Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978–1987

Abstract

Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?' the title of which reveals the conflict which animated most of his intellectual and political career, the struggle to be both a Marxist and a philosopher.In the early years, in which Reading Capital and For Marx were published, Althusser saw his task as supplementing Marx's political and economic analyses with the philosophy he never had time to complete.As Althusser writes, summarizing this position: 'The biggest gap in Marxism, the work of Marx and even Lenin included, was philosophy' (p.210).In the latter years Althusser began to wonder if the exigencies of philosophy and Marxism were compatible at all, or if philosophy, which always aspires to universality, to a system, and Marxism, which is based on the analysis of a concrete historical situation, were opposed.This is another way of saying that in these later years Althusser occupied himself with the specific problem of 'materialist philosophy,' a philosophy that is oriented not on the primacy of thought or the concept, but on the primacy of material conditions over thought, and thus the irreducible gap that separates thought from reality.The problem of materialist philosophy constitutes a central theme running through the various writings collected in the Philosophy of the Encounter, which includes the manuscripts posthumously published in the two volumes of E ´crits Philosophiques et Politiques 'Marx in his Limits' and 'The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter', as well as the interviews and letters to Fernanda Navarro previously published (in French) as Sur la philosophie.In 'Marx in his Limits' Althusser returns to the texts of Marx under somewhat different conditions than those under which he wrote the texts that made his reputation, a decade earlier.Whereas his early writings were situated against the backdrop of the critique of Stalinist dogmatism and the rupture between China and the Soviet Union, tremors within the communist movement, at this point in the late 1970s the full-blown 'crisis of Marxism' had become unavoidable (p.10).These different conditions lead to different conclusions.It is no longer enough to defend the 'true' or mature Marx against the deviation of interpretations or the limitations of his earliest works, the