The problematic Althusser

pp. 121-149

in: Robert Albritton, Dialectics and deconstruction in political economy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

There has been a remarkable resurgence of interest in Althusser's work in recent years with the publication of a spate of books and articles by and about him. Most of the writing about Althusser treats his work as interesting for its historical influence on the development of poststructuralism and other schools of thought. Others extract certain concepts from the corpus of his work, for example "overdetermination", and use them as a basis for postmodern Marxism.¹ Lehmann (1993) and Resch (1992) go the furthest in resurrecting Althusserian social science in opposition to poststructuralism, with Lehmann advocating a "critical structuralism" and Resch a Bhaskarian critical realist interpretation. I intend neither to praise nor to bury Althusser. Instead I intend to engage with some of his perspectives in order to move beyond them without falling into the modish antiscience stance of postmodernism.