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Previous message: andrew kliman: "[OPE-L:4074] Dancing with Wolves"
I perused Althusser's autobiography in the library a while back. I didn't
come across the particular admissions Jerry mentioned. This doesn't mean they
aren't there, because I only skimmed and the book is not structured
"linearly."
I did read Althusser admit that he was asked by students to lead a seminar on
_Capital_ and, although he hadn't yet read it, he agreed. So, if this
statement is true (more on this below), he either first read the book right
before the seminar (course?), or the statement is indeed tantamount to an
admission that "he hadn't completely read _Capital_ at the time that he taught
a course on that subject." It is noteworthy that _Reading Capital_ is a
product of that seminar and appeared shortly thereafter. At the very
beginning of Part I, Althusser notes "The following papers were delivered in
the course of a seminar on _Capital_ ... early in 1965." _Lire le Capital_
appeared later in the *same* year!
The general sense of what Jerry reports is not new. I haven't heard the
claims stated in the particular manner he reports, but I've heard a lot about
and read in print that in his autobiography Althusser admitted that he "didn't
know his Marx" (_NY Times Book Review_) or never completed reading _Capital_.
Of course, the substance behind all this may be "only" what I myself read.
The embarrassing things he writes have sometimes been explained away with
references to his emotional state when he wrote the autobiography and to his
"humor." The first few paragrpahs of _Reading Capital_ are interesting, in
retrospect. Althusser begins his first lecture as follows: "Of course, we
have all read, and all do read _Capital_." Then he explains that he doesn't
mean by this the actual TEXT. But as concerns the text, "We have read bits of
it, the 'fragments' which the conjuncture had 'selected' for us. We have even
all, MORE OR LESS, read Volume One, from 'commodities' to the expropriation of
the expropriators [my emphasis]."
End of paragraph. The next begins: "But some day it is esssential to read
_Capital_ to the letter. To read the text itself, complete, all four
volumes, line by line, to return ten times to the FIRST CHAPTERS [?!] ... [my
emphasis]."
The next paragraph begins: "That is how we decided to read _Capital_. The
studies that emerged from this project are no more than the various individual
protocols of this reading: each having cut the particular oblique path that
suited him through the immense forest of this Book." Now, I don't know
French, but this might seem to indicate the taking of shortcuts, not a line by
line reading.
Jerry writes: "Can anyone remember any other instances of people teaching and
writing
about _Capital_ without having read it?" Not exactly. But it is obvious that
Samuelson didn't know much about it. Also I have heard a rumor concerning an
acknowledgement along these lines by a formerly self-described Marxist
professor at one of the centers of academic "Marxian economics" in the U.S.
But the more elemental issue is whether there *is* a whole that can be read.
Althusserianism says no on epistemological grounds, from the "epistemological
break," through the "symptomatic reading" and the recommendation that Part I
of Vol. I be skipped, to the claim that Notes on Wagner is the only fully
Marxist text of Marx, not "tainted" by Hegelianism. Jerry and now Duncan (in
his review of _Marx and Non-equilibrium Economics_) also call this into
question, but on empirical grounds, principally the early projection of
additional books and the fact that much of _Capital_ was not reworked for
publication. (Of course, they're not the first to do so.) I think this
question is a crucial one, since how one answers it colors how one reads the
text. For instance, if the self-contradictory or incomplete state of the work
(in a theoretical sense) can be taken for granted instead of having to be
demonstrated, then a reading can and must be selective, symptomatic,
reconstructive, etc. I hope to write some more about this in the near future,
since Duncan's review has (very appropriately in my view) highlighted this as
*the* crucial question concerning the interpretation of Marx's value theory,
or perhaps theorieS.
Andrew Kliman