Reading Capital: Part II Concluded (Conjuncture Juncture, What's Your Functure?)

There is no common space between RO and KO—they can never intersect, they are absolutely different in kind.

Marx lapses into talk of essence and phenomenon due to the lack of another, more adequate concept to undergird his account.

But “interiority” is not the essence or core of the real object, it is knowledge of it. Better, the ‘inside’ is the concept, the ‘outside’ is the specification of the concept.

We have replaced the empiricist model—impure phenomenon, pure essence—with a new one—a structural concept and the elaboration of its elements in further concepts. The distinction runs along two axes—the aforementioned one, entirely among concepts, and the distinction between KO and RO. It would seem, however, that we cannot conceive of this latter difference—all we can do is keep constructing KOs. Althusser does the empirical the dubious honor of saving it from the ravages of empiricists who want to purge it as inessential, only to banish it to the perimeter, as a sort of ideal limit, solemn and unapproachable. Althusser refuses the epistemological question, but how successfully? He asked about the relation of KO to RO, and to me this suggested an important dilemma—in what respect is this materialism? Perhaps thought does not constitute the real, but what’s left of the real?