pdf Politically or symptomatically Reading (in) Althusser

This paper addresses Althusser’s theory of symptomatic reading following its first and almost unique presentation in his first contribution to Reading Capital. Through a reconstruction of some of its most important theoretical references, namely Freud’s unconscious and Spinoza’s structural causality, I argue that reading Althusser politically necessary is to read Althusser symptomatically. In Althusser’s own theoretical elaboration, the symptomatic reading of Marx’s texts and the political reading of a given conjuncture, shares a common conceptual ground. They are both understood from the idea of a “topological” articulation of different instances, and the idea of a “double inscription” of the text. As in symptomatic reading, the field of visibility in a given political conjuncture must always be related and explained by the “structure of structures” that overdetermines all visibility and invisibility. The article argues that to read politically is necessarily to read symptomatically and conversely.