Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2022
Jessie Joshua Z. Lino
Pages 320-340
On the Authority of Science Over Ideology in Louis Althusser: Towards Rancière’s Rupture Epistémologique
This paper provides a discussion of Jacques Rancière’s former teacher at École Normale Supérieure (ÉNS), then famous for fashioning Marxism with the philosophical gauge of structuralism, Louis Althusser (1918-1990). Perhaps a brief discussion on the relation between the two would render context to the origins of Rancière's philosophico-political praxis, specifically the humble beginnings of conceptualizing an egalitarian method out of his philosophical rupture with Althusserianism. Meanwhile, to reduce the philosophical enterprise of Althusser into its practical shortcomings and silence during the revolutionary events of May 1968 in France would do an injustice to the magnitude of his contribution to contemporary French political theory and his major revisions in the theoretical direction of the Parti communiste français (PCF). Thus, the following discussions focus on sketching Althusser's theoretical foundations, which possibly clarifies the political decision he has made during May '68: a demand for organization over spontaneous revolutionary activity based on the authority of theoretical practice over the ideological activities—a decision that became the point of departure for Rancière's subversion of both mastery and the structural inequality Althusserianism entail. The whole piece is guided by the following two-fold question—a question, perhaps, akin to Badiou's inquiry: What were the philosophico-political interventions of Louis Althusser, and why did Rancière move away from his direction?