The Althusserian Definition of "Theory"

ALAIN BADIOU

What does Althusser have in mind when he uses the word theory? This word, in some sense, in Reading Capital, is what I would call a "master-word." The exact intention of Louis Althusser is to formulate a proof that Capital is, I quote, "the absolute beginning of the history of a science" (RCC 13). And the provisional definition of "science," the absolute beginning of which he speaks, is the "theory of history." So, the problem is to give a proof that, reading Capital, we can identify the absolute beginning of the theory of history. And so, we find the word theory present at the very beginning of Althusser's investigation, as he summarizes the intellectual strategy of Reading Capital. But, immediately, we run into difficulties ...

First, what exactly constitutes the absolute beginning of a science? The absolute beginning of a science is not the same thing as the pure apparition of something of theoretical value. Why? Because the birth of a theory is very often, perhaps always, the revolution of a preexistent theory: a theory comes, in general, not in the void but by revolution, as the transformation of an old or preexistent theory. Engels explains this point in the preface of the second volume of Capital, which is a very important reference for Althusser himself: a new theory is not the creation ex nihilo of a new theoretical dimension. In the best case, it is a complete revolution of an old theory ... that is, in the case of Capital, a complete revolution of classical economic theory. So, and this is my first point, theory is not the name of newness as such; it is not pure invention. Its value is a differential one. It is the distance — the écart — between two different theories. This point will be a constance, a sort of fixed point in Reading Capital. All beginnings and also all contradictions must be reduced to differences. All that really exists is an articulated complex of differences. This is the principal idea of the end of Althusser's introduction, at the beginning of Reading Capital ... the text that announces the passage from Capital to Marx's philosophy.

Any theory possesses its discursive order, and thus the effective existence of a theory is always the immanent organization of concepts in the system. This is the last word of Althusser's text, "system," and we shall see much more systématicité of the system in the chapters that follow (RCC 72). But of what system does Althusser speak? Of the system of thinking as a totalité, of the thinking of totalité. So, theory, as a word, becomes in the end what Althusser names quite precisely the systematicité of the system. Theory thus occurs alongside other words like totalité, thinking, and concept, while system, as systematicité, is dissolved in a complex of differences. The word theory is not a stable word, and the history of the word in Althusser's text is much more the history of a sort of vanishing, of its décomposition. So, my argument here will be something like the story of the vanishing of theory; the theoretical vanishing of theory.

Theory cannot be understood, in the context of the Althusserian text, from the point of view of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. This is a significant change from the Marxist tradition. In a common Marxist tradition, the relation between theory and practice is a very important one. Althusser is constantly attempting, in fact, to destroy this opposition between theory and practice. Why is this point so important? Why is it so important for Althusser to explain that the word theory cannot be understood from the point of view of its relationship to practice? I think it is because this constitutes the definition of the immanent materialism of Althusser, its general definition. Althusser always wants to replace the guarantee of relation by the real of production: this is the crux of Althusser's intervention. And if, after all, a dialectical relationship is a relation, it is not by itself a production. So we cannot understand clearly what constitutes a theory only by its dialectical relationship to practice. We must observe and determine to what extent that theory must also be a production, and must be by itself a production, and not in an external relationship to its opposite.

Althusser affirms a new form of materialism by the destruction of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice: not a materialism of relations but a materialism of production. And this is a very important point. Consequently, we also have the impossibility of determining theory, not only as the opposite term of practice, but as a result of practices, as something which is the abstract result of concrete practices. In a common vision of therelationship between practices and theory, theory is a sort of abstract synthesis, the origin of which is practice. For Althusser, we encounter what he named "pragmatism." Pragmatism is precisely defined by the idea that the verification of the truth of a theory lies in practice. Althusser affirms that a true understanding of theory must be the discovery of an immanent guarantee of truth, and not its external guarantee verified in the field of practices. Althusser is truly an immanentist thinker, at every level of its determination. A truth of a theory — if truth exists, if there is something like truth — lies purely within the theoretical process, inside the process of scientific theory and not in the form of an external guarantee. And this, naturally, introduces the question of theory as production and not as an expression, a theory which is not a result of some complex of social or historical practices. And this leads finally to the question, which will be my final question, as it is in the text of Althusser himself: the question of the productive mechanism, the productive apparatus, the materiality of production itself in the case of theory.

Althusser refuses any dialectical vision of the pair theory-practice. Theory cannot be understood by its...