I am proposing here an examination o f the text Reading Capital, written by Louis Althusser in 1965. I will consider it as a text in the history o f philosophy. In Reading Capital Althusser explicitly asks which philosophy provides the basis, the foundation, for Marx’s scientific work? In this sense, Reading Capital is, at the same time, a text in the history o f philosophy and a text in the philosophy o f science. In research on Marx’s philosophy, it (...) becomes essential in the Althusserian argument to consider Marx’s historical position in relation to the school o f classical economy, on the one hand, and to Hegel’s philosophy, on the other. In other words, it is a matter of determining Marx ’s p o sitio n in a history of science and in a history of philosophy. (shrink)

The Empire strikes again. This article puts forward a sharp critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Despite the book’s « post-modern » apparel, what it actually proposes is a pairing of two teleological « grand narratives». The first of these is a history of western political thought which is basically an apologia for the American constitution, whose ultimate manifestation is this hypothetical empire, the contemporary guise of an elusive political power. As for the second narrative, it sketches a history of (...) capitalism which, by way of its incarnations in the figures of the « professional worker » and the « mass worker », at last arrives at the figures of the « social worker » and the multitude, the latter being the-equally elusive- figure in a rather curious version of French communism. Faced with an epoch marked by a series of transformations requiring the most rigorous examination, telling such « stories » is a futile exercise. (shrink)