ABSTRACT
For a period during the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser was probably France’s and possibly the world’s best-known Marxist philosopher. He could readily be associated with a range of concepts and terms: epistemological break, interpellation, overdetermination, process without subject, symptomatic reading, Repressive State Apparatus and Ideological State Apparatus. But the theoretical edifice was weakened by its inability to account for the events of May 1968 and it was brought into further question by Althusser’s subsequent self-criticisms and partial recantations, his ambiguous rejection of his own theoreticism and his failure either to break with or remain comfortably within the French Communist Party. By the late 1970s Althusserianism could be dismissed as a spent force, and Althusser ‘effectively ended’ his career3 by a frontal assault on his party. There only remained for him to play out a sad history. In 1980 he murdered his wife, spent the next few years in mental institutions and died in relative obscurity in 1990 after years of psychological and physical illness. The posthumous publication of his autobiography, L’Avenir dure longtemps (1992), showed up the severe mental disorders that had always been a dark presence in his life and thought, permitting his intellectual achievements to be discredited in the nowglaring light of his crime and madness. A bleak story, but perhaps also a morality tale of sorts, illustrating the demise of Marxism and the poverty of theory.
