albeit partisan and
philologically questionable, was then soon banalised in the assertion that it perhaps even
constitutes a departure from the Marxist tradition tout court.56 Insofar as the more recent
readings emphasis upon the continuities with Althussers earlier project allow us to read these

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late writings as resources for the renewal of the Marxist tradition rather than its abandonment,
it constitutes a welcome corrective.
Nevertheless, the general direction of the most sophisticated contemporary Althusser
scholarship can have the unintended consequence of downplaying the significant differences
between the later and the earlier writings that are found alongside and sometimes, precisely
within such continuities. This is to say that it is not merely a question of two Althussers, or
an early versus late Althusser, to adopt the common caricature of the terms of his influential
reading of Marx. Rather, it is much more a case of the emptiness of a distance taken within
Althussers thought itself,57 of his ongoing break with and return to himself, within and across
the different moments of his projects enunciation. This distance is intensified rather than
reduced in the final phases of his thought, without finding any stable or definitive resolution.
It gives rise to an internal tension between the substantive and formal dimensions of his
project. While the former open up a new dynamic that potentially goes beyond the determining perspectives of Althussers earlier work, the latter remain tied to them, in a moment of
negative critique, which ultimately threatens to overpower his new substantive orientation.
Substantively, the materialism of the encounter consolidates lines of research that, at least
in potential, overcome the theoreticist limitations of the approach of the early 1960s and
even, arguably, its residues in the works of the late 1960s and early 1970s. When Althusser
declares in The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter that all reality,
all necessity, all Meaning and all reason emerge from the lasting encounter, or the accomplished fact in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason,
Meaning, Necessity and End, he has definitively abandoned any claim either to a scientificity
or to a philosophy that is not organic to its time.58 Indeed, Althusser goes so far as to argue
that the thesis that there exist only cases, i.e. singular individuals wholly distinct from one
another, is the basic thesis of nominalism, and, following this, that nominalism is not merely
the antechamber of materialism, but materialism itself.59 The distance taken from the earlier
attempt rigorously to distinguish between the real object and the object of knowledge
could not be greater; now, Althusser claims that knowledge can only be produced by working
on the real object itself, which is redefined as the encounter, constituted in its contingency
and fragility. The real object is here grasped as a conjuncture of conjunctures, or an unstable
constellation of encounters that continually threaten to give way to other encounters, decomposing themselves, as it were, from within. The encounter has always-already achieved its
constitutive incompletion, conceived as a process in continual renewal, rather than a fixed
state. The encounter may not take place, Althusser notes, or it may no longer take place.60
The Meaning and reason that arise from it and which exist only within it thus also may not
take hold, or may no longer take hold. They are entirely dependent upon the articulation of
the encounter or conjuncture they attempt to grasp in thought, determined and defined by no
structure that precedes or goes beyond them. This is the present that, for the late Althusser,
constitutes the absolute horizon of all knowing.61
Can we therefore say that in these final texts, conjuncture has finally dispensed with its
metaphysical corruption in the concept of structure that haunted the project of For Marx
and Reading Capital? Certainly, Althusser now strives to find a mode of thought adequate
to thinking the specificity of each conjunctural encounter on its own terms, rather than
subsuming them as variations on an enduring structural theme. Implicitly dispensing with his
previous qualitative distinctions between ideology, science and philosophy and thinking their

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dialectical implication, he now posits thought as a constitutive and active element of each
such conjuncture, a theoretical moment internal to and determined by it. Althusser would here
appear to be very close to Gramscis equation of history-politics-philosophy, as the various
attributes, in a Spinozist sense, according to which a constitutively non-contemporaneous
present can be immanently comprehended, in relations of continual reciprocal translation. It
may thus seem that the late Althusser finally returned to the troubling intuition that had originally prompted him to set out on his long adventure, or detour, advancing masked through the
strongholds of a degenerating Diamat and its derivatives, which he had acted out in negative
and polemical terms in Reading Capitals critique of Gramsci. That is, at least one dimension
of the materialism of the encounter would seem no longer to hide politics behind appeals
for the autonomy of philosophy; rather, here Althusser boldly steps forward and attempts to
politicise the notion of philosophy itself. No longer the guarantee of the veracity of revolutionary politics, philosophy is now identified as the property, in all senses of the term, of the
party of the state. For this perspective, a possible future proletarian non-state state will have
the need not of a philosophy, whether Marxist or not, but of a non-philosophy.62 Althussers
attempt to theorise the simultaneously theoretical and political preconditions for its emergence
undoubtedly constitutes one of the primary reasons that the publication of his late writings has
been greeted with such enthusiasm.63 In a period that has witnessed other powerful attempts
to inherit the dynamic of the original Althusserian paradigm in terms of a return of and perhaps
to philosophy itself, this dimension of the late Althussers project has seemed to offer the
outlines of a possible Marxist non-philosophy-to-come.64
At the same time, however, the late Althusser continues themes from his earlier work that
reduce the potentially explosive force of this new orientation. Formally, the philosophy of the
encounter seems to be distinguished by the way in which it treats the question of Marxist
philosophy. While this treatment is indeed different from central formulations in Althussers
early work, it is nevertheless also remarkably similar in certain decisive respects; in the
intertwining of elements of continuity and innovation, it is, pace Negri, ultimately the former
and not the latter that acquire hegemony.65 For Marx and Reading Capital had attempted to
explicate a philosophy of Marxism, the philosophy buried in Marxs work in a practical state.
In the period of his self-critiques, Althusser had argued that its successful excavation would
reveal not a (new) philosophy, but rather, a (new) practice of philosophy.66 The novelty of this
practice of philosophy was indicated precisely by its status as a properly Marxist philosophy, or
as a philosophy adequate to the immense theoretical revolution introduced by Marx into the
history of Western Philosophy. The philosophy of the encounter, on the other hand, strives to
be, at the most, not a philosophy of Marxism, but a (non-)philosophy for Marxism. The earlier
ambition of replacing Diamat as the true philosophy of Marxism is entirely abandoned, as
Althusser adopts what seem to be more modest activist postures. This non-philosophy will
merely attempt to account for what Marx thought in Capital, to be capable of comprehending
the conceptual discoveries that he put to work there.67
It is notable, however, that while the claims of Marxist philosophy have been downgraded,
those of philosophy itself have not. Arguably, philosophy remains the absolute horizon of
knowing for the late Althusser, even and especially in its negation. As Matheron not entirely
unfairly notes, the primacy of science in the 1960s, which is already a primacy of philosophy,
was succeeded by the absolute primacy of philosophy in the enigmatic texts of the 1980s.68
This primacy is maintained in a transformed and negative mode; as a non-philosophy for

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Marxism, the philosophy of the encounter takes its distance from all philosophy hitherto
and thereby leaves it intact. Philosophy, that is, remains the positive figure that defines this
non-philosophy, in its negative and structurally subaltern relation, as that which it is not,
or more precisely, that which it fails to become.69 This formulation of the philosophy of the
encounter remains, despite Althussers intentions, merely a (new) philosophy, assimilable to
a notion of philosophy as an instance of organisation and domination to the precise extent that
it does not formulate a coherent alternative to it. It is unable to produce that transformation
within the practice of philosophy that Althusser had indicated in 1976 as necessary in order to
break the persistent capacity of philosophical form to subordinate other social practices and
reshape them within itself,70 as a laboratory for the theoretical unification and foundation of
the dominant ideology.71
It was Gramsci who, foremost among all of Althussers interlocutors, had insisted that the
historical epoch opened by Marxs thought consisted, among other things, in the possibility
of practising philosophy in such a way that it would not only oppose the existing philosophy
of the party of the state, but would also lead to the transformation of the very nature of
philosophy: a new form of philosophy that would be both a laboratory for and an enactment of
the self-regulating society it aimed to bring into existence. As Gramsci argued, the originality
[of Marxs thought] lies not only in its transcending of previous philosophies but also and above
all in that it opens up a completely new road, renewing from head to toe the whole way of
conceiving philosophy itself.72 No longer practiced as a speculative command or an instance
of exterior ordering, Gramscis reformulation of Marxism as a philosophy of praxis aimed to
be immanent to the social and political relations in which it is elaborated, functioning as the
critical dimension of those practices and reconfiguring them as self-organisation from below.
Crucially, Gramscis proposal was not content to cede philosophy to the existing dominant
order, but struggled to redefine it as the theory of the elaboration of such forms of association
of the irreducibly diverse. In this sense, we might say that Louis Althussers first and most
enduring encounter remains waiting for his last reflections, both as their immanent critique and
as their necessary supplement.

Notes
1 Althusser 2006a, p. 168.
2 Althusser 2006a, p. 168.
3 See Morfino 2005 for an important reckoning of accounts with Althussers frequently elliptic
references in these texts.
4 Franois Matheron, seemingly eager to distance Althussers thought, in any of its phases, from
a Marxist matrix, has claimed that aside from Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao and occasionally
Gramsci, Marxist references in Althussers texts are fairly rare and most of the time
pretty imprecise (Matheron 2008, pp. 51819). If we leave aside the obvious performative
contradiction of Matherons qualification, his assertion still remains, in strictly philological terms,
incorrect. In particular, references to Gramsci, both implicit and explicit, abound throughout all
of Althussers text.
5 For a critical discussion of the relation between these concepts, see Bollinger and Koivisto 2001.
6 Althusser 2006a, p. 150.

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7 For Gramscis original formulation, see Q11, 27. References throughout this chapter are to the
critical edition of the Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana (Gramsci 1975). The
numbers that follow the letter Q [Quaderno] indicate the notebook, while numbers following
indicate a note. The English critical edition of The Prison Notebooks, edited by Joseph A.
Buttigieg, now comprises three volumes (Gramsci 1992; 1996; 2007), containing Notebooks
18; notes included in those volumes can also be located according to the notebook and
number of the note.
8 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 94.
9 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 132.
10 On the theme of the scientific foundations of (Marxist) philosophy for the Althusser of For
Marx and Reading Capital, see Goshgarian 2003, p. xii et sqq.
11 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 133.
12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 131.
13 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 132.
14 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 137.
15 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95.
16 Hegel 1991, p. 21.
17 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95.
18 Tosel 1995a and 1995b provide comprehensive overviews of the ensuing debate in France,
while Liguori 1996, particularly pp. 13252, reconstructs the Italian discussion. Lo Iacono 2012
provides an extensive overview of the reception of Althussers thought in Italian Marxism. For
recent reflections on both the historical and contemporary significance of Althussers critique
and concept of historical time, see Hindess 2007 and Macherey 2005.
19 See Buci-Glucksmann, 1980; Tosel 1995a, in particular pp. 5-26; Haug 2006.
20 I have previously attempted to analyse the philological errors of Althussers critique in Thomas
2004 and 2009, particularly pp. 243306.
21 See Q11, 46.
22 The theme of translatability in the Quaderni del carcere constitutes the focus of Boothman
2004. Ives 2004 examines the concept both in relation to other Marxist thinkers and significant
currents in twentieth century linguistics. Frosini 2011 emphasises the importance of the
concept of translatability for the elaboration of Gramscis philosophy of praxis; see in particular
pp. 313.
23 Now, I must confess that the best studies that I have been able to read on the thought of
Gramsci have not really dissipated the theoretical doubt to which I refer. Althusser 1971b,
pp. 3412.
24 On this theme, see Frosini 2003, in particular pp. 126-7. See also the interesting if partial
reading of Hegel developed in Coassin-Spiegel 1997, in particular pp. 3953. For a novel reading
of Hegel as a theorist of irreducible alterity, see Finelli 2004.
25 Q4, 11.
26 See, for example, Q8, 224.
27 Q10II, 41xvi.
28 Q8, 224. A particularly acute analysis of Gramscis critique of the a-historicity of Croces
categories can be found in Roth 1972, p. 68 et sqq.
29 Q11, 12.
30 Q11, 12. See the delicate analysis of this theme in Gerratana 1997.
31 Q11, 62.

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32 Q11, 24.
33 Gramsci explores the political implications of this insight of historical linguistics in his final
notebook (Q29), particularly with the elaboration of a critique of normative grammar a
veritable materialist grammatology avant la lettre.
34 In the East, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the West,
there was a proper relationship between State and civil society (Q7, 16).
35 Q8, 227, p. 1084.
36 Burgio 2003, pp. 1920.
37 On the notion of a (self-)regulated society in Gramsci, see Q6, 65; Q6, 88; Q7, 33. Morfino
2009 explores the Spinozian (and Machiavellian) dimensions of a notion of non-contemporaneity
as ensemble of durations.
38 See Q7, 35, where Gramsci argues that everything is politics, even philosophy or the
philosophies ... and the only philosophy is history in act. Rather than a politicism, this line of
reasoning gives rise to a theory of the primacy of politics as transformation.
39 Q10I, 10. These are not Gramscis only definitions of philosophy and ideology in the Prison
Notebooks, which include a range of critical, neutral and positive definitions of each term.
For alternative and more extensive treatments of Gramscis notions of ideology, see Jan
Rehmann 2008, particularly pp. 82101, and Liguori 2010. Gramscis discussion here of the
distinction between the two thought-forms is particularly significant, however, when considered
in relation to the early Althussers alternative attempt to theorise the passage from ideology
to philosophy: Althusser conceived the passage as an epistemological one, whereas Gramsci
insisted that this question of (the form of) knowledge was overdetermined by augmentation
or diminution of the capacity to act. In this sense, it is Gramsci and not Althusser who comes
closest to reproposing Spinozas critique of the limitations of Cartesian epistemology within the
Marxist Weltanschauung.
40 See the nomination of ideology in Marxism and Humanism as the very element and
atmosphere indispensable to [the] historical respiration and life of human societies. Althusser
1969a, p. 232. While Althusser later produced more sophisticated accounts of the notion of
ideology, the notion of the organic and necessary character of ideology arguably remains a
constant in his theoretical evolution. Cf. the discussion of ideology in Philosophy and Marxism
in Althusser 2006a.
41 On the political status of the concept of prevision for Gramsci, see Badaloni 1981.
42 Q1, 151.
43 Althusser 2006a, p. 259.
44 See the letter of 2 July 1965, in Althusser 1998b, pp. 6234.
45 See Althusser 1997a, pp. 1011.
46 See Balibar 1994. See also Ichida and Matheron 2005.
47 Althusser 1969a, pp. 2012.
48 Q10II, 41i. G.M. Goshgarian 2006 contains an important discussion of the relation of
conjuncture and structure in Althussers development, as does Lahtinen 2009.
49 Gregory Elliott 2006 provides a sophisticated delineation of the moment of Althusser, born
from the events of 1956 (Khrushchevs secret speech, crisis in the international Communist
movement) but crystallising in definite and irrevocable ways in the changed conjuncture of the
Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s the self non-contemporaneity of a distinctive intellectualpolitical project.
50 Montag 1998a and Fourtounis 2005 in particular have provided a more complex reading of the
Spinozist dimensions of the project of For Marx and Reading Capital. Read 2007 points to the
unfinished nature of the early Althusserian notion of theoretical practice and suggests how

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a deepening of its Spinozist dimensions, particularly in Machereys work with the concept of
philosophy as an operation, helps to overcome some of it contradictions.
51 Matheron 2008, p. 504.
52 Althusser 2006a, p. 167.
53 See for example Morfino 2005, Goshgarian 2006, Turchetto 2009 and Lahtinen 2009.
54 On Althussers different terminology, and relatively late emerge of aleatory materialism, see
Goshgarian 2006.
55 For the most influential formulation of the Kehre thesis, see Negri 1996a.
56 Representative of a more general post-Marxist interpretation is Vatter 2004. For a salutary
critique of the politically overdetermined errors of this reading, see Montag 2004.
57 Althusser 1971a, p. 62.
58 Althusser 2006a, p. 169.
59 Althusser 2006a, p. 265. See also Althusser 1997a, p. 11; and, for an exploration of the
consequences of this claim, Suchting 2004.
60 Althusser 2006a, p. 172. On the theme of the always incomplete and thus ongoing taking hold
of the encounter, see Morfino 2005 and Suchting 2004, particularly p. 30.
61 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 95.
62 Althusser 2006a, p. 259.
63 For representative examples, see McInerney 2005 and Read 2005.
64 Among a number of recent attempts to argue for Badious inheritance of significant dimensions
of Althussers project, see the different approaches and emphases of Feltham 2008, pp. 131
and Bosteels 2011, pp. 5076.
65 Negri 1996a, p. 58.
66 Althusser 1971a, p. 68.
67 Althusser 2006a, p. 2589.
68 Matheron 2008, p. 514. Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject in Badiou 2005a would
seem to concur with the notion of such a continuing priority of the philosophical in Althussers
development.
69 In a maudlin spirit, Althusser will even argue, in the mock interview Philosophy and Marxism,
that it would be possible simply to translate and update existing philosophies for the analysis of
our own historical period. See Althusser 2006a, p. 260. A similar implicit perspective is present
in Balibars proposition that there is no Marxist philosophy and there never will be (Balibar
1995, p. 1). Philosophy here comes to function as an absent centre around which Marxs
interventions are forced to revolve, in their excess or destitution extremes that are only
defined as such due to a prior ordering of discourses in which philosophy continues to occupy
a privileged position of reference, prior to and independent of attempts to transform the forms
of its constitution and practice.
70 Althusser 1990a, p. 245.
71 Althusser 1990a, p. 260.
72 Q11, 27.

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