(The Future Lasts Forever is the famous French philosopher...)
The Future Lasts Forever is the famous French philosopher Louis Althusser's memoir written during his years of confinement in a mental hospital after murdering his wife. Reminiscent to many readers of Strindberg's Diary of a Madman and Styron's Darkness Visible, The Future Lasts Forever is a profound yet subtle exercise in documenting madness from the inside. This paperback edition also includes Althusser's earlier autobiographical essay "The Facts," as well as a preface by Douglas Johnson, Emeritus Professor of French at London University.
(Louis Althusser's renowned short text Ideology and Ideolo...)
Louis Althusser's renowned short text Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses radically transformed the concept of the subject, the understanding of the state, and even the very frameworks of cultural, political, and literary theory. Its publication makes possible a reappraisal of seminal Althusserian texts already available in English, their place in Althusser's oeuvre, and the relevance of his ideas for contemporary theory.
(In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political perio...)
In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser's own ideas and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings.
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French philosopher. He was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th century.
Background
Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pieds-noirs family. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was initially a lieutenant in the French army. Later, he settled down in Algiers, where he began working as a bank clerk. His mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Catholic, worked as a school teacher. He had at least one sister.
He was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser wrote later that his mother had intended to marry his uncle, and married his father only because of the brother's death. Althusser later alleged that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle, to which he attributed deep psychological damage.
Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger sister to Marseille, where he spent the rest of his childhood.
Education
Althusser was a brilliant student at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was later (in 1939) accepted by the elite École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris. His attendance however was deferred by six years, because he was drafted in the run-up to World War II and, like most French soldiers following the Fall of France, was interned in a German prisoner of war camp. There, Althusser began the thinking that took him toward Communism. He was held in the camp for the rest of the war, under conditions that contributed to his lifelong bouts of mental instability.
In 1948, Louis Althusser began his career as the agrégé répétiteur (director of studies) at the ENS. He was responsible for offering special courses on particular topics and on particular figures from the history of philosophy.
His lectures and writings became very influential and he was seen by many to be the party's most outstanding intellectual. He now started publishing papers and soon became quite popular with his students. In 1954, he became secrétaire de l'école litteraire (secretary of the literary school). In this capacity, he became responsible for the management and direction of the school.
In 1949, he taught Plato. Next in 1949-1950, he gave lectures on René Descartes and wrote a thesis entitled "Politics and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century." Then from 1950 to 1955, he concentrated on Rousseau, changing his focus to the philosophy of history, also studying Voltaire, Condorcet, and Helvétius.
Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital (1965), which collects the work of Althusser and his students in an intensive philosophical rereading of Karl Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as a "critique of political economy," and on its object. The original English translation of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet.
Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained influential in Marxist philosophy. The introduction to his collection For Marx proposes a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early writings (1840-1945) and his later, properly Marxist texts, borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. 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 cultural hegemony.)
Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology. His best-known essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation," establishes the concept of ideology. Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud's and Lacan's psychological concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of self. For Althusser, these structures are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology and avoid being subjected to it. On the other hand, the collection of essays from which "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" is drawn contains other essays which confirm that Althusser's concept of ideology is broadly consistent with the classic Marxist theory of class struggle.
In 1976 Louis Althusser was married, but in November of 1980, the philosopher strangled his wife to death and was committed to a Paris hospital for the insane. He spent the last ten years of his life in and out of various institutions. During this time he continued to write essays, attempting to explain his homicidal action in the light of a wider social analysis. A posthumous autobiography of collected memoirs, The Future Lasts Forever, was published in 1992.
(In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political perio...)
Religion
Intellectual revolutionary prior to and through World War II, 1939-1945, Althusser was involved in the Roman Catholic youth movement and advocated some of the church's more conservative teachings.
Politics
During his student years at École Normale Supérieure, Althusser became sympathetic to the leftist movement but did not officially join the party. Neither did he move away from religion, instead tried to synthesize Christian and Marxist thoughts.
Althusser joined the French Communist Party in 1948, a time when others such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty were losing sympathy for the party.
Although he did not teach Marxism in class or published any work on the subject from 1953 to 1960, he was otherwise very active, opening the Cercle Politzer, a Marxist study group at École Normale Supérieure. He was also an active member of the Peace Movement.
Views
Althusser attempted to reconcile the views of French structuralism with those of Marxism by denying the primary role of the individual subject in the face of historically unfolding social structures.
Althusser's thought evolved during his lifetime. It has been the subject of argument and debate, especially within Marxism and specifically concerning his theory of knowledge (epistemology).
While many Marxists were looking for a more "humane" alternative to the totalitarianism unfolding in the Soviet Union and a way to resolve the split caused by the Chinese revolution, Althusser, taking the opposite tack, proposed a purely scientific approach, one he ascribed to the maturing Marx himself in For Marx, (1970). In Reading Capital and in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971) he aimed at an objective account of how the total society works from its technological top-down, generating the classes that run and do the work of a society. In the latter collection, he described how such a structure operates through the languages we speak in common. These, he said, tend to instill in people their sense of reality and of themselves and their social roles, all in the interest of perpetuating the order of the given society: this is the thought-controlling use of language called "ideology."
Structuralist Analysis Althusser sketched the underlying fabric of a society with the help of the French "structuralist" theory. This led to the development of a comprehensive and intricate Marxist model for society as a whole, although access to the model is made difficult by Althusser's style and terminology. In the structuralist view, society cannot be understood through the subjective experience of individuals seen as in some way differentiated from the unfolding processes in which they are enmeshed. Society functions as a single organism in a manner determined by its technology and its modes of production. Every individual action is solely determined by its role in relation to that technology. Althusser's critique was partly in reaction to prevailing individualistic philosophies, as well as the increasingly embarrassing historical degenerations of the Marxist system under Stalin. Critics of Althusser's thinking largely objected to the extreme austerity of a system that denies the primacy of the subjective experience, insisting that a system which so entirely subordinates the individual to the "total" structure can never hope to sustain itself in any realm other than the theoretical. The Chinese experience reminded Marxists that "contradictions" were the essence of their world view; unity is achieved only through the play of opposites, and all "wholes" contain and even consist of the struggles internal to them. As an organism breaks down food to build up nourishment, the state takes life to protect itself. Later disciples of Althusser would point out that both language and personality reveal inherent tensions in the makeup of the self. These as oppositions can be counted on to result in change and progress as they are products of the internalization of "idealistic" structures in the society as a whole. Marxists who preferred to see change as brought on from "the bottom up" (the oppressed, the working class) criticized Althusser for this scheme of resistance from "the inside out" (the repressed inside any group, body, or system: in the economic system, workers). Others found this to be one of his most fruitful new turns of thought.
Quotations:
"Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory."
"Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."
"Ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’ – it is profoundly unconscious."
"What seems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality, takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, I am ideological."
"Ideology… is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed, and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence."
"To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun."
"In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible."
"What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of "seeing," "perceiving" and "feeling" (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes."
Personality
It is known, that Althusser owned a huge library of thousands of books.
Physical Characteristics:
Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness.
Returning from the war, Louis Althusser was in poor health, both mentally and physically. In 1947 he was hospitalized for the first time for manic-depressive psychosis and received electroconvulsive therapy.
Althusser would from this point suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life and was repeatedly hospitalized. In about 1950 he received narcotherapy and from 1964 to 1980 he was treated by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst René Diatkine.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Connections
In 1946, Louis Althusser met sociologist Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, a Jewish woman, ten years older than him. She was a former member of the French Resistance and the French Communist Party. Although it is not known when or if they got married, they lived at École Normale Supérieure and shared a deep emotional bonding.