Louis Althusser

In 1948, he was approved to teach in secondary schools but instead made a tutor at the ENS to help students prepare for their own agrégation.[30] His performance on the exam—he was the best ranked on the writing part and second on the oral module—guaranteed this change on his occupation.^[15] He was responsible for offering special courses and tutorials on particular topics and on particular figures from the history of philosophy.^[15] In 1954, he became secrétaire de l'école litteraire (secretary of the literary school), assuming responsibilities for management and direction of the school.^[15] Althusser was deeply influential at the ENS because of the lectures and conferences he organized with participation of leading French philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan.^[33] He also influenced a generation of French philosophers and French philosophy in general^[15]—among his students were Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres.^[34] In total, Althusser spent 35 years in the ENS, working there until November 1980.^[35]

Parallel to his academic life, Althusser joined the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF) in October 1948. In the early postwar years, the PCF was one of the most influential political forces and many French intellectuals joined it. Althusser himself declared, "Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance."^[36] Althusser was primarily active on the "Peace Movement" section and kept for a few years his Catholic beliefs;^[36] in 1949, he published in the L'Évangile captif (The captive gospel), the tenth book of the Jeunesse de l'Église (the youth wing of Church), an article on the historic situation of Catholicism in response to the question: "Is the good news preached to the men today?"^[28] In it, he wrote about the relationship between the Catholic Church and the labour movement, advocating at the same time for social emancipation and the Church "religious reconquest".^[31] There was mutual hostility between these two organizations—in the early 1950s, the Vatican prohibited Catholics from membership in the worker priests and left-wing movements—and it certainly affected Althusser since he firmly believed in this combination.^[36]

Initially afraid of joining the party because of ENS's opposition to communists, Althusser did so when he was made a tutor—when membership became less likely to affect his employment—and he even created at ENA the Cercle Politzer, a Marxist study group. Althusser also introduced colleagues and students to the party and worked closely with the communist cell of the ENS. But his professionalism made him avoid Marxism and Communism in his classes; instead, he helped students depending on the demands of their agrégation.

Key events in the theoretical struggle took place in 1966. In January, there was a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi;^[55] Althusser was absent but Roger Garaudy, the official philosopher of the party, read an indictment that opposed the "theoretical anti-humanism".^[47] The controversy was the pinnacle of a long conflict between the supporters of Althusser and Garaudy. In March, in Argenteuil, the theses of Garaudy and Althusser were formally confronted by the PCF Central Committee, chaired by Louis Aragon.^[47] The Party decided to keep Garaudy's position as the official one,^[49] and even Lucien Sève—who was a student of Althusser at the beginning of his teaching at the ENS—supported it, becoming the closest philosopher to the PCF leadership.^[47] General secretary of the party, Waldeck Rochet said that "Communism without humanism would not be Communism".^[56] Even if he was not publicly censured nor expelled from the PCF, as were 600 Maoist students, the support of Garaudy resulted in a further reduction of Althusser's influence in the party.^[49]

Still in 1966, Althusser published in the

May 1968, Eurocommunism debates, and auto-critique: 1968–1978

During May 68, the tumultuous events of May 1968 in France, Althusser was hospitalized because of a depressive breakdown and was absent from the Latin Quarter. Many of his students participated in the events, and Régis Debray in particular became an international celebrity revolutionary.^[59] Althusser's initial silence^[59] was met with criticism by the protesters, who wrote on walls: "Of what use is Althusser?" ("A quoi sert Althusser?").^[60] Later, Althusser was ambivalent about it; on the one hand, he was not supportive of the movement^[33] and he criticized the movement as an "ideological revolt of the mass",^[61] adopting the PCF official argument that an "infantile disorder" of anarchistic utopianism that had infiltrated the student movement.^[62] On the other hand, he called it "the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism" and wanted to reconcile the students and the PCF.^[63] Nevertheless, the Maoist journal La Cause du peuple called him a revisionist,^[61] and he was condemned by former students, mainly by Jacques Rancière.^[33] After it, Althusser went through a phase of "self-criticism" that resulted in the book Essays in Self-criticism (Éléments d'autocritique, 1974) in which he revisited some of his old positions, including his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.^[64]

While Althusser was criticized in France by his former students, such as Jacques Rancière (right), his influence in Latin America grew, as exemplified by Marta Harnecker (left).

In 1969, Althusser started an unfinished work^[f] that was only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction ("On the Reproduction"). However, from these early manuscripts, he developed "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", which was published in the journal La Pensée in 1970,^[67] and became very influential on ideology discussions.^[68] In the same year, Althusser wrote "Marxism and Class Struggle" ("Marxisme et lutte de classe") that would be the foreword to the book The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism of his former student, the Chilean Marxist sociologist Marta Harnecker.^[69] By this time, Althusser was very popular in Latin America: some leftist activists and intellectuals saw him almost as a new Marx, although his work has been the subject of heated debates and sharp criticism.^[61] As an example of this popularity, some of his works were first translated to Spanish than into English, and others were released in book format first in Spanish and then in French.^[g] At the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s, Althusser's major works were translated into English—For Marx, in 1969, and Reading Capital in 1970—disseminating his ideas among the English-speaking Marxists.^[73]

In the early 1970s, the PCF was, as most of European Communist parties, in a period of internal conflicts on strategic orientation that occurred against the backdrop of the emergence of Eurocommunism. In this context, Althusserian structuralist Marxism was one of the more or less defined strategic lines.^[74] Althusser participated in various public events of the PCF, most notably the public debate "Communists, Intellectuals and Culture" ("Les communistes, les intellectuels et la culture") in 1973.^[75] He and his supporters contested the party's leadership over its decision to abandon the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" during its twenty-second congress in 1976.^[76] The PCF considered that in the European context it was possible to have a peaceful transition to socialism,^[77] which Althusser saw as "a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism".^[78] In a lecture given to the Union of Communist Students in the same year, he criticized above all the form in which this decision was taken. According to Althusser—echoing his notion of "French misery" exposed on For Marx—the party demonstrated a contempt for the materialist theory when it suppressed a "scientific concept".^[79] This struggle ultimately resulted in the debacle of the fraction "Union of the Left" and an open letter written by Althusser and five other intellectuals in which they asked for "a real political discussion in the PCF".^[80] That same year, Althusser also published a series of articles in the newspaper Le Monde under the title of "What Must Change in the Party".^[81] Published between 25 and 28 April, they were expanded and reprinted in May 1978 by François Maspero as the book Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste.^[82] Between 1977 and 1978, Althusser mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF. "Marx in his Limits" ("Marx dans ses limits"), an abandoned manuscript written in 1978, argued that there was no Marxist theory of the state; it was only published in 1994 in the Écrits philosophiques et politiques I.^[83] The Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto allowed Althusser to develop new ideas on a conference held in Venice about "Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies" in 1977.^[84] His speeches resulted into the articles "The Crisis of Marxism" ("La crisi del marxismo") and "Marxism as a 'finite' theory" in which he stressed "something vital and alive can be liberated by this crisis": the perception of Marxism as a theory that originally only reflected Marx's time and then needed to be completed by a state theory.^[85] The former was published as "Marxism Today" ("Marxismo oggi") in the 1978 Italian Enciclopedia Europea.^[86] The latter text was included in a book published in Italy, Discutere lo Stato, and he criticized the notion of "government party" and defended the notion of a revolutionary party "out of state".^[87]

During the 1970s, Althusser's institutional roles at the ENS increased but he still edited and published his and other works in the series Théorie, with François Maspero.

National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled "Machiavelli's Solitude" ("Solitude de Machiavel", 1977).^[96] In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok to write for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi, he drafted a presentation titled "The Discovery of Dr. Freud" ("La découverte du docteur Freud").^[97] After sending it to Chertok and some friends, he was unsettled by the requested criticism he received by Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, and then, by December, he wrote a new essay, "On Marx and Freud".^[98] He could not attend the event in 1979 and asked Chertok to replace the texts, but Chertok published the first without his consent.^[99] This would become a public "affair" in 1984 when Althusser finally noticed it by the time Chertok republished it in a book titled Dialogue franco-soviétique, sur la psychanalyse.^[100]

Killing of Rytmann and late years: 1978–1990

After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978, Althusser's bouts of depression became more severe and frequent.^[15] In March 1980, Althusser interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris, and, "in the name of the analysts", called Lacan a "beautiful and pitiful harlequin."^[96] Later, he went through a hiatal hernia-removal surgery as he had difficulties breathing while eating.^[101] According to Althusser himself, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate; in particular, he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He would recall later:

I wanted not only to destroy myself physically but to wipe out all trace of my time on earth: in particular, to destroy every last one of my books and all my notes, and burn the École Normale, and also, "if possible," suppress Hélène herself while I still could.^[101]

After the surgery, in May, he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic. His condition did not improve, but in early October he was sent home.^[96] Upon returning, he wanted to get away from ENS and even proposed to buy Roudinesco's house.^[101] He and Rytmann were also convinced about the "human decline", and so he tried to talk to the Pope John Paul II through his former professor Jean Guitton.^[102] Most of the time, however, he and his wife spent locked in their ENS apartment.^[102] In the fall of 1980, Althusser's psychiatrist René Diatkine, who by now was also treating Althusser's wife Hélène Rytmann,^[103] recommended that Althusser be hospitalized, but the couple refused.^[104]

Before me: Hélène lying on her back, also wearing a dressing gown. ... Kneeling beside her, leaning over her body, I am engaged in massaging her neck. ... I press my two thumbs into the hollow of flesh that borders the top of the sternum, and, applying force, I slowly reach, one thumb toward the right, one thumb toward the left at an angle, the firmer area below the ears. ... Hélène's face is immobile and serene, her open eyes are fixed on the ceiling. And suddenly I am struck with terror: her eyes are interminably fixed, and above all here is the tip of her tongue lying, unusually and peacefully, between her teeth and her lips. I had certainly seen corpses before, but I had never seen the face of a strangled woman in my life. And yet I know that this is a strangled woman. What is happening? I stand up and scream: I've strangled Hélène!

— Althusser, L'avenir dure longtemps^[105]

On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He himself reported the murder to the doctor in residence who contacted psychiatric institutions.

Paris police prefecture;^[111] the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from the ENS;^[112] and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment.^[111] In June, he was transferred to the L'Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.^[113]

The murder of Rytmann attracted much media attention, and there were several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal.

Despite the critics, some of his friends, such as Guitton and Debray, defended Althusser, saying the murder was an act of love—as Althusser argued too.[122]^{[failed verification]} Rytmann had bouts of melancholy and self-medicated because of this.^[123] Guitton said, "I sincerely think that he killed his wife out of love of her. It was a crime of mystical love".^[16] Debray compared it to an altruistic suicide: "He suffocated her under a pillow to save her from the anguish that was suffocating him. A beautiful proof of love ... that one can save one's skin while sacrificing oneself for the other, only to take upon oneself all the pain of living".^[16] In his autobiography, written to be the public explanation he could not provide in court,^[124] Althusser stated that "she matter-of-factly asked me to kill her myself, and this word, unthinkable and intolerable in its horror, caused my whole body to tremble for a long time. It still makes me tremble ... We were living shut up in the cloister of our hell, both of us."^[102]

I killed a woman who was everything to me during a crisis of mental confusion, she who loved me to the point of wanting only to die because she could not continue living. And no doubt in my confusion and unconsciousness I 'did her this service,' which she did not try to prevent, but from which she died.

— Althusser, L'avenir dure longtemps^[125]

That of course, is what he said, but Rytmann's point of view is unknowable. According to the [1] French wikipedia page about Althuser], Quebecois author ^[126] has written that Rytmann wanted to leave him. Another Quebecois author,^[127] also confirms that idea in an article about how the media dealt handled the murder, and later in a book called "Althusser Assassin." The crime seriously tarnished Althusser's reputation.

Althusser was such a homebody that biographer William S. Lewis affirmed, "Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp" by the time he met his future wife.[15] In contrast, when he first met Rytmann in 1946, she was a former member of the French resistance and a Communist activist. After fighting along with Jean Beaufret in the group "Service Périclès", she joined the PCF. ^[132] However, she was expelled from the party accused of being a double agent for the Gestapo,^[133] for "Trotskyist deviation" and "crimes", which probably referred to the execution of former Nazi collaborators.^[132] Although high-ranking party officials instructed him to sever relations with Rytmann,^[134] Althusser tried to restore her reputation in the PCF for a long time by making inquiries into her wartime activities. Although he did not succeed in reinserting her into the party, his relationship with Rytmann nonetheless deepened during this period.^[15] Their relationship "was traumatic from the outset, so Althusser claims", wrote Elliott.^[135] Among the reasons were his almost total inexperience with women and the fact she was eight years older than him.^[15]

I had never embraced a woman, and above all I had never been embraced by a woman (at age thirty!). Desire mounted in me, we made love on the bed, it was new, exciting, exalting, and violent. When she (Hélène) had left, an abysm of anguish opened up in me, never again to close.

— Althusser, L'avenir dure longtemps^[136]

His feelings toward her were contradictory from the very beginning; it is suggested that the strong emotional impact she caused in him led him to deep depression.

Althusser considered that Rytmann gave him "a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of reasoned action, ... a world of courage".[135] According to him, they performed an indispensable maternal and paternal function for one another: "She loved me as a mother loves a child ... and at the same time like a good father in that she introduced me ... to the real world, that vast arena I had never been able to enter. ... Through her desire for me she also initiated me ... into my role as a man, into my masculinity. She loved me as a woman loves a man!"^[135] Roudinesco argued that Rytmann represented for him "the sublimated figure of his own hated mother to whom he remained attached all his life". In his autobiography, he wrote: "If I was dazzled by Hélène's love and the miraculous privilege of knowing her and having her in my life, I tried to give that back to her in my own way, intensely and, if I may put it this way, as a religious offering, as I had done for my mother."^[139]

Although Althusser was really in love with Rytmann,^[15] he also had affairs with other women. Roudinesco commented that "unlike Hélène, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue".^[139] She gives as an example of the latter case a woman named Claire Z., with whom he had a long relationship until he was forty-two.^[140] They broke up when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian bourgeois family from Romagna.^[141] Madonia was married to Mino, whose sister Giovanna was married to the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini. Every summer the two families gathered in a residence in the village of Bertinoro, and, according to Roudinesco, "It was in this magical setting ... that Louis Althusser fell in love with Franca, discovering through her everything he had missed in his own childhood and that he lacked in Paris: a real family, an art of living, a new manner of thinking, speaking, desiring".^[142] She influenced him to appreciate modern theatre (Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett), and, Roudinesco wrote, also on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts (For Marx especially) but also his most important concepts".^[143] In her company in Italy in 1961, as Elliott affirmed, was also when he "truly discovered" Machiavelli.^[144] Between 1961 and 1965, they exchanged letters and telephone calls, and they also went on trips together, in which they talked about the current events, politics, and theory, as well as made confidences on the happiness and unhappiness of daily life.^[145] However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings.^[145] They nevertheless continued to exchange letters until 1973; these were published in 1998 into an 800-page book Lettres à Franca.^[146]

Mental condition

Althusser underwent psychiatric hospitalisations throughout his life, the first time after receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia.^[135] He suffered from bipolar disorder, and because of it he had frequent bouts of depression that started in 1938 and became regular after his five-year stay in German captivity.^[147] From the 1950s onward, he was under constant medical supervision, often undergoing, in Lewis' words, "the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer", which included electroconvulsive therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis.^[148] Althusser did not limit himself to prescribed medications and practised self-medication.^[149] The disease affected his academic productivity; in 1962, he began to write a book about Machiavelli during a depressive exacerbation but was interrupted by a three-months stay in a clinic.^[106] The main psychoanalyst he attended was the anti-Lacanian René Diatkine, starting from 1964, after he had a dream about killing his own sister.^[150] The sessions became more frequent in January 1965, and the real work of exploring the unconscious was launched in June.^[150] Soon Althusser recognized the positive side of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; although sometimes tried to ridicule Diatkine giving him lessons in Lacanianism, by July 1966, he considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results".^[151] In 1976, Althusser estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.^[152]

Althusser analysed the prerequisites of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex relationships with his family (he devoted to this topic half of the autobiography).^[153] Althusser believed that he did not have a genuine "I", which was caused by the absence of real maternal love and the fact that his father was emotionally reserved and virtually absent for his son.^[154] Althusser deduced the family situation from the events before his birth, as told to him by his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was to marry his father's brother, Louis Althusser, who died in World War I near Verdun, while Charles, his father, was engaged with Lucienne's sister, Juliette.^[155] Both families followed the old custom of the levirate, which obliged an older, still unmarried, brother to wed the widow of a deceased younger brother. Lucienne then married Charles, and the son was named after the deceased Louis. In Althusser's memoirs, this marriage was "madness", not so much because of the tradition itself, but because of the excessive submission, as Charles was not forced to marry Lucienne since his younger brother had not yet married her.^[156] As a result, Althusser concluded, his mother did not love him, but loved the long-dead Louis.^[157] The philosopher described his mother as a "castrating mother" (a term from psychoanalysis), who, under the influence of her phobias, established a strict regime of social and sexual "hygiene" for Althusser and his sister Georgette. His "feeling of fathomless solitude" could only be mitigated by communicating with his mother's parents who lived in Morvan.^[158] His relationship with his mother and the desire to deserve her love, in his memoirs, largely determined his adult life and career, including his admission to the ENS and his desire to become a "well-known intellectual".^[159] According to his autobiography, ENS was for Althusser a kind of refuge of intellectual "purity" from the big "dirty" world that his mother was so afraid of.^[160]

The facts of his autobiography have been critically evaluated by researchers. According to its own editors, L'avenir dure longtemps is "an inextricable tangle of 'facts' and 'phantasies'".^[161] His friend^[162] and biographer Yann Moulier-Boutang, after a careful analysis of the early period of Althusser's life, concluded that the autobiography was "a re-writing of a life through the prism of its wreckage".^[163] Moulier-Boutang believed that it was Rytmann who played a key role in creating a "fatalistic" account of the history of the Althusser family, largely shaping his vision in a 1964 letter. According to Elliott, the autobiography produces primarily an impression of "destructiveness and self-destructiveness".^[163] Althusser, most likely, postdated the beginning of his depression to a later period (post-war), having not mentioned earlier manifestations of the disease in school and in the concentration camp.^[164] According to Moulier-Boutang, Althusser had a close psychological connection with Georgette from an early age, and although he did not often mention it in his autobiography, her "nervous illness" may have tracked his own.^[165] His sister also had depression, and despite their living separately from each other for almost their entire adult lives, their depression often coincided in time.^[166] Also, Althusser focused on describing family circumstances, not considering, for example, the influence of ENS on his personality.^[167] Moulier-Boutang connected the depression not only with events in his personal life, but also with political disappointments.^[166]

Thought

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Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital (1965), which collects the work of Althusser and his students in an intensive philosophical rereading of Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as a "critique of political economy", and on its object. Althusser would later acknowledge^[168] that many of the innovations in this interpretation of Marx attempt to assimilate concepts derived from Baruch Spinoza into Marxism.^[169] The original English translation of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar,^[170] while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey and Roger Establet. A full translation was published in 2016.

Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained influential in

In addition to its unique epistemology, Marx's theory is built on concepts—such as forces and relations of production—that have no counterpart in classical political economy.^[190] Even when existing terms are adopted—for example, the theory of surplus value, which combines David Ricardo's concepts of rent, profit, and interest—their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different.^[191] However, more fundamental to Marx's "break" is a rejection of homo economicus, or the idea held by the classical economists that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or "given" independent of any economic organization. For the classical economists, individual needs can serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting point for a theory about society.^[192] Where classical political economy explains economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounts for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Consequently, Marx's Capital has greater explanatory power than does political economy because it provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of a whole society. In Althusser's view, Marx does not merely argue that human needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandons the very idea that there can be a theory about what people are like that is prior to any theory about how they come to be that way.^[193]

Although Althusser insists that there was an epistemological break,

Because of Marx's belief that the individual is a product of society, Althusser holds that it is pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather "structure". As he sees it, Marx does not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons—their beliefs, desires, preferences, and judgements. Rather, Marx defines society as a set of fixed "practices".[200] Individuals are not actors who make their own history, but are instead the "supports" (Träger) of these practices.^[201]

Althusser uses this analysis to defend Marx's historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base (economic level) and superstructure (culture/politics) "rising upon it" and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the (economic) base (the well known architectural metaphor). For Althusser, it is a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx. Just as Althusser criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on a historical conception of human needs, so does he reject the idea that

Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes: economic practice, ideological practice, and politico-legal practice. Although each practice has a degree of relative autonomy, together they make up one complex, structured whole (social formation).[204] In his view, all practices are dependent on each other. For example, among the relations of production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers respectively. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers. Furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means.^[205] From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa.^[206] For him this was the moment of reproduction and constituted the important role of the superstructure.

Contradiction and overdetermination

An analysis understood in terms of interdependent practices helps people to conceive of how society is organized, but also permits them to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marx's theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganization of the whole. To develop this idea, Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they "grate" on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to

For Althusser, this example reinforces his claim that Marx's explanation of social change is more complex than the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production.[211] The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution.^[212] The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction.^[213] Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality. From this, Althusser concludes that Marx's concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a complex structured social whole. To emphasize that changes in social structures relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as "overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud.^[214] This interpretation allows people to account for the way in which many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and how these circumstances may combine to produce unexpected social changes or "ruptures".^[213]

However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a part of a complex whole, economic practice is a "structure in dominance": it plays a major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal formations and the economic aspect in capitalist formations) is called the "dominant instance", and is in turn determined "in the last instance" by the economy.^[215] For Althusser, the economic practice of a society determines which other formation of that society dominates the society as a whole.

Althusser's understanding of contradiction in terms of the dialectic attempts to rid Marxism of the influence and vestiges of Hegelian (idealist) dialectics, and is a component part of his general anti-humanist position. In his reading, the Marxist understanding of social totality is not to be confused with the Hegelian. Where Hegel sees the different features of each historical epoch – its art, politics, religion, etc. – as expressions of a single essence, Althusser believes each social formation to be "decentred", i.e., that it cannot be reduced or simplified to a unique central point.^[216]

Ideological state apparatuses

Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements, and so forth are the effects of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject—a self-conscious, "responsible" agent whose actions can be explained by their beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, a person's capacity to perceive themselves in this way is not innate. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject.^[217] Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give them an idea of the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues that many roles and activities are acquired and learned by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories.

In Althusser's view, values, desires, and preferences are inculcated in by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects.

In various short papers drafted from 1982 to 1986 and published posthumously,[230]^[231] Althusser is critical of the relation of Marxist science to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and materialist philosophy in general. Althusser rejects dialectical materialism and introduces a new concept: the Philosophy of the Encounter, renamed Aleatory Materialism in 1986.^[232] To develop this idea, Althusser holds that there exists an “underground” or barely recognized philosophical current of Aleatory Materialism,^[233] articulated by Marx, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.^[234]

He argues that it was an idealist and teleological mistake to think that there are general laws of history and that social relations are determined in the same manner as physical relations. Emphasising the role of contingency in history over laws of development he states that reconstructed historical materialism has as its object complex historical singularities or conjunctures,^[235] The conjuncture is the pivotal point, where political practice may intervene,^[236] and Aleatory Materialism is a materialist philosophy to understand this conjuncture.

Reception and influence

While Althusser's writings were born of an intervention against reformist and ecumenical tendencies within Marxist theory,

Althusser's influence is also seen in the work of economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick, who have interpreted that Marx's mature works hold a conception of class different from the normally understood ones. For them, in Marx class refers not to a group of people (for example, those that own the means of production versus those that do not), but to a process involving the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labour. Their emphasis on class as a process is consistent with their reading and use of Althusser's concept of overdetermination in terms of understanding agents and objects as the site of multiple determinations.

Althusser's work has also been criticized from a number of angles. In a 1971 paper for Socialist Register, Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski^[240] undertook a detailed critique of structural Marxism, arguing that the concept was seriously flawed on three main points:

I will argue that the whole of Althusser's theory is made up of the following elements: 1. common sense banalities expressed with the help of unnecessarily complicated

neologisms

; 2. traditional Marxist concepts that are vague and ambiguous in Marx himself (or in Engels) and which remain, after Althusser's explanation, exactly as vague and ambiguous as they were before; 3. some striking historical inexactitudes.

Kołakowski further argued that, despite Althusser's 'verbal claims to "scientificity"', is himself "building a gratuitous ideological project". In 1980, sociologist Axel van den Berg^[241] described Kołakowski's critique as "devastating", proving that "Althusser retains the orthodox radical rhetoric by simply severing all connections with verifiable facts".

G. A. Cohen, in his essay 'Complete Bullshit', has cited the 'Althusserian school' as an example of 'bullshit' and a factor in his co-founding the '

Althusser was vehemently attacked by British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson in his book The Poverty of Theory.^[244][245] Thompson claimed that Althusserianism was Stalinism reduced to the paradigm of a theory.^[246] Where the Soviet doctrines that existed during the lifetime of the dictator lacked systematisation, Althusser's theory gave Stalinism "its true, rigorous and totally coherent expression".^[247] As such, Thompson called for "unrelenting intellectual war" against the Marxism of Althusser.^[248]

Legacy

Since his death, the reassessment of Althusser's work and influence has been ongoing. The first wave of retrospective critiques and interventions ("drawing up a balance sheet") began outside of Althusser's own country, France, because, as Étienne Balibar pointed out in 1988, "there is an absolute taboo now suppressing the name of this man and the meaning of his writings."^[249] Balibar's remarks were made at the "Althusserian Legacy" Conference organized at Stony Brook University by Michael Sprinker. The proceedings of this conference were published in September 1992 as the Althusserian Legacy and included contributions from Balibar, Alex Callinicos, Michele Barrett, Alain Lipietz, Warren Montag, and Gregory Elliott, among others. It also included an obituary and an extensive interview with Derrida.^[249]

Eventually, a colloquium was organized in France at the University of Paris VIII by Sylvain Lazarus on 27 May 1992. The general title was Politique et philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Louis Althusser, the proceedings of which were published in 1993.^[250]

In retrospect, Althusser's continuing influence can be seen through his students.

Badiou has lectured and spoken on Althusser on several occasions in France, Brazil, and Austria since Althusser's death. Badiou has written many studies, including "Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject", published in his book Metapolitics in 2005. Most recently, Althusser's work has been given prominence again through the interventions of Warren Montag and his circle; see for example the special issue of borderlands e-journal edited by David McInerney (Althusser & Us) and "Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal", edited by Montag. (See "External links" below for access to both of these journals.)

In 2011 Althusser continued to spark controversy and debate with the publication in August of that year of Jacques Rancière's first book, Althusser's Lesson (1974). It marked the first time this groundbreaking work was to appear in its entirety in an English translation. In 2014, On the Reproduction of Capitalism was published, which is an English translation of the full text of the work from which the ISAs text was drawn.^[252]

The publication of Althusser's posthumous memoir^{[citation needed]} cast some doubt on his own scholarly practices. For example, although he owned thousands of books, Althusser revealed that he knew very little about Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel. While he was familiar with Marx's early works, he had not read Capital when he wrote his own most important Marxist texts. Additionally, Althusser had "contrived to impress his first teacher, the Catholic theologian Jean Guitton, with a paper whose guiding principles he had simply filched from Guitton's own corrections of a fellow student's essay," and "he concocted fake quotations in the thesis he wrote for another major contemporary philosopher, Gaston Bachelard."^[253]

Selected bibliography

French books

English collections

Selected articles in translation

• "Our Jean-Jacques Rousseau". Telos 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press

Notes