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.
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Notes
1 As Levine (Citation1984) argued, Mao indirectly absorbed Hegelianism through Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks. Balibar also realized that Mao did not eliminate Hegelian “negation of the negation” (Citation2015).
2 Mao (Citation1965) restated Lenin’s words and equaled “identity” with “unity” and “interdependence” (337).
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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).