AUT: RE: Re: Negri's translation

[Júlio Béjar <jbexar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: rc-am <rcollins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, July 22, 1999 12:43 AM
Subject: AUT: Re: Negri's translation


> thanks Julio!
>
> btw, i don't see how anyone has assumed then that negri wrote 'MBM' as a
> riposte to althusser.
>
> Angela
> ---
> rcollins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
>
    Dear friend,
followin' on Negri and Althusser relationship, here you are another old
reminiscence. This one is dated at October 24th 1990, and it was published
in the spanish journal "El Mundo", two days after Althusser's death. I hope
it can be interesting to you.
    Ah, apologize you all if havin' any problems with the "english"
translation  ;-)
    Warm regards,

  Júlio


 I SAW HIM AGAIN

 By Toni Negri, 1990


 Some time ago, a common friend invited me for visiting Louis Althusser at
the house in Paris where he takes refuge when -every time more rarely- he
goes out the hospital. I haven't seen  him from 1979, when, at his proposal,
I had dictated a course on Marx lectures at l'École Normale Supérieur.
 In the apartment are his books, any photographs, any things that remember
him the life of a time before. On the tables, folios and fragments around
new thoughts, never finished new projects.
 Althusser talks feeling sorry for himself. He´s an old man, sick in his
body and reason.
 Around him, disciples and friends, attentive and cordial that, in the style
of the big french schools comradeship, organize him his life as they are
able. Too many medicines at that home for a kind of sickness that nobody
knows if he has just contracted from a mental illness ou by abusing of
medicaments, required drugs.
 Althusser expresses himself with keenness, bringinsg together the daily
matters -always experienced with extreme irritation- and the anguish to work
again, to produce, to recover the intelectuas relationships. When the chat
returns at last, Althusser comes back to the life difficulties
imprecation...
 Apparently he controls the situation and, as he used to do at his Rue d'Ulm
appartment, he enjoys gambling with his interlocutors. Life and illness are
not therefore so different.
 In the other hand, how could he live but innering the cartesian ambiguity
"larvatus prodeo", masked ruin? How to developpe his theoretical practice,
imprisoned as he was between a big institution, like l'École Normale
Supérieur, and the rigid big movement of the French Communist Party (PCF)?
He was secretary of the first one and guardian protector of the philosophy
devoted young men; he was the ideological lider of the second one.
 Althusser practiced  at that time a double strategy: in presence of the
institutions he defended the class struggle as the theory fundamental part,
and in presence of the Party, the class struggle independence and the
communism practice. Beginning with the last 40's, after his return from the
nazi's concentration camp where he was prisoner five years along, Althusser
kept cohesively his marxism restoration job, trying to profile an autonomous
scientific statute.
 In that place the discussion against humanism, developped above all in
"Pour Marx" (1965), where he fighted the marxism existencialist
interpretations, headed by Sartre, and the thousands of Hegel-Marx in
fashion contaminations at that time. But it was also required inside the
party to rescue the marxist method against naturalism and economicism in
force.
 Althusser and his disciples proposed in "Lire le capital" (1966) a new
construction of the methodologic condition in marxist analysis, trying a
strong synthesis with structuralism, that in their point of view was opened,
below, to the class struggles experiences and, above, to leninism, so to
speak, to politics and insurrection dynamics.
 These two books turned 68's  fundamental texts. Beginning with its reading
some mao leftest groups rised, but Althusser relation with 68 ends here.
Meanwhile his pupils left him, he continued in fact into PCF. Without
illusions. In one every time more difficult and hopeless internal battle.
Are memorable his 77-78's articles about democracy in the party.
 More and more lonely, while his health and the political context were
deteriorating, a painful though lucid concience about communism maturity
began  to take form in him. Around 1980 he finishes in this way an (inedit)
conference around Machiavelo: "His last loneliness perhaps was this: he
knews that if his thought had contributed to make a little history he would
not had been there".
 No consolation, and less a religious one. In fact, if we search for any
religious in Althusser, it's just not in theory where we shall find it, but
rather in that conjoint of virtues that in christian tradition are
associated to the confessor's figure: Althusser at his apartment in Rue d'
Ulm.
  It was said about him, so to tell a joke, that he had distract the lecture
because he employed full time in discussions and all the important authors
told him their works in advance. It's often forgotten that he was a man
ready to give ears: first his ears, and afterwards, the scientific comunity
ones.






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