A Subterranean Althusser

Each of these books provides a sound basis for what Stefano Pippa calls the "'second reception' of Louis Althusser's philosophy, triggered by the publication of many posthumous writings after the philosopher's death in 1990" (2019, 18). Whereas Pippa affectionately refers to Emilio de Ípola as an "old Althusserian" (18) who has sought in his book to reassess Althusser's legacy and to reactivate it for a new generation, Pippa himself appears as what could be called a "millennial Althusserian" who boldly takes up that challenge by zeroing in on a single concept—a "fil rouge traversing the whole of Althusser's philosophy, undergoing a progressive elaboration throughout the years, at the same time that Althusser confronts different problems in his attempt to produce a breakthrough in the Marxist tradition" (241). Let us begin with de Ìpola's book.

Emilio de Ípola is an Argentinian sociologist who not only studied in Paris during the 1960s but also attended Althusser's seminars. Althusser: The Infinite Farewell (first published in Spanish in 2007) is a poetic recollection of those years; indeed, it is an elegy to Althusser, his circle of friends, and the profound impact he had on an entire generation of Marxist intellectuals and militants around the world, and especially in Latin America. It is a way for de Ípola not only to bear witness to a long-gone conjuncture in which socialism was on the ascendancy but also to endure a present time of political failure and retreat. It is even a way for him to invoke or summon a new time—with new political deeds yet to be accomplished.

Instead of indulging in nostalgia, de Ìpola reconstructs the "subterranean current" of Althusser's writings in a way that resists the conventional periodization of a "classic," "transitional," and "last" Althusser. This concise book is organized into a prologue, four main chapters, and a conclusion. In the prologue, de Ìpola offers a (Straussian) distinction between "exoteric" and "esoteric" and informs the reader that his aim "is to give an account of Althusser's philosophical itinerary and especially of the conceptual and political tensions and conflicts that unsettled, like a kind of silent but constant turbulence, the unfolding of his entire oeuvre" (2018, 5).

Chapter one takes up the distinction between Althusser's "declared" project and his "subterranean" project. The former project "explicitly presented itself as a strategy aimed at accomplishing a leftist transformation of the French Communist Party line through a theoretical labor of renewal and development of Marx's thought" (16), namely by "reestablishing the entire Marxist theory on the solid terrain of Science" (24). Yet for de Ípola very little of this declared project retains its value today. As he confesses, "…today I am not sure what is more surprising: the illusion that made those questions [of the scientificity of Marxism] seem to be of fundamental importance or the pathetic transience of that illusion" (26).

By contrast, Althusser's other project "existed in a larval state underneath the explicit positions" and "except for sudden appearances…remained hidden for a long time" (21). De Ípola explains what was at stake in this subterranean project by advancing two theses: 1) "Lévi-Straussian structuralism is the horizon with which and against which Althusserian thought struggles; and 2) "Althusser's subterranean thought takes on the form of a philosophy that sets as its objective and assumes the possibility of rendering politics thinkable and possible" (22). In his book, de Ípola wants to convey the sense not just of both projects—exoteric and esoteric—but how the tension between them enables one to read Althusser symptomatically just as the latter had read Marx, Freud, Rousseau, Machiavelli, and others in a way that was attentive to their gaps, silences, slips, and contradictions. In other words, de Ípola wants to convey "the encounter of Althusser with himself, which is to say, with the most profound and authentic aspects of his theoretical and political thought" (28).

In the densely argued second chapter...