ABSTRACT
This essay is a response to four commentaries on the book Louis Althusser. Michael Hardt argues that the book's emphasis on Althusser's critique of the subject and his questioning (with Pierre Macherey) of the notion of the author is itself conjunctural, made possible by the hegemony of "immaterial labor" in the recent period. I respond that the subversion of the subject emerged with the legal subject itself—that is, at the dawn of capitalism in the seventeenth century. Similarly, Antonio Callari wonders whether I have not unduly privileged the concept of author and thereby overemphasized the cultural in Althusser's work. I address this problem by pointing to the fact that authorship is one of the most illustrative versions of the legal subject and operates far beyond the realms of literature, as the work of Hobbes shows. Andrew Parker asks why I insist on the term "materiality," arguing that the term remains as ill defined in my work as in Althusser's ISAs essay. In response I maintain that the term has a specific meaning in literary and cultural studies in which most previous practices of interpretation or analysis work to reduce the text to something, whether an internal structure or an external presence, declared more real and more true. Finally, I agree with Jason Smith's comment that at stake in the discussion of materiality is the question of cause. If the text is material, it cannot be understood through the causal forms of expression, emanation, or representation.
