Louis Althusser Quotes on Politics
Louis Althusser’s For Marx (1965) and the collaboratively produced Reading Capital (1965) gave twentieth-century Western Marxism its most influential structuralist re-reading of the Marxian inheritance. The central commitments — the epistemological break in Marx’s intellectual development between the early humanist writings and the mature Capital, the analysis of ideology as the imaginary relation of subjects to their real conditions of existence, and the corresponding doctrine of the Ideological State Apparatuses through which capitalist social formations reproduce themselves — articulate a distinctive anti-humanist Marxism that broke with both the Hegelian-humanist Marxism of Lukács and the orthodox party-line Marxism of the postwar Communist parties. The framework shaped the structuralist French theoretical tradition through Althusser’s students (Balibar, Rancière, Macherey) and the contemporary engagement with ideology, interpellation, and the politics of theory.
Quotes
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Ideology has no history.”
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“Ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects.”
p. 117 -
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.”
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Attributed to Louis Althusser:
“Marx's true discovery is the discovery of history as a process without a subject.”
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“The reproduction of labour power thus reveals as its sine qua non not only the reproduction of its ‘skills’ but also the reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology. ... It is in the forms and under the forms of ideological subjection that provision is made for the reproduction of the skills of labour power .”
p. 89 -
“The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state.”
p. 95 -
“the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties),”
"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses"