Science and epistempology in althusser and della volpe

Recuperating Science, Attenuating Philosophy: The Spinozism of Louis Althusser

The protracted effort to develop a Spinozist politics in the wake of Althusser’s theoretical intervention in Marxism has taken many forms. Some thinkers emphasize Spinozist strategy - occupying the fortress of the ideological enemy to hollow it out from within - whereas others focus on the implications of a Spinozist ontology which pulverizes the concept of the autonomous subject dear to liberal political theory. The underdeveloped quality of Althusser’s late writings on the materialism of the encounter, inspired above all by Spinoza and Machiavelli, has inspired myriad avenues of theoretical inquiry in turn. What the focus on Althusser’s late writings, and those of his theoretical progeny, obscures, however, are the essential ingredients of Althusser’s Spinozism which were established very early in his career. Long before Althusser developed a concept of philosophy as a mode of political strategy, he had developed a critique of philosophical idealism and empiricism (and their correlates in Marxist theory, humanism and pragmatism, respectively), which was inspired above all by French critiques of phenomenology grounded in Spinozism as a thoroughly rationalist mode of philosophy. By reconsidering Marxism in terms of an irreconcilable, though permanent and intransigent, confrontation between the discourses of science and ideology, Althusser translated Spinozist metaphysics into a rationalist philosophy for Marxism. In his efforts to recuperate science from its twice-over degradation in the hands of Stalinists and phenomenologists, Althusser developed a philosophy capable of forging a distinction between a scientific discourse and an ideological one. In doing so, however, he established the incapacity of science to determine its own results in advance, and, by the very same measure, he attenuated the capacity of philosophy to produce a coherent theory of political determination.

Epistemology and Practice: Marxist Dialectic According to Della Volpe and Althusser

On account of the importance and of the diffusion of the althusserian writings among an intellectuality still very wide, and on account of the significance very considerable of the work of Della Volpe ‘ though it hasn’t the same repercussion of Althusser’s writings; on account above all of the common points between these two authors, i.e. the epistemological reading of Marx’s work and an epistemological conception which come to an achievement of theory by practice (political practice), our aim is to propose a reading of the common points of Althusser’s and Della Volpe’s works and to compare at the same time their positions with the results of a research on Marx’s work of maturity.