Concept and Form:
The Cahiers pour l’Analyse
and Contemporary French Thought

This project is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research grant and is supported by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) and Kingston University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Born in Trier, Prussia, Marx had his itinerary shaped by three conditions: the political legacy of the French Revolution; English theories of political economy accompanying the rise of industrialisation; and the philosophical framework of German Idealism. After his early relation with the Young Hegelians, Marx broke with this group through a series of critical works, culminating in the publication of The Communist Manifesto, co-authored with Friedrich Engels, in 1848, shortly before the revolutions that rattled Europe that same year. In 1849, he moved to London, where he spent the rest of his life, sheltered from the forces of reaction on the continent threatened by his ideas and their spread. In the 1850s and 60s, Marx devoted himself to study, the major result of which was Capital, vol. 1, published in 1867. In addition to his theoretical works are Marx’s varied occasional writings, many of which retain their political and historical resonance, from the influential Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) to his remarks on The Civil War in France (1871). Marx’s work is both an expansive theoretical achievement - developing a materialist theory of history and a critique of capitalism as a historical and social form - and a practical intervention in history itself, geared toward achieving the political goal of Communism.

Louis Althusser’s philosophical return to Marx, and particularly Marx’s Capital, in the early 1960s was a major influence on the members of the Cercle d’Épistémologie. A central element of Althusser’s project was the concern to develop a theory of ideologythat was lacking in Marx’s corpus, but was nonetheless essential to its theoretical integrity. Althusser’s own flirtations with Lacan’s re-thinking of psychoanalysis were a tentative step in this direction. The effort to develop the consequences of thinking Althusser’s Marx alongside Lacan’s Freud - that is, the effort to develop a structural account of historical causality consistent with a renovated theory of the subject - lay at the heart of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse.