The Althusserian Battlegrounds

Abstract

In the first chapter of his Absolute Recoil, Slavoj Žižek aims at a “materialist theory of subjectivity.” Louis Althusser’s theory serves him here as a point of reference, yet he regards it as an insufficient effort. In this chapter, I want to examine a few of Žižek’s criticisms and try to point out in what respect Althusser’s best solutions might lie exactly where Žižek sees his limitations. But before that, I would like to roughly point out what, conversely, from an Althusserian point of view, might be a critical reproach to Žižek’s endeavor. Žižek suggests the Hegelian figure of “absolute recoil” as that which all contemporary attempts of materialism lack; according to him, this figure would be the foundation for a materialism able to cope with the epistemological and political challenges of our times (AR¹ 4). This Hegelian “recoil” figure teaches that every impediment a thing encounters should not be regarded as an external obstacle but rather as the resistance of the thing against itself: for example, if an ideal appears to be constantly “thwarted” by empirical circumstances which prevent its full actualization, we should not blame the empirical world for that but instead understand that the problem lies within the ideal itself (AR 56). Or, to take another example, if an emancipatory theory turns, during its actualization, into a most repressive nightmare, then this is not to be understood as a simple abuse of the noble theory—”we should rather indicate how it lies dormant in it as a possibility” (AR 40).