If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’
The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our daily pudding!
Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
Ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’ – it is profoundly unconscious.
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.
In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production.
Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle.
Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.
There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.
I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.
In reality ‘we’ have never been alone. Communists are never alone.