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.

Louis Althusser was born in 1918 in Birmandreis, a suburb of Algiers, into a French colonial family. Captured at the front in 1940, he spent the rest of the war in a German prisoner-of-war camp, an experience whose effects on his fragile mental health were lifelong. After the war he completed his studies at the Ecole normale superieure on the rue d'Ulm in Paris, where he would teach philosophy from 1948 until his retirement, and joined the French Communist Party in the same year.

His major works are For Marx and the collective Reading Capital (both 1965), the essays Lenin and Philosophy (1968) and 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1970), and the philosophical autobiographies The Future Lasts Forever and The Facts, published posthumously. Through his teaching and through these writings he formed a generation of French thinkers, including Etienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Ranciere, and Alain Badiou.

Althusser's reading of Marx as the discoverer of a new scientific 'continent' of history, his theory of an epistemological break between the early and the mature Marx, his structural concept of overdetermination, and his analysis of ideology as the interpellation of subjects by the apparatuses of the modern state shaped Marxist theory and cultural studies for decades. In 1980, in a state of acute mental illness, he killed his wife, the sociologist Helene Rytmann; declared unfit to stand trial, he was confined to psychiatric care and a private clinic until his death in 1990 at La Verriere.