Louis Althusser
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"In his loyalty to the truth and to the Communist Party, Althusser could no longer remain Althusser. Thus, the world-famous Marxist philosopher, in a "psychotic" attack of mental confusion, as they say, murdered his wife on 16 November 1980, perhaps in one of those desperate states in which one no longer knows where the other begins and the ego ends, where the boundaries betwen self-assertion and blind destruction dissolve."--Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) by Peter Sloterdijk |
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Louis Pierre Althusser (October 16, 1918 – October 22, 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher, best-known for developing structural Marxism and for strangling his wife.
He was born in Algeria and studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a lifelong member and sometimes 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 democratic socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European Communist Parties, as well as the problem of the 'cult of personality' and of ideology itself. 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 is critical of many aspects of structuralism.
Influence
Although Althusser's theories were born of an attempt to defend what some saw as Communist orthodoxy, the eclecticism of his influences - drawing equally from contemporary structuralism, philosophy of science and psychoanalysis as from thinkers in the Marxist tradition - reflected a move away from the intellectual isolation of the Stalinist era. Furthermore his thought was symptomatic both of Marxism's growing academic respectability and of a push towards emphasising Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than only as an economist. Judt saw this as a criticism of Althusser's work, saying he removed Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort.
Althusser has had broad influence in the areas of Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism: Interpellation has been popularised and adapted by the feminist philosopher and critic Judith Butler; the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses has been of interest to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; the attempt to view history as a process without a subject garnered sympathy from Jacques Derrida; historical materialism was defended as a coherent doctrine from the standpoint of analytic philosophy by G. A. Cohen; the interest in structure and agency sparked by Althusser was to play a role in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration; Althusser was vehemently attacked by British historian E. P. Thompson in his book The Poverty of Theory. As well as this, several of Althusser's students became eminent intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere in philosophy, Pierre Macherey in literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in sociology. The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the aforementioned Derrida, noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.
Epistemological break
Althusser argues that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemns various interpretations of Marx's works—historicism,<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, pp. 119–45. Template:ISBN</ref> idealism and economism—on grounds that they fail to realize that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx has constructed a revolutionary view of social change. Althusser believes these errors result from the notion that Marx's entire body of work can be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Marx's thought contains a radical "epistemological break". Although the works of the young Marx are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, The German Ideology (written in 1845) makes a sudden and unprecedented departure.<ref>Althusser, L. "Elements of Self-Criticism" (1974) in Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), translated by Grahame Lock, pp. 101–62, 107. New Left Books. Template:ISBN</ref> This break represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e., a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 25–28. Template:ISBN</ref> Althusser believes that Marx himself did not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, and was able to express it only obliquely and tentatively. The shift can be revealed only by a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading".<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 28. Template:ISBN</ref> Thus, Althusser's project is to help readers fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. Althusser holds that Marx has discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics or Galileo to physics,<ref>Althusser, L., "Philosophy as a Revolutionary Weapon" (1968) in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (1971), pp. 13–26, 18. Template:ISBN</ref> in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors.
Althusser believes that Marx's work is fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it is built on a groundbreaking epistemology (theory of knowledge) that rejects the distinction between subject and object. In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claims that Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, counters the theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 24.</ref>Template:Sfn On the empiricist view, a knowing subject encounters a real object and uncovers its essence by means of abstraction.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E., Reading Capital, 36. Althusser's definition of "empiricism" is much broader than the traditional one.</ref> On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a "real" object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that is external to thought itself.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E., Reading Capital, 36–42</ref> By contrast, Althusser claims to find latent in Marx's work a view of knowledge as "theoretical practice". For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 41–43</ref> Knowledge is not discovered, but rather produced by way of three "Generalities": (I) the "raw material" of pre-scientific ideas, abstractions and facts; (II) a conceptual framework (or "problematic") brought to bear upon these; and (III) the finished product of a transformed theoretical entity, concrete knowledge.<ref>Althusser, L. (1969). "On the Materialist Dialectic" in For Marx (1969), pp. 161–218, 183–85. Verso Template:ISBN</ref>Template:Sfn In this view, the validity of knowledge does not lie in its correspondence to something external to itself. Marx's historical materialism is a science with its own internal methods of proof.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 59–60</ref> It is therefore not governed by interests of society, class, ideology, or politics, and is distinct from the superstructure.
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.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970), Reading Capital, 166–68.</ref> 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.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E., (1970). Reading Capital, 168–70.</ref> 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.<ref>Althusser, L. and Balibar, E. (1970). Reading Capital, 161–67.</ref> 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.<ref>Althusser, L., "Is It Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy" (1975) in Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), pp. 163–215, 205. Template:ISBN</ref>
Although Althusser insists that there was an epistemological break,<ref>Althusser, L. (1974), "Elements of Self-Criticism", 107–118</ref> he later states that its occurrence around 1845 is not clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism, and Hegelianism are found in Capital.<ref>Althusser, L., "Preface to Capital Volume One" (1969) in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971), pp. 69–96, 90 Template:ISBN</ref> He states that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme and some marginal notes on a book by Adolph Wagner are fully free from humanist ideology.<ref>Althusser, L., "Preface to Capital Volume One" (1969), 90.</ref> In line with this, Althusser replaces his earlier definition of Marx's philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice" with a new belief in "politics in the field of history"<ref>Althusser, L. (1973). "Reply to John Lewis", 68 in Essays in Self-Criticism (1976), pp. 35–79 Template:ISBN</ref> and "class struggle in theory".<ref>Althusser, L. (1976). "Elements of Self-Criticism", 142.</ref> Althusser considers the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event — the product of incessant struggle against ideology. Thus, the distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is not assured once and for all by the epistemological break.<ref>Althusser, L. (1976). "Elements of Self-Criticism", 119–25</ref>
