The Method of Equality E-Book

Jacques Rancière

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 456

Beschreibung

The development of Rancière's philosophical work, from his formative years through the political and methodological break with Louis Althusser and the lessons of May 68, is documented here, as are the confrontations with other thinkers, the controversies and occasional misunderstandings. So too are the unity of his work and the distinctive style of his thinking, despite the frequent disconnect between politics and aesthetics and the subterranean movement between categories and works. Lastly one sees his view of our age, and of our age's many different and competing realities. What we gain in the end is a rich and multi-layered portrait of a life and a body of thought dedicated to the exercise of philosophy and to the emergence of possible new worlds.

Leseprobe

Copyright page

First published in French as La méthode de l'égalité, © Editions Bayard, 2012

This English edition © Polity Press, 2016

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8062-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8063-7 (pb)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rancière, Jacques, interviewee. | Jeanpierre, Laurent, interviewer. | Zabunyan, Dork, interviewer.

Title: The method of equality : interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan / Jacques Rancière.

Description: English edition. | Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Translated from: La méthode de l'égalité. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015030102| ISBN 9780745680620 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745680637 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Rancière, Jacques–Interviews. | Philosophers–France–Interviews. | Political science–Philosophy.

Classification: LCC B2430.R274 A5 2016 | DDC 194–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030102

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Foreword

Jacques Rancière is one of a generation of French philosophers who, in recent years, have been unstinting in giving interviews to people from all kinds of different fields. While this is noteworthy, it is no accident. As Rancière explains here, an interview is not to be confused with the research work it's always in danger of short-circuiting or over-simplifying, but it does nonetheless represent a non-negligible part of the ‘method of equality’ that provides the present work's title. It's a title chosen by the philosopher for a process he has tirelessly defended since the 1970s. The activity of thinking is no less effective in an interview than in a written work, and one of the characteristics of the method in question is to posit that ‘there is no proper place for thought. Thought is everywhere at work.’1 But why add another book-length interview to past interviews, some of which have already been brought together in book form?2

Two objectives guided our approach here. This long conversation, divided into four phases, is meant to provide an introduction to the thought of a present-day theorist who is abundantly read and commented on. The point was to spell out the origin, function and definition of certain concepts and catch phrases (the distribution of the sensible,3 dissensus, the ignorant schoolmaster, disagreement, the part of those who have no part ...) that are sometimes taken up by readers automatically and used without thinking. Beyond these now routine expressions, we asked Jacques Rancière to go into details on several issues in a bid to deepen or clarify certain elements of his thinking. That aim squared with our second goal, which was to restore the unity of Rancière's philosophical project, given that that project continues to be misread almost universally as being split into a so-called ‘political’ moment followed by a moment described as ‘aesthetic’. Ever since his masterwork, The Nights of Labour, came out in 1981, the whole of the French philosopher's œuvre has consisted, on the contrary, in contesting that opposition along with all a priori demarcations of fixed fields of competence, by working on regimes of interaction and circulation between different ways of seeing and thinking, different ways of coming together and doing battle. This also allows us to define a method of equality that is fleshed out in a reconfiguration of territory and capacity and in the shift in the meaning of words and things that follows from this. If Rancière's work is all of a piece in its perspective and its method, it has shown, and continues to show, different inflections, moments and reworkings, which are also dealt with in the pages that follow.

The first part of the book, ‘Geneses’, revisits the elaboration of Rancière's intellectual programme via the education he received, born as he was in 1940, as well as his early writing. The first known text that Rancière published under his name was a contribution to Reading Capital, edited by Louis Althusser and published in 1965. In 1974, the publication of Althusser's Lesson ratified a methodological and political break, obvious as early as 1969, with the Marxist philosopher of ‘the rue d'Ulm’ (the École normale supérieure). In 1980, under the supervision of Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Rancière defended his thesis, which was called La formation de la pensée ouvrière en France: le prolétaire et son double (The Formation of Working-Class Thought in France: The Proletarian and His Double). This was published the following year as The Nights of Labour. The problems orchestrating Rancière's thinking as a whole seem to have crystallized around that time. They also arose out of all he learned from the events of May 68 and the new diagnosis that ensued concerning the task of intellectuals and how far their knowledge and their discourse might extend.

The second part, ‘Lines’, tests the hypothesis that Rancière's œuvre is all of a piece by suggesting various ways of reading it that are internal to Rancière's research. It is not so much a matter of summing up or reiterating his thinking and its main categories, or of tracing its contours and compartments, as of seeking – as Rancière invites you to do in other forums – the transitions and various subterranean circuits. This sometimes happens by exposing the work to classical problems of philosophy. Particular attention has been paid to the philosophical utterance as such and this represents a way of raising a whole set of questions about Rancière's œuvre that Rancière has himself put to other producers of official discourses. More than a general philosophy, what we have tried to capture is a theoretical style.

The following phase of our interview, ‘Thresholds’, consists in comparing Rancière's work with that of other thinkers of the same period and subjecting it to some of the recurring objections it attracts, or, indeed, to new critical investigations. The possible connections or distinctions we could make between Rancière's œuvre and other significant bodies of work produced in his time are numerous and no doubt other researchers will work through these more systematically and precisely in future. For our part, we deliberately limited references to other authors, preferring to underscore, without attributing them, some of the controversies, misunderstandings or differences that have arisen. We locate ourselves here at the outer foothills of Rancière's conceptual mountain.

The last part of our interview, ‘Present Tenses’, aims to project Rancière's thought on to the current scene and the available possibilities. Various themes are dealt with, but the relationship the philosopher maintains with them is emphatically not one based on expertise or science, thanks to the method of equality. So the challenge is to isolate a way of viewing the times by posing a few unavoidable questions for contemporary liberation practices. This overview notes one thing in particular, which is the multiplicity of present tenses running through the current moment. As coherent and unified as it is, Rancière's intellectual programme continues to be endlessly renewed through the discordance between these various versions of the present.

The four moments of our interview describe one possible reading of this book. But nothing would be more in keeping with a theoretical approach that has stood from the outset for ‘rejecting hierarchical thinking’ than to work through them any way you like.

Laurent Jeanpierre

Dork Zabunyan

Notes

1

  This is a claim Rancière made in the closing lecture of the conference devoted to him at Cerisy in 2005 and which was entitled ‘The Method of Equality’ in the annals published subsequently. See

La Philosophie déplacée – Autour de Jacques Rancière

(Lyon: Horlieu, 2006), edited by Laurence Cornu and Patrice Vermeren, p. 519.

2

  Jacques Rancière,

Et tant pis pour les gens fatigués. Entretiens

(Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2009).

3

‘Le partage du sensible’

has been translated in a number of ways but is now usually translated as ‘the distribution of the sensible’, as ‘distribution’ manages to capture both senses of

partage

as a parcelling out or sharing and as a division.

Translator's note

.

Part OneGeneses

Childhood and Youth

Let's start with your formative years and the building blocks of your thinking, up to when The Nights of Labour was published in 1981. Tell us firstly what you remember of the period before you went to the École normale supérieure.1Whether we like it or not, for most of us in France the years of preparatory classes for the grandes écoles and exams often remain important elements in our intellectual trajectories. Maybe that means something to you too?

I got into the École normale sort of ‘automatically’, even if you had to sit for the exam and pass. When I was twelve, I wanted to be an archaeologist. I was told that, for that, you had to prepare for the École normale, you had to do Latin and Greek, so I started off in the Latin-Greek stream. I went off archaeology, but I forged ahead anyway. I was good at arts and I took the supposedly royal road. In the end, those years of preparation weren't especially traumatic for me apart from a few serious health problems, it was just a little strange as an experience. We had a fairly amazing number of bad teachers. I discovered for the first time that the pinnacle of the teaching hierarchy had nothing to do with any level of competence or ability to teach. I also discovered the strange law of exams and competitions, which is their ritualistic quality, both in terms of setting you up and then humiliating you. I remember this bigwig at the Sorbonne who cut me off at the first sentence to say, ‘Monsieur, this is a classic example of poor analysis,’ after which I got my certificate with second-class honours. But that's a part of my experience that only played a role much later on. Because, once I got into the École normale supérieure, I was able after all to quite easily slip into the character of a person who'd passed a very hard exam and so could speak in the name of knowledge, of science. You could say there was a certain contradiction between my experience as a student doing exams and competitions, confronted by all the mechanics of getting in and being humiliated, and then, later, my fairly unproblematic support for the Althusserian struggle of science against ideology.

Did you go to school in Paris?

Yes, I left Algiers at the age of two. I lived in Marseilles between 1942 and 1945. After that, I spent my whole childhood in Paris, more precisely at the Porte de Champerret, which played a certain role because it was the border between several worlds. Right at the Porte, there was a bit of the zone, the rough area, that hadn't been completely destroyed; and after that, on the left, there was Neuilly, the bourgeois town, and, on the right, Levallois, which was still a working-class town at the time. I went to school in Neuilly, but there weren't many children from Neuilly in the local lycée since the whole of the north-western suburbs went there, including suburbs that were still very working class. I lived my childhood in an atmosphere that was very IVth Republic. By that I mean in an immediate postwar atmosphere, with rationing and power cuts, blackouts and strikes (those days we went to school in a military truck) and in a social world that was still extremely mixed. There were communist councillors in Neuilly. At Pasteur, the local lycée of that posh suburb par excellence, people came from everywhere. And at soccer matches, on the Île de Puteaux, which was another kind of zone, you would go, from one week to the next, from the posh kids from Janson de Sailly to teams from the technical colleges. I lived in that world, which was both conflictual and mixed at the same time, though its memory has been crushed under the weight of the clichés about the Trente Glorieuses2 and the baby boom.

My experience was filtered through a vaguely progressive Catholic conscience. I was in the Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC), the Christian Youth Organization, and I first came to Marx because the school chaplain showed me a book he was enjoying reading, Calvez's book on Marx (La Pensée de Karl Marx, 1956). That means I first got interested in Marx through all the themes that Althusserism later brushed aside, notably the critique of alienation. I also discovered Marx through Sartre, since my first way into philosophy was Sartre via Sartre's novels and protest plays. I'd read him as a philosophical writer before my final year of high school. Those were the days when people still engaged in the great philosophical debates about existence, its absurdity, commitment, and so on – the heyday of Sartre and Camus, if you like. The first book of philosophy I ever read was Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. When I got to the philosophy class and I was subjected to courses on attention, perception, memory, etc., I was in complete despair. Luckily, the following year, in hypokhâgne3 at Henri IV, I had Etienne Borne's philosophy courses. That was a revelation for me, the discovery of the ‘great philosophers’ in a form that was at the same time very impassioned. Because of an essay I happened to have to do on the distinction between the body and the soul in Descartes, I threw myself into his Metaphysical Meditations and Objections and Replies. My philosophical culture, like my culture generally, has always been cobbled together in fits and starts; it's been local, localizable, sporadic, never encyclopedic, and very often developed either alongside official school courses, or based on specific projects I had to do for school but which I immediately took a lot further than was required.

You managed to reconcile those two things? After all, there is the entrance exam …

At first, I didn't understand how it worked. When we were in Henri IV, they made us think we were the best, that the rest were plodders, losers. Result: the exams were a bloodbath. When I got to Louis-le-Grand, where the teachers were very grey, where even the students mostly looked grey, I realized the problem was first and foremost to somehow manage to translate any random extract from Homer off-the-cuff. In the oral exam in Greek, there was a text you prepared and afterwards there was the killer question where you were given ten lines of Homer to translate – just like that. I understood that the great philosophical and literary production numbers were one thing, but that studying for the exam was a precise gymnastic exercise and you just had to do it. I did it, despite everything, and apparently I remember it, whereas all the people who now give fiery speeches about the republican education system and the great themes – being steeped in a humanist culture, learning to think, learning to be critical – have forgotten that, like me, they sat for their exams on the basis of a culture of lecture handouts (at the time the history syllabus meant lecture handouts) or index cards listing the meanings of all the Greek particles, and what was called at the time minor Latin and minor Greek, meaning daily drilling so as to be able to translate any text whatever off-the-cuff.

Before you penetrated the ‘fortress’ of the École normale, we should perhaps go back over your family background, which you glossed over so quickly. Was it a milieu in which people had already had careers in teaching at school or university?

No, my family had nothing to do with any university or academic milieu. My father had started studying German but gave it up for a career as a government official, but he was killed in France in 1940. I never knew him. And my mother was in the public service. My father had been in the public service, my uncle was in the public service, and my mother joined the public service when she had to go out and work. I didn't have an academic or university background at all.

Did you father die in combat?

Yes, in June 1940, just before the armistice. My mother never remarried. She had all the strength it took to raise three children on her own. I grew up in a very protective, close and loving environment. I didn't have a father, but I was never an unhappy child. The only time I felt miserable was when I started high school because, at home and at primary school, I'd lived in an essentially feminine world. The discovery of the masculine world was the main traumatism of my youth.

You mentioned Algiers. Well, before you went to the École normale, there was the Algerian War. Did that mean anything to you?

Let's say I had a split conscience when it came to Algeria. I lived surrounded by objects and documents from Algeria, books, postcards with coloured Algerian landscapes: Bougie Bay all in pink, Chréa all in blue, Timgad dun-coloured … I had a vision of Algeria as a kind of dreamland, as far as that went. Otherwise I lived through the Algerian War, after the war in Indochina, just as I was waking up to political life. But I didn't live through it as a native of Algeria. I lived through it as a young man of the times who read L'Express, with a mix of admiration for Mendès France and disgust for Guy Mollet. The Lycée Pasteur was pretty right-wing; I remember seeing extremely violent tracts for the defence of the Christian civilization of the West passed around in class. I wavered a bit, I have to say, but the kind of Catholic circles I hung out with were pretty progressive.

Later, when I was at the École normale, it was the days of the OAS4 and the big demonstrations against them. The year 1961–2 was vital from that point of view. One of the first demos following the violent attacks on North African immigrants started off from the École normale; there were a few dozen of us, a few hundred demonstrating in the boulevard Montparnasse the next day or the day after that. Before, I didn't belong to any political group. I was in various Catholic youth movements, but they weren't political even if there was a fairly left-wing sensibility. Once we were at the École, there was constant agitation, rallies. The people who organized the rallies were communists who would say the word and, after that, we'd either follow or not. So that was my experience and it wasn't linked to the fact that I was born in Algiers, except that when Algeria became independent I said to myself, why not go down there? I even put in a request to go to Algiers as a teacher, but that wasn't till 1965.

Education

By the time you got into the École normale supérieure, your dream of becoming an archaeologist was a thing of the past, but had you already decided on philosophy?

I hadn't decided. I started first year at the École normale supérieure without knowing whether I'd do literature or philosophy. I was enrolled in arts; I went to see Althusser, who didn't exactly wildly encourage me to do philosophy. So I hesitated for a long while and then, in my second year, I took the plunge, I had to make up my mind and I opted for philosophy. We went to the Sorbonne to enrol and to sit the exams. Otherwise we never set foot in there, with one exception: if you were doing arts, you went to the philology classes there, as that's something you can't make up and it takes up a lot of time if you want to do it without teachers. The first year, when I was still enrolled in arts, I took the courses for the grammar and philology degree, but otherwise we hardly ever went to the philosophy courses at the Sorbonne. There were no courses at the ENS either. Those were the days when there was no teaching profession. There were just the ‘crocs’,5 like Althusser, who was either there or not there and hardly ever gave classes, though he'd invite other people to give classes, seminars, but we weren't forced to go to them. I hardly followed any philosophy classes at the Sorbonne and very few at the ENS. I didn't do that much philosophy at school, except in my agrégation6 year, the year I did the teachers' exams.

That was also a time when figures who are sometimes at the outer limit of philosophy, like Bataille or Blanchot, shot to the fore. Did you follow the literary debates?

Absolutely not. I don't know when I first heard of the existence of Blanchot or Bataille, but I think I was already a qualified teacher by then. I'm exaggerating a bit, but that was completely outside my world. Once again, my horizon, at seventeen, was Sartre and maybe the people he talked about, the great novelists of the 1930s, like Faulkner and Dos Passos. He also talked about Blanchot and Bataille, to tell you the truth, but I must have skipped those chapters. Otherwise, my world was Rilke, since the first philosophy course I ever heard was Jean Wahl's course on Rilke. That was the Sorbonne open course, which I'd listen to on the radio when I got home from school. Otherwise, I knew there were things like the new novel; I read a few of them. I knew the Barthes of Mythologies. My culture, when I was twenty, was a modernist culture, which could possibly be called structuralist already, but let's just say that I saw myself more generally as being part of a culture we could describe as ‘avant-gardiste’ – even if it was only avant-gardiste for me, without necessarily being so historically. My references were the new novel, new-wave cinema, the concerts put on by the Domaine musical society, and abstract painting – to cut a long story short, the modernity of the 1950s and 1960s, excluding all the offshoots of surrealism which weren't part of my world at all.

In philosophy, did you see yourself as having any masters, such as Hippolyte, Canguilhem or Alquié? They were still alive then.

We knew Hippolyte as the school director at the ENS, but he'd stopped playing a role as a philosopher or master. There was Althusser, but he wasn't a teacher. He inspired us more with conversation or certain texts more than any actual lessons. There were the people Althusser invited in. I remember some of Serres's lectures that were pretty brilliant. I also remember Foucault, who came and announced a seminar but never came back to do it. So in those days I hardly followed any philosophy at all. In second year, I started on an essay on the young Marx. It seems to me that as soon as I chose to do philosophy, I decided to do the diplôme d'études supérieures7 on ‘critical thought’ in the young Marx. I'd gone to see Ricœur, who asked me if I wouldn't prefer to work on alienation or fetishism. I said no, I wanted to work on critical thought.

I didn't want to work on a philosophical theme; I wanted to work on a practice of thinking. I read a lot of the young Marx. I began my philosophical career by doing a talk on Marx's essay on the law on the theft of dead wood. That was in the winter of 1961–2. It was pretty funny because, just a bit before this, I'd gone to see Althusser and he'd said to me, ‘Listen, I can't guarantee you success in philosophy, but if you want to do it, do it.’ Then he launched his seminar on Marx, at the end of 1961 I think, and I gave the paper on the theft of dead wood and, at the end of the paper, Althusser came to see me to tell me I'd get the agrégation, no problem, I wouldn't have any trouble with philosophy. For two years I basically concentrated on that piece. At the same time, I did a degree in psychology, with social psychology, the psychology of the child, etc., which involved a certain amount of practical work. Since I wanted to work on issues to do with ideology and representation, I hit on the idea that it might be interesting to go in that direction. But it didn't help me at all.

I didn't do much history of philosophy; there was no reason to once you got your history of philosophy certificate at the Sorbonne, unless maybe you wanted to learn more about a particular philosopher if a course or seminar had excited you. I only began working – or working again – on the history of philosophy after the khâgne8 for the agrégation year. I remember the beginning of that year, when Canguilhem was president of the board of examiners. As a result, the class on the history of the sciences where there were usually only five or six people – Balibar, Macherey and two or three others – was full from then on. Everyone was there. Canguilhem said not to have any illusions, the die was cast, you either knew the history of philosophy or you didn't. I said to myself, ‘No, listen, you don't know the history of philosophy, but at the end of the year, you'll know all you need to know.’ I spent the year reading all of Kant and, at the end of the year, I was able to answer any even remotely thorny question on Kant.

Reading Capital

You were talking about the young Marx, your DESS project, but did people really already say ‘the young Marx’ at the time? Wasn't it an effect of Althusserian reconstruction – distinguishing between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ Marx?

Althusser's essay on the young Marx dates from 1961 and it was in response to an issue of an orthodox Marxist review on Marx that tried precisely to reappropriate the ‘young Marx’, who was then inspiring the theologians after having inspired the social democrats. So I don't know if people actually said ‘the young Marx’, but there was already a surge in interest in all the young Marx's essays, especially the Manuscripts of 1844. That was notably the case with the books that introduced me to Marx, books written by the Jesuits, Father Calvez and Father Bigo, who made the essays on alienation the very basis of Marxism. So the young Marx existed but it was Althusser who said, ‘No, that's not the real Marx.’ At the ENS we thought alienation was a joke; we laughed at Lefebvre, Morin or whoever, but without having read them. The world of the left-wing traditions of Marxism was totally unfamiliar to me, since they held sway in circles that were completely separate from ours.

So I began my DESS on the boundary between two worlds of thought, since, on the one hand, I was already more or less part of the enthusiastic uptake of the essays of the young Marx with all that was lyrical about essays like the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, which sort of corresponded to my idea of the time, to a philosophy that emerges from itself and becomes a way of life, a world. So I had even less reason to spend a lot of time studying the history of philosophy as it felt like the thinking I was involved in spelled the end of philosophy. I started working on the young Marx with that particular impetus. Meanwhile, that impetus was mitigated by Althusser and his critique of the ‘young Marx’. My masters thesis turned into an essay in which I tried to prove the existence of an ‘epistemological break’. The third part was on German Ideology and Ricœur told me it was truly sad: the first two parts sparkled and then this third part just reiterated Marx's ‘let's start with the facts; it is a fact that …’. He felt this descent into the world of facts was truly dismal.

In 1964–5, while Althusser's seminar dealt with reading Capital, you did an essay on the concept of a ‘critique’ in Marx. What made Althusser decide to publish that exchange? The other seminars weren't published, were they?

Yes, in 1964 there was the seminar project based on Capital. Althusser had said that Marx's philosophy was there in practical form in Capital, but still needed to be identified and put into theory. It was all a bit Hic Rhodus, hic salta – ‘Prove what you can do, here and now’. What we had to do was try and dig the philosophy from out of the guts of Capital. I didn't really have much to do with the core group that discussed the seminar and its role, etc. My job was to demonstrate this ‘epistemological break’. As a specialist in the young Marx, I was given the job of showing the difference between the young and the old. It was a strategic job, since if I hadn't got started on it, nothing would ever have happened. No one knew what philosophy we were going to be able to find in Capital that we could identify and extract. What I extracted wasn't necessarily what should have been extracted, but someone had to take the plunge, even if it was completely mad.

Summing up the Manuscripts of 1844 and showing why they weren't scientific was relatively easy, but showing how Capital changed everything was much more complicated. First of all you had to read Capital, which I'd never read. Like everyone else, I knew the first chapter of the first book, and that was all. I threw myself into it, did my first paper and then normally I should have done the next one a week later. I went to see Althusser to tell him I had another two books of Capital to read, that it wasn't possible to work out its philosophical rationality in such a short time. So I got a bit of an extension. But it was still a completely mad process for me in which I poured out what I discovered as I went along without getting any distance on it, except for bearing in mind the seminar on structuralism that had taken place two years previously, in 1962–3, when the whole thing took off with several papers on Lacan. In the years before that, all I'd done was a paper on The German Ideology for the structuralism seminar, but I'd never done anything on Lacan or on any of the great structuralists. Michel Tort was the first to talk about Lacan, followed swiftly by Jacques-Alain Miller. I was trapped into having to do a synthesis as fast as I could of what I was reading in Marx and what was already in the wind at the time, what was going on in our minds after the structuralism seminar. I spoke four times as there was no end to it.

At the time, there was absolutely no question of publishing; it was originally planned as a seminar, and then it became a series of public lectures, which meant certain individuals, like Miller, who wanted it to be a seminar, pulled out. At the end of the year, Robert Linhart told me he wanted to turn my essay into a manual for theory training since this was the time when the Ulm Circle was becoming very vocal and was involved in organizing training in theory for the militants in the UEC (Union des étudiants communistes).9 There was still no question of a book. I only found out quite late in the piece that it was going to be turned into a book. That was part of Althusser's politico-theoretical strategy, which I didn't have any kind of hand in.

Were the essays touched up or were they published as they were?

The essays were published as they were, or mine was anyway. Althusser didn't edit my essay for the original edition. Everyone handed in their essay and it was published just as it was. Mine was really a lecture and that wasn't a problem for a course in theory training whereby it would have been distributed to the militants as a handout. Afterwards, it turned into a book without people like me having any control over the process.

What was happening in 1968 when your essay was removed from the new edition of Reading Capital? Were you driven to react or did it happen behind your back?

Early in 1967, Althusser wrote to us saying there'd be a second edition, that it would have to be abridged but that at the same time we could take advantage of this to correct any errors in theory we might have made, rework the texts and so on. So I rewrote my essay, taking out the rather naive thoughts of the young structuralist discovering Capital. I made a lot of changes and I sent it off to Maspero and a few days later I received a letter saying that, in the end, for cost-cutting reasons, it had been decided that the second edition would be the same as the English edition, which had already come out and which only kept Althusser's and Balibar's essays. Voilà. Basically, it never was explained. They must have discussed it among themselves, but I was completely out of the loop. They must have felt that some of the essays weren't what was required theoretically and politically, and mine, which was a bit of a rallying cry for structuralism, was really a bit behind the times by then. They didn't say anything to me at the time. Althusser just told me that that's how it was; he'd decided there would be just the two essays. I didn't say anything. I sort of couldn't have cared less; I didn't say a word. I wasn't all that happy about it because, after all, I'd worked on it for two months and, what's more, I'd been coming out of a concussion, but in a way I was almost happy not to be associated with the whole thing any more. The real clash happened in 1973 when the decision was made to publish the complete set of essays again.

That was when you published that hostile article in Les Temps modernes …10

… which was the preface I'd written and they'd cut. I'd sent the text to Maspero and he'd obviously started working on it, since I got my manuscript back all formatted, and then one day this note arrives saying that, despite the initial agreement for the preface, there were new problems and that, consequently, the first edition was to be published as it was, without any changes. I don't know exactly now how it happened that I sent the text to Temps modernes. André Gorz accepted it and saw to it that it was published.

And the idea for Althusser's Lesson (1974) took shape then?

No. It took shape when Althusser's Réponse à John Lewis was published in 1973 because I told myself that the fact that an essay as hopeless as that could cause such a stir was symptomatic of something. I told myself that apparently everything was reverting to how it was before. There was an outward show of moving further left but basically things were not only just the same, they were actually going backwards – even to the point of negating what had happened, that is, the political effects of Althusserism. I decided I had to put my foot down and say my piece: say exactly what, from my point of view of course, its effects had been, what Althusser's so-called ‘conversion’ to politics in 1973 actually represented.

Speaking of the effect of Reading Capital, it was profoundly ambivalent. On the one hand, it had the effect of tidying things up, since all the somewhat dissident tendencies, all the interrogations going on all over the place, were suddenly stopped dead, as Althusser asserted that all of that was mere ideology, idle chatter, that what we needed was science. Said science had been put to work in the service of the communist orthodoxy. That said, the second thing was equally true: the autonomy of theory proclaimed by Althusser had sort of made Marxism available to everyone. Well, not to everyone, but at least to people who weren't part of the party machine. It had created something like a Marxist theory party – a party in the broadest sense, of course, not an organized party.

In actual fact, Althusserism was both completely dogmatic and ultimately in thrall to the classic idea of the workers' movement – the direction it was headed, the science behind it, etc. – and at the same time it had created an unidentified object, the theory of Marx, with all that that implied, including the move of wresting Marx from out of the clutches of the people who were his authorized agents, a way of extricating Marx from the legacy of the official Communist Parties and allowing us to draw all the logical conclusions from it. In 1968 there was this twin effect, starting with the critique of the movement as petit bourgeois, and then most Althusserians were marked by May 68, after all, a number of them permanently, others temporarily. Anyway, Althusserism had one unpredictable effect, which was to initiate a break with the whole system of allegiances Marxism was based on. You could do whatever you liked with Marxism. Althusser and his movement actually produced this rupture, which meant that other people could take up Marxism and work on it in a way that was different from what the traditional small groups did. All of a sudden, something like a Marxist authority was created and it eluded the party system, including all its appendages, the different varieties of Trotskyism or whatever …

Attitude to Communist Engagement

Since you brought it up earlier when you were talking about the Althusserian environment at the ENS, were you part of the Ulm Circle or of the UEC?

I joined the Ulm Circle in 1963, when it was being reorganized. The Algerian War was over and the old team that was so tough on party positions had gone – people like Jean-Pierre Osier, who's since become a specialist on Jewish and Hindu thought but was in those days still very solid on the dialectics of nature. After that there were people like Roger Establet; he was the most rousing in general meetings. Then the Ulm Circle fell into the hands of my generation and we didn't really know what to do with it. That was the moment we sort of got going, Miller, Milner, Linhart and I, and tried to make something of the Circle. That something was necessarily connected to the Althusserian enterprise – let's say it was a matter of fighting against the spontaneous ideology of the students, against Clarté, which was the organ of a new-look and somewhat rebellious student communism. Serge July published articles in it on Le Golf-Drouot, the nightclub, interpreting what he saw as the symptoms of a youthful ‘romanticism’ …

We really joined the UEC as a result of Althusser's essay on student problems,11 which I critiqued afterwards. Althusser defended the idea that we needed to set up training in theory, to combat ideologies that perverted thinking and the student struggle. I was fairly active in that – I was even the person who was sort of behind the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, including the title, since some people wanted to call it the Cahiers marxistes to flag the fact that it was anchored in theory; others, the Cahiers léninistes to underscore the fact that it was all to do with militant politics. I suggested Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, which was purely a compromise, only it then became an even stronger militant emblem than léniniste in the Maoist period. I wrote the article ‘On the pseudo-Marxist concept of alienation’ for the first number and, in number three, an article on the concept of relationships of production. I think that was my main contribution to the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, apart from my contribution to the actual dynamics of the thing. For me, it was supposed to just act as a sort of bulletin, but it began to attract people's interest. Students bought it. On top of that, the PCF (Partie communiste français) and its faithful followers in the UEC saw that it could be good for them because it attacked the leadership of the UEC, and of Clarté – what was called at the time the ‘Italian tendency’. A special issue of a communist magazine reprinted the essays that were in the first issue of the Cahiers marxistes-léninistes, seeing all that as a sign of a revival of Marxist thought, of thought that positioned itself in opposition to the eclecticism of the student leadership of the day. But it was nonetheless put together by a small group of people who belonged to a fairly closed circle with pretty strong personal ties, such as I had with Miller and Milner at a certain point, or else ties of camaraderie with people I'd gone through khâgne with then cohabited with at the ENS, like Balibar. They were, after all, people who lived at the ENS, who saw each other every day through militant or other activities. So it was all very in-school, even if there might have been a few antennae tuned to the outside world.

By then, wasn't it embarrassing to be so intimately linked to the fate of the Communist Party? Hadn't anti-Stalinism gained your ranks? Or other ranks at the ENS who might have attacked you on that basis by emphasizing that you were young intellectuals who belonged to the party?

You have to understand we couldn't have cared less about Stalin in the 1960s. We weren't looking to the USSR at all. The outlook then was both all the movements in what was known as the Third World, and it was Cuba, the idea of a sunny, smiling revolution. It was the whole boiling over of the Italian Communist Party; it was Frantz Fanon prefaced by Sartre, and then it was Althusser, the idea of Marxism as the one theory in step with all that was new: structuralism, Foucault, Lacan. We had the idea that a new world was getting going, that a new Marxism was being created and that it would be the theory of this new world that was just getting going. The USSR really wasn't something we could do anything about. Then China arrived and support for Maoism, but we were basically Marxists who had the idea that everything was there to be done, that it was up to us to recreate Marxism. There was the working-class tradition, the working-class world and the labour movement but otherwise, for us, Marxism as a theory didn't yet exist in France. We scarcely registered that the radical libertarian group Socialisme ou barbarie or the review Arguments existed. Trotskyism existed at the Sorbonne, not at the ENS. To cut to the chase, Maoism was an ideology for normaliens, and Trostkyism was an ideology for sorbonnards.

Anyway, being a communist student wasn't at all stigmatizing at the time. Quite the opposite, it was more a form of aristocracy. As for the party itself, I hardly had anything to do with it. At the end of my first year at school, the secretary of the PC decided I ought to pay for his stamps since he'd found out I was a communist. I paid for them, that was my one action, and then I told him I was going to the Fondation Thiers12 and didn't know what cell to go to. He told me about a neighbourhood cell and said they wouldn't ask me anything, wouldn't give me any trouble. In spite of everything, there was this idea that the PC was all about workers.

How was your first year teaching after the agrégation in philosophy? Did it bring back memories of your disappointing years in high school?

I taught for a year at the Lycée Carnot. That year was a catastrophe for me, I didn't know a lot about philosophy and I knew nothing about these young people, who lived in a completely different world from mine. They had interests, including cultural and theoretical interests, which were completely different. It was a world that had nothing to do with the one we'd sort of shut ourselves away in at the École normale. I turned up with my Althusserian certainty that I owned ‘science’, and I discovered that I really didn't know much at all. Consequently, I was forced to do the same hopeless courses that I'd sat through when I was young, since I didn't have time to come up with anything better. I realized at the same time that I had no real knowledge of the world I lived in. That experience was important to me later, during May 68. The people who did 68 were sort of the same people I'd dealt with when I was teaching at high school – people I basically didn't understand and who didn't understand what I was telling them either, even if some of them were happy because the rigour of Marxist theory appeals to some people, after all. That year I really felt that science as an emblem and a stance was one thing, but that the reality of knowledge was something else altogether.

May 68, Vincennes and the Gauche Prolétarienne

What did you do in 68?

Not a lot. In fact, the year before I'd had a serious accident, then a serious illness, and I was living on the fringes of society. I was half at the Fondation Thiers, which was a kind of oasis, and half in the country. I had no links with any militant group. When I saw what was happening at the beginning of May 68, I didn't really know what was going on, apart from the fact that all the slogans were ‘ideological’ and not at all ‘scientific’. I was in the country not far from Paris; I had a sort of split consciousness. When I was coming back from the country, as you were emerging from the Saint-Cloud tunnel, you could see a big factory on the other side of the Seine with red flags on it and I was very happy to see those red flags. But in the beginning, that didn't mean that I was a player or a militant, I didn't build any barricades; I wasn't in the big demos. I was surprised by it all and I tried to hang on to what seemed to me to be really important, meaning, of course, what was happening in the factories. When the Sorbonne reopened, when we saw militant workers and all sorts of people at the Sorbonne, I told myself there was something positive about it, the encounter between students and workers. One of the rare things I did in 1968 was taking part in the discussions at the factory gates or a few meetings inside the factories. That movement ran completely counter to Marxism, both as we'd learned it and as we'd taught it. That's why I especially got involved in what seemed to me important, that is, meeting workers.

In the months and the two or three years that followed, you often returned to the event and the surprise factor. There is after all an interpretation and an analysis of the event that isn't just negative.

There were several phases. A negative interpretation to start with, because, for us, it was a petit-bourgeois revolt. Then I gave my positive support to that world where things were being decompartmentalized, especially with the student–worker connection and the possibility of free access to this working class that had till then been a matter for the party. And, in a third phase, Vincennes was set up … Even if the buildings didn't yet exist, the department of philosophy already existed. As early as 1968, there were meetings about the department's programme, and the issue was, in the parlance of the day, whether we were going to let ourselves be ‘recuperated’ by the bourgeoisie or not. That was the word we used at the time to designate the enemy. There were meetings that paved the way for setting up the philosophy department at which Foucault asked Balibar to do a syllabus, and that syllabus was very much oriented towards epistemology. I said it was out of the question, that that was reactionary. Balibar was the only one from the PC on the team. One of the courses he'd planned was called ‘The Philosophy of Work’. There were a few of us there and I leaped up and said, ‘What do you mean, “Philosophy of Work”?’ And he said, ‘Yes, yes, “Philosophy of Work”; I like it and I'm sticking to it.’ All of a sudden, I told myself that that was beyond the pale. I'd been behind in relation to the event, but the more time passed, the more I believed in 68. It's from that point that I started developing the thinking that led to the 1969 essay on the theory of ideology and then to Althusser's Lesson. I began to react in a way that was the complete opposite of what I'd been part of till then – the struggle of science against ideology, the theory of a rupture. It's based on this initial confrontation that I really started to question Althusserism, the famous essay on student problems and the whole trajectory we'd been on before that. Anyway, I'd never been very closely involved with the Althusserian enterprise. For the seminar, I'd been recruited as a specialist in ‘rupture’, but I never took part in the meetings of the inner circle – the Spinoza Circle – or other things like that. Never. The last time I saw Althusser was in 1967.

In 1969, I was really in a militant Maoist milieu with no ties to the old Althusserians, except the ones who'd become Maoists. Of my generation or later, Miller and Milner become Maoists, Badiou too in his own way, since his original family wasn't the Communist Party but the PSU, the Parti socialiste unifié (Unified Socialist Party). There were sympathisers like François Regnault, but it was Judith Miller who was the great militant Maoist at Paris-VIII. Vincennes militancy was an echo of the great battle between the PCF, for whom Vincennes was a model university, its university, and, opposite them, the lefties who said, ‘Let's destroy the university’. I was dragged off to the Gauche prolétarienne13 by the students. At the start of the year, I had a mix of students from the PCF, since we were dealing with Marxist theory after all, and students from what was starting to be known as the Gauche prolétarienne. But for the Gauche prolétarienne the main thing was playing out elsewhere, inside the factories, while the university was seen as a ‘rear base’.