PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by [Duke University]

On z! lebruary zc1c
Access details Access Details [subscription number v1!!cc]
Publisher Routledge
lnforma ltd Registered in lngland and Wales Registered Number 1czv1 Registered office Mortimer House, !-
11 Mortimer Street, london W1T !JH, UK
Rethinking Marxism
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information
http//www.informaworld.com/smpp/title-contentt1!!vzz1
Althusser's Nominalism Structure and Singularity (1vez-e)
Warren Montag
To cite this Article Montag, Warren(1vvc) 'Althusser's Nominalism Structure and Singularity (1vez-e)', Rethinking
Marxism, 1c !, e1 !
To link to this Article DOl 1c.1ccc/ccv!evvcccec11
URl http//dx.doi.org/1c.1ccc/ccv!evvcccec11
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf
This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Rethinking MARXISM Volume 10, Number 3 (Fall 1998)
Althussers Nominalism: Structure and
Singularity (1 962-6)
Warren Montag
The posthumous publication of a large number of previously unpublished texts by
Althusser, together with the establishment of an archive containing manuscripts and
lecture notes as well as his voluminous correspondence, will not only add to what
we already know about Althusser, but will transform what we think about the work
published during his lifetime. For the meaning of For Marx and Reading Capital is
not fixed once and for all; these works are inscribed in a network of references and
allusions that determines what is visible and invisible in them. As that network is
modified (and not simply by previously unknown work by Althusser or by the ap-
pearance of new and supposedly more perceptive commentaries or critiques but by
those works, in whatever domain, that have been influenced by Althusser-that is,
that are the effects of his work and as such redefine the nature of that which is their
cause), so too is the internal limit that separates the legible from the illegible and
there occurs a redistribution of the relations of visibility and invisibility within the
works themselves. Such a transformation in turn produces certain effects: what once
appeared to be most compelling or, alternatively, most questionable about a text is
deprived of interest, displaced by a new set of insights and oversights, which in turn
will gradually be displaced by another ad infinitum. This is not a relativism that posits
a finite truth that we may approach but never find, a truth placed perpetually beyond
our reach. It is rather a recognition that there is a history of the true, that philosophi-
cal works (among others) are never completed, self-sufficient things but rather, are
dynamic processes, open and unfinished.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
Althusser s Nominalism 65
This transformation not only allows but actively enjoins us to return to elements
in Althussers work that not so long ago would have appeared utterly devoid of
interest. To take only one specific case, few topics would once have seemed so
uninteresting and unproductive as the notion of structure in Althussers work.
For those who know Althussers texts well, the term recalls the critiques and com-
mentaries of more than twenty years ago which, whatever their merits, today ap-
pear dated; the passions that drove them have now cooled considerably, and many
of his critics have adopted theoretical positions that they once would have criti-
cized far more severely than even the most objectionable that they claimed to find
in Althusser. To be blunt, for anyone who shares Althussers theoretical antihu-
manism, the vast majority of these critiques, however important they may be for
an understanding of the Anglo-American or French Marxist culture of the 1960s
and 1970s, have nothing to tell us about Althusser. They tended almost exclusively
(I am tempted to say obsessively) to address two apparent dilemmas: structure versus
agency and structure versus process. The first was a dilemma only for those who
could not bear any questioning of the individual as subject and for whom the only
alternative would be structure. Similarly, those who charged that Althusser, like
other structuralists, asserted the primacy of the synchronic over the diachronic seem
utterly to have ignored one of the most lucid passages in one of his most important
works: Althussers critique of the synchronicldiachronic opposition in Reading
Capital (1975,91-118).
But there are other reasons to regard with skepticism a return to the question of
structure in Althusser, a number of which are to be found in Althussers own discus-
sion of structuralism in Elements of Self-criticism. While he and his cothinkers of
the early sixties regarded themselves as objective allies of high structuralism in a
common struggle against the humanist ideology of the originary subject, Althusser
concludes the chapter on structuralism with the assertion that he and his colleagues
were never structuralists (1976, 131). In one sense the assertion is incontestable:
the critique of structure as a combinatory of pregiven elements (the linguistic model)
and therefore as a kind of formalism (the structuralism of Barthes and Ltvi-Strauss
as well as certain of Lacans texts) recurs throughout the work of the sixties. More-
over, Althusser, in a text that dates from 1966 but that was published only recently,
argued that LCvi-Strawss structural anthropology was in fact functionalist, defin-
ing functionalism as a form of subjectivism, that endows society with the form of
existence of a subject having intentions and objectives (1995,425), which seeks or
produces the means to realize these objectives.
The fact remains, however, not only that Althusser used the concept of structure,
primarily in For Marxand Reading Capital, but that his use of the term, especially at
the end of his contribution to the latter work, became a flash point of criticism (espe-
cially the notorious phrase structural causality). Further, when we examine the dis-
crepancies between the first and second editions of Reading Capital, we find that
Althusser removed or reworked the bulk of the passages concerning structure. Some-
thing important was going on here that his critics utterly failed to recognize for what
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
66 Montug
it was, with one unexpected and, until very recently, unknown exception, to be dis-
cussed below.
Among the elements that have emerged in the posthumous publications and ar-
chival materials, one in particular confers a certain interest on the notion of struc-
ture, specifically by giving it the appearance of an anomaly in the work of Althusser,
the logic of which runs counter to his stated philosophical objectives. Where his crit-
ics saw homogeneity and coherence in what they argued was Althussers consistent
structuralism, we now unmistakably see stark conflict and contradiction, as the in-
visible and the unthought in Althussers texts are placed clearly in relief. I refer to
what Althusser himself chose to call his nominalism.
Attentive readers will undoubtedly recall that one of Althusser s more frequent
citations (I put the word in quotation marks because the operation of citation for
Althusser was often a kind of dreamwork compounded of condensation and displace-
ment) of Marx was the statement in The HoZy Family that nominalism is the first form
of materialism ( Man and Engels 1975, l50), der erste Ausdruck des Materialismus
(1973,135). With the exception of two works from the 1980s, Althusser was content
to refer to this proposition without supplying either context or explanation. More-
over, in rendering this passage into French he transposed its meaning in certain ways.
In some places he tells us that Marx declared nominalism to be the ante-chamber of
materialism ( 1992). The substitution of the spatial ante-chamber for the temporal
first form, of course, changes the meaning of the assertion. Marx sought to de-
scribe the historical process by which materialism emerged from the medieval and
early modem philosophical tendencies that waged a struggle against the dominant
idealism and spiritualism of the period. He mistakenly credits Duns Scotus with the
question can matter think? and adds moreover, he was a nominalist (Marx and
Engels 1975, 150) (certain commentators have suggested that the reference is actu-
ally to William of Occam, who is usually associated with the founding of nominal-
ism). In any case, these medieval English philosophers (Marx seeks to prove that the
origins of materialism are peculiarly British) produced a doctrine that anticipated
in an undeveloped and partial manner the materialism that would continue to evolve
through Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke until the evolutionary path led it across the Chan-
nel, first to France and finally to the Germany of the 1840s.
It is precisely this sense of historical evolution that is absent from Althussers
formulation of nominalism as the antechamber of materialism. Nominalism is no
longer a stage, long since surpassed, in an evolution that has led to materialism-
that is, to our materialism. Instead, it remains an entryway into materialism. Are there
others? If so, Althusser does not indicate them, leaving us to conclude that there is
no other way into materialism but through nominalism, which thus assumes the char-
acter of a chamber through which we must pass in order to find materialism. What
then is this materialism, if it cannot be reached directly but only indirectly, by means
of another philosophy that inescapably interposes itself between us and materialism?
We might with justification begin to suspect that there is nothing behind the curtain,
no other room, no other world, no other scene.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
Althusser s Nominalism 67
Indeed, when Althusser returns to this reference in his last works, his rendering
of Marx and Engelss phrase is even more distant from the original. In the chapter on
Spinoza from LAvenir dure longtemps (unfortunately not included in the English
translation), he retains the spatial metaphor while introducing an entirely new frame
of reference. Concluding his discussion of the most profound reasons for his at-
traction to Spinoza, Althusser informs us that not only did Spinoza refuse the Carte-
sian cogito as the originary foundation of meaning and truth, but he was a nominal-
ist. I had read in Marx that nominalism is the royal road to materialism. To tell the
truth, I really believe that nominalism is not the royal road to materialism but the
only conceivable materialism in the world (1992,478). There are a number of things
to say about this passage before we turn to its conclusion. First, the antechamber has
become the royal road, an obvious allusion not to Marx at all but to Freud, who
argued that the dream is the royal road to the unconscious. But to return to the ques-
tion that we have already posed in relation to the metaphor of the antechamber: where
does the royal road lead? The answer supplied by Freud at the end of The Interpre-
tation of Dreams and later examined in great detail by Derrida in Freud and the Scene
of Writing (Althussers copy of which is copiously annotated [Althusser 19951) was
precisely nowhere: the unconscious and consciousness are not two systems or two
localities in the mental apparatus (to use Stracheys extraordinarily inexact and in-
elegant translation of Freuds text) (Freud 1965,648). Derridas commentary is well
known: There is thus no unconscious truth to find because it would have been writ-
ten elsewhere. There is no text written and present elsewhere that would give rise
without being modified in the process, to a work and a temporalization (the latter
pertaining to consciousness, if one follows Freud literally) that would be exterior to
it and floating on its surface. There is no text present in general and there is not even
a past present text, a text past as having once been present (1978). For Derrida, the
royal road leads to traces of a meaning that was never present and that is only ever
constituted retroactively.
If we follow this chain of associations through Althussers text, we find that ma-
terialism considered as that of which nominalism is the mere expression or, para-
doxically, a form, and thus one of many possible forms, disappears into what was
supposedly its expression, one of the possible forms in which it might be represented.
There is no room beyond the antechamber and the royal road is a Holzwege, un
chemin qui ne mbne nulle part. Althusser presents his characterization of the nomi-
nalisdmaterialism relation as a kind of ruse, as if in his earlier formulations he was
concealing a truth that he now, in a work likely to appear only after his death, can
reveal: u dire vrai, j e crois bien que . . . (1992, 478). Are we thus to consider
Althussers commitment to nominalism as the only conceivable form of materialism
to be a truth dissimulated until the moment or conjuncture is ripe for its unveiling,
and therefore as a position that he sought to advance through a strategy of substitu-
tion and displacement until reason could assume a rational form? Such a view would
certainly confer upon his philosophical oeuvre a coherence and unity of purpose as
his autobiography tends, in general, to do, despite Althussers frequent invocation
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
68 Montag
of another of Marxs epigrams: never judge a man by what he thinks about him-
self. I would argue, in contrast, that to adopt the perspective Althusser offers in his
final words would be not only to obscure the conflictual process of his own philo-
sophical development, but to obscure the very idea that he incites us to think about.
How exactly did Althusser understand the term nominalism? Again, he discusses
it by name only briefly and only in the texts from the 1980s. In the collection of in-
terviews conducted by Fernanda Navarro and published in Spanish translation as
Filosofia y marxismo in 1988 (and later published in the original French in Sur la
philosophie), he derives the fundamental thesis of nominalism directly from the
first proposition of Wittgensteins Tructutus-Logico-Philosophicus: Die Welt ist
alles, was der Fall ist, translated in the English edition of the Tractatus, Althusser
reminds us, as The world is all that is the case (Althusser 1994,46). This superb
phrase, as he calls it, leads him to characterize nominalism as the position that there
exist only cases (in the plural il nexiste que des cas, which would seem to modify
the meaning of Wittgensteins proposition), that is, singular individuals totally dis-
tinct one from the other. Here as elsewhere Althusser, of course, refers to Spinoza,
who went so far as to argue that the more we know singular things, the more we
know God (1992,2 16). And Spinozas conception of the res singulares had noth-
ing in common with the atomism of a Hobbes. On the contrary, the originality of
Spinozas concept of individuality, according to Pierre Macherey, is that the indi-
vidual or subject does not exist by itself, in the irreducible simplicity of a unique and
eternal being, but is rather composed by the encounter of singular beings that as-
semble conjuncturally in it . . . but without this assemblage presupposing any privi-
leged relation (Macherey 1979, 216). There are thus no simple entities, only com-
plex beings composed of and composing other singular beings ad infinitum. The
singular things to which Spinoza refers are not simply human individuals (to take
only the case of the human world) but also groups, masses, and nations (Spinoza
examines in detail the case of the Hebrew nation), all of which exist only in the form
of singularities.
Althusser demonstrated all this himself without, however, invoking either Spinoza
or nominalism, and in a text known to all his readers: For Murx. Blinded, apparently,
by the stunning critique of Hegel in the same essay, with the interesting exception of
a few official philosophers of the French Communist party whose charges of plu-
ralism and positivism (Althusser 1990, 163) were undoubtedly responses to the
passage in question, most readers failed to see the nominalism that stared them in the
face. In Contradiction and Overdetermination, Althusser argued that the Russian
Revolution was not only not a particular manifestation of a general rule or law (that
is, that history is driven by the contradiction between labor and capital), but that it
could not even be understood as an exception to this rule: we should perhaps ask
what is exceptional about this exceptional situation and whether like all exceptions
this one does not clarify its rule, is not unbeknown to the rule the rule itself. For after
all are we not always in exceptional situations? The failure of the 1849 revolution in
Germany was an exception, the failure in Paris in 1871 was an exception, the Ger-
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
Althusser Is Nominalism 69
man Social Democratic failure at the beginning of the twentieth-century pending the
chauvinist betrayal of 1914 was an exception. . . exceptions but with respect to what?
To nothing but the abstract but comfortable and reassuring idea of a pure and simple
dialectical schema, which in its very simplicity seems to have retained a memory
(or rediscovered the style) of the Hegelian model and its faith in the resolving power
of the abstract contradiction as such: in particular, the beautiful contradiction be-
tween Capital and Labour (1990, 104).
Althusser thus rejects any passage beyond what might once have been regarded
as the particular concrete expressions of a general and essential contradiction to that
general contradiction itself, even if only to refer to their deviation from the model
it offers. There are only exceptions, only singular cases each of which must be ex-
plained without reference to a universal principle that would supply the generality
into which their specificity might be resolved. From this perspective we can under-
stand Althusser s repeated invocation of yet another sole definition of material-
ism: Engelss assertion in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Phi-
losophy (1888) that the materialist outlook on nature means no more than simply
conceiving nature just as it exists without any foreign admixture (1969,67). Engelss
proposition is remarkably similar to that advanced by another German philosopher
in exactly the same year: The apparent world is the only one: the real world
has only been lyingly added. That philosopher was, of course, Nietzsche, whom
Althusser often praised (see Freud and Lacan and Reading Capital), but without
ever explaining why, in Twilight of the Idols (1990,46). If we conjugate the two defi-
nitions of materialism, we are confronted with the notion that when we separate the
foreign admixture that has been lyingly added to the world (was der Fall ist), posed
as the reality of which the world is merely the phenomenal form and thus as the be-
yond to which it must be reduced in order to be known, we are left not only with a
world without transcendence, a world in the pure positivity of its being, but also a
world that can only be grasped as irreducible diversity, as an infinite-that is,
nontotalisable-production of singularities in which essence can be nothing more
than the singular essence of each particular, discernible thing.
It is precisely this nominalism, this emphasis on the singular and the diverse-an
emphasis that, as we have seen, is already quite explicit in Althussers 1962 text
Contradiction and 0verdetermination-that allows us to see instead of the homo-
geneity and simplicity that critics have attributed to his use of the term structure in
the writings from the period of 1962-6, a disassociation of meaning that goes unrecog-
nized in the texts in question, an unthought conjunction of utterly opposed meanings
between which there is no possibility of reconciliation. In particular, I want to turn to
the end of the section LObjet du Capital in the 1965 edition of Reading Capital
to consider two passages that were removed from subsequent editions for reasons
that will become explicit in a moment. In the conclusion to his contribution to Reading
Capital, Althusser attempts to summarize what he calls Marxs Immense Theoreti-
cal Revolution. The problem that Marx formulated and even began to answer, ac-
cording to Althusser, was the problem of thinking economic causality in the absence
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
70 Montag
of the anthropological givens that served as a foundation for all inquiry, a problem
that Althusser formulates as the effectivity of a whole on its elements (1965, 186).
He begins by drawing a line of demarcation between two conceptions of the whole
for which, interestingly, structure functions as a synonym in the concluding pages of
Reading Capital or, more precisely, between two conceptions of the relation of the
whole to its parts. In doing so, he produces a distinction between the spiritual and the
structured whole. The spiritual whole is one in which the difference or singularity of
its elements is only phenomenal, each being the expression of an inner principle or
essence to which it is therefore reducible. Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit-a text
that, Althusser tells us, is as beautiful as the night-ffers the most comprehensive
explanation of the spiritual whole, showing it to be the product of the labor of the
negative in which the negativity of difference is itself negated and the parts of the
whole resolve into each other in a unity that is perfect because it has overcome and,
in overcoming, interiorized difference and diversity. Thus, from the point of view of
Althussers nominalism, the negative is nothing other than a form of denial, a way of
refusing the positivity and diversity-let us say, the materiality-of what is the case,
the imaginary overcoming of a multiplicity that is experienced as intolerable.
But what of the alternative: the structured whole possessing a type of unity
quite different from the type of unity of the spiritual whole? Here (that is, in the
concluding pages of Marxs Immense Theoretical Revolution), Althusser, with-
out explanation, ceases to refer to the whole at all, and for the problem of the whole
and its parts substitutes that of structure and its elements. The second edition ofRead-
ing Capital, which furnished the basis for the English translation, at this point be-
comes particularly elliptical, referring us to the concept of Darstellung in which the
whole matter can be entirely summed up (1969, 188). From the point of view of
Althussers nominalism, of course, it is not enough to make a distinction between
the spiritualist and nonspiritualist conceptions of the whole or structure. The ques-
tion remains, and I believe that it is this question that gives Althussers text a symp-
tomatic incoherence: what can structure be to its elements if not a unity lyingly
added to them, as if their intelligibility depends on the reduction of singularity to
generality? On this precise point the first edition of Reading Capital is remarkably
equivocal. In a passage removed from subsequent editions, Althusser cites the oppo-
sition between Darstellung and Vorstellung, both of which terms signify representa-
tion or presentation. While Vorstellung suggests a positing of something which is
kept behind, something that is represented by that which is kept out in front, by its
emissary, the Vorstellung, in the Darstellung, on the contrary, there is nothing be-
hind: the thing itself is there, da, offered in the position of presence (Althusser
et al. 1996,646). So far so good: we are on the verge of a definition of structure con-
sistent with the nominalism that is the only conceivable materialism there is. Althusser
1. Michael Sprinker (1987) is one of the few commentators to have undertaken a fairly systematic
comparison of the treatment of these questions in the first and second editions of Reading Capital. I
find his discussion particularly valuable.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
Althusser s Nominalism 71
does little more than name it: the structure that has no other existence than in its ef-
fects-that is, structure that has no existence outside or prior to the diversity of its
elements and the specific configuration they form. Why does Althusser have no more
to say about what would appear to be among the most decisive contributions of this
text except to refer the reader, as was his custom, to Spinoza who, it is true, had a
great deal more than Althusser to say about this topic? The sentence that follows the
definition of Darstellung marks this point as a limit beyond which Althusser cannot
go and from which there is no other way than retreat: The entire text of a play is
thus there offered in the presence of the representation (the Darstellung) but (and
here Althusser begins to regress to precisely the conception of structure that he ear-
lier rejected) the presence of the entire play is not exhausted in the immediacy of
the deeds or words of the character: we know that it is the presence of a completed
whole which lives in each moment and in each character and in all the relations be-
tween the characters given in their personal presence, only to be grasped, however,
as the presence of the whole, as the latent structure of the whole, in the whole and
only felt in each element and each role (1996, 646).
What Althusser has just described is quite the contrary of the existence of the struc-
ture in its effects; he has instead posited a whole or structure that not only exceeds its
effects, is not exhausted in them, but leads a latent existence beneath or behind the
manifest content, the truth of which in turn could only be that hidden whole that it is
the task of interpretation to decipher. A few lines later Althusser refers us to his
essay The Piccolo Teatro: Bertolazzi and Brecht, written at almost the same
moment as Contradiction and Overdetermination in the summer of 1962. There,
Althussers approach is almost Aristotelian. Parisian critics condemned Bertolazzis
El Nost Milan, Althusser argues, because they failed to distinguish (and we can see
here the provenance of the conception of Darstellung in Reading Capital) between
the consciousness of the characters and the dynamic of the plays latent structure
(1990, 145) which cannot be reduced either to the sum of the characters or even to
the relations among characters. This structure can properly be described as latent
precisely because even if it is implied by the action as a whole, by the existence and
movements of all the characters, it is their deep meaning, beyond their conscious-
ness-and thus hidden from them (145). Similarly, it is only potentially visible to
the spectators insofar as it has to be discerned, conquered and drawn from the shadow
which initially envelops it (146).
Thus it appeared that another line of demarcation remained to be drawn, this time
within the notion of structure or the structured whole itself. However, it was not
Althusser who initially brought this distinction to light, but one of his former stu-
dents and fellow readers of Capital, Pierre Macherey. In a letter dated 10 May 1965,
Macherey wondered if the notion of the whole, even the structured whole, was not
merely the spiritualist conception of structure. To understand Machereys mean-
ing here, we might turn to the essay he was writing at that very time, an essay com-
missioned by Althusser for a special issue of Les Temps modernes, the topic of which
was structuralism. In his essay Literary Analysis, the Tomb of Structures, Macherey,
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
72 Monrag
in direct opposition to Althusser, argues that if there is a structure it is not in the
book, concealed in its depths (1978). Instead, structure is the only concept that can
. . . think irregularity; structure allows us to see that the work is diverse, scattered
and irregular (1978).
Following the exchange of letters, Althusser received and read the manuscript of
Literary Analysis, the Tomb of Structures. In an undated letter, almost certainly
written in the early fall of 1965, Althusser wrote to Macherey: I have understood
what you indicated to me one day when you told me that the concept of latent struc-
ture appeared to you dubious . . . I now see clearly what you meant. . . It is that the
concept is ambiguous, divided between a conception of structure as inferiority, there-
fore as the correlate of an intention, or at least of a unity, and another conception,
close to yours, in which structure is thought as absent exteriority.
Thus Althusser, with the help of Macherey, draws a line of demarcation that sepa-
rates two distinct notions of structure. One, the first, is entirely expected; it is the
notion most associated with the structuralist activity, as Barthes called it: structure
as the interiority of a field, whether that interiority is the order, that secret rational-
ity to which the disorder of the field must be reduced by the act of knowing it, or
the ground of potentiality or possibility that conditions the actual, the rules or laws
that determine what exists. In either case, the reality inhabited by structure is a two-
level reality in which the surface is doubled by a depth. The structure of such a field
is the correlate of an intention, the purpose it serves, the end that all its complex-
ity, despite appearances, can do nothing other than realize. Structure is the deep unity
behind surface diversity and is therefore a spiritual unity in which difference is
only a matter of appearances and therefore a failure of knowledge, or the effect of a
homogeneity more profound than itself which it only temporarily negates precisely
so that this unity will have confronted and overcome that alterity that was simulta-
neously the only obstacle and the only means to its becoming itself. In order to bar
the way to such an interpretation, Althusser removed every reference to latent struc-
ture from the subsequent editions of Reading Capital.
But why did he not drop the term structure altogether as he was to do later? The
answer lies in the fact that the term structure in his work never functioned in a
univocal way and was not reducible to the designation of a spiritual unity. As he
remarks to Macherey, structure also allowed him, in opposition to any spiritualism,
to think absent exteriority. The phrase absent exteriority refers, of course, to the
absence of any foreign admixture, any lying addition, even or perhaps especially when
the addition is posited as an interior, as the real of the real. Structure or, more pre-
cisely, an absent structure, a structure present only in its effects, thus becomes the
principle of the diverse-that is, the principle that makes the diverse intelligible with-
out reduction or unification. We might even say that structure according to the sec-
ond definition offered by Althusser, a definition close to Machereys, structure as
the thought of the outside (la penste du dehors), to cite Foucaults expression from
exactly the same period (1966), is paradoxically necessary if we are to think the
diverse and the heterogeneous. For what would the alternative be if not a simple
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0
Althusser s Nominalism 73
inversion of philosophies of order that, for structure and coherence, substitutes a
primal and therefore indeterminate disorder? We have seen that Althusser did not
entirely escape the first alternative; it remains to be determined whether in his last
works, particularly those that attempt to define an aleatory materialism, he escaped
the second.
References
Althusser, L. 1976. Essays in Self-Criticism. Trans. G. Lock. London: New Left Books.
. 1990. For Marx. Trans. B. Brewster. N&w York: Verso.
. 1992. Lavenir dure longtemps. Pans: Editions STOCWIMEC.
. 1994. Sur la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard.
. 1995. Ecrits philosophiques et politiques. Vol. 2. Paris: Editions STOCWIMEC.
Althusser, L. et. al. 1996. &ire le Capital. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. 1975. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books.
Derrida, J. 1978. Freud and the Scene of Writing. In Writing and Difference. Chicago:
Engels, F. 1969. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy. Moscow:
Foucault, M. 1986. La pensee du dehors. Paris: Editions fata morgana.
Freud, S. 1965. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon Books.
Macherey, P. 1978. A Theory of Literary Production. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
. 1979. Hegel ou Spinoza. Paris: Maspero.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. 1973. Die heilige Familie. Frankfurt: Verlag Marxistische Blatter.
. 1975. The Holy Family. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Nietzsche, F. 1990. Twilight of the Idols. London: Penguin Books.
Spinoza. 1992. Ethics. Vol. 5. Trans. S. Shirley. Cambridge: Hackett.
Sprinker, M. 1987. Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical
University of Chicago Press.
Progress Publishers.
Materialism. New York: Verso.
D
o
w
n
l
o
a
d
e
d

B
y
:

[
D
u
k
e

U
n
i
v
e
r
s
i
t
y
]

A
t
:

0
1
:
5
7

2
3

F
e
b
r
u
a
r
y

2
0
1
0