Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most
influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to
offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophically
respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were
discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical
positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes
of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser’s
reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference
shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology
Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences
and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist”
philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser’s project have served as
inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism and Philosophy
of Language. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser’s work and
that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary
studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. In addition,
his autobiography has been subject to much critical attention over the last
decade. At present, Althusser’s philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical
reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of
hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts and who have begun to engage with
the great mass of writings that remain in his archives. His concepts are also
being increasingly employed by philosophers, political theorists, and activists
who have returned to Marx and to Marxian analyses in order to explain and to
envision alternatives to our present socio-economic conjuncture.
Louis Althusser was born on October 16th, 1918 in
Birmandreis, a suburb of Algiers. Hailing from Alsace on his father’s side of
the family, his grandparents were pieds noirs, or French citizens who had
chosen to settle in Algeria. At the time of his birth, Althusser’s father was a
lieutenant in the French Military. After this service was up, his father
returned to Algiers and to his work as a banker. By all accounts save for the
retrospective ones contained in his autobiographies, Althusser’s early
childhood in North Africa was a contented one. There he enjoyed the comforts of
the Mediterranean environment as well as those provided by an extended and
stable petit-bourgeois family.
In 1930, his father’s work moved the family to Marseille.
Always a good pupil, Althusser excelled in his studies and became active in the
Scouts. In 1936, the family moved again, this time to Lyon. There, Althusser
was enrolled in the prestigious Lycée du Parc. At the Lycée, he began taking
classes in order to prepare for the competitive entrance exams to
France’s grandes écoles. Raised in an observant family, Althusser was
particularly influenced by professors of a distinctly Catholic tendency. These included
the philosophers Jean Guitton and Jean Lacroix as well as the historian Joseph
Hours. In 1937, while still at the Lycée, Althusser joined the Catholic youth
group Jeunesse étudiantes chrétiennes. This interest in Catholicism and
his participation in Catholic organizations would continue even after Althusser
joined the Communist Party in 1948. The simultaneous enthusiasm that Althusser
showed in Lyon for Royalist politics did not last the war.
In 1939, Althusser performed well enough on the national
entrance examinations to be admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in
Paris. However, before the school year began, he was mobilized into the army.
Soon thereafter, he was captured in Vannes along with the rest of his artillery
regiment. He spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war at a camp in
Northern Germany. In his autobiographical writings, Althusser credits the
experiences of solidarity, political action, and community that he found in the
camp as opening him up to the idea of communism. Indeed, his prison writings
collected as Journal de captivité, Stalag XA 1940–1945 evidence these
experiences. They also provide evidence of the cycles of deep depression that
began for Althusser in 1938 and that would mark him for the rest of his life.
At the end of the war and following his release from the
P.O.W. camp in 1945, Althusser took his place at the ENS. Now 27 years old, he
began the program of study that was to prepare him for the agrégation, the
competitive examination which qualifies one to teach philosophy in French
secondary schools and that is often the gateway to doctoral study and
university employment. Perhaps not surprisingly for a young man who had just
spent half a decade in a prison camp, much happened during the three years he
spent preparing for the exam and working on his Master’s thesis. Though still
involved in Catholic groups and still seeing himself as a Christian, the
movements that Althusser associated with after the war were leftist in their
politics and, intellectually, he made a move to embrace and synthesize
Christian and Marxist thought. This synthesis and his first published works
were informed by a reading of 19th Century German idealist philosophy,
especially Hegel and Marx, as well as by progressive Christian thinkers
associated with the group Jeunesse de l’Église. Indeed, it was 19th Century
German Idealism with which he was most engaged during his period of study at
the ENS. In line with this interest (one shared with many other French
intellectuals at the time), Althusser obtained his diplôme d’études
supérieures in 1947 for a work directed by Gaston Bachelard and titled “On
Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel.” In 1948, he passed his agrégation,
coming in first on the written portion of the exam and second on the oral.
After this showing, Althusser was offered and accepted the post of agrégé
répétiteur (director of studies) at the ENS whose responsibility it was to
help students prepare for their own agrégations. In this capacity, he
began offering courses and tutorials on particular topics in philosophy and on
particular figures from the history of philosophy. As he retained this
responsibility for more than thirty years and worked with some of the brightest
thinkers that France produced during this time (including Alain Badiou, Pierre
Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault), through his teaching Althusser left a deep and
lasting impression on a generation of French philosophers and on French
philosophy.
In addition to inaugurating his extended association with
the ENS, the first few years spent in Paris after the war saw Althusser begin
three other long-lasting relationships. The first of these was with the French
Communist Party, the second with his companion and eventual wife, Hélène
Rytman, and the third with French psychiatry. Begun to treat recurrent bouts of
depression, this last affiliation continued for the rest of his life and
included frequent hospitalization as well as the most aggressive treatments
post-war French psychiatry had to offer such as electroconvulsive therapy,
narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis.
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