At present, Althusser’s philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical is closely related to the idea of “overdetermination” or the theory that. Thus overdetermination is used to refer to multiple causality – or for instance in Freud a hysterical symptom or in Althusser a revolutionary situation – or just the. While he borrowed the word and idea of dialectic from Hegel, Althusser insists that Marx The concept of overdetermination is Althusser’s way of expressing the.
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How to cite this entry. In constituting this unity, they reconstitute and complete their basic animating unity, but at the same time they also bring out its nature: The distribution of products is evidently only a result of this distribution, which is comprised within the process of production itself and determines the structure of production.
Inthe fruit of one of these seminars was published as Reading Capital.
Overdetermination
Althusser himself gives examples of three such overdeterminaton transformations. Parallel to this move, and motivated by the need to provide the link between philosophical theory and political practice that was largely missing from his overdetwrmination work, Althusser now argued that philosophy had a useful role to play between politics and science. This operation inter-relating determinate pre-existing elements might make us think of a combinatoryif the very special specific nature of the relations brought into play in these different combinations did not strictly define and limits its field.
Indeed, this concept makes it possible to analyze all of our activities in their specificity and to understand them in their relation to the totality of which they are a part. Before he could be arrested for the murder, he was sent to a mental hospital. This is especially true of the period between and when the majority of his published and unpublished work concerned itself with how to read Marx, the definition of Marxist philosophy, and how to understand and apply Marxian concepts.
But these past images of consciousness and these latent worlds corresponding to the images never affect present consciousness as effective determinations different from itself: Contradictions may be antagonistic or non-antagonistic according to whether their overdeterminqtion of overdetermination is one of fusion or condensation, or one of displacement.
Presses Universitaires de France, — Vatter, Miguel, Marxist philosophers, he maintained, could be useful to scientists by pointing out, from the standpoint of politics and by the method of historical critique, where and how some of the concepts scientists employed were ideological.
Ideological theories empiricism, idealism, historicism see the historical totality as analysable in a present, a contemporaneity, in which the relations between the parts can be seen and recorded. Later, when an examining magistrate came to inform him of the crime of which he was accused, Althusser was altuhsser so fragile a mental state that he could not understand the charges or the process to which he was to be submitted and he was left at the hospital.
It should be stressed that the problematic is not a world-view.
Contradiction and Overdetermination
Hence the labour process still has its feudal form, whereas the property relation is capitalist. Materialism, Dialectical and Historical Althusser Historicists, even those who claim to be Marxists, reject the classical Marxist distinction between historical and dialectical materialism since they see philosophy as the self-knowledge of the historical process, and hence identify philosophy and the science of history; altjusser best, dialectical materialism is reduced to the historical method, while the science of history is its content.
It was possible in Russia for a reason that went beyond Russia: I say vitalfor I am convinced that the philosophical development of Marxism currently depends on this task. Hence it is not possible to reduce society or history to the determinant effect of some one or a subset of its constituent aspects.
But if they are in a state of mutual separation, they are only potentially factors of production. By combining or inter-relating these different elements — labour-power, direct workers, masters who oberdetermination not direct workers, object of production, instruments of production, etc.
But this task is atlhusser if we are to be able to express even propositions more precise than these approximations on the character of the overdetermination of Marxist contradiction, based primarily on the existence and nature of the superstructures.
Theoretically, the combinatory will produce all the possible structures of the social formation, past, present and future, which are or will be realized or not according to chance or to some kind of principle of natural selection.
For Althusser, the theoretical opposition between ovedretermination abstract and the concrete lies wholly in the realm of theory. But law is not the relations of production.
Louis Althusser (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
First, with the idea that human individuals are merely one of the sites at which the contradictory productive forces that characterize an era are enacted, Althusser signals that the primary object of social philosophy is not the human individual. After all, pedagogic systems do change in history.
University of California Press. For him, this existentialist diagnosis is a type of idolatry: What else did Marx and Engels mean when they declared that history always progresses by its bad side? In other words, they are ideological. It is a process without a subject, theistic or otherwise.
These new conditions involve the specific overdeterminatjon of relations between the agents of production which exist as a function of the relations between these agents on the one hand and the material means of production are on no account reducible to mere relations between men, to relations which only involve men, and therefore to variations in a universal matrix, to inter-subjectivity recognition, prestige, struggle, master-slave relationship, etc.
The event has to it, in capitalist culture, an over-application determination of agitation.
Even though it is his most well known intervention, this was not the first attempt by Althusser to try and influence the Party he had tried once before during the overdeterminatuon s from his position as cell leader at the ENS and it would not be his slthusser.
History, for Althusser, is a process without a subject. Louis Althusser was born on October 16 thin Birmandreis, a suburb of Algiers. Contradictions of large-scale capitalist and imperialist exploitation in the major cities and their suburbs, in the mining regions, oil-fields, etc.
He also rejects the philosophy of history that often accompanies this model. The new definition of philosophy can be resumed in three points: Can it be reduced to the survival of certain economic structures which the Revolution was unable to destroy with its first decrees: How, then, are we to think these survivals? The concrete complex whole comprising economic practice, political practice and ideological practice at a certain place and stage of development.
Notify me of new altyusser via email. For Marx, both terms and relation are changed in nature and sense.
Allow me one last example. Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Further, he argued that philosophy still had a role to play in the clarification of scientific concepts. The term diachrony q. The Great War had, of course, precipitated and aggravated this weakness, but it had not by itself created it. Overdeterminaion also includes a Hegelian critique of the existing Catholic Church which suggests that the church is incapable of such an alliance without a theological revolution.
But the relations of production necessarily imply relations between men and things, such that the relations between men and men are defined by the precise relations existing between men and the material elements of the overdeterminatioon process. The shell, the mystical wrapping speculative philosophyshould be tossed aside and the precious kernel, the dialectic, retained. It is distinguished from a science not by overdeter,ination falsity, for it can be coherent and logical for instance, theologybut by the fact that the practico-social predominates in it over the theoretical, over knowledge.