Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became professor of philosophy.
Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party. His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism. He later described himself as a social anarchist.
Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.
Biography
Early life: 1918–1948
Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace, France. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk, while his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Catholic, worked as a schoolteacher. According to his own memoirs, his Algerian childhood was prosperous; historian Martin Jay said that Althusser, along with Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida, was "a product of the French colonial culture in Northern Africa." In 1930, his family moved to the French city of Marseille as his father was to be the director of the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch in the city. Althusser spent the rest of his childhood there, excelling in his studies at the and joining a scout group. A second displacement occurred in 1936 when Althusser settled in Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc. Later he was accepted by the highly regarded higher-education establishment École Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, and wanted to be a Trappist. His interest in Catholicism coexisted with his communist ideology, and some critics argued that his early Catholic introduction affected the way he interpreted Karl Marx.Image:LyceeDuParcLyon.jpg|thumb|left|The Lycée du Parc, where Althusser studied for two years and was influenced by Catholic professors
After a two-year period of preparation under Jean Guitton at the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was admitted into the ENS in July 1939. But his attendance was deferred by many years because he was drafted into the French Army in September of that year in the run-up to World War II and, like most French soldiers following the Fall of France, was captured by the Germans. Seized in Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein, in Northern Germany, for the five remaining years of the war. In the camp, he was at first drafted to hard labour but ultimately reassigned to work in the infirmary after falling ill. This second occupation allowed him to read philosophy and literature. In his memoirs, Althusser described the experiences of solidarity, political action, and community in the camp as the moment he first understood the idea of communism. Althusser recalled: "It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit—and that I actually met a communist". His experience in the camp also affected his lifelong bouts of mental instability, reflected in constant depression that lasted until the end of life. Psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco has argued that the absurd war experience was essential for Althusser's philosophical thought.
Althusser resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare himself for the agrégation, an exam to teach philosophy in secondary schools. In 1946, Althusser met sociologist Hélène Rytmann, a Jewish former French Resistance member with whom he was in a relationship until he killed her by strangulation in 1980. That same year, he started a close friendly relationship with Jacques Martin, a translator of G. W. F. Hegel and Hermann Hesse. Martin, to whom Althusser dedicated his first book, would later commit suicide. Martin was influential on Althusser's interest on reading the bibliography of Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem and Hegel. Although Althusser remained a Catholic, he became more associated with left-wing groups, joining the "worker-priests" movement and embracing a synthesis of Christian and Marxist thought. This combination may have led him to adopt German Idealism and Hegelian thought, as did Martin's influence and a renewed interest in Hegel in the 1930s and 1940s in France. In consonance, Althusser's 1947 DES thesis, roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis, was "On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel". Based on The Phenomenology of Spirit, and under Gaston Bachelard's supervision, Althusser wrote a dissertation on how Marx's philosophy refused to withdraw from the Hegelian master–slave dialectic. According to the researcher Gregory Elliott, Althusser was a Hegelian at that time but only for a short period.
Academic life and Communist Party affiliation: 1948–1959
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. 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. He was responsible for offering special courses and tutorials on particular topics and on particular figures from the history of philosophy. In 1954, he became secrétaire de l'école litteraire, assuming responsibilities for management and direction of the school. 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. He also influenced a generation of French philosophers and French philosophy in general—among his students were Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. In total, Althusser spent 35 years in the ENS, working there until November 1980.Parallel to his academic life, Althusser joined the French Communist Party 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." Althusser was primarily active on the "Peace Movement" section and kept for a few years his Catholic beliefs; in 1949, he published in the L'Évangile captif, the tenth book of the Jeunesse de l'Église, an article on the historic situation of Catholicism in response to the question: "Is the good news preached to the men today?" 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". 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.
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. In the early 1950s, Althusser distanced himself from his youthful political and philosophical ideals and from Hegel, whose teachings he considered a "bourgeois" philosophy. Starting from 1948, he studied history of philosophy and gave lectures on it; the first was about Plato in 1949. In 1949–1950, he gave a lecture about René Descartes, and wrote a thesis titled "Politics and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century" and a small study on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Second Discourse". He presented the thesis to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1950 but it was rejected. These studies were nonetheless valuable because Althusser later used them to write his book about Montesquieu's philosophy and an essay on Rousseau's The Social Contract. Indeed, his first and the only book-length study published during his lifetime was Montesquieu, la politique et l'histoire in 1959. He also lectured on Rousseau from 1950 to 1955, and changed his focus to philosophy of history, also studying Voltaire, Condorcet, and Helvétius, which resulted in a 1955–1956 lecture on "Les problèmes de la philosophie de l'histoire". This course along with others on Machiavelli, 17th- and 18th-century political philosophy, Locke, and Hobbes were later edited and released as a book by François Matheron in 2006. From 1953 to 1960, Althusser basically did not publish on Marxist themes, which in turn gave him time to focus on his teaching activities and establish himself as a reputable philosopher and researcher.
Major works, ''For Marx'' and ''Reading Capital'': 1960–1968
Althusser resumed his Marxist-related publications in 1960 as he translated, edited, and published a collection directed by Hyppolite about Ludwig Feuerbach's works. The objective of this endeavour was to identify Feuerbach's influence on Marx's early writings, contrasting it with the absence of his thought on Marx's mature works. This work spurred him to write "On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions". Published in the journal La Pensée, it was the first in a series of articles about Marx that were later collected in his most famous book For Marx. He inflamed the French debate on Marx and Marxist philosophy, and gained a considerable number of supporters. Inspired by this recognition, he started to publish more articles on Marxist thought; in 1964, Althusser published an article titled "Freud and Lacan" in the journal La Nouvelle Critique, which greatly influenced the Freudo-Marxism thought. At the same time, he invited Lacan to a lecture on Baruch Spinoza and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. The impact of the articles led Althusser to change his teaching style at the ENS, and he started to conduct a series of seminars on the following topics: "On the Young Marx", "The Origins of Structuralism", "Lacan and Psychoanalysis", and Reading Capital. These seminars aimed for a "return to Marx" and were attended by a new generation of students.For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, brought international fame to Althusser. Despite being criticized widely, these books made Althusser a sensation in French intellectual circles and one of the leading theoreticians of the PCF. He supported a structuralist view of Marx's work, influenced by Cavaillès and Canguilhem, affirming that Marx laid the "cornerstones" of a new science, incomparable to all non-Marxist thought, whose fundamental principles he espoused from 1960 to 1966. Critiques were carried out of Stalin's cult of personality and Althusser defended what he called "theoretical anti-humanism", as an alternative to Stalinism and the Marxist humanism—both popular at the time. At mid-decade, his popularity grew to the point that it was virtually impossible to have an intellectual debate about political or ideological theoretical questions without mentioning his name. Althusser's ideas were influential enough to arouse the creation of a young militant group to dispute the power within the PCF. Nevertheless, the official position of the party was still Stalinist Marxism, which was criticized both from Maoist and humanist groups. Althusser was initially careful not to identify with Maoism but progressively agreed with its critique of Stalinism. At the end of 1966, Althusser even published an unsigned article titled "On the Cultural Revolution", in which he considered the beginning of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as "a historical fact without precedent" and of "enormous theoretical interest". Althusser mainly praised the non-bureaucratic, non-party, mass organizations in which, in his opinion, the "Marxist principles regarding the nature of the ideological' were fully applied.
Key events in the theoretical struggle took place in 1966. In January, there was a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi; Althusser was absent but Roger Garaudy, the official philosopher of the party, read an indictment that opposed the "theoretical anti-humanism". 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. The Party decided to keep Garaudy's position as the official one, 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. General secretary of the party, Waldeck Rochet said that "Communism without humanism would not be Communism". 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.
Still in 1966, Althusser published in the Cahiers pour l'Analyse the article "On the 'Social Contract'", a course about Rousseau he had given at the ENS, and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract" about Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini. In the following year, he wrote a long article titled "The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy" that was submitted to the Soviet journal Voprossi Filosofii; it was not accepted but was published a year later in a Hungarian journal. In 1967–1968, Althusser and his students organized an ENS course titled "Philosophy Course for Scientists" that would be interrupted by May 1968 events. Some of the material of the course was reused in his 1974 book Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. Another Althusser's significant work from this period was "Lenin and Philosophy", a lecture first presented in February 1968 at the.