Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

Althusser • 527
Althusser to produce a concept that is dif� cult to integrate as such into his
own problematic – ‘ideology of a scienti� c character’:
For the first time in history, we can thus be present at the birth of a
radically new phenomenon: the constitution of a transformed ideology,
because produced by the action of scienti� c principles on existing ideology: the
constitution of a new ideology that is ideological in its form and increasingly
scienti� c in its content. 60
But a desperate work, like all the other Althusserian projects of this kind,
in that it aims to compete with Stalinist ‘diamat’ on its own ground: that of
an ontology of the working class and the party. On this ground, obviously,
Althusser was defeated from the outset.
In the image of his own life, Althusser constructed his whole œuvre in
the dimension of catastrophe. For better or worse, he always saw to it that
his concepts are undermined from within by their opposites, and thus constantly
threatened with immediate collapse. At the end of this trajectory, there
remains something like a incredible tension of the concept, characteristic of a
style unlike any other – or rather, of one of Althusser’s styles. For there were
in fact several styles, bound up with projects that everything in a sense separates
and yet unites. If the real catastrophe supervened when the violence of
the ontology of the party asserted itself, the tension of the concept is never
very far off. Conversely, when the tension of the concept is asserted, the violence
of the ontology is always subjacent. Althusser can at one and the same
time write Reading ‘Capital’ and ‘Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical
Formation’, Reply to John Lewis and Machiavelli and Us. He can simultaneously
practice symptomatic reading and reading at sight. At all events, the theoretician
of the purity of the concept always wrote under the régime of the impurity
of the concept.
60 Untitled manual on the principles of Marxism (1966–7), IMEC archives, p. 121.