Pierre Macherey (; born 17 February 1938,

Belfort Belfort (; archaic german: Beffert/Beffort) is a city in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region in Northeastern France, situated between Lyon and Strasbourg, approximately from the France–Switzerland border. It is the prefecture of the Terri ...

) is a French Marxist philosopher and literary critic at the

University of Lille Nord de France The Community of Universities and Institutions (COMUE) Lille Nord de France (formerly Université Lille Nord de France) was a French Groups of Universities and Institutions ( COMUE) spread over multiple campuses and centered in Lille (North - Haut ...

. A former student of Louis Althusser and collaborator on the influential volume ''

Reading Capital ''Reading Capital'' (french: Lire le Capital) is a 1965 book about the philosopher Karl Marx's ''Das Kapital'' by the philosophers Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière, the sociologist Roger Establet, and the critic Pierre Mac ...

'', Macherey is a central figure in the development of French

post-structuralism Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critiques ...

and

Marxism Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...

. His work is influential in literary theory and Continental philosophy in Europe (including Britain) though it is generally little read in the United States.

Scholarly work

Macherey is known for his contribution to ''Reading Capital'', his influential work in Marxist literary criticism, and intensive philosophical engagement with both

Spinoza Baruch (de) Spinoza (born Bento de Espinosa; later as an author and a correspondent ''Benedictus de Spinoza'', anglicized to ''Benedict de Spinoza''; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, ...

and Hegel. His work on these figures (from his early ''Hegel or Spinoza'' through his ''Hegel et la société'' and his five volume study of Spinoza's ''Ethics'') complicates a relationship that is often otherwise taken to be a simple opposition between the competing paradigms of 'immanance' and 'dialectics'. For Macherey, as Jason Read puts it, "the task is not to choose between Team Hegel and Team Spinoza, but to interrogate each by means of the other." Since October 2000, he has been engaged in a group project entitled "La ''Philosophie au sens large''" (Philosophy in the grand sense), which has been hosted on the academic web platform Hypotheses.org since 2009. The project collects essays, presentations, and longer form studies that highlight the interrelation between philosophy and the literary, political, artistic, and social scientific thought that conditions it. The project is described as an attempt to reformulate the problematic of practice. In this context, Macherey has described philosophy in the 'grand sense' as " a conjunctural practice, which has no other means of surpassing the limits imposed by the conjunctures with which it is confronted other than to reflect on them and to elucidate their conditions in such a way as to eventually be able to intervene with regard to them and, therefore, to contribute to the transformation or evolution of these conjunctures."

Works

Only a partial selection of Macherey's work has been translated into English.
"The Productive Subject"
Viewpoint Magazine 5 (October 2015) * ''

'', (1965 - with Louis Althusser,

Étienne Balibar Étienne Balibar (; ; born 23 April 1942) is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern E ...

and

Jacques Rancière Jacques Rancière (; born 10 June 1940) is a French philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII: Vincennes—Saint-Denis. After co-authoring ' ...

) * ''Hegel ou Spinoza'', Maspéro, 1977 (reed. La Découverte, 2004) * ''A Theory of Literary Production'' (1978): * ''Hegel et la société'',

PUF PUF may refer to: * Physical unclonable function, in computer security, a physically-implemented secure identifier * The University Presses of France *Permanent University Fund, for Texas public universities * Pau Pyrénées Airport in France (I ...

, (1984) * ''The Object of Literature'' (1995): * ''In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays'' (1998 ed. Warren Montag): * "Hegel or Spinoza", University of Minnesota Press (Jan 2012). Translator, Susan M. Ruddick

References

External links

Pierre Macherey's personal site

Macherey from the Literary Encyclopedia

{{DEFAULTSORT:Macherey, Pierre 1938 births Living people French literary critics Marxist theorists École Normale Supérieure alumni University of Lille Nord de France faculty French male writers French philosophers Spinoza scholars Spinozist philosophers Neo-Spinozism