ABSTRACT
Today Marxists question the Althusserian project. Ideas only recently taken to be of extraordinary importance have been widely relegated to secondary intellectual status or dismissed altogether. It is often said that while Althusserian notions of overdetermination and contradiction were compelling abstractly, they proved impossible to apply to concrete political and theoretical activity. Indeed, first Althusser’s work and then Marxism more generally have had to face a common complaint from former devotees: neither seemed to go anywhere after the promises and hopes of 1968. Althusser’s work, much like that of Marx, seems to have been superseded by events.
