As will be apparent, the style is that not of an ‘introduction’, but of a semi-philological, semi-philosophical discussion

the family complex constituted by the teleologies of historical progress in the bourgeois era

incorporating in the knowledge process, in a reflexive but open or even aporetic fashion, the very conflictuality that it sought to explain

completely displacing the question by inventing the ‘aleatory materialism’ of his last texts

the philosophy of Marx – which I conceived as a problematic open to all kinds of transformations, reformulations and extrapolations, whose starting point is not the oblivion of Marx’s words and sentences but their intrinsic vacillation – and Marxism – an intellectual and institutional historical phenomenon, circumscribed in time by the end of the historical cycle of organization of the labour movement and class struggle

‘dialectical materialism’, a relatively late term and one inspired by the use Engels had made of various of Marx’s formulations

The caesura effected by Marx has been more or less clearly acknowledged, more or less willingly accepted; it has even given rise to violent refutations and strenuous attempts at neutralization

metaphorical expression in the doctrine of the clinamen or random ‘swerving’ of atoms

The presentation of Marxism as a world-view long ago coalesced around the formula, the ‘three sources of Marxism’: German philosophy, French socialism and British political economy.

A series of aphorisms that here outline a critical argument, there advance a lapidary proposition and what is, at times, almost a slogan.