ABSTRACT
Louis Althusser has had more influence on recent literary theory than any other Marxist philosopher, including Lukács and Sartre; but he wrote little on the subject himself. Althusser was in fact a philosopher of science, though not of a kind to appeal to Popperians. His life's project was to provide a philosophical justification and reworking of the science of Historical Materialism; and to provide or reconstruct Dialectical Materialism as the philosophy of that science. His chosen method of working was to make a close rereading of Marx's works, in particular, Capital, in order to find the hidden philosophical assumptions that make them scientific. This is rather a literary way of doing philosophy of science; and some critics have applied Althusser's method of 'symptomatic reading' to literature as well. But the true source of his influence on literary theorists is different.
Althusser flourished in the age of French structuralism; his theories became known as structural Marxism. After the 1968 failed revolution in France (which he missed), he produced a theory of ideology and ideological state apparatuses which virtually relocated the class struggle in the production lines of subjectivity: the schools and colleges. This was the basis of his influence in Britain in the 1970s. He was never a genuine structuralist; but he coquetted with structuralist terminology, and his theory was briefly seen as the central feature of a revolutionary synthesis of structuralist, Freudian and Marxist ideas, which had considerable vogue. It is this synthesis which influenced Pécheux, Macherey, Eagleton, Bennett, etc. for a time.
174Althusserian theory lost influence in the 1980s and was replaced by that of Foucault: a very personal post-Marxist historiography of ideas that seemed to offer fewer dogmatic hostages than Marxism and was adaptable to radical concerns other than class. In effect, Foucault offered a royal road for radicals, and it was the road out of Marxism, and towards the Rainbow Alliance of every victim group. Foucault's early work suggests a conception of governing patterns of thought for each era — 'epistemes' — that recalls Hegel; later work moves to a philosophy of knowledge constructed in relations of power, which is influenced by Nietzsche; this is a poor theory of truth, though rather a good one of ideology.
