Together with Louis Althusser’s book For Marx, Reading Capital represents one of the foundational texts of the school of “structuralist Marxism” which transformed the face of modern philosophy and social theory. Presided over by the magnetic and intellectually coruscating figure of Althusser, the structuralist Marxists attempted no less than an intellectual revolution against dominant interpretations of Marx. Seeking to cleanse Marx of all Hegelian impurities and recast his thought on a rigorously scientific basis, in this work Althusser and one of his most brilliant students and colleagues, Etienne Balibar, subjected Marx’s method in Capital, his critique of classical political economy, and the fundamental terms of historical materialism, to searching textual analysis and challenging conceptual reconstruction. Inaugurating a new way of reading Marx that was to prove both intensely stimulating and capable of generating fierce controversy, Reading Capital is a work that cannot be bypassed by anyone interested in Marxism, and in theory more generally, in this century.

Reading Capital

Politics & Social Sciences

Étienne Balibar

louis-althusser

Politics & Government

Verso

We maintain that the invention of psychoanalysis discovers its true specificity at the precise point when Freud, having listened well to the appeals of his analysand, refuses to concern himself with making her 'happy again,' with recalibrating her relation to reality so as to help her finally achieve her 'full potential.' We can read this specificity at the outset, in Freud s early Studies on Hysteria, which concludes with these words of 'encouragement' to the analysand: 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.' One might say - and this would be to say nearly the same thing - that psychoanalysis arrives at the domain proper to it (and only it) when Freud, rather than respond to his patient's demand to simply get rid of her suffering - to excise, annihilate, or at least cauterize the symptom that stands between her and the world in which she recalls she once took so much satisfaction - instead allies himself to her symptom, positions himself as its oblique addressee. In so doing, Freud absents psychoanalysis once and for all from the normalizing schema of 'therapy,' a schema oriented toward the elimination of what is beyond the pleasure principle - today we call this orientation 'biopower' - and makes of it a practice oriented toward the subject's construction of a knowledge about the jouissance which alone marks her singularity. The promise of psychoanalysis, then, is neither personal happiness nor a happy return to the shared norms of the social field, but the articulation of a singular truth that opens up for the subject a horizon for creative action.

Umbr(a): Utopia

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Joseph Jenkins

Juliet Flower MacCannell

Kōjin Karatani

Joan Copjec

Danielle Bergeron

Adrian Johnston

Felix Ensslin

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx

Routledge

De La Individualidad A La Transindividualidad. Spinoza

BRUJAS

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Books by Étienne Balibar