G. M. Goshgarian
The present book contains translations of all the texts by Althusser that Jacques Bidet assembled, edited and published in French under the title Sur la reproduction (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1995, 2nd ed. 2011). It also contains a translation of Bidet’s introduction to the 1995 edition of Sur la reproduction, reproduced virtually unchanged in the second edition, as well as a translation of Etienne Balibar’s preface to the second edition. Written in French, Balibar’s text initially appeared in Hebrew as the preface to a Hebrew translation (trans. Ariella Azoulay, Tel Aviv, Resling, 2003) of an extract from the text that Althusser published in La Pensée in 1970. Althusser’s 1970 piece first appeared in English in a collection of his writings, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London, New Left Books, 1971, pp. 121–73) translated by Ben Brewster. Titled ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)’, Brewster’s translation has been republished a number of times since, in reprints of Lenin and Philosophy and also in Essays on Ideology (London, Verso, 1984). It has been reprinted in the present book as well. The 1976 ‘Note sur les AIE’ first saw the light in Peter Schöttler’s 1977 German translation and first appeared in English in 1983 (‘Extracts from Althusser’s “Note on the ISAs” ’, trans. Jeremy Leaman, Economy and Society, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 455–65) as the appendix to an essay by Mike Gane. Leaman’s translation omits only a short passage at the beginning of the ‘Note’.
Balibar’s Preface, Bidet’s Introduction, and all the other material collected in Sur la reproduction, with the exception of the ‘Note’ and the ‘ISAs Essay’ are here published in English for the first time.
My translation is based on the second French edition of Sur la reproduction, which I have compared throughout with Althusser’s manuscript at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Saint Germain la Blanche Herbe, near Caen. I have also profited from reading Frieder Otto Wolf’s German translation and his notes to it (Über die Reproduktion, 2 vols., Hamburg, VSA, 2011–12).
At the publisher’s request, Althusser’s idiosyncratic capitalization and italicization have been standardized throughout. Specifically, Althusser, like many French writers, tends to capitalize only the first word in a compound term used in a technical sense, but sometimes capitalizes both (or all three: Appareil Idéologique d’Etat). I have capitalized every word in such terms of the author’s own coinage, even when Althusser capitalizes only one. Thus Appareil répressif d’Etat becomes ‘Repressive State Apparatus’. I have not capitalized other terms, such as Productive Forces or State, that Althusser generally tends to capitalize.
Leaman’s English translation of ‘Note on the ISAs’ was based on Schöttler’s German translation. I have made a new, rather different, translation of the ‘Note’ based on the French. There are also disparities between Ben Brewster’s elegant and, with rare exceptions, accurate English translation of the ‘ISAs Essay’ and my translation of the corresponding passages in Althusser’s manuscript. Some of them reflect differences between the 1970 La Pensée text and the hastily composed manuscript. Others are due to choices for which I bear the sole responsibility.