Althusser’s Spinozism: A Philosophy for the Future?

The ‘second’ Spinoza-Renaissance generally refers to 1960s France, where a small group of scholars—Gueroult,1 Matheron,2 and Deleuze3 among them—advanced a new image of Spinoza that broke with the then still widely dominant one developed by Hegel and his students and commentators. More attentive reconstructions of this period include Althusser among the Parisian musketeers of Spinozism, if only as a marginal reference. In fact, any effort to identify a text of Althusser’s specifically on Spinoza must surely end in disappointment. The works published in his lifetime include only a handful of brief references to Spinoza—none longer than a paragraph. And neither his extensive posthumous work nor his archived writings contain texts dedicated to Spinoza.4 An entirely different task was occupying Althusser’s time in the sixties: the theoretical renewal of Marxism. It is his later recollection of this task that contains his now famous confession of Spinozism: