CHAPTER 2 Rereading the Symptomatic Reading robert j. c. young If we read its opening page in the original French, our frst understanding of the meaning of the title Lire le Capital is that it takes the form of an injunction. Althusser is telling us that instead of understanding Marx through the prism of secondary accounts of his work, we should return to the original text and read Marx in his own words, unmediated by the many political and academic commentaries, paraphrases, and interpretations of his work that have prolifer- ated since Capital was frst published in 1867—a move that corresponds in a recognizable way to the general “return to” of the 1960s, the rereading of orig- inal texts initiated by Jacques Lacan a decade earlier with respect to Freud. 1 Te problem is that in some sense we already “read” Capital all around us, says Althusser, that is, to the degree that the book is visible in the disputes, con- ficts, defeats, and victories of everyday history. So too, we read Capital in the writings of the dead and the living, in Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and so on, in the many fragments from Capital that are quoted and selected for us, as well as in the many popular paraphrases and introductions to Marx that have always proliferated and which continue to “introduce” or explain Capital to us right up to today: the book is at once overread and yet remains unread. “But some day,” Althusser famously adds at this point, “it is essential to read Capital to the letter. To read the text complete, all four volumes, line by line.” 2 What might it mean, though, to read Capital “to the letter”? Or to read “the text complete”? A literal reading, painfully scrupulous, word by word; a slow, plodding, complete, exact reading that omits nothing. A vast under- taking. Althusser has already given us this message in the epigraph to the book, the prominently displayed letter from Marx to Maurice Lachâtre, his French publisher, of March 18, 1872, where Marx endorses the idea of making Capital more accessible to the workers by publishing it in serial form, warning Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/chapter-pdf/577511/9780822372905-003.pdf by NEW YORK UNIVERSITY user on 03 June 2020