Affective capitalism, higher education and the constitution of the social body Althusser, Deleuze, and Negri on Spinoza and Marxism

Abstract

In a little book published nearly 20 years ago, Postsructuralism, Neoliberalism and Marxism: Between Theory and Politics (Peters, 2001) I made a simple argument, summarised in the Preface as: ‘poststructuralism is neither a form of anti-Marxism nor antithetical to Marxism’. I sought to demonstrate this observation through a series of critical engagements with the work of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, maintaining: ‘They have either been Marxist or still christen themselves as Marxist and invent new ways of reading and writing Marx’ (p. vii). I saw this discussion as important to initiate because of a looming crisis in educational theory that, on the basis of the lack of interpenetration of national philosophical traditions, threatened to turn the modernity/postmodernity debate into a sterile affair. The stand-off in the 1980s between German Critical Theory and French Poststructuralism (framed up in charicatures) dominated discussion well out of proportion to its theoretical significance. In one sense it was about polemics, initiated by Habermas, on the basis of Hegelian Marxism, against French poststructuralists whom he likened to the ‘Young Conservatists’ of the Weimar Republic (Habermas, 1981). This was an exordinary claim by Habermas that he later retracted as his attitude softened to Foucault and Derrida (Peters, 1994). Habermas grew up in post-war Germany in the shadow of the Nuremberg trials and came to requestion Heidegger Nazi afilliation in 1953. On Heidegger‘s silence, Habermas systematically moved away from Heidegger’s influence and outside the German tradition to critically refashion the liberal democratic traditon. It is perhaps ironic that the long French engagement with and exordinary impact of Heidegger‘s philosophy had inspired generations of existentialists, phenomenologists and poststructuralists. The latter were especially influenced by Heideggers’ reading of Nietzsche and the attempt to recast truth as a phenomenological search based on experience rather than as a matter of deduction based on a priori concepts. There is no underestimating the Heideggerian effects on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Irigaray and many others. Most famously, in Germany Hebert Marcuse (1964) who studied with Heidegger at Freiburg University from 1928 to 1932, pursued the prospects of Heideggerian Marxism up until the rediscovery of The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1932.1 I began my book with a chapter that discussed ‘Poststructural Marxisms’, starting with a couple of orienting quotations from Heidegger in which he is entirely complimentary of Marx: one where he comments that the reversal of metaphysics accomplished by Marx completes the inner possibilities of philosophy, and the other where he suggests that the Marxist view of history is superior to all other accounts.2 I was trying to show that the notion of Marxism that inhabited most critical work in education and the social sciences was often simple-minded and sometimes an unreflective fiction; and, that after structuralism, ‘after Althusser’, reading Marx had become a favourite critical activity that had released Marx from the confines of Hegel’s metaphysics and his Christian eschatology. At that point,