G.M. Goshgarian thanks Nathalie Léger, director of the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, together with the rest of the Imec staff, and also François Boddaert, Jackie Épain, Luke Épain, Peter Schöttler and Laurie Tuller.

With one semi-exception, Louis Althusser did not publish any of the texts on history contained in the present collection: four short notes detailing various aspects of his theory of historical time; his reply to a critique of his conception of the science of history by the well-known Marxist historian Pierre Vilar; a transcription of an informal discussion about the premises of a Marxist approach to literary history; a definition of historicism written at the request of a Soviet journalist and philosopher; the text of what seems to have been a course or public lecture on Marx and history; and, at the centre of the present collection, Book on Imperialism, a theorization of globalized capitalism that is also one of the founding texts of the Althusserian materialism of the encounter.

These texts are outlines and drafts; an informal talk posing as improvised remarks tape-recorded by happy accident; and notes on particular points reserved for a small circle of insiders. The manuscripts on which the versions presented here are based are all freely available in Althusser’s archives, housed in the Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (Imec) in Saint-Germain-la-Blanche-Herbe, near Caen, France. To judge by their physical appearance, ‘Marx and History’ is the only one of these writings to have been seriously revised. The manuscripts of the other eight hitherto unpublished texts collected here were very lightly retouched by their author, unlike most of the Althusserian manuscripts published posthumously in the last twenty-five years, a considerable number of which were so heavily revised that certain passages are hard to decipher. The reader will judge whether the fact that Althusser left these writings in a drawer is an indication of their insignificance. It may be left to the philosopher’s biographer to enlighten us about the contingent circumstances of their genesis, about which I know next to nothing.¹ I content myself in what follows with providing basic information about the state of the manuscripts and the dates of their composition, adding, in the case of Book on Imperialism, a page or two on the type of publication for which Althusser seems to have intended it before consigning it to his files and, in the case of the reply to Vilar, a few words on the history of the unfinished dialogue between the two men.

The ‘conversation’ on the theory of literary history, which opens the present collection, is, more exactly, a monologue of over ten thousand words that is interrupted in three places by Althusser’s unidentified interlocutor. Internal evidence shows that it dates from 1963, although Althusser himself dated the typed transcription to 1965 in organizing his archives. The tape recording has not been catalogued at the Imec and I have been unable to locate it, but this absence of an original is hardly cause for alarm: the document that stands in for it attests to an effort to reproduce Althusser’s words with a fidelity so exact that it borders on fetishism. The words with which it begins, crossed out in pencil and therefore not reproduced in our edition, are proof: ‘it’s obviously pretty damned stupid to tape something of the sort without having prepared it beforehand’ – a remark outside the limits of the text proper that rather too conspicuously advertises the improvised character of the reflections thus ‘accidentally’ preserved to be taken seriously. If the monologue that it prefaces suggests that Althusser’s comments were in fact carefully prepared from start to finish and down to the level of detail, the coquettishness of this opening finds its extension in a certain carelessness of expression which, if it is inoffensive in oral discourse, can be irritating in a written text several pages long. While respecting the informal character of the text, I have therefore taken certain liberties in editing the transcription, eliminating a considerable number of repetitions, filler words, linguistic tics and so on. While waiting to see what the tape recording will reveal, if it is ever found, I have also ventured to correct a number of odd expressions that are probably attributable to errors of transcription, taking my licence from the fact that the infrequent corrections pencilled into the manuscript are not in Althusser’s hand. When such editorial interventions are open to debate, they are put in square brackets and the reading found in the transcription is given in a note. Thus I have replaced ‘c’est-à-dire un refus’ [that is, a refusal] with ‘a un statut’ [has a status] and ‘il [Roland Barthes] pense que le mot est dans la chose’ [he thinks that the word is in the thing] with ‘il pense que le beau est dans la chose’ [he thinks that the beautiful is in the thing], while providing the rejected readings in a note. In contrast, I have not indicated that ‘penser à un certain type d’histoire’ [to think of a certain type of history] has been replaced by ‘penser un certain type d’histoire’ [to think a certain type of history]. I am also responsible for the division of the text into sections and for the section titles.

Nothing about the manuscripts of the four Notes calls for comment, aside from the rarity of the modifications that Althusser made to them. It is not clear when he wrote the Note that seems to be the oldest, titled ‘Supplementary Note on History’. In it, he gives more precise explanations of aspects of the theory of historical temporality sketched in one of his two contributions to Reading Capital,² making it likely that he circulated this Note amongst his collaborators after recovering, early in 1966, from the depression that overcame him after the book they had co-authored appeared in autumn 1965. ‘On Genesis’, dated 22 September 1966 at the time of writing, provides a more detailed explanation, aleatory-materialist avant la lettre, of the same conception of the heterogeneity of historical time. This text takes its point of departure in a letter of Althusser’s that has not been identified with certainty, but is most probably the one he wrote to René Diatkine on 22 August.³ The manuscript of ‘How Can Something Substantial Change?’ (I have provided the title), dated 28 April 1970 at the time of writing, bears only one correction, of a typo; it looks like copy neatly typed up for the printer, which it most certainly was not, since publication of this short text in its day would probably have resulted in its author’s expulsion from the French Communist Party at a time when he had plainly resolved to remain a member of it. ‘On History,’ dated 6 July 1986, was written in a trembling hand in a psychiatric clinic in Soisy-sur-Seine, near Paris. Along with ‘Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher’, it is one of Althusser’s very last philosophical texts.⁴

‘On Genesis’ was recently published online.⁵ The same is true of Althusser’s projected reply to Pierre Vilar, probably written in 1972 or 1973. It first appeared in 2015, together with a downloadable version of the critique that precipitated it, ‘Marxist History, a History in the Making: Towards a Dialogue with Althusser’.⁶ Originally destined to take its place in a collection that Pierre Nora and Jacques Le Goff would publish in 1974, Vilar’s critique was first published in the journal Annales at Le Goff’s emphatic request,⁷ as Vilar recalled almost fifteen years later in an interview testifying to the spirit in which Althusser wrote his reply.

The dedication of the offprint of Vilar’s essay, preserved in Althusser’s archives, corroborates this testimony: ‘For Louis Althusser, who has understood my intention in the kindest possible way, this “attack” that is in fact a common defence. Affectionately, Pierre Vilar.’⁹

Did Althusser leave the text of his ‘projected reply’ unfinished? Neither the manuscript’s physical appearance nor its content proves it. Althusser may even have intended his short text to appear as such in the 1973 volume of Annales, as a companion piece to Vilar’s critique. It should be added that, although the public dialogue between the philosopher and the historian failed to materialize at the time, it was initiated two years later during Althusser’s habilitation at the University of Amiens before a large audience and a jury of which Vilar was one of the five members.¹⁰ And nothing prevents us from discerning, in certain passages that Althusser wrote at the very end of his career amid the public silence that he had imposed on himself after killing his wife in 1980, a renewed attempt to enter into dialogue with the historian of ‘conjunctural problematics’¹¹ – a dialogue that will have to wait for one of the ‘posthumous encounters’ that Althusser wrote about to bear fruit.¹²

The destiny of ‘To Gretzky’, which Althusser dated 20 January 1973 in his own hand, may surprise those who think that the Althusserian materialism of the encounter emerged in 1982–1983. In 1988, a version of the extract from this text included in the present collection was integrated into Filosofía y marxismo: Entrevista a Louis Althusser por Fernanda Navarro, the short book which announced, three years before his death on October 1990, the resurrection of the ‘late Althusser’.¹³ When it was translated into Spanish, the extract from ‘To Gretzky’ underwent a purely formal metamorphosis, with the result that its publication here cannot quite be called posthumous, although it is also impossible to affirm that the original was, properly speaking, published in its author’s lifetime. In the 1973 version, ‘To Gretzky’ presents itself as the response to just one question, which a Soviet citizen by the name of Gretzky asked Althusser: ‘What is to be understood by “historicism”?’ In the 1988 version, certain affirmations in Althusser’s answer have become questions, turning a professorial monologue into a lively exchange. Thus an observation of Althusser’s in ‘To Gretzky’ – ‘of course, absolute relativism is untenable (for, at the limit, one cannot even state it, as Plato objected)’ – is put, fifteen years later, in Navarro’s mouth, where it takes an interrogative turn: ‘As a matter of fact, absolute relativism is untenable, is it not? Plato raised that objection; for, at the limit, one cannot even state it.’ The exchange thus fabricated makes up Entrevista’s fourth and final chapter.¹⁴ Since it was included neither in the French version of the Spanish interview published in 1994 in the collection Sur la philosophie nor in the English version based on the French,¹⁵ it seemed to me worthwhile to present it to a French-speaking public in its original language and form and, now, to Anglophone readers. Like Navarro, I have not reproduced the latter half of ‘To Gretzky’, which is about Lucien Sève’s humanist Marxism and structuralism considered as a ‘spontaneous philosophy of scientists’, for it contains nothing that Althusser does not say better elsewhere.

The evolution of the manuscript of ‘Marx and History’ is that of the typical unpublished Althusserian text. It saw three successive stages of development. The oldest state of the text, which is typewritten, bears a large number of handwritten corrections. They were integrated into a revised second version that was retyped and corrected by hand in its turn. The typescript of this second version was then photocopied and lightly retouched by hand, in order to end up in the folder from which it was retrieved forty years later. It is possible, however, that one of the versions of the text that was thus interred by its author found auditors, if not readers, a reminder that is an integral part of the typed text taking the form – ‘read page n’ – that Althusser generally used when he planned to quote, in a course or lecture, a passage that he did not want to write out. Dated 5 May 1975, this version of the text also bears, on page 1, a handwritten word that is hard to read, possibly the toponym Gien or Giens (or something else). This word disappears from the two later versions, as does the reminder ‘read page 192’, which is replaced by a bibliographical reference. Thus it would seem that ‘Marx and History’ is the text of a lecture that Althusser, at some point, prepared for publication in one form or another. I have based the present edition of this presumed lecture on the most recent version, which is also dated 5 May 1975, while reproducing, in the footnotes, the more interesting variants from the earlier versions.

The unpublished, unfinished book that dominates the present collection has its origins in a text called ‘On Imperialism’s Final Crisis’, ‘written in the train between Bologna and Forli the [blank space] July 1973’, according to a note that Althusser scribbled at the top of one of the four handwritten versions of it. He filled in the blank later, dating these pages, which are hard to read, ‘9 July’. A letter that he wrote to Étienne Balibar ten days later, during a stay in Brittany, shows that he had already formed the project of turning this work-in-progress into the introduction to a short book, provisionally and inelegantly titled What Is Imperialism? Toward Imperialism’s Final Crisis. The various chapters to which this book project gave rise materialized so rapidly thereafter that one can only assume that their author had already composed them mentally before committing them to paper. He suggests as much, in his fashion, in a letter that he sent Franca Madonia from Paris on 15 August: ‘I have two or three things to write, of capital importance from a theoretical and political standpoint; I have them in my head.’¹⁶

By this time, he had already written, in the proper sense of the word, two of the ten chapters or sub-chapters that he would turn out before abandoning his project: ‘On Certain Marxists’ Relation to Marx’s Work’,¹⁷ dated 14 August, and another, produced late in July, which has not been included in the present volume. Everything else in Book on Imperialism, as we have it, took form between 17 August, the date on which Althusser began writing ‘What Is a Mode of Production?’ and, probably, the end of the month, since what seems to be the most recent of the four versions of the prefatory text here entitled ‘To my readers’ is dated 29 August. Althusser submitted some of the chapters of his manuscript to the judgement of people close to him as soon as he had finished drafting them: Yves Duroux, Étienne Balibar, Emmanuel Terray, Hélène Rytmann, and perhaps others. Balibar, Terray and Rytmann, his companion, provided him with written comments that have been preserved in his archives. Terray’s commentary, which is dated, confirms Althusser’s own dating of the text.

These chapters were not revised in the light of the criticisms addressed to him. They exist in just one version that has undergone virtually no modification at all, aside from the countless changes that Althusser made while typing them. The same holds for all of the rest of the text. The manuscript on which the present edition of Book on Imperialism (the definitive version of the title he gave the text) is based is thus, for the most part, a hastily composed first draft, a ‘book’ which, thanks to its incompletion as well as the diversity of the problems addressed in it, looks more like a collection of essays, whose relevance to the question of imperialism does not, moreover, always leap to the eye. Althusser himself was well aware of the disjointed nature of the polemic that he was then rapidly drafting, a ‘sustained volley aimed at all sorts of possible objectives’, on his own evaluation of the first chapters, which he submitted to Terray’s judgement on 19 August. At this stage of his project, he was even considering turning his text into two separate books, one of which, he wrote to Terray in the letter he sent him along with a photocopy of ‘What is a Mode of Production?’, would be ‘very methodical and pedagogical’ and also ‘shorter’ than the other.

He probably intended to include the ‘pedagogical’ book, at least, in a new series that the publishing house Hachette had recently suggested that he found – a suggestion that Althusser enthusiastically took up, in part because he was convinced that François Maspero, the publisher for whom he edited the series ‘Théorie’, in which his own texts as well as those of a considerable number of his collaborators had appeared since 1965, was losing momentum. The ‘principle’ informing the new series, ‘Analyse’, had been ‘established’ by the end of the summer, according to a letter that its future director sent to Renée Balibar on 28 August 1973. The books that would ultimately be included in it had been put on the drawing board much earlier: two of which Renée Balibar herself was the main author and a collection of essays by Althusser, Elements of Self-Criticism, the main text in which, the eponymous ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, had been written in summer 1972, the other dating from June 1970.¹⁸ The ‘thing of such great importance on imperialism’ did not have the time to join them in ‘Analyse’.¹⁹ A few months after Éléments d’auto-critique was published by Hachette in autumn 1974, this second and last Althusserian series was discontinued, essentially because its general editor refused, in January 1975, to pledge ‘not to direct any book series, whether alone or in collaboration with others’, of a kind that could compete directly with the collection ‘Analyse’ – in other words, because he refused ‘to abandon François Maspero and turn to a bourgeois publisher’, to cite the terms of several similar press releases diffused as early as October 1973 in, as Maspero put it, ‘the provincial press under Hachette’s control’.²⁰

Did this publishing misadventure deal a fatal blow to Althusser’s project to finish and publish Book on Imperialism? Or was it a casualty of the devastating depression, warning signs of which had materialized during, or in the form of, his frenetic composition of the text, forcing a ‘slowdown’²¹ in the last days of August before it caught up with him a month later and conducted him to a psychiatric clinic? Was it the aleatory-materialist heterodoxy of this text, which did not, in the end, much resemble a ‘pedagogical’ work, that made it inopportune to pursue the project after the philosopher had recovered in 1974? Was it the political risk he would have run in publishing the uncompromising attack which, springing from this heterodox materialism, was launched on the theory of imperialism that enjoyed the favour of the French Communist Party? Or had Althusser simply realized that his Book was so far from being ‘methodical’ that it had nothing of a book about it but the name, so that it would be wiser to revise and then integrate its different components into separate future works – a task to which he turned, in a sense, from 1975 on?

Whatever the reasons, Althusser left Book on Imperialism unpublished. In retrieving it from his archives forty-five years later, I have not attempted to impose on it the unity and coherence that it obviously lacks, except by excising certain chapters or sections which would most likely have been relegated to the ‘short pedagogical book’ destined for the ‘Analyse’ series – more precisely, for the political-theoretical sub-series of this series that was to be addressed to militants of the French Communist Party and other left parties and movements.²² Let me say a concluding word about these chapters not included in the lightly abridged version of Book on Imperialism found below.

They are, first and foremost, those in which Althusser elaborates his refutation of the economic doctrine promoted by the Party leadership since the mid-1960s. Taking its point of departure or its pretext from a misinterpretation, as Althusser saw it, of Lenin’s thesis that the capitalism of the monopolies and, consequently, imperialism, were the ‘antechamber of socialism’, this theory of ‘state monopoly capitalism’ constituted, he argued, a historicist perversion of Marxism and a theoretical rationalization of the reformism and opportunism that he had been combatting in his Party for the past fifteen years. If these passages of Book on Imperialism have not been included here, it is not because they have lost their interest in the age of ‘globalization’ – the opposite is the case – but, rather, in order to facilitate a project to bring them together with other unpublished writings of Althusser’s bearing first and foremost on economic problems. While waiting for that collection, the reader will find an excellent summary of the Althusserian critique of the theory of state monopoly capitalism in his posthumously published Les vaches noires: Interview imaginaire (1976).²³

I have also left aside a page on absolute surplus value, another on Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and a text several pages long on the role of the sciences and technology in capitalism, because all three resemble notes rather than continuous texts. The introduction has also been excluded, because it is spread out over four overlapping versions that Althusser would no doubt have combined into one, but that I did not feel authorized to unify in his place. As for the prefatory text here called ‘To my readers’, I have reproduced the version that seems to be the most recent, leaving the others aside.

Slips of the pen and spelling and punctuation mistakes have been silently corrected. In particular, the capitalization of words that Althusser sometimes begins with upper-case and sometimes with lower-case letters has been largely standardized. Chapter titles have been put in brackets when they are not the author’s, as have words inadvertently omitted in the manuscript.