Warren Montag

Materiality, Singularity, Subject: Response to Callari, Smith, Hardt, and Parker

This essay is a response to four commentaries on the book Louis Althusser. Michael Hardt argues that the books emphasis on Althussers critique of the subject and his questioning (with Pierre Macherey) of the notion of the author is itself conjunctural, made possible by the hegemony of “immaterial labor” in the recent period. I respond that the subversion of the subject emerged with the legal subject itself—that is, at the dawn of capitalism in the seventeenth century. Similarly, Antonio Callari wonders whether I have not unduly privileged the concept of author and thereby overemphasized the cultural in Althussers work. I address this problem by pointing to the fact that authorship is one of the most illustrative versions of the legal subject and operates far beyond the realms of literature, as the work of Hobbes shows.  Andrew Parker asks why I insist on the term “materiality,” arguing that the term remains as ill defined in my work as in Althussers ISAs essay. In response I maintain that the term has a specific meaning in literary and cultural studies in which most previous practices of interpretation or analysis work to reduce the text to something, whether an internal structure or an external presence, declared more real and more true. Finally, I agree with Jason Smiths comment that at stake in the discussion of materiality is the question of cause. If the text is material, it cannot be understood through the causal forms of expression, emanation, or representation.

From Clinamen to Conatus: Deleuze, Lucretius, Spinoza

In 1961, Gilles Deleuze published a short essay titled “Lucrece et le naturalisme” in the journal Etudes philosophiques.1 At the end of the sixties, a version of the essay, approximately two pages longer, which included the entirety of the earlier version (with the exception of a diagram) appeared as one of five appendices to The Logic of Sense.2 It was presented under the heading “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy” where it was preceded and, in a certain sense, introduced by an essay on Plato, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” also a revised version of an earlier essay originally published under the title “Renverser le platonisme” (“To Reverse Platonism”) in the Revue de metaphysique et de morale in 1967.3

Shattered Syllogisms: Andrew Cole’s The Birth of Theory

THAT IS MORE AUDACIOUS THAN IT MIGHT FIRST SEEM: “THEORY, AS WE have known it and practiced it for a century or more, inds its origin in Hegel—and Hegel himself inds his theory, his dialectic, in the Middle Ages” (xiii). In the face of the prevailing indiference, if not hostility, to questions of origin, descent, and inheritance in theory today (although Cole’s “today” oten seems to refer less to the present than to the francophone sixties and the anglophone eighties), we cannot acknowledge Hegel as the real father of theory, let alone understand the efects of theory’s unknown paternity. Cole’s statement of purpose is clear enough, and whatever ambiguity remains will be quickly dispelled: Hegel, he argues, “begot” theory and is thus “responsible” for it (x, xi). To position Hegel as the begetter or progenitor of theory, who is by virtue of this fact both causally and legally or morally responsible, is important here: it allows Cole to sort through multiple claimants (or suspects) and extend recognition where he feels it is due but has been denied. From this perspective, to complicate notions of origin and “birth” beyond what the title’s Nietzschean reference would authorize—that is, to suggest that theory has neither birth nor origin but emerged through an unevenly developed and historically contingent concatenation of multiple causal series—is nothing more than an evasion, another way of saying that theory has many fathers, an absurdity that amounts to saying that theory has no (legitimate) father. Cole proposes to administer a kind of philosophical paternity test and thus to settle the matter once and for all. Much here can and should be questioned. The most obvious problem concerns what we mean by “theory” and to what extent it can be understood as distinct from other ields of inquiry, not simply logically but also in its material and institutional existence. For a number of reasons, however, I want to take up another problem or set of problems that emerges with the restoration of the rights and privileges of the concept of the origin, especially in a work whose central WARREN MONTAG is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College. His most recent book (cowritten with Mike Hill) is The Other Adam Smith (Stanford UP, 2014). He is also the editor of Decalages, a journal focused on Louis Al thusser and his circle, and the translator of Etienne Balibar’s Identity and Dif-

Lacan and feminine sexuality

Jacques Lacan. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne. Edited by Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. New York: W. W. Norton., 1983. 187 pp.

Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries

9.95 paper. Jane Gallop. The Daughters Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1982. 164 pp.

The New Spinoza

19.95 cloth.