Reading Marxist Texts

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David McInerney's fuller post on his decision to
"follow the materialist road out of the Lacanian dead-end" referred to
Warren Montag as well as many others in the academic network.

Although largely ignorant of this whole field, I was reminded with
pleasure of the insights in Warren Montag's essay on Spinoza and Althusser
in "The Althusserian Legacy" (Verso 1993) about *reading*

 - whether, it seems to me, we are talking about reading the old
or the new testament.

"Althusser writes in [Reading Capital]: 'the first man ever to pose
the problem of *reading* and in consequence, of *writing*, was Spinoza,
and he was the first man in the world to have proposed both a theory of
history and philosophy of the opacity of the immediate. With him, for the first
time ever, a man linked together in this way the essence of reading and the
essence of history in a theory of the difference between the imaginary
and the true.'"

"...Althusser proposed the notion of the symptomatic reading of Marx,
a notion which stressed the necessarily contradictory character of
theoretical texts, not as a fault for which they might be reproached
but as the very principle of their intelligibility.."

This insight accentuates for me the pleasure of the detailed concrete
non-dogmatic revisiting of the texts of the old testament, for the potential
links with understanding and with practice.

I take this opportunity to raise this point, because I think dogmatism
has given a bad name to the practice of quoting from the marxist classics,
(which I enjoy) the implication being that if Marx or Lenin said something,
it must be right.

However now in this electronic medium we have the opportunity to
visit and revisit the texts and to compare from many different points of view
what they were getting at, and why the authors wrote what they did when
they did. Ultimately the fullest truth lies beyond our powers of
magnification but the struggle to do reach it brings us face to face with the
finest grain of the contradiction between the imaginary and the true.

As this list is entirely about reading and writing, I wonder if anyone agrees.


Chris B,
London.





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