Yibing Zhang

Althusser Revisited. Problematic, Symptomatic Reading, ISA and History of Marxism Yibing Zhang

This original textological analysis work reads the epoch making texts of outstanding Marxist philosopher, Althusser's For Marx (1965), Reading Capital (1965), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971) which includes, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses and the author delves into other texts of him to support the analysis. Althusser, again and again becomes a major topic of discussion. Behind him stood two others: the young, morbid Catholic one and the older, gloomy Pre-Modernity classical materialist one. Putting it more precisely, these existential figures are factual images that Althusser had, in the past, intentionally concealed. This leads to an interpretative dramatization and an inexplicable mystery. A formerly dazzling yet fictive sage and a multi-faceted yet intentionally-concealed person both present themselves in the research realm. Traditional academic circles were thrown into disorder and discomfiture when the accepted, singular conception of a scientific, Marxist Althusser's original consistent image is destroyed, leaving only a mist that gradually dissipates. As Lacan put it, with the shedding of its coverings, the original vacancy further revealed itself. This is another victory of "the Other". Nanjing's keen researcher Zhang Yibing, whom we know from his three other successful textological readings, discovers Marxist Althusser shifting to an Althusser with four distinct facets. Zhang argues, the precondition of exploring this mystery is to demonstrate Althusser's complex, painful and obscure life and the mystery of his paradoxical thoughts. Contemporary researchers only make a distinction between the four different Althussers, but they fail to find integrated research logic. According to my understanding, there still exists continuity between the four Althussers. This is an anti-teleological viewpoint of non-subject and pseudo-subject that takes the absence of individual subject as the core.