Louis Althusser

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Althusser was born on the 16th of October 1918 in Birmendreïs, a town near Algiers in French Algeria, and he died on the 22nd of October 1990 in a psychiatric institution. Between those two dates lies one of the most turbulent intellectual lives of the twentieth century. He became a professor at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, taught students who would reshape French thought, and produced books that made him, by mid-decade of the 1960s, impossible to ignore in any serious debate about Marxism. Then, on the 16th of November 1980, he strangled his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, in their apartment at the ENS. He was declared unfit for trial and spent years in psychiatric hospitals. He had virtually stopped producing academic work. He died having never faced a court.

  How does a thinker of that stature arrive at that moment? What did the prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein have to do with his philosophy? What did the French Communist Party make of a man who disagreed with almost everything it did while remaining its member for decades? And what exactly was the idea, the one about ideology and how it shapes every person alive, that made scholars on every continent read him as if he were rewriting the rules of thought?

  Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Colonial Childhood

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  Birmendreïs sat near Algiers, and Althusser's family was pied-noir, the name for settlers of European origin living in French North Africa. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was both an army lieutenant and a bank clerk; his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, was a devout Catholic schoolteacher. Historian Martin Jay grouped Althusser with Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida as products of that French colonial culture in Northern Africa.

  In 1930, the family relocated to Marseille so that Charles could direct the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch there. Althusser excelled in his studies and joined a scout group. A second displacement came in 1936 when he moved to Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc, where Catholic professors left a deep mark on him. He joined the youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne and at one point wanted to become a Trappist monk. Critics later argued that this early Catholic immersion shaped the way he would eventually read Karl Marx.

  After two years of preparation under the philosopher Jean Guitton, Althusser was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in July 1939. He never made it to Paris that autumn. He was drafted into the French Army in September 1939, captured in Vannes in June 1940 following the Fall of France, and spent the next five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein in Northern Germany. The camp began with hard labour. After falling ill, he was reassigned to the infirmary, where he could read philosophy and literature. It was there, he recalled, that he first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer passing through transit and that he actually met a communist. Psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco later argued that the absurd experience of captivity was essential to his philosophical thought. It was also, by his own account, where the depression that would define his life took root.

• 3. The ENS and the Party

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  Althusser returned to the ENS in 1945 and passed the agrégation, the competitive exam licensing philosophy teachers, with the best written score in his cohort and second place on the oral module. Rather than taking a secondary-school post, he stayed on at the ENS as a tutor. By 1954, he had become secrétaire de l'école littéraire, managing and directing the school's literary branch.

  His influence at the ENS went well beyond administration. He organized lectures and conferences that brought figures like Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan to the school. Among the students he shaped were Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. He would spend 35 years in total at the ENS, working there until November 1980.

  In October 1948, the same year he began teaching full-time, Althusser joined the French Communist Party. He later explained: "Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance." He was initially reluctant because the ENS administration opposed communists, but once secured in his tutoring role, membership felt less risky. He even founded a Marxist study group at the school, the Cercle Politzer, and introduced colleagues and students to the party. He kept his Catholic beliefs for several years, publishing in 1949 an article in a Church youth publication arguing for social emancipation alongside what he called the Church's "religious reconquest". His professional scrupulousness led him to keep Marxism out of his classroom; instead, he tailored tutorials to whatever each student's agrégation demanded.

  His first and only book-length study published during his lifetime appeared in 1959: Montesquieu, la politique et l'histoire, growing out of lectures he had been delivering since the early 1950s.

• 4. For Marx and Reading Capital

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  In 1960, Althusser translated and edited a collection on Ludwig Feuerbach's works, intending to trace Feuerbach's influence on Marx's early writings and its absence from Marx's mature ones. This project pushed him to write "On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions", published in 1961 in the journal La Pensée and the first in the series of articles that would become his most celebrated book, For Marx.

  The articles ignited French debate about Marxist philosophy and won him a substantial following. In 1964, he published "Freud and Lacan" in La Nouvelle Critique, an article that shaped Freudo-Marxist thought. Simultaneously, he restructured his teaching around seminars: "On the Young Marx" in 1961-1962, "The Origins of Structuralism" in 1962-1963 (centred on Foucault's History of Madness), "Lacan and Psychoanalysis" in 1963-1964, and "Reading Capital" in 1964-1965. Both For Marx and Reading Capital, the second co-authored with students, appeared in 1965 and brought Althusser international recognition.

  At the heart of both books was the claim that Marx's work contained a radical epistemological break. Althusser located the turning point around 1845, in The German Ideology, where Marx departed from the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy. The young Marx's texts were still bound by Hegelian idealism and notions of a universal human nature; the mature Marx abandoned those categories and built something Althusser compared to what Thales did for mathematics or Galileo did for physics. This break was not simply a change of opinion. For Althusser, it represented a shift to an entirely different "problematic", a different set of questions and theoretical tools. He argued that Marx himself did not fully grasp the significance of what he had done, and that a careful "symptomatic reading", attending as much to what was left unsaid as to what was stated, was required to bring it to light.

  By mid-decade his popularity had reached the point that it was virtually impossible to hold an intellectual debate about political or ideological theory in France without invoking his name. His ideas were influential enough to spark the creation of a militant faction within the PCF contesting its leadership.

• 5. Ideology and Interpellation

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  From an unfinished manuscript begun in 1969 and only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction, Althusser developed the essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", published in La Pensée in 1970. It became one of the most-cited texts in twentieth-century social thought.

  Althusser's starting point was the question of how capitalist societies reproduce themselves. He argued that it was not enough to control the means of production; ruling arrangements needed to reproduce the conditions under which workers would keep showing up and accepting their roles. The institutions that achieved this he called ideological state apparatuses, or ISAs: the family, the media, religious organizations, and above all the education system. These were distinct from what he called repressive state apparatuses, such as the police and the army, which operated primarily through force. ISAs operated primarily through meaning.

  The mechanism he described for how ISAs produce subjects was interpellation. He illustrated it with a vivid image: a police officer shouts "Hey you there!" at someone on the street, and that person turns around. In turning, the person recognizes themselves as the one being addressed and in that recognition becomes a subject. Althusser called this recognition a "mis-recognition", because it works retroactively: the material individual is always already constituted as an ideological subject, even before birth. To illustrate the structure further he described Christian religious ideology, in which a person responds to God's call and in doing so affirms themselves as a free, responsible agent. The freedom felt is itself ideological.

  The theory drew heavily on Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage, in which identity is formed through seeing oneself reflected from outside. For Althusser, ideologies served this mirroring function across society as a whole. Judith Butler would later adapt and extend the concept of interpellation; Slavoj Zizek took up the ISA framework; and Jacques Derrida expressed sympathy for the attempt to treat history as a process without a subject.

• 6. The Party and Its Critics

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  January 1966 brought a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi. Althusser was absent, but the party's official philosopher Roger Garaudy read an indictment against Althusser's "theoretical anti-humanism". In March of that year, in Argenteuil, the PCF Central Committee chaired by Louis Aragon formally confronted the two positions. The party sided with Garaudy. General secretary Waldeck Rochet stated that "Communism without humanism would not be Communism". Even Lucien Seve, who had been Althusser's student early in his teaching career, aligned with the leadership. Some 600 Maoist students were expelled; Althusser was not publicly censured but his influence within the party diminished.

  May 1968 found Althusser hospitalized for depression and absent from the upheaval in the Latin Quarter. His students participated; Régis Debray became an internationally known revolutionary figure. Protesters painted on walls: "Of what use is Althusser?" He was ambivalent afterward. On one side, he dismissed the movement as an "ideological revolt of the mass" infected with an "infantile disorder" of anarchistic utopianism, adopting the PCF's line. On the other, he called it "the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism". The Maoist journal La Cause du peuple denounced him as a revisionist; former student Jacques Rancière condemned him.

  At the PCF's twenty-second congress in 1976, the party abandoned the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat". Althusser called this "a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism" and published a series of articles in Le Monde between the 25th and the 28th of April under the title "What Must Change in the Party". These were expanded into a book by François Maspero in May 1978. In 1977, at a conference in Venice on "Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies", Althusser developed articles on "The Crisis of Marxism" and argued that something vital could be freed by acknowledging Marxism's limits as a theory still needing a theory of the state.

• 7. Hélène Rytmann

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  When Althusser first met Hélène Rytmann in 1946, biographer William S. Lewis noted that Althusser "had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp". Rytmann was a Jewish former member of the French Resistance, a Communist activist who had fought alongside Jean Beaufret in the group Service Périclès. She had been expelled from the PCF, accused of being a double agent for the Gestapo, of "Trotskyist deviation" and "crimes", a charge that likely referred to the execution of former Nazi collaborators. High-ranking party officials instructed Althusser to sever contact with her; he refused and spent years trying to restore her standing. He never succeeded.

  Researcher Gregory Elliott's summary of their relationship was blunt: it was "traumatic from the outset". She was eight years older than him. Roudinesco described what Rytmann represented: she had been in the Resistance while he had been remote from anti-Nazi combat; she was a Jew who carried the memory of the Holocaust, while he remained shaped by Catholicism; she had suffered under Stalinism at the moment he was joining the party. For Althusser, she embodied what he lacked. He described what she gave him: "a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of reasoned action... a world of courage".

  Despite this bond, Althusser had other relationships during these years. A long affair with a woman named Claire Z. ended when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian family from Romagna. Madonia's brother-in-law was the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini, and every summer the two families gathered in the village of Bertinoro. Roudinesco wrote that it was there that Althusser discovered through Madonia everything he had missed: a real family, an art of living, a new way of thinking. Her influence, Roudinesco argued, touched his most important texts, For Marx especially, and nudged his detachment from Stalinism. They exchanged letters from 1961 until 1973; these were published in 1998 in an 800-page volume titled Lettres à Franca.

  Althusser and Rytmann eventually married, though the exact timing is not fixed in the source. He was still with her on the 16th of November 1980, when he strangled her in their ENS apartment.

• 8. Mental Illness and Aftermath

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  Althusser's first psychiatric hospitalization followed a diagnosis of schizophrenia. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and his depressive episodes had begun in 1938, becoming regular after his five years in German captivity. From the 1950s onward he was under constant medical supervision, receiving what biographer William S. Lewis described as "the most aggressive treatments post-war French psychiatry had to offer", including electroconvulsive therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis. He supplemented prescribed medication with self-medication. In 1976, he estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.

  His main analyst from 1964 onward was René Diatkine, an anti-Lacanian psychiatrist. The sessions intensified in early 1965, and by July 1966 Althusser considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results". Diatkine was also treating Rytmann by the time he recommended in the autumn of 1980 that Althusser be hospitalized. The couple refused.

  After the murder on the 16th of November 1980, a psychiatric report concluded he had killed Rytmann during an acute crisis of melancholy, without realizing what he was doing, in the course of "an iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression". The court ruled in February 1981 that he had been mentally irresponsible at the time and could not be prosecuted. He lost his civil rights, was mandated into retirement from the ENS, and was moved between clinics for years. In June 1981 he was transferred to the L'Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.

  The murder drew wide attention and controversy. Journalist Dominique Jamet, the newspaper Minute, and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte accused Althusser of receiving preferential treatment because he was a Communist. Roudinesco catalogued three charges levelled at him by critics: that he had legitimated the current of thought held responsible for the Gulag; that he had praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution; and that he had, as some put it, corrupted elite French youth. Le Monde critic Claude Sarraute compared his case in 1985 to that of Issei Sagawa, who had killed and cannibalized a woman in France and been absolved by psychiatric diagnosis; Sarraute argued that when prestigious names were involved, little was written about the victim.

  Althusser wrote his autobiography in 1985, intending it as the public statement he could never make in court. He showed the manuscript, titled L'avenir dure longtemps, to friends but locked it in a desk drawer and never sent it to a publisher. It was published posthumously in 1992. In it he wrote about his marriage to Rytmann: "We were living shut up in the cloister of our hell, both of us." From 1984 to 1986 he lived in a Paris apartment in the north of the city, receiving visits from philosopher and theologian Stanislas Breton and from Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro, with whom he exchanged letters until February 1987. A collection of those interviews, Filosofia y marxismo, appeared in Mexico in 1988. He died of a heart attack on the 22nd of October 1990 at the psychiatric institution MGEN in La Verrière, following a pneumonia contracted that summer. His work "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter", begun in the clinic in 1982, was published posthumously, and the fuller collection Philosophy of the Encounter appeared in the Verso edition of 2006.