Concepts supposedly abolished in theory keep returning in altered form.

Evidence

There is a wonderful moment in an Althusser text where he says, “I can now abolish the notion of ideas.” And he actually writes the word “ideas” and draws a line through it to convince himself that we need never use the word again. … In exactly the same way, the old discourse of the subject was abolished, put in a deep container, concrete poured over it, with a half-life of a million years. We will never look at it again, when, bloody hell, in about five minutes, we are talking about subjectivity, and the subject in discourse, and it has come roaring back in. So it is not, I think, surprising that, having lost one sense of identity, we find we need it. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 199

Categorization

• CANDY: The Althusser image of writing ‘ideas’ and drawing a line through it, then Hall’s ‘concrete poured over it’ rant, is a genuinely funny and quotable moment about theory’s doomed attempts at conceptual murder.
• XREF: This dialectic of abolishing and having concepts return ‘roaring back’ connects to the broader genealogy of the subject that Islamophobia theory inherits — the erased-then-returned subject feeds analyses of how Muslim identity is constructed in discourse. — connects to: Concepts carry excess meaning that reveals the deceptiveness of immediate facts — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 426; Linguistic philosophy advances an ideology that deletes critical concepts. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 662; Forms, capacities and habits remain unchanged while their substrate changes. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 497 (+3 more)