Chinoiserie and The (Un)staging of French Hegelianism

Abstract

Abstract China and Maoism were intertwined with the fate of French Hegelianism due to Louis Althusser’s ceaseless effort of bundling them with his anti-Hegelian project. Althusser reinvented Hegelianism as a matrix of One to challenge Western metaphysical tradition, which laid the ground for the continuous involvement between China/Maoism and the core concerns of contemporary French theory, namely differences, anti-determination, anti-reductivism, anti-essentialism, and anti-teleology. Althusser harnessed the complexity of revolutionary China and Maoist difference and unevenness to remake a Marxism of difference and a non-teleological imagination of history; paradoxically, he constrained their momentum at least in the period of For Marx and Reading Capital.