The Finite Dialectic

In recent years there have been a slew of publications dealing with the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx. It could be argued that these works follow the lead of Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, each of which argues for a relation between Marx and post-structuralism. Or it could be that the turn to Marx, or to a relation between Marx and post-structuralism, reflects not so much a change in the intellectual atmosphere, in the old battles for intellectual hegemony, as a change in the political and economic atmosphere. The years of neoliberal restructuring of the university and subsequent austerity cuts have made it harder and harder to separate post-structuralist concerns with the nature of subjectivity, knowledge and desire from Marxist concerns with exploitation. Problems with capitalism have become increasingly hard to avoid in recent years, and thus we see a turn to Marx in academia as well as in mainstream media.

John Grant’s book is not about the relationship between post-structuralism and Marx, but about the contemporary relevance of dialectical thinking. This shift takes us to the core of much of the post-structural opposition to Marx: the dialectic, with its central notions of totality and contradiction. The post-structuralist thinkers that argued for the importance of Marx, such as Deleuze, the late Derrida, and Foucault, were trenchant critics of the dialectic; Marx, materialism, and the critique of capital could be salvaged, but the dialectic was forever associated with the original sins of totality, teleology, and identity. There have even been attempts to save Marx from the dialectic, to produce a non-dialectical Marx in which immanence, power, or difference takes the place of the dialectic. Grant tempers this critique of the dialectic by returning to dialectical thinkers such as Althusser and Adorno who tried to separate the dialectic from its idealistic tendencies, to produce a dialectic without a subject, totality, or telos. By bringing together the criticisms of the dialectic with the most profound revisions of dialectical thinking, Grant is able to produce a dialectical revision of sorts, in which negations of the dialectic converge with its revision. The opposition to dialectics is a determinate negation, one that retains as much as it negates.

Grant begins his book with an examination of the Phenomenology of Spirit. His interpretation follows Adorno and Zizek, and anticipates such works as Fredric Jameson’s The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit and Étienne Balibar’s Citoyen sujet et autres essais d’anthropologie philosophique, in arguing that the Phenomenology is less a systematic exposition of the march of spirit than of the dialectic of disjuncture between experience and concept. Grant thus breaks with what he refers to as the onto-structural understanding of the dialectic, in which the various stages are the stages of being and its conceptual articulation, stressing instead the finitude of the Phenomenology, the tension in it between experience and its historical situation (17). It is not a matter, however, of choosing the existential understanding of the dialectic, dominated by the struggle for recognition, against the onto-structural interpretation of the unfolding of being, but of recognizing that the tension between experience and structure or logic is, as Grant understands it, the dialectic itself.

Louis Althusser’s articulation of a materialist dialectic draws a line of demarcation against both an existential interpretation--and any humanism--and the idealism and teleology of the onto-structural understanding. This makes him an unlikely figure for Grant’s project. However, in the second chapter, Grant excavates a provocative and surprising passage from Althusser’s early writing on Hegel, a passage in which Althusser argues for the superiority of Hegel over Marx. Althusser argues that Marx’s method is predicated on an anthropology of labor, while Hegel’s dialectic is one in which there is no first time, no ontological or anthropological postulate, but every starting point, every given is negated, becoming the initial moment of a dialectic (Grant 38). While Althusser’s celebration of...