Science and Struggle: On the Althusserianism of Mauricio Malamud

A certain tension cuts across Althusser’s many theoretical experiments: a tension — perhaps even a “paradox”— between science and struggle. In a conjuncture in which a self-defeating skepticism short-circuits the conjunction between science and struggle, it seems vital to reformulate this problem anew. By turning to Althusser’s formulation of the “revolutionary” materialist dialectic in the so-called “theoreticist” texts this essay elaborates a re-formulation of the supposed aporias of this paradox and finds a possible way out of it. Science and struggle are disarticulated insofar as no other practice produces the effect of their conjunction. That is the task of the revolutionary materialist dialectic. Having defined “Althusserianism” as the philosophical practice which continuously produces combinations, conjunctions, or encounters between science and struggle, this essay then turns to the theoretical and political practice of Mauricio Malamud. The variations in the “Althusserianism” of this communist philosopher and militant further displace the apparent paradoxical character of the relation between science and struggle. In the political and theoretical practice of Malamud, this essay encounters both the necessity of theory as “a guide for action” and affirms neither “a scientism without politics” nor a “politicism without science.

Marx, ciencia de la contingencia

En su libro On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra hereda otro Marx, y otro materialismo. Un materialismo aleatorio, un materialismo de la contingencia dinámica de Marx y sus “cosas”. Tal “corriente subterránea” del materialismo aleatorio es excavada por Lezra en su desvío por las cartas, cuadernos y notas “privadas” de un joven Marx que trabajaba en su tesis de doctorado. Siguiendo el hilo necrofilológico de Lezra, que se topa con Lucrecio y sus “cosas,” encontramos que, paralelamente, Marx también busca un concepto de ciencia en su tesis: lo que tentativamente nombramos ciencia de la contingencia. Ciencia, no ya disciplinaria, que abre la posibilidad de una alianza con el materialismo performativo de Karen Barad que desplaza el humanismo de los “nuevos materialismos” desde una reflexión critica que piensa a la par de otra ciencia de la contingencia, también de cierta herencia lucreciana, con la cual Marx no llegó a pensar: la mecánica cuántica

Brecht’s Life of Galileo: Staging theory of the encounter of practices

Brecht’s Life of Galileo provides elements for elaborating what I call “a theory of the encounter of practices”. The concept of the encounter pushes back against teleological theories that predestine modern science to operate as an instrument of domination. I argue that Life of Galileo stages the missed encounters in modernity between science, politics, and art at the same time as it foregrounds the emancipatory power of science. I trace the encounter of practices from the play’s opening scenes – highlighting what I call Galileo’s “double life”. Then, I turn to the most important scene of the play, Scene 10, in which political and artistic practices repurpose Galileo’s novel inventions for their emancipatory desires. In the virtual potentialities of this encounter, that is, despite the missed encounter between Galileo and “the people”, Brecht’s Life of Galileo continues to be fruitful for theorizing the emancipatory power of science

The nerves of the Leviathan: On metaphor and Hobbes' theory of punishment

Thomas Hobbes’ theory of punishment plays a constitutive role in the Leviathan’s theory of state sovereignty. Despite this, Hobbes’ justification for punishment is widely found to be discrepant, weak, inconsistent, and contradictory. Two dominant tendencies in the scholarship attempt to stabilize the Leviathan’s justification for the state’s right to punish by either identifying it with the sovereign’s right to war or by elaborating a theory of authorization within the state. In contrast, by tracing the deployments of the metaphor that Hobbes utilizes to evoke the state’s right to punish in the Leviathan (i.e. that of the nerves of the Leviathan) this paper finds that these two accounts can be made to be consistent with each other — thereby destabilizing the grounds upon which the theory of punishment can be founded

Anomalous Alliances: Spinoza and Abolition

What effects are produced in an encounter between what Gilles Deleuze calls Spinoza’s ‘practical philosophy’ and abolition? Closely following Deleuze’s account of Spinoza, this essay moves from the reifying and weakening punitive moralism of carceral state thought towards a joyful materialist abolitionist ethic. It starts with the three theses for which, Deleuze argues, Spinoza was denounced in his own lifetime: materialism (devaluation of consciousness), immoralism (devaluation of all values) and atheism (devaluation of the sad passions). From these three, it derives three parallel abolitionist theses: (1) Spinozan materialism undermines the reifications of carceral state thought; (2) Spinozan ethics undermines the punitivism of the carceral state; and (3) Spinozan joy is inversely proportional to the power of the carceral state. While Spinoza’s corpus may not give us an adequate account of the complex dynamics of the carceral state and racial capitalism today, this essay argues that in the infinite streams of the Ethics we nonetheless find some vital strategies through which we might compose an anomalous alliance between this condemned philosopher and abolition

On Mariátegui’s plural spatiotemporal concept of history

In what follows, I will provide some elements for constructing Mariátegui’s plural spatiotemporal conception of history. I will do so by focusing on the two books he published in his lifetime: The contemporary scene and Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. In a footnote in the Seven Essays, the reader encounters a concept that opens up the problem of plural temporality in Latin American Marxism: relativismo histórico (historical relativism). This will be the keystone concept upon which certain fragments of Mariátegui’s writings will be put together to construct the concept of plural temporality. This involves taking a detour through what Mariátegui understood by relativismo (relativism). In that detour, we find that Mariátegui’s use of relativismo consists in translating and assimilating the insights of one of the pillars of contemporary physics: Einstein’s theory of relativity. For Mariátegui, the relativistic theory of spacetime undermined the old “absolutes” of the positivist unilinear philosophy of history. I then argue that Mariátegui, through his friend and comrade Hugo Pesce, assimilates and translates the “revolutionary” theory of spacetime as a weapon against the unilinear philosophy of history and as a resource to construct a concept of plural spatiotemporal concept of history. Re-situating Mariátegui’s work along this axis puts some pressure on certain Bergsonian and Sorelian readings that overemphasize the importance of Myth and Humanity as a “metaphysical animal” and thereby tend to underemphasize or outright suppress his creative assimilation and translation of the sciences of his time

Galaxies, Cosmology and Gravitation: On Escaping Galaxy Clusters in Accelerating Universes

The late-time cosmic acceleration of the universe is one of most profound mysteries of physical cosmology. What is at stake with this discovery is the following: either our universe is composed of some exotic ``dark energy" which drives the dynamics of the acceleration or our general relativistic theory of gravity must be radically transformed. Clusters of galaxies, some of the largest gravitationally-bound objects in our universe containing hundreds of galaxies, have been fruitful sites from which to study the consequences of our cosmological models and the gravitational theory from which these models are derived. In this work, we derive and test a novel model that takes into account the effects of our accelerating universe at the scale of galaxy clusters. More specifically, the theoretical observable we work with in this dissertation is the escape velocity profile of galaxy clusters. Our model implies that in an accelerating universe, the escape velocity profile of galaxy clusters is lower than what is expected from a universe that is not accelerating. Put differently, if the universe is accelerating, galaxies confined to their clusters have an easier time escaping them. However, testing the implications of this model is difficult given that observations can only allow us to infer the projected escape velocity profiles. Here, we study how the observed profiles can be de-projected via a function that depends on the cluster velocity anisotropy profile. To that end, we also develop a novel approach to derive cluster velocity anisotropy profiles with joint dynamical and weak lensing data. We further show that our cosmology-dependent model of the escape velocity profile can be utilized to constrain cosmological models. In particular, with the Fisher matrix formalism we show that our theoretical observable has the capacity to set competitive constraints on relativistic cosmological models of the accelerating universe in the near future. Lastly, we drop the presupposition that general relativity is the only way to describe gravitational phenomena and develop a novel probe of gravity that utilizes the sensitivity of our theoretical observable to changes in the gravitational potential.PHDAstronomy and AstrophysicsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144093/1/alejo_1.pd