Kirshner - The Case of Althusser (Biografía)

The Man Who Didn't Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser
Author(s): LEWIS A. KIRSHNER

Source: American Imago, Vol. 60, No. 2, Monsters of Affection (Summer 2003), pp. 211-239
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26304714
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LEWIS A. KIRSHNER
The Man Who Didn't Exist:

The Case of Louis Althusser
On the morning of November 16, 1980, the eminent

Parisian philosopher and Communist intellectual, Louis
Althusser, burst from his shuttered apartment at the École
Normale Supérieure in a state of confusion and disarray, calling to
his friend and physician Pierre Etienne that he had strangled
his wife Hélène. The body of the victim lay across their bed
peacefully, without any indication of struggle, perplexing those
arriving on the scene and instilling a mystery reinforced by
Althusser's own amnesia, as he brooded in isolation at the
Sainte-Anne Hospital, the site of his first admission for manic
depressive psychosis in 1947. To the dismay of many, the court
ruled that because of his mental illness he was not to be legally
charged, leaving events behind the murder unexamined and
open to speculation. Partly for this reason, Althusser wrote a
remarkable autobiography, L'Avenir dure longtemps (1985), with
the intent of throwing light on this sad final chapter of his
history.1
Aside from its relevance to forensic psychiatry, this docu
ment, with its strange mixture of fact, fantasy, and delusion,
raises fascinating questions about human behavior, the nature
of the self, and mental illness. Because of the public nature of
his apparent act of madness, which Althusser placed in the
context of his private psychic reality, as well as in the context of
his philosophy of history and subjectivity, the autobiography
bears comparison to that of Presiding Judge Schreber, mined
by Freud (1911) for his theory of paranoia. It demonstrates
what is at once most familiar to clinicians (the repetitive
phenomenology of a major mental disorder) and most unfath
omable (the unique case)—all the more so since Althusser had
undergone years of biological treatments and psychoanalytic
therapy, and written with real insight on these subjects.
American Imago, Vol. 60, No. 2, 211-239. © 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
211
212 The Case of Louis Althusser
Althusser was one of those unfortunates who poignantly

express a sense of lacking "an authentic existence of my own"
(1985, 107). He felt disembodied and unreal, attributing this
deficiency to a maternal gaze that looked through him towards
another person, his deceased namesake. "Death was inscribed
in me from the beginning," he writes. "I wanted to destroy
myself at any price because, from the start, I did not exist"
(306). From this self-perception flowed Althusser's fascination
with an anthropology of the void. He echoed the structuralist
pronouncement of "the death of man" and developed a
conception of history without subjects, a theory of beginnings
from "the nothingness of cause, of essence, and of origin"
(492). In his ultimate formulations, there was no place for
agency, cohesive selfhood, or intentionality. The materialist
philosopher, he declared, is like one who boards a moving
train by accident, "not knowing where it is going or where he is
headed" (480). Above all, he asked in the autobiography,
could he be held responsible for the death of the person
around whom his life had revolved for over thirty years?
Biography
Louis Althusser was born in a small Algerian town on

October 16, 1918, the son of a father of Alsatian background,
Charles Althusser, who made a successful career in banking,
starting as an adolescent on the lowest rung, and a French
mother, Lucienne Berger.2 He had a younger sister Georgette,
to whom he seems to have been devoted and who also suffered
severe depressions. The family saga is emphasized in The Future
Lasts Forever and The Facts (1976b), another autobiography
written four years before the murder. The latter title, undoubt
edly ironic since the account incorporates fictitious material,
alerts us to the perennial difficulty in distinguishing between
subjective truth and objective (consensual) reality.
In The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser repeatedly insists on
his role in his mother's unconscious as the replacement for her
lost love, his deceased uncle Louis. The original Louis Althusser
was, like his nephew, a brilliant lycée student in Algiers prepar
Lewis A. Kirshner 213
ing for entry into a prestigious national academy when he was

drafted in 1914. Killed in battle, he left a grieving family (he
was his mother's favorite) and a bereft fiancée, Lucienne
Berger. Into this vacated place stepped the older brother,
Charles, who, following the biblical custom of levirate mar
riage, became the substitute groom and, nine months later, the
father of another Louis. Before his birth, Althusser concluded,
his destiny had been determined by two inescapable facts: his
function as an embodiment of his mother's desire for her
deceased fiancé, and his father's resentment of that same
favored younger brother. Lacan might have said that the dice
were already thrown for him. But "the facts" become murky
when we read the devastating 1964 letter by Hélène Rytman, in
which she laid out the dynamics of this family constellation,
along with a detailed analysis of Althusser's infancy in the
hostile milieu of a North African colony.3 Althusser substan
tially concurred with her account, but it needs to be viewed
with caution given Rytman's part in Althusser's story; her
desires were far from altruistic and she apparently had a
tendency to think in paranoid terms.
Many readers of his autobiography, including de Marty
(1999), Rosset (1992), and de Pommier (1998), have been
convinced that Althusser was a pathetic wreck of a person,
stunted in his emotional development and never genuinely
existing as a true subject. To be sure, there was always an
element of contrivance and ruse in Althusser, who deliberately
played the psychiatric victim, but he undeniably also had
severe psychiatric problems. In addition to numerous docu
mented episodes of mental illness beginning in 1947, Althusser
was from childhood on inhibited and insecure, vulnerable to
both success and failure, which could alike induce extreme
anxiety, withdrawal, or depression. Revealing evidence of his
frailty is provided by his stunted sexual development. This he
blamed on two interventions by his mother, the first of which,
Boutang suggests (1992, 82), may never have occurred. In one
episode, his mother is said to have objected during Althusser's
adolescence to his visiting a female acquaintance; and in
another, to have commented on the stain of a nocturnal
emission. Whatever the reality of these incidents, he displayed
a near-phobic avoidance of women as a young man and

claimed not to have masturbated until age twenty-seven. Rytman
was, in fact, his first sexual partner, and their liaison directly
preceded the depression that culminated in his first hospital
ization.
Despite his difficulties, the young Althusser possessed

many strengths and excelled in diverse areas. He was a brilliant
student, artistic, athletic, a talented violinist, and, in general,
engaged in the real world. Perhaps most important, he had the
ability to form close friendships. From all appearances, his
relationships with his family did not take on their bleak cast at
least until the 1964 letter from Rytman, and possibly much
later. In the autobiography, which reflects her influence, he
complains of his father's failure to make any meaningful
connection with him, a situation worsened by an emotional
schism between his parents that left them living almost com
pletely disconnected lives. Only the kindly maternal grandfa
ther, Pierre Berger, idealized in Althusser's portrait, offered
warmth and contact. But the heavy artillery is reserved for his
mother, who is described as cold, emasculating, phobic, and
controlling. If the evidence gathered by Boutang suggests that
this one-dimensional portrayal was in part a product of the
colossal effort at self-justification that inspired Althusser's
autobiographical project, this qualification ironically vindi
cates Althusser's own philosophical claim that the sense of a
life can only be emergent, never determined by the past.
As a youth, Althusser was deeply involved in Catholic faith
and devotion. His piety echoed that of his mother, who
appears to have exhibited an idiosyncratic religiosity and
habits of hygiene, which, as time went on, evolved into frankly
obsessional and psychosomatic symptoms. At Lyon, as a lycée
student, Althusser participated in religious retreats, favored
observant professors, and moved in conservative Catholic,
monarchist circles. In the late 1930s, however, through the
influence of his teacher Jean Guitton, he was drawn to the
Catholic workers' movement. His subsequent break with the
Church and its left-wing humanist politics was gradual, and it is
not clear when his faith was lost. Certainly, he remained a
practicing Catholic until well after World War Two.
Althusser's fledgling career, like that of his namesake a

generation earlier, was interrupted in 1940 by the outbreak of
hostilities in Europe. Inducted alongside his classmates, he
served briefly with an artillery unit in Bretagne. Its surrender
led to his removal to a POW work camp in Germany, where he
was confined for almost five years. Althusser's failure to at
tempt the escape that was on every prisoner's mind thence
forth occupied an important place in his self-analysis. He
attributed his paralysis to a fear of danger and a need for
protection, which kept him inside the stalag. When, finally, he
did seek to gain repatriation by counterfeiting certification as
a nurse, he failed to remove a crucial page from his official
record, which exposed his ruse. There was always a sense of
security to be found "on the inside" for the fragile Althusser,
who was able to make strong friendships and do useful work
within the confines of the all-male camp.
There is a parallel between Althusser's wartime intern
ment and his relations to the Church, to the École Normale
Supérieure, where he resided for most of his adult life, and, most
dramatically, to the French Communist Party. Towards each of
these institutions he evidenced an amalgam of profound
loyalty and radical alienation. His unresolved ambivalence
required the security of an ideological structure (the fantasy of
being contained) and the freedom to be critical of that
structure. He resembles the severely narcissistic patients who
find psychic equilibrium in what Arnold Modell (1984) has
termed "the sphere within a sphere." They maintain a tenuous
self-cohesion by remaining within the envelope of a protective
object towards which they profess indifference or hostility.
Although Althusser's ambivalence towards his containing per
sons and institutions at times seemed to verge on bad faith, it
also seems clear that his psychic survival required the support
of an ideal object represented by these containers.
During captivity, Althusser wrote to family members, read,
and kept a daily journal, in which a hiatus in early 1941 is
viewed by Boutang as indicating the first episode of depres
sion. His major crisis of religious belief probably occurred
about two years later. According to Boutang, Althusser admit
ted to having lost his faith in the camp, although he remained
for many years a practicing Roman Catholic. As a seventeen

year-old, Althusser wrote in a letter to his closest friend, Paul
de Gaudemar, "I am not stable, passing through successive and
even absolutely opposing states of mind. ... If I did not have
what I call my 'profound beliefs' I would be pathetic. . . .
Without my religious faith, my parents, and my friend close to
me, I would be a sorry person" (quoted in Boutang 1992, 82).
Enthralled at nineteen by a lecture on Islamic mysticism, he
expressed in his journal a need to immerse himself no less
intensely in Christianity as "an all-encompassing religion"
(134), and his lycée thesis was consecrated to the God of Faith
(119).
After the war, Althusser began to advocate the participa
tion of Christians in the Communist party, on whose claim to
carry the banner of history his faith increasingly came to lean.
Arriving in Paris, he enrolled in the École Normale Supérieure,
where he would spend the next thirty-four years, first as a
student, then as a professor. He prepared his diplôme d'études
supérieures—roughly equivalent to a master's thesis—on Hegel
in 1947 and opened contacts with left-wing Catholic groups,
writing for their publications. In 1948, he joined the Commu
nist Party. Upon completing his agrégation in philosophy—a
competitive examination qualifying one as a professor—in the
same year, he was offered a position at the École, launching his
career as a politically engaged intellectual.
Althusser's move leftward owed much to the influence of
Hélène Rytman, whom he met near the end of 1946. Ten years
his senior, she was an intense and passionate woman who had
a tangled history of involvement with the French resistance
and the Communist Party, with which she became embroiled
in a struggle to be readmitted as a member. She initiated
Althusser into a new world of sexuality and emotional inti
macy.
Althusser and Rytman developed an instant complicity,
based in large measure on their shared identification with the
working class and a commitment to revolutionary change. He
was far from unique in replacing religious idealism with a
political and ideological one, and it seems probable that he
was heading towards Communism with or without Rytman.
There was an obvious irony in the maverick Althusser's being

able to join the French Communist Party, while she, a true
believer, remained excluded. Matheron (1994) states that it
would have been surprising, given the historical context, had
Althusser not been a Stalinist during the postwar period. A
certain logic led him to accept the Party as the only possible
vehicle for revolutionary transformation of European civiliza
tion, while the void at the heart of his increasingly formal
religious commitment demanded a new set of ideals as a
bulwark against the madness by which he felt threatened.
Althusser needed to adhere body and soul to a representa
tion of an ideal. Boutang (1992, 218-21) suggests that the
depression of 1943 may have been either the cause or (more
likely) the effect of a loss of his link to God, which confronted
him with an unbridgeable Augustinian distance from the
divine. De Pommier (1998) proposes the Lacanian hypothesis
that God for Althusser was "a third term," a figure of separa
tion, functioning in the symbolic role for which his father had
been disqualified by his mother's love for his dead brother. De
Pommier sees Althusser's psychopathology as springing from
his continuous effort to escape an identification with the
"imaginary phallus," that is, to stop trying to fill the lack in his
depressed mother by serving as a replacement for her lost
object, but without ever being able to accomplish this "sym
bolic castration" because of the absence of a true father to aid
him in the task of separation. From this perspective, all the

institutions that came to represent the "third term" of the
paternal function were bound to fall short. Althusser em
braced, then undermined, each one in turn, caught in an
unconscious compulsion to repeat his basic dilemma.
Althusser articulated his disenchantment with organized
religion in two posthumously published documents. The first
is a seventy-page letter written in late 1949 to his Lyonnais
spiritual guide, Jean LaCroix, in which he rejected religious
faith (and with it his former relationship of discipleship) as the
basis for social and political action. The affective tone was one
of extreme ambivalence towards LaCroix, who never ceased to
support his former student.4 The second document bearing on
his evolution away from religious humanism is the 1951 essay,
"On Conjugal Obscenity." From what might today be described

as a radical feminist perspective, Althusser attacked the Church's
efforts to promote a spiritual partnership between husband
and wife on the basis of a religious vision. He could not
conceive that a couple might find fulfillment in a shared
devotion to spiritual ideals in spite of—or even because of—
temporal renunciations. He rightly condemned the expecta
tion that women who marry must sacrifice opportunities for
intellectual and creative growth, but he did not grasp that
balancing professional achievement with emotional satisfac
tion could be important for both partners. This lack of balance
goes to the heart of his long and stormy relationship with
Rytman. Throughout their lives together, Althusser repeatedly
turned elsewhere for emotional and sexual satisfaction, prob
ably never coming to terms with his dependency on a strong
woman with her own burden of problems.5
These two essays display the eloquence of Althusser's
rhetoric, which took on a rapturous quality at times. His
idealism was, however, saved from an extreme moralism by his
adherence to logical structure, occasionally the simulacrum of
banal Communist propaganda, but more often a rigorous
version of Marxist theory and philosophy. His analytical gift
enabled him to step back from a polemic with hypomanic and
fanatical overtones to engage in sharp intellectual debate. In
his essays, we can trace the evolution of his ideal object from
God and religion to the proletariat and Communism. Later,
psychoanalysis was to enter the picture, and, as always, his
idealizations had to be represented by a hero or master, with
whom he entertained an ambivalent relationship. Althusser
oscillated between submissive humility, which does not seem to
have been simply a pose, and grandiosity, leading him to
dethrone his objects by becoming what he called a "father to
the father" (1985, 193), since he could not long tolerate
anyone else in this paternal role.
Consistent with his self-definition as a nonperson from
birth, Althusser regarded himself as an intellectual fraud or
imposter, a fate that received its ultimate seal in the juridical
non-lieu that exculpated him from criminal responsibility in
the death of his wife. Indeed, he claimed (1985, 218-21) never
to have read many of the authors about whom he wrote. He
described his scholarly method as one of listening to hearsay

and then taking core samples—carottes—of the works in ques
tion, from which he was able to make astute generalizations
about the whole. Perhaps this disparaging characterization
contains a kernel of truth, but it is not borne out by the
content of his many published and unpublished papers, to say
nothing of the annotated volumes in his personal library.
Certainly, beginning at the lycée where he prepared for his
examinations to enter the École Normale Supérieure, Althusser
was marked out as possessing the character and intellect of a
future member of the French elite. From at least his twenties,
however, this exceptional talent was at the mercy of escalating
recurrences of manic depression.
Despite his mood swings, Althusser established lasting
relationships with a number of important figures at the École
Normale Supérieure. Among others, Foucault and Derrida stud
ied with him, as did André Green, whom he befriended. He
was a caring and responsible mentor who kept his political and
personal rivalries from impinging on his faculty duties. Even
Rosset, who is far from admiring, writes that Althusser was the
"most devoted, informed, and liberal of masters" (1992, 12).
By the 1960s, the timid philosopher was becoming widely
known internationally.
Most notably, he developed an alliance with Jacques
Lacan, of whose theories he was an enthusiastic supporter and
whom he brought into the École Normale Supérieure, an amazing
feat given the hostility to psychoanalysis of the French Commu
nist Party and much of the French academic world at that time.
In many respects, these new commitments displaced his former
political ones, which were shaken by his disagreements with
the Party hierarchy over Rytman's ostracism in 1950 (or,
according to some accounts, 1951) and his own later heresies
with respect to Marxist theory. In 1964, he entered treatment
with a non-Lacanian analyst, René Diatkine, which lasted more
than fifteen years. Unfortunately, Diatkine's treatment, which
included medications and hospital stays, proved unsuccessful,
and Althusser suffered his most serious episode of depression
at the age of sixty-two, resulting in the tragedy that cast his
madness in its definitive form and stamped his reputation as a
murderer.
The circumstances of the catastrophe were as follows. In

the course of a highly productive period of creative work,
Althusser developed symptoms of an inflamed esophagus,
diagnosed as a hiatal hernia. After a routine surgical proce
dure in April 1980, he awoke with restless anxiety that pro
gressed into a severe depression. Since his youth, Althusser
had been sensitive to physical ailments, a castration anxiety in
its most elemental form. Althusser always blamed his depres
sions on medical problems, and after his release from wartime
captivity he had referred to his "little physical miseries" (Boutang
1992, 222), only much later acknowledging his fears of sexual
impotence. His first hospital admission in the stalag had
followed an inguinal hernia. Now, his alarmed physicians told
him that he was displaying classic symptoms of melancholia
(Althusser 1985, 274). He was rehospitalized and various
medications were tried, one of which may have led to a toxic
delirium. In any event, he suffered symptoms of profound
regression, confusion, and paranoia. Upon discharge, he was
not fully recovered, and his relationship with Rytman disinte
grated into a destructive stalemate of shared despair and self
hatred from which she tried, according to Althusser's autobi
ography, to extricate herself, only to arouse in him the keenest
separation anxiety.
As the couple turned inwards, isolated in their apartment
on the rue d'Ulm, Althusser slid further downhill. Diatkine,
who by then had reluctantly become Rytman's therapist as
well, urged rehospitalization, allegedly against her opposition.
An urgent letter he sent to Rytman was apparently never
delivered. From here, the facts are unknown, Althusser claim
ing amnesia for the events. There was no evidence of a
struggle. The philosopher came to his senses while his fatigued
arms massaged the inert neck of his wife, as he had often done
at her request. His account paints a picture of her complicity
in the strangulation, as though she had wished to be released
from their shared inferno by being murdered, "a suicide by an
interposed person" (1985, 285).
The strangeness of this scenario recounted by Althusser is
augmented by seeming to have been lifted from two dreams he
had transcribed sixteen years earlier. The first dream followed
his receipt of Rytman's 1964 letter about his familial pathol
ogy—the same letter that, in the guise of helpful analysis, gave

rise to a paranoid explanation for Althusser's illness that had
not previously been indicated in either his correspondence or
personal conversation, but which may have steered his ambiva
lence towards a destructive hate. He responded that the letter
"touched him to the quick" (1985, 422) and that, like the
lightning, "it illuminates and it kills" (428). In his dream,
Althusser was obliged to murder a complicit sister—"a sort of
pathetic communion by sacrifice"—with her accord (429). In a
second dream, a "man-father" had murdered his wife, al
though there were exculpatory features. In his associations, he
brought up his lack of support for Rytman during her "trial" by
a Communist-front peace council, which had voted to exclude
her as an agent provocateur after she recommended sabotaging
munitions trains at a Paris railway station. The record of the
two dreams was discovered by a friend among Althusser's
papers four years after his murder of Rytman. Sections were
underlined in the version he showed to Diatkine, but we do
not have any record of their conversations.
Intellectual Contributions
It is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate the

theoretical contributions of Louis Althusser. One striking fact
is the sheer quantity of material that he withheld from publica
tion, though under the direction of François Matheron and
Olivier Corpet much of it has appeared posthumously. Despite
being exceedingly critical of his own work, as well as frequently
incapacitated by depression, Althusser produced a series of
important studies, as well as privately circulated writings, all of
which contributed to a legendary reputation. His readers can
not fail to be struck by a powerful intellect wielding a vigorous
and eloquent style. Althusser had wide-ranging interests, but his
originality rests largely on his reading of Marx and, especially,
the structural theory that organized that interpretation.
Whoever speaks of Marx must inevitably speak of Hegel
and the tradition of German idealist philosophy. Hegel had
gained renewed attention in France just before World War
Two, when Jean Hyppolite published his translation of the
Phenomenology of Spirit (see d'Hondt 1991). Its reception was

facilitated by Alexandre Kojève, a German-trained Russian,
who from 1933 to 1939 devoted a seminar to this magisterial
work for an audience that included Hyppolite, Lacan, and
Merleau-Ponty. Althusser initially valued Kojève 's work on
Hegel, which was published in 1947, although he later de
clared that Kojeve "knew stricüy nothing" (1985,199) of either
Hegel or Marx. Lacan was influenced by Kojève's interpreta
tion, and his emphasis on the struggle for recognition as the
fundamental desire of the subject can be traced to Hegel's
parable of the master-slave dialectic.6 The themes of self
formation through the mediation of the other and the need
for recognition by the other must have resonated with
Althusser's fragile self. Yet if vestiges of the intellectual pathway
leading from Hegel through Kojève to Lacan can be found in
Althusser's diagnosis of his mother's failure to acknowledge his
separate identity, he never made these connections explicit.
For all his denials, Althusser had read Hegel in German
and can be said to have been engaged in a life-long struggle
with the great philosopher. Like the Christianity of his youth
and the Communism of his maturity, Althusser's encounter
with Hegel was marked by ambivalence; the idealism of the
Phenomenology and its belief in the inexorability of the historical
process exercised both a powerful appeal and a deep unease.
On the negative side, the later Hegel seemed to justify the
perpetuation of a feudal-like system in Germany under Kaiser
Friedrich Wilhelm. At the same time, by approaching history
as a dialectic, in which ideology played a decisive role, Hegel
created a powerful instrument for a revolutionary assault on
bourgeois democracy from beneath.
In his 1947 master's thesis, Althusser had argued that
Hegel's awareness of the material existence of mankind in
concrete historical forms meant the abolition of a metaphysi
cal logic driving history. For the young Althusser, this rejection
of transcendence justified a humanistic Marxist concern for
the oppressed:
The entire revolutionary effort could be considered as

the taking possession of the transcendent by the empiri
cal, of the form by the contents. This is why the Marxist
movement is a materialism . . . but also a humanism. . . .
Revolutionary action can conceive, at least formally, of

the coming to be of the human totality reconciled with
its own structure. (1947, 222)
But Althusser's attempt to harmonize Marxist praxis with

Hegelian theory—in keeping with the self-representation of
the French Communist Party—was abandoned in his mature
work, in which he likewise repudiated his erstwhile Catholic
social and theological commitments.
Long before his rejection of Utopian Marxism, Althusser
was hostile to the notion that Marx had built upon an
inherited Hegelianism. In the standard account, Feuerbach
had corrected Hegel's individualism by redefining man as the
ensemble of his social relationships. From here, it seemed only
a short step to Marx's identification of the class struggle as the
true subject of the historical dialectic. The later Althusser
argued, however, that Marx had broken decisively with both
thinkers by abandoning a humanistic focus on the individual
subject of history. What counted instead was structure, deter
mined by economic relationships and modes of production;
the changing forms of human consciousness were the effects
of this structure, not its cause. By his advocacy of a structuralist
approach, Althusser rendered expendable the notion of a
conscious subject as the agent of history.
Roudinesco (1994) observes that structuralism seemed to
offer a scientific approach to the "human sciences" by elevat
ing theory and analysis over unreflective observation. It al
lowed one to go beneath the psychological and phenomeno
logical levels of experience to uncover underlying causes. The
individual subject could now be seen as a historical construct
belonging to a particular time and social class. For this reason,
Althusser rejected the attempt by progressive Communists to
harmonize Marx's early humanistic ideals with his later empha
sis on class struggle. Instead, he argued, Marx represented "a
prodigious tearing away from his origins" in replacing indi
viduals with societies as the true subjects of history. In a
notorious phrase, he insisted that Marx had effected a "dis
placement" that dispensed with "the theoretical services of a
concept of man" (1965, 255).
With this finely chiseled interpretation of an antihumanist

Marx, Althusser was transformed from an obscure philosopher
with political enthusiasms into an intellectual star who rode
the structuralist wave with Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, and
Lacan. Yet this very breakthrough got him into trouble with
the French Communist Party, which, in a humanistic turn, was
now denouncing the Stalinist-Chinese revisionism that they
accused Althusser of fomenting. He began to assume his
preferred position as an internal critic. Still later, his structural
ism led him to reject altogether any notion of an inherent
logic to history, which he described as "a process without a
subject or purpose" (1985, 243), determined only by the
fortuitous concatenation of events. Despite class conflict, he
came to believe, it was not inevitable that social change would
proceed from a dialectic of contradiction. The suffering prole
tariat remained important for him, but he did not address why
one should continue to struggle in its behalf or remain a
Communist.7
In his impressive study, de Marty (1999) makes a great
deal of the denial of the individual subject as a defining
feature of Althusser's work and madness. But Althusser be
longed to a generation of eminent thinkers who did not have
much use for liberal humanism; and others, such as Foucault,
were even more vociferous in their denunciations than he. There
are, moreover, cogent arguments against taking the perspective

of the subject as the best means of understanding history or
biography, not the least important of which are Freud's. Thus,
Althusser's contribution to structuralist theory needs to be
assessed on its own merits, not as a symptom of his pathology.
What seems genuinely symptomatic is Althusser's refusal
to acknowledge a persistent concern with his own subjectivity.
One wonders whether, had he continued to live and work, he
might have revised his antihumanist positions. Although he
continued to call himself a materialist and to identify with
revolutionary politics, Althusser discarded most of Marxist
theory, and his materialism was tempered by a recognition of
the independence of ideology from economic arrangements.
In a 1966 paper on the cultural revolution in China, he
described ideology not as an "epiphenomenon" but as the
"cement" binding societies.8 A coherent system of beliefs was
the cement Althusser sought for himself, but, in the end, he

was unable to ground himself in any single ideology. He was an
"outsider on the inside" of the Church, the stalag, the Party,
and psychoanalysis, accepting no master in the flesh and
having immense difficulty even with symbolic ones. Although
his autobiography revolves around this crucial issue, he was never
able to account theoretically for the dynamic relationship be
tween ideology and the individual subject. He refers frequently
to Spinoza's three orders of knowledge, in which the nominal
ism of the first exists in tension with the abstract truth of the
second, while both are integrated on a third level of synthesis
(1985, 242-44). We probably would not be far off the mark in
seeing here a reflection of Althusser's struggle to grasp his life
both objectively, as a patient determined by a psychiatric
"condition," and subjectively, as a singular psychological being.
Paradoxically, Althusser, once an apologist for Stalinism
and an opponent of liberal Eurocommunism, concluded by
rejecting the Marxist dialectic and the Leninist philosophy of
historical determinism. Although he never left the Party, he
came to the poststructuralist conclusion that history has no
laws. As I have noted, his ultimate version of a materialist was
of one who boards a train with no starting point and no
destination. History, by the same token, is without a subject or
purpose. Sartre's existential critique of Genet, that "he refuses
to hear the voice of the cogito" (1963, 36), could thus also be
directed against Althusser. His account of his murder of
Rytman is striking for its refusal to accept responsibility, an
evasion that has disturbed many readers. At the close of his
autobiography, an astonishing disclaimer of personal guilt is
attributed to an anonymous friend who interjects, "It would
have sufficed for only a few" of the many random factors at
play "to declare you not responsible for your act" (1985, 314).
Psychoanalytic Contributions
In a manner unusual for French intellectuals of his

generation, Althusser developed an early interest in psycho
analysis. In his master's thesis, he cited Freud, notably for his
account of negation. A positive content can present itself,
Althusser wrote, in the form of an absence or a negative, and

he went on to criticize Freud's concept of a substantive
unconscious from a Hegelian perspective (1947, 275). Possibly
this interest was reinforced by his own clinical experiences of
depression, and certainly by his narcoanalysis—a therapy using
a drug such as sodium pentothal to facilitate memory—which
began with Laurent Stevenin about 1950. Roudinesco says that
he discovered psychoanalysis "by way of the mirror of his own
madness" (1986, 376). In any event, he began reading psycho
analytic texts after the War and gave a lecture on child analysis
in 1959 (see Corpet and Matheron 1993, 1). Despite his
denials, Althusser clearly used Freudian concepts in his think
ing. This appropriation took three forms: (1) the application
of psychoanalytic analogies and metaphors to philosophy; (2)
efforts to integrate Freudian and Marxist theories of society;
and (3) explorations of the status of psychoanalysis as a science
growing out of his encounter with Lacan.
According to Roudinesco, after Lacan 's schismatic group
of analysts had founded a new society, the French Psychoana
lytic Association, in the 1950s, Althusser began to read Lacan 's
publications in La psychanalyse. His laudatory discussion of
Lacan 's work in a 1963 article, "Philosophy and the Human
Sciences," brought him to the attention of the master, then in
the throes of his inquisition by the International Psychoana
lytic Association (Corpet and Matheron 1993, 7). Althusser
organized a seminar on psychoanalysis at the École Normale
Supérieure in 1963-64, published his well-known essay "Freud
and Lacan" in La nouvelle critique in 1964, and invited Lacan to
move his own seminar to the École Normale after his expulsion
from the International Psychoanalytic Association that same
year. Although in The Facts he claimed to have attended
Lacan's seminar only once, Althusser was familiar with the
latter's Écrits (1966), an annotated copy of which was found in
his library. He credited Lacan with grasping the essential in
Freud, namely, the essential role of theory in advancing
scientific knowledge. What could be viewed as either a mea
sure of his genius or excessive intellectualism was Althusser's
insistence that psychoanalysis move beyond being a colloca
tion of impressive findings and useful techniques towards the
status of a genuinely scientific theory.
In "Freud and Lacan," Althusser offered an ideological

critique of the social functions of psychoanalysis, especially in
its revisionist versions, which he accused of subsuming its
radical discoveries into academic disciplines such as sociology
and psychology, and also gave an "epistemological elucidation"
of its original concepts. These concepts had to do above all
with a new object—the unconscious—that cannot be annexed
to other human sciences that seek to define "human nature"
or to develop an ethology of humankind. The latter project of

assimilation characterized American ego psychology, whose
European-born founders explored the function of the ego as
an evolutionary organ of adaptation to external reality. Althusser
honored Freud's break with the thinking that preceded him by
situating the coming-in to-being of the human subject as an
uncertain journey—an "eruption"—the success of which can
never be foreordained. At this time, he closely followed
Lacan's interpretation of Freud, especially concerning the
function of language in producing a split subject inserted into
the symbolic order. He defended Lacan's aphorism that "the
unconscious is structured like a language," and he saw the
brilliance of substituting the linguists, Saussure and Jakobson,
for Freud's reliance on the natural sciences.
Although he never subscribed to Lacan's nearly exclusive
emphasis on the signifier, Althusser grasped the structuring
role of language even for the preverbal infant, who enters a
world organized by symbolic systems. In one of two long letters
to Diatkine in 1966, he brilliantly explained how this net
captures one even at birth: "The child irrupts as a biological
being within the system of the symbolic order. He is caught up
in it from his birth exactly as he is caught within the element of
the atmosphere . . . cast into a world that is structured by the
symbolic order. That order will become his order" (1966, 67
68). From this standpoint, he saw the possibility for a new
science of psychoanalysis. The crucial point was to separate
ideology (a conception of normality privileging the values of a
particular class or society) and ritual (an esoteric technique
passed on through indoctrination) from science (a system of
ideas attempting to define a theoretical object—in this case,
the unconscious).
Althusser again took up the question of psychoanalysis as

a science in an undelivered paper for a 1979 symposium on the
unconscious at Tbilisi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Repub
lic, though written several years earlier. While recognizing the
necessity of integration with other disciplines, Althusser (1976a)
continued to advocate the specificity of psychoanalysis as a
science of the unconscious. After first praising Lacan 's attempt
at mediation between an outmoded biophysical theory of
psychoanalysis and current scientific and philosophical mod
els, Althusser stringently criticized the results of Lacan's project,
which he described as "teetering on the pedestal of its uncer
tain theses" (92). Instead of a scientific theory of the uncon
scious, he wrote, Lacan had given a "fantastic" philosophy of
psychoanalysis that "duped everybody." Althusser withdrew this
paper in reaction to the alarm of his associates, notably
Roudinesco, and the name of Lacan disappeared from the
revised version, "On Marx and Freud" (1976c).
In "On Marx and Freud," Althusser confronted the offi
cial Communist opposition to psychoanalysis, observing that
part of the resistance was indeed unconscious. He lauded
Freud and Marx for instituting radical breaks with their
predecessors that made them "illegitimate children" without
fathers. Both treated their objects of study—the individual and
society, respectively—as ensembles without a center. Marx's
discovery of the dialectical opposition of classes had under
mined the metaphor of society as a seamless fabric, while
Freud's conception of a decentered subject, riven by an
unconscious, refuted the idealism of a unified self. The ego is
not master in its own house, as Freud had proclaimed and
Lacan amplified. Yet Althusser was forced to admit that Freud's
therapeutic effort was focused on strengthening the ego's
control over its destiny. Freud's determinism and commitment
to uncovering causal factors clashed with Althusser's philoso
phy of the aleatory.
Despite Althusser's antideterminism in theory, he ac
cepted the importance of early life experiences in shaping the
person. He understood how drives and early mothering work
together to create an embodied subject, and he was more
interested than either Lacan or Freud in the impact of family
relationships. This inconsistency is reflected in his quotation
(1985) from Gramsci that "if we cannot predict, we can in a

certain measure foresee" (526). This statement is another
example of his fudging of a crucial issue. As de Marty (1999) has
noted, Althusser's autobiography portrays him as a victim of
forces outside his control, as though his life were the unfolding
of an implacable destiny. Yet in a strange postscript, he reasserts
the indeterminate nature of existence, demoting the murder
to the chance eruption of an event devoid of real meaning.
Although de Marty trenchantly analyzes Althusser's eva
sions, he is too quick to dismiss the way in which he exempli
fies the inevitably paradoxical conceptualization of the subject
or self in psychoanalysis. As Allen Wheelis (1973) wrote years
ago, there is a realm of freedom and a realm of determinism,
depending on one's point of observation, both being necessary
to any useful account of human experience. Individuals are
responsible for what they have become, yet they are at the
same time caught in unconscious patterns of repetition. Clini
cal psychoanalysis aims at enlarging the scope of freedom
through a reconstructive reliving of early experiences and the
subjective assumption of a path already taken. This ambiguity
is criticized by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943), where he
attacks the Freudian unconscious as a form of bad faith. He
proposes instead the concept of the "for itself," a self that takes
responsibility for its ethical choices: "Man being condemned
to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his
shoulders. He is responsible for the world and for himself as a
way of being" (553-54).9
Although Althusser shared the structuralist antipathy to
the bourgeois idealization of the individual and regarded
traditional humanism as an ideology serving class interests, he
concluded For Marx on an almost Sartrean note: "Men live
their ideologies as their world itself," as "a mixture of relation
to the real and an imaginary relation (men are free)" (1965,
246). He justified the Communist Party's usage of the notions
of individual freedom and "socialist humanism" as "a game of
words" (243), but claimed that this appropriation was not
cynical because history would eventually provide the terms
with "a new content." He thereby postponed the problem to an
indefinite future, which he still believed was being constructed
in the Soviet Union.
Althusser's self-analysis in The Future Lasts Forever founders

on the shoals of his hostility to the individual person as source
of meaning. The presentation of his tragedy as due to a
historically determined lack of a personal self contradicts both
the extreme antihumanism of his early Stalinist politics and his
later fantasy of a history without subjects. Even at the end he
could not accept that, whatever deficits he might have suffered
as an "embodied self," his actions had consequences. If the
category of "man" as individual subject were nothing more
than a bourgeois illusion, then the man who never existed
could be only a virtual murderer.
Contrary to Althusser, I would submit that psychoanalysis,
perhaps like Marxism, sits ambiguously between humanism
and science. A narrow version of Freudian determinism is
obviously untenable, even though we have a sense of character

as a destiny that unfolds outside our command. Likewise, there
is no entity we could label as "the subject" or "the self," and yet
we are bound to fall back on such constructs, and even on the
notion of conscious agency. As Althusser (1955) recognized,
the debate is ultimately about how a philosophy of realism can
be applied to history or, analogously, to psychoanalysis. That is,
for the realist or scientist, there must be a truth beyond ideas.
Althusser (1985) was fond of quoting Spinoza's aphorism,
'The concept of the dog does not bark" (244). For Lacan, what
lay beyond conscious experience was the materiality of lan
guage, the signifier that carries the subject helplessly in its
wake. Although Althusser initially accepted this formulation,
in the end he found the source of human actions in the
conjoncture, the accidental association of events at an unpredict
able moment.
Although he admired Lacan, Althusser did not choose a

Lacanian analyst, a fact cited by de Pommier (1998, 135) as
evidence of his ambivalence. He came to see Lacan as a fraud,
yet his autobiography is saturated with Lacanian interpreta
tions. Something made Althusser keep his distance from
Lacan, despite—or perhaps because of—his initial idealiza
tion. His choice of therapist may have been influenced by
Diatkine's specialization in child analysis, as well as by the
recommendation of Nicole Alphandery, a Communist psycho
analyst alleged by Althusser to have been in love with him after
the War (1985, 141, 169). There were also parallels between
his ideas and Diatkine's. The latter, for example, opposed
psychic determinism by declaring that a psychotic break had
something aleatory about it. Still, Althusser's relationship with
Diatkine repeated his attempt to become "father to the father"
(1985, 193). Thus, he noted his analyst's problems of counter
transference, notably in being too accommodating to him,
though Althusser also conveyed his love and appreciation for
Diatkine. Diatkine was justly criticized after the murder by
Boutang (1997) for agreeing to treat Rytman concurrently,
and also arraigned by de Pommier (1998, 135-37) for failing
to address the underlying structural deficit in Althusser. But it
is doubtful whether any analyst could have severed the Lacanian
knot of a symbolic past, an imaginary present, and the real of
a serious illness.
The Man Who Didn't Exist
Althusser manifestly suffered from a severe form of bipo

lar disorder, yet most persons with this condition do not share
his painful sense of nonbeing, become murderers, or develop
a bleak version of materialistic philosophy. So psychiatry in the
end does not take us very far in understanding his case. If the
sense of a genuine existence derives from the connection of
the desiring subject to a set of ideals that gives coherence and
meaning, Althusser was unable to sustain such a bond. No
doubt psychosis can produce a disruption of the symbolic
world, but Althusser did not exhibit overt paranoid fanaticism
or delusion. Above all, he was an intellectual, committed to
rigorous thought and the careful investigation of "reality,"
values that likely helped him to preserve his grasp on sanity.
To make more sense of Althusser's struggle with his ideals
and the ambivalent way he related to people and institutions,
we need to look once again at the emotional dilemmas with
which he was confronted and the context in which they
unfolded. Abundant evidence points to Althusser's narcissistic
vulnerability and sensitivity, and supports the notion that he
sought the position of a "sphere within a sphere" as a solution
to his difficulty in sustaining a cohesive self in the face of his
own desires and those of others. I believe that Althusser's early

self-diagnosis was correct. He required his religious faith to
survive, as well as living people to represent that faith. He
found many such icons or idols, yet the faith did not hold. As
we have seen, he moved from pious Catholicism through
militant Christian-Marxist humanism to hard-line Commu
nism. Along the way, psychoanalysis, via the charismatic figure

of Lacan, played an important role.
None of these movements was able to bear the weight
Althusser placed on them. His idealistic visions of Christianity,
Communism, and psychoanalysis went beyond—and even at
times contradicted—their ideologies; and he became in the
process a subversive adherent, working to transform the insti
tutions in question into something they could not become. Of
course, the world is not lacking in disillusioning experiences,
and many people have lost their political and religious faith
without catastrophic consequences. World War Two and the
ensuing Cold War-period produced a crisis of disillusionment
that stimulated an efflorescence of creative thought through
out Europe. Althusser was caught up heart and soul in this
upheaval, which spurred his most original work, but perhaps in
the end he was broken by it.
Althusser was one of those comparatively rare individuals
who in their discomfort with what exists want to change the
world. This aspiration is associated with intellectual brilliance,
a touch of grandiosity, and coming of age at a particular
historic moment. In Lacanian terms, we might speak of the
necessity of locating for oneself a place within the Symbolic
order. In times of upheaval, some individuals seem called to
represent or articulate the forces at play and to influence the
passage of a society from one era to another. What summons
them to come forward must be quite complex; perhaps
Althusser's philosophy of the "conjuncture" is as satisfying an
explanation as any other. For all his antihumanism, Althusser
was paradoxically attracted to the individual genius as a mover
of history. He was finally not to become such a major figure
himself, but, in retrospect, appears rather as the symptom of
an age filled with Utopian and revolutionary ferment, but
which failed to produce a substantial change in ideology or
society. We might charitably say that he rode the structuralist

wave to its crest and then contributed to its crash. His idealism
drew him towards a metatheory, while keeping him grounded
in the disastrous politics of the French Communist Party and,
for a long time, a posture of sycophancy towards the USSR.
It was clear to Althusser that the leaders of the French
Communist Party could never really accept him, never see him
as anything other than a sometimes desirable, sometimes
troublesome, intellectual adornment. Communist ideology,
however admirable in its pursuit of liberation and equality, was
badly flawed, as he never failed to observe, and even Marxist
theory did not hold together very well. To be sure, he re
mained committed to intellectual work, and the École Normale
Supérieure consecrated that activity, yet Althusser could not
resist criticizing the obsessiveness and triviality of his own
endeavors. Taking the long view, he wondered, what point did
academic study have, notably of philosophy, which he dispar
aged as "blah blah" and "telling tales"? Something more solid,
something scientific and anchored in reality, seemed called
for, not only by Althusser, but by a generation seeking a new
ideological cement after Communism. During the late 1950s
and early 1960s, French thinkers were transforming many
disciplines, and a revised form of psychoanalysis seemed to
offer an ethics and a scientific vision to a society whose
institutions were in disarray. Lacan, as the inspired genius
behind this shift, may have represented an alter ego to
Althusser's own grandiose aspirations, as Sollers suggested in
Femmes (1983), in which the megalomaniacal character repre
senting Lacan suggests dividing the world between their two
domains, the psychic and the political.
When Althusser ultimately became disillusioned with
Lacan, did his intellect burn through the theory, as the Tbilisi
texts suggest, or was the personal factor crucial? Clearly, Lacan
did not reciprocate the enthusiasm and warmth of Althusser's
initial letters in 1963, and he seemed to take for granted
Althusser's support for the relocation of his seminar to the
École Normale. Althusser's later attitude was expressed in his
account of the suicide of Lucien Sebag, a brilliant Marxist
analysand of Lacan's, in 1974. He was appalled by Lacan 's self
protective demeanor when he informed him of the suicide.

According to Althusser (1985), Lacan announced that he had
been obliged to drop Sebag as a patient "for technical reasons"
because Sebag had fallen in love with his daughter, Judith
(212). Althusser did not ask why Lacan had failed to hospital
ize his suicidal patient. He added:
I have very often wondered what he would have done in

my own case had I been one of his patients and whether
he would have left me without protection so as not to
infringe the slightest analytic rule . . . rules which in the
mind of Freud were never imperatives without other
recourse. Let me be forgiven, if it is possible, for having
accurately reported this, but through the unhappy Sebag,
whom I loved a lot, and Judith, whom I knew fairly well,
the story also concerned me. (213)
Through his account of Sebag's death Althusser spells out the

imperative to protect his own vulnerable self. Objects of
idealization are beacons that can guide and illuminate, but
they become blinding if approached too closely. Most of his
pupils and patients (including Diatkine) survived Lacan quite
well, for which that particular master must deserve some
credit. However, I believe that being rebuffed by his hero was
damaging for Althusser, just as coming too near might have
been.
A final disillusioning experience with Lacan came more

than fifteen years after Sebag's suicide (see Althusser 1980).
Lacan had decided for obscure reasons to dissolve his analytic
training program, the École Freudienne de Paris, summoning his
followers to a gathering at the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques at
which this decision would be debated. Althusser's behavior at
this meeting was puzzling. After all, what was it to him that this
latest incarnation of a Lacan-dominated institution was about
to go the way of its predecessors? No doubt it would be reborn
in other forms. Yet Althusser was beside himself, frightened
and enraged, as he gained uninvited access to the stormy
assembly of psychoanalysts, which, in his agitation, he felt
compelled to address. He fulminated against the foolishness of
the political machinations of Lacan's followers and for the
welfare of the proletariat of patients. Althusser knew well that

individuals draw their sustenance from social systems, and that
when institutions or their representatives are discredited, the
work suffers and the profession begins to crumble. The fragil
ity of symbolic structures meant that, for Althusser, a great deal
was at stake, not least his own well-being as an analysand. If
Lacanianism was rotten and Freudianism held hostage by
revisionist Americans, what hope was there for himself to be
cured?
Althusser was torn between two impossible alternatives:

the grandiose role of the hero, and the nonperson who is a
conjuncture of external forces. The search for a father who
could support a symbolic identification brought him to Spinoza,
Nietzsche, Freud, and many others. Unfortunately, this at
tempt to install a symbolic father failed. His successions of
heroes functioned rather to sustain an omnipotent ideal self by
which Althusser tried to fill the chronic emptiness from which
he suffered. In the end, his quest for this imaginary object, and
its impossible promise of wholeness and perfection, proved
self-destructive.
In attempting to make sense of the murder of Hélène

Rytman, I suggest that her role as carrier of the Communist
ideal that nourished Althusser for so long and that bound the
couple together may have been a key. In the void of his
depression, she provided both an explanation and a cure. She
became, like the Church or the École Normale, the containing
sphere that held Althusser's fragile self. Perhaps she replaced
(and realized that she replaced) his parents in that role, which
was bound up with his Catholic faith. As Modell (1984)
explains, overly intense feelings for the transferential object
can explode the inner sphere. The subject's tenuous protec
tion against the antithetical threats of loss and merger, and the
primitive anxieties these threats arouse, cannot survive the
intrusion of emotions into the virtual space that buffers the
contained from the container.
Throughout his life, Althusser seemed incapable of cop

ing with strong sexual or aggressive feelings. Although it
remains unclear whether he came to enjoy sexual intercourse
in his adult years, he certainly kept his women at arm's length.
The initial eruption of passionate emotion after his "seduc
tion" by Rytman was too much for him to bear, and analogous
situations of overstimulation—in his affairs with Claire (whose
last name has been kept confidential) and with Franca Madonia,
for example—triggered depressive relapses. Similarly, the pub
lication of his works on Marx, which brought him so much
attention, left Althusser overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt,
precipitating a recurrence of his illness. When Althusser felt
exposed either to the critical gaze of the world or to unmedi
ated contact with the other, the effect was a liberating but
frightening bursting of his bubble, leaving vulnerable the
surface of a shakily bound self. As Modell's formulation would
suggest, the relationship between Rytman and Althusser oscil
lated between an insupportable distance and a destructive
closeness, compounded at the end by their isolation in their
small apartment.
Lacan's meeting at the Hotel Saint-Jacques occurred in
May 1980. That summer, Althusser underwent hiatal hernia
surgery. In the fall, he and Rytman disregarded Diatkine's
recommendation that he be hospitalized and closeted them
selves at home. In October, she died at his hands, and another
intellectual idol, now floridly psychotic, was about to be
toppled by an outraged press and public. If Althusser's agita
tion in the presence of his former hero, whom he now saw in a
more sinister light and who treated his interruption cavalierly,
was a reflection of the threat to his psychic stability posed by
the dissolution of the École Freudienne, perhaps it indicated the
collapse of the structure Freud-Lacan-Marx that, in guise of an
ego ideal, had long supported his damaged self. In strangling
Rytman, he attacked his ultimate intellectual and emotional
container, which could no longer shield him from despair.
After the murder, a gravely ill Althusser buried himself
once again in a series of psychiatric hospitals for a lengthy
period, only to reemerge in a new existence, for the first time
having his own independent apartment, on the door of which
he affixed the name of Pierre Berger, his idealized maternal
grandfather. Althusser died of a heart attack on October 25,
1990. He declared in an optimistic note at the end of the
autobiography that he had finally come into his own, found a
self, and learned to love and appreciate others:
I think I have learned what it is to love, not to take the

initiative of self-promotion and exaggeration, but to be
attentive to the other, to respect her desire and her
rhythms, to ask for nothing and to receive each gift as a
surprise of life, and to be capable of the same gift and
surprise for the other, without inflicting the slightest
duress [la moindre violence]. In sum, simply freedom. So
life can still be beautiful. I am sixty-seven years old, but,
at last, I, who never had a childhood, because I was never
loved for myself, feel young as never before, even if this
business must soon be concluded. Yes, the future lasts a
long time. (1985, 307-8)
306 Harvard St.
Cambridge, MA 02139
lewis_kirshner@hms. harvard, edu
Notes
1. The title of the English translation is The Future Lasts Former (Althusser 1992),
rather than the more literal The Future Lasts a Long Time.
2. For the material in this section I am indebted to the magisterial biography of
Boutang (1992) and to the editorial notes of Corpet and Matheron in Althusser's
autobiography (1985), writings on psychoanalysis (1993), and collected philo
sophical and political writings (1994a).
3. For example, she referred to the "compromise" by which his mother accom
plished her conjugal duties, preserving a relationship with her imaginary
husband, while removing Charles from his function as father (Rytman 1964,
419).
4. Althusser's rebellion escalated in 1953 when he delivered a party-line, Stalinist
apologetic in the presence of his former mentor in Lyon (Boutang 1992, 486
87).
5. One version of this story, fictionalized in Philippe Sollers s novel Femmes
(1983)—itself a remarkable socio-historical document of the 1970s—has a
much-abused character representing Althusser finally striking back against a
monster-shrew of a spouse.
6. Borch-Jacobsen (1990) documents the many connections between Lacan's
thought and Kojève's Hegel.
7. The nihilism of Althusser's condemnation of the concept of "man" as illusory
and fetishistic can be seen in his Response to John Lewis (1972).
8. This paper, "On the Cultural Revolution," in the Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes, no.
11, is contained in the journal of the Communist Student association of the École
Normale Supérioure.
9. Sartre's attempt to reconcile an antibourgeois humanism with a radical indi
vidualism was derided by Althusser in a February 2, 1964, letter to Franca
Madonia as "a happy psychosis." He was appalled by Sartre's claims in The Words
not to have had an Oedipus complex or a super-ego: "I can only see a lash in the
face to impose silence on this imposture" (Althusser 1998, 518-19).
References
Althusser, Louis. 1947. Du contenu dans la pensée de G. W. F. Hegel [The Content in the
Thought of G. W. F. Hegel]. In Althusser 1994a, pp. 59-246.
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Kirshner - The Case of Althusser (Biografía)

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The Man Who Didn't Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser

Author(s): LEWIS A. KIRSHNER

The Man Who Didn't Exist:

On the morning of November 16, 1980, the eminent

Althusser was one of those unfortunates who poignantly

Louis Althusser was born in a small Algerian town on

ing for entry into a prestigious national academy when he was

a near-phobic avoidance of women as a young man and

Despite his difficulties, the young Althusser possessed

Althusser's fledgling career, like that of his namesake a

for many years a practicing Roman Catholic. As a seventeen

There was an obvious irony in the maverick Althusser's being

him in the task of separation. From this perspective, all the

"On Conjugal Obscenity." From what might today be described

described his scholarly method as one of listening to hearsay

The circumstances of the catastrophe were as follows. In

ogy—the same letter that, in the guise of helpful analysis, gave

It is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate the

Phenomenology of Spirit (see d'Hondt 1991). Its reception was

The entire revolutionary effort could be considered as

movement is a materialism . . . but also a humanism. . . .

Revolutionary action can conceive, at least formally, of

But Althusser's attempt to harmonize Marxist praxis with

With this finely chiseled interpretation of an antihumanist

are, moreover, cogent arguments against taking the perspective

the cement Althusser sought for himself, but, in the end, he

In a manner unusual for French intellectuals of his

Althusser wrote, in the form of an absence or a negative, and

In "Freud and Lacan," Althusser offered an ideological

or to develop an ethology of humankind. The latter project of

Althusser again took up the question of psychoanalysis as

(1985) from Gramsci that "if we cannot predict, we can in a

Althusser's self-analysis in The Future Lasts Forever founders

obviously untenable, even though we have a sense of character

Although he admired Lacan, Althusser did not choose a

The Man Who Didn't Exist

Althusser manifestly suffered from a severe form of bipo

own desires and those of others. I believe that Althusser's early

nism. Along the way, psychoanalysis, via the charismatic figure

society. We might charitably say that he rode the structuralist

protective demeanor when he informed him of the suicide.

I have very often wondered what he would have done in

Through his account of Sebag's death Althusser spells out the

A final disillusioning experience with Lacan came more

welfare of the proletariat of patients. Althusser knew well that

Althusser was torn between two impossible alternatives:

In attempting to make sense of the murder of Hélène

Throughout his life, Althusser seemed incapable of cop

I think I have learned what it is to love, not to take the

Roudinesco, Elizabeth. 1986. Jacques Lacan and Compan

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