AUT: more Negri on Althusser

[pmargin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Steve Wright)]

I don't know if Michael Hardt is currently on either of these lists: it
would be interesting to hear his views of Negri/Althusser.

Anyway, just to add to the confusion:

The following is just a passing reference, but since it is from a book that
hasn't appeared in English, some list members may not have seen it.

It's from a book published in 1997, but based on lectures written in 1972:

A. Negri, (1977) _La Fabbrica della strategia. 33 lezioni su Lenin._
Padova: CLEUP, pp.10-11.

'From this point of view we must immediately declare as unsatisfactory some
other orientations which attempt to expunge the analysis of the proletarian
subject within marxist theory. Typical of these is the position of L.
Althusser (5) which, in the same measure in which it tends to define theory
as the practice of intervention and the taking of a class position,
insistently refuses to impute these activities to a material subject --
charactersied by an internal dialectic between material discontinuity and
subjectivity, between the various elements that compose it. Here the
science of the revolutionary process refuses to render itself as the
science of the revolutionary subject. And it is easy to understand the
effects of this conception: exalting reflection and mediation (whether of
the intellectual or the party) against dialectical immediacy, therefore
against the marxian concreteness of the revolutionary subject. But how can
this conception claim to be marxist, and leninist above all, when in Lenin
-- as we have begun to see and as the analysis will better clarify -- the
fundamental problem is that of the determination of the revolutionary
subject and of its temporal and spatial determination? Clearly constituting
the party is different from gazing upon it in adoration! [vagheggiarlo]'

accompanying footnote:
' (5)  L. Althusser, _Lenin et la philosophie_, but also _Response to John
Lewis_. It remains to be said that other aspects of Althusser's thought is
fundamental for us [va tenuta presente in maniera fondamentale]. In
particular his negation of the 'idealist' category of the subject permits
us to confront the history of the workers' movement in a non-ideological
manner. As a particualrly effective pars destruens against all
surreptitious [surretizie?] continuities, introducing in effect, to my
mind, the concept of class composition itself - on all this see 'Ideology
and Ideological State Apparatuses'.'




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