Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Keywords

Marxism, Louis Althusser, Dialectics

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis addresses the limits of Louis Althusser's thought. Althusser was indispensable in raising Marxist politics to the level of philosophical rigor and clarity. But while he returned materialism to its rational core, he thought structural change only as a mode or affect of necessity. What remains to be thought is the disruption of this reproduction of a structure, the contingent act which emerges, unprecedented, to determine the life of the masses anew. This thesis attempts to supplement Althusser's registration of structural causality and ideology with a concept of emancipation. The first chapter grapples with Althusser's theory of ideology and the possibility of a subject that is produced as a byproduct of state-based ideology but is irreducible to it. The second chapter analyzes Althusser's concept of structural causality, on the basis of which the result of contingent struggles is retroactively posited as an a priori. This temporal loop provides the basic frame for a "determinate negation," or a negation which substitutes a new term for an old one, of surplus-value/capital. While, I claim, capital produces a collective subject predicated on the subsistence of its biological life�and hence determined in its desire by the relation of labor-power to its wage�this predication is established through a transfiguration of the contingency of struggle into the appearance of necessity. This conversion of contingency into necessity allows the dominating form of necessity, which I also call the law or form of recognition, to be itself based in contingency and therefore subject to negation through struggle. Communist activity would demand the positing of a different presupposition for the subject, a new form of necessity for the collective body of subjects, namely: the non-appearance or effacement of its being, of what it is "in-itself" as an active substance. So "subject is its biological life," as a presupposition for desire, would be deprived of its content to look like: "subject is in excess of what can be said or mediated by thought." The third chapter stages an encounter between Alain Badiou and Kant in order to produce a working theory of the revolutionary subject, as a group formed in reference to the unnamable "X" retroactively posited by the operation of ideology as having preceded it.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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