“A philosophical reading of Capital is quite the opposite of an innocent reading. It is a guilty reading, but not one that absolves its crime on confessing it. On the contrary, it takes the responsibility for its crime as a ‘justified crime’ and defends it by proving its necessity.”
Louis Althusser, Reading Capital
When Louis Althusser famously set out to read Capital, he didn’t do so as an economist, historian, or even as a committed Marxist hoping to decode the text’s revolutionary potential. He read it as a philosopher. And for him, that distinction made all the difference. His close, methodical re-reading of Marx’s Capital -line by line, in both French and German- was not a neutral scholarly exercise. He knew there was no such thing as an “innocent” reading. All reading is already an interpretation. His own, he freely admits, is a guilty one. Guilty, but necessary.
As a philosopher, Althusser brought a particular kind of questioning to Capital: What is its object? What is the nature of its relationship to that object? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of discourse makes this relationship possible? What distinguishes Capital (in both its object and its language) from classical political economy, or even from the early philosophical writings of the Young Marx?
These questions are not just academic nitpicking. They are, in Althusser’s view, epistemological. That is, they concern how Capital produces knowledge, and whether that knowledge represents a genuine rupture—a founding moment for a new science of history and society.
To ask these questions, Althusser argues, is to break with the illusion that a text transparently communicates its meaning. And here, his reading begins to echo the structuralist psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Like Lacan, Althusser is interested not in what a subject (or a text) says, but in what it cannot say: what it represses, omits, or fails to articulate, even as it inadvertently reveals those absences. In Lacanian terms, the unconscious is structured like a language. And for Althusser, so too are texts and ideologies. What matters, then, is not just what a text says, but how its silences structure what is said—and what those silences reveal about the limits of its conceptual apparatus.
Althusser takes seriously Lacan’s lesson that absence is not simply a void or lack outside a structure; it is a structural effect within it. In fact, Althusser’s “symptomatic reading” owes a clear debt to Lacan’s notion of the symptom. This formation marks a return of the repressed, a trace of what cannot be fully integrated into the symbolic order. In the same way, Althusser reads classical political economy for its symptoms: those places where the text stumbles, contradicts itself, or substitutes one term for another without realizing the shift.
For example, classical economists talked about the “value of labor.” On the surface, their answer made sense: the value of labor equals the value of the subsistence goods necessary to maintain the laborer. But something is off. “Labor” and “laborer” are not interchangeable. And it is not the laborer who is bought in the wage relation, but their labor. Marx notices this slippage—not by imposing something from the outside, but by reading the text against itself. He sees that what’s missing is not simply absent, but structured into the very answer that classical economists gave. The concept of labor power (crucial to Marx’s theory of exploitation) was already haunting the classical discourse, present in its absences.
This is what Althusser calls a symptomatic reading. It doesn’t just note what’s there and what’s not. It reads the relationship between the visible and the invisible, and how what is unseen actually structures what is seen. In Lacanian terms, this is the logic of the extimate –what is both external and intimate, both inside and outside the field of vision.
Althusser insists that Marx’s greatness lies not in “seeing what Smith could not see,” as if he were simply a more astute observer. That would be to fall back into the old myth of knowledge as “clear sight”—a mirror reflection of reality. Instead, Marx occupied a different terrain—he worked within a different problematic, a different structure of thought. That’s why he could read classical economics symptomatically—because he had already broken with its assumptions, even if they were still structuring the discourse he read.
This structural understanding of visibility and blindness is deeply Lacanian. For Lacan, what we do not see is not simply what lies outside our field of vision. It is what is foreclosed within it. The real is not what is merely outside the symbolic; it is what returns as a rupture, a symptom, a trauma. Althusser applies a similar logic to theoretical texts: the most significant truths lie not in what they state, but in what they cannot state. Their ideological blind spots are internal to their structure.
And this is why, for Althusser, reading Capital is not just an academic task; it is a philosophical and political one. It is about understanding how knowledge is produced, how ideology functions, and how science emerges not through continuity but through rupture. Capital is not merely the endpoint of a linear intellectual development from the Young Marx. It is a break, a dislocation, a theoretical revolution.
This revolution also requires a new practice of reading. Just as Freud made us suspicious of speech and dreams, and Lacan taught us to distrust the clarity of language, Marx makes us suspicious of reading itself. Althusser says we had to “track down the religious myth of reading to its lair.” That is, we had to abandon the comforting belief that the truth of history, society, or the economy lies on the surface, just waiting to be deciphered. The text of history is not one in which a divine Logos speaks. Rather, it is made up of silences, gaps, and illegibilities: “the effects of a structure of structures.”
To read Capital philosophically, then, is to break with the idea that language and meaning are transparent. It is to understand that knowledge is produced in specific historical and ideological conditions. It is to approach the visible always through the logic of the invisible. And it is to see that sometimes, the most meaningful thing a text can tell us is what it does not say, but what it cannot help but reveal.
Bibliography
Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” Reading Capital, New Left Books, 1970.
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