Against the Period
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3893970 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joshua Kates (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 136-164 |
| Publication date | 2012-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | differences (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1040-7391 • E-ISSN: 1527-1986 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10407391-1629839 |
| OpenAlex | W2328556251 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This essay returns to part 2, chapter 4 of Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar's landmark text Reading Capital to interrogate some of the historiographical concepts upon which literary studies continues to rely, especially that of the period. Althusser's profound critique of the period remains cogent, this article argues, for a field in which individual events and texts and large-scale social and political formations are often bound together by no framework other than their putative belonging to one and the same block of time-that is, a period. Aiming to reform this concept in order to institute a more complex historiography, Althusser invents a version of what came to be known simply as "theory." (Théorie was the name of Althusser's series at Maspero, in which Reading Capital and many of his subsequent works appeared.) Thus, while this essay, on the one hand, discloses the limits of Althusser's own practice of theory (in its ambivalent relation to structuralism), it concludes, on the other, that no genuine reworking is possible of the historical horizon we all presuppose, apart from the revival of theory or one of its avatars or successors. As in Althusser's example, theory's task, as yet unfulfilled, is to recast thought and knowledge's relation to time and history
Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Historiography · Ideology · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The Imaginary · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychology
Pre-capitalist modes of production
Essays in self-criticism
Marxism and literature
Narrative logic
Making of the English Working Class
Metahistory
The Birth of the Clinic
Louis Althusser
Lire Le Capital
What Is Enlightenment
The Order of Things
Better Read Than Dead
Philosophy of the Encounter
Althusser's Object
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
| Highly cited | No |
|---|