This article seeks to locate Louis Althusser’s late preoccupation with the status of Marxists in philosophy through a survey of archival and marginal texts written on and amid struggles within the French education system. This material evidences that Althusser held a long-term ambition to reconcile the demands of being a Marxist in his professional life with the demands of being a philosopher in his political life. On this basis, this article offers an expanded contextualisation of the stakes that weighed upon Althusser’s shifting understanding and inhabitation of a Marxist position in philosophy. It aims to show that Althusser’s involvement with, and changing attitudes towards, the educational institution (and in particular the teaching of philosophy) played a significant role in forging the discontinuities in his conceptualisation of Marxist philosophy. The article additionally traces the afterlife of this practice in the work of Jacques Derrida and the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement de a philosophe (GREPH).
This chapter aims to introduce the problematic of the end of philosophy in Marx and argue for its central place in the historical development of debates around the relation of philosophy to Marxism. Surveying the motif as it appears across the writings of Marx and Engels, the chapter will clarify the distinct formulations that make up the textual sources of this problem. It will then trace the waning of this problem during the Second International and locate its re-instantiation in the interwar years as a challenge to the so-called Marxist orthodoxy. It will then follow the displacement of this interwar formulation into French debates of the Cold War period, focusing specifically on Henri Lefebvre's role in re-surfacing the motif to challenge Stalinist dogmatism in the French Communist Party. The chapter will conclude by linking this longer pre-history to Louis Althusser's effort to respond to the end of philosophy injunction in Marx during the mid-sixties and track the influence that this legacy has had upon contemporary debates around Marxism and philosophy.
This article seeks to locate the seminar series that Derrida delivered at the École normale superieure during the mid-seventies within the broader political and theoretical aspirations of the Groupe de recherches sur l’enseignement philosophique (GREPH), particularly considering the group’s thematization and politicisation of pedagogy in the history of philosophy and the philosophical establishment. It also aims to contextualise Derrida’s recourse to a Marxian and Marxist problematic as part of these aspirations in view of his longer-term engagement with the question of philosophy in Marx and Marxism. The article brings together these two contextual dimensions of Derrida’s teaching activities at the ENS through a close reading of the seminar series he delivered on the agrégation topic of Theory and Practice in 1976–7. This reading focuses specifically on how Derrida mobilised the Althusserian problematic to attempt to transform the role and function of the agrégés-répétiteur (a position he shared with Althusser at the ENS) within the frame of reference of his political work with GREPH.
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