History as a Process Without a Goal

Implicit in Althusser's rejection of all philosophies of the subject, whether the deus ex machina of economism or the humanist-voluntarist "drama of Man," is a rejection of all teleological philosophies of history. For Althusser not only is history a process without a subject, but

it is also a process without a goal. Althusser finds the anticipation of such an idea in Montesquieu's work, but the full-blown concept he attributes to the outcome of Marx's critique of Hegel. We have already discussed Althusser's criticism of the expressive or essentialist character of the Hegelian dialectic, which makes it impossible to think the concept of uneven development within the framework of Hegelian totality. For Althusser, not only is it impossible to escape the baleful effects of essentialist causality by "inverting" Hegel—that is, by replacing the Hegelian Idea with "materialist" categories such as the economy or Man—but it is equally impossible to retain any trace of the Hegelian dialectic—that is, the negation of the negation—without retaining elements of an essentialist teleology along with it:

To criticize the Hegelian philosophy of history because it is teleological, because from its origins it is in pursuit of a goal (the realization of Absolute Knowledge), hence to reject the teleology in the philosophy of history, but to return to the Hegelian dialectic as such at the same time, is to fall into a strange contradiction: for the Hegelian dialectic, too, is teleological in its structures , since the key structure of the Hegelian dialectic is the negation of the negation, the "Aufhebung ," which is teleology itself, within the dialectic. (Althusser 1972, 181)

Attempts by Hegelian Marxists to replace the Hegelian Idea with a problematic of Man and human alienation invariably encounter two problems, according to Althusser. In the first place, within Hegel's system the dialectic is always outside and prior to the limits of human history. Thus any problematic of alienation must account for the fact that "from the point of view of human history the process of alienation is thought [by Hegel] as a process of alienation without a subject or a dialectical process without a subject" (Althusser 1972, 182). In order to conceptualize the dialectic in terms of human history (and human alienation), it is necessary to subordinate the dialectic to human history; there must be some human essence posited outside human history that is to be realized inside human history. The first problem of any Hegelian humanism, then, is establishing Man as an immanent subject of all process, natural and human (as is the Hegelian Idea), while at the same time dealing with the inescapable fact that (unlike the Idea) such an essence is necessarily restricted to the purely human.

These difficulties reveal a second, even more profound problem, namely, that the Hegelian Idea and the Hegelian dialectic are inseparable; as a result, it is impossible to eliminate the expressive teleology

of the Idea without eliminating the negation of the negation at the same time. In other words, there is a subject in Hegel's philosophy, but it is, in Althusser's view, a "strange" subject; the only subject of the process of alienation is the process itself in its teleology. "I well know, there is in Hegel a subject for the process of alienation without a subject. But it is a very strange subject . . . the subject is the very teleology of the process, it is the Idea , in the process of self-alienation which constitutes it as the Idea" (Althusser 1972, 183).

The Idea is an essence never embodied in any particular entity; it exists only in the process of its self-realization, in the dialectic itself. At the same time, the culmination of the dialectic lies in the recognition of reality as the creation by the sole subject of the process, this very same Idea. The Absolute's being does not consist in any identifiable individuality; it consists in the very structure of the process, the succession of circles whose point of arrival and departure is the same—the identity of thought and being in the Absolute. This is the paradox of Hegel, according to Althusser: history is a process without a subject at the same time that its process, the negation of the negation, is teleological in its structure. The end is already in the beginning, but it is immediately denied from the moment it is affirmed, and this denial permits the process of alienation to be a process without a subject: "The beginning of the Logic is the theory of the non-primordial nature of the origin. Hegel's Logic is the Origin affirmed and denied; the first form of a concept Derrida has introduced into philosophical reflection, erasure" (Althusser 1972, 184).

According to Althusser, the notions of process without a subject and negation of the negation exist in an uneasy tension in Hegel's thought. Any attempt to invert Hegel while at the same time retaining his dialectic will merely add to the problem of origin the unbearable strain of an immanent historical subject. However, all that is required to open up history to scientific knowledge is to "break with the irreconcilable" and transform the very structure of the dialectic by removing its "strange" subject—that is, the self-realization of the process—by abolishing the negation of the negation, the category whose function it was to realize that subject in that process.

It is in teleology that there lies the true Hegelian Subject. Take away the teleology, there remains the philosophical category of a process without a subject. But to speak of a process without a subject implies that the notion of a subject is an ideological notion. Whereas if: the concept of process is scientific and the category of the subject is ideological; then: (1) a revolution

in the sciences, the science of history becomes possible and (2) a revolution in philosophy becomes possible, for all classical philosophy depends on the categories of subject and object. (Althusser 1972, 184-85)

In defending Althusser's position, Karsz argues that in Hegelian philosophy process without a subject is less the explanation of a process than the transitory expression of a process. Hegel dissolves everything into process rather than explaining the position of everything at the heart of process, Karsz maintains, whereas Marx sees things in a fundamentally different way: "[In Capital ] the process (of the capitalist mode of production) implies the analysis of the economic, political, and ideological relations through which and within which the process takes place, and therefore, the irreducibility of these relations into one another. They are not so much the expression of the capitalist mode of production as its material foundation, the condition of its existence" (Karsz 1974, 116). Once freed from the teleology of the negation of the negation, which suppresses the specificity of each level of structural effectivity, the notion of process without a subject may serve to open up the analysis of the specific articulation of contradictions, that is, the uneven development, which constitutes a given structure.