E. P. 톰슨의 알튀세르 비판의 때늦은 현재성

Abstract

This study aims at examining the current meanings of Edward Palmer Thompson's criticism of Louis Althusser. Althusser is a marxist philosopher who burst upon Korea in the early 1990s, the period of the crisis of Marxism through the breaking down of real socialism in Eastern Europe and Soviet Union. He was considered a key figure who could secure the transformation of Marxism from the crisis of Marxism through, for example, his key concepts such as ‘relative autonomy’, ‘overdetermination’, ‘ideological state apparatus’, ‘ideological interpellation’, ‘theoretical practice’ which played the important roles in expanding the spectrum of traditional Marxism. Thompson, however, did not embrace and even reject Althusser's concepts. He insists that the idea penetrating every Althusser's concept including ‘theoretical practice’ is the denial of a ‘subject’ as a human ‘agent’, which can be expressed in Althusser's remark on history as “the process without a subject”. For Thompson, Althusser's fatal problem comes not only from the denial of a subject, but also mainly from his theoretical reductionism where everything has resolved within the boundary of ‘theoretical practice’. In this reductionism, Thompson detects “Stalinism reduced to paradigm of theory”. He characterizes it as ‘structuralism of stasis’. In this structuralism, he continues to secure the concepts structuralism denies, such as ‘historicism’, ‘empiricism’, and ‘moralism’. Thompson insists that Althusser confines vivid human life, experience, and morals to the theoretical frameworks so that there is not a ‘blade of human aspiration’, which means the denial of a subject. In his book, The Poverty of Theory, he criticizes bitterly Althusser's exclusion logic of subject in history. In this process, he impliedly emphasizes the return of subject and the dialogue with subject, resulting in the restoration of a ‘blade of human aspiration’ withered by complicate control mechanism. It has been a half generation since the attack of New Liberalism in this country. As Postists vaguely warns, it seems that subjects of substantial discourses has disappeared. The shades of world market system is overwhelming everywhere. Despite the desperate situation, we cannot give up a ‘blade of human aspiration’. Thompson's continuous trials of reviving a subject and a ‘blade of human aspiration’ stand for his nowness in the present.