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On Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:35:02 +0000 Lenin's Tomb <[email protected]> writes: > > On 13/11/2011 16:24, Tom Cod wrote: > > Say, isn't this the guy who bludgeoned his wife to death? > Helluva > > Sensitive New Age Guy of a Marxist Humanist. > > If you mean to say, "isn't this the guy who, under the influence of > > manic depression, strangled his wife", then indeed it is the very > same > individual. The laboured irony over Althusser being a sensitive New > Age > Marxist Humanist fails, however, on the simple ground that if there > is > one thing that Althusser never was, it is a humanist. > > ________________________________________________ Althusser was not a humanist in the peculiary French sense of that word. For Althusser being a humanist meant positing a philosophy of man which in turn posits a concept of human nature. Thus, according to Althusser, the young Marx, in his earlier writings, such as the 1844 Manuscripts, was most definately a humanist, who talked much about human nature and criticized capitalism for alienating man from his own nature. The mature Marx, as seen by Althusser, instead explained thing scientifically in terms of the conflicts between classes, the dialectic between the forces of production and the relations of production, etc. For Althusser, humanism is always a form of ideology. It has no legitimate role in a science of history. In fact in French thought, humanism versus antihumanism was a big controversy in the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the structuralists, not just Althusser, were antihumanists. Thus, Levi-Strauss was antihumanist, as was Althusser's famous student, Michel Foucault and the famous psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. For Marxist antihumanists like Althusser, antihumanism was seen as implicit in the writings of the mature Marx, while many of the non-Marxist antihumanists drew upon people like Heidegger or figures liks Saussure or Freud as their source. I think that Richard is a little bit off in saying that Althusser was never a humanist. He arguably was back in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he writing stuff on Marx and Hegel that were not too different in substance from what other humanist Marxists were writing at the time. Arguably, Althusser himself experienced a kind of epistemological rupture in his intellectual development, not unlike the one that he attributed to Marx. Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math ____________________________________________________________ Groupon™ Official Site 1 ridiculously huge coupon a day. Get 50-90% off your city's best! http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL3141/4ebffe97b4d5e14283a1st06vuc ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
