ABSTRACT
Within the theory of science, Louis Hjelmslev and Louis Althusser are the two most important inspirations for life-mode analysis. Within their respective fields of comparative linguistics and philosophy, Hjelmslev and Althusser each sought to explore how a theoretical conceptual apparatus had to be structured in order to analyse social processes. Both Hjelmslev and Althusser broke with modern epistemology's subject-object problematique and with the distinction made by its many philosophical variants (rationalism, empiricism, realism) between concept and object (as well as the necessity to create agreement between these). Instead of epistemology's distinction between concept and object, Hjelmslev and Althusser distinguished between different forms of concepts, i.e. different ways of developing and using concepts. Whereas science develops and reworks relational and terminal concepts, the 'experiential material' of empirical research and other forms of praxis consists of classificatory concepts. Instead of a dichotomy between subject and object, Bachelard, Hjelmslev, and Althusser concerned themselves with how the modes of analysis of science were able to clarify and restructure the associations among the concepts we use (in other forms of praxis) to understand and deal with the world. As was also the case with Niels Bohr, their theory of science was nourished by being applied to the practical activity of rethinking and reformulating fundamental theoretical problems in specific scientific disciplines: physics, linguistics, history, and philosophy.
