Althusser, Louis

Louis Althusser (1918–1990) was born in Birmandries, in Algeria, to a petit-bourgeois, Catholic family. His father, Charles Althusser, was a bank manager and had all the traits of the authoritarian colonialist personality. The young Louis was fascinated by monastic life and remained a believer until after World War II.

In 1939, Althusser began his agrégation in philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (Rue d'Ulm) in Paris, but the war intervened, so it was not until 1946, after a period in a German prison camp, that he could continue his studies, taking his agrégation in 1948, the same year that he joined the French Communist Party. After this, Althusser became the caïman of the École Normale Supérieure, a position that involved preparing candidates for the agrégation in philosophy.

While a student at the École—and still suffering the after effects of being a prisoner of war, manifested in severe bouts of depression—Althusser met his future wife, Hélène Rytman, with whom he had a tempestuous and tragic relationship. It ended in Althusser taking his wife's life in November 1980.

Thus, despite becoming a hard-line Marxist, Althusser's biography points to a supremely tormented and conflicted individual who truly agonised over the state of the world and his own, often less-than-admirable personal traits.

This, then, is the man who became the leading thinker of Structuralist Marxism. As such, he led the movement against the humanist interpretation of Marx's work, an interpretation based on Marx's Hegelian and Feuerbachian early works. Indeed, Althusser, famously, became a theoretical antihumanist, claiming that if Marx was humanist in his theory of capital, he was little different from many other nineteenth-century, including Christian, thinkers. The most important ideas for which Althusser became well-known can be summarised in the following terms: (1) problematic, (2) symptomatic reading, (3) Marx's science (of the mode of production), (4) epistemological break, (5) overdetermination, and (6) ideology. We shall examine each of these in turn.

[Page 11]When considering what distinguishes Marx's theory of history and economic relations from other epistemological and ontological positions, Althusser claims that Marx was not simply the inheritor of the classical political economy framework, nor was he a philosopher in the style of Hegel's idealism and Feuerbach's humanism, even if Marx's early works, such as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1967) are often couched in the language of Hegel (1770–1831) and Feuerbach (1804–1872). Even if in his early work Marx ponders the nature of the essence of “man,” this does not constitute the core of his originality. Moreover, while at the level of appearance, Marx seems to endorse the idea that the proletariat—like the poor in Christianity—will come to inherit the wealth of society because they are its producers and the revealers of its essence, this does not constitute Marx's originality. Instead, the significant difference that is discernible between Marx's writing of the 1840s and his work between 1857 and 1863, including Capital, must be interpreted. In the later writing, Marx is not looking for the essence of “man,” but for the logic of the capitalist system in history. That capitalism is a system has fundamental implications for its theorisation. To explain how Marx's originality might be couched in a language and a terminology that were sometimes evocative of an earlier philosophical era, Althusser uses the term problematic.

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