This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Of Masters, Intellectuals and Inequality On Lessons, Equality, Democracy Focus and Contributions to the book Notes Acknowledgement References Bibliography Jacques Rancière.

We intend to come back to the Althusserian theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses and to the critiques it immediately sparked off during the theoretical-political conjuncture of the seventies. We have chosen to focus on the critique that Alain Badiou and François Balmès made in their anti-althusserian theoretical lampoon On ideology in 1976. They reproached him with the functionalist orientation of his theory which denied the importance of the class struggle and which preferred to develop a theory of the ideological (...) subjection. Althusser replied to them in 1976 in a “Note on ISA” in which he reclaimed from Badiou and Balmès the idea of a contradictory and continuous process of constitution of the dominant ideology by preventive repression of the dominated ideology. He was led, in the second part of the seventies, to redefine the State as an apparatus of conversion of the violence of the ideological class struggle into dominant ideology. (shrink)

Instead of a ?meditation on first philosophy; (Descartes) or a ?return to first principles; (Kant), Laruelle's work is presented here as a kind of ?meditation on last philosophy; in which the normal structuring conditions of philosophical knowledge are withheld. By superimposing non-philosophy on Kant's two-by-two matrix of a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic, we see a relative enlargement of analytic a priori statements, those itemized by Kant but ultimately deemphasized by him as ?merely; analytic. An analytic statement such as n=n is (...) recast by Laruelle not as a marginally useful tautology but as the identity axiom, the most central axiom in non-philosophy. Likewise, the domain of the a priori is enlarged in Laruelle to encompass the entire universe. What this produces, for Laruelle and non-philosophy, is an ?autistic; rationality, in which normal communicative relations are marginalized in favor of a unidirectional identity with the One. (shrink)

The Frankfurt School has often been associated to the project of “marrying” Freud’s psychoanalysis with a Marxian critique of capitalist societies. This article offers however another version of the link between Critical Theory and psychoanalysis. After having briefly sketched the notion of a “critical theory of society”, the Author shows how a critique of modern capitalist societies and Freudian psychoanalysis actually meet at a “methodological” level for which the marriage between Hegel and Freud seems to be the relevant one. As (...) a conclusion, the Author contrasts two kinds of social critique that can be found in the Frankfurt School, which are deeply linked with the first and the latest generation of the Frankfurt School considered in their relation to psychoanalysis. (shrink)