86 Facts About Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser was an Algerian born French Marxist philosopher who studied at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.

Louis 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.

Louis Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness.

Louis Althusser was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years.

Louis Althusser did little further academic work, dying in 1990.

Louis Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreis, near Algiers, to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace, France.

Louis Althusser's father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk, while his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Roman Catholic, worked as a schoolteacher.

At the Lycee du Parc, Louis Althusser was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Etudiante Chretienne, and wanted to be a Trappist.

Louis Althusser resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare himself for the agregation, an exam to teach philosophy in secondary schools.

In 1946, Louis Althusser met sociologist Helene Rytmann, a Jewish former French Resistance member with whom he was in a relationship until he killed her by strangulation in 1980.

Martin, to whom Louis Althusser dedicated his first book, would later commit suicide.

Louis Althusser was responsible for offering special courses and tutorials on particular topics and on particular figures from the history of philosophy.

Louis 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.

In total, Louis Althusser spent 35 years in the ENS, working there until November 1980.

Parallel to his academic life, Louis Althusser joined the French Communist Party in October 1948.

Louis Althusser introduced colleagues and students to the party and worked closely with the communist cell of the ENS.

Louis Althusser presented the thesis to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankelevitch in 1950 but it was rejected.

From 1953 to 1960, Louis 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.

Louis Althusser resumed his Marxist-related publications in 1960 as he translated, edited, and published a collection directed by Hyppolite about Ludwig Feuerbach's works.

Louis Althusser supported a structuralist view of Marx's work, influenced by Cavailles and Canguilhem, affirming that Marx laid the "cornerstones" of a new science, incomparable to all non-Marxist thought, of which, from 1960 to 1966, he espoused the fundamental principles.

Louis Althusser's ideas were influential enough to arouse the creation of a young militants group to dispute the power within the PCF.

Louis Althusser was initially careful not to identify with Maoism but progressively agreed with its critique of Stalinism.

Still in 1966, Louis 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.

Later, Louis Althusser was ambivalent about it; on the one hand, he was not supportive of the movement and he criticized the movement as an "ideological revolt of the mass", adopting the PCF official argument that an "infantile disorder" of anarchistic utopianism that had infiltrated the student movement.

In 1969, Louis Althusser started an unfinished work that was only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction.

Louis Althusser participated in various public events of the PCF, most notably the public debate "Communists, Intellectuals and Culture" in 1973.

The PCF considered that in European condition it was possible to have a peaceful transition to socialism, which Louis Althusser saw as "a new opportunistic version of Marxist Humanism".

That same year, Louis Althusser published a series of articles in the newspaper Le Monde under the title of "What Must Change in the Party".

Between 1977 and 1978, Louis Althusser mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF.

Louis Althusser started a rereading of Machiavelli that would influence his later work; he worked between 1975 and 1976 on "Machiavel et nous", a draft, only published posthumously, based on a 1972 lecture, and wrote for the National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled "Machiavelli's Solitude".

On 16 November 1980, Louis Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room.

Louis Althusser himself reported the murder to the doctor in residence who contacted psychiatric institutions.

In February 1981, the court ruled Louis Althusser as having been mentally irresponsible when he committed the murder, therefore he could not be prosecuted and was not charged.

The newspaper Minute, journalist Dominique Jamet and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused Louis Althusser of having "privileges" because of the fact he was Communist.

From this point of view, Roudinesco wrote, Louis Althusser was three times a criminal.

Philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff went further on claiming Louis Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution.

Louis Althusser compared his case to the situation of Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalized a woman in France, but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him.

Louis Althusser's friends persuaded him to speak in his defense, and the philosopher wrote an autobiography in 1985.

Louis Althusser showed the result, L'avenir dure longtemps, to some of his friends and considered publishing it, but he never sent it to a publisher and locked it in his desk drawer.

Louis Althusser was forced to live in various public and private clinics until 1983, when he became a voluntary patient.

Louis Althusser was able to start an untitled manuscript during this time, in 1982; it was later published as "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter".

In 1987, after Louis Althusser underwent an emergency operation because of the obstruction of the esophagus, he developed a new clinical case of depression.

Roudinesco commented that "unlike Helene, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue".

Louis Althusser influenced him to appreciate modern theatre, and, Roudinesco wrote, on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts but his most important concepts".

However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Louis Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings.

Louis Althusser underwent psychiatric hospitalisations throughout his life, the first time after receiving a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Louis Althusser suffered from bipolar disorder, and because of it he had frequent bouts of depression that started in 1938 and became regular after his five-year stay in German captivity.

Louis Althusser did not limit himself to prescribed medications and practised self-medication.

Soon Louis Althusser recognized the positive side of non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; although sometimes tried to ridicule Diatkine giving him lessons in Lacanianism, by July 1966, he considered the treatment was producing "spectacular results".

In 1976, Louis Althusser estimated that he had spent fifteen of the previous thirty years in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.

Louis Althusser analysed the prerequisites of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex relationships with his family.

Louis Althusser believed that he did not have a genuine "I", which was caused by the absence of real maternal love and the fact that his father was emotionally reserved and virtually absent for his son.

Althusser deduced the family situation from the events before his birth, as told to him by his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was to marry his father's brother, Louis Althusser, who died in World War I near Verdun, while Charles, his father, was engaged with Lucienne's sister, Juliette.

Louis Althusser's "feeling of fathomless solitude" could only be mitigated by communicating with his mother's parents who lived in Morvan.

Louis Althusser's friend and biographer Yann Moulier-Boutang, after a careful analysis of the early period of Althusser's life, concluded that the autobiography was "a re-writing of a life through the prism of its wreckage".

Louis Althusser's sister had depression, and despite their living separately from each other for almost their entire adult lives, their depression often coincided in time.

Also, Louis Althusser focused on describing family circumstances, not considering, for example, the influence of ENS on his personality.

Louis Althusser argues that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated.

Louis Althusser believes these errors result from the notion that Marx's entire body of work can be understood as a coherent whole.

Louis 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.

Louis Althusser holds that Marx has discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics or Galileo to physics, in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors.

Louis Althusser believes that Marx's work is fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it is built on a groundbreaking epistemology that rejects the distinction between subject and object.

Louis Althusser uses this analysis to defend Marx's historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base and superstructure "rising upon it" and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the base.

For Louis Althusser, it is a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx.

Just as Louis Althusser criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he reject the idea that economic practice can be used in isolation to explain other aspects of society.

Louis Althusser believes that the base and the superstructure are interdependent, although he keeps to the classic Marxist materialist understanding of the determination of the base "in the last instance".

Louis Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes: economic practice, ideological practice, and politico-legal practice.

Louis Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms.

Louis Althusser explained the revolution in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc.

From this, Louis Althusser concludes that Marx's concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a complex structured social whole.

Louis Althusser's understanding of contradiction in terms of the dialectic attempts to rid Marxism of the influence and vestiges of Hegelian dialectics, and is a component part of his general anti-humanist position.

Louis Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice.

Louis Althusser calls this recognition a "mis-recognition", because it works retroactively: a material individual is always already an ideological subject, even before he or she is born.

The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always already happened; Louis Althusser here acknowledges a debt to Spinoza's theory of immanence.

In various short papers drafted from 1982 to 1986 and published posthumously, Louis Althusser is critical of the relation of Marxist science to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and materialist philosophy in general.

Louis Althusser rejects dialectical materialism and introduces a new concept: the Philosophy of the Encounter, renamed Aleatory Materialism in 1986.

Louis Althusser argues that it was an idealist and teleological mistake to think that there are general laws of history and that social relations are determined in the same manner as physical relations.

Louis Althusser drew as much from pre-Marxist systems of thought and contemporary schools such as structuralism, philosophy of science and psychoanalysis as he did from thinkers in the Marxist tradition.

Cohen; the interest in structure and agency sparked by Louis Althusser was to play a role in sociologist Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration.

Louis Althusser's work has been criticized from a number of angles.

Louis Althusser says that 'the ideas that the Althusserians generated, for example, of the interpellation of the subject, or of contradiction and overdetermination, possessed a surface allure, but it often seemed impossible to determine whether or not the theses in which those ideas figured were true, and, at other times, those theses seemed capable of just two interpretations: on one of them they were true but uninteresting, and, on the other, they were interesting, but quite obviously false'.

Where the Soviet doctrines that existed during the lifetime of the dictator lacked systematisation, Louis Althusser's theory gave Stalinism "its true, rigorous and totally coherent expression".

In retrospect, Louis Althusser's continuing influence can be seen through his students.

The prominent Guevarist Regis Debray studied under Louis Althusser, as did the aforementioned Derrida, noted philosopher Michel Foucault, and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.

In 2011 Louis Althusser continued to spark controversy and debate with the publication in August of that year of Jacques Ranciere's first book, Louis Althusser's Lesson.

For example, although he owned thousands of books, Louis Althusser revealed that he knew very little about Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel.