Althusser, Louis (1918—90)
French Marxist philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. His work fused the insights of Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis to create a powerful critique of contemporary capitalist society, focusing particularly on the function of ideology. His aim was to revive the revolutionary dimension of Marxism and construct a theory that could make a real and practical difference in the world. Althusser’s academic career was unconventional. In spite of his renown, he never held a prestigious chair at a university. He worked as a tutor at the ENS for his entire career, where his students included such future luminaries as Foucault, Michel and Derrida, Jacques, among many others. Although a prolific and ambitious author (his goal was nothing less than a complete reinterpretation of Marxism), he never produced a full account of his theory. His publications consist of a series of fragmentary interventions (several written in collaboration with students) into a variety of philosophical and political debates as well as a number of autocritiques or self-criticisms, frequently as damning as any of those produced by his detractors. He also left behind a substantial corpus of unpublished work, including a number of book-length manuscripts, a full assessment of which has yet to be made. His most important works, Pour Marx (1965) translated as For Marx (1969), Lire le capital (1968), translated as Reading Capital (1970), and Lenin and Philosophy (1971) continue to be read and studied. In his highly combative account of Althusser’s work Arguments within English Marxism (1980), Anderson, Perry argues that Althusser’s thought took shape in response to the Sino-Soviet dispute which erupted in response to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956. Contrary to Thompson, Edward Palmer, whose Poverty of Theory (1978) provided the immediate occasion for Anderson’s remarks, Anderson argues that Althusser was sympathetic to Khrushchev’s anti-Stalinist position, but unsympathetic to his reformist proposals, which he felt betrayed the revolutionary spirit of Marx. He called instead for a ‘Left critique’ of Stalin, which in effect meant trying to get back to an understanding of Marx’s thought before the Stalinist re-interpretation of it. Althusser used the slogan ‘return to Marx’ to rally support for this program at the same time that his friend Lacan, Jacques was calling for a ‘return to Freud’. This put him out of favour with the French Communist Party, of which he was a staunch member for most of his life, because it implies a higher authority than the party itself. In the sympathetic but exacting work, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (1987), for many the definitive account of Althusser and Althusserianism, Gregory Elliott argues that Althusser’s philosophical position is best defined in terms of what he was against: he was anti-Hegel, anti-historicism, and anti-humanism. He rejected the young Marx, who was an avid reader of genre and consequently still a humanist and a historicist, in favour of the mature Marx, who claimed to have stood Hegel back on his feet. The mature Marx was in Althusser’s view the founder of a science, namely historical materialism, with all the attendant connotations of objective rigour that term implies. Marx, he argued, had established a science of the general laws of the development of society, but for that very reason his work remained incomplete and it was the task of contemporary Marxism to continue his project. In political terms, Althusser’s reasoning was that if society could be understood scientifically (in the same way humans understand the natural world), then that would enable a program of change to be implemented. History, for Althusser, is a process without a subject. He maintained that it is the masses who make history (not individuals) and that class struggle is the motor of history. Spinoza, from whom he adopted the idea of structural causality, rather than Hegel was Althusser’s surprising choice of philosophical predecessor, because it allowed him to conceive of society and culture as so many manifestations of an otherwise invisible omnipotent force. In doing so, Althusser renovated Marx’s famous spatial metaphor, which separated society into an economic space (infrastructure), determinant in the last instance, and a subordinate but semi-autonomous politico-legal and ideological superstructure, by creating the analytic apparatus to explain how the two levels interact. Comprised of two interrelated but distinct systems, the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) and the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), the superstructure provides the conditions needed for the infrastructure to operate by facilitating the reproduction of the social relations inherent to capitalist production. Control of the RSAs (e.g., police, army, courts, prisons) is not sufficient by itself to maintain power, the state must also achieve hegemony over and in the ISAs (e.g., churches, schools, family media, trade unions, cultural forms). Ideology was, in turn, redefined by Althusser as the imaginary relationship we have to the real conditions of our existence; this relationship is fostered by a process Althusser referred to as interpellation. As a leading spokesperson for the revolutionary spirit of Marx’s thought, Althusser was expected by his students and followers to be at the forefront of the events of May ’68, but illness prevented him from participating fully. Many saw this as a betrayal and it is now part of the Althusser legend that his stock as a theorist went into decline at this precise moment, but the truth is more complicated than that. Indeed, in the Anglophone world, Althusser’s peak period of influence came after May 1968 in the 1970s when the authors behind the seminal British film studies journal Screen championed his thought. Similarly, it was not until the 1970s that Althusser’s thought took effect in literary studies, the path having been blazed by the pioneering work of Macherey, Pierre in France and Eagleton, Terry in Britain. It was rather his inadequate responses to two other historical events, the discrediting of the Cultural Revolution in Communist China and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s revelation of the existence of gulags in the USSR, which brought his star down to earth. For most of his life Althusser lived in the tutor’s hall of residence at the ENS on the Rue d’Ulm. There, in 1980, he strangled to death his partner of thirty-four years, Hélène Rytman. The exact circumstances are not known, but Althusser was never charged with murder. He was found to be of diminished capacity and he was committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, where he remained for three years. He wrote two autobiographical works, L’Avenir dure longtemps (1992), translated as The Future Lasts a Long Time (1993), and Les Faits (1992), translated as The Facts (1993), which sought to explain what happened. Althusser died of a heart attack in 1990 at the age of 72. Althusser’s legacy is difficult to assess. His work no longer has the influence it did at its peak---there are very few, if any scholars remaining who would consider themselves to be Althusserian. In part, this is no doubt a reaction to the tragic events in Althusser’s own life, but it is also attributable to a general decline in the influence of Marxist thought. Yet, having said that, many of Althusser’s former students and collaborators (e.g. Badiou, Alain, Balibar, Étienne, Debray, Régis, Macherey, Pierre, Pêcheux, Michel, Poulantzas, Nicos, and even Rancière, Jacques, who effectively renounced his connection to Althusser in the rather stern critique La Leçon d’Althusser (1974) (The Lesson of Althusser) have gone on to become significant theorists in their own right, and in their own way they continue his project of developing Marxism as a problematic. And in that sense one can say he achieved his goal of renewing Marxism by invigorating debate within Marxism. Further Reading: P. Anderson Arguments within English Marxism (1980). A. Callinicos Althusser’s Marxism (1976). G. Elliott Althusser: The Detour of Theory (1987).