Althusser's Study Of Overdeterminism

The overdetermination theory is the fruit of Louis Althusser who opposed the economic determinism and Marxist humanitarian interpretation firmly.On the one hand,it emphasizes the decisive role of economy “in the last instance”;on the other hand,it emphasizes the pivotal role of superstructure such as politics and ideology in a specific historical situation.At the same time,from the perspective of dialectics,he uses the overdetermination theory to express Marx's materialistic dialectics,which is only put forward in the form of metaphor by Marx himself,so as to eliminate the erosion of Hegel's dialectics from Marxist philosophy and completely reject humanitarianism as Hegel's ideology of essentialism.The antiessentialism tendency of the overdetermination theory provides a powerful theoretical weapon for contemporary social critical thought.Its rich connotation inspired post structuralist thinkers such as Laclau and Murphy.At the same time,it has been widely discussed because it seems to retain some remnants of economic determinism.Fundamentally speaking,overdetermination is a dialectical view of the relationship between different levels of social structure in a specific historical situation,and it is a theoretical expression of "concrete analysis of specific problems".Because Althusser himself didn't make a systematic exposition of overdetermination,this paper attempts to use the methods of etymology and text comparison on the basis of the discussions of these domestic and international scholars to systematically sort out the overdetermination from the French original word surdétermination(English translated as overdetermination).It holds that The overdetermination theory includes at least four aspects: the views of totality;materialistic dialectics;structural causality;and the view of uneven development.It is these four aspects,as an organic whole,that constitute a relatively complete expression of Althusser's overdetermination.After sorting out that,we can find that some of the current discussions of The overdetermination theory are based on differences in understanding,while others are based on the overt transformation of Althusser's overdetermination to construct a new theory.Because of The overdetermination theory emphasizes the givenness of the whole,it also shares the common impulse of antiauthoritarianism with the "Situated rationality" in contemporary western social critical theory.This paper also makes a simple discussion from this aspect.