Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

Althusser • 521
ised by an accentuation of the void. In Machiavelli, Althusser tells us, the
place of the subjects is absolutely empty. As a result of Italian speci� city, no
one can predict which subject will � ll this void – a negative that nevertheless
has its positive counterpart. In any event, we know that it will not be any of
the Italian princes currently living. But this is de� nitely not a question of an
Italian exception. In this type of dispositive, the place of the subjects is always
empty, always fashioned to be � lled by future subjects, including in France
in the 1960s. This is why Althusser is fascinated by Machiavelli. However,
it is precisely here that things become complicated. For if everything, in a
sense, prompts Althusser to think that the conjuncture is empty, and that the
place of political subjects is unoccupied, a different tendency draws him in
completely the opposite direction: the place of the subjects is always already
occupied by a completely hypostatised working class embodied by the Communist
Party. 46 This leads him to an extremely signi� cant formula: if the space
of a conjunctural analysis only makes sense if it arranges a place that is empty
for the future, Althusser hastens to add: ‘I say empty, though it is always
occupied.’ 47 In the case of Machiavelli, it is dif� cult to see how this place could
be occupied. In contrast, however, we can see it very clearly when the formula
is applied to the French situation. To adopt his own terms, Althusser too is
seeking to ‘think the unthinkable’. He is setting himself a task that appears to
him to be as imperative as, and even more impossible than, the one Machiavelli
set himself. And it is here that the ‘space of pure theory’ reappears, in
highly paradoxical form.
In 1967 Althusser formed a politico-theoretical group around him called the
‘Spinoza group’, 48 which was modelled, including as regards pseudonyms,
on the more-or-less clandestine organisations common at the time. If the
existence of the group was contemporaneous with the initial self-criticisms
of ‘theoreticism’, it is no less illuminating about Althusser’s general relationship
to his theoretical work. In a note of July 1967 ‘on the politico-theoretical
46 As we know, for some years Althusser maintained a certain political ambiguity
as to what was to be understood by the ‘party’: de facto party or de jure party? But
over and above this ambiguity, which was rapidly dispelled, the main thing was this
hypostatising of the ‘working class’.
47 Althusser 1999, p. 20.
48 Althusser’s archives contain a massive � le on the ‘Spinoza group’, including
numerous notes taken by Althusser during its meetings.