EN
The article offers a comparison of two near-contemporary views of Karl Marx in the history of thought those of Louis Althusser in the book Reading Capital and of Michel Foucault in the book The Order of Things. The tertium comparationis is provided by Marx’s conception of man and work. Despite their common starting points (a critique of dialectics and humanism), the two authors bring diametrically opposed interpretations to Marx. The article argues that the most significant difference is one of methodology. While Althusser takes as his starting point a conception of the history of science due to G. Bachelard, Foucault constructs his own history of knowledge which, thanks to the thesis of the discontinuity between particular periods, constitutes a radicalisation of the Bachelard-Althusser approach. On the other hand a critical eye is, however, cast on Foucault’s overly selective reading of Marx. The article also indicates the prospects for a synthesis of Althusser’s symptomatic history and Foucault’s archeology.