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Rethinking MARXISM Volume 10, Number 3 (Fall 1998)

Deleuze and Althusser: Flirting with Structuralism

Ted Stoke

Neither Gilles Deleuze nor Louis Althusser was ever a structuralist. Nonetheless, in 1974 Althusser famously admitted in his Elements of Self-criticism to a “flirtation” with structuralism that he viewed as a kind of repetition or reenactment of Marx’s previous flirtation with Hegel (Althusser 1976, 126-3 l).’ Less famously, in 1973 appeared a remarkable essay by Deleuze on the criteria by which one might “recog- nize” structuralism (Deleuze 1973).

As is well known, Althusser contended in his self-criticism that what was really most important for him was not structuralism at all but Spinoza: “If we never were structuralists, we can now explain why: why we seemed to be, even though we were not, why there came about this strange misunderstanding on the basis of which books were written. We were guilty of an equally powerful and uncompromising passion: we were Spinozists” (1976, 132). What is scarcely known, though, is that Althusser’s relationship to both structuralism and Spinoza involved yet a third philosophical relationship, this time with Deleuze. Although only in the posthumous writings do we find explicit references to Deleuze’s writings,2 Althusser and his circle seem to have been quite favorably disposed toward certain of Deleuze’s early works (such as a 1961 essay on Lucretius and the already classic book on Nietzsche published in 1962).3 What remains virtually unknown, however, is Althusser’s (and Pierre Macherey’s) response to an early draft of Deleuze’s essay on structuralism. A sig- nificant part of that response is now available in the Althusser Archive in the form of a letter. As a result, in this article my objective is simply to fill in some missing intel-

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lectual and textual history by tracing the revision of Deleuze’s essay from first draft to final publication in light of Althusser’s critical remarks on the first draft.

Such a project of reclamation seems to me especially urgent today in light of the astonishing silence regarding Deleuze’s relation to Althusser. For example, in sev- eral new anthologies devoted to Deleuze’s philosophy (whose contributions total over seventeen hundred pages and represent a wide range of international scholarship), there are but two occurrences of the proper name “Louis Alth~sser .”~ It is as though one had at all costs to protect a “good” Deleuze from keeping philosophical com- pany with a “bad” Althusser! Whether this is the result of philosophical disagree- ment, personal animosity, or political hostility is not for me to speculate, but I intend to proceed otherwise here. In my view, the conscious attempt to link the respective theoretical labors of Deleuze and Althusser marks a crucial moment in the endless struggle to persevere as a Marxist in philosophy.

Deleuze’s First Draft

The first draft of Deleuze’s essay on structuralism was a transcription from a tape recording of a talk given 6 December 1967.5 In February 1968 Deleuze sent a copy of this talk to Althusser to ask whether he thought it “publishable” (Deleuze 1968).

In keeping with his general view of philosophical activity as a kind of conceptual creation: Deleuze’s interest in structuralism lies not in criticizing its shortcomings but in discerning what “new forms of thought” it makes available. Deleuze opens his presentation with the question, “What is structuralism?” as an echo of an older ques- tion, “What is existentialism?” Despite the great diversity of authors, texts, and “do- mains,” Deleuze contends that there is a “certain analogy” or “family resemblance” among them. Thus, the question “What is structuralism?’ is better posed as “Who is a structuralist?’ or “Who are the structuralists?’ Deleuze includes Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, Claude L6vi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and the Tel Quel novelists within the structuralist camp; indeed, the rest of

1. Althusser was, of course, referring to Marx’s famous admission that he had “coquetted” (kokettieren) with Hegelian dialectics in writing the first volume of Capital (Marx 1977, 102-3). 2. For example, see Althusser (1994a, 561-2, 82) for an inclusion of Deleuze within the “subterra- nean current of materialism” and Althusser (1995,335) for a reference to Deleuze’s book on Kant, which was originally published in 1963 and is now available in translation as Deleuze (1984). 3. The essay on Lucretius was later reprinted as an appendix (Deleuze 1990,266-79) and the book on Nietzsche has been translated (Deleuze 1983). Evidence of Deleuze’s influence on Althusser and his circle can be found in letters from Pierre Macherey to Althusser contained in the collection of Althusser’s papers located at the Institut MCmoires de I’fidition Contemporaine (IMEC) in Paris. 4. See, for example, Boundas and Olkowski (1994), Patton (1996), Ansell-Pearson (1997). Buchanan (1997). and Alliez (1998a). Unless I have missed a couple, the only-passing-references are in Michael Hardt’s contribution to the last of these anthologies (see Hardt 1998, 371, 373). 5. All translations from French are my own. 6. Most recently defended explicitly in Deleuze and Guattari (1994), but implicit as early as Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche.

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Deleuze and Althusser 53

his lecture cites them and certain of their texts as exemplary of the structuralist ap- proach. I should emphasize at this point that my concern here is primarily with Deleuze’s references to Althusser.

Deleuze again transforms the question “Who are structuralists?” into “By what are structuralists recognized?” and into “What does the structuralist recognize?” This is because he wants to establish a kind of “nomenclature”-namely, the “criteria” by which structuralism and structuralists can be recognized just as “one recognizes someone in the street.” To facilitate such recognition Deleuze proposes, and discusses in order, five “basic” criteria: a symbolic criterion, a topological criterion, a differ- ential and singular criterion, a serial criterion, and a criterion involving the “empty case.”

First, the symbolic criterion marks the structuralist “refusal” to be confined to the historical alternative in Western classical thought between the “categories” or “or- ders” of the “real” and the “imaginary,” as well as their “dialectical interplay.” Deleuze maintains that structure is distinct from “sensible forms,” “imaginary figures,” and “intelligible essences”; instead, it is beyond the real and the imaginary. In his view, “every structure is, by definition, unconscious,” whether one is talking about poli- tics, psychoanalysis, or language. For example, in Althusser’s writings we find the desire to seek “behind real human beings and ideologies . . . something deeper which he calls the symbolic order.” Likewise, Lacan seeks behind the real father and father images a properly symbolic “name of the father.” His analysis of psychoses reveals that whatever is not integrated into the symbolic order of a subject’s unconscious may well reappear in the real in a hallucinatory form.

Now the elements of a structure-its “symbolic elements”-refer neither to “pre- existing realities” nor to “immanent imaginary content.” Rather, according to Deleuze, these elements have “neither interiority nor exteriority; they are neither external designations nor do they have internal signification.” How then should these elements be defined? Deleuze’s answer is that we should define them by their “place” within a “combinatory” or “topological space” which is not a sensible, imaginary, or intel- ligible extension but a purely logical “intensive spatium.” These places have prior- ity over both the “real objects and beings” that come to “occupy” them as well as the “imaginary roles” that these objects and beings will play once they have taken their places: “For example, Althusser informs us that the true subjects of a society are not those who come to occupy the places, but the places themselves, in a structural space, in a social spatium, which defines the types of society. And this spatium finally re- fers to the Marxist notion of the ‘relations of production.”’

Deleuze goes on to note three implications or consequences of the symbolic and topological criteria of structure. First, meaning is always “a product, a result of the combination of symbolic elements which themselves have no intrinsic signification.” In other words, meaning is simply a “surface-effect.’’ There is an irreducible pro- duction, a proliferation of non-sense in the midst of what Althusser would call an “overdetermination” of meaning. A second consequence is that structuralists share a “taste” for certain games, game theory, art, or even theater; in this regard Deleuze

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mentions Althusser’s essay on Brecht in ForMarx (Althusser 1969,129-5 1) in which is analyzed not a “theater of realities or a theater of ideas . . . but . . . a theater of struc- tural places.” A third and final consequence is that structuralism lays claim to a “new materialism, a new atheism, a new anti-humanism.’’ Here Deleuze evokes Althusser’s “reinterpretation of dialectical materialism” as a denunciation of the ideology of humanism “by virtue of the primacy of structural places over the real human beings who occupy them.”

Deleuze now turns to the third basic criterion by which one might recognize struc- turalism: that of differentiation and singularity. He notes that in the domain of lin- guistics a phoneme is the smallest unit by means of which one can distinguish two words having different significations; an individual phoneme has no existence apart from its relation to another phoneme. Moreover, to every determination of differen- tial relations of phonemes there correspond in a language singularities that are the “true centers of signification for the words differentiated by the phonemes.” More generally, though, Deleuze proposes that every structure is composed of symbolic elements, differential relations, and the corresponding singularities; every structure is a “combinatory.”

Deleuze admits that such a general+ven ‘‘obscure’’-presentation of the prob- lem is inadequate: in a specific domain of investigation one has to ask in an emi- nently “practical” way whether that domain is suitable for structural analysis. To “extract” the structure of a given domain is precisely to isolate the symbolic elements, their differential relations, and their points of singularity. Here again, Deleuze con- siders the “basis” of Althusser’s “reinterpretation of Marxism” to be the following: “what Marx calls the ‘relations of production’ must not be understood as the real relations between real data but must be interpreted as differential relations between symbolic elements in such a way that to these relations correspond the singularities that constitute a type of production, for example, capitalism in a given society.”

All this has been only a matter of preliminaries, representing the definition of just “half” a structure. Deleuze contends that every system of symbolic elements and differential relations can be organized into at least two distinct series-for example, between signifiers and signifieds. Since structural analysis is not the “application of ready-made formulae” and cannot be given in advance, in a specific domain it is a practical task to construct such series. A striking example in anthropology is LCvi- Strauss’s 1963 analysis of totemism, which involves the construction of an animal series and a series of social places or functions between individuals or social groups. Likewise, in psychoanalysis Lacan constructs such series to characterize the struc- ture of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Purloined letter” (Lacan 1966, 1 1-61)7 and Freud’s case study of the “Rat Man” (Lacan 1979).

As if the first four criteria weren’t already sufficiently obscure and abstract, Deleuze proposes yet another, fifth criterion by which to recognize structuralism:

7. Lacan’s 1956 seminar has appeared in English (Lacan 1972). What remains untranslated from the 1966 text that opens kcrits, though, is Lacan’s “introductory” postface.

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between the two series within a structure there are “inversions, reversals . . . disguises, discrepancies . . . in short, for all that, let us use a concept, that of displacement.” The two series in a given structure are displaced in relation to one another, and com- munication between the two takes place only as a result of their respective shifting or displacements. Here the “principle of displacement and communication of series” is the presence of a paradoxical object, what Deleuze calls the “object = x” or “ob- jectx.”s Deleuze mentions Lewis Carroll’s and James Joyce’s use of “esoteric” words as classic literary deployments of such paradoxical objects. This object x has the property of always being displaced, not only in relation to what animates it but in relation to itself. As opposed to a real object which is always in the place it happens to occupy, a symbolic object is “never where one looks for it” and “is found only where it is not.” In his seminar on Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” Lacan offers the ex- ample of a book that has been mislaid in a library; although the book is actually in full view (let us say, on a nearby shelf or table), it nonetheless remains symbolically hidden. The paradoxical object x introduces into every structure what Deleuze calls an “empty case”: “Everything happens, then, as if the two series converged toward a mysterious object which is always displaced in relation to itself, and it is in relation to it that the terms of the two series are defined in their respective situations and in their roles.”

Deleuze concludes his talk by arguing that the famous structuralist critique of time is “secondary” and follows from, instead of governing, the five criteria he has set forth. For Deleuze structuralism in 1967 is not just a “reflection on . . . language, social reality, the unconscious, literature”; rather, it “strives to be a new language, a new literature, a new practice, in every sense of the word.” Indeed, Deleuze insists that given the role of the empty place that “makes possible a structural mutation . . . in this sense there is no structuralism without revolutionary practice.” It is hard not to see in Deleuze’s description of the present (December 1967) as “very rich and very unstable” an anticipation of the May-June “events” that were shortly to rock France.

An Exchange of Letters

It seems clear that Althusser gave Pierre Macherey a copy of Deleuze’s transcribed lecture for comment^.^ In a note to Althusser written sometime in February 1968, Macherey quite sharply remarked that Deleuze’s talk on structuralism “only presents in a more refined form the illusion that feeds all ordinary publications on structural-

8. Here Deleuze has appropriated for his own philosophical ends the striking way in which Kant had indicated the unknowability of “things in themselves.” This paradoxical or virtual object = x will later play a prominent conceptual role in Difference and Repetition and The Logic ofSense (see, for ex- ample, DeIeuze 1994, 1224, 1990, 66-73). 9. According to Etienne Balibar (personal communication), Althusser regularly passed along such material for his “students” to read and evaluate.

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ism . . . The content remains the same: confusion and amalgamation.” Morever, ac- cording to Macherey, Deleuze “establishes a continuity where there is a real disor- der. It would be necessary to show that in fact the structuralist ideology is made up of pieces and fragments. This is entirely astonishing of Deleuze, who also tirelessly teaches us, in speaking of Nietzsche, that it is necessary to differentiate, to distin- guish” (Macherey 1968).1°

Althusser’s letter to Deleuze (dated 29 February 1968) incorporates some of Macherey’s criticisms but presents them in a less confrontational manner. Althusser opens his letter with the following praise.”

I have read your text with a passionate attention, and I am indebted to you for having understood a number of decisive points whose importance I had not seen, and that I had not even known how to express, above all on Lacan, and also (which is only nor- mal, for you know how I “advance,” if one can say it: in a kind of mist in which I discern only the presence of the masses, a little like radar in the night) on the pages we have published. Everything concerning the objectx (value) in particular has profoundly struck and enlightened me (everything concerning it and everything due to it). (Althusser 1968)

Althusser goes on to offer two main criticisms of Deleuze’s work. First, he reiterates Macherey’s complaint that Deleuze’s analysis suffers from a kind of “amalgamation” of authors and texts that are not easily unified; for Althusser, though, this objection is more a matter of “prudence” which need not greatly affect the substance of Deleuze’s text. His second and more extended criticism concerns Deleuze’s use of the concept of the “symbolic” and suggests that, when taken out of a Lacanian context, the concept of the symbolic involves “equivocation and a kind of word play”; it has a “double mean- ing.” The rest of Althusser’s letter develops this point.

According to Althusser, structuralism can first of all be designated in terms of “what it rejects”-a break with the “real” object, whether sensible, historical, or empirical-in order to constitute a distinct “theoretical” object. This was, he says, already true of Marx’s break with the real, historicist, and empiricist object of his- tory that was in fact the “ideological object of the philosophies of history.” Marx constituted the theoretical object of history as a science. We can also discern such a break in Freud and Lacan with psychologism, biologism, and sociologism, and in linguistics in its break with “the historicism and empiricism of classical philology.” Finally, though, in the domain of anthropology Althusser insists that one sees such a theoretical break “only to a certain extent in Ltvi-Strauss.” In short, Althusser con- tends that

10. In this regard Macherey also mentions Deleuze’s 1967 book onMasochism, now available in English (Delyze 1989). 11. Etienne Balibar (personal communication) has recalled that such praise was a stylistic device, even a ploy, that Althusser regularly used to open letters in which he intended a few paragraphs later to offer criticisms of an author’s work.

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behind the claim of “structuralism” [is] this simple fact: a certain number of disciplines of the Human Sciences have discovered, (more or less) blindly, that they could only exist as sciences provided that they break with historicism, that is, with the empiricist ideology of their “object.” They have “discovered” the necessity of theory as an abso- lute condition of their scientific existence. I say “discovered” with quotation marks, and I say blindly, for they really don’t know it and don’t say it. The only one to know it is doubtless Lacan, who is not only a theorist of psychoanalysis but also an episte- mologist and a philosopher. The others don’t know it. When they talk about “struc- ture’’ and “structuralism,” they don’t know they are expressing the fact of theory. Not being informed of this fact, they “interpret” what they say by oscillating between two tendencies, which naturally refer to one another in an endless interplay. On the one hand, they take this theory for a “model” . . . on the other hand, they take this theory for a “reality” (a specific modality of the “real,” distinct from the real, but real insofar as a modality: for example, they say-and you follow them on this point-that struc- ture is a matter of the symbolic).

The upshot is that most structuralists amalgamate and only think in a confused way a crucial distinction between the real object and the object of knowledge. Al- though the concept of the symbolic may be appropriate in the domains of psycho- analysis and linguistics, it is not appropriate in the domains of biology, mathemat- ics, or Marxism when Marx “analyzes the relations of production, the forces of production, and the effects of their structural relations.” In this regard Althusser apologizes for his terminology of real object and object of knowledge, but suggests that “between Spinozists we understand ourselves.”

Structuralists fail to distinguish adequately between the “fact” of theory and the “content” of scientific concepts. In the last analysis, structuralism is a “spontaneous philosophy of the scientists” which in its confusion reestablishes empiricism as the “theoreticity of the concept is amalgamated with the scientific content of the con- cept.’’** Althusser sets forth three possible variants of this confusion, present above all in LCvi-Straws’s writings: an “idealist” variant invoking “models,” a “realist or even materialist” variant invoking an unconscious reality hidden under appearances, deep or latent structures, and a “formalist” variant invoking a “combinatory” or “order of orders.” With this final variant-one that Deleuze himself seems to en- dorse-“electronic machines” have been entrusted “the role, formerly allotted to God, of thinking the fuit accomplit.”

Althusser proffers that one should “clear the ground” occupied by the spontane- ous philosophy of structuralism in order to see what different authors, texts, and domains have in common. First, one has to “sort out” and distinguish truly scientific concepts and second, one has to see “how their concepts function before deciding if they arise from really common philosophical categories.” In conclusion, his advice

12. One might usefully compare Althusser’s remarks in this letter with the general critical assessment of the “spontaneous philosophy of the scientists” to be found in his 1967 lectures (see Althusser 1990) and with the particularly sharp attack on LCvi-Strauss to be found in an unpublished article dating from 1966 (see Althusser 1995, 417-32).

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to Deleuze is to be “extremely prudent,” even though he agrees that there is indeed something in common between Marx and Lacan which is why Deleuze’s lecture “speaks” to him. He ventures to Deleuze that “it is Lacan who is at the center of your thought, Lacan to the extent that he ‘communicates’ with Marx.” Althusser indicates that he “feels most in agreement” with Deleuze’s discussion of the empty case, which at the beginning of his letter he had already implied took the form of value in Marx- ist theory.

What Althusser (by way of Macherey) seems to be most concerned about in his letter to Deleuze, then, is the latter’s failure to grasp the unevenness of structuralism-to see the contradictions within such a heterogeneous movement of diverse authors, texts, and insights. There is a pressing theoretical need to distinguish between those features of structuralism that can lead to enriching Marxism and those features that must be kept at some distance. In a word, Deleuze’s lecture inadequately sorts out the materi- alist and idealist elements at work within the structuralist ideology.

Deleuze’s Revision

Let us now consider some of the most important changes Deleuze made in the transcription of his 1967 lecture before this text appeared six years later under the same title, but in a substantially lengthened and modified version. In his second ver- sion Deleuze sets forth not five but six criteria by which one might recognize struc- turalism. Also, he identifies these criteria no longer as “basic” but as “formal.” The first, second, and third criteria are, as in the first version, the symbolic, the positional (or topological), and the differential and singular. Likewise, the fourth and fifth cri- teria of the first version are identical to the fifth and sixth criteria of the second ver- sion-namely, those involving the serial and the empty case. What is most striking about Deleuze’s second version is his inclusion, and detailed discussion, of a new fourth criterion called that of differenciation, with a “c” to distinguish it from the criterion of differentiation with a ‘‘t.”l3

Regarding differentiation, Deleuze considers at greater length in his second ver- sion “the interpretation of Marxism by Louis Althusser and his collaborators,” for whom in Reading Capital especially

the relations of production are determined. . . as differential relations which are not established between real human beings or concrete individuals but between objects and agents which first have a symbolic value (object of production, instrument of produc- tion, labor force, direct laborers, direct non-laborers, as they are taken up into rela- tions of property and appropriation). Every mode of production is characterized, then, by singularities corresponding to the values of the relations. And if it is obvious that concrete human beings come to occupy the places and effectuate the elements of the

13. Deleuze’s treatment of differenciation here anticipates his later treatment in DifSerence and Rep- etition. published in the fall of 1968 (see Deleuze 1994, 207-21).

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structure, it is by taking on the role that the structural place assigns to them (for ex- ample, the “capitalist”), and by serving as a support for the structural relations . . . The true subject is the structure itself: the differential and the singular, reciprocal determi- nation and complete determination.

As a new criterion by which to recognize structuralism and structuralists, differ- enciation concerns and in turn raises different questions. Deleuze introduces the concept of “~irtuality,”’~ which he uses to “designate the mode of structure or the object of theory.” A structure is “real without being actual, ideal without being ab- stract”; consequently, to “extract the structure of a domain is to determine an entire virtuality of coexistence which preexists the beings, objects, and works of this do- main.’’ In Deleuze’s view, every structure is “a multiplicity of virtual coexistence.” Again, he appeals to the example of Althusser, who “shows in this sense that Marx’s originality (his anti-Hegelianism) resides in the way in which the social system is defined by a coexistence of economic elements and relations, without one being able to engender them successively according to the illusion of a false dialectic.”

The relation between differenciation and differentiation depends on how the vir- tual is actualized. Deleuze argues that

there is no total society, but every social form embodies certain elements, relations, and values of production (for example, “capitalism”). We must therefore distinguish the total structure of a domain as the totality of virtual coexistence, and the substruc- tures that correspond to the various actualizations in the domain. We should say of structure as virtuality that it is still undifferenciated, although it is entirely and com- pletely differentiated. We should say of the structures embodied in a given actual (present or past) form that they are differenciated, and that to be actualized is for them precisely to be differenciated. Structure is inseparable from this double aspect, or from this complex which could be designated by the name differentkiation, in which the “tk” constitutes the universally determined phonematic relation.

Now the “process of actualization,” according to Deleuze, “always implies an inter- nal temporality” which varies depending on what is actualized. Deleuze thus returns to the problem of time for structuralism, a problem he had raised but immediately dropped at the end of his December 1967 lecture.

Not only does every type of social production have an internal global temporality, but its organized parts have particular rhythms. The position of structuralism regarding time is thus quite clear: for structuralism time is always a time of actualization, ac- cording to which the elements of virtual coexistence are effectuated with various

14. Deleuze introduced this important concept in his book on Bergsonism, which appeared in 1966 (see Deleuze 1988, 51-72 and, in commentary, Boundas 1996 and Alliez 1998b). For Deleuze’s later elaboration of the crucial distinction between actuality and virtuality, see his previously unpublished text included as an appendix (“The Actual and the Virtual”) to the second edition of his Dialogues (1996, 177-85) with Claire Parnet. Also, Deleuze concluded the last text published during his lifetime with a poetic invocation of the role played by virtuality in the effort to construct a philosophy of im- manence (see Deleuze 1995, 6-7).

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rhythms. Time proceeds from the virtual to the actual, that is, from a structure to its actualization, and not from one actual form to another.

Contrary, then, to a standard view and criticism of structural analysis, Deleuze main- tains that “one can no more oppose the genetic to the structural than one can oppose time to structure. Genesis, like time, proceeds from the virtual to the actual, from structure to its actualization; the two notions of internal multiple temporality and of static ordinal genesis are in this sense inseparable from the interplay of structures.”

Here we should note a striking affinity between Deleuze’s conception of time and the conception that Althusser and Balibar offer in Reading Cupital.I5 To be precise, in an important chapter devoted to “The Errors of Classical Economics: An Outline for a Concept of Historical Time,” Althusser had famously proposed that every so- cial formation consists of different “levels,” none of which has “the same type of historical existence.”

On the contrary, we have to assign to each level a peculiar time, relatively autono- mous and hence relatively independent, even in its dependence, of the “times” of the other levels. We can and must say: for each mode of production there is a peculiar time and history, punctuated in a specific way by the development of the productive forces; the relations of production have their peculiar time and history, punctuated in a spe- cific way; the political superstructure has its own history. . . philosophy has its own time and history . . . aesthetic productions have their own time and history . . . scien- tific formations have their own time and history, etc. Each of these peculiar histories is punctuated with peculiar rhythms and can only be known on condition that we have defined the concept of the specificity of its historical temporality and its punctuations (continuous development, revolutions, breaks, etc.) . . . The specificity of these times and histories is therefore diflerentiul, since it is based on the differential relations be- tween the different levels within the whole: the mode and degree of independence of each time and history is therefore necessarily determined by the mode and degree of dependence of each level within the set of articulations of the whole. (Althusser and Balibar 1970, 99-100)

Quite clearly, then, Deleuze has embraced Althusser’s critique of the “homogeneous continuity” and “contemporaneity” at work in the Hegelian account of historical time (94). He agrees that the “differential histories” comprising a given social formation manifest their own distinctive rhythms and only exist in a complex state of interde- pendence. However, Deleuze has enriched Althusser’s analysis by further distinguish- ing the “virtual coexistence” or “differentiation” of these histories from their “actu- alization” as particular material eflects-that is, their “differenciation.”

Moving on to the criterion of the “empty case” or “object = x,” I would highlight in the second version Deleuze’s now explicit identification of “value” as Marxism’s paradoxical object which is always “displaced in relation to itself.” In a footnote Deleuze acknowledges the importance of Pierre Macherey’s contribution to Read-

15. For overviews of Deleuze’s and Althusser’s views on the nature of time, see Zourabichvili (1996, 71-94) and Resch (1992, 65-7), respectively.

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Deleuze and Althusser 61

ing the exchange in which it appears.” In Deleuze’s view,

a contribution that shows that value “is always shifted in relation to

it is obvious that the empty case of an economic structure, such as an exchange of commodities . . . consists in “something” that is reducible neither to the terms of ex- change nor to the relation of exchange itself, but which forms an eminently symbolic third in perpetual displacement, and as a function of which the variations of relations are defined. As the expression of “labor in general,’’ beyond every empirically observ- able quality, value is the place of the question traversing or running through the economy as structure.

A final difference between Deleuze’s first and second versions lies in the more extensive conclusion to the second version in which Deleuze discusses other, “final” criteria concerning the “subject” and “practice.” He connects the ideas of the subject and the empty place in terms of what he calls a “nomadic subject,” a term he will make substantial use of in later writings.I7 Deleuze also addresses the question how contradictions arise within a structure; in his view, they are derived from the empty place and its becoming within the structure as “immanent tendencies.”I* Once again, he refuses to see present structures as closed off from the prospect of mutation or transition to new structures: “The point of mutation defines a praxis, or rather the very connection where praxis must be established. For structuralism is not only in- separable from the works it creates, but also from a practice in relation to the prod- ucts it interprets. Whether this practice be theoretical or political, it designates a point of permanent revolution or permanent transference.” No longer an anticipation but a reminder of 1968 this time.

Conclusion

By way of conclusion, let me insist that I have not tried to establish that by itself Althusser’s letter played a decisive role in Deleuze’s reworking of a second version of his text, for as yet I do not know of others to whom Deleuze sent the transcription of his lecture for their comments. Further, despite a number of important modifica- tions to his first version, Deleuze does not depart in the second version from his basic contention that it is indeed possible to isolate certain criteria by means of which it is possible to recognize structuralism and structuralists. Nonetheless, it seems to me that Deleuze clearly valued Althusser’s opinion and altered the second version at least

16. Unfortunately, this important text, entitled “Regarding the Process of Exposition in Capirul (The Labor of Concepts),” has never been translated into English. It is only after many years of being out of print in France that it has become available again in a third edition of Lire le Cupitul (Althusser et al. 1996, 201-44). 17. See especially Deleuze (1973). 18. Here he cites Etienne Balibar’s contribution to Reading Cupitul, available in Althusser and Balibar (1970, 199-308).

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62 Stolze

in part as a response to certain of Althusser’s (and Macherey’s) objections. In fact, Deleuze’s references in the second version to Althusser are much more extensive- and no less favorable-than in the first. indeed, Deleuze remarks near the beginning of the second version that no one “better than Louis Althusser has assigned the sta- tus of structure as identical to ‘Theory’ itself-and the symbolic must be understood as the production of the original and specific theoretical object.”

At most, then, what I have sought to do in this article is to “clear the ground” for future research regarding Althusser’s and Deleuze’s complicated and mutually im- plicated intellectual itineraries. Such research would necessitate a new evaluation and appreciation of Deleuze’s two great works of 1968 and 1969-Difference and Rep- etition (1994) and The Logic of Sense (1990), respectively-as “virtualizations” of structuralism and as vital resources in the “actualization” not so much of a Marxist philosophy, but instead of a philosophy for Marxism. l9

I would like to express my deepest appreciation to Warren Montag and Carol Stanton, without whose encouragement I could never have pursued the research culminating in this article. I would also like to thank Antonio Callari and David Ruccio for their critical remarks on an earlier draft.

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