Presentation

The collective work Lire le Capital, which is given here in a new edition, has been out of print and unobtainable for several years. Yet it continues to serve as a marker and reference in debates and research over the interpretation of Marx’s thought (even beyond the different currents of ‘Marxism’), whether the object and status of epistemology (caught between ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ models), or questions of political philosophy and theory of history raised by the critique of the category of ‘subject’, for which the notion of structuralism at one time served as a signal, despite uncertainties that will be mentioned below.

These three theoretical contexts were typical of the intellectual movement of the 1960s, the effects of which are still being felt today. Lire le Capital is particularly representative of this conjunction. It is situated in fact at the point of encounter (and mutual tension) of various projects that will be found constantly intertwined in the following texts, each of its authors seeking to bring to these their own illumination and particular emphasis. The first of these is the critical re-reading of Marx’s scientific work and the mobilization of his concepts across the field of the human sciences. The second is the recasting of the categories and figures of dialectics, in the light of the idea of ‘structural causality’. This in its turn is inseparable from a reflection on the scope of the concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, beyond the strict boundaries of the clinic, and a philosophical attempt to substitute for any theory of knowledge (that is, of its foundation or criteria) a problematic of the ‘symptomatic reading’ of texts, ‘theoretical practice’, and the material production of ‘knowledge effects’. The final project, which at least subjectively dominated all the others, was the quest for a Communist politics of Spinozist inspiration (or, as Althusser also formulated it at this time, ‘theoretically anti-humanist’), which would conceive this as the necessary becoming of freedom rather than the ‘emergence from the realm of necessity’ (in the celebrated Hegelian formula employed by Marx in Volume Three of Capital and taken up by Engels in Anti-Dühring).

For all these reasons, and without ever ceasing to arouse discussion and even argument, Lire le Capital ended up becoming for many people a kind of classic, both in France and abroad. Yet it was originally just the transcription of a seminar held at the École Normale Supérieure under the direction of Louis Althusser, who exercised at the time the functions of an ‘agrégé répétiteur’ and secretary of the Lettres section.¹ We shall briefly recall here these circumstances before giving the necessary indications on the production of the present edition and what distinguishes it from its predecessors.

The seminar from which Lire le Capital emerged was situated in the context of the activities of research training organized at the ENS on the proposal of teachers or the request of students (and most often after consultation between them). In principle, these activities were designed for students in a particular section (in this case, the Philosophy section), but they could also be open to those of other sections (Science, Literature), and to a greater or smaller number of listeners and participants from outside the establishment. The seminars organized by Althusser in the previous years were respectively devoted to The Young Marx (1961–2), The Origins of Structuralism (1962–3), Lacan and Psychoanalysis (1963–4). That of 1964–5, devoted to the collective reading of Marx’s Capital and the demonstration of its general philosophical importance, constituted a kind of recapitulation and reinvestment of the previous results.

The continuity of this work was ensured by the implicit or explicit (but not exclusive) reference to Althusser’s early theoretical essays (later published in Pour Marx, 1965, and Positions, 1976),² as well as by his continuing collaboration with a number of normaliens from the years 1958 and later, who, without strictly speaking forming a group, shared a certain number of interests and commitments. The seminar on Capital, envisaged at the end of the previous academic year, had thus been collectively prepared by Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Yves Duroux and Jacques Rancière (then fifth-year students at the ENS). Yves Duroux and Jean-Claude Milner first carried out a (pioneering) translation of Marx’s text ‘Forms Which Precede the Capitalist Mode of Production’.³ Robert Linhart, who had returned from a study trip to Algeria, was also associated with the preparatory discussions. Pierre Macherey, who had already left the École, returned to take part in these sessions. Roger Establet, also a former philosophy student, subsequently wrote a contribution that served as a conclusion to the volume.

It was natural that a circulation of ideas, not institutionalized but sustained, should also exist with other theoretical sites. We may mention above all the seminar of Georges Canguilhem at the Institut d’Histoire des Sciences of the Université de Paris, which a number of Althusser’s students attended year after year,⁴ as well as that of Lacan, which transferred to the ENS from January 1964.⁵ However, to confine ourselves here to the themes covered in Lire le Capital, exchanges of ideas or questions also took place with other groups. We may mention for example that at the time of publication of The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss came to the ENS to discuss his critique of the Sartrean conception of dialectics and history, in the presence of Lucien Goldmann and Lucien Sebag in particular. We may also mention the seminar of Charles Bettelheim on the theoretical problems of socialist planning at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (VIe section), and the work of Claude Meillassoux at the Centre d’Études Africaines directed by G. Balander at the EPHE.⁶

The seminar on Capital was held in the Salle des Actes of the ENS (rue d’Ulm) with some ten or so sessions between late January and early April 1965, in the presence of an audience that was larger than that of the usual sessions, but not more than some thirty persons. After Althusser’s opening, the first presentation was given by Maurice Godelier, who took up the themes of three articles he had published a few years earlier in the periodical Économie et Politique.⁷ He was followed, in this order, by Rancière, Macherey, then Rancière again with the latter part of his presentation, then Althusser himself, and finally Balibar, the presentations being on each occasion followed by discussions involving the whole audience.⁸

At the conclusion of the seminar, Althusser asked the participants (with the exception of Godelier) to write out and revisit their interventions. He himself wrote the Preface ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’ over a few days in June. Roger Establet, who had followed the seminar from a distance, sent his own paper ‘Presentation of the Plan of Capital’. The two volumes thus compiled would inaugurate, together with the anthology Pour Marx, the new ‘Théorie’ collection published by Éditions François Maspero under Althusser’s direction. They made up volumes II and III in this series, appearing in November 1965.⁹

In this first two-volume edition (Vol. 1: Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey; Vol. 2: Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet), Althusser’s Preface was followed by the following notice (Vol. 1, pp. 91–2):

The presentations included here have been reproduced in the order in which they were delivered. With one exception: P. Macherey’s paper, which comes after J. Rancière’s contribution, actually came between the first and second parts of the latter.

R. Establet’s text, as well as the Preface (first chapter of volume 1), were written later.

It may seem paradoxical, in a book dedicated to Capital, to leave a set of remarks bearing on the plan of Marx’s work to the end of the second volume. We decided on this for two reasons: firstly because the plan of Capital can only itself become an object of reflection on condition of being conceived as the index of problems identified by a critical reading of the work; and secondly because a ‘proper reading’ of the plan, summing up this critical reading, is the best possible introduction to a direct relation with Marx’s text.

The reader will be able to appreciate better than ourselves the encounters, cross-currents and divergences of our presentations. If we have each in our own way beaten our path through Marx’s text, it is only natural that, whatever our freedom or stubbornness, we have noted the traces of others before us, which have served us as bearings even when we have not crossed them. Certain important concepts that have served in this way, elaborated in different circumstances and present in these texts, are for example the notions grouped around the concept of ‘metonymic causality’, defined by J.-A. Milner in the course of an earlier seminar, which bears on the reading of Freud by J. Lacan.

We have often had occasion to correct the standard French translations, including that of Volume One of Le Capital by Roy, so as to stick more closely to the German text in certain passages that are particularly dense or charged with theoretical meaning. Throughout, in our reading, we have referred to the German text published by Dietz Verlag (Berlin), in which Capital and Theories of Surplus-Value both take up three volumes.¹⁰

L.A.

Early in 1968 (before the ‘events’ of May–June, but after the Chinese ‘Cultural Revolution’ and the establishment of Maoist organizations in France, towards which the co-authors of Lire le Capital took up differing positions), given that the first edition, which had been several times reprinted, was now out of print, the question arose of a new edition in small format that would make possible a wider distribution. The publisher François Maspero proposed an edition in two reduced volumes. On Althusser’s proposal, these two volumes were in the end limited to his own contributions and that of Étienne Balibar (volume 1 containing Althusser’s Preface: ‘From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy’, and chapter 1 through 5 of ‘The Object of Capital’; volume 2 containing chapters 6 to 9 and the Appendix of ‘The Object of Capital’ and Étienne Balibar’s ‘On the Fundamental Concepts of Historical Materialism’). For this occasion the texts were revised, corrected and modified on several points. The new edition, ‘completely remodelled’ (according to the jacket), appeared in late 1968. This also served as the basis for foreign translations in one volume, the first of which was the Italian edition (Feltrinelli, 1968), followed by Spanish (Siglo XXI, 1969) and English (New Left Books, 1970).¹¹

Volume 1 of this new edition contained the following Avertissement (‘Petite Collection Maspero’, pp. 5–6):¹²

1. This edition of Lire le Capital differs from the first edition in several respects.

On the one hand, it is an abridged edition, since we have omitted a number of important contributions (the papers of Rancière, Macherey and Establet) in order to allow the book to be published in a smaller format.

On the other, it is a revised and corrected edition, and therefore in part a new edition: several pages, notably in Balibar’s text, were published in French for the first time in this edition.

However, the corrections (cuts and additions) we have made to the original text concern neither the terminology nor the categories and concepts used, nor their internal relations, nor in consequence the general interpretation of Marx’s work that we have given.

This edition of Lire le Capital, although different from the first, and abridged and improved, therefore strictly reproduces and represents the theoretical positions of the original text.

2. This last comment was a necessary one. Indeed, out of respect to the reader and simple honesty, we have maintained an integral respect for the terminology and the philosophical positions of the first edition, although we should now find it indispensable to correct them at two particular points.

Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the ‘structuralist’ ideology (we said very clearly that the ‘combination’ to be found in Marx ‘has nothing to do with a combinatory’), despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to ‘structuralism’ (determination in the last instance, domination, overdetermination, production process, etc.), the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the ‘structuralist’ terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. With a very few exceptions (some very perceptive critics have made the distinction), our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion, as ‘structuralist’.

We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the ‘structuralist’ ideology. It is our hope that the reader will be able to bear this claim in mind, to verify it and to subscribe to it.

On the other hand, we now have every reason to think that, despite all the sharpening it received, one of the theses I advanced as to the nature of philosophy did express a certain ‘theoreticist’ tendency. More precisely, the definition of philosophy as a theory of theoretical practice (given in Pour Marx and again in Part One of Lire le Capital) is unilateral and therefore inaccurate. In this case, it is not merely a question of terminological ambiguity, but one of an error in the conception itself. To define philosophy in a unilateral way as the Theory of theoretical practices (and in consequence as a Theory of the differences between the practices) is a formulation that could not help but induce either ‘speculative’ or ‘positivist’ theoretical effects and echoes.

The consequences of this error in the definition of philosophy can be recognized and delimited at a few particular points in Part One of Lire le Capital. But with the exception of a few minor details, these consequences do not affect the analysis that we have made of Capital (‘L’objet du Capital’ and Balibar’s paper).

In a forthcoming series of studies, we shall have the opportunity of rectifying the terminology and correcting the definition of philosophy.

Louis Althusser

In 1973, Althusser and François Maspero wanted to expand these two volumes so as to restore the full text of the first edition. Jacques Rancière then asked for the republication of his own contribution to be preceded by a self-critical Preface entitled ‘Mode d’emploi’. As not all the participants could agree, this was rejected by the publisher, and the text appeared in no. 328 of Les Temps Modernes, November 1973.¹³ As a consequence, Rancière’s contribution, unmodified, made up volume III of Lire le Capital in the ‘Petite Collection Maspero’. Volume IV contained the contributions of Pierre Macherey (revised and corrected) and Roger Establet (unchanged). This ‘second edition’ of Lire le Capital was thus completed in four volumes (1968 and 1973), and was again reprinted several times. Volumes III and IV were preceded by a Publisher’s Note as follows:

It is in response to the desire often expressed by readers of the first two volumes of Lire le Capital published in the ‘Petite Collection Maspero’ that we have decided to publish these two new volumes, Lire le Capital III and Lire le Capital IV. The edition published in 1965 in the ‘Théorie’ collection, directed by Louis Althusser, has thus been fully restored.

The Publisher

The present edition, being in fact the third edition of Lire le Capital, was prepared by myself with the assistance of Pierre Bravo-Gala and Yves Duroux, and with the agreement of the living co-authors and Althusser’s heirs. The text follows that of the second edition, though the contributions have been placed again in the order of the first edition so as to restore the plan of the original book, and of the seminar from which it arose.

Étienne Balibar