The Infinite Articulation: Althusser, Balibar, and the Crisis of Marxism

Although the 1980s are perhaps not given the historical weight accorded to the 1960s and 1970s as "cultural" decades, they might be legitimately considered one of the most important historical periods for the destiny of Marxist theory in the hundred and twenty years to that point since the founding of the First International.A moment of intense crises and change, from the sclerotic Soviet bureaucracy's disastrous Afghani adventure under Yuri Andropov, the predations of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Augusto Pinochet against the trade unions and even the concept society as such, to the election of Franois Mitterand in France and its retrospectively enormous effects on the culture and politics of the French left, the 1980s constituted a decade of retreat and reflection for Marxism as a system of thought and guide to political action.Among the dominant theoretical interventions within the Marxist camp, Louis Althusser's work of the 1960s and 1970s in particular had traversed the world, linked inextricably to questions of imperialism and decolonization since Althusser was one of the few figures of European Marxist theory whose work became a key point of reference in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.This is due to numerous factors: the position of Althusser's Thorie series at Maspero, a kind of clearinghouse for Marxist, anti-imperialist, and Third-Worldist literature within French publishing, but also the deep links Althusserianism established with the Latin American conjuncture, ripe for new creative developments of Marxist theory beyond the Soviet orthodoxy in the wake of the Cuban Revolution of 1959.It would be hard to overstate the role played by figures like Marta Harnecker, who had studied with Althusser, and her