## 1. Life



Louis Althusser was born on October 16th, 1918 in Bir
Mourad Rais (formerly Birmandreis), a suburb of Algiers.
Hailing from Alsace on his father's side of the family, his
grandparents were French citizens who had chosen to settle in
Algeria. At the time of his birth, Althusser's father was a
lieutenant in the French Military. After this service was up, his
father returned to Algiers and to his work as a banker. By all
accounts save for the retrospective ones contained in his
autobiographies, Althusser's early childhood in North Africa was
a contented one. There he enjoyed the comforts of the Mediterranean
environment as well as those provided by an extended and stable
petit-bourgeois family.



In 1930, his father's work moved the family to Marseille. Always
a good pupil, Althusser excelled in his studies and became active in
the Scouts. In 1936, the family moved again, this time to Lyon. There,
Althusser was enrolled in the prestigious Lycee du Parc. At the
Lycee, he began taking classes in order to prepare for the
competitive entrance exams to France's *grandes
ecoles*. Raised in an observant family, Althusser was
particularly influenced by professors of a distinctly Catholic
tendency. These included the philosophers Jean Guitton and Jean
Lacroix as well as the historian Joseph Hours. In 1937, while still at
the Lycee, Althusser joined the Catholic youth group
*Jeunesse etudiantes chretiennes*. This interest
in Catholicism and his participation in Catholic organizations would
continue even after Althusser joined the Communist Party in 1948. The
simultaneous enthusiasm that Althusser showed in Lyon for Royalist
politics did not last the war.



In 1939, Althusser performed well enough on the national entrance
examinations to be admitted to the Ecole Normale
Superieure (ENS) in Paris. However, before the school year
began, he was mobilized into the army. Soon thereafter, he was
captured in Vannes along with the rest of his artillery regiment. He
spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war at a camp in
Northern Germany. In his autobiographical writings, Althusser credits
the experiences of solidarity, political action, and community that he
found in the camp as opening him up to the idea of communism. Indeed,
his prison writings collected as *Journal de captivite,
Stalag XA 1940-1945* evidence these experiences. They also
provide evidence of the cycles of deep depression that began for
Althusser in 1938 and that would mark him for the rest of his
life.



At the end of the war and following his release from the P.O.W. camp
in 1945, Althusser took his place at the ENS. Now 27 years old, he
began the program of study that was to prepare him for the
*agregation*, the competitive examination which
qualifies one to teach philosophy in French secondary schools and that
is often the gateway to doctoral study and university employment.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a young man who had just spent half a
decade in a prison camp, much happened during the three years he spent
preparing for the exam and working on his Master's thesis.
Though still involved in Catholic groups and still seeing himself as a
Christian, the movements that Althusser associated with after the war
were leftist in their politics and, intellectually, he made a move to
embrace and synthesize Christian and Marxist thought. This synthesis
and his first published works were informed by a reading of
19th Century German idealist philosophy, especially Hegel
and Marx, as well as by progressive Christian thinkers associated with
the group *Jeunesse de l'Eglise*. Indeed, it was
19th Century German Idealism with which he was most engaged
during his period of study at the ENS. In line with this interest (one
shared with many other French intellectuals at the time), Althusser
obtained his *diplome d'etudes
superieures* in 1947 for a work directed by Gaston
Bachelard and titled "On Content in the Thought of G.W.F.
Hegel." In 1948, he passed his *agregation*,
coming in first on the written portion of the exam and second on the
oral. After this showing, Althusser was offered and accepted the post
of *agrege repetiteur* (director of
studies) at the ENS whose responsibility it was to help students
prepare for their own *agregations*. In this capacity,
he began offering courses and tutorials on particular topics in
philosophy and on particular figures from the history of philosophy.
As he retained this responsibility for more than thirty years and
worked with some of the brightest thinkers that France produced during
this time (including Alain Badiou, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel
Foucault), through his teaching Althusser left a deep and lasting
impression on a generation of French philosophers and on French
philosophy.



In addition to inaugurating his extended association with the ENS, the
first few years spent in Paris after the war saw Althusser begin three
other long-lasting relationships. The first of these was with the
French Communist Party, the second with his companion and eventual
wife, Helene Rytmann-Legotien, and the third with
French psychiatry. Begun to treat recurrent bouts of depression, this
last affiliation continued for the rest of his life and included
frequent hospitalization as well as the most aggressive treatments
post-war French psychiatry had to offer such as electroconvulsive
therapy, narco-analysis, and psychoanalysis.



The second relationship begun by Althusser was little happier and no
less dependent than the first. At its outset, Althusser's bond
with Rytmann-Legotien was complicated by his almost
total inexperience with women and by her being eight years older than
him. It was also made difficult by the vast differences in their
experience of the world and by her relationship with the Communist
Party. Whereas Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W.
camp, Rytmann-Legotien had traveled widely and had long
been active in literary and radical circles. At the time the two met,
she was also embroiled in a dispute with the Party over her role in
the resistance during World War II.



Though Althusser was not yet a Party member, like many of his
generation, he emerged from the War deeply sympathetic to its moral
aims. His interest in Party politics and involvement with Party
members grew during his time as a student at the ENS. However, the
ENS' suspicion of communists as well
as Rytmann-Legotien's troubles with the Party
complicated Althusser's relationship with each of these
institutions. Nonetheless, shortly after being offered the post of
*agrege repetiteur* (and thus safe
from being bypassed for the position due to his membership), Althusser
joined the Communist Party. For the next few years, Althusser tried to
advance the aims of the Communist Party as well as the goal of getting
Helene Rytmann-Legotien accepted back into it. He
did so by being a good militant (going to cell meetings, distributing
tracts, etc), by re-starting a Marxist study group at the ENS (the
*Cercle Politzer*), and by making inquiries into
Helene Rytmann-Legotien's wartime
activities in the hopes of clearing her name. By his own account, he
made a terrible activist and he also failed to rehabilitate
her reputation. Nonetheless, his relationship with the Party and
with his future wife deepened during this period.



During the 1950s, Althusser lived two lives that were only somewhat
inter-related: one was that of a successful, if somewhat obscure
academic philosopher and pedagogue and the other that of a loyal
Communist Party Member. This is not to say that Althusser was
politically inactive at the school or that his communism did not
influence his philosophical work. On the contrary, Althusser recruited
colleagues and students to the Party and worked closely with the
communist cell based at the ENS. In addition, at mid-decade, he
published a few introductions to Marxist philosophy. However, in his
teaching and advising, he mostly avoided bringing in Marxist
philosophy and Communist politics. Instead, he catered to student
interest and to the demands of each new *agregation* by
engaging closely with classic philosophical texts and with
contemporary philosophy and social science. Further, the bulk of his
scholarship was on 18th Century political philosophy.
Indeed, the only book-length study Althusser published during his
lifetime was a work on Montesquieu, which appeared at the end of the
decade. At the ENS, Althusser's professionalism as well as his
ability to think institutionally was rewarded in 1954 with a promotion
to *secretaire de l'ecole
litteraire*, a post where he had some responsibility for
the management and direction of the school.



It would have surprised no one if Althusser had continued to influence
French political and philosophical life subtly, through the students
that he mentored, through his scholarship on the history of political
philosophy, through the colloquia among philosophers, scientists, and
historians that he organized, and through his routine work as a Party
member. However, in 1961, with an essay titled "On the Young
Marx," Althusser aggressively entered into a heated debate about
the continuity of Marx's oeuvre and about what constitutes the
core of Marxist philosophy. Appearing at a time of crisis in the
French Communist Party's direction and seeming to offer a
"scientific" alternative to Stalinism and to the humanist
revisions of Marxism then being proffered, the theoretical viewpoint
offered by Althusser gained adherents. Invigorated by this recognition
and by the possibility that theoretical work might actually change
Communist Party practice, Althusser began to publish regularly on
Marxist philosophy. These essays occasioned much public discussion and
philosophical activity both in France and abroad. At the same time as
these essays began creating a stir, Althusser changed his teaching
style at the ENS and began to offer collaborative seminars where he
and his students attempted a "return to Marx" and to
Marx's original texts. In 1965, the fruit of one of these
seminars was published as *Reading Capital*. That same year,
the essays on Marxist theory that had made such a sensation were
collected and published in the volume *For Marx*. Amplifying
these books' collective impact well beyond the realm of
intra-party discussion was the general trend in literary and social
scientific theory labeled "structuralism" and with which
Althusser's re-reading of Marx was identified.



At mid-decade, Althusser seized on these works' popularity and
the fact that his arguments had created a faction within the French
Communist Party composed mostly of young intelligentsia to try and
force change. This gambit to have the Party directed by theorists
rather than by a Central Committee, whose Stalinism remained
entrenched and who believed in the organic wisdom of the worker, met
with little success. At the most, he succeeded in carving out some
autonomy for theoretical reflection within the Party. Even though it
is his most well-known intervention, this was not the first attempt by
Althusser to try and influence the Party (he had tried once before
during the mid 1950s from his position as cell leader at the ENS) and
it would not be his last. While he lost much of the student support
that his work had created when he remained silent during the
"revolutionary" events of May 1968 (he was in a
psychiatric hospital at the time), he campaigned once more to
influence the Party during the mid 1970s. This intervention occurred
in response to the French Communist Party's decision to abandon
traditional Marxist-Leninist aspects of its platform so as to better
ally itself with the Socialist Party. Though Althusser's
position was well publicized and found its supporters, in the end, his
arguments were unable to motivate the Party's rank-and-file such
that its leadership would reconsider its decision.



During the decades in which he became internationally known for his
re-thinking of Marxist philosophy, Althusser continued in his post at
the ENS. There he took on increasing institutional responsibility
while continuing to edit and, with Francois Maspero, to publish
his own work and that of others in the series *Theorie*.
In 1975, Althusser acquired the right to direct research on the basis
of his previously published work. Shortly after this recognition, he
married his longtime companion, Helene
Rytmann-Legotien.



Following the French Left's and the Communist Party's
electoral defeats in the 1978 elections, Althusser's bouts of
depression became more severe and more frequent. In November 1980,
after a painful surgery and another bout of mental illness, which saw
him hospitalized for most of the summer and whose symptoms continued
after his return to the ENS in the fall, Althusser strangled his wife.
Before he could be arrested for the murder, he was sent to a mental
hospital. Later, when an examining magistrate came to inform him of
the crime of which he was accused, Althusser was in so fragile a
mental state that he could not understand the charges or the process
to which he was to be submitted and he was left at the hospital. After
an examination, a panel of psychiatrists concluded that Althusser was
suffering at the time of the murder from severe depression and
iatrogenic hallucinations. Citing a French law (since changed), which
states that "there is neither crime nor delict where the suspect
was in a state of dementia at the time of the action," the
magistrate in charge of Althusser's case decided that there were
no grounds on which to pursue prosecution.



The last ten years of Althusser's life were spent in and out of
mental hospitals and at the apartment in Paris' 20th
arrondissement where he had planned to retire. During this period, he
was visited by a few loyal friends and kept up some correspondences.
Given his mental state, his frequent institutionalizations, his
anomie, and the drugs he was prescribed, these were not very
productive years. However, at mid-decade, he did find the energy to
re-visit some of his old work and to attempt to construct from it an
explicit metaphysics. He also managed to write an autobiography, a
text he averred was intended to provide the explanation for the murder
of his wife that he was never able to provide in court. Both texts
only appeared posthumously. When his mental and physical health
deteriorated again in 1987, Althusser went to live at a psychiatric
hospital in La Verriere, a village to the west of Paris. There,
on the 22nd of October, 1990, he died of a heart attack


## 2. Early Work (1946-60)



Despite its being anthologized and translated during the mid 1990s,
there has until recently been relatively little critical attention
paid to Althusser's writings prior to 1961. Certainly, in terms
of method, style, and inspiration, the Althusser found in these works
differs significantly from the Althusser of *For Marx* and
*Reading Capital*. In his writings from the 1940s, for
instance, his method and conclusions resemble those of the Marxist
Humanists of whom he would later be so critical, while texts from the
1950s deploy without irony the Stalinist shibboleths he would later
subject to such castigation. Nonetheless, as these texts announce many
of Althusser's perennial themes and because some of the
contradictions these works possess are shared with his classic texts
and are repeated again in his late work, these early essays, books,
and translations are worthy of examination


### 2.1 Christianity and Marxism



Althusser's philosophical output between 1946 and 1961 can
roughly be divided into four categories. The first category includes
those essays, mostly written between 1946 and 1951, where Althusser
explores possible rapports between Christianity and Marxism. In the
first of these essays "The International of Decent
Feelings," Althusser argues from what he takes to be "the
truth of Christianity" against the popular post-war view that
the misery, guilt, and alienation of the human condition in the atomic
age is equally experienced by all subjects. For him, this
existentialist diagnosis is a type of idolatry: it replaces
recognition of our equality before God with our equality before the
fear of death. In that it does so, it is twice anti-Christian. For, in
addition to the sin of idolatry (death equals God), it fails to
acknowledge the existence of a particular class, the proletariat, for
whom anguish is not its lot and who is actually capable of delivering
the emancipation from fear by re-appropriating the products of human
production, including the atomic bomb. A subsequent essay from 1947,
"A Matter of Fact," continues in this vein, suggesting the
necessity of socialist means for realizing Christian ends. It also
includes a Hegelian critique of the existing Catholic Church which
suggests that the church is incapable of such an alliance without a
theological revolution. Each of these essays includes the suggestion
that critique and reform will occasion a better church and a truer
Christianity. By 1949, however, Althusser was totally pessimistic
about this possibility and, in a letter to his mentor Jean Lacroix, he
argued that the sole possibility for realizing Christian values is
through communist action. Though some critics have argued that
Christian and Catholic values and modes of reasoning inform all of
Althusser's philosophy, any explicit consideration of a
practical and theoretical reconciliation between the two was abandoned
at this point in Althusser's development.


### 2.2 Hegelian Marxism



The second category of Althusser's early work, one closely
related to the first, are those texts that deal with Hegel. Written
primarily for an academic audience, they approach Hegel's
philosophy either critically, in terms of the history of its reception
and use, or exegetically, in terms of examining what possibility
Hegel's metaphysics, logic, politics, epistemology, and
understanding of subjectivity offer to those interested in
understanding and encouraging societal transformation. Between 1946
and 1950, the results of Althusser's exegeses were positive:
Hegel indeed had something to offer. This judgment finds its most
detailed explanation in Althusser's 1947 thesis "On
Content in the thought of G.W.F. Hegel." In addition to
detailing Hegel's relation to Kant and criticizing the
simplification of the dialectic by Hegel's commentators,
Althusser argues in this work that the dialectic "cannot be
attacked for its form" (1947, 116). Instead, Hegel can only be
critiqued for a failure of the contents of the form (as these contents
are specified in Hegel's historical and political works) to have
actually fulfilled the absolute idea. Following the Young Hegelians,
then, Althusser uses Hegel's dialectic against itself to
criticize claims like the one made in *The Philosophy of Right*
that the Prussian state is the fulfillment of the dialectic. Though he
uses Marx's *Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of
Right* to make his points and though he is in agreement with Marx
that the Hegelian concept, realized in thought, must now be realized
in the world, Althusser does not suggest in his thesis that
Marx's philosophy leaves Hegel's insights about, history,
logic, and the subject behind. Instead, he contends that Marx is
guilty of committing the same error as Hegel in mistaking historical
content for the fulfillment of the dialectic. Because all knowledge is
historical, Althusser argues, Marxists can only correct for this error
by appeal to the idea of the dialectic and to its end in the absolute
and the eternal, to a time "when the human totality will be
reconciled with its own structure" (1947, 156). Something like
this argument will appear again in his classical work as a critique of
the empiricist tendency in Marxist philosophy.


### 2.3 Marx not Hegel



By the early 1950s, Althusser's judgments that Marxism was, of
necessity, Hegelian and that it aimed at human fulfillment had
undergone revision. This transition to thinking about Marx as the
originator of a philosophy totally distinct from Hegel's was
signaled in a review essay from 1950 which argued that the post-war
mania for Hegel in France was only a bourgeois attempt to combat Marx.
In two short essays from 1953 on Marxist philosophy, this switch is
fully apparent. In these texts, Althusser aligns himself with the
position advanced by Mehring and Lenin that, at a certain point in
Marx's development, Hegel is left behind and that, afterwards,
Marx forged his own original concepts and methodology. In his
description of what these concepts and methodology are, Althusser
pretty much follows the Party line, insisting that Marx reversed the
Hegelian dialectic, that historical materialism is a science, that the
sciences verify dialectical materialism, and that the proletariat
needs to be taught Marxist science from above. Though these essays
repeat the Party philosophy as formulated by Lenin, Stalin, and
Zhdanov, they also include recognizable Althusserian themes and show
his thinking about these themes to be in transition. For instance,
both essays retain the idea from Althusser's 1947 thesis about
the quasi-transcendental status of present scientific knowledge. Both
also anticipate future concerns in their speculations about the
ideological character of current scientific knowledge and in their
incorporation of ideas from Mao about the relationship between theory
and practice. Written as a response to Paul Ricoeur and representing
the last example of this third category of Althusser's early
work, a text from 1955 argues for the objectivity of historical
science. This is a theme to which he would return. Noticeably absent
from this body of work, however, are the detailed and original claims
Althusser would make in the early 1960s about Marx's
philosophy.


### 2.4 Historical Work: Montesquieu and Feuerbach



Two essays that Althusser wrote in the mid 1950s were the first to
focus exclusively on Marxist philosophy and are interesting inasmuch
as they evidence his rejection of Hegel and his embrace of the
Party's Marxism-Leninism. In addition, these texts suggest the
need for a thorough study of Marx. This study, however, would wait
until the beginning of the next decade. For the rest of the 1950s,
most of Althusser's published work involved the study of
philosophical figures who preceded Marx. These figures included
Montesquieu, on whose political philosophy and theory of history he
wrote a book-length study, and Feuerbach, whose writings he translated
and commented upon. The dual thesis of Althusser's Montesquieu
book: that, insofar as Montesquieu studies the "concrete
behavior of men" he resists idealism and inaugurates the study
of history as a science and that, insofar as Montesquieu accepts past
and present political formations as delimiting the possibilities for
political life, he remains an idealist, is one that will find echoes
in Althusser's study of Marx during the next decade. Similarly,
inasmuch as he makes the argument in a commentary (1960) that part of
his intention in translating Feuerbach is to show just what Marx owes
in his early writings to the author of *The Essence of
Christianity* so that these may be better seen as absent from
Marx's mature work, these studies of Feuerbach can also be seen
as propaedeutic to the study of Marx which Althusser inaugurated in
1961 with his article "On the Young Marx".


## 3. Classic Work (1961-1966)



With the perspective afforded by the mass of posthumous writings
published since the 1990s, it has become clear that Althusser was
perennially concerned with important issues in metaphysics,
epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, hermeneutics, and
political philosophy. However, it is also true that the primary medium
Althusser employed for thinking through problems in these areas was
Marxist philosophy. This is especially true of the period between 1961
and 1966 when the majority of his published and unpublished work
concerned itself with how to read Marx, the definition of Marxist
philosophy, and how to understand and apply Marxian concepts. In
addition, if we are to take Althusser's retrospective word for
it, the pieces he published during this period were intended as
political-theoretical acts, polemics meant to respond to contemporary
opinions and policies and to shift the terms of these arguments as
well as the actions which were their results. For these reasons, it is
natural when discussing these texts to focus upon the contexts that
engendered them and upon the positions within Marxist philosophy that
Althusser stakes out by their means. Alternatively, as Althusser
indicates in many of these pieces his debts to contemporaneous
theorists and to philosophical predecessors such as Spinoza, there is
the temptation to understand his thought as a combination of the
insights contributed by these thinkers with Marxist philosophy. While
each is a useful approach to understanding and explaining
Althusser's philosophy, when excessive attention is paid to one
or another of them, one risks historicizing his contributions or
suggesting that they are merely derivative. Seeking to avoid either
result, even though the following discussion will note the context for
Althusser's work, its relation to Marxist philosophy, and the
non-Marxist philosophical insights that contribute to its method and
conclusions, this account will also suggest the uniqueness of his
contributions to hermeneutics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy
of science, historiography, and political philosophy.



For multiple, overlapping, and complicated reasons of which the most
relevant may be the discrediting of Stalin's personage,
policies, and version of Marxist philosophy that followed
Khrushchev's "Secret Speech," Europe in the late
1950s saw a blossoming of political and philosophical alternatives to
the version of Marxism-Leninism promulgated by the Soviet Union. This
version of Marxist philosophy had dominated European leftist thought
and action since the dawn of the Cold War in 1947 and, in France, was
widely disseminated via Communist Party schools and literature. While
political and philosophical change were slow to occur in the French
Communist Party, by the late 1950s, many intellectuals associated with
the Party began to ask questions about what constitutes the core of
Marx's philosophy and about how this philosophy guides, relates
to, or allows for political action.



For many of these intellectuals, answering this question meant a
return to Marx's early work (those texts written before 1845) in
the hopes of finding the "key" to his philosophy. In
pieces like "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right" (1844), and the *Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts* (1844), these thinkers found and
championed a Marx obviously indebted to a Hegelian dialectical
understanding of subjectivity and historical development and deeply
concerned about ending human alienation. It is to this
project--that of finding the true method, aim, and intent of
Marx's philosophy in his early work's emphasis on the
realization of full human freedom and potentials through dialectical
historical change--that Althusser made the first of his public
"interventions" into Marxist philosophy. He inaugurated
this effort with the essay "On the Young Marx" (1961),
which sought to demonstrate that this method of looking to
Marx's early work for the key to his philosophy was
methodologically suspect and ideologically driven. Further, in this
essay and in subsequent work, he developed an alternate method of
investigation or "reading" that would allow Marx's
true philosophy to be revealed in its purity.



From the fruits of this new method of reading, Althusser argued that
not only was Marx the originator of a new philosophy, Dialectical
Materialism, that had nothing to do with its Hegelian and Feuerbachian
predecessors, but that he also founded a new science, Historical
Materialism, which broke with and superseded such ideological and
pre-scientific precursors as the political economics of Smith and
Ricardo. For the most part, the essays collected in *For Marx*
(1965) and the seminar papers issued as *Reading Capital*
(1965) develop and utilize this method of reading in order to justify
and describe Marxist philosophy and Marxist science as well as to
distinguish between these two theoretical activities. In so doing,
Althusser says quite a bit about the nature of knowledge and the
general relations between philosophy, science, politics, and ideology.
Further, Althusser applies this hermeneutic method to argue against
what he labeled "empiricist" understandings of Marx. These
included the Humanist interpretations of Marx described above as well
as variations on the orthodox Marxist-Leninist theory, which specified
the strict determination of culture and history by the existing modes
of economic exchange and resulting class struggles. The following
paragraphs discuss this theory of reading, how it produces a different
understanding of Marx's philosophy than that which is derived
from Humanist and Economist readings, and how it informs his
epistemology, philosophy of science, historiography, and political
philosophy.


### 3.1 Hermeneutic Theory



The label that Althusser gave to the method by which he approached
Marx's texts was that of a "symptomatic reading."
Instead of looking back at Marx's early work in order to find
the "essence" of his philosophy, one of whose expressions
was *Capital*, and also instead of trying to build a true or
consistent theory out of Marx's oeuvre by explaining away
contradictions within it and noting certain passages as key, Althusser
argued that Marx's true philosophy was largely absent from his
work prior to 1845. Even in mature texts such as *Capital*,
Althusser maintained that Marx's philosophy remained largely
implicit, as the background system of concepts which allowed the
scientific work Marx was involved in generating to take place. The
symptomatic method of reading was designed to make these concepts
explicit and "to establish the indispensable minimum for the
consistent existence of Marxist philosophy**"**
(1965a [2005], 35).



The three inspirations Althusser gave for this interpretive method
were those provided by Spinoza, Freud by way of Lacan, and that
provided by Marx himself. In addition, he added to these examples
insights from the French tradition of historical epistemology about
the way in which sciences come to be constituted. One of the ideas
borrowed from Spinoza was the contention that texts and authors are
the products of their times and that the thoughts authors set down on
the page cannot help but be a part of, and be affected by, the
ideological currents that accompany and allow for the satisfaction of
needs in a specific era. So then, similar to the way in which Spinoza
argued in the *Theological Political-Treatise* that by engaging
in a materialist historical study of the Bible one could disentangle
those prophetic laws and commands which were merely the result of
temporal exigencies and the prophet's imagination from those
which represented the true word of God, so Althusser argued that one
could disentangle those concepts which were merely ideological in
Marx's texts from those which comprised his true philosophy.



Though this theory was later to be complicated and revised, during
this period, Althusser consistently argued that Marx's work
prior to 1845 was ideological and that it was saturated with
non-Marxian concepts borrowed from Hegel's and Feuerbach's
philosophical anthropologies. Althusser did recognize that some of
Marx's early work is marked by its rejection of idealist
premises and concepts. However, inasmuch as this early work was seen
to espouse a telic view of humanity in which the individual and
society was said to undergo a necessary historico-dialectical
development, Althusser identified it as fundamentally Hegelian. That
there was a materialist correction to this basic narrative with
Marx's embrace of Feuerbach, Althusser also granted. However,
the replacement by Marx of a speculative anthropology which saw the
historical development of society as the self-fulfillment of human
freedom with a materialist anthropology that cited the same logic of
development but which specified that the motor of this development was
human beings in their "sensuous life activity," was seen
by Althusser to represent little conceptual and no logical advance
from Hegel.



This "theory of the break," which held that Marx's
early work was Hegelian and ideological and that, after a decisive
rupture in 1845 and then a long period of transition between
1845-1857, his work became recognizably Marxist and scientific,
would seem to indicate that all one has to do to understand
Marx's philosophy is to read this mature work. However, the
actual case is not so simple. While reading *Capital* and other
late works is necessary for understanding Marx's philosophy, it
is not sufficient. It is not sufficient, Althusser argued, because,
even in his post-1857 writings, Marx provides no systematic exposition
of his epistemology or his ideas about social structure, history, and
human nature, all of which were necessary for Marxist
philosophy's consistent and continuing existence.



Many interpreters of Marx, and not just those Althusser directly
engaged with during the early 1960s, have maintained that such texts
as the *1859 Preface* and the *1844 Manuscripts* provide
keys to understanding Marx's philosophy. However, Althusser made
the case that these texts were contradictory and insufficient for this
purpose. It is with this contention that the models provided by
psychoanalysis and by Marx's own critique of classical political
economy come to inform Althusser's overall hermeneutic strategy.
Part of this strategy, Althusser maintains, is directly taken from
Marx's own method. Thus, in a way parallel to Marx pointing out
in *Capital* V.II (1885) that Adam Smith needed the concept of
the "value of labor" for his explanations of capitalist
economic activity but could not fully generate it out of the systems
of ideas available to him, Althusser argued that, though Marx was
recognizably engaged in the work of Historical Materialism in
*Capital*, the philosophical theory or background conceptual
framework that allowed this investigation to proceed was not fully
articulated.



The explicit project of *Reading Capital* and of many of the
essays included in *For Marx* was to make these fundamental
concepts explicit. It was to do so by paying attention to the
theoretical "problematic," or background ideological
framework in which the work was generated, by analyzing those passages
where a philosophical concept had to have been in use but was not made
explicit, and by noting and explaining where and why one theoretical
pronouncement is in contradiction with itself or with another passage.
For Althusser, such areas of Marx's text are
"symptoms," in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, of
the necessary but unarticulated philosophical framework that
underwrites and allows his scientific investigations. Of these
frameworks, Marx was not fully conscious. However, they were what
allowed him to investigate and describe such socio-economic events as
the transformation of money into capital without recourse to Hegelian
logic and concepts. Althusser argues that by paying attention to these
passages in Marx's text as well as by seeking out Marxist
concepts as these were developed during the course of practical
Marxist activity by theorists such as Lenin and Mao, an attentive
reader can render explicit Marx's philosophy.



That the concepts Althusser derived from his symptomatic reading of
Marx, Lenin, and Mao were Marxist concepts was avowed. Nevertheless,
Althusser also acknowledged that some of the concepts found latent in
these texts were derived from and consistent with his philosophical
and social scientific contemporaries as well as with those of Spinoza.
Of course, this is not inconsistent with the theory of reading and
authorship that underwrites a symptomatic reading of a text. Inasmuch
as authors and readers are always said to think with concepts borrowed
from or supplied by the problematic that they inhabit, there is no
such thing as an innocent or objective reading: we understand things
with and through the concepts available to us. Perhaps nowhere is this
borrowing more evident than in Althusser's ideas about how
scientific and philosophic knowledge is generated. Though Althusser is
very careful to back up his arguments about Marx's epistemology
with close analyses of Marx's work, it is apparent that the
model for knowledge acquisition that is developed in *Reading
Capital* owes much to Spinoza and to the French tradition of
historical epistemology.


### 3.2 Epistemology and Philosophy of Science



With his re-reading of Marx, Althusser wished to offer an alternative
to the two then dominant understandings of Marx's philosophy.
Both understandings were charged with the same mistake. This mistake
was, fundamentally, an epistemological one: each cast Marx as an
empiricist. At first glance, this charge might seem ridiculous. This
is especially the case as, according to Althusser's own
critique, both understandings of Marx offered variants of the Hegelian
claim that there is a reason to history. For Althusser, however, both
readings were "empiricist" inasmuch as each ascribed to
Marx a theory of knowledge in which the subject, by means of a process
of observation and abstraction, comes to know what an object really
and truly is, according to its essence. This is a definition of
empiricism meant to include philosophers as diverse as Locke, Kant,
and Hegel and traditions as varied as British Empiricism, German
Idealism, Positivism, and Pragmatism. In the case of Humanist Marxism,
the object that comes to be known by its essence is the human subject
in its full freedom. It does so by means of critique and by creatively
overcoming that which is alien to it or "merely
historical." In the case of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, this
object is the economy, the reality that underlies, causes, and can
explain all historical structures and transformations. The economy
comes to be known as it truly is only by the proletariat, by those
whom the historical process has endowed with an objective gaze and who
possess the ability to make this truth objective.



In opposition to the empiricist model of knowledge production,
Althusser proposes that true or scientific knowledge is distinguished
from ideology or opinion not by dint of an historical subject having
abstracted the essence of an object from its appearances. Instead,
this knowledge is understood to be produced by a process internal to
scientific knowledge itself. Though this transformation takes place
entirely in thought, Althusser does not maintain that scientific
knowledge makes no use of facts. However, these facts or materials are
never brute. Rather, specific sciences start with pre-existing
concepts or genera such as "humors,"
"unemployment," "quasars," or
"irrational numbers." These genera may be ideological in
part or in whole. Science's job is to render these concepts
scientific. This labor is what Althusser terms "theoretical
practice." The result of this practice is scientific knowledge.
Scientific knowledge is produced by means of applying to these genera
the body of concepts or "theory" that the science
possesses for understanding them. This body of concepts may be more or
less unified and consistent and it may be more or less consciously
articulated. Further, the sum of the individual concepts that this
theory consists of delimits the possible ways in which the genera that
a science begins with can be understood.



When applied, a science's theory weeds out ideological notions
associated with the original concept or genera. The result of this
application of theory to genera is the transformation of the
"ideological generality into a scientific generality"
(1963b [2005], 185). An example of such a process is the
transformation in medical science of a concept like "phlegmatic
humors" into the idea of blood-borne pathogens by dint of the
theory of circulation and infectious disease. Once generated, such
scientific concepts inform regular scientific practice, allowing
specific research programs within an individual science to progress.
Althusser himself gives examples of three such major transformations.
The first is the founding of modern physics by Galileo, the other that
of Greek mathematics, and the third, that of Marx's founding of
the science of Historical Materialism out of Classical Political
Economy. Each of these foundings is marked by what Althusser terms an
"epistemological break," or a period when ideological
concepts are replaced by scientific ones. Any similarity here to
Kuhnian ideas about revolutionary and normal science is not
surprising. Both Canguilhem and Bachelard, from whom Althusser drew
inspiration for his theory, were part of a dialogue that took in the
work of Alexander Koyre on scientific revolutions, a thinker
from whom Kuhn, in turn, drew his inspiration.



Althusser's debt to the tradition of French historical
epistemology in this account of knowledge production and philosophy of
science should now be evident. However, this epistemology's
Marxian and Spinozistic elements may be less pronounced. The
vocabulary adopted above to express this theory, however, gestures to
both influences. For Althusser, Marx's founding of the science
of history is crucial not only to politics (as will be addressed
below) but also to understanding all of human activity, including
scientific activity. That there is a circular logic to this
epistemological theory, Althusser readily admits, for it is only the
science of Historical Materialism that allows us to understand
scientific practice in general. Althusser, though, is comfortable with
this circularity. This is because, insofar as this understanding of
scientific practice in general allows us to understand how individual
sciences produce their knowledge, Historical Materialism is a science
that functions like any other.



For Althusser, the concept that helps to produce this understanding of
scientific practices is that of the "mode of production."
With it, he argues, Marx supplied theorists with an idea sufficient to
comprehend the way in which we materially produce our selves, our
environments, our knowledges, and our histories. Indeed, this concept
makes it possible to analyze all of our activities in their
specificity and to understand them in their relation to the totality
of which they are a part. As it must be if we are to make sense of
scientific practice as one aspect of the total mode of production,
much more than the activity of economic production must be included in
this totality of productive practices. Added by Althusser to these two
aspects of the mode of production are those of ideological, political,
and philosophical production, among others.



In each of the practices that together comprise, at any given time, a
specific mode of production, some form or forms of labor uses the
existing means of production to transform existing materials into new
products. According to Althusser, this realization is Marx's
basic insight. In scientific production, for example, thinkers use
existing theories to transform existing concepts into new, scientific
concepts. However, and this is where Althusser's Spinozism
becomes apparent and also where he breaks with economistic
understandings of Marx, it is not the case that the analysis of any
one mode of production within the totality of productive practices is
capable of generating an understanding of the way in which all rest of
the productive processes are causally determined. Rather, and in line
with the parallelism attributed by Leibniz to Spinoza, as each
productive process transforms a unique material (concepts in science,
goods in economics, social relations in politics), each process can
only be understood in terms of its unique causal structure. In
addition, and again also in a way similar to Spinoza's account
of substance as seen from different aspects, each productive process
is understood to stand in relation to and play a part of a complexly
structured whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or
essential cause of the others.



That Althusser regards most, if not all, human activity as consisting
of material processes of production and reproduction can be used as a
key to understanding other parts of his philosophy. These include his
thoughts on the structure of the social and political world, the
historical process, and philosophy. As philosophy is closely related
to science and because it is charged with a task that allows the
production of knowledge about the other socio-economic practices to be
generated, it is probably best to start with Althusser's
understanding of philosophy as a material practice of production
before proceeding to a discussion of how Althusser understands the
other practices listed above.


### 3.3 The Role of Philosophy



According to Althusser, most activity labeled "philosophy"
is really a type of ideological production. By this, he means to say
that most philosophy reproduces, in highly abstract form, notions
about the world whose effect is to sustain existing socio-economic
relations. As such, philosophy merely reflects the background values,
attitudes, and ideas that allow the socio-economic world to function.
However, for Althusser, genuine philosophy functions as a
"Theory of theoretical practice" (1965b). In this mode, it
works to provide an aid to scientific practice by distinguishing
between ideological concepts and scientific ones as well as by
clarifying and rendering consistent the scientific concepts that
enable a science to transforms existing ideas into scientific
knowledge.



For Althusser, it is not necessary that this process of distinction
and clarification be accomplished before a specific theoretical
practice can generate scientific knowledge. In fact, scientific
activity often proceeds without a clear understanding of the concepts
that allow it to produce its knowledge. Indeed, Althusser maintained
that this was Marx's lot when he was writing *Capital*:
scientific knowledge of the capitalist economic system was being
produced, but Marx did not possess a full awareness of the concepts
allowing this production. According to this definition of philosophy
as the Theory of theoretical practice, Althusser's re-reading of
*Capital* and other texts was philosophical insofar as it was
able to name and distinguish the concepts that allowed Marx's
scientific analysis of history to proceed.


### 3.4 Marxist Philosophy



The latent concepts rendered explicit by the practice of symptomatic
reading were said by Althusser to constitute the theory of Dialectical
Materialism, or what is the same thing, Marx's philosophy. With
these concepts made explicit, Althusser believed that Marxist science,
or Historical Materialism, could employ them in order to achieve
better analyses of specific modes of production and better
understandings of the opportunities that specific modes of production
presented for political change. Some of these concepts have already
been articulated in the discussion of the mode of production above,
but without being named. To label these concepts and then to add some
more, the idea that each individual productive process or element
stands in relation to and plays a part of a complexly structured
whole, none of which is reducible to being the simple or essential
cause of the others, is what Althusser terms the idea of
"structural causality." This concept, in turn, is closely
related to the idea of "overdetermination" or the theory
that every element in the total productive process constituting a
historical moment is determined by all the others.



Another Marxist philosophical concept that allows the historical
materialist scientist to understand the logic of a specific mode of
production is that of "contradiction." This is the idea
that, at any given period, multiple, concrete and definite practices
take place within a mode of production. Among and within these
specific practices, there may or may not be tensions. To take an
example from Marx's chapter on "Primitive
Accumulation" in *Capital V.I*, at the same time as
peasants holdings were being expropriated in the late 15th
and early 16th centuries by a nascent bourgeoisie, the
church and the aristocracy were passing laws against this
appropriation. Any isolable element of the total structure, be it a
person, a social class, an institution, or the state, in some way
reflects and embodies these practices and these antagonisms and as
such each is said to be "overdetermined." Further,
Althusser specifies that the development of productive practices
within a specific mode of production is often "uneven" in
addition to possibly being antagonistic. This means, for instance,
that some economic elements within a whole may be more or less
capitalistic while others simultaneously operate according to
socialist norms. Thus, the development within a mode of production of
the practices specific to it is not necessarily homogenous or
linear.



Added to the Marxian concepts of structural causality, contradiction,
uneven development, and overdetermination is that of the
"structure in dominance." This concept designates that
major element in a structural whole that tends to organize all of the
other practices. In much of the contemporary world and inasmuch as it
tends to organize the production of moral values, scientific
knowledge, the family, art, etc. this structure is the economic
practice of commodity production and consumption. However, in another
era and in other places, it may be the production and dissemination of
religious beliefs and practices that dominates and organizes the
socio-economic structure.


### 3.5 Social and Political Philosophy, Historiography



With this understanding of the elements that compose any
socio-economic structure and their relations made explicit, something
can now be said about the social and political philosophies that
follow from it. First, with the idea that human individuals are merely
one of the sites at which the contradictory productive forces that
characterize an era are enacted, Althusser signals that the primary
object of social philosophy is not the human individual. Second, with
the idea that the state produced by political activity is merely one
productive process among others, Althusser signals that the primary
element in political philosophy is not the state. Though both states
and individuals are important elements of the socio-economic whole,
nothing philosophical is learned by examining the essence of the
individual or the way in which justice is embodied by the state.



As Althusser understands them, whatever conceptions we have of the
nature of human beings or about the proper function of the state are
historically generated and serve to reproduce existing social
relations. In other words, they are ideological. Apart from the
necessity of human beings to engage in productive relations with other
human beings and with their environment in order to produce their
means of subsistence, there is no human nature or essence. This is the
core of Althusser's "anti-humanist" position.
Further, though some order must exist in order to allow for the
production and reproduction of social life, there is no essential or
best form that this order must take. This is not to say that human
beings do not conceive of or strive for the best order for social life
or that they do not believe that they are essentially free or equal
and deserving of rights. It also does not mean that all of our ideas
are homogenous and that heterogeneous ideas about what is best cannot
exist side by side in the same system without leading to conflict
(though they sometimes do). However, the science of Historical
Materialism has revealed the desire for such orders to be historically
generated along with the ideas about human nature that justify
them.



This account of the ideological role of our conceptions of human
nature and of the best political arrangement shows Althusser to differ
little from interpretations of Marx which hold that political
ideologies are the product of and serve existing economic relations.
However, and as was detailed above, Althusser rejects the simple
understanding of causality offered by this model in which economic
practices order consciousness and our cultural practices. He also
rejects the philosophy of history that often accompanies this model.
This philosophy has it that certain economic practices not only
generate corresponding cultural practices, but that there is a pattern
to economic development in which each economic order inexorably leads
to its own demise and replacement by a different economic system. In
this understanding of history, feudalism must lead to capitalism and
capitalism to socialism. Althusser, however, argues against the idea
that history has a subject (such as the economy or human agency) and
that history has a goal (such as communism or human freedom). History,
for Althusser, is a process without a subject. There are patterns and
orders to historical life and there is historical change. However,
there is no necessity to any of these transformations and history does
not necessarily progress. Transformations do occur. However, they do
so only when the contradictions and levels of development inherent in
a mode of production allow for such change.


## 4. Revisions (1966-78)



From the time of its initial dissemination, Althusser's
re-reading of Marx was met by almost equal amounts of enthusiasm and
castigation. For every reader who found in his prose an explanation of
Marx's philosophy and science that rendered Marx philosophically
respectable and offered renewed hope for Marxist theory, there were
critics who judged his work to be idealist, Stalinist, dogmatist, or
excessively structuralist, among myriad other charges. Though many of
the initial reactions were contradictory and evidenced
misunderstandings of what Althusser was up to, compelling criticisms
were also offered. One was that Althusser was only able to offer his
reading by ignoring much of what Marx actually wrote about his logic
and about the concepts important to his analysis. Another criticism,
and one voiced to Althusser by leaders of the French Communist Party,
was that Althusser's reading of Marx offered little on the
relationship between Marxist theory and Marxist political
practice.



It took a long time before Althusser explicitly addressed the charge
that he had ignored much of what Marx had to say about his own logic
and concepts. However, buffeted by these criticisms and with a sense
that there were idealist or "theoreticist" tendencies in
his reading of Marx and that the relationship between theory and
practice was indeed under-developed, Althusser set out during the late
1960s and 1970s to correct and revise his take on the relationships
among philosophy, science, ideology, and politics. To some readers,
these revisions represented a politically motivated betrayal of his
theoretical accomplishments. For others, they simply revealed his
project as a whole to be untenable and self-contradictory. Some recent
critics, however, have argued that these revisions are consistent with
and necessary to the development of what they view to be the overall
goal of Althusser's work: the development of a materialist
political philosophy adequate for political practice.


### 4.1 The Relationship between Theory and Practice



Althusser's initial revisions to his understanding of the social
structure and knowledge production were informed by a renewed
attention to the works of Lenin and by a seminar he convened at the
ENS in 1967 for leading scientists and interested students. This
course resulted in a series of papers, gathered together as
*Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists*
(1967a), in which Althusser began rethinking the relations among
philosophy, science, ideology, and politics. Though this revision was
later to be made more explicit, one of the most striking aspects of
these papers was Althusser's abandonment of the Spinozistic
claim that the different levels of theoretical practice were
autonomous. He now maintained that there was no criterion sufficient
to demarcate scientific from ideological concepts and that all
theoretical concepts are marked by ideology. This did not mean,
however, that any concept was as good as any other. Scientists,
through their work on the material real, tended to generate better
understandings of things than were available intuitively. Further, he
argued that philosophy still had a role to play in the clarification
of scientific concepts. This is the case because, no matter how much
work scientists do to understand the material real and to generate
better concepts, they must always employ ideological concepts to frame
their investigations and its results. Marxist philosophers, he
maintained, could be useful to scientists by pointing out, from the
standpoint of politics and by the method of historical critique, where
and how some of the concepts scientists employed were ideological. The
result of this intervention of philosophy into politics would not be
"truer" concepts, but ideas that were more
"correct" or "right" in both the normative and
positive senses of these words.



Parallel to this move, and motivated by the need to provide the link
between philosophical theory and political practice that was largely
missing from his classic work, Althusser now argued that philosophy
had a useful role to play between politics and science. Political
practice, Althusser maintained, was mostly motivated by ideological
understandings of what the good is and how to accomplish it. Though he
did not argue that there was a way to leave ideology behind and to
reveal the good in itself, he did maintain that science could help to
correct ideological thinking about political means and ends. Social
science in particular could do so by showing how certain goals were
impossible or misguided given present socio-economic relations and by
suggesting that, at a certain time and in a certain place, other means
and other ends might be more fruitfully adopted and pursued. As
scientific knowledge does not speak directly to the public or to
politicians, Althusser assigned materialist philosophers the job of
communicating scientific knowledge of the material real, its
conditions, and its possibilities to politicians and the public. If
this communication is successful, Althusser maintained, one should not
expect all political activity to be successful. Instead, one should
expect a modest shift from an idealist ideology to one that is
materialist and more scientific and which has a better chance of
realizing its goals.


### 4.2 Theory of Ideology



During the 1970s, Althusser continued the revisions begun in 1967 and
elaborated other Marxian ideas he believed to be underdeveloped.
Perhaps the best known of the new conceptual formulations resulting
from these efforts is that of "ideological
interpellation." This account of how a human being becomes a
self-conscious subject was published in an essay titled
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" (1970). It
was excerpted from a larger essay titled "On the Reproduction of
Capitalism." This work analyzed the necessary relationship
between state and subject such that a given economic mode of
production might subsist. It includes not only an analysis of the
state and its legal and educational systems but also of the
psychological relationship which exists between subject and state as
ideology. This narrative of subjectification was intended to help
advance Althusser's argument that regimes or states are able to
maintain control by reproducing subjects who believe that their
position within the social structure is a natural one. Ideology, or
the background ideas that we possess about the way in which the world
must function and of how we function within it is, in this account,
understood to be always present. Specific socio-economic structures,
however, require particular ideologies. These ideologies are
instantiated by institutions or "Ideological State
Apparatuses" like family, schools, church, etc., which provide
the developing subject with categories in which she can recognize
herself. Inasmuch as a person does so and embraces the practices
associated with those institutions, she has been successfully
"hailed" or "interpellated" and recognized
herself as that subject who does those kinds of things. As the effect
of these recognitions is to continue existing social relations,
Althusser argued that a Dictatorship of the Proletariat is necessary
so that Ideological State Apparatuses productive of the bourgeois
subject can be replaced with those productive of proletarian or
communist subjects.


###  4.3 Aesthetic Theory



Althusser's engagement with aesthetic theory was not nearly
so consistent as those with philosophy of science and social
philosophy. However, dramaturgical speculations from the
early 1960s were crucial to the development of his method of
symptomatic reading and forays into the criticism of
visual art beginning in the mid-1960s likewise proved of decisive
importance for the development of his theory of ideology. In
particular, Althusser's Brechtian musings on aesthetics
provide partial answers to the question of how criticism
of ideological notions of the real as well as the
development of revolutionary strategy is possible. Althusser does
not argue that art provides a glimpse of actual social conditions
unfiltered by ideology. Indeed, he argues that art mostly
reproduces ideology. Further, there is no formal way
to distinguish between a work of art and other cultural
productions like advertising. A person can "sees
herself" in a pick-up truck advertisement as easily as a
subject can mis-recognize herself as the subject of a drama.
However, some art, that which Althusser
deems "authentic" (1996a), troubles a subject's
usual relationship between herself and the world. This habitual
relation is one where the world is always seen to conform to and
to confirm the subject's view of "the way
things are". Authentic art though makes felt or known the
distance between the real world and a subject's
habitual ideological view of it. In this moment, the space for
criticism, investigation, and, perhaps, the possibility for
acting to change the world is inaugurated.
  




### 4.4 Marx's Philosophy Redux



In 1978 and as a response to what he saw, yet again, as the
theoretical and political misdirection of the Communist movement,
Althusser authored a piece, "Marx in his Limits," which
was intended to separate the good from the bad in Marx's
philosophy. In his classic work (1960-65), Althusser had tried to
accomplish this goal by separating out ideological concepts and by
bringing forth the scientific ones. However, in "Marx in his
Limits," he now argued that such a method of separation cannot
work because--within Marx's writings and throughout his
oeuvre--both good and bad, materialist and idealist concepts, are
hopelessly intermixed and many are underdeveloped.



Inasmuch as Althusser admits in this piece that Marx never fully
abandoned Hegel's logic, the concept of human alienation, or the
idea that history has a goal, the inventory Althusser offers can be
seen as an assenting response to the charge that he had ignored
Marx's explicit statements in order to imagine for Marx a
consistent and "true" philosophy. Althusser does not give
up on the task of articulating a better Marxist philosophy, however.
Instead, he argues that there is another, "materialist"
criterion that allows us to see the limits of Marx's thinking
and to recognize those points in his work where Marx was unable to
transcend his bourgeois background and his education in German
Idealism. This criterion is that of the practical success or failure
of Marx's concepts as each has been employed in the history of
Marxist movements. When we have made this inventory and grouped
together the successful concepts, what we are left with is a
materialist Marxism, a Marxism which endorses the scientific method as
the best way for understanding ourselves and our potential but that
also understands that this method is fallible. Remaining also is a
Marxism which does not subscribe to any philosophy of history and
which certainly does not maintain that capitalism will inevitably lead
to communism. This Marxism has no system of interrelated concepts that
guarantee a scientific analysis. Further, it possesses no worked-out
theory of the relations between economic structures and cultural
structures but for that limited knowledge which scientific practice
provides. Finally, this Marxism has given up the dream of analyzing
the whole of culture and its movement from the outside; it realizes
that one thinks inside and about the culture one inhabits in order to
possibly effect and change that culture.


## 5. Late work (1980-1986): Aleatory Materialism



After being interrupted by ill health and by the events following from
the murder of his wife, in 1982 Althusser returned to the question of
what was essential to Marx's philosophy and expanded the scope
of this inquiry to include speculation about the metaphysics that must
underlie it. Freed by his ignoble status from the task of influencing
the direction of the Communist movement, the texts associated with
this project and gathered together in the book *Philosophy of the
Encounter* differ tremendously in subject matter, style, and
method from his other writings. Whether these texts represent a
continuation of, or even the key to his philosophy or whether they are
an aberration is presently being debated in the secondary literature.
However, as there is strong textural and archival evidence that many
of the ideas explicitly expressed in these works had been gestating
for a long time, the contention that these writings are of a piece
with his earlier work seems to be gaining ground.



The principal thesis of Althusser's last philosophical writings
is that there exists an "underground" or little recognized
tradition in the history of philosophy. Variously labeled a
"materialism of the encounter" or "aleatory
materialism," the method which he uses to articulate this
philosophy is to simply comment upon works by philosophers who
exemplify this current and to point out where, how, and to what extent
they do so. In addition to Marx, the philosophers that he cites as
being part of this underground tradition include Democritus, Epicurus,
Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu,
Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. From these readings in the
history of philosophy, Althusser aims to suggest that this tradition
exists and that it is both philosophically fecund and viable. He also
wishes to return to and bolster the thesis he first ventured in the
late 1960s that there are really only two positions in philosophy:
materialism and idealism. As he understood it, the two tendencies are
always in a war of opposition with the one functioning to reinforce
the status quo and the other to possibly overcome it.



Perhaps because it functions in opposition to the idealist tendency in
philosophy, aleatory materialism is marked almost as much by its
rejections as it is by the positive claims it contains about the world
and about history. As Marx is included within this tradition, it is
not surprising that many of these rejections are also attributed to
him during the course of Althusser's earlier work. These include
a dismissal of what Althusser calls "the principle of
Reason," or the idea that the universe or history has an origin
or an end. With this prohibition, Althusser means to exclude from this
tradition not only the usual suspects in the rationalist tradition,
but also mechanical and dialectical materialisms with their logics of
determination. Also dismissed, he maintains, is the myth that somehow
philosophy and philosophers are autonomous, that they see the world
from outside and objectively. Though there is an objective world,
philosophy does not have knowledge of this world as its object for
there is no way for it to ground itself and the material it thinks
with and through arises historically. Philosophy is therefore not a
science or the Science of sciences and it produces no universal Truth.
Rather, the truths it produces are contingent and are offered in
opposition to other competing truths. If philosophy does have an
object, it is the void, or that which is not yet but which could
be.



That the philosophy of the encounter lacks an object does not mean
that it lacks positive propositions. However, given the
epistemological status attributed to philosophy by Althusser, these
metaphysical propositions or "theses" are true only
insofar as they have explanatory or practical value. First among them,
following Democritus, is the thesis that matter is all that exists.
Second is the thesis that chance or the aleatory is at the origin of
all worlds. That the patterns which constitute and define these worlds
can be known, described, and predicted according to certain laws or
reasons is also true. However, the fact that these worlds ever came to
be organized in these patterns is aleatory and the patterns themselves
can only ever be known immanently. Third, new worlds and new orders
themselves arise out of chance encounters between pre-existing
material elements. Whether or not such orders emerge is contingent:
they do not have to occur. When material elements collide, they either
"take" and a new order is founded, or they do not and the
old world continues.



To Althusser, the propositions which have explanatory value at the
level of ontology and cosmology also have value at the level of
political philosophy. After first citing Rousseau and Hobbes as
example of philosophers who recognized that the origin and continued
existence of political orders is contingent, Althusser turns to
Machiavelli and Marx for his principal examples of how aleatory
materialism functions in the political realm. The anti-teleological,
scientistic, and anti-humanist, Marxist philosophy developed by
Althusser over the course of his career works well with the
materialist metaphysics recounted above. In this understanding of
Marxist philosophy, societies and subjects are seen as patterns of
activity that behave in predictable ways. Though scientists may study
and describe these orders in their specificity, it does not at first
appear that philosophy can do much except to categorize these
interactions at the most general level. However, citing Marx's
work again and taking inspiration from Machiavelli's project of
installing "a new prince in a new principality," Althusser
argues that the materialist philosopher may accomplish somewhat more
than this with her descriptions, critiques, and predictions. This is
because, by examining a political order not from the perspective of
its necessity but with an awareness of its contingency, this
philosopher may be able think the possibility of its transformation.
If chance smiles on her, if someone listens and if effects occur, then
elements might recombine and a new political might take hold. This is,
to be sure, a very limited and unpredictable power attributed to the
philosopher. However, it is also the only one that Althusser in his
late works argues is adequate for political practice and that does
not, like idealism, merely serve to reproduce existing relations.