ABSTRACT
The commitment to antiessentialist ways of thought, now significant and growing across many domains of knowledge, owes considerable debts to Althusser’s Marxist reading of Hegel (especially Althusser 1972: 161-86). At the same time, a certain self-questioning about that commitment has recently arisen among those who share it. Is consistently antiessentialist explanation of social phenomena always possible or always desirable? Such questioning represents a maturation of antiessentialist thinking. It has moved beyond its first phase of critically exposing the absolutism of all efforts to formulate the “foundations” or “essences” or “ultimate causes” of the objects of human thought and to “guarantee truth” (Althusser and Balibar 1970: 57). Now, as it explores the new worlds (or in Althusser’s related phrase, the “new continents”) that it has opened up, antiessentialism encounters and engages its own contradictions and so raises new questions and doubts. Rethinking the Hegel-Althusser connection as proposed here enables an answer to the questions and perhaps, thereby, a further contribution to antiessentialism. Secondarily, such a rethinking may, by its appreciation of Althusser’s positive attitude toward and use of Hegel’s dialectics, offset what I believe are the one-sided exaggerations of opposition between Althusser and Hegel.1
