Philosophy and Forms of Objectivity: Althusser vis-a-vis Hegel

The purpose of this essay is to grapple with the difficulties that, according to Althusser’s agrégation thesis, affect the relationship between form and content in Hegelian philosophy, before examining how he attempted to overcome them in the subsequent anti-historicist and anti-humanistic phase of his thought. In doing so, my aim is to demonstrate that the Hegelian notion of “philosophy” was essential for Althusser, even in the period following 1956 in which he restructured his theoretical discourse by assuming an anti-Hegelian stand; a sort of theoretical meta-level which Althusser constantly engaged with in order to define and determine his own concept of "philosophy". My claim, then, is that philosophy acted as a "sensor" for the transformations in his understanding of the relationship between truth and reality – that is, every time this relationship was altered, the status attributed to philosophy also underwent a significant shift. In the last part of the essay, I argue that this becomes especially evident once we move on from Althusser’s ontology of practices in the 1960s to his mellowing in the 1970s: the period in which the study of the “reproduction” of the system of capital presented him with the need to think not only about the distinction between practices, but also how they are connected and form a unity.