SAULO LANCE REIS

Our objective is to analyze Althusserian positions in the works Reading Capital and In Favor of Marx with the aim of discussing their relevance in the context and currently based on questions related to the procedural complexity of history and the role of consciousness and the humanist perspective in the Marxist field, observing them, however, from a critical perspective capable of highlighting their limits in relation to the dialectical ground of Marxian reflection. In a first major movement of the dissertation, we address the theoretical and political context of these works in order to situate Althusserian questions in relation to mechanism and humanism, given that such readings of Marx's work polarize the discussion on the meaning of Marx's work in the context of the 20th Congress and the debates that followed within the French Communist Party. In this movement, we discuss the reasons why the economistic reading of history appears as a problem in the Marxist field and the reasons why, within the PCF and according to the tone given by the attempt to overcome this economistic perspective, there is a predominant recurrence to the concept of man as a way of approaching Marx's work. By reconstructing this debate, we seek to highlight the relevance of Althusserian positions regarding the complexity of the historical process and the impossibility of thinking about this process from the perspective of a subject of consciousness, unfolding the proposals for interpreting Marx's work offered by Balibar and Althusser based on the notion of epistemological cut and theoretical anti-humanism. On the other hand, and in a subsequent movement, we argue that the limits of Althusserian interpretative proposals regarding Marx's work derive from the affirmation of the “cut” between Hegel and Marx, a problematic thesis that, however, does not detract from the value of the questions raised by both in the context. Hence, in order to assimilate the aforementioned issues on dialectical grounds, we criticize the solutions offered by Althusser and Balibar based on a reflection on the relations between the works of Hegel and Marx. And this in two ways: the first distinguishes the concepts of “structural causality” and “overdetermination”, taken by the Althusserian group as implicit objects of Marx’s theoretical discourse, from what is effectively the Marxian theoretical object, capital – whose dialectical treatment, marked by relations of continuity and discontinuity with Hegel’s dialectic, explains both its speculative character and the relevance of the Althusserian question about the complexity of the historical process when we think about the specificity of Marx’s work. As a second way, we discuss the problems related to Althusserian “theoretical anti-humanism”, linked to the failure to understand the speculative character of Marx’s discourse on history, largely related to Hegel’s treatment of the subject. Following this path, we explore the differences in relation to Hegel in order to theoretically situate the concept of man in Marx's work, on the one hand problematizing the Marxian perspective of human fulfillment and, on the other, referring such discussions to the concept of suffering, in a movement of assimilation of humanist concerns placed, however, beyond the perspective of consciousness.