ABSTRACT
Louis Althusser, The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (New York: The New Press, 1993), 365 pp., $25.00 (hardback)
Along with the recent publication of D.A.Miller’s Bringing Out Roland Barthes, Barthes’s Incidents, and Hervé Guibert’s fictionalized account of the last days of Foucault’s life, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, the appearance of Miller’s work alongside Althusser’s controversial ‘confession’, adds to the growing interest in excavating the private lives of various poststructuralist philosophers. While both publications created a series of debates in scholarly and popular journals, in France the news of Althusser’s crime allowed the enemies of Marxism to assert how his actions simply reinforced their beliefs that ‘communism=crime [and] philosophy=madness’ (256). In his own way Miller is asking us to accept the same conclusions about Foucault insofar as his analysis suggests that poststructuralism=sickness.
