Desire and power

pp. 81-111

in: Alex Callinicos, Is there a future for Marxism?, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1982

Abstract

Signification as play, the irreducibility of difference, the subversion of the subject, the deconstruction of truth — these themes came to dominate French thought in the 1960s and early 1970s. We have seen how even marxism, in the shape of Althusser and his followers, was not immune to their attraction. Necessarily any philosophy which took shape from these themes — a philosophy of difference — could not avoid a confrontation with Hegel. For his was the philosophical system which sought, explicitly and consistently, to interiorise difference within thought, to make difference (in the shape of Contradiction) the moving principle of reality and yet, as it were, to sublimate difference into the process of the self-realisation of Absolute Spirit. "The truth", Hegel wrote, "is … the bacchanalian revel where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached than it eo ipso collapses straightaway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent unbroken calm".¹