We Have One True Idea

As we approach the sixtieth anniversary of its publication, it is worth assessing the impact of Lire le Capital. Such a task is difficult in part because the book is made up of a series of interventions by different thinkers, and because whatever unity of interpretation or position it may have represented in 1965 did not emerge unscathed from the tumultuous years of the sixties and the seventies. Its contributors all took different trajectories. Jacques Ranciére was the first and most famous to break off, writing a criticism of Althusser soon after the events of May 1968 in Althusser’s Lesson. There were other criticisms as well. Pierre Macherey was critical of his own submission, retracting it from the second edition, and Althusser apparently had reservations about Roger Establet’s contribution, which was also removed. None of the three were republished in the second edition, which formed the basis of the only English translation; what was available in English for forty years was a volume made up of only Althusser and Balibar’s contributions. It was a volume paired down by criticisms and divisions. Such critiques were surpassed in their intensity by Althusser’s own self-criticism. In the decades that followed, Althusser engaged in a destruction of his own theoretical and philosophical claims, replacing them with such concepts as class struggle in theory and, later, aleatory materialism. The posthumously published writings on aleatory materialism, Machiavelli, and Rousseau that appeared at the end of the twentieth century transformed the image of Althusser. The revival of interest in Althusser in the past decades was framed around a very different Althusser than the one who came to prominence in the sixties. The central concern of the Althusser of the sixties was Marx’s break with not just Hegel, or the young Marx, but with all of philosophy, producing a new theory of theoretical practice and a science of history, while the Althusser that emerged in posthumous writings published in the nineties was concerned more with contingency and conflict than the necessity of history.

In recent years, there has been something of a call to a return to Althusser’s writings of the mid-sixties, the period in which Althusser wrote his contributions to Lire le Capital and Pour Marx. This rediscovery of the “theoreticist” Althusser, to use his term, has been in part driven by a broader interest in the impact of Spinoza on not only Althusser’s thought and that of his students, most importantly Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, but also on the broader terrain of Marxist thought. Two books have appeared in the last few years reconsidering Althusser’s relationship with Spinoza: Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop’s Althusser et Spinoza: Détours et Retours (published in 2022) and Jean Matthys’ Althusser Lecteur du Spinoza: Génese et enjeux d’une éthico-politique de la théorie (published in 2023). In some sense, both of these books echo and expand on Althusser’s famous claim that Althusser and his contemporaries are not structuralists but Spinozists. Both books expound beyond the limited references to Spinoza that made up Althusser’s published writings to locate Spinoza as in some sense the immanent cause of Althusser’s theoretical revolution, existing in its effects in such concepts as theoretical practice and structural causality. A similar idea underlies Nick Nesbitt’s Reading Capital’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx, Spinoza, and the Althusserians. As the title suggests, the scope of Nesbitt’s book is simultaneously more narrow and broader. More narrow in that it is concerned with the specific question of the reading of Capital and the idea of a specifically materialist dialectic; broader in that it is not just concerned with Althusser or just the immediate circle of those people who contributed to Lire le Capital, but with the influence he had on French thought in general; Pierre Macherey’s contribution is central to Nesbitt’s investigation as is the work of Alain Badiou. More importantly, the book is concerned with what might have been the most important but also arguably least developed aspect of Althusserian thought, that is, the articulation of a truly materialist dialectic, one that is oriented as much by Spinoza’s thought as it is by Marx.

Nesbitt’s book takes up what could be considered the central claim, or question of Lire Le Capital: What does it mean to read Marx’s Capital, not as a critique of political economy, but as a philosophical text? In answering this, Nesbitt’s book is divided into five chapters: one on the overall project of Lire le Capital; one on not only Macherey’s contribution to that book, but his general reconsideration of Spinoza’s contribution to dialectical thought; one on Marx’s revisions to Capital, and what they mean for the subterranean presence of Spinoza in Marx’s thought; and two chapters on Badiou, one on the odd omission of any consideration of Capital in Badiou’s thought and the other on what it would mean to read Capital as the kind of axiomatic science that Badiou argues for. Nesbitt is not just offering an interpretation of Althusser and Macherey’s reading of Capital or using it to argue for the relevance of Spinoza for the study of Marx. Rather, in some sense, Nesbitt constructs a trajectory between the intersection of Marx and Spinoza and the question of how to not just read Capital but to understand its fundamental method.

Nesbitt’s central claim is that Lire Le Capital should be read as an epistemological project about the particular knowledge that Marx’s immense theoretical revolution in Capital produces. Capital’s revolution of theoretical practice has to be understood as not just a critique of political economy in the negative sense, or even a historicization of the claims of political economy, but the foundation for a new mode of knowledge. As Althusser states in Lire le Capital, “In Capital we find a systematic presentation, an apodictic arrangement of the concepts in the form of that type of demonstrational discourse that Marx calls analysis” (Althusser 2015, 44). Nesbitt emphasizes this apodictic idea of knowledge, which is a different claim than the idea that Capital historicizes political economy or places economics in a broader social context. Such a claim only makes sense if read through the intersection of Spinoza and Marx. It is not just a matter of reading Marx’s categories through Spinoza’s sub speciesaeternitas, of making the concepts of Capital, exchange value, use value, abstract labor, concrete labor, and surplus value a timeless geometry to understand any period of capitalism, but of finding the parallels, hidden as they maybe, between the theory of the production of knowledge in both thinkers. This production begins from the starting point that Spinoza introduced: we have a true idea (Habemus enim ideam verum). Spinoza’s claim, which has both provoked and confused readers, can be actualized, if not clarified, by bringing it in line with the opening of Marx’s Capital. Marx opens Capital with the assertion that “The wealth of societies dominated by the capitalist mode of production appears in the form of an ‘enormous accumulation of commodities’”( Marx 2024, 13). The commodity form, and its exchange as a fundamental basis for life and existence under capitalist production, is the beginning of knowledge of capitalism. As Nesbitt writes,

To read Capital in the terms Althusser first proposed, refusing ontological guarantees, presuppositions, and imaginary assertions of monism and totality, is to assume only the single presupposition that initiates Marx’s demonstration: that we, subjects of capital, always already have a true idea of the nature of capitalism—a minimal, raw, merely apparent idea, but a true one nonetheless: that the capitalist social form is characterized by the accumulation of commodities and the generalisation of their exchange (Nesbitt, xi).

This “true idea” constitutes the starting point, but the fundamental question has to do with how we proceed from that starting point. How does the one true idea become the condition for the production of knowledge and the development of concepts? There is a long tradition of mapping the concepts of Capital back onto Hegel, onto a dialectic fueled by contradiction and negation. In this view it is the contradiction between use and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor, that drives the progression of categories in which the negation of one concept by its contradiction can only be resolved in another category. Hegel then provides the key to reading Marx. Nesbitt suggests a more oblique relation, that of Marx and Spinoza, and a different dialectic—a positive dialectic in which the knowledge of one finite or particular thing is not negated but added to by considering multiple determinations (Nesbitt, 134). Knowledge is produced not by contradiction and negation but by addition and increasing complexification of multiple determinations.

In order to demonstrate this positive dialectic, Nesbitt turns to one of the often-neglected contributions to Lire le Capital: Macherey’s “On the Process of the Exposition of Capital (The Work of Concepts).” Macherey’s analysis focuses on the way in which Marx’s exposition is at the same time the production of a particular kind of knowledge. As Macherey writes, “From the materialist standpoint, cognition is a determined effect of the process of objective reality: it is not its ideal double” (Macherey 2015, 182). The production of knowledge works on the fundamental given condition as its raw material. “Wealth of societies,” as Macherey argues, is a fundamentally ideological notion, but from this notion we get the commodity form and the commodity form is the beginning of knowledge. This knowledge begins when we move from the abstract ideological notion of wealth, what Spinoza called the first kind of knowledge, to not just the commodity form, but also to the relations that define the commodity form. The passage from one concept, that of wealth, to the commodity understood not as use value or exchange value but as the relation between them is also a transformation of the concept from a vague empirical notion, what Spinoza calls an inadequate idea, to a concept, which does not represent reality but produces its own effects on reality. What is crucial about this transformation is that it is not the dialectical overcoming of each contradiction; the two sides of labor, concrete and abstract, do not resolve the contradiction of the two sides of the commodity, use and exchange, but constitute a new articulation. The materialist dialectic is defined not by negation, but addition, adding new concepts in the refinement and development of knowledge. As Nesbitt writes,

Macherey’s analysis to this point has traced the systematic elimination of all empirical qualities (of wealth, and the use-value aspect of commodities) in the analytical passage to exchange value and then value, arguing in Spinozist terms that just as ‘the area of the triangle is not in itself triangular; in the same way too, the notion of value is not exchangeable’ (Nesbitt, 67).

As Althusser said in one of his many provocative and cryptic remarks about Spinoza, “the concept dog doesn’t bark,” thereby stressing the break with any empirical concept of knowledge; the concept does not represent the world that exists prior to it but produces its own kind of knowledge.1 It is the break with what is given, with the experience of the commodity, with wealth, with the accumulation of commodities, that makes possible knowledge.

It is worth noting here, as part of taking stock of this reading, how much a kind of empiricism haunts many readings of Marx’s text. There is a repeated tendency to distinguish between two terms in question: use value—that which is real, the supposedly correct term—and concrete labor, an abstraction or alienation of the former. By this reading, use value is the real concrete side of the commodity, the one aimed at needs, while exchange value is its abstraction; or, concrete labor is an activity with concrete goals, objectives, and a sense of purpose, and abstract labor is its subordination to quantitative metrics of productivity. According to this reading, Marx would be a champion of the concrete against abstraction. The terms of this reading could be reversed. Jean Baudrillard and, more recently, Jacques Derrida have in different ways argued that Marx naively affirms the values of concrete against abstraction.2 Such readings entirely misunderstand the nature of Marx’s thought, and the materialist dialectic. Dualisms, especially those that are informed by a hierarchy of good and bad, are not the antechamber of dialectic but its opposite. It is not a matter of thinking use value against exchange value, concrete labor against abstract labor, but of thinking the relation of use value and exchange value, and with that the relation of concrete to abstract labor—adding the concepts together in the constitution of a positive dialectic in which relation and complexity and not contradiction and negation are the basis for knowledge.

This brings us to the third Spinozist notion integral to a reading of Marx, and that is the idea of what Spinoza calls common notions, that is, the notions that are fundamental to constructing true knowledge and that are not to be found in any singular thing. As Nesbitt states,

“What then is the nature of such common notions? For Spinoza, the crucial distinction between the inadequate, imaginary ideas we necessarily form from sense impressions, and common notions, is that the latter are ideas not about any given, actually existing singular thing (such as coats and linen or bakers and cotton spinners, among Marx’s examples), but about certain qualities common to all things in general. In the wake of Galileo, who died in 1642, Spinoza’s privileged example in these propositions is that of physical bodies as such, universally existing in space and following the general laws that govern their relations. If it is the case that ‘all bodies agree in certain things’–i.e., that aside from their particular existences, they possess common characteristics, which is to say their extension—then they therefore have in common that ‘they are determinations of extension, and are universally and identically subject to the same laws of movement and rest” (Nesbitt, 203)

We begin with wealth, an inadequate idea of capitalism, one that confuses our sense impressions with the characteristics of the thing, and from there move to the commodity form, which is both a fact of existence—we need commodities to survive—and its own form, or structure. From there, we arrive at its constituent relations. The important thing about these relations is not their empirical character, not the specific use or utility of a commodity or the specific concrete nature of this or that labor, but the relation between use and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor. This relation is present in all commodities, in all labor processes, because it is given in none. In the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics, Spinoza writes that it is necessary to move beyond the obstacle of superstition in order to grasp what he refers to as the “concatenation of all things [rerum concatenationem]” (Spinoza, EIApp). What Spinoza calls god, or nature, is nothing other than the infinite relations that produce or determine any finite thing. To understand any particular finite thing, it is necessary to understand the causal relations that determine it. Cesare Casarino has argued that this idea of a connection of all things, of an additive synthesis, also defines Marx’s thought. Capital is an attempt to grasp the connection of economic relations, political conflicts, technological developments, and even cultural transformation—all of the things that make up the capitalist mode of production. (Casarino, 211). For Both Spinoza and Marx, understanding something, anything, is a matter of understanding the connection of things that define it and sustain it.

The possession of one true idea, the critique of empiricism or the non-representational nature of the concept, and the relational nature of thought are three fundamental epistemological orientations of Spinoza that become the basis for a new positive dialectic in Althusser and Macherey, a dialectic in which the terms and concepts are neither grounded on some fundamental negativity or resolved into a higher unity. Nesbitt argues that one of the most pressing questions of Althusser’s thought—how to think a materialist dialectic, a dialectic freed from totality and teleology—was perhaps already answered, albeit in a nascent form, by Macherey’s contribution to Lire le Capital. Or, more to the point, this reading set the terms for a thought of the dialectic that can be glimpsed through Macherey’s later works, and, more generally, in the relation between Marx and Spinoza set forth in those texts. Nesbitt’s reading of Macherey is only one part of his argument, making up only one chapter, but this chapter outlines the fundamental task that Nesbitt sets for himself of fulfilling Althusser’s claim that in Capital, Marx “really did invent a new form of order for axiomatic analysis . . .” (Althusser 2015, 44). As Nesbitt reminds us, this project was not fulfilled by Althusser after the publication of Lire le Capital. In fact, he turned away from it, first in his self-criticism of his theoreticism, then later in the development of his idea of philosophy as class struggle in theory, and ultimately in his final posthumously published project of The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter. This does not mean that such a project did not perhaps continue by other means and in other places. Nesbitt turns to Alain Badiou as continuing this project of an apodictic, anti-empiricist, and anti-historicist reading of Capital. Such a claim runs up against a strange paradox: as much as Badiou continued to affirm his communism, and thus his commitment to a Marxist liberatory perspective, even as many of his contemporaries turned away from it, he has had very little to say about Marx’s Capital. As Nesbitt describes this paradox,

Badiou’s relation to Capital is nonetheless an uncanny mixture of manifest disinterest to the point of disavowal and censorship (is it not odd for such a committed philosopher of Marxist communism never to have discussed Capital at some point in over two hundred monographs?), and the corresponding recurrent, unacknowledged reinscription of the order of Marx’s critique within the abstract terms [of] Badiou’s universal logic. (Nesbitt, 209)

As much as this paradox makes possible a criticism of Badiou’s own limitations, it also paves the way for an address of this missed connection. As Nesbitt argues through his reading of Macherey, and of Macherey reading Marx, it is possible to see it as not only fulfilling Badiou’s own idea of an axiomatic system of thought, but also incorporates Marx’s Capital as the paradigmatic example of such an axiomatic system. Central to this second aspect is the question of where and how a philosophy begins. As Nesbitt argues, the “true idea” with which Marx begins his investigation of Capital is not a subjective decision. Capital appears as the general commodification of all things. Nesbitt writes:

In contrast to Badiou’s generic materialism, Marx’s science of causes in Capital begins from the materialist position he develops not from empirical reflection on the lived experience of capitalism, but from his critical analysis of the contradictions and insufficiencies of classical political economy and French socialism. Despite this comparative insufficiency of Badiou’s ontological materialism, it is nonetheless possible and even fruitful, I wish to argue, to continue to read Badiou’s abstract logic as the objective displacement (Verschiebung, in the Freudian terminology) of Capital, as a body of work that in its incessant commitment and faithfulness to the Marxian political project of communism, objectively reinscribes Marx’s critique of political economy within terms that raise to a point of extreme abstraction and schematisation that same initial tendency to formalisation identifiable (as I argued in the previous chapter) in Marx’s own revision process of his manuscript (Nesbitt, 231).

Nesbitt argues that Marx’s Capital comes closest to articulating a logic of the world, of our world, of a world governed by commodity exchange. “In other words, Capital should and indeed must be read and understood as the science of the logic governing our world, the capitalist social form” (260).

Nesbitt’s turn to Badiou raises another question. Not that of Althusser’s own trajectory, which constitutes a kind of self-destruction of the positions put forward in the sixties, but perhaps that of the larger Althusserian project. I might be more accurate to say trajectories since it is hard to sum up the directions of research and writing taken up by Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, and others in any one direction. It takes up multiple directions of critique, contestation, and continuation. Of these multiple trajectories Nesbitt attaches himself to Macherey’s. In the years since Macherey’s contribution to Lire le Capital, he has been known in the English speaking world for his A Theory of Literary Production and Hegel or Spinoza. If one expands beyond these publications into the works not available in English translation, there is a more sustained engagement with Spinoza, including five volumes dedicated to the Ethics as well as books on everyday life, the university, and utopia. What holds these disparate investigations together is an interest in the question of philosophical practice: what philosophy can do but also its limitations and the way in which philosophy, as one particular practice, is both finite and situated by other practices (Macherey 1998, 33).

At the center of Marx’s thought there is an attempt to struggle with the finite and partial nature of philosophy as an activity. This is why Althusser argues that Marx’s method in Capital is primarily a method of reading, of a symptomatic reading, which reads political economy for the problems that it cannot pose or articulate (Althusser 2015: 27). Specifically, this reading identifies the problem that classical political economy could not address concerning labor, which Smith and Ricardo saw as the source of value. Macherey has returned to this concept in recent years, in both recently translated essays and in his most recent book, La Chose Philosophique. In both those texts what Macherey stresses is that what political economy cannot address is the problem of power: power both in terms of labor power and in terms of the power relations that make labor power possible. As Macherey writes,

Marx’s discovery is that capitalism exploits an ambiguity related to that on which the notion of “power” is based; it is made possible by the ambiguity proper to a reality that may exist both potentially and actuality at the same time, and from which it has found the means to draw the maximum profit, in the two forms of extraction of absolute surplus value (an extension of the working day) and of relative surplus value (an increase in the productivity of labor power). (Macherey 2022, 175).

This refers us back to Marx’s theoretical and terminological innovation. Marx stresses that what the capitalist buys is not labor but labor power, not work but a capacity to work. The capitalist must then put this capacity to work, and the entire history of capitalism is one of the various strategies, from the length of the working day to the various forms of management and surveillance, that make work more productive. This entire metaphysics, this transformation of potentiality into actuality, has as its condition a history that is also beyond the purview of political economy, and this history makes it so there are people with only their labor power to sell: workers. As Macherey writes,

Before becoming a so-called natural given of economics, the existence of labor power rests on the relationship of domination, a constraint whose actual nature the legal form of the contract eludes by exploiting the confusion that is key to its operation. In fact, if the worker were not forced, not only would he not offer his labor power for hire to the capitalist, but he would not possess this very force, which is a fiction completely fabricated by the regime of wage labor, a potential reality assumed to exist separately from the conditions of its realization . . . (Macherey 2022, 176).

Power, force, is the unrecognized but necessary condition of capitalism as a mode of production. As much as Marx makes a massive break with political economy, posing the problem of power that it could not see, this break is incomplete; Marx presents it as a division between how labor appears, as a commodity, and its reality as a potential or capacity (Macherey 2024). Marx does not fully grasp the radical nature of his own break. What appears in a specific problem in Marx’s critical engagement with political economy, is, as Macherey argues, a more general problem: philosophy, like political economy, cannot see the position from which it speaks, cannot see its historical situation nor can it grasp its own break with it (Macherey 2024). Thus, Marx needs Althusser to read and interpret his own revolution. This is but a specific case of a more general problem, one that Macherey turns to in his later writing, not the problem of an apodictic science but that of an ongoing problem of understanding the relation between philosophy and its history, the history that makes it and the history that it makes.

That Macherey’s trajectory differs from Nesbitt’s is not itself meant as criticism; every philosopher’s work is marked by steps not taken, and the conclusions that they draw from their own trajectory are not the only possible conclusions. As Nesbitt and others have demonstrated, Althusser’s own self-destructive self-criticism is not the only conclusion to draw from Althusser’s work in the sixties. However, these different trajectories reveal or illustrate different facets and possibilities of the work in question. It is possible to find in Macherey’s later work a tension between structure and conjuncture. During the same period that Althusser proposed for a reading of Capital as an apodictic science, articulating the structure and structural causality of capitalism, he also posited a reading of history through the concept of conjuncture, of the singular and overdetermined moments of history, ultimately arguing that every historical moment is necessarily overdetermined. These two concepts, conjuncture and structure, are not necessarily opposed, and to some extent, as Etienne Balibar argues, “the reality of the structure is nothing but the unpredictable succession of conjunctures” and, “conversely, the conjuncture is merely determined as a certain disposition of the structure” (Balibar 1996, 115). That they are not necessarily opposed does not mean that their opposition has not emerged, especially as conjuncture and structure are drawn from different traditions and trajectories, the former from Lenin and from the political analysis of the concrete situation and the latter from Spinoza. These two different materialist dialectics, or materialist critiques of the dialectic, are defined by a fundamental tension. To quote Balibar once again,

In one case, the determinism of the “meaning of history” is criticized in the name of the singularity of conjunctures, in the name of “the concrete analysis of concrete situations”: the Leninist, and even more, the Machiavellian side of Althusser’s analysis (which is dominant in “Contradiction and Overdetermination”). In the other case, critique aims above all at the idea of the simple and expressive “totality” (emphasized by Lukacs and his disciples) in the name of the complexity of the structure, of its unequal development and its variations: the truly structuralist side to Althusser, invested in the analysis of “modes of production” (which “On the Materialist Dialectic” tries to formalize). There are thus Althusserians of the Conjuncture and Althusserians of the Structure (this is still true today, even if some have changed sides) (Balibar 1994, 166).

Balibar himself would seem to be a Althusserian of the Conjuncture. In the years since the publication of Lire Le Capital, he has developed a series of brief studies on philosophers, including Marx, Spinoza, and Locke, but he is perhaps more well known for his interventions in the conjunctures around the intersecting matters of race, state, and nation—from the face of nation in light of the European Union to the changing nature of racism in the era of anti-immigration. Badiou could in some sense be an Althusserian of the Structure, even if, as Nesbitt demonstrates, he was never interested in the mode of production as a structure; nonetheless, his systemic works have attempted to think the structure of being. One could perhaps speculate that Macherey might be one who has changed sides, going from the systemic study of the structure of capitalism, to the conjunctures, to the historical situation as that which exceeds its own conceptualization. Badiou’s thought can be understood as the realization of the reading of Capital that Macherey undertook in 1965, but Macherey’s own work takes a different trajectory, one oriented less towards the structure than the conjuncture.

These trajectories and tensions reflect a fundamental tension in the very idea of “theoretical practice.” Theoretical practice, or practice of philosophy, is a concept that at once asserts the fundamental efficacy and reality of practice: that theory, theoretical work, is practice, with its own effects, and as a practice it is necessarily situated and conditioned by other practices. As Balibar sums up this relation in a discussion of his own work:

. . . I drew a hypothesis about the specific modality of theoretical practice in philosophy. I would put it this way: philosophy constantly endeavors to untie and retie from inside the knot between conjuncture and writing, or if you will, it works from within the element of writing to untie the elements of conjuncture, but it also works under the constraint of conjuncture to retie the conditions of writing (Balibar 1995, 144).

All philosophy is situated between two determinations: first, the determinations of its historical moment, which in part shapes it, even if these conditions are not recognized by the philosopher; second, the determination of its own writing, its own attempt to articulate a system. This could be seen as a reflection of Marx’s fundamental assertion that while human beings make history, they do so not under the conditions of their choosing. At every historical moment there is both activity, the act of making history, and the conditions that situate and limit that activity. Even revolutions must work with their existing conditions. This same problem is given a more general or ontological articulation in Spinoza, framed not just in terms of human action in history, but in terms of everything that exists: every finite thing that exists is at once an effect of the other things that determine it, which is to say ultimately all of nature, as well as its own particular force of striving. As André Tosel presents this problem in Spinoza,

Spinoza unites somehow two traits that are incompatible in all other philosophies. He corrects one conception by the other through a confrontation that exceeds them both. On the one hand, he distances himself from a conception of finitude forbidding man any fantasy of mastery and referring him to his mortal condition and his passionate servitude, a conception that is generally a property of religions which found their authority and domination on this weakness. On the other hand, he redefines an active and productive conception of this finitude; it has become a means for man to affirm and increase his power to think and act properly, a conception peculiar to the modern and humanist tradition, sustained above all by the Enlightenment and by philosophical idealism. But Spinoza rejects the Promethean pretensions that make man a kingdom within a kingdom. This is a strange philosophy that unites the infinite and the finite and finds no reason to despair or hope in the true idea that nature is indifferent to the ends that man proposes, but that does not prevent man, like any other mode, from striving to realize his causal power (Tosel, 178).3

Jean Matthys argues that what is presented in Marx as the condition of history and in Spinoza as the condition of existence becomes in Althusser a specific problem, the problem of philosophical or theoretical practice. As Jean Matthys writes,

Althusser’s philosophical intervention, which has both an epistemological and political aspect, would be to think the conditions of a “new theoretical practice,” of finitude, equally opposed to fantasies of all power as to melancholic resignation, which is also a politics of complexity, of difference and heterogeneity opposed to all politics of identity comprised of the fantasy of full coincidence of the self to the self, which cannot fail to block the political processes of emancipator self-transformation, the transformation of the self and social relations (Matthys, 369).4

Matthys argues that Althusser’s turn to Spinoza, his theoreticist period, should be understood as not an attempt to construct a reading of capital sub speciesaeternitas, as the fundamental structure of our existence, but as articulating a fundamental investigation into the finitude of theoretical practice. Philosophy is only one practice, determined and situated as other practices are, including aesthetic practices such as literature, and disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. To paraphrase the name of Macherey’s long-running seminar, Philosophe au sens large, it is by grasping the limitations of philosophy that we are capable of recognizing its power and capacity.

Macherey’s and Nesbitt’s different trajectories attest to not only the groundbreaking nature of Althusser’s work but also a fundamental tension at the heart of Spinoza’s philosophy: the recognition that a finite thing, thought at a particular point in time, could produce infinite effects. That our partial and limited perspective could, precisely because of its limitations, produce the capacity to know and comprehend the world.