surdétermination · Concept

Overdetermination

중층결정

A concept Louis Althusser imported from Freudian psychoanalysis into Marxist political theory, denoting that contradictions within a social formation are never reducible to a single economic base but are determined by the complex interplay of political, ideological, and economic instances. In his 1962 essay 'Contradiction and Overdetermination,' Althusser contrasted this with the Hegelian 'expressive totality' and argued that the specificity of the Marxist contradiction lies precisely in its uneven overdetermination.

Related people

Louis Althusser Mao Zedong

Sources

  1. Marxists Internet Archive Althusser's original 1962 essay 'Contradiction and Overdetermination,' the primary source for the concept and its elaboration against Hegelian dialectics
  2. Wikipedia (EN) encyclopedic overview of the term's trajectory from Freud through Althusser to analytic philosophy, including Ben Brewster's glossary definition from Reading Capital
  3. plato.stanford.edu Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Althusser (sec. 3.4–3.5), clarifying overdetermination's place within structural causality, uneven development, and the structure in dominance
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