Althusser’s Spinozism and the Problem of Theology

Dr Knox Peden (ANU)

Althusser’s philosophical debt to Spinozism complicates his relationship to theology in a fundamental way. Put schematically, where theology is a closed discourse – the hermeneutic circle par excellence – materialist philosophy is a nominally open discourse, one responsive to developments in science, politics, and, to be sure, ideology writ large. In a certain sense, Althusser’s break with the Catholicism of his intellectual youth also involved a rejection of phenomenology, an avatar, in Althusser’s view, of theological discourse in the French scene. But his later work on the circularities of ideological discourse and practice, the phenomenon of reproduction as such, suggests that Althusser recognized that the closed and circular nature of theological discourse was not without its own purchase, perhaps one with a firmer grip on the reality of ideological reproduction than a materialist philosophy that sought to break free from it. Althusser equivocated on this point throughout his mature career. This talk will focus on Althusser’s writings “on reproduction” to identify this equivocation between his filiation for theology and his longing for Spinozism at a point of maximal tension.

Dr Knox Peden is an ARC Research Fellow at the Australian National University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and the co-editor with Peter Hallward of a two-volume work devoted to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Verso, 2012).