In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays

Best known for his work in literary criticism, Pierre Macherey has, over the past two decades, produced a series of original philosophical works. This first collection of his philosophical writings to be published in English discloses the full range of Macherey's interventions, testifying to his signal status as one of France's leading philosophers. Pierre Macherey was one of the original circle of brilliant Marxist students who gathered around Louis Althusser in Paris in the 1960s, and he contributed to the groundbreaking collective volume Reading Capital. His book A Theory of Literary Production transformed approaches to literary criticism and inspired much discussion in the 1970s. Since then, Macherey has been closely engaged with the texts of Spinoza, Hegel and Marx, and, through them, with a range of associated issues such as truth, science, critique, ideology, and the relationship between material and cultural or intellectual modes of production. In a Materialist Way ranges over Macherey's writings on philosophy and theory, critiques of the work of major figures in contemporary French thought such as Lacan, Foucoult and Canguilhem, and analyses of the work of Spinoza. It reveals to English-speaking audiences what has long been common knowlege in France: that Pierre Macherey is among the most fertile, imaginative and subtle of contemporary thinkers.