I wanted to illustrate this post with images of simple machines,
but couldn't find any I liked. I then remembered the great collection of records
that Simple Machines put out.
Althusser and the students and collaborators who made up his circle have perhaps never been forgiven for developing the concept of “theoretical practice.” Their critics have argued that the concept attempted to grant an importance to philosophy, seeing it as immediately practical and effective, without the need of organization or materiality. Thus reversing Marx’s famous dictum, that “philosophers have only interpreted the world.” Philosophy became a practical act in itself. To dismiss such a concept is to not only misread what is at stake in Althusser’s attempt to the think philosophy as a particular practice, as something which is both limited, as all practices are, but as something which has effects, even if these effects are only on philosophy. One of the central threads running through Pierre Macherey’s thought is an attempt to think through both the implications and conditions of theoretical practice. The problem of theoretical practice, of what philosophy is and does, runs through all of Macherey’s research from his writing on Spinoza, to the question of literature, and the history of philosophy. It also defines his particular practice, his teaching through the seminars on Philosophie au sense large, and the books on utopia, everyday life, the university, and the essay, all of which are defined by an attempt to think the conditions and limitations of philosophy as a practice. Furthermore, this reflection on philosophy as a transformative activity can be found in one of Macherey’s earliest philosophical works, Hegel or Spinoza. Read through Macherey’s later work it is possible to see Hegel and Spinoza as two different ideas of theoretical practice, of what it means to do philosophy.
