By Rafael Khachaturian
Dissent - March 11, 2014
In a recent review of Louis Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Anne Boyer misrepresents
key aspects of his thought. At the center of her argument is the claim
that “Althusserianism has been a Marxism for those who prefer their
class struggle as Philosophy.” In this she is admittedly repeating the
earlier critiques of figures like E.P. Thompson and Jacques Rancière.
But whereas those writers at least made a concerted effort to critique
Althusser from within (Rancière is one of his best known former
students), Boyer’s excessively unsympathetic takedown relies mostly on
rehashed ad hominem attacks that only tangentially touch the book.
Reading the review, one is led to believe that Althusser embodied the
very same ideology that he critiqued—“a pure dream fabricated by
nothing,” a Master who only appeared to be one to interpellated
subjects. How and why this fraud influenced an entire generation of
French intellectuals is inconceivable for Boyer, unless we accept that
he appealed to their basically anti-political stance, which—in her
account—was swept away by the revolutionary tide of 1968.
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