Description
THESE TWO talks given by Louis Althusser in 1963–1964, in the context of an ENS seminar on the question of psychoanalysis seen from Jacques Lacan’s perspective, deal with the topic of the problematic scientificity of the human sciences in general. They are of strategic interest not only because they first reveal, just before the article “Freud and Lacan” was published in 1964–1965,1 the deep intellectual influence exerted by Lacan’s thought on Althusser’s own theoretical task in these years—the return to Marx, which involved a struggle against psychologism as well as against any philosophy of consciousness, but also because they involve a concept at stake in Althusser’s philosophical program of elaborating a theory of ideology in general—the concept of the subject.
The Question of the Human Sciences: A Central Philosophical Issue
It is well known that the question of the human sciences and their scientific status lay at the heart of French philosophical reflection in the second half of the twentieth century.2
When Althusser gave these two talks, he saw the problematic character of the human sciences—that is, their uncertain scientificity—as characterized by their oscillation between science and ideology or technique. This problem may be considered central for philosophy, considered as theoretical philosophy, by contrast with what Althusser sometimes calls “ideological philosophy,” namely subjectivist and existential philosophy.
An almost contemporary article called “Philosophy and the Human Sciences” sheds light on what at stake in this problem of the epistemology of the human sciences insofar as philosophy is concerned.3
In “Philosophy and the Human Sciences” Althusser denounces contemporary philosophy’s continuing “predilection” for psychology even after the decay of spiritualism and Bergsonism. He also underlines a crucial reason why the “human sciences” are still not real sciences: the strange persistence of the philosophical notion of a “radical transcendence of the Subject.” Phenomenology, represented in the early 1960s by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty—whose phenomenology is very remote from the original Husserlian insight—is the main target of Althusser’s attack, so far as it had become the mask for a philosophy of consciousness and of the subject. He suggests that the domination of this philosophical trend explains the unstable and unsatisfying situation of the human sciences, their lack of genuine scientificity. In contrast, Althusser calls for an autonomous philosophy based upon the rejection of “positivism,” “empiricism,” “psychologism,” and “pragmatism.”
Philosophy in general may thus be conceived as a double of the human sciences. One might therefore expect Althusser to assert the common destiny of philosophy and the human sciences, against empiricism, positivism, and psychologism, which together form an ideology generally identified with “empiricist ideology.” This ideology represents the adversary of philosophy considered as theory and not as ideology. More precisely, Althusser assigns to philosophy the epistemological task of “reflecting on the reality of scientific practice.” Consequently, once the myth of the sciences’ spontaneous comprehension of their own practice has been set aside, an important object of philosophical investigation is reflection on the specific scientificity of the human sciences, these “disciplines that call themselves sciences.” Therefore, philosophy’s general scope does not consist in the rejection of the “objectivity” of the human sciences but, on the contrary, in the attempt to give them conceptual tools that can help them recognize their own possibility as sciences and fully achieve scientificity.
However we must note that Althusser generally sees “philosophy” as occupying an ambiguous position between theory and ideology—like the human sciences themselves. Hence the constant denunciation of this ideological philosophy (existentialism, personalism, subjectivism) identified as “pseudo phenomenology,” a legacy of Bergsonian spiritualism, which he calls the ally of “technocratic ideology.” Thus Althusser draws a clear dividing line between this ideological philosophy and a theoretical philosophy—which he adopts as his own position—conceived as an antiempiricist and antipsychologistic reflection on scientific practice: what was later called a “philosophy of the concept.”
In that conflictual context, the role of nonideological philosophy is said to consist in defending the human sciences against what prevents them from being truly scientific, in permitting their transformation from their current status of techniques— human techniques—to the status of genuine sciences. Consequently it involves freeing the human sciences from technocratic ideology, whose correlatives are subjectivism, anthropologism, and psychologism.
The general perspective adopted by Althusser in 1963, just before these two talks, thus appears to be a critical perspective on the situation of the so-called human sciences at that time—human sciences whose scientificity was still to come and were for the most part mere techniques for adapting or readapting individuals to their social milieu: “Human Techniques of Adaptation” disguised as sciences. Linguistics, Althusser insists, is a remarkable exception, it is a real science with a specific object and a specific method. But other so-called sciences, such as contemporary sociology and psychology, or psychosociology, are nothing but techniques for gaining social control over individuals; they are still pseudo-sciences.
In this respect, it is conceivable that psychoanalysis, taking linguistics as its model, might also constitute a precious paradigm of scientificity in the domain of the human sciences, insofar as it could be seen as built on a rejection of psychology. And this is where Lacan comes in. He addresses this question of the complex relation between psychoanalysis and psychology, which involves the possibility that psychoanalysis can form a genuine theory, a genuine science, and not a mere intersubjective practice, by making a radical break with the tradition of psychology: a break entailed by the Freudian concept of the unconscious. This concept may be considered strategic insofar as it allows us to build a bridge with the human sciences, in the rigorous sense of the word, and with their “objective reality.” These sciences are related to a certain conception of the unconscious, namely the unconscious as the structures that determine the laws of the anthropological sphere—like modern linguistics, which postulates the unconscious character of the laws that govern the human use of language. This understanding of psychoanalysis as the theory of the unconscious is developed by Lacan precisely through his recourse to linguistics and structural analysis.4