Absent Causality and Shocking Connections: The Question of Revolutionary Reading in Louis Althusser and E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel

Abstract

"I will argue in this essay that the methodology of reading that would enable [Doctorow's protagonist] Daniel to locate his own subjective necessity is precisely the methodology of reading that Althusser fails to explicitly articulate in his own autobiography. This methodology, which I will refer to as an immanentist method for reading absent causes, is the same one Althusser developed with Étienne Balibar in ..Reading ‘Capital.’"