Translation of an interview with Étienne Balibar in Viewpoint.

This text was first pub­lished in L’Human­ité on March 13, 2015.

Jérome Skalski: Fifty years ago Louis Althusser’s For Marx, and, under his direc­tion, Read­ing Cap­i­tal, were pub­lished. What was the con­text of the debate at that period?

Étienne Bal­ibar: To put it very briefly, I would say that the ques­tion speaks to an intel­lec­tual and even aca­d­e­mic dimen­sion, and a polit­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal one. I belong to a gen­er­a­tion that entered the École Nor­male Supérieure in 1960. That’s not irrel­e­vant from an his­tor­i­cal point of view. In our group, which was formed lit­tle by lit­tle around Althusser, there were stu­dents, of course, but also dis­ci­ples. Peo­ple who were a bit older, like Pierre Macherey, and later those a bit younger who came just after, the future Maoists, like Dominique Lecourt. That is, over the span of five or six years. On the one hand, then, the year 1960 was two years before the end of the Alger­ian War, and the year that Jean-Paul Sartre’s Cri­tique of Dialec­ti­cal Rea­sonwas pub­lished. We had been politi­cized by the Alger­ian War. We were all UNEF mil­i­tants, which was the first French union to meet with the Alger­ian unions linked to the FLN in order to coor­di­nate actions against the war. This con­text was one of intense politi­ciza­tion and mobi­liza­tion, but also very sharp inter­nal con­flicts. The basis of our politi­ciza­tion was mostly that of the anti-colonial and, con­se­quently, anti-imperialist mobi­liza­tion. The social dimen­sion existed, but it came as a kind of an add-on.

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