Louis Althusser 1918 – 1990
Louis Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher and a teacher at the Ecole Normale Superieure for nearly thirty years. His For Marx and Reading Capital, the latter co-written with his students, proposed a structuralist reading of Marx that rejected the early Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts in favor of the mature Marx of Capital. He developed the concepts of overdetermination, the epistemological break, and the ideological state apparatuses, and he influenced a generation of French thinkers including Foucault, Derrida, and Badiou. His later years were marked by mental illness; in 1980 he killed his wife and was confined to a psychiatric clinic.
Key facts
- Nationality
- French
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Marxism, Critical Theory
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Ideology has no history.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“There is no practice except by and in an ideology.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“The lonely hour of the last instance never comes.”