Chinoiserie and The (Un)staging of French Hegelianism

Abstract

China and Maoism were intertwined with the fate of French Hegelianism due to Louis Althusser’s ceaseless effort of bundling them with his anti-Hegelian project. Althusser reinvented Hegelianism as a matrix of One to challenge Western metaphysical tradition, which laid the ground for the continuous involvement between China/Maoism and the core concerns of contemporary French theory, namely differences, anti-determination, anti-reductivism, anti-essentialism, and anti-teleology. Althusser harnessed the complexity of revolutionary China and Maoist difference and unevenness to remake a Marxism of difference and a non-teleological imagination of history; paradoxically, he constrained their momentum at least in the period of For Marx and Reading Capital.

Keywords:

• Hegelianism
• Althusser
• Chinoiserie
• Maoism
• Oneness
• Teleology

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Levine (1984) argued, Mao indirectly absorbed Hegelianism through Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. Balibar also realized that Mao did not eliminate Hegelian “negation of the negation” (2015).

2 Mao (1965) restated Lenin’s words and equaled “identity” with “unity” and “interdependence” (337).

Additional information

Funding

This article is supported by the program “Research on the Relationship between Chinese Marxist Cultural Criticism and Western Left-wing Cultural Criticism in the 20th Century (Grant Number 23BZW002)” funded by the National Social Science Foundation of China.

Notes on contributors

Fang Yan

Fang Yan is an Associate Professor at Central China Normal University. Her interests include Marxism, critical theory and cultural studies. Her publications include “Maoism and Western Theory: An Interview with Fredric Jameson” (2017), “The ‘Althusser-Mao’ Problematic and the Reconstruction of Historical Materialism: Maoism, China and Althusser on Ideology” (2018).