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WORK TITLE: The Other Adam Smith
WORK NOTES: with Mike Hill
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/21/1952
WEBSITE:
CITY: Los Angeles
STATE: CA
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.oxy.edu/faculty/warren-montag * http://heymancenter.org/people/warren-montag/ * http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/1930 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Montag
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 21, 1952; married; children: Jacob, Elisa.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A.; Claremont Graduate University, M.A., Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, Brown Family Professor in Literature, English, and Comparative Literary Studies.
WRITINGS
Editor, Décalages: A Journal of Althusser Studies. Coeditor of a special issue of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Contributor of chapters to books and articles to publications, including Culture, Theory, and Critique; Global South; Multitudes; Minnesota Review; and Differences.
SIDELIGHTS
Warren Montag is a writer and educator based in Los Angeles, California. He is the Brown Family Professor in Literature, English, and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College. Montag is also the editor of Décalages: A Journal of Althusser Studies. He has written articles that have appeared in academic publications and chapters that have been featured in books. Montag has written, cowritten, and edited books, some of which focus on philosophers.
Bodies, Masses, Power and Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere
In 2000, Montag released Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. In this volume, he analyzes the influential philosopher’s attitudes toward politics and his materialism. Montag compares Spinoza’s work to that of other philosophers, including Locke and Hobbes. Writing in the Review of Metaphysics, Branka Arsic asserted: “The value and importance of Montag’s analysis resides … in his effort to emerge from Spinoza’s impasse, which is to say to push Spinoza’s materialism further, beyond the limits imposed by the philosopher himself, and to try to overturn the affect of joy and transform it into a force of action that leads toward individual liberation. For that reason his book should also be read as a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of radical democracy.”
Montag collaborated with Mike Hill to edit Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. The essays in the book focus on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, an important work by Jürgen Habermas. Kent Worcester, contributor to Library Journal, commented: “Hill’s chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is … strong, while Montag’s ‘The Pressure of the Street’ is polemically charged if heavy-handed.”
The Unthinkable Swift and Althusser and His Contemporaries
The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man finds Montag analyzing the work of Jonathan Swift. Discussing the book in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Frank Boyle suggested: “His thesis is that Swift is so successful in exploiting the contradictions of the historical moment in which he lived, that his representations of this moment go beyond and often work directly against Swift’s own ironic intentions. Montag sees Swift as unwittingly figuring the as yet unthinkable truth of a modern materialist view of the world.” Boyle added: “This is a book well worth reading, both for its important historical and philosophical consideration of Swift’s work, and for the way it illustrates how Swift’s mirror continues to undermine even his finest readers.”
Montag discusses the theories of Louis Althusser in Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War. K. Tololyan, critic in Choice, remarked: “Accessible to experienced undergraduates, this will be a required resource on Althusser for the next generation of readers.” Derek Wall, reviewer on the Marx & Philosophy Society Web site, asserted: “Beg, steal, borrow, or even buy Warren Montag’s book on Althusser, it is very good. While he suggests that there can be no last word on Althusser, Montag’s work provides an impressive overview which is a delight to read. Montag argues that Althusser’s work draws on a range of thinkers and cannot be understood in isolation from Spinoza, Lacan and, above all, his contemporaries such as Derrida and Foucault.” Wall continued: “Montag has read, carefully, a huge amount of material written by Althusser such as notes from lectures, letters and unfinished essays, which have only become available in recent years. As well as gathering new material and reading it with care, Montag is able to discuss the most difficult and challenging of philosophical questions with great clarity.” Writing on the Radical Philosophy Web site, Stefano Pippa commented: “Beyond the specific points on which one might agree or disagree, this is a much-needed book. It extricates Althusser from the ‘gnawing criticism of mice’ and paves the way for a renewed interest in his work, one that takes into account the unpublished materials that emerged after his death–not only to make possible an analysis of the ‘late’ Althusser (the Althusser of the aleatory materialism explicitly elaborated in the 1980s), but also for a reconsideration of the Althusser of the 1960s and 1970s.” Pippa added: “As to whether Althusser’s philosophy can still produce effects today, in a very different historical conjuncture, Montag appears hesitant. But if it does, it will be thanks in some degree to his research and to the analysis proposed in his book.”
The Other Adam Smith
Montag and Hill worked together again on the 2015 volume The Other Adam Smith. In this book, they discuss the work of the eighteenth-century thinker.
Choice reviewer D.A. Robinson suggested: “This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith.” Wall, the contributor to the Marx & Philosophy Society Web site, commented: “This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed.” Wall continued: “Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith’s work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Choice, Dececember, 2013, K. Tololyan, review of Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War, p. 618; April, 2016, D.A. Robinson, review of The Other Adam Smith, p. 1155.
Journal of English and Germanic Philology, July, 1996, Frank Boyle, review of The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, p. 442.
Library Journal, June 1, 2001, Kent Worcester, review of Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere, p. 196.
Review of Metaphysics, June, 2003, Branka Arsic, review of Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries, p. 892.
ONLINE
Heyman Center Web site, http://heymancenter.org/ (March 28, 2017), author profile.
Marx & Philosophy Society Web site, http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/ (December 31, 2013), Derek Wall, review of Althusser and His Contemporaries; (July 23, 2015), Derek Wall, review of The Other Adam Smith.
Occidental College Web site, http://www.oxy.edu/ (March 28, 2017), author profile.
Radical Philosophy, https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/ (March 3, 2017), Stefano Pippa, review of Althusser and His Contemporaries.
LC control no.: n 94048609
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Montag, Warren
Birth date: 19520321
Found in: The unthinkable Swift, 1994: CIP t.p. (Warren Montag)
Louis Althusser, 2003: t.p. (Warren Montag) jkt. (prof. of
English and comparative literature, Occidental Coll.,
Los Angeles) CIP data sheet (b. 03-21-1952)
Hill, M. The other Adam Smith, 2014: ECIP t.p. (Warren
Montag)
Stanford University Press website, July 1, 2014 (Warren
Montag is Professor of English at Occidental College)
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Warren Montag
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Warren Montag (born March 21, 1952)[1] is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosopher Spinoza.
Contents
1 Overview
2 Publications
2.1 Books
2.2 Journal Special Issues
2.3 Essays
2.4 Translations
3 External links
4 Endnotes and references
Overview
Montag's work has focused on the origins and internal contradictions of political liberalism and individualism, and has demonstrated, following the suggestions of Étienne Balibar, the existence of "a fear of the masses" (or multitude) in the classic texts of seventeenth century liberal thought. More recently, he has shifted to a study of the emergence of the concept of the market in the work of Adam Smith. Montag received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He has published three books and three edited collections, and has translated many essays by Althusser. In addition, Montag has published more than forty essays. He resides in Los Angeles and is married with two children, Jacob Montag and Elisa Montag.
Publications
Books
(Co-Written) The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014).
Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War (Duke University Press, 2013)
Louis Althusser. (London: Palgrave, 2002).
(Co-Editor) Masses, Classes and The Public Sphere. (London: Verso, 2001).
Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries. (London: Verso, Spring 1999). (Spanish translation, Ediciones Tierra de Nadie, 2005; Italian translation, Edizioni Ghibili, forthcoming).
(Ed) In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey. (London: Verso, 1998).
(Co-Editor) The New Spinoza. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man. (London: Verso, 1994).
Journal Special Issues
(Co-editor with Nancy Armstrong) differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol 20, n.3-4, 2009 ("The Future of the Human").
Essays
"Louis Althusser." The Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy. Vol. 6, ed. Alan Schrift. London: Acumen Press, forthcoming.
“The Late Althusser: Materialism of the Encounter or Philosophy of Nothing?” Culture, Theory and Critique, Vol. 51, Issue.2, pp. 157–70, 2010; Religgere Il Capitale: La lezione di Louis Althusser. Edizione Mimesis (Italian Translation), forthcoming; Problemi (Slovenian trans.), forthcoming.
"Interjecting Empty Spaces: Imagination and Interpretation in Spinoza's Tractatus Theologica-Politicus" in Spinoza Now ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011
"Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza," differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Vol 20, n.3-4, 2009. (Italian translation forthcoming).
"War and the Market: The Global South in the Origins of Neo-liberalism." The Global South, April 2009, Vol.3, no.1.
"Locke et le concept d'inhuman." Multitudes. no.33, Eté 2008.
"Semites, ou la fiction de l'autre." (review essay) La revue internationale des livres et des idees. mai-juin 2008, no.5
"Tumultuous Combinations: Transindividuality in Adam Smith and Spinoza," Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28(1)2007.
"El peligroso derecho a la existencia: la necroeconomia de Von Mises y Hayek." Youkali. 2 November 2006.
"Necro-Economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal," Radical Philosophy (November 2005), Youkali 1 April 2006 (Spanish translation), Critica Marxista 23, 2006 (Portuguese trans.).
"Jonathan Swift." Encyclopedia of British Literary History, Oxford University Press, 2006.
"Louis Althusser: the Intellectual and the Conjuncture." Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics, ed. David Bates, London: Palgrave, 2006. Abridged version in Il Manifesto. Nov. 9, 2006 (Italian translation).
"Foucault: the Immanence of Law in Power." Michel Foucault and Social Control, ed. Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard, Lexington Press, 2005; French version Editions Harmattan, forthcoming).
"Foucault and the Problematic of Origins: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et déraison." Borderlands 4.2, 2005. Actuel Marx (French trans. 2004); Theseis (Greek trans. 2004).
"Who’s Afraid of the Multitude: Between the Individual and the State." South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 2005). Slagmark n.39 2004 (Danish trans.); Quaderni Materialisti n.2 2004 (Italian trans.); Theseis (Greek trans. 2004).
"Spinoza's Spirit: the Concept of the Trace in Levinas and Derrida" Specters of Derrida, ed. Julian Wolfreys (SUNY Press, forthcoming). Oltrecorrente (Italian trans. forthcoming).
"On the Function of the Concept of Origin: Althusser’s Reading of Locke", Current Continental Theory and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Stephen Daniels (Northwestern U P: 2006).
"Materiality, Singularity, Subject: Response to Callari, Hardt, Parker and Smith", Symposium on Louis Althusser, Rethinking Marxism(17:2, April 2005).
"Politics: Transcendent or Immanent? A response to Miguel Vatter," Theory and Event (7:4, 2004).
"Der neue Spinoza" Immaterielle Arbeit und imperiale Souveräinität ed. Thomas Atzert and Jost Müller (Munster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004).
"La dialectique à la cantonade: Althusser devant l’art." Sartre, Althusser, Lukacs ed. Eustache Kouvelakis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).
"Towards a Conception of Racism without Race: Foucault and Contemporary Bio-politics," Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy (2002).
"From the Standpoint of the Masses: Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies" (review essay) Historical Materialism 9 2002.
"Descartes and Spinoza" and "Althusser" The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2002).
"Vers une conception du racisme sans race: Foucault et la biopolitique contemporaine", Foucault et la médecine ed. Philippe Artières et Emmanuel da Silva (Paris: Kimé, 2001).
"Gulliver’s Solitude: the Paradoxes of Swift’s Anti-Individualism", Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 42:1 2001.
"The Pressure of the Street: Habermas’s Fear of the Masses", Masses, Classes, Counterpublics, ed. Mike Hill and Warren Montag (London: Verso, 2001)
"Spinoza and the Concept of the Shekhinah." Jewish Themes in Spinoza's Philosophy, ed. Lenn Goodman and Heidi Ravven. (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
Preface to Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 1998).
"Althusser's Nominalism: Structure and Singularity 1962-1966." Rethinking Marxism 10:3 (Fall 1998).
"Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida's Specters", Ghostlier Demarcations ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso,1999)(Spanish translation, 2002, Turkish translation 2004, Portuguese translation 2008, Italian translation 2009).
"Second Response to Carole Fabricant" (on Swift), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 10:1, 1997.
"Response to Carole Fabricant" (on Swift), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9:1, 1996.
"The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightenment", Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
"The Soul is the Prison of the Body: Althusser and Foucault 1970-1975", Yale French Studies, Fall 1995.
"Beyond Force and Consent: Hobbes, Spinoza, Althusser." Marxism and Postmodernism: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, eds. Antonio Callari and David Ruccio (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). (Korean translation 1998, Norwegian translation forthcoming).
"A Process without a Subject or Goal(s): How to Read Althusser's Autobiography", Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities, ed. Antonio Callari (New York: Guilford Press, 1995) (Korean translation 1996; Greek translation 1998).
"Althusser and Spinoza Against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention?" The Althusserian Legacy, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993).
"The Workshop of Filthy Creation: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism." eds. Ross C. Murfin and Johanna Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991, Second Edition, 2000).
"The Emptiness of a Distance Taken: Freud, Lacan, Althusser." Rethinking Marxism, Spring, 1991 (Korean translation, 1994).
"Spinoza: Politics in a World Without Transcendence", Rethinking Marxism, Fall 1989. (Swedish translations 2004).
"What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism", Postmodernism and Its Discontents, (London: Verso, 1988). (Korean Translation 1990, Portuguese translation 1993).
"Macherey and Literary Analysis", Minnesota Review, Spring 1986.
"Lacan and Feminine Sexuality", Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Fall 1985.
"Marxism and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Encounter." Minnesota Review, Fall 1984 (Korean Translation 1992).
Translations
Louis Althusser, "On Marx and Freud." Rethinking Marxism, Spring, 1991.
Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists: And Other Essays, (London: Verso, 1990).
Michel Pêcheux, "Discourse: Structure or Event?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Pierre Macherey, "History and Novel in Balzac's The Peasants." Minnesota Review, Spring 1986.
Warren Montag
Brown Family Professor in Literature, English and Comparative Literary Studies
Occidental College
Warren Montag is Brown Family Professor in Literature, English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. He is known primarily for his work on twentieth-century French theory, especially Althusser and his circle, as well as his studies of the philosopher Spinoza. Montag's work has focused on the origins and internal contradictions of political liberalism and individualism, and has demonstrated, following the suggestions of Étienne Balibar, the existence of "a fear of the masses" (or multitude) in the classic texts of seventeenth-century liberal thought. Montag received his PhD from Claremont Graduate University. Among his books Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy's Perpetual War (Duke University Press, 2013) and Louis Althusser (London: Palgrave, 2002). He is co-editor of Masses, Classes and The Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2001).
Warren Montag
Brown Family Professor in Literature, English
Montag teaches 18th-century British and European literature with particular reference to political philosophy; he also teaches 20th-century European critical theory.
Contact
Office: Swan Hall Room #233
Email: montag@oxy.edu
Phone: (323) 259-2863
Office Hours: M/W 2:30-4:00
Education: B.A., UC Berkeley; M.A., Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School
Editor of Décalages: a Journal of Althusser Studies
Areas of Specialization:
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature, the Enlightenment, Literature and Philosophy 1600-1800, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy.
Publications: Books:
(with Mike Hill) The Other Adam Smith (forthcoming 2014, Stanford University Press)
Philosophy’s Perpetual War: Althusser and his Contemporaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013)
Louis Althusser (London: Palgrave, 2003)
Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries, (London: Verso, 1999).
(Spanish translation, Ediciones Tierra de Nadie, 2005; Korean translation forthcoming)
The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man, (London: Verso, 1994).
Publications: Edited Collections
(Co-Editor) Masses, Classes and The Public Sphere (London: Verso, 2001).
(Ed) In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays by Pierre Macherey (London: Verso, 1998).
(Co-Editor) The New Spinoza (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Publications: Journal Special Issues
(Co-editor with Nancy Armstrong) differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Vol 20, n. 3-4, 2009 (“The Future of the Human”).
Publications: Essays:
“From Clinamen to Conatus: Deleuze, Lucretius and Spinoza,” in Lucretius and Modernity, ed. Jacques Lezra. Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming. French translation 2013.
“Rancière’s Lost Object” Cultural Critique, vol 83, Winter 2013. 139-155.
Althusser: Law and the Threat of the Outside,” Althusser and Law, ed. Laurent du Sutter. Routledge, 2013..
“Macherey entre le quotidien et l’utopie,” La Revue des Livres (Mai-Juin 2013)
“Between Interpellation and Immunization: Althusser, Balibar and Esposito,” Postmodern Culture Vol 33, number 3, 2012
“Conjuncture, Conflict, War: Machiavelli Between Althusser and Foucault (1975-1976)” Encountering Althusser, ed. Peter Thomas. Continuum, 2012.
“Hegel, sive Spinoza or Hegel as his Own True Other,” Hegel after Spinoza, ed. Hasana Sharp and Jason Smith. Continuum, 2012.
“El afuera de la ley: Schmitt, Kelsen y la Resistencia legal a la ley,” Youkali 13 (2012).
“To discompose and disorder the whole machine of the world:” Adam Smith, Epicurus and Lucretius,” Rivista di storia della filosofia 67:2 (2012): 267-276.
Introduction to Louis Althusser, “Student Problems,” Radical Philosophy 170, Nov.-Dec, 2011.
“Immanence, Transcendence and the Trace: Derrida between Levinas and Spinoza,” Badmidbar: a Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2, Autumn 2011.
“Lucretius Hebraizant: Spinoza’s Reading of Ecclesiastes,” European Journal of Philosophy, 20 (2012). Spanish translation, Spinoza contemporaneo. Ed. Galcerán and Espinoza. Madrid: Tierradenadie ediciones, 2009.
“Louis Althusser,” The Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy, vol. 6, ed. Alan Schrift,. London: Acumen Press, 2010.
“The Late Althusser: Materialism of the Encounter or Philosophy of the Void?” Culture, Theory and Critique, (2010); Religgere Il Capitale: La lezione di Louis Althusser. Edizione Mimesis (Italian Translation), 2010. Problemi (Slovenian trans.), (2009)..
“Interjecting Empty Spaces: Imagination and Interpretation in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus , Spinoza Now , ed. Dimitris Vardoulakis, University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming (Italian trans. 2010).
“Spectres d’Althusser,” La revue internationale des livres et des idées, janvier-février 2010, no. 15. English version, Historical Materialism
“Imitating the Affects of Beasts: Interest and Inhumanity in Spinoza,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies Vol 20, n. 3-4, 2009. (Spanish trans. 2009) (Italian Translation forthcoming).
“War and the Market: the Global South in the Origins of Neo-liberalism,” The Global South, April 2009, Vol. 3, no. 1.
“Locke et le concept d’inhumain,” Multitudes, no. 33, Été 2008.
“Semites, ou la fiction de l’autre,” (review essay) La revue internationale des livres et des idées, mai-juin 2008, no 5.
“Tumultuous Combinations: Transindividuality in Adam Smith and Spinoza,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (1) 2007.
“El peligroso derecho a la existencia: la necroeconomia de Von Mises y Hayek,” Youkali 2, November 2006.
“Jonathan Swift,” Encyclopedia of British Literary History, Oxford University Press, 2006.
“Louis Althusser: the Intellectual and the Conjuncture” Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics, ed. David Bates, London: Palgrave, 2006. Abridged version in Il Manifesto, Nov. 9, 2006 (Italian Translation).
“On the Function of the Concept of Origin: Althusser’s Reading of Locke”, Current Continental Theory and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Stephen Daniels (Northwestern U P: 2006).
“Necro-Economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal,” Radical Philosophy November 2005, Youkali 1, April 2006 (Spanish trans.), Critica Marxista 23, 2006 (Portuguese trans.)
“Foucault: the Immanence of Law in Power,” Michel Foucault and Social Control, ed. Alain Beaulieu and David Gabbard, Lexington Press, 2005.
“Foucault and the Problematic of Origins: Althusser’s Reading of Folie et déraison” Borderlands 4.2, 2005; Actuel Marx (French trans. 2004); Theseis (Greek trans. 2004).
“Who’s Afraid of the Multitude: Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic Quarterly (Fall 2005); Slagmark n.39 2004 (Danish trans.); Quaderni Materialisti n.2 2004 (Italian trans.); Theseis (Greek trans. 2004) (Polish translation 2010).
“Materiality, Singularity, Subject: Response to Callari, Hardt, Parker and Smith,” Symposium on Louis Althusser, Rethinking Marxism (17:2, April 2005).
“Politics: Transcendent or Immanent? A response to Miguel Vatter,” Theory and Event (7:4, 2004).
“Der neue Spinoza” Immaterielle Arbeit und imperiale Souveräinität ed. Thomas Atzert and Jost Müller (Munster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2004).
“La dialectique à la cantonade: Althusser devant l’art” Sartre, Althusser, Lukacs ed. Eustache Kouvelakis (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004).
“Towards a Conception of Racism without Race: Foucault and Contemporary Bio-politics,” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy (2002).
“Spinoza and the Concept of the Shekhinah” Jewish Themes in Spinoza’s Philosophy,ed.
Lenn Goodman and Heidi Ravven (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002).
“From the Standpoint of the Masses: Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies” (review essay) Historical Materialism 9 2002).
“Descartes and Spinoza” and “Althusser” The Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Literary Criticism and Theory 1945-2000, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P, 2002).
“Vers une conception du racisme sans race: Foucault et la biopolitique contemporaine,” Foucault et la médecine ed. Philippe Artières et Emmanuel da Silva (Paris: Kimé, 2001).
“Gulliver’s Solitude: the Paradoxes of Swift’s Anti-Individualism,”Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 42:1 2001.
“The Pressure of the Street: Habermas’s Fear of the Masses”, Masses, Classes, Counterpublics, ed. Mike Hill and Warren Montag (London: Verso, 2001)
“Spirits Armed and Unarmed: Derrida’s Specters”, Ghostly Demarcations ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999). (Spanish translation, 2002, Turkish translation 2004, Portuguese translation 2008, Italian translation 2009)
“Modernité de Spinoza” Magazine Littéraire 370, Novembre 1998 (Portuguese translation, 2006).
Preface to Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 1998).
“Althusser’s Nominalism: Structure and Singularity 1962-1966". Rethinking Marxism 10:3 Fall 1998.
“Can the Subaltern Speak and Other Transcendental Questions,” Cultural Logic 1.2 1998. (French translation, Multitudes, 2006).
“Second Response to Carole Fabricant” (on Swift), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9:3, 1997.
“The Universalization of Whiteness: Racism and Enlightenment”, Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
“Response to Carole Fabricant” (on Swift), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9:1, 1996.
“The Soul is the Prison of the Body: Althusser and Foucault 1970-1975", Yale French Studies, Fall 1995. Spanish translation, Youkali, 2010, Polish translation 2010.
"Beyond Force and Consent: Hobbes, Spinoza, Althusser" in Marxism and Postmodernism: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, eds. Antonio Callari and David Ruccio (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1995). (Korean translation 1998, Norwegian translation forthcoming).
"A Process without a Subject or Goal(s): How to Read Althusser's Autobiography", Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities, ed. Antonio Callari (New York: Guilford Press,1995) (Korean translation 1996; Greek translation 1998).
"Althusser and Spinoza Against Hermeneutics: Interpretation or Intervention?", in The Althusserian Legacy, eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993) (Turkish translation, forthcoming.
"The Workshop of Filthy Creation: A Marxist Reading of Frankenstein in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, eds. Ross C. Murfin and Johanna Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991, Second Edition, 2000).
"The Emptiness of a Distance Taken: Freud, Lacan, Althusser" Rethinking Marxism, Spring, 1991 (Korean Translation, 1994).
"Spinoza: Politics in a World Without Transcendence", Rethinking Marxism, Fall 1989.
(Swedish translation, 2004).
"What is at Stake in the Debate on Postmodernism", Postmodernism and Its Discontents, (London: Verso, 1988).
(Korean translation 1990, Portuguese translation 1993)
"Macherey and Literary Analysis", Minnesota Review, Spring 1986.
"Lacan and Feminine Sexuality", Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Fall 1985.
"Marxism and Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Encounter", Minnesota Review, Fall 1984 (Korean Translation 1992).
Translations:
Etienne Balibar, Identity and Difference: Locke’s Invention of Consciousness, (Verso, 2013)
(with Willi Goetschel) Jacques Derrida, “Language and the Discourse of Method,” Badmidbar: a Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, 2, Autumn 2011.
Louis Althusser, "On Marx and Freud." Rethinking Marxism, Spring, 1991.
Louis Althusser, The Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists and Other Essays, (London: Verso, 1990).
Michel Pécheux, "Discourse: Structure or Event?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1988). Revised version in Ian Parker, ed. Lacanian Discourse Analysis (forthcoming)
Pierre Macherey, "History and Novel in Balzac's The Peasants." Minnesota Review, Spring 1986.
QUOTED: "Hill's chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is similarly strong, while Montag's "The Pressure of the Street" is polemically charged if heavy-handed."
Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere
Kent Worcester
126.10 (June 1, 2001): p196.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere. Verso, dist. by Norton. 2001. 276p. ed. by Mike Hill & Warren Montag. index. LC 00-061438. ISBN 1-85984-777-3. $30. SOC SCI
This collection explores the politics and intellectual history of Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published in 1961 in German and in 1989 in English), one of the most influential works of postwar social science. As the editors note, Habermas "seems to have provided `modernity' with its most theoretically sophisticated defense." In highlighting the emergence of civil society and a "public sphere" in 18th-century Britain, Habermas provided "a set of realistic objectives for social reforms." But editors Hill (Whiteness: A Critical Reader) and Montag (Bodies, Masses, Power), along with their contributors, take issue with Habermas's conception of the public sphere as a safe environment in which individuals can formulate their ideas and debate issues without having to resort to force or action to advance their position. Their point is that in the real world ideas are always linked to economic, political, and/or social interests that embody the threat of force (even if the threat isn't always carried out) and that Habermas is putting an ideological gloss on a system based on coercion. While some of the contributors explore these issues by way of historical research, others tackle Habermas's conceptual apparatus by way of theoretical critique. The strongest chapters are those that connect Habermas's research with the broader intellectual concerns of thinkers such as Etienne Balibar and Michael Hardt. Hill's chapter on E.P. Thompson, Louis Althusser, and Adam Smith is similarly strong, while Montag's "The Pressure of the Street" is polemically charged if heavy-handed. Highly recommended for university libraries.--Kent Worcester, Marymount Manhattan Coll., NY
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Worcester, Kent. "Masses, Classes, and the Public Sphere." Library Journal, 1 June 2001, p. 196. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA76487812&it=r&asid=e44b0dcfc7f5c55301880feebd23a7e0. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A76487812
Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith
D.A. Robinson
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1155.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith, by Mike Hill and Warren Montag. Stanford, 2015. 397p index afp ISBN 9780804791946 cloth, $90.00; ISBN 9780804792943 pbk, $29.95; ISBN 9780804793001 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3346
B1545
2014-25816 CIP
This challenging, cogent study is the first serious overview of the career of Adam Smith (1723-90). The "other" Smith is a capacious thinker interested in the fine arts, ethics, stoicism, crime, pleasure, even literary history. Hill (Univ. of Albany, SUNY) and Mon tag (Occidental College), both English professors, show that Smith should be read not only as an economist and amateur philosopher but also as a writer and thinker--a public intellectual, a philosophe. Liberating Smith's economic theory from that of contemporary idealogues, the authors argue that ignorance of Smith's other writing and thinking has led to a limited understanding and application of The Wealth of Nations. The authors' literary approach is refreshing: it is grounded in philosophy, history, and economics, disciplines that provide them with fascinating theoretical tools for reading Smith from a variety of perspectives. A chapter addressing Hume, Jacobitism, and the novel is a tough read and a bit of an outlier, but the book ends powerfully; the authors interweave Smith's economics with those of his successors, particularly Malthus, and examine the fascinating implications of a necro-economic theodicy. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--D. A. Robinson, Widener University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Robinson, D.A. "Hill, Mike. The other Adam Smith." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1155. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661477&it=r&asid=f2e024dbc50245c0f496cf8c80554a21. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "Accessible to experienced undergraduates, this will be a required resource on Althusser for the next generation of readers."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661477
Montag, Warren. Althusser and his contemporaries: philosophy's perpetual war
K. Tololyan
51.4 (Dec. 2013): p618.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Montag, Warren. Althusser and his contemporaries: philosophy's perpetual war. Duke, 2013. 246p bibl index afp IS8N 9780822353867, $84.95; ISBN 9780822354000 pbk, $23.95
51-1859
B2430
2012-48670 CIP
Every year, several thousand undergraduates read Louis Althusser's essay on ideology, a foundational text of cultural studies and modern critical theory. Several hundred more-advanced students also read Reading Capital (Eng. ed., CH, Dec'71), which develops a theory and practice of symptomatic reading that remains indispensable to contemporary literary studies. Yet the rest of Althusser's work remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world. Gregory Elliott's Althusser: The Detour of Theory (1987) was a useful introductory study, but the present work does justice to the range and power of Althusser's thought. A deeply learned, scrupulous, and penetrating reader of knotty passages--whether by Althusser or Hegel, Marx or Carl Schmitt, Derrida or Foucault, Lucretius or the Apostle Paul--Montag (Occidental College) provides an original, unprecedented account of a career that developed in encounters and conflicts with some of the most important works of Western thought. For Montag, as for Althusser, "even the most rigorously argued ... text [is] necessatily a constellation of oversights, discrepancies, and disparities, requiring a reading attuned to the ... conflicts that animated it." Attuned to such complexity, yet accessible to experienced undergraduates, this will be a required resource on Althusser for the next generation of readers. Summing Up: Essential, **** Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.--K. Tololyan, Wesleyan University
Tololyan, K.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Tololyan, K. "Montag, Warren. Althusser and his contemporaries: philosophy's perpetual war." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Dec. 2013, p. 618. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA393972337&it=r&asid=1cb759c29b5f03ecd2834e481539548f. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
NOT A REVIEW OF A MONTAG BOOK
Gale Document Number: GALE|A393972337
Spinoza now
D.A. Forbes
49.5 (Jan. 2012): p895.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
49-2599
B3998
2010-32605 CIP
Spinoza now, ed. by Dimitris Vardoulakis. Minnesota, 2011. 375p index afp ISBN 9780816672806, $82.50, ISBN 9780816672813 pbk, $27.50
A spiritual successor to Warren Montag and Ted Stolze's anthology The New Spinoza (1997), this interdisciplinary collection showcases recent interest from Continental scholarship in the metaphysical, psychological, and political thought of Benedict de Spinoza. Contributors (including luminaries Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri) explore and defend Spinoza's continuing relevance for a variety of contemporary discussions, including matters of methodology, interpretation, critical theory, religion, and the arts. Editor Vardoulakis (Univ. of Western Sidney, Australia) posits as a common theme that Spinoza is "a philosopher of power ... who concentrates on immanence and particularity"; hence Spinoza's historically controversial philosophical work continues to resonate in contemporary critiques of both modernity and postmodernity. While some contributors occasionally acknowledge mainstream analytic scholarship, most look primarily to Continental interpretations of Spinoza's thought and influence, including those of Balibar, Macherey, and especially Deleuze. Analytic researchers likely will find little of interest here, but those interested in the interdisciplinary significance and application of Spinoza's philosophy may find this volume provocative. Includes an index of names. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty.--D. A. Forbes, West Chester University of Pennsylvania
Forbes, D.A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Forbes, D.A. "Spinoza now." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Jan. 2012, p. 895. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA276134367&it=r&asid=76c9144f7c5998c4bcda04bfe23232d2. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "The value and importance of Montag's analysis resides, therefore, in his effort to emerge from Spinoza's impasse, which is to say to push Spinoza's materialism further, beyond the limits imposed by the philosopher himself, and to try to overturn the affect of joy and transform it into a force of action that leads toward individual liberation. For that reason his book should also be read as a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of radical democracy."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A276134367
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power, Spinoza and His Contemporaries
Branka Arsic
56.4 (June 2003): p892.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 Philosophy Education Society, Inc.
http://www.reviewofmetaphysics.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=15&Itemid=16
New York: Verso, 2000. xxi + 136 pp. Cloth $35.00--Warren Montag's book is a fine analysis of the ways in which Spinoza's materialism, as it was formulated in The Ethics, affects his political theory. Even though Montag's analysis is historical, and sensitive to the theoretical and political context of Spinoza's thinking (which is of utmost importance not only for the careful differentiation between Spinoza's politics and the liberal theories of Hobbes and Locke, but also for an understanding of his list of those who are excluded from democracy: foreigners, children, women and servants), it also takes decisively into account contemporary political theories and so works to frame the context within which Montag himself thinks. Constantly referring to Louis Althusser's remarks about the connection between Spinoza's philosophy and the former's theory of ideology, as well as to Antonio Negri's, Etienne Balibar's, and Pierre Macherey's readings of Spinoza, Montag formulates the core problem of his analysis by means of the following theses: "There can be no liberation of the mind without a liberation of the body"; and "There can be no liberation of the individual without collective liberation" (p. xxi).
That there is no liberation of the mind without a liberation of the body is the conclusion of the second chapter of the book ("Seeing the Better and Doing the Worse") in which Montag interprets Spinoza's parallelism of attributes and their modes for the goals of the theory of absolute democracy. If the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things, if therefore the mind does not transcend the body but is affected by ideas (that is to say by other bodies) in a manner parallel to the way in which the body is affected by other bodies, then modern liberal theories, starting with Descartes's provisional moral, have to face the fact that it is untenable to strive toward social conditions in which an individual can think, speak, and write freely even though its body remains disciplined by and subjected to the dominant structure of power: "Subjection becomes a physical, corporeal matter, a matter of what bodies do and do not do and how they affect each other" (p. 42). It is not enough, as Descartes would have it, to obey the King and respect the laws of one's country in order to think freely in one's own study: it is not enough for the simple reason that it is impossible. For the subjected body affects the mind in such a way that that mind can never be free. The idea of the free mind but disciplined body is therefore a mere ideological delusion. As a result the liberation of the mind presupposes the liberation of the body--bad news for liberalism.
However, and following Spinoza's determination that every individual is composed of other individuals and that every body is the effect of the motions of other bodies that act upon it, a new insight arises: in order to liberate the body from its subjection to the actions of other bodies it is necessary to liberate those other bodies, that is, the community: "not simply the liberation of an individual who is the owner of himself and his rights, but the liberation of the collectivity outside of which the individual has no existence and apart from which the freedom of the individual is inconceivable" (p. 63). In his effort to explain how it would be possible to imagine such a liberation of the collectivity Montag develops an analysis (that owes a lot to Balibar) of Spinoza's use of the term "multiplicity" that denotes "the crowd, or the masses, as well" (p. 76). Following Balibar, Montag argues that Spinoza adopts "the standpoint of the masses ... [the] abyss upon which every state is constructed" (p. 77). That abyss marks the space from which the possible liberation of the collectivity derives precisely because it presupposes a double process: the increase in power of the masses (to think and live under the guidance of reason) and by the same token the decrease in power of the sovereign or the tyrant.
However, it was precisely the radicalism of Spinoza's materialism that forced him to claim the impossibility of the liberation of the body from its subjection to other bodies. That is to say: if one is always already exposed to the activity of external causes then one has necessarily and always to surfer or to be only the inadequate cause of one's actions. The powerful individual could then only be an individual that suffers joy (instead of sadness) insofar as joy increases the power of one's passivity (one could even argue that powerful and joyful passivity is the very core of Spinozism). But how is the liberation of an individual possible if one remains necessarily subjected to other bodies? Or: how is one supposed to understand the possibility of the liberation of a community if the community is an individual different from other communities or other individuals, and if the increase in its power means by the same token the decrease in power of another community exposed to its actions? It seems precisely that by claiming the necessity of suffering, Spinoza could not foresee any happy outcome for those problems. The value and importance of Montag's analysis resides, therefore, in his effort to emerge from Spinoza's impasse, which is to say to push Spinoza's materialism further, beyond the limits imposed by the philosopher himself, and to try to overturn the affect of joy and transform it into a force of action that leads toward individual liberation. For that reason his book should also be read as a significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of radical democracy.--Branka Arsic, State University of New York at Albany.
Arsic, Branka
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Arsic, Branka. "Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power, Spinoza and His Contemporaries." The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 56, no. 4, 2003, p. 892+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA105046585&it=r&asid=bba04c3730418842bf41c2bb6341a91e. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
QUOTED: "His thesis is that Swift is so successful in exploiting the contradictions of the historical moment in which he lived, that his representations of this moment go beyond and often work directly against Swift's own ironic intentions. Montag sees Swift as unwittingly figuring the as yet unthinkable truth of a modern materialist view of the world."
"This is a book well worth reading, both for its important historical and philosophical consideration of Swift's work, and for the way it illustrates how Swift's mirror continues to undermine even his finest readers."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A105046585
The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man
Frank Boyle
95.3 (July 1996): p442.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 University of Illinois Press
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/jegp.html
By Warren Montag. London: Verso, 1994. Pp. vii + 174. $17.95 (paper).
"Why was it so difficult for Swift to speak in his own voice? To what extent was his recourse to impersonation a necessity imposed on him rather than a choice freely made . . .?" (p. 3). Can one imagine asking such questions of Shakespeare? Of Goethe? But critical positions that would be unthinkable if applied to other writers are the standard fare of Swift criticism. Ronald Paulson's landmark study of Theme and Structure in Swift's Tale of a Tub undertakes the task of answering charges of irreligion and even nihilism by revealing the godly (or at least Leavisian) order beneath the work's "eccentric" surfaces. Irvin Ehrenpreis dug so deeply into Swift's personality he discovered places where "Swift misunderstood himself" (Dr Swift, p. 119). So Warren Montag is in superior Swiftian company when he poses his unthinkable question in introducing his Unthinkable Swift.
And indeed Montag's work is comprised of a number of superior parts. His thesis is that Swift is so successful in exploiting the contradictions of the historical moment in which he lived, that his representations of this moment go beyond and often work directly against Swift's own ironic intentions. Montag sees Swift as unwittingly figuring the as yet unthinkable truth of a modern materialist view of the world. His first chapter, after setting out this thesis, develops into an exemplary political/religious history that provides background for discussions of Swift even larger than the argument Montag goes on to make. Chapter 2 has the great merit of insisting that a detailed understanding of seventeenth-century philosophy, particularly the work of Spinoza, is useful to a reading of A Tale. And though apparently unaware of it, Montag joins a number of other recent critics (Kenneth Craven, The Millennium of Madness [Brill, 1992], and most directly Joel Weinsheimer's Eighteenth Century Hermeneutics [Yale, 1993]) in arguing that the philosophic implications of Swift's work deserve the most serious scrutiny. This he undertakes in his third chapter, reading certain sections of A Tale closely and against the philosophical and political background elucidated in the earlier chapters. His final chapter, however, despite some interesting reflections on colonialism, seems a hurried and unconvincing attempt to extend a rhetoric of necessary materialist contradiction across the breadth of the Travels.
But it is this rhetoric applied to A Tale that gives this book its remarkable aspect. Montag sees Swift's "polyvalent" art in A Tale realizing--against Swift's specific (Anglican) intentions--the logical materialist ends of Spinoza's philosophical discourse. By "inhabit[ing] the philosophical positions" of his time, Swift goes "far beyond Hobbes," to identify a strategy acknowledged "not even by Spinoza" which posits "a solely material world without transcendence, a world ruled not even by mechanical, physical laws but characterized by an infinite productivity without origin or end" (p. 92). Montag sees Swift's literary imagination extending and even completing the most Modern implications of some of the most important and radical thinkers of the Western tradition. While it is not without precedent for critics to say Swift represents systems at their logical extremes, Montag has, in a specifically philosophical context, taken that idea further and more seriously than any other critic to date.
Montag's fascinating method is eclipsed only by the fascinating entrapping qualities of the text he tries to illuminate. Beginning his book with a passage in which Marx claims that "consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life" (p. 1), Montag sees Swift as compelled (" [t]he force of the materialist arguments is so great that, far from using them for his own purposes, Swift is rather used by them") by the logic of a literary imagination Swift cannot either comprehend or control. But in setting aside arguments that rest on Swift's intention (in Montag, Swift only and always has one: the defense of Anglicanism), Montag substitutes his own: "For to read works as a materialist is . . . to grasp through a 'concrete analysis of a concrete (textual) situation' the way in which each text constitutes a singular realization of ideological struggle" (p. 126). So certain is Montag of the concrete reality of his materialist position that he forgets that Swift described satire as a glass in which readers discover every face but their own. The critic who begins with the charge from Marx to "explain" consciousness discovers, in his reflections on Swift's material life, that the satirist has spontaneously confirmed the inescapable, necessary truth of a materialist view of the world.
One can hardly fault Montag for making the text mirror its reader the way Swift said it would. It is reasonable to question whether any reader of A Tale has escaped its traps. Perhaps the way the text returns upon its readers may help explain Montag's most bizarre claim, that William Wotton is Swift's "most acute critic" (p. 84). Given this extraordinary claim, which is reiterated on a number of occasions, it is strange that Montag only cites Wotton's Defense (and then only passages included with the Guthkelch/Nichol Smith edition of A Tale). If Montag had considered Wotton's Reflections, which are part of the subject of the original Tale, rather than commentary on it, he would have noticed that Wotton is following Bentley in linking Anglican Christianity with the New Philosophy and, particularly, the work of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton. So Wotton was directly involved with a branch of the "Anglican intelligentsia" who, in Montag's words, "had ceded so much theoretical ground to their materialist adversaries that they had difficulty distinguishing their own position from those they opposed" (p. 107). It is this new-philosophical Anglicanism that leads to Wotton's appearance in A Tale as, not merely a pedant and a fool, but one especially well-suited for the creation of a "new religion." Montag likes Wotton so much because they share the idea that the irony of A Tale returns upon itself with unthinkable consequences. But Montag's readers may focus instead on A Tale's unthinkable way of returning on its readers: the text that, even by Montag's own account, figures ancient and modern materialists as foolish and depraved bedfellows has now persuaded a Marxist materialist to climb willingly into an Anglican materialist's critical bed. It may be that A Tale is an Antaean text that gains strength with each critical assault, extending, in the current instance, its ridicule of materialist systems by way of the reading of one intent on explaining its materialist truths.
This is a book well worth reading, both for its important historical and philosophical consideration of Swift's work, and for the way it illustrates how Swift's mirror continues to undermine even his finest readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Boyle, Frank. "The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 95, no. 3, 1996, p. 442+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18725240&it=r&asid=79c95c6d96a5dca4c69f801e37c108f5. Accessed 3 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18725240
QUOTED: "This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed."
" Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith's work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book."
'The Other Adam Smith' by Mike Hill and Warren Montag Mike Hill and Warren Montag
The Other Adam Smith
Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2015. 397pp., $29.95 pb
ISBN 9780804792943
Reviewed by Derek Wall
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About the reviewer
Derek Wall
Derek Wall is International Co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is an associated tutor in Politics, Goldsmiths College, London. His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge) and The Commons in History (MIT). He is a columnist for the Morning Star newspaper and is writing a book on post-capitalist economics.
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Review
There are, at least, two reasons why Marxists might consider reading Adam Smith. First, while Adam Smith has been seen as the prophet of the free market, a debate has raged as to the nature of his politics with some arguing that he was very much on the left. Second, any reader of Marx's volumes of Capital, will know that Marx was an obsessive reader of Adam Smith's political economy. Marx's Capital is, at least partly, a detailed reading of Smith's The Wealth of Nations, with Marx noting the silences and contradictions in the text around questions of value and accumulation.
Mike Hill and Warren Montag argue, convincingly to my mind, that Adam Smith was a major thinker across a vast range of fields. In turn, they suggest not just the other Adam Smith but multiple others. While all texts can give rise to different readings, they hint that multiple Adam Smiths are more immediately obvious from reading his output than that of many other thinkers.
The notion that Smith was an uncritical advocate of the market has been strongly questioned. Hill and Montag note, for example, that while Alan Greenspan spoke of his support for an ‘ideology’ of self-regulating markets and gave an Adam Smith Memorial Lecture in Kirkcaldy, the former chair of the Federal Reserve remained 'bound to a version of Smith that, while not exactly false, can be sustained only by suppressing the enormous complexity and constitutive contradictions of his actual work.' (3) In dramatic contrast to Greenspan the Marxist sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has argued that Smith was a ‘'Theorist of commercial society who rejects the idea of a self-regulating market and sees the necessity for state intervention to insure economic growth and protect against crisis' (4).
Adam Smith promotes the market but is clear that market power is often asymmetric with the wealthy using their power to combine and reduce wages for workers. There are numerous statements in The Wealth of Nations that can be quoted to support a left Adam Smith. Perhaps most dramatically he Smith was cynical about the motives of business people, and is well known for observing that business people would tend to meet so they could conspire against the public by raising prices.
Commentators from the left make use of his other major published work The Theory of Moral Sentiment to present a quasi-socialist Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiment suggests that social good is promoted by empathy and allied values, apparently contrasting with the notion that rational self-interest alone in a market setting is sufficient. Thus left interpreters of Smith have much material to support their reading. Hill and Montag reject this a binary of the 'left' versus the 'right' Smith and in doing so note that while best known The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments are only part of Smith's output. While Smith had some of his work destroyed, such as his study of astronomy, which he felt was inadequate, much was published in his life time and more has emerged since. Most dramatically a number of unknown Adam Smith texts were discovered in an Aberdeen junk shop in the 1960s. Smith was not primarily an economist but wrote on a large number of topics, and it is important to acknowledge often largely forgotten texts including Essays on Philosophical Subjects, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Lectures on Jurisprudence, and Correspondence.
There are obvious parallels with the evolving reception of Marx's work. It might be possible to debate the difference between a young Adam Smith who wrote the more humanistic and left The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and the 'mature' Smith who wrote The Wealth of Nations. In turn new writing by Marx continues to be published in the 21st century and the Paris Manuscripts and Grundrisse transformed readings of Marx in the 20th century. Hill and Montag resist any easy division between a young and mature Smith and note that both readings are inadequate to our understanding of Smith. They also note that tensions and contradictions in Smith's work cannot be dismissed, it is not a problem of which Adam Smith to ignore so as to construct a coherent reading. Smith's own investigations generated particular problems which he was unable to resolve, even if we accept a crude notion of a 'left' and a 'right' Smith: these are features inherent in his work. Hill and Montag argue that Smith's corpus cannot
be reduced to being either a theory of the immanent rationality of the market or the expression of an original intersubjectivity grounded in sympathy, or even an ingenious amalgamation of the two. On the contrary, Smith's works more often than not produce the very contradictions on which they founder. The market performs its miracles (above all in the corn trade) only at the expense of the life it is supposed to support, just as sympathy arises precisely from the impossibility of a communication of sentiments between individuals. (21)
Clearly Smith was an eccentric and ambiguous character. Contemporaries noted that he had a 'tendency to absence', for example, he would often talk to himself and sleep walk. He was once so focused on his thoughts that he stepped into a tanning pit full of foul substances and on another occasion forgetfully placed bread and butter in his kettle before making his tea. He lived with his mother for most of his life, who out of maternal affection rather than material self-interest made his meals. Boswell claimed that Smith was reluctant to talk about his ideas in case this reduced his income from book sales. However Smith's personal absences and ambiguities do not sufficiently explain those in his texts.
Smith, of course, was Scottish and wrote at a time when national identities were being formed, Scotland's union with England was strongly contested and the 18th century was a period of conflict. Hill and Montag note that while Smith and the other thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were working, 'the nation was at war with its self'' (19). They suggest that Smith can be seen as trying to investigate or even create disciplinary divisions of knowledge in a context where discourse was being mobilised in an attempt to discipline the Scottish population so as to resist popular contention including rioting, from getting out of control. In a number of wide ranging chapters that bring together literary theory and the study of 17th century Scottish and English history, they suggest that disciplinary questions were of great concern to Smith.
Economics via the invisible hand of the market can be seen in this context as a form of governance. However the market mechanisms explained by Smith tends to be corroded in various ways. I have tended to argue that Smith was crudely an egalitarian sympathetic to a 'fairer' and more democratic order. It is consistent with this approach that he was critical of corporate power, combination and monopoly, fearing that manipulation of the market would exploit workers and buyers. Nonetheless there is an often forgotten element of cruelty in Smith's work, which Hill and Montag identify as producing necro-economics. An economic system that depends on threat and injury. The providence of the market requires the motivation of fear. Smith in investigating the market helps produce the market but the market to exist must promise death.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments contains numerous references to punishment including execution. To make the market work requires fear, unless individuals fear starvation they may be too ill motivated and lazy to work perhaps. The free workings of the market require Homo Sacer, the category of individual who cannot be killed but can be allowed to die. Homo Sacer explains the British government’s response to the Irish famine, to provide food would disrupt the market because fear of famine motivated work and participation in the market. Such necro-economics is a core topic in The Other Adam Smith, the ongoing attempts to discipline the Greek economy using austerity is consistent with such necro-economics. In the recent UK budget the economic liberalism of the Conservative government has seen 30% cuts in welfare benefits for those too sick or disabled to work. Hardly a day goes by without news of the death of disabled, sick or unemployed individual who has died as a result of benefit sanctions.
Smith suggests that workers may resist the division of labour with a saunter, Hill and Montag illustrate that at the margins of his work the author of The Wealth of Nations, acknowledges the resistance of workers to work place discipline. In short the investigations of Smith whether in wider philosophy or the market, produce contradictions and silences that erode his work. Smith constructs his own weaknesses. His texts helped summon up the market system that he tries to describe, so he helps produce the contradictions and gaps in the evolving market system which he examines.
This is not an easy book, some of the formulations could have been clearer, yet Adam Smith is a much more difficult and sophisticated thinker than is often supposed. His reputation as the father of economics can hide the fact that his interest in economics is a part of a much wider series of investigations. His work was undertaken in the context of widespread social conflict and uncertainty, as an attempt to construct a field of knowledge linked implicitly to social control. The free market right wing Smith is challenged by his awareness of the dangers of markets being manipulated and monopolised. In turn, the benign market that serves humanity with efficiency and grace when it is left to its 'natural' devices, is a myth. The market requires continued threat to survive. The challenge to austerity and other elements of contemporary cruelty, which suggest that both human life and ecological diversity are worthless compared to the majesty of the market, demand actions not just at the level of the street and the ballot box. From the Latin American left to, perhaps surprisingly, the interventions of Pope Francis against capitalism, to the struggles of Syriza and the Greek people, have a material effect. Theory too has a material effect and Hill and Montag move us beyond interesting but limited binary debates to show that the, apparently, marginal focus on cruelty in Smith's work, has helped justify a political-economy of neo-liberal necro-economics. This is, in summary, a tough but rewarding book.
23 July 2015
QUOTED: "Beg, steal, borrow, or even buy Warren Montag's book on Althusser, it is very good. While he suggests that there can be no last word on Althusser, Montag's work provides an impressive overview which is a delight to read. Montag argues that Althusser's work draws on a range of thinkers and cannot be understood in isolation from Spinoza, Lacan and, above all, his contemporaries such as Derrida and Foucault."
"Montag has read, carefully, a huge amount of material written by Althusser such as notes from lectures, letters and unfinished essays, which have only become available in recent years. As well as gathering new material and reading it with care, Montag is able to discuss the most difficult and challenging of philosophical questions with great clarity."
'Althusser and His Contemporaries' by Warren Montag Warren Montag
Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War
Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2013. 256pp., $23.95 pb
ISBN 9780822354000
Reviewed by Derek Wall
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Derek Wall
Derek Wall is International Co-ordinator of the Green Party of England and Wales. He is an associated tutor in Politics, Goldsmiths College, London. His books include The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (Routledge) and The Commons in History (MIT). He is a columnist for the Morning Star newspaper and is writing a book on post-capitalist economics.
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Review
Beg, steal, borrow, or even buy Warren Montag's book on Althusser, it is very good. While he suggests that there can be no last word on Althusser, Montag's work provides an impressive overview which is a delight to read. Montag argues that Althusser's work draws on a range of thinkers and cannot be understood in isolation from Spinoza, Lacan and, above all, his contemporaries such as Derrida and Foucault. Montag has read, carefully, a huge amount of material written by Althusser such as notes from lectures, letters and unfinished essays, which have only become available in recent years. As well as gathering new material and reading it with care, Montag is able to discuss the most difficult and challenging of philosophical questions with great clarity. Yes, at times the book made my head hurt but it made it hurt in a good way. Althusser and His Contemporaries outlines a number of important but difficult debates that are at the centre of any exploration of Althusser's work and have resonance for philosophers and political activists in general.
Louis Althusser either revolutionised Marxist philosophy or, according to his many critics, contributed nothing but obscure, opaque and entirely abstract anti-political musing. He was born in Algeria in 1918 and spent much of World War Two in a German prison camp. Originally a devout Catholic, who attempted at one point to unite theology and communism, he joined the French Communist Party and worked on the study of Marxist philosophy. In densely argued books, such as Reading Capital and For Marx, he developed new interpretations of Marx's work. Plagued by severe mental health problems, he killed his wife and was hospitalised. In the early 1970s he was one of the best known Marxist thinkers in the world but rejection of his work, including devastating self-criticism, saw him disappear from view.
Althusser is a hate figure. Montag asks 'why read Althusser today?' and lists many of the books with 'Against Althusser' in the title. The British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson issued a polemic entitled 'The Poverty of Theory' in the 1970s, directed against Althusser and his British followers such as Paul Hirst, who were accused of denying history, defending Stalin and via a suffocating structuralism attacking the notion of human agency. E.P. Thompson produced a laudatory biography of the artist, writer, designer and revolutionary William Morris. Morris, in turn, is said to have argued that we should have nothing in our homes which is neither beautiful nor useful. Althusser's work has been condemned often, and from many perspective, as ugly and useless, so should we still read his books? Should we let his words into our homes? Montag argues convincingly that Althusser's often paradoxical and shifting work remains essential to read. He notes that Althusser wrestled with issues important not just to Marxists but to a much wider circle of thinkers.
While devoted to Marx, Althusser was an admiring student of Machiavelli. There is a contradiction between Machiavelli's radical republican commitment to democracy and the multitude expressed in his Discourses on Livy and the grim political calculation of The Prince. Much ink has been shed debating who the 'real' Machiavelli was, a revolutionary or a servant of autocrats. Machiavelli has, of course, been vilified. Like Stalin, his name has become descriptive of political evil. Althusser's lectures on Machiavelli have been published, and provide an interesting contribution to the debate as to the 'real' Machiavelli. Althusser argued that Machiavelli was vilified because he showed that violence was necessary in the production of state power. Althusser noted how Marx had outlined the process of primitive accumulation, showing that the commons were enclosed and peasants pushed off of the land, to create capital. Althusser suggests that Machiavelli identified a process of primitive political accumulation; to create a state, violence is required. I think it is implicit in Montag's book that Althusser was attacked, partly at least, because like Machiavelli he identified questions that are necessary to ask, but are at the same time disturbing or offensive.
Althusser, according to Montag, waged war as a philosopher. His target was any form of essentialism, any pre-given ultimate cause or pre-written narrative. This can be unsettling; the idea that there is a purpose is under withering attack. The idea that Marx believed in any a form of historical inevitability was perhaps Althusser's main target. While the understanding that there is no 'big story' may be disturbing, Althusser's criticism of individual agency is even more offensive. The 'I' is abolished and even the 'we' of a class is under some discussion. We clearly don't function as methodologically independent individuals, ever since Freud, the notion that we have total free will to make history is a myth. Althusser, by asking difficult questions about subjectivity, structures and the nature of events or the possibility of change, became a hate figure. These questions must be asked, even if we dislike the answers.
Montag emphasizes this notion of philosophical warfare in Althusser's work, stressing that Althusser sought allies outside of Marxism to attack essentialist, historicist or humanist understanding of Marx's work. Althusser challenged any notion of a human essence, human nature was not fixed and we are not unitary, thus Lacan and Freud were used to develop his examination of human subjectivity. In his 'war' Althusser worked with others, typically Reading Capital was a multi-author work including sections from Jacques Rancière, who later became a bitter critic, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Étienne Balibar.
There are many useful insights into Althusser's work within Montag's book. For example, Althusser suggested that our subject status was established by an act of 'hailing'. Montag notes that this refers not to a jaunty greeting but the action of a police man or women calling over a suspect. We are not so much addressed as threatened so as to establish our subject status, picked up and scared with a truncheon or a gun, dissuaded from joining the demonstration, because we fear a beating. Althusser drew upon the thought of a number of philosophers of science as he laboured, perhaps unsuccessfully, to make a distinction between science and ideology. These debts are detailed by Montag. Althusser's notion of an epistemological break between the Hegalian or humanist young Marx and the mature Marx the scientist, is widely discredited if nothing else by the elder Marx's exploration of anthropology and the micro structure of property. Althusser's use of sophisticated accounts of science that move us beyond positivism, are of interest to all who struggle to understand what is distinct about science.
Althusser's links to continental philosophy, especially French philosophy, are noted. Foucault was one of his students, and Althusser was enthusiastic about Foucault's account of madness in Madness and Civilization. Montag observes that, despite being seen as opposed thinkers, their accounts of ideology and subjectivity are related. Foucault believed that ideology proceeds by acting on our physical bodies. While Althusser noted the material effect of ideology, Montag suggests that even an ideological state apparatus acts repressively, disciplining us physically. Religion, for example, as we see in scandals involving religious institutions, used physical violence on occasions to discipline its subjects. Foucault and Althusser's lives and thoughts touched at various points.
Again, the closeness of Derrida and Althusser is often forgotten. It is well established that Derrida talked of the politics of friendship in regard to Althusser. The notion of symptomatic reading of texts, which Althusser derived from Marx and Freud, where the silences and unexamined aspects of a piece of writing are explored, is clearly linked to Derrida's development of deconstruction. From Marx's reading of Adam Smith to Freud's analysis of patients' dreams, we have a political reading that explores texts and gains as much as from the words left out as from the words written on the page.
Montag does not claim that Althusser was the 'same' as Foucault or Derrida, or suggest an origin in each of the three thinkers thought within another, but clearly shows dialogue, suggesting that they were allies, or even more radically friends, rather than opponents.
Althusser's work was marked by conflict, mutation, confusion and self-criticism, yet some continuities can be detected. It is clear from Montag's analysis that Althusser was never a structuralist. While Althusser felt that human subjectivity was an effect not a cause, an enduring stable cause of our subjectivity was also illusory. Structuralism, while pointing beyond the illusion, for Althusser, of personal autonomy, was similar to historicism. Hegelian readings of Marx suggested that we perform in a story with a predetermined end. For Althusser, structuralism tended to be a slice of such historicism, a hidden code which ordains what we do.
Althusser's later work advanced a form of aleatory materialism, based upon the encounter or a specific conjuncture, as opposed to a pre-ordained outcome. “Aleatory” means based on chance such as the outcome of a throw of a dice. Aleatory materialism was introduced by the Greek philosopher of the atom, Epicurus, who discussed the swerve of particles and was later promoted by Spinoza. Observation of this aleatory materialism, a submerged current in both Althusser's early work and via his PhD thesis on Epicurus, Marx's own thought, is another important contribution of Montag's book.
Montag does not provide a unique interpretation, but a well founded reminder that those who simply frame Althusser as a discredited structuralist oversimplify their case. Althusser has also been conceptualised as working within a particular political conjuncture. The posthumous denunciation of Stalin by Khrushchev led Althusser to attempt to develop what he saw as a left critique of Stalinism. Opposition to the notion of 'the bad man who distorted communism through the cult of personality', which might be opposed by a humanist Marxism, was Althusser's starting point. Montag does not dispute this interpretation or challenge the importance of Marx, Mao, Lenin or Brecht to Althusser, yet he notes his debt to Lacan and Spinoza, and his contemporaries such as Foucault and Derrida. There is no essence to Althusser. While this is a book with 'war' in the title, it is very gentle. Althusser's many detractors and those with alternative interpretations of his thought escape without the threat of violence.
So where does this leave political practice? Marx was seen as suggesting that communism was inevitable. Marx, in the hands of Althusser, becomes in contrast the dice man. Everything is possible because politics and social change occur in particular circumstances, this notion links the concept of 'over determination', that events are outcomes of multiple factors, to Althusser's aleatory materialism. Mao and Lenin played the game perhaps and we are invited to play too. Of course, the understanding that we are not independent agents striding on to the stage to make history, conflicts with Althusser's admiration for those like Marx or Machiavelli who tried to do just this. This paradox appears insoluble and taunts Althusser. A self-critic, as Montag notes, while Althusser read Althusser's own work symptomatically and attacked his own failures and silences with disturbing honesty, this problem is never squarely addressed. Tragic, flawed, Althusser's life fell apart and his theoretical investigations appear, like a snow man dissolving in the rain. Nonetheless his work is necessary to read, re-read and address. Love or hate them, numerous thinkers such as Laclau, Negri and Hardt or Zizek, owe a debt to Althusser and can more easily be appreciated by understanding his orientating questions and concerns. Althusser reminds us that Marx's own philosophical adventure was already post-modern, in the sense of challenging fixed identities and suggesting that relationships are rarely fixed. Althusser was not an ecological thinker, in the direct mundane sense that Marx and Engels examined environmental problems like pollution and soil erosion, but for those of us who are political ecologists, his thought helps us better understand the flux of human society and our relations with the rest of 'nature'.
Reading Montag's book is a safe encounter but a stimulating one. Montag suggests that there is no obvious beginning or end to Althusser's work, it is a process, an adventure. While human agency is challenged, history is based on chance encounters and class struggle is conceived as a motor, we are invited to make busy, play the game and trick fortune if we can.
31 December 2013
QUOTED: "Beyond the specific points on which one might agree or disagree, this is a much-needed book. It extricates Althusser from the ‘gnawing criticism of mice’ and paves the way for a renewed interest in his work, one that takes into account the unpublished materials that emerged after his death – not only to make possible an analysis of the ‘late’ Althusser (the Althusser of the aleatory materialism explicitly elaborated in the 1980s), but also for a reconsideration of the Althusser of the 1960s and 1970s."
"As to whether Althusser’s philosophy can still produce effects today, in a very different historical conjuncture, Montag appears hesitant. But if it does, it will be thanks in some degree to his research and to the analysis proposed in his book."
Althusser’s Perpetual War
Stefano Pippa
Review | RP186
Warren Montag, Althusser and His Contemporaries: Philosophy’s Perpetual War, Duke University Press, Durham NC and London, 2013. 246 pp., £62.00 hb., £15.99 pb., 978 0 82235 386 7 hb., 978 0 82235 400 0 pb.
The result of more than twenty years of engagement with Althusser’s philosophy, Montag’s book proposes a wide-ranging reading that engages both with the most famous works published in Althusser’s lifetime and with the enormous amount of writings that have emerged since his death in 1990. Montag’s explicit purpose is to call into question, on the basis of newly available materials, some of the most common interpretative stereotypes, specifically the reading of Althusser as a structuralist and ‘philosopher of order’ and as a theorist of the ‘death of the subject’. The originality of Montag’s approach lies in the fact that it raises to the status of a methodological principle the Althusserian definition of philosophy as a Kampfplatz: the site of a struggle about and for positions (concepts) that have to be won by means of confrontation with, and criticism of, those positions already occupied by others. Consequently, Montag locates Althusser in his ‘theoretical conjuncture’ in order to show the making of a philosophy conceived less as an abstract meditation than as a constant dialogue with his contemporaries – from Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Canguilhem, Cavaillès and Bachelard, to other less fashionable figures such as Malraux and Camus – in search of a truly materialist position from which to attempt to provide Marxism with new foundations.
Althusser webTo be clear, this reading ‘in conjuncture’ is in no way historicist. Premissed upon Althusser’s agonistic conception of philosophy, it does not pursue a ‘reduction’ to an alleged zeitgeist conceived of as a unity or ‘truth’ of the times; on the contrary, as Montag points out, a historicist reading would label Althusser’s work ‘structuralist’, thus reducing both his ‘work’ and his ‘structuralism’ to the fictitious unity of an imaginary entity supposedly immune from fractures, gaps and points of tension. In keeping with the Althusserian definition of philosophy as a struggle, Montag instead organizes his rereading around three ‘theoretical objects’ that are so many ‘stakes’ in Althusser’s attempt to provide Marxism with new foundations: structure, subject and the couple ‘origin/end’. The first part of the book (chapters 1–5) focuses on Althusser’s relationship with the concept of structure. Montag’s underlying thesis is that Althusser, even in the moment of his deepest involvement with the (uneven and non-homogeneous) structuralist front, cannot be classified as a ‘philosopher of order’ or of ‘structures’ (here, the polemical reference is to the critiques of Jacques Rancière and E.P. Thompson). Rather, Althusser examines the concept of structure as a way to conceptualize ‘a determinate disorder’ of history. The specificity of his concept of structure is to be found in the Spinoza-inspired idea of the structure as a ‘structure of singularities and as a form of causality entirely immanent in its effects’. Montag divides Althusser’s involvement with structuralism into two moments: a first phase (1961–62) of initial enthusiasm and fascination, testified to by his reading of Foucault and Barthes, among others, and by a definite sense of being part of a moment capable, potentially, of bringing about a deep renewal in the field of the human sciences; and a second phase that begins with the seminar on structuralism that Althusser organized at the École Normale Supérieure in 1962–63, during which – tracing an ‘unfamiliar’ genealogy of structuralism back to Montesquieu, Hegel and Dilthey – he first endorsed some aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s conception of structure before going on to criticize it as irredeemably flawed by formalism and functionalism.
Montag shows how Althusser, in spite of his criticism that the Lévi-Straussian conception of structure remained haunted by the spectre of the (transcendental) order ordinum, does not quite manage to completely avoid the conception of structure as ‘latent order’ in Reading Capital. Here, Montag stresses the importance of Macherey’s Spinozist intervention, soon after the publication of the collective book, on precisely this point. Montag shows that Macherey’s comments and doubts, raised in some letters to Althusser, produce a certain Spinozist twist from structure as ‘latent’ order to structure as ‘absent exteriority’; a rather obscure definition through which, according to Montag, Althusser attempts to think structure as ‘an absent cause of a determinate disorder’ and to bridge the gap between structure and the ‘logic of the diverse’ that he had already explored in ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’. This dialogue with Macherey was of crucial importance, as it led to a substantial revision of Althusser’s contributions to Reading Capital (it should be noted that the only English translation available today is based on the second abridged edition – i.e. the revised one – so the English reader cannot gain a sense of the importance of these amendments); revisions that Montag analyses in detail and that show the extent to which Althusser was struggling precisely with the aspects that he so firmly criticized in Lévi-Strauss and in Deleuze’s description of structuralism.
The second part of Montag’s book (chapters 6–8) is concerned with the ‘subject’; that is, with Althusser’s quest for a new theory of ideology. The central thesis of this section is that Althusser’s writings on ideology show a progressive ‘shift in perspective’ that leads Althusser from a still idealistic conception of ideology as a ‘system of representation’, in ‘Marxism and Humanism’ (1963), to an increasingly materialist conception: first through the ambiguous and problematic attempt to define ideology from the perspective of a theory of discourses in ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’ (1966), and then by assigning ideology to material apparatuses in the ISAs essay (1970). Unlike many of Althusser’s previous readers, Montag avoids the temptation to read in the first essay only an anticipation of the theory later presented in the 1970 essay. Furthermore, Montag is certainly right when he argues that in the 1963 piece Althusser is still relying on quasi-idealistic presuppositions and that this essay ‘remained haunted by the humanism it sought to criticize’. In this light, Montag discusses Althusser’s crucial – and so far virtually neglected – confrontation with Lacan in an ENS seminar in 1963/4, which he rightly privileges over the essay ‘Freud and Lacan’. Although recognizing the importance of Lacan for Althusser, Montag stresses that in this seminar the confrontation between psychology (and, more generally, the human sciences) and psychoanalysis fades into a more radical confrontation between Descartes and Spinoza, concluding that the crucial step towards a materialistic theory of ideology is taken with the endorsement of the Spinozist (and not Lacanian) concept of the imaginary. This development allows Althusser to move beyond a consciousness-based conception of representation, so as to think it in trans-individual terms.
Montag is surely right to stress the importance of Spinoza for Althusser’s theory of ideology, but he tends to underestimate the relevance of the problem of the unconscious – that is, of psychoanalysis. It is not by chance that, when discussing the theory of ideology put forth in the famous ISAs essay, Montag reduces what is ‘really innovative’ in it to the ‘most Spinozist part of a very Spinozist essay’ – that is, the final section, ‘On Ideology’. The emphasis on the Spinozist and materialist point of view that Althusser eventually reaches risks obscuring the main tension of the essay (and the main problem to be found in the ‘Three Notes’): the problem of the articulation of ideology and the unconscious. Montag is aware of this tension, as well as of the question of how to reconcile the ‘central thesis’ of the essay, concerning the interpellation of individuals as subjects, with the thesis of the materiality of ideology. He attempts to circumvent this tension by means of a new (Foucauldian) redefinition of interpellation as ‘the permanent production of a hold over the body’. The fact remains, however, not only that the notion of interpellation originates, as Montag recognizes, within Althusser’s reflection on the theory of discourses, but also that Althusser, for all his Spinozism, situated the problem of ideology in between the space of the materiality of the apparatuses and the space of the unconscious (and did so until the very end, as some notes on the ISAs, dating from the 1980s, which Montag does not discuss, clearly show).
The third part is organized under the title ‘Origin/ End’. This final section does not measure up to the first two in terms of either length or level of detail. The first chapter is an interpretation of the posthumously published text ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ (1982); the second is an analysis of another ‘lost object’, an essay written by a still Catholic Althusser in 1947, ‘The International of Decent Feelings’, which Montag presents as an early corrective of the messianic tension that emerges in the ‘late’ Althusser. In the first chapter, Montag argues that the materialism of the late Althusser moves in the direction of a philosophy of nothingness, positing an ontological conception of the ‘void’ as ‘an original abyss from which all comes and to which all must return’. The positing of an origin, argues Montag, performs the role of a guarantee against the possibility that the actual order (capitalism) might not collapse, that a specific ‘conjunction’ of elements forming a structure might in fact not be ‘haunted by a radical instability’ and may, therefore, last indefinitely. For Montag, Althusser here posits a principle of nothingness in order to endow himself with ‘a principle of hope, of anticipation’; he suggests that the concomitant emphasis on the notion of the event should be read in parallel with the Benjaminian conception of a messianism without Messiah. Montag detects, however, another notion of the void, one that stands in contrast with the first: the idea of the void as something that must be produced by philosophy ‘in order to endow itself with existence’. According to Montag, Althusser here does not pursue to its conclusion this definition of philosophy: if philosophy, in order to exist, must evacuate all the philosophical problems and concepts, even the ontological conception of the void must be evacuated.
The decision to devote the last chapter to an essay written by ‘Althusser before Althusser’ is interesting for the effect of chronological inversion that it produces, as Montag returns to a moment of Althusser’s career scarcely known, let alone studied. Montag analyses here the criticism levelled in 1947 by the young Althusser against post-war apocalyptic tendencies, responsible, with their appeal to the unity of mankind against the evil represented by the Cold War superpowers, for preventing the organization of real class struggle in the ‘here and now’. It appears, Montag concludes, that Althusser had already endowed himself with the means to criticize every messianism and every religious conception of time. Beyond the effect of inversion, however, and beyond the interest of the writings analysed in this third section, this final part appears perhaps too reductive. The theme ‘Origin/End’ can hardly be reduced to two single essays written in 1982 and 1947, ignoring what happens in between – for instance, Althusser’s criticism of idealism, his concept of ‘process’ and the important reflection on the notion of commencement (as opposed to origin) as an attempt to think, with Machiavelli, the reality of political practice.
Beyond the specific points on which one might agree or disagree, this is a much-needed book. It extricates Althusser from the ‘gnawing criticism of mice’ and paves the way for a renewed interest in his work, one that takes into account the unpublished materials that emerged after his death – not only to make possible an analysis of the ‘late’ Althusser (the Althusser of the aleatory materialism explicitly elaborated in the 1980s), but also for a reconsideration of the Althusser of the 1960s and 1970s. As to whether Althusser’s philosophy can still produce effects today, in a very different historical conjuncture, Montag appears hesitant. But if it does, it will be thanks in some degree to his research and to the analysis proposed in his book