'Columbia University Libraries/Information Services'
Doi
Abstract
The "idealist" and the "materialist" are both exclusive predications. There
have been attempts to question this exclusivist opposition, generally by way of a
critique of the "idealist" predication of the subject: Nietzsche and Freud are the
most spectacular European examples. Sometimes consciousness is analogized
with labor-power as in the debates over intellectual and manual labor.
Althusser's notion of "theoretical production" is the most controversial instance
[For Marx 173-93]. The anti-Oedipal argument in France seems to assume a certain
body without predication or without predication-function. (The celebrated
"body without organs" is one product of this assumption -see Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.) I have not yet
been able to read this as anything but a last-ditch metaphysical longing. Since I
remain bound by the conviction that subject-predication is methodologically
necessary, I will not comment upon this anti-Oedipal gesture. The better part of
my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when
determined by a "materialist" subject-predication such as Marx's. This is a theoretical
enterprise requiring a certain level of generality whose particular political
implications I have tabulated in passing and in conclusion. Here it is in my interest
to treat the theory-politics opposition as if intact
