by Tony Judt
Thus, when I arrived in Paris as a graduate student in the late sixties, I was skeptically curious to see and to hear Louis Althusser. In charge of the teaching of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, the French elite academy for future teachers and leaders, Althusser was touted by everyone I met as a man of extraordinary gifts, who was transforming our understanding of Marx and reshaping revolutionary theory. His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere. But listening to him, at a crowded and sycophantic seminar, I was utterly bemused. For Althusser’s account of Marxism, to the extent that I could make any sense of it, bore no relation to anything I had ever heard. It chopped Marx into little bits, selected those texts or parts of texts that suited the master’s interpretation, and then proceeded to construct the most astonishingly abstruse, self-regarding, and ahistorical version of Marxist philosophy imaginable. The exercise bore no discernible relationship to Marxism, to philosophy, or to pedagogy. After a couple of painful attempts to adapt myself to the experience and to derive some benefit from it, I abandoned the seminar and never went back.
Returning to the subject many years later, and constrained for professional reasons to read Althusser’s mercifully few published works, I understood a little better what had been going on, intellectually and sociologically. Althusser was engaged in what he and his acolytes called a “symptomatic reading” of Marx, which is to say that they took from him what they needed and ignored the rest. Where they wished Marx to have said or meant something that they could not find in his writings, they interpreted the “silences,” thereby constructing an entity of their own imagination. This thing they called a science, one that Marx was said to have invented and that could be applied, gridlike, to all social phenomena.
Why invent a Marxist “science” when so much was already at hand, the Marxist “theory of history,” “historical materialism,” “dialectical materialism,” and the rest? The answer is that Althusser, like so many others in the sixties, was trying to save Marxism from the two major threats to its credibility: the grim record of Stalinism and the failure of Marx’s revolutionary forecasts. Althusser’s special contribution was to remove Marxism altogether from the realm of history, politics, and experience, and thereby to render it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort.
In Althusser-speak, Marxism was a theory of structural practices: economic, ideological, political, theoretical. It had nothing to do with human volition or agency, and thus it was unaffected by human frailty or inadequacy. These “practices” determined history. Their respective importance, and their relationship to one another, varied with circumstances; the “dominant structure” was sometimes “economic practice” and sometimes “political practice,” and so on. Of particular significance was the notion of “theoretical practice.” This oxymoronic phrase, which came to be chanted, mantralike, all over Europe in those years, had the special charm of placing intellectuals and intellectual activity on the same plane as the economic organizations and the political strategies that had preoccupied earlier generations of Marxists.
This subjectless theory of everything had a further virtue. By emphasizing the importance of theory, it diverted attention from the embarrassing defects of recent practice. In such an account, Stalin’s crime was not that he had murdered millions of human beings, it was that he had perverted the self-understanding of Marxism. Stalinism, in short, was just another mistake in theory, albeit an especially egregious one, whose major sin consisted of its refusal to acknowledge its own errors. This was important to Althusser, who was a member of the French Communist Party and who sought to admit the embarrassing history of that organization without undermining whatever remained of its claim to revolutionary omniscience. The party’s leadership itself had responded to this conundrum by belatedly treating Stalin as an unfortunate but parenthetical episode in the otherwise unblemished record of Communism. His crimes were a mere deviation born of the cult of personality. But Althusser went one better by showing that “Stalin” and his works constituted only a collective analytical error. This performed the double service of keeping personalities out of the matter and reiterating the centrality of concepts.
It is hard, now, to recapture the mood of the sixties, in which this absurd dialectical joust seemed appealing. But Althusser unquestionably filled a crucial niche. He gave young Maoists an impressively high-flown language in which to be “anti-humanist” Communists, dismissive of the “Italian road” to Socialism. At the time this was a matter of some importance: The early works of Marx, notably the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, had only recently entered the canon, having for many years languished unknown and untranslated. Placed alongside his other youthful writings, they suggested a rather different Marx from the conventional image passed down from Engels via the popularizers of the early European Socialist movements; a man more interested in Romantic-era philosophy than in classical economics, an idealist whose agenda was not simply social revolution but the moral transformation of mankind. The interest in this “humanist” Marx had been aroused both by the recent French rediscovery of Hegel and by a new generation of radical intellectuals seeking to locate Marx in something other than the lineage imposed upon the European left by the doctrinaire positivism of Leninism.
Taking his cue from the growing fashion for “structuralism” (initially confined to linguistics and anthropology, but by the early sixties seeping into sociology and philosophy), Althusser worked hard to excommunicate this humanist and understandably more appealing Marx as “unscientific.” In his view, to emphasize the moral condition and responsibilities of individual men was to detract from an appreciation of the larger, impersonal forces at work in history, and thus to delude the workers, or anyone else, into believing they could act on their own behalf, instead of accepting the authority of those who spoke and thought for them. In his words, “only theoretical anti-humanism justifies general practical humanism.”
To flesh out his structuralist account, Althusser invented something that he and his followers called “Ideological State Apparatuses.” In his heyday these were confined to the public and political world. In his memoirs, however, his attention was diverted to more personal matters.6 Althusser informs us that “it is an irrefutable fact that the Family is the most powerful State Ideological Apparatus” (obligatory capitals), and in reflecting upon his experience in a mental hospital he wonders “what can now be done to free the mentally ill from the Hell created for them by the combined operations of all the Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Althusserian dogma the presence of these repressive and all-embracing ogres was held particularly responsible for the inconvenient stability and durability of liberal democracy. Of special note was the announcement that the university was, of all of these, the dominant one for our era. “Theoretical practice” in the academic arena was thus the site of ideological battle; and philosophy was absolutely vital as the “class struggle in theory.” Scholars in their seminars were on the front line, and need feel guilty no more.
Althusser borrowed a term from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard and announced that an “epistemological break” in Marx’s writings had occurred somewhere in the mid-1840s. Everything he wrote before the break was neo-Hegelian humanist flannel and could be ignored. Henceforth left-wing students and lecturers were free to jettison those bits of (the early) Marx that seemed to speak of alienation, reconciliation, human agency, and moral judgment.
This was hard for many people in the sixties to swallow. In Italy and in the English-speaking world, most young left-wingers were more attracted to the idea of a gentler, kinder Marx. In France, however, where the sordid political compromises of the Socialists and Communists during the battle over decolonization had left a sour taste among some of their younger supporters, this static, structuralist Marx sounded analytically pure and politically uncompromising.
By the end of the seventies however, Althusser’s star was on the wane. He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in
the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the “failed revolution” of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: “When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred, it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate.” Even his erstwhile followers admitted that he had nothing new to offer, and his rigid stance in defense of Marxism, Communism, and “the revolution” made him appear irrelevant in a decade that saw the publication in France of The Gulag Archipelago, the tragedy in Cambodia, the eclipse of Mao, and the steady loss of radical faith among a generation of French intellectuals. Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.
But then, on November 16, 1980, he murdered his wife Hélène in their apartment at the École Normale. Or, as the jacket copy of The New Press’s translation of his memoir coyly puts it, “while massaging his wife’s neck [he] discovered he had strangled her.” (To be fair, this is how Althusser himself explained the event; but it is curious to find the claim reproduced unattributed on the book.) Althusser was examined by doctors, found to be mentally unfit to stand trial, and locked away in a psychiatric hospital. Three years later he was released and spent his last years in a dreary flat in north Paris, emerging occasionally to startle passers-by with “Je suis le grand Althusser!” It was in these years that he drafted two versions of an autobiography. They were found after his death in 1990 and first published in French, as a single book, in 1992.
These “memoirs” are curious. Althusser would have us read them as Rousseau-like confessions, but that is hard to do, and the comparison is embarrassingly unflattering to their author. They are clearly an attempt on Althusser’s part to make sense of his madness, and to that extent they are indeed revealing; by his own account he wrote them “to free myself from the murder and above all from the dubious effects of having been declared unfit to plead” (it is ironic that their posthumous impact on any unprejudiced reader will surely be to confirm the original forensic diagnosis). As a genre, however, they really come closer to magical realism. The book, especially a short early draft incongruously titled “The Facts,” is full of fantasies and imagined achievements, so much so that it is sometimes hard to disentangle the fictive Althusser from the rather mundane creature whose sad story emerges in these pages.
That story is soon told. Althusser was born in 1918, the eldest child of middle-class French parents in Algeria. His father was a banker whose career took him back to Marseilles in Louis’s adolescent years. The young Althusser had an utterly uneventful early career. Academically promising, he was sent to the lycée in Lyon to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale. He passed the exam, but had to postpone his higher education when he was drafted into the army in 1939. Like many French soldiers, he had a futile war; his company was rounded up by the Germans in 1940, and he spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp. About the only interesting thing that seems to have happened to him there was that he learned, somewhat belatedly, the pleasures of masturbation (he was not to make love for the first time until he was twenty-nine).
Finally admitted to the École upon his return to France, Althusser did well there, coming in second in the national philosophy examinations. Having spent his adolescence and his youth as an active young Catholic, he discovered left-wing politics at the École and joined the Communist Party in 1948, which was about the time when other young intellectuals, nauseated and shocked by its Stalinist culture and tactics, were beginning to leave it. Shortly after graduating, Althusser obtained a teaching post at the École and settled into the quiet, secure life of an academic philosopher. He was to stay in the same post until being forcibly retired in the aftermath of the scandal that ended his career.
It was during his student years that Althusser met his future wife, Hélène Légotien (she had abandoned her family name, Rytmann, during the war), a woman nine years his senior who had played an active part in the Communist Resistance. As he acknowledges in his memoir, it was a troubled relationship. They were held together by bonds of mutual destructiveness. By 1980, he writes, “the two of us were shut up together in our own private hell.” Hélène seems to have been an unhappy woman, insecure, tormented, and bitter—and with good reason. The Communist Party abandoned her after the war, falsely accusing her of some obscure act of betrayal during the Resistance. Uneasy with her own immigrant Jewish background, and desperate for the love and attention of her husband, she put up with his moods, his women friends, and his colleagues, most of whom looked down on her from the very great height of their own vaunted intellectual standing. She was clearly not a person comfortable with herself or others; and Althusser’s own bizarre personality can only have made matters worse.
For what emerges clearly from his own account is that Althusser was always a deeply troubled person. This memoir is warped and curdled by his morbid self-pity, by his insecurity and the repeated invocation of Lacanian clichés to account for his troubles. Indeed, the book’s main theme is his own psychological and social inadequacy, a defect for which he naturally holds his parents responsible, in equal parts. His mother’s insistence on naming him for a dead uncle is blamed for his lifelong sense of “not existing”: Louis being homonymic with the word “lui,” meaning “him,” the young Althusser’s name rendered him impersonal and anonymous. (He seems not to have given much thought to the millions of happy Louis among his fellow countrymen.) According to Althusser, his mother “castrated” him with her excessive care and attention; hence his belated discovery of women and his inability to form satisfactory relations with them. And so it goes, for page after page. Small wonder that when Louis does away with his wife, after forty years of manic-depressive bouts, hospitalization, treatment, and analysis, we learn that he was taking his revenge on the older woman who not only brought him to Communism but substituted, as he admits, for mother and father alike.
There is a human tragedy here, but it is presented in a breathtakingly narcissistic key. Althusser wrote this memoir not in order to comprehend why he killed his wife, but to show himself and others that he was sane. He had been, as he puts it, “deprived of his status as a philosopher” by being declared unfit to plead, and this final loss of identity, this fear that once again he would “not exist,” seems to have been the driving compulsion behind his autobiography. If we take him at his word, this fear of “not existing” was the very engine that propelled his life’s work. By elaborating a doctrine in which human volition and human action counted for naught, in which theoretical speculation was the supreme practice, Althusser could compensate for a life of gloomy, introspective inaction by asserting and legitimizing his existence in the arena of the text. As he says, “I . . . emerged as the victor, in the realm of pure thought.”
This much, at least, we can learn from the memoir, and it casts interesting new light on the otherwise inexplicably murky and self-referential quality of the earlier philosophical writings. Althusser was reconstructing Marx to give his own life a shape with which he could live, and one that could stand respectable comparison with those of his father (a successful banker) and his wife (a Resistance fighter). We thus learn from this book that Althusser was conscious, in every sphere of his life, of “having practiced a great deception,” though it never seems to have occurred to him that this insight bodes ill for the credibility of his intellectual legacy. Unfortunately for its author, however, the book reveals much more. We are presented not only with a man who is on the edge of insanity, obsessed with sexual imagery (a stick of asparagus is “stiff as a man’s penis” and so on), dreams of grandeur, and his own psychoanalytical history but also with a man who is quite remarkably ignorant.
He seems to know nothing of recent history (among his howlers is an indictment of the “Polish fascist” Pilsudski for starting World War II). He appears only late in life to have discovered Machiavelli and other classics of Western philosophy, and he even admits to a
skimpy and partialacquaintance with Marx’s texts (something one might have inferred from his published work). He is also unsophisticated to the point of crudity in his political analysis. He seems to have learned nothing and to have forgotten nothing in the last twenty years of his life. Thus there is much talk of “the hegemony of bourgeois, imperialist capitalism”; and he is dismissive of the dissidents of the Soviet bloc (“cut off from their own people”) and contemptuous of writers like André Glucksmann for “putting around unbelievable horror stories of the Gulag.” Those words were written in 1985!
One puts down this depressing book with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. How could it be that so many intelligent and educated people were taken in by this man? Even if we allow that his manic fancies met some widespread need in the sixties, how are we to account for the continuing fascination that he exercises in certain circles today? In France he is largely forgotten, though the jacket blurb by Didier Eribon describes the autobiography as “magnificent” and explains that “madness [is] the inevitable price of philosophy.” It is a conclusion whose deductive logic and historical accuracy are truly in the Althusserian tradition; but Eribon is a French journalist who has made a career of playing the fawning hyena to the preening lions of Parisian intellectual life, and he is not representative.
In the United States, however, there are still university research centers that devote time and money to the study of Althusser’s thought, and mount expensive conferences at which professors lecture one another earnestly about “Althusserianism” in everything from linguistics to hermeneutics. Meanwhile respectable English-language publishers continue to market books with titles like The Althusserian Legacy; Althusser and the Detour of Theory; Reading Althusser ; Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory; and (inevitably) Althusser and Feminism: most of them unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.