http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/index.htm

Contradiction (Althusser)

A term for the articulation of a practice into the complex whole of
the social formation. Contradictions may be antagonistic or
non-antagonistic according to whether their state of overdetermination
is one of fusion or condensation, or one of displacement.

Overdetermination (Althusser)

Freud used this term to describe (among other things) the
representation of the dream-thoughts in images privileged by their
condensation of a number of thoughts in a single image
(condensation/Verdichtung), or by the transference of psychic energy
from a particularly potent thought to apparently trivial images
(displacement/Verschiebung-Verstellung). Althusser uses the same term
to describe the effects of the contradictions in each practice
constituting the social formation on the social formation as a whole,
and hence back on each practice and each contradiction, defining the
pattern of dominance and subordination, antagonism and non-antagonism
of the contradictions in the structure in dominance at any given
historical moment.

More precisely, the overdetermination of a contradiction is the
reflection in it of its conditions of existence within the complex
whole, that is, of the other contradictions in the complex whole, in
other words its uneven development.


Supersession (Althusser)

A Hegelian concept popular among Marxist-humanists, it denotes the
process of historical development by the destruction and retention at
a higher level of an old historically determined situation in a new
historically determined situation – e.g. socialism is the supersession
of capitalism, Marxism a supersession of Hegelianism. Althusser
asserts that it is an ideological concept, and he substitutes for it
that of the historical transition, or, in the development of a
science, by the epistemological break.

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