Althusser, Louis (1918‐1990)

Friday, August 08, 2008
4:43 PM

Biographic Information: A French Algerian, Althusser moved to 
Marseilles as a boy. Raised a Roman Catholic, he fought in WWII and 
was captured by the Germans. After the war, he returned to school at 
the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where experienced profound 
bouts of depression and received electric shock.  He later joined the 
French Communist Party. In 1980, Althusser (accidentally???) strangled 
his wife and was institutionalized for three years. 

MAJOR WORKS—For Marx (1965), Reading Capital (1968),

"Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus" (1969)

Theoretical Overview: Althusser sought to rewrite Marx in the

same way that Lacan rewrote Freud. Often combining Marxism
and Psychoanalytic theory, Althusser criticized the Humanist and
Hegelian strands in Marxism, emphasizing that individuals were
incapable of creating the social change that the masses could
enact.

I. Theory
a. Working from Lacan and Marx
b. Ideology: a system of practices and institutions which promotes on the part of the subject an 
‘imaginary’ relationship to the material conditions of  existence        
i. Real: “the relations of production and to class relations”(qtd. Silverman 216)—a
Marxist evaluation of reality
ii. Imaginary: Culturally initiated relations and identifications (mirror)
iii. Ideology has a material existence: ISA, RSA, practices, rituals
iv. Ideology is a misrecognition of ourselves (related to Lacan’s Mirror Stage)
v. The subject can never transcend Ideology, but she can become aware of its operations
and find a set of identifications that more accurately reflects the real.
c. Repressive State Apparatus: Elements of the government which can use force
i. Military
ii. Police
iii. Judiciary    
d. Ideological State Apparatus (ISA): an agency for reproducing the cultural order
i. Schools
ii. The family: produces sexual differentiated subjects
iii. Media
iv. Boyscouts
e. Hailing/ Interpellation: when the subject of speech recognizes themselves as the subject of
speech
i. Althusser (Lacan?) uses the image of a policeman saying, “Hey, you!”
ii. The subject is hailed even before birth (the family prepares for it)
iii. The subject is “always-already”
iv. Althusser borrows the term interpellation from Freud.
f. The subject exist in the illusion of freewill
i. “action:” implies freewill, volition, the individual—rejected by Althusser
ii. “practice:” exists only within the bounds of ideology

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 iii. The spatial metaphor (from class): it similar to a person who is locked inside a room
and is told they can do whatever they want. Of course, the person’s freewill is
constrained within the boundaries of that room.
g. Possible challenges to Althusser's concept of agency and ideology.
II. "Letter On Art in Reply to André Daspre" (1966) [in Marxist Literary Theory 269]
III. "Freud and Lacan" (1969)
a. Defends psychoanalysis from the other sciences, and Marxism, that either dismiss it
entirely or mis-appropriate it.
b. Asserts the important role of Lacan's work in bringing about a return to Freud
c. The object of study for psychoanalysis is the "unconscious"
A. "What is the object of psychoanalysis? It is what analytical technique deals with in the 
analytical practice of the cure…[T]he ‘effects’, prolonged into the surviving adult, of the 
extraordinary adventure which from birth to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms 
a small animal conceived by a man and a woman into a small human child. . .

One of the ‘effects’ of the humanization of the small biological creature that results from 
human parturition [childbirth]: there in its place is the object of psychoanalysis, an object 
which has a simple name: the unconscious.’

That this small biological being survives, and not as a ‘wolf‐child, that has become a little 
wolf or bear (as displayed in the princely courts of the eighteenth century), but as a human 
child (having escaped all childhood deaths, many of which are human deaths, deaths 
punishing the failure of humanization), that is the test all adult men have passed: they are 
the never forgetful witnesses, and very often the victims, of this victory, bearing in their 
most hidden, i.e., in their most clamorous parts, the wounds, weaknesses and stiffnesses 
that result from this struggle for human life or death. Some, the majority, have emerged 
more or less unscathed—or at least, give this out to be the case; many of these veterans 
bear the marks throughout their lives; some will die from their fight, though at some 
remove, the old wounds suddenly opening again in psychotic explosion, in madness, the 
ultimate compulsion of a ‘negative therapeutic reaction’; others, more numerous, as 
‘normally’ as you like, in the guise of an ‘organic’ decay. Humanity only inscribes its official 
deaths on its war memorials: those who were able to die on time, i.e., late, as men, in 
human wars in which only human wolves and gods tear and sacrifice one another. In its sole 
survivors, psychoanalysis is concerned with another struggle, with the only war without 
memoirs or memorials, the war humanity pretends it has never declared, the war it always 
thinks it has won in advance, simply because humanity is nothing but surviving this war, 
living and bearing children as culture in human culture: a war which is continually declared 
in each of its sons, who, projected, deformed and rejected, are required, each by himself in 
solitude and against death, to take the long forced march which makes mammiferous larvae 
into human children, masculine or feminine subjects." (57)
IV. Resources
a. Althusser Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/

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