Western Philosophy
20th-century philosophy |
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Name
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Birth
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October 16, 1918
 Birmendreïs, Algeria
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Death
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October 22 1990 (aged 72)
Paris, France
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School/tradition
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Marxism, Structuralism
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Main interests
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Politics, Economics, Ideology
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Notable ideas
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The "epistemological break"
Overdetermination
Ideological state apparatuses
Interpellation
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Influences
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Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao
Zedong,
Antonio Gramsci, Machiavelli,
Spinoza, Georges Canguilhem,
Gaston Bachelard, Sigmund Freud,
Jacques Lacan
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Influenced
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Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Perry Anderson, Nicos Poulantzas, Jean-Luc Marion, Slavoj Žižek, Ernesto Laclau
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Louis Pierre Althusser (Pronunciation: altuˡseʁ) (October 16, 1918 – October 22, 1990) was a Marxist philosopher. 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 reformist
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.
Biographical information
Early life
Althusser wrote two autobiographies, L'Avenir dure longtemps, or "The Future Lasts a Long Time," which is published in
America as "The Future Lasts Forever," in a single volume with Althusser's other, shorter, earlier autobiography, "The Facts."
These documents provide most of the information known about his life.
Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pied-noirs family. He was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser alleged that his mother had intended to marry his uncle and married his father
only because of the brother's demise. Althusser also alleges that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle,
to which he attributes deep psychological damage.
Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger
sister to Marseilles, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne in 1937. Althusser performed brilliantly at school at the
Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted to the elite
École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris. However, he found himself enlisted in the run-up to World War
II, and like most French soldiers following the Fall of France Althusser was
interned in a German POW camp. Here, his move towards
Communism was to begin. He was relatively content as a prisoner, and remained in the camp for
the rest of the war, unlike many of his contemporaries who escaped to fight again—for this, Althusser later had reason to
chastise himself.
Health
After the war, Althusser was able finally to attend ENS. However, he was in poor health, both mentally and physically. In
1947 he received electroconvulsive therapy.
Althusser was from this time to suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life. The ENS was sympathetic however,
allowing him to reside in his own room in the school infirmary. Althusser found himself living at the ENS in the Rue d'Ulm for
decades, except for periods of hospitalization.
Post-War
In 1946, Althusser met Hélène Rytman, a revolutionary of
Lithuanian-Jewish ethnic origin eight years older than
he. She remained his companion until Althusser killed her in 1980.
Formerly a devout, if left-wing, Roman
Catholic, Althusser joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in
1948, a time when others such as Merleau-Ponty were
losing sympathy for the party. That same year, Althusser passed the agrégation in
philosophy with a dissertation on Hegel, which allowed him to become a tutor at the ENS.
De-Stalinisation
With the Twentieth Party Congress in
1956, Nikita Khrushchev began the process of
"de-Stalinisation". For many Marxists, including the PCF's
leading theoretician Roger Garaudy, this meant the recovery of the humanist roots of Marx's thought, such as the theory of alienation. Althusser, however, opposed this trend, sympathising instead with the
criticisms made by the Communist Party of China, albeit cautiously. His stance
during this period earned him notoriety within the PCF and he was attacked by its secretary-general Waldeck Rochet. As a philosopher, he was treading another path, which would later lead him to "random materialism"
(matérialisme aléatoire); however, this didn't stop him from enforcing the marxist orthodox thought to supposed
"heretics", such as during his 1973 answer to John
Lewis.
Despite the involvement of many of his students in the events of May 1968, Althusser
initially greeted these developments with silence. He was later to parallel the official PCF line in describing the students as
victim to "infantile" leftism. As a result, Althusser was attacked by many former
supporters. In response to these criticisms, he revised some of his positions, claiming that his earlier writings contained
mistakes, and a significant shift in emphasis was seen in his later works.
1980s
On November 16, 1980, Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène
Legotien nee Rytmann, to death, following a period of alleged mental instability. The exact circumstances are debated, with some
claiming it was deliberate, others accidental. Althusser himself claimed not to have a clear memory of the event, saying that,
while he was massaging his wife's neck, he discovered he had strangled her. Since he was alone with his wife when she died, it is
difficult to come to firm conclusions. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility, and he was not tried, but instead committed to the Sainte-Anne
psychiatric hospital. Althusser remained in hospital until 1983. Upon release, he moved to Northern
Paris and lived reclusively, seeing few people. He continued to work and write, but published little. A notable exception is his
autobiography, L'avenir Dure Longtemps. He died of a heart attack on
October 22, 1990 at the age of 72. Much of his post-1980 work
has been published posthumously.
Thought
Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital,
which collects the work of Althusser and his students on an intensive philosophical re-reading of Karl Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status
of Marxist theory as "critique of political economy," and on its object. The current English edition of this work includes only
the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains
additional contributions from Jacques Ranciere, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet.
Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained very influential in Marxist
philosophy. Althusser's essay On the Young Marx draws a term from the
philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard
in proposing a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early, "Hegelian and Feuerbachian" writings and
his later, properly Marxist texts. His essay Marxism and Humanism is a strong statement
of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and
"species-being," which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a
bourgeois ideology of "humanity." His essay Contradiction and Overdetermination
borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple
causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).
Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology, and his best-known essay is
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation [1]. The essay establishes the concept of ideology, also based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony. Whereas hegemony is ultimately
determined entirely by political forces, ideology draws on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and
systems that allow us to meaningfully have a concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression
and inevitable - it is impossible to escape ideology; to not be subjected to it. The distinction between ideology and science or
philosophy is not assured once and for all by the epistemological break: this "break" is not a chronologically-determined
event, but a process. Instead of an assured victory, there is a continuous struggle against ideology: "Ideology has no
history".
The "epistemological break"
It was Althusser's view that Marx's thought had been fundamentally misunderstood and
underestimated. He fiercely condemned various interpretations of his works - historicism,
idealism, economism - on the grounds that they
had failed to realise that with the "science of history", historical materialism,
Marx had constructed a revolutionary view of social change. These errors, he believed, resulted from the notion that Marx's
entire body of work could be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Althusser held, it contains a radical "epistemological
break". Though the early works are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical
political economy, with The German
Ideology (written in 1845) there is a sudden and unprecedented departure which paves the way for Marx's later works.
The problem is compounded by the fact that even Marx himself did not fully comprehend the
significance of his own work, being only able to communicate it obliquely and tentatively. The shift can only be revealed by way
of a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading". Thus, it is Althusser's project to help us fully grasp the originality and
power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. He held that
Marx had discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of
Thales to mathematics, Galileo to physics or, better, Freud's psychoanalysis, in that the structure of his theory is
unlike anything posited by his predecessors.
Althusser believed that underlying Marx's discovery was a ground-breaking epistemology
centred on the rejection of the dichotomy between subject and object, which makes Marx's work incompatible with its antecedents. At the root of the break is a
rejection of the idea, held by the classical economists, that the needs of individuals can be
treated as a fact or 'given' independent of any economic organisation, and could therefore 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. In Althusser's view, Marx did not simply argue that people's needs are largely created by their
social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandoned the very idea that there could be a theory about what
people are like which was prior to any theory about how they come to be that way.
As well as this, Marx's theory is built on concepts - such as forces and
relations of production - that have no counterpart in classical political economy. Even when existing terms are adopted - such as the combination of David Ricardo's notions of rent, profit and interest through the theory of surplus value - their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different.
Furthermore, apart from its unique structure, historical materialism's
explanatory power is unlike that of classical political economy; whereas
political economy explained economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's
analysis accounted for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Resultantly,
Marx's Capital provides both a model of the economy and a description of the
structure and development of a whole society.
Though Althusser steadfastly held onto the claim of its existence, he later asserted that the turning point's occurrence
around 1845 was not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism and Hegelianism were to be found in
Capital. He even went so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme [1] and some notes on a
book by Adolph Wagner [2] were fully
free from humanist ideology. In fact, Althusser considered the epistemological break to be a
process instead of a clearly defined event. He described Marxism and psychoanalysis as "scissional" sciences, which
always had to struggle against ideology, thus explaining the succeeding ruptures and splittings. They are scissional sciences
because their object ("class struggle" or the topic of the unconscious) is itself split and divided.
Practices
Because of Marx's belief in the close relation between the individual and society, it is, in Althusser’s view, pointless to
try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human
elements, but rather 'structure'. As he has it, Marx did not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons
- their beliefs, desires, preferences and judgements - but rather broke it up into related units called ‘practices’. He uses this
analysis to defend Marx’s historical materialism against the charge that it
crudely posits a base and superstructure and then attempts to explain all aspects of the
superstructure by appealing to features of the base. For Althusser, it was a mistake to
attribute this view, based on economic determinism, to Marx: much as he criticises
the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he dismiss the idea that an
independently defined notion of economic practice can be used to explain other aspects of
society. Like Lukács, Althusser believed that both the base and the superstructure were
dependent on the whole. The advantage of practices over individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a
part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of various different kinds of parts;
economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc. all
united in a process of production. Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes –
economic practice, ideological practice and politico-legal practice – which together make up one complex whole. In his view
all practices are dependent on each other. For example, amongst the relations of
production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers. These relations are
part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers
and sellers; furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means. From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice
depend on the superstructure and vice versa.
Contradiction and overdetermination
An analysis understood in terms of interdependent practices helps us to conceive of how society is organised, but also allows
us to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. 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. Marx’s theory
seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes
to a major reorganisation of the whole. To develop this idea Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and
non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory
when they grate on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by
reference to Lenin’s analysis of the Russian
Revolution of 1917.
Lenin posited that in spite of widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early
20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution
occurred because it contained all the contradictions possible within a single state at the time. It was, in his words, the ‘weak
link’ in a ‘collection of imperialist states’. The revolution is explained in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly,
the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc.,
disparity between urban industrialisation and medieval conditions in the countryside, and lack of unity amongst the ruling class;
secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the
Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists.
This example is used by Althusser to reinforce his claim that Marx did not see social
change as the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the
relations of production, but rather held a more complex view of it. The
differences between events in Russia and Western Europe
highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution. The
circumstances that produced revolution in Russia, mentioned above, were heterogeneous, and cannot
be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction. Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality. From this,
Althusser draws the conclusion that Marx’s concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a social whole. In order
to emphasise that changes in social structure relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as
"overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud. This interpretation allows us to account for how many different circumstances may play a
part in the course of events, and furthermore permits us to grasp how these states of affairs may combine to produce unexpected
social changes, or ‘ruptures’.
However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a
part of a complex whole, economic practice is, in his view, a structure in dominance: it plays a
major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most
prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal
formations and the economic aspect in capitalist ones) is
called the 'dominant instance', and is in turn determined 'in the last instance' by the economy. For Althusser, the
economic practice of a society determines which other aspect of it dominates the society as a
whole.
Ideological state apparatuses
Because Althusser held that our desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements and so forth are the consequences of
social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within
capitalist society, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious agent. For Althusser, however, a
person’s capacity for perceiving herself in this way is not innate. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established
social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject. Social practices both determine the
characteristics of the individual and give her an idea of the range of properties they can have, and of the limits of each social
practice. 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. However, other characteristics of
individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on
the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories. In Althusser’s view, our values, desires and preferences are
inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of
constituting individuals as subjects through the process of interpellation.
Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which include
the family, the media, religious organisations and, most importantly, the education system, as well as the received ideas they
propagate [2]. There is, however, no one ISA that produces
in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we learn this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a
daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.
Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history; as
Althusser's first thesis on ideology states, "ideology has no history". All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or
she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of
interpellation. He uses the example of an individual walking in a street: upon
hearing a police whistle, or any other form of hailing, the individual turns round and in this simple movement of her body she is
transformed into a subject. Althusser discusses the process by which the person
being hailed recognizes herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond. Even though there was nothing suspicious about
her walking in the street, she recognizes it is indeed she herself that is being hailed. This recognition is a mis-recognition
(méconnaissance) in that it is working retroactively: a material individual is always-already an ideological subject. The
"transformation" of an individual into a subject has always-already happened; Althusser acknowledges here a debt toward
Spinoza's theory of immanence. That is to say, our
idea of who we are is delivered by ideology. The second of Althusser's theses is that "ideology has a material existence":
| “ |
Ideas have disappeared as such (insofar as they are endowed with an ideal or spiritual
existence), to the precise extent that it has emerged that their existence is inscribed in the actions of practices governed by
rituals defined in the last instance by an ideological apparatus. It therefore appears that the subject acts insofar as he is
acted by the following system (set out in the order of its real determination): ideology existing in a material ideological
apparatus, describing material practices governed by a material ritual, which practices exist in the material actions of a
subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief. [3] |
” |
These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus, as the ISA may in a
sense be compared with Foucault's disciplinary institutions. Althusser offers the example of the Voice of God - an embodiment of Christian religious ideology - instructing a person on what her place in the world is and what she must do to be
reconciled with Christ. From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to
identify herself as a Christian, she must first already be a subject. We acquire our
identities by seeing ourselves and our social roles mirrored in material ideologies.
Influence
Although Althusser's theories were born of an attempt to defend what some saw as Communist
orthodoxy, his manner of presenting Marxism reflected a move away from the intellectual
isolation of the Stalinist era - Althusser argued strongly for what he called a left-wing
rather than liberal or reformist critique of Stalinism - and furthermore was symptomatic both of Marxism's growing academic
respectability and of a push towards emphasising Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than
as an economist.
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 and
Étienne Balibar in philosophy, Jacques Ranciere in history and the philosophy of history, Pierre Macherey in
literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in
sociology. The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the noted philosopher Michel Foucault and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.
Endnotes
- ^ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an
Investigation is available in several English volumes including Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
- ^ The concept may be found in the text Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses, published in English in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, available online here
- ^ Ibid., p.169-70
See also
References
- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. (Online version)
- Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism
- Callinicos, Alex (ed.), Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976).
- James, Susan, 'Louis Althusser' in Skinner, Q. (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.
- Waters, Malcolm, Modern Sociological Theory, 1994, page 116.
- Lewis, William, "Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism." Lexington books, 2005. (link)
- Resch, Robert Paul. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992.
(link)
- Heartfield, James, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, Sheffield Hallam UP, 2002 [3]
External links
