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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
This essay is not about contemporary French philosophy, strictly speaking, but something which concerns it—an important episode in its modern history. Its intention is to deal, in very schematic terms, with the nature and evolution of French Marxism from the mid-1950s to the end of the 70s, focusing on two of its best-known and most influential representatives, Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, and relating the internal history of their ambitious reconstructions of Marxism to the wider, non-theoretical history of which they were a part— and for whose comprehension they sought to supply the conceptual instruments. Maurice Merleau-Ponty's balance-sheet of a century of Marxism, Adventures of the Dialectic, published in 1955, provides my starting point and explains my title.
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8 See ibid., 30–73.
9 Ibid., 62–64.
10 See ibid., 54–55.
11 Ibid., 86.
12 See ibid., 203–233.
13 Garaudy, R., Cogniot, G., Caveing, M., Desanti, J.-T., Kanapa, J., Leduc, V. and Lefebvre, H., Mésaventures de l'Anti-Marxisme—Les Malheurs de M. Merleau-Ponty (Paris: éditions Sociales, 1956).Google Scholar The volume concludes with a letter from Lukács, disavowing History and Class ConsciousnessGoogle Scholar and repudiating Merleau-Ponty, 's construction of it (pp. 158–159).Google Scholar
14 Desanti, Jean-Toussaint, in Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens (Paris: Marabout, 1985), 510.Google Scholar
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52 In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), 121–173.Google Scholar
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54 See, e.g., ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ (1968)Google Scholar, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 27–68Google Scholar; ‘Reply to John Lewis’ and ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’ (1972)Google Scholar, in Essays in Self-Criticism, 33–99, 101–161.Google Scholar
55 The verdict of Sollers, Phillipe, editor of Tel QuelGoogle Scholar, in his Sur le Matérialisme (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 140–141n.Google Scholar
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60 New Left Review 109, (1978), 19–45.Google Scholar In a related interview given to Les Nouvelles Littéraires (15 June 1978), Althusser made what (to my knowledge) is the only direct reference to Merleau-Ponty, 's Adventures of the DialecticGoogle Scholar, endorsing its criticism of Sartre for confusing the CP and the working class.
61 By Pêcheux, Michel in the Postscript to his Language, Semantics and Ideology (London: Macmillan, 1982), 211–220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
62 Situations IV, 200–201.Google Scholar
63 D'une Saint Famille à l'Autre—Essais sur les Marxismes Imaginaires (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 73, 78–79.Google Scholar
64 This lecture, draws on a book devoted to Althusser, Louis, Althusser—The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1987).Google Scholar I would like to thank Sarah Baxter for all her help.