If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange misunderstanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty of an equally powerful and compromising passion: we were Spinozists. In our own way, of course, which was not Brunschvicg's! And by attributing to the author of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the Ethics a number of theses which he would surely never have acknowledged, though they did not actually contradict him. But to be a heretical Spinozist is almost orthodox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world has seen! In any case, with very few exceptions our blessed critics, imbued with conviction and swayed by fashion, never suspected any of this. They took the easy road: it was so simple to join the crowd and shout "structuralism"! Structuralism was all the rage, and you did not have to read about it in books to be able to talk about it. But you have to read Spinoza and know that he exists: that he still exists today. To recognize him, you must at least have heard of him.
    Let us clarify this business in a few words. After all, to lump structuralism and theoreticism together is hardly satisfactory or illuminating, because something in this combination is always "hidden": formalism, which happens to be essential to structuralism! On the other hand, to bring structuralism and Spinozism together may clarify certain points, and certain limits, as far as the theoreticist deviation is concerned.
    But then comes the important objection: why did we make reference to Spinoza, when all that was required was for us simply to be Marxists? Why this detour? Was it necessary, and what price did we have to pay for it? The fact is: we did make the detour, and we paid dearly. But that is not the question. The question is: what is the meaning of the question? What can it mean to say that we should simply be Marxists (in philosophy)? In fact I had found out (and I was not

 
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the only one, but the reasons which I gave at the time are still almost all relevant) just how hard it was in practice to be a Marxist in philosophy. Having for years banged our heads against a wall of enigmatic texts and wretched commentaries on them, we had to decide to step back and make a detour.
    In itself, nothing scandalous. It is not simply accidental, personal factors which are relevant here: we all begin from a given point of view, which we do not choose; and to recognize it and understand it we need to have moved on from this point, at the cost of so much effort. It is the work of philosophy itself which is at stake here: for it requires steps back and detours. What else did Marx do, throughout his endless research, but go back to Hegel in order to rid himself of Hegel and to find his own way, what else but rediscover Hegel in order to distinguish himself from Hegel and to define himself? Could this really have been a purely personal affair -- fascination, rejection, then a return to a youthful passion? Something was working in Marx which went beyond the individual level: the need for every philosophy to make a detour via other philosophies in order to define itself and grasp itself in terms of its difference: its division. In reality (and whatever its pretensions) no philosophy is given in the simple, absolute fact of its presence -- least of all Marxist philosophy (which in fact never made the claim). It only exists in so far as it "works out" its difference from other philosophies, from those which, by similarity or contrast, help it sense, perceive and grasp itself, so that it can take up its own positions. Lenin's attitude to Hegel is an example: working to separate out from the "debris" and useless "rubbish" those "elements" which might help in the effort to work out a differential definition. We are only now beginning to see a little more clearly into this necessary procedure.[21] How can it be denied that this procedure is indispensable to every philosophy, including Marxist philosophy itself? Marx, it has often been pointed out, was not content with making a single detour, via Hegel; he also constantly and explicitly, in his insistent use of

 
    21. Cf. D. Lecourt, Une Crise et son enjeu, Maspero, 1973.

 
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certain categories, measured himself against Aristotle, "that great thinker of the Forms". And how can it be denied that these detours, indispensable as they were, nevertheless had to be paid for, that we do not yet know (though we have our suspicions) what the theoretical cost really is, and that we can only find out by ourselves working on these detours ?
    This -- keeping the matter (of course) in proportion -- is how we approached Spinoza, courageously or imprudently (as you prefer). In our subjective history, and in the existing ideological and theoretical conjuncture, this detour became a necessity.
    Why?
    If a reason, one single and therefore fundamental reason must be given, here it is: we made a detour via Spinoza in order to improve our understanding of Marx's philosophy. To be precise: since Marx's materialism forced us to think out the meaning of the necessary detour via Hegel, we made the detour via Spinoza in order to clarify our understanding of Marx's detour via Hegel. A detour, therefore; but with regard to another detour. At stake was something enormously important: the better understanding of how and under what conditions a dialectic borrowed from the "most speculative" chapters of the Great Logic of Absolute Idealism (borrowed conditionally on an "inversion" and a "demystification", which also have to be understood) can be materialist and critical. Now this astonishing and enigmatic game of manoeuvres between idealism and materialism had already taken place once in history, in other forms (with which Hegel typically identified) two centuries earlier, under astonishing conditions: how could this philosophy of Spinoza have been materialist and critical -- a philosophy terrifying to its own time, which began "not with the spirit, not with the world, but with God", and never deviated from its path, whatever form or appearance of idealism and "dogmatism" it might take on? In Spinoza's anticipation of Hegel we tried to see, and thought that we had succeeded in finding out, under what conditions a philosophy might, in what it said or did not say, and in spite of its form -- or on the contrary, just because of its form, that is, because of the theoretical apparatus of its theses, in short because of

 
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its positions -- produce effects useful to materialism. Thus, some light would be thrown on what philosophy really is, therefore on what a philosophy is, and on materialism. And then other things would begin to become clear.
    I mentioned Hegel and the Great Logic, and not without reason. Hegel begins with Logic, "God before the creation of the world". But as Logic is alienated in Nature, which is alienated in the Spirit, which reaches its end in Logic, there is a circle which turns within itself, without end and without beginning. The first words of the beginning of the Logic tell us: Being is Nothingness. The posited beginning is negated: there is no beginning, therefore no origin. Spinoza for his part begins with God, but in order to deny Him as a Being (Subject) in the universality of His only infinite power (Deus = Natura ). Thus Spinoza, like Hegel, rejects every thesis of Origin, Transcendence or an Unknowable World, even disguised within the absolute interiority of the Essence. But with this difference (for the Spinozist negation is not the Hegelian negation), that within the void of the Hegelian Being there exists, through the negation of the negation, the contemplation of the dialectic of a Telos (Telos = Goal), a dialectic which reaches its Goals in history: those of the Spirit, subjective, objective and absolute, Absolute Presence in transparency. But Spinoza, because he "begins with God", never gets involved with any Goal, which, even when it "makes its way forward" in immanence, is still figure and thesis of transcendence. The detour via Spinoza thus allowed us to make out, by contrast, a radical quality lacking in Hegel. In the negation of the negation, in the Aufhebung ( = transcendence which conserves what it transcends), it allowed us to discover the Goal: the special form and site of the "mystification" of the Hegelian dialectic.
    Is it necessary to add that Spinoza refused to use the notion of the Goal, but explained it as a necessary and therefore well-founded illusion? In the Appendix to Book I of the Ethics, and in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, we find in fact what is undoubtedly the first theory of ideology ever thought out, with its three characteristics: (1) its imaginary "reality"; (2) its internal inversion ; (3) its "centre": the illusion of the subject. An abstract theory

 
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of ideology, it will be said. I agree: but try to find something better before Marx, who himself said little on the subject -- except in The German Ideology, where he said too much. And above all: it is not sufficient to spell out the letter of a theory, one must also see how it operates, that is, since it is always an apparatus of theses, what it refuses and what it accepts. Spinoza's "theory" rejected every illusion about ideology, and especially about the number one ideology of that time, religion, by identifying it as imaginary. But at the same time it refused to treat ideology as a simple error, or as naked ignorance, because it based the system of this imaginary phenomenon on the relation of men to the world "expressed" by the state of their bodies. This materialism of the imaginary opened the way to a surprising conception of the First Level of Knowledge: not at all, in fact, as a "piece of knowledge", but as the material world of men as they live it, that of their concrete and historical existence. Is this a false interpretation? In certain respects, perhaps, but it is possible to read Spinoza in such a way. In fact his categories do function, daringly, in this way in the history of the Jewish people, of its prophets, of its religion, and of its politics, where the primacy of politics over religion stands out clearly, in the first work which, after Machiavelli, offered a theory of history.
    But this theory of the imaginary went still further. By its radical criticism of the central category of imaginary illusion, the Subject, it reached into the very heart of bourgeois philosophy, which since the fourteenth century had been built on the foundation of the legal ideology of the Subject. Spinoza's resolute anti-Cartesianism consciously directs itself to this point, and the famous "critical" tradition made no mistake here. On this point too Spinoza anticipated Hegel, but he went further. For Hegel, who criticized all theses of subjectivity, nevertheless found a place for the Subject, not only in the form of the "becoming-Subject of Substance" (by which he "reproaches" Spinoza for "wrongly" taking things no further than Substance), but in the interiority of the Telos of the process without a subject, which by virtue of the negation of the negation, realizes the designs and destiny of the Idea. Thus Spinoza showed us the secret

 
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alliance between Subject and Goal which "mystifies" the Hegelian dialectic.
    I could go on. I will however deal with one last theme: that of the famous "verum index sui et falsi ". I said that it seemed to us to allow a recurrent conception of the "break". But it did not only have that meaning. In affirming that "what is true is the sign of itself and of what is false", Spinoza avoided any problematic which depended on a "criterion of truth ". If you claim to judge the truth of something by some "criterion", you face the problem of the criterion of this criterion -- since it also must be true -- and so on to infinity. Whether the criterion is external (relation of adequacy between mind and thing, in the Aristotelian tradition) or internal (Cartesian self-evidence), in either case the criterion can be rejected: for it only represents a form of Jurisdiction, a Judge to authenticate and guarantee the validity of what is True. And at the same time Spinoza avoids the temptation of talking about the Truth: as a good nominalist (nominalism, as Marx recognized, could then be the antechamber of materialism) Spinoza only talks about what is "true". In fact the idea of Truth and the idea of the Jurisdiction of a Criterion always go together, because the function of the criterion is to identify the Truth of what is true. Once he has set aside the (idealist) temptations of a theory of knowledge, Spinoza then says that "what is true" "identifies itself", not as a Presence but as a Product, in the double sense of the term "product" (result of the work of a process which "discovers " it), as it emerges in its own production. Now this position is not unrelated to the "criterion of practice", a major thesis of Marxist philosophy: for this Marxist "criterion" is not exterior but interior to practice, and since this practice is a process (Lenin insisted on this: practice is not an absolute "criterion" -- only the process is conclusive) the criterion is no form of Jurisdiction; items of knowledge [connaissances ] emerge in the process of their production.
    There again, by the contrast between them, Spinoza allows us to perceive Hegel's mistake. Hegel certainly did rule out any criterion of truth, by considering what is true as interior to its process, but he restored the credentials of the Truth as Telos within the process itself, since each

 
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moment is only ever the "truth of" the moment which precedes it. When, in a provocative formula which took up Lenin's words ("Marx's doctrine is all-powerful because it is true") directed against the dominant pragmatism and every (idealist) idea of Jurisdiction, I "defined" knowledge as "production " and affirmed the interiority of the forms of scientificity to "theoretical practice", I based myself on Spinoza: not in order to provide The answer, but to counter the dominant idealism and, via Spinoza, to open a road where materialism might, if it runs the risk, find something other than words.
    It is understandable that, behind these reasonings, we found other theses in Spinoza which supported them, and that we put these to use too, even at the cost of overdoing things.
    Spinoza helped us to see that the concepts Subject/Goal constitute the "mystifying side" of the Hegelian dialectic: but is it enough to get rid of them in order to introduce the materialist dialectic of Marxism, by a simple process of subtraction and inversion? That is not at all sure, because, freed of these fetters, the new dialectic can revolve endlessly in the void of idealism, unless it is rooted in new forms, unknown to Hegel, and which can confer on it the status of materialism.
    Now, what does Marx demonstrate in the Poverty of Philosophy, in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy and in Capital ? Precisely that the functioning of the materialist dialectic is dependent on the apparatus of a kind of Topography [Topique ]. I am alluding to the famous metaphor of the edifice, in which, in order to grasp the reality of a social formation, Marx instals an infrastructure (the economic "structure" or "base") and, above it, a superstructure. I am alluding to the theoretical problems posed by this apparatus: "the determination in the last instance (of the superstructure) by the economy (the infrastructure)", "the relative autonomy of (the elements of) the superstructure", their "action and reaction on the infrastructure", the difference and the unity between determination and domination, etc. And I am alluding to the decisive problem, within the infrastructure for example, of the

 
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unity of the relations of production and productive forces under the dominance of the relations of production, therefore the problem of the determination by relations on the one hand (you find the trace of this problem everywhere in Marx: cf. the concepts of structure/elements, of position, function, support, etc.) and on the other hand the problem of domination.
    Now, we are not talking here about a few formulae which might have slipped from Marx's pen by accident, but about a necessity, something which expresses a position essential to materialism and which must be taken seriously. For nowhere do you see Hegel thinking within the structure of a Topography. It is not that Hegel does not propose topographical distinctions: to take only one example, he does indeed talk about abstract right, subjective right (morality), and objective right (the family, civil society, the State), and talks about them as spheres. But Hegel only ever talks about spheres in order to describe them as "spheres within spheres", about circles in order to describe them as "circles within circles": he only advances topographical distinctions in order later to suspend them, to erase them and to transcend them (Aufhebung ), since "their truth" always, for each of them, lies beyond itself. We know the consequences of this idealist retreat: it is abstract right which comes first! Morality is "the truth of" law! The family, civil society and the State are "the truth of" morality! And, within this last sphere (Sittlichkeit ), civil society (let us say: Marx's infrastructure) is "the truth of" the family! And the State is "the truth of" civil society! The Aufhebung is at work here: Aufhebung of every Topography. But there is worse: the "spheres" which have been introduced are arranged in the order which allows the greatest possibility of this retreat. All the spheres of the Philosophy of Right are only figures of the law, the existence of Liberty. And, in order to "demonstrate" it, Hegel buries the economy between the family and the State, after abstract right and morality. This allows us to glimpse what might come of a dialectic abandoned to the absolute delirium of the negation of the negation: it is a dialectic which, "starting" from Being = Nothingness, itself produces, by the negation of the negation,

 
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all the figures in which it operates, of which it is the dialectic; it is a dialectic which produces its own "spheres" of existence; it is -- to put it bluntly -- a dialectic which produces its own material substance. A thesis which faithfully transposes and translates the fundamental thesis of bourgeois ideology: it is (the capitalist's) labour which has produced capital.
    It is now possible to understand the materialist stamp of the Marxist Topography. The fact that the metaphor of the structure is a metaphor matters little: in philosophy you can only think through metaphors. But through this metaphor we come up against theoretical problems which have nothing metaphorical about them. By the use of his Topography, Marx introduces real, distinct spheres, which only fit together through the mediation of the Aufhebung : "below" is the economic infrastructure, "above" the superstructure, with its different determinations. The Hegelian order is overthrown: the State is always "up above", law is no longer either primary or omnipresent, and the economy is no longer squeezed between the family and the State, its "truth". The position of the infrastructure designates an unavoidable reality: the determination in the last instance by the economic. Because of this, the relation between infrastructure and superstructure no longer has anything to do with the Hegelian relation: "the truth of . . .". The State is indeed always "up above", but not as "the truth of" the economy: in direct contradiction to a relation of "truth", it actually produces a relation of mystification, based in exploitation, which is made possible by force and by ideology.
    The conclusion is obvious: the position of the Marxist Topography protects the dialectic against the delirious idealist notion of producing its own material substance : it imposes on it, on the contrary, a forced recognition of the material conditions of its own efficacy. These conditions are related to the definition of the sites (the "spheres"), to their limits, to their mode of determination in the "totality" of a social formation. If it wants to grasp these realities, the materialist dialectic cannot rest satisfied with the residual forms of the Hegelian dialectic. It needs other forms, which cannot be found in the Hegelian dialectic. It is here that Spinoza

 
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served us as a (sometimes direct, sometimes very indirect) reference: in his effort to grasp a "non-eminent" (that is, non-transcendent) not simply transitive (á la Descartes) nor expressive (á la Leibniz) causality, which would account for the action of the Whole on its parts, and of the parts on the Whole -- an unbounded Whole, which is only the active relation between its parts: in this effort Spinoza served us, though indirectly, as a first and almost unique guide.
    A Marxist cannot of course make the detour via Spinoza without paying for it. For the adventure is perilous, and whatever you do, you cannot find in Spinoza what Hegel gave to Marx: contradiction. To take only one example, this "theory of ideology" and this interpretation of the "First Level of Knowledge" as a concrete and historical world of men living (in) the materiality of the imaginary led me directly to the conception (to which The German Ideology can lend support): materiality/imaginary/inversion/ subject: But I saw ideology as the universal element of historical existence: and I did not at that time go any further. Thus I disregarded the difference between the regions of ideology and the antagonistic class tendencies which run through them, divide them, regroup them and bring them into opposition. The absence of "contradiction" was taking its toll: the question of the class struggle in ideology did not appear. Through the gap created by this "theory" of ideology slipped theoreticism: science/ideology. And so on.
    But in spite of everything, it seems to me that the benefit was not nil. We wanted to understand Marx's detour via Hegel. We made a detour via Spinoza: looking for arguments for materialism. We found some. And through this detour, unexpected if not unsuspected by many, we were able, if not to pose or to articulate, at least to "raise" (as you might raise an animal, unexpectedly disturbing it) some questions which otherwise might have remained dormant, sleeping the peaceful sleep of the eternally obvious, in the closed pages of Capital. While waiting for others either to show the futility of these questions or to answer them more correctly, we shall continue, you can bet, to be accused of structuralism . . .

 
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Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory

Robert Paul Resch