Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

Althusser • 517
Despite everything, the world is ‘a continuum of questions and answers that
give rise to antagonism and imparts meaning to it’. 33 However, the explanation
is one-sided, for Althusser is just as interested by the break as by continuity:
this is even one of the constitutive tensions in his work.
The concept of the break forms part of a much broader theme that runs
through most of Althusser’s writings: solitude and beginnings; or, more precisely,
the solitude of beginnings. We � nd it as early as the Foreword to Montesquieu
(‘No one went before him in this adventure’) and in the Conclusion
(‘this man who set out alone and truly discovered the new lands of history’). 34
We � nd it in connection with Lenin, ‘absolutely alone, against everyone, in an
apparently lost cause’. 35 We � nd it par excellence whenever Althusser speaks
of Machiavelli. We � nd it a hundred times in connection with Marx, particularly,
with all its ambivalence, in what is virtually the � nal word of Althusser’s
contribution to Reading ‘Capital’: ‘Alone, Marx look around him for allies
and supporters. . . . As for us, we can thank Marx for the fact that we are not
alone’. 36 But it is clear that Althusser is speaking here of himself in the � rst
instance, as someone who (if his own words are to be believed) never recognised
any contemporary apart from his friend Jacques Martin. The image of
solitude in Althusser must be taken seriously, for far from being reducible to
a form of pathos, it belongs to a constellation that gives this conceptualisation
its particular tenor. In fact, he treats solitude in the same way that he treats
the beginning or the void: in and through multiple variations, we witness a
perpetual inversion of the for into the against – the requisite task is simultaneously
an impossible task; what is to be warded off is what is to be established.
This position, which he went on fashioning and reworking, was encountered
by Althusser from 1962 onwards above all in Machiavelli, with whom – to
an even greater degree than in the case of Spinoza or even Marx – he never
stopped identifying.
In Machiavelli and Us, Althusser attributes a decisive role to Chapter 9 of
Book I of the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius: ‘it is necessary to
be alone to found a new republic or completely reform it’ – that is to say, the
thematic of the ‘New Prince in a New Principality’.
33 Rancière 1993, pp. 64, 62.
34 Althusser 1972, pp. 14 and 107.
35 Althusser 1990, p. 188.
36 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 193.