How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy by Louis Althusser

Author:Louis Althusser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474280556
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

14

The time has come to discuss another category that has been waiting for us kindly to concern ourselves with it, since we have summoned it to appear before the ‘Tribunal’ of our limited reason together with the object. I mean the subject, S.

Obviously – we have already realized this about the object, which we have evoked by way of its truth, namely Being – these categories are of interest not just to the theory of knowledge, but to philosophy as a whole. It is in this spirit that we shall say a few words on the Subject.

The subject can be what one is talking about even when one talks about the object. At all events, the subject is then identified. The subject can be the one who speaks and says ‘I’, as he says ‘you’ to an interlocutor who is present and ‘he’ of a third party who is impersonal and absent. ‘He is the one who is absent’: the absent person, the impersonal person, as Benveniste very nicely puts it.1 This is a way of saying that language, especially verbs, cannot be employed without identification, hence without the identity of subjects, which designate the one who speaks, the one to whom one speaks, and the one of whom one speaks, in the singular and plural. Identification, identity: it is plainly I, it is plainly you, it is plainly he; there can be no question of an error about who is who. Otherwise, all discourse would be impossible, no reality would be identifiable, and nothing would be identical with itself. Nothing would be one, this one.

There we have what the subject adds to Being: it is plainly he, not another, this individual who is such because he cannot be cut in half. Thus Hegel tells the story of Solomon rendering a judgement without appeal in the case of two women both claiming to be the mother of the same child: since each of them says that the child is hers, let it be cut in half! This made them cry out in horror, for the concept of the individual, as the word suggests, cannot be divided and is stronger than any putative property that would divide or fragment it. We have to go back to what is prior to [en deçà de] every subject, the unconscious, in order to acknowledge, as Freud had said and as Melanie Klein showed with respect to very young infants,2 that there exist fantasies of partial objects, hence that fragmentation can be a form of existence, and that the non-division [l’indivis] of the subject presupposes this primordial fragmentation as that which it must go beyond in the Oedipus complex in order to attain to the existence of the subject: one and indivisible, like the Republic or God. For the fact is that, in philosophy as well as politics, all division is deadly.

It is plainly he, not someone else, and he is one and indivisible: such is the subject, in principle. Thus it is the subject

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