Althusser’s reckoning with his own theoretical past
What the Work Is
Essays in Self-Criticism is a collection of writings by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, first published in English in 1976. The book belongs to the genre of communist self-criticism — a form of theoretical reckoning in which a thinker re-examines and revises his own earlier positions. It is a translation of texts written in French. The volume gathers texts in which Althusser turns a critical eye on the theoretical framework he had built during the 1960s, the period of his greatest influence.
What the Book Is About
The central purpose of Essays in Self-Criticism is exactly what its title announces: Althusser subjects his own earlier philosophical work to scrutiny. During the 1960s, through works such as For Marx and Reading Capital, he had advanced a radical reinterpretation of Marx grounded in the French tradition of the epistemology of science, structuralism, Spinozism, and psychoanalysis. That project had introduced concepts such as theoretical anti-humanism, the epistemological break, history as a “process without a subject,” overdetermination, and theoretical practice — ideas that provoked intense debate across the Marxist world.
By the mid-1970s, Althusser had come to see shortcomings in that earlier project. The essays collected here represent his attempt to identify and correct what he regarded as errors or inadequacies in his own theoretical positions. The book thus stands as a document of intellectual revision: a philosopher publicly reworking the foundations of a system of thought for which he was already widely known.
Key Ideas and Themes
The most concrete theme the sources attach to this work is Althusser’s changed stance toward the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He had not spoken out against the invasion at the time it occurred; his condemnation came later, and it is in Elements of Self-Criticism (1974) — a text associated with this self-critical turn — that he expressed it. This delay and its eventual reversal are emblematic of the book’s broader character: a reckoning with political as well as theoretical commitments.
The work also reflects Althusser’s engagement with the internal conflicts of the French Communist Party during the 1970s. He criticized both the parliamentary strategy of left unity and the remnants of Stalinism that the party leadership had still not officially rejected. One of the most debated questions of the period was the thesis of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which the party formally abandoned at its 1976 congress. Althusser sharply criticized the manner in which this abandonment was carried out, and he later set out his position in a series of publications titled “What Must Change in the Communist Party,” which appeared in Le Monde in 1978.
Running through the book is the tension between Althusser’s loyalty to the communist movement and his growing dissatisfaction with its theoretical and political direction. His self-criticism was not a simple retraction but an attempt to hold on to what he considered scientifically valid in his earlier work while discarding what he now judged mistaken. The volume belongs to a period in which Althusser and his supporters were gradually losing ground within the party, becoming a marginal group composed mainly of students and intellectuals.
Structure and Approach
The book is a compilation of essays and articles written at different times and brought together under a unifying self-critical theme. This compositional method was characteristic of Althusser’s output: his books were typically assembled from previously written pieces on related subjects rather than conceived as single continuous treatises. The approach is polemical and theoretical, aimed at clarifying and correcting positions through argument rather than through systematic exposition.
Significance and Influence
Essays in Self-Criticism belongs to the later phase of Althusser’s career, when his influence within the French Communist Party was declining and his earlier certainties were giving way to revision and doubt. By the 1980s, with the general decline of Marxism, Althusser’s works fell into neglect; interest in his thought returned in the 1990s, after the posthumous publication of numerous manuscripts, letters, and his autobiography, often accompanied by a reassessment of earlier judgments. The self-critical writings collected in this volume document a pivotal moment in his trajectory — the point at which Althusser began to distance himself from the very theoretical edifice that had made him one of the most influential representatives of Western Marxism.
Louis Pierre Althusser was born on 16 October 1918 in Birmandreis, a suburb of Algiers in French Algeria, into a Catholic petty-bourgeois family of Alsatian origin. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was an officer in the French army and later a bank employee and director of the Marseille branch of the Algerian Banking Company. His mother, Lucienne-Marthe Berger, a devout Catholic, worked as a schoolteacher. By Althusser’s own recollection, his Algerian childhood was comfortable. The researcher Martin Jay noted that Althusser, like Camus a generation earlier and Derrida a generation later, was a “product of the French colonial culture of North Africa.”
In 1930 the family moved to Marseille, and in 1936 to Lyon. Althusser studied in schools in Algeria and Marseille, and later in Lyon at one of the best provincial lycées in France. During his school years Althusser, who came from a conservative family, was influenced by Catholic teachers, philosophers and historians, and in 1937 he joined the youth Catholic organization “Jeunesse étudiantes chrétiennes.” One of his teachers was the Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton, who later recalled that the young Althusser in 1938 wanted to become a Trappist monk. According to some of Althusser’s critics, his early exposure to Catholicism subsequently influenced his approach to Marx’s teaching.
At the Lyon lycée Althusser completed two years of preparatory study (“Khâgne”), preparing for entrance examinations to the prestigious grandes écoles. In July 1939 he entered the elite École Normale Supérieure (ENS). But before the academic year began Althusser was called up into the army and soon, in June 1940, was taken prisoner in the town of Vannes (Brittany) and spent five years of the war in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein (Northern Germany). He was first sent to heavy labor, but he fell ill and was transferred to work as an orderly in the camp infirmary. In his autobiography Althusser described the camp experience of solidarity, shared activity and community which, by his recollection, opened the idea of communism to him. At the same time, his stay in the camp worsened his mental health, which manifested in constant depressions that continued until the end of his life. According to the biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco, the experience of the absurd war was decisive for Althusser’s philosophical generation; by the end of the war Althusser was gripped by inner turmoil — glory and heroism, as well as suspicions of collaborationism, had not touched him.
After liberation and the end of the war in 1945, Althusser resumed his studies at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1946 he formed a friendship with the translator of Hegel and Hölderlin, Jacques Martin, who would later commit suicide. Althusser would dedicate his book For Marx to him. At the ENS he was friends with Michel Foucault, Jean-Toussaint Desanti and the Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao. Under Martin’s influence Althusser began to study Hegel seriously, along with the French philosophers of science Jean Cavaillès and Georges Canguilhem. His interest in Hegel’s phenomenology was also connected with the Hegelian “renaissance” in France in the 1930s and 1940s. Althusser did not accept Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Kojève’s work was published in 1947; Althusser wrote a short review of it, “Man, That Night”), since he refused to derive Marx’s philosophy from the Hegelian dialectic of master and slave. According to the researcher Gregory Elliott, Althusser in those years was a Hegelian, though not for long. His graduation thesis, written under the supervision of Gaston Bachelard, was titled “On the Concept of Content in the Philosophy of Hegel” (published in 1992).
While studying at the ENS the young Althusser remained a Catholic and belonged to Catholic organizations, maintaining relations with the left-wing “worker-priest” movement.
Having completed his studies in 1948, Althusser received a diploma in philosophy. In the same year he passed the competitive examination for a university teaching post (“agrégé”) and was appointed assistant at the ENS, where he later held the positions of philosophy teacher, senior lecturer and lecturer, conducting his own thematic courses on philosophy and individual philosophers. From 1948 he was a course supervisor (a “caiman” in student slang), preparing students for final examinations; among his students were Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault and Michel Serres. In 1950 he became secretary of the humanities and social sciences section of the ENS. In total Althusser spent thirty-five years at the ENS, until 1980. All those years he had great influence there, constantly organizing lectures and seminars with the participation of leading French philosophers.
In the late 1940s Althusser gradually moved away from Catholicism toward communism. His political education was greatly influenced by his friendship with Martin, a party activist. In the first post-war years the PCF was one of the most influential political forces: many French intellectuals joined it. Althusser became a member of the PCF in November 1948 and was active, participating in particular in the left-wing “Peace Movement.” Having joined the PCF, Althusser nevertheless retained Catholic convictions for several years. In 1949 the philosopher spoke about relations between the Catholic Church and the workers’ movement, advocating simultaneously the social liberation of the church and a “religious reconquest.” Probably this difficult dual position persisted longer than Althusser openly admitted — until the early 1950s, when the Vatican banned Catholics from participating in the worker-priest movement and other left-wing movements that meant much to Althusser.
Throughout his life Althusser wrote almost no major works. His legacy includes collections of previously delivered lectures, draft versions of unpublished books, unfinished fragments. As a rule, books were created on the basis of compilations of articles on similar themes. From 1946 Althusser wrote articles devoted to Christianity, politics, the philosophy of history and current political events (for example, the Rajk trial in Hungary). His first article, on the relevance of Christianity in the modern world, published in the Catholic publication Le Evangile captif, answered the question “Is the good news proclaimed to today’s people?” In the same period he worked on the philosophy of the French Enlightenment, for which in 1949–1950 he prepared a project for a large dissertation on the theme “Politics and Philosophy in the 18th Century” and a small study on Rousseau. In 1950 the dissertation was presented to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankélévitch, but in the end it was rejected. Later Althusser wrote that this work always retained significance for him, which found embodiment in the book on Montesquieu and later works on Rousseau. In the early 1950s Althusser definitively distanced himself from Hegel, whose teaching became for him a “bourgeois” philosophy.
From 1953 to 1960 Althusser published almost nothing on Marxist themes. But his teaching activity created for him a reputation as a philosopher and researcher. In 1955 he published in the journal Revue de l’enseignement philosophique an open letter to Paul Ricœur “On the Objectivity of History,” devoted to questions of the scientific foundations of history; the letter was a response to Ricœur’s harsh criticism of Raymond Aron’s book Introduction to the Philosophy of History. In 1959 his first book appeared — on the philosophy of Montesquieu. In 1960 Althusser translated, edited and published selected works of Feuerbach from 1839–1845, writing a preface to the collection of his texts.
In 1961, with the publication of the article “On the Young Marx — Questions of Theory” in the journal La Pensée, a series of works on Marx began that brought Althusser fame. Althusser entered the debates flaring up among French Marxists about Marx and Marxist philosophy. The debates proceeded in three different ways: through book publications, polemics in the newspaper La Nouvelle Critique (in 1964–1965) and at the PCF plenum in 1966.
In 1964 the article “Freud and Lacan” appeared in La Nouvelle Critique, devoted to psychoanalysis and Marxism in France. At the same time the ENS, on Althusser’s initiative, invited Lacan to conduct seminars. At the very first seminar Spinoza was mentioned. To the same period of intense creative and teaching activity belongs Althusser’s cycle of seminars on the following themes: “The Early Works of Marx” (1961–1962), “The Origins of Structuralism” (1962–1963; the seminar also examined Foucault’s History of Madness, which Althusser rated very highly), “Lacan and Psychoanalysis” (1963–1964), “Reading Capital” (1964–1965). The last seminar served as the basis for the collective work of the same name. The seminars were attended, in particular, by Étienne Balibar, Alain Badiou, Pierre Macherey, Dominique Lecourt, Régis Debray, Jacques Rancière and Jacques-Alain Miller.
For Marx (1965, a collection of texts published from 1961 to 1965) and Reading Capital (1965, with co-authors J. Rancière, P. Macherey, É. Balibar and R. Establet) brought Althusser international fame, although they were also subjected to serious criticism. He became one of the leading theoreticians of the PCF. In these books Althusser proposed a radical interpretation of Marx for that time. For two decades his works had influence on Marxist debates. The peak of polemic came in the mid-1960s; it had wide resonance, and Althusser’s two main books became bestsellers. In the course of the debates, which took place against the background of criticism of the cult of personality of Stalin, the “humanists” opposed the “scientistic” camp; the leader of the latter was Althusser, speaking from the positions of “theoretical anti-humanism.” Althusser recalled that in the struggle against “humanism” and, simultaneously, against Stalinist diamat, he pursued political as well as strictly scientific goals. Although the humanism and anti-Stalinism of Jean-Paul Sartre, who had great influence in those years, was also left-wing, his voluntarism did not contribute to the elaboration of a consistent political tactic or strategy. For the Marxist humanists of the French Communist Party, scientific Marxism was associated with Stalinism. Therefore Althusser’s intellectual maneuvers for a radical interpretation of Marx were carried out in a rather complex situation.
In the mid-1960s, under the influence of Althusser’s works, a faction of his supporters formed in the PCF, consisting mainly of young intellectuals. The official leadership remained on the positions of Stalinist Marxism, being criticized both “from the left,” by the emerging Maoist groups, and “from the right” — by the humanists. Left-wing groups (Maoists and Trotskyists) opposed the transformation of the party into a parliamentary structure. Althusser, at first cautiously and then more openly, identified himself with the Maoist left-wing critique of Stalinism (his first mention of Mao Zedong dated to 1962). At the end of 1966 Althusser published in one of the Maoist journals an unsigned article “On the Cultural Revolution,” which had great resonance. The philosopher evaluated the incipient Chinese Cultural Revolution as an “unprecedented historical fact” representing “enormous theoretical interest.” Referring to the experience of the Cultural Revolution, Althusser spoke out against the transformation of the PCF into a parliamentary-type party and called for its reform on the basis of the mass character and spontaneity of the revolutionary movement.
By that time Althusser’s popularity in France had grown so much that a rare intellectual discussion about politics, ideology or questions of theory took place without mentioning his works. From 1965, for the publisher Maspero, Althusser began editing the series “Theory,” in which he and his supporters published. Key events in the theoretical struggle took place in 1966. In January a conference of communist philosophers was held at Choisy-le-Roi. At the conference the leader of the humanists, Roger Garaudy, delivered an “accusatory speech” against theoretical anti-humanism. Althusser was absent, and his letter was read out. The polemic became the peak of the long conflict between Althusser’s supporters and Garaudy. In March the plenum of the Central Committee of the PCF was held at Argenteuil (a suburb of Paris), chaired by Louis Aragon. As a result of considering the theses of Althusser and Garaudy, the leadership adopted a decision (read out by the philosopher Lucien Sève) to support Garaudy’s position, although the latter was also criticized. Theoretical anti-humanism was called a dead-end approach that excluded the concept of man and incorrectly interpreted questions of social relations and class struggle; the resolution asserted that the theory leads to “idealist anthropology” and “historical skepticism.” The general secretary of the party, Waldeck Rochet, declared that “communism without humanism is not communism.” At the end of 1966, 600 Maoist students were officially expelled from the PCF. After the plenum Althusser prepared a long letter to the Central Committee of the PCF criticizing the theoretical problems in the resolution, but never sent it. The leadership’s decision to support Garaudy subsequently reduced Althusser’s influence in the PCF.
In the same year, 1966, Althusser published several articles on Rousseau. In 1967 he wrote a large article, “The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy,” for publication in the Soviet journal Voprosy Filosofii, but it was not accepted by the Soviet journal and appeared in Hungarian a year later. At the same time Althusser organized at the ENS the “Spinoza” group on theoretical and political questions. The participants of the group, among whom was Alain Badiou, hid under pseudonyms, following the example of the numerous underground organizations of that time. In 1967 and 1968, up to the May events, Althusser together with his students conducted at the ENS a “Philosophy Course for Scientists.” Part of the materials formed the book Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1974). At the French Philosophical Society on 24 February 1968, Althusser delivered the lecture “Lenin and Philosophy” (published in 1969).
During the events of May 1968 Althusser was hospitalized due to a depressive breakdown and was absent from the Latin Quarter. Many of his students participated in the events, and Régis Debray became an international revolutionary celebrity. Althusser’s silence was received negatively by radicalized students; on the walls of houses was written: “A quoi sert Althusser? Althusser — a rien.” He was sharply criticized by the left-radical Maoist newspaper La Cause du peuple, which called him a revisionist. From that moment his influence among students began to decline. Althusser’s passivity was condemned by some of his supporters, above all his student Jacques Rancière.
In response to the criticism Althusser later undertook an attempt at “self-criticism” and expressed his attitude to the May events in subsequent publications and letters, in particular in the article “Concerning Michel Verret’s Article on the Student May,” published in the journal La Pensée in the summer of 1969. His position was ambivalent. On the one hand, Althusser called the May events “the most important event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism” and tried to reconcile the radical students and the PCF, but on the party’s terms; on the other hand, Althusser accepted the official argument of the PCF against the “infantile disorder” of anarchic utopianism which had “infected” the student movement. The philosopher did not speak out against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, condemning it much later, in Elements of Self-Criticism (1974). The attitude toward Althusser on the part of the PCF leadership was rather negative, although L’Humanité at that time published fragments of his preface to the reissue of Capital.
In 1969 the work State, Law, Superstructure was written but in the end not published (fully published in 1995), part of which was the famous article “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which appeared in the journal La Pensée in 1970. In the same year Althusser wrote a preface to the book by the Chilean Marxist sociologist Marta Harnecker, Basic Elements of Historical Materialism, published in Mexico and Argentina and which became a bestseller. By this time Althusser had gained great popularity in Latin America: to some left-wing activists and intellectuals he appeared practically a new Marx, although his works were the subject of sharp discussions and harsh criticism. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s his main works were translated into English: For Marx in 1969, Reading Capital in 1970, after which Althusserian ideas gained wide circulation among English-speaking Marxists.
In the 1970s Althusser worked intensively at the ENS, and the range of his administrative duties was rather broad. He published the series “Theory.” By the beginning of the 1970s the PCF had entered a period of internal conflicts over theoretical questions, which took place against the background of the emergence of Eurocommunism. Althusserian structural Marxism in those conditions represented one of the more or less formed tendencies. Althusser criticized both the parliamentary strategy of left unity and the remnants of Stalinism, still not officially rejected by the PCF leadership. One of the most discussed questions was the thesis of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” which the PCF officially abandoned at its congress in 1976. Althusser sharply criticized the form in which this was done, and later expressed his position in a series of publications “What Must Change in the Communist Party” in Le Monde (1978). Althusser and his like-minded associates gradually lost their positions in the party, turning into a marginal group consisting mainly of students and intellectuals. They tried to defend their positions within the party, but Althusser’s defeat was indisputable. At the same time, political demarcation in the PCF along the right-left principle could be conditional: Althusser often had positions similar, for example, to those of the right-wing communist Jean Elleinstein.
Althusser continued to participate in various public events of the PCF: in 1973 in the discussion “Communists, Intellectuals and Culture” organized by the newspaper L’Humanité (together with Jean Elleinstein and Louis Aragon), in 1976 at the Festival of the Book. In 1975 Althusser received a doctorate at the University of Amiens on the basis of his published works. In 1976 the collection of articles from various years, Positions, appeared. In July of the same year the philosopher lectured at the universities of Madrid and Barcelona, and in November 1977 delivered the report “At Last, the Crisis of Marxism!” at a congress in Venice organized by the Italian left-wing journal Il Manifesto. The report “The Solitude of Machiavelli” was presented at a conference at the National Foundation of Political Sciences (1977). To 1978 belong the “revisionist” text “Marx in His Limits” (published in 1994) and an article on Marxism for the Italian Enciclopedia Europea. In 1979 Althusser was to deliver a report on psychoanalysis at a French-Soviet conference in Tbilisi, but refused to participate.
Althusser suffered from bipolar disorder all his adult life; he had frequent depressions, probably beginning as early as 1938 and becoming regular after his five-year stay in German captivity. He lived most of his life in an apartment in the ENS building, rarely leaving it. Beginning in the 1950s he was under constant medical supervision, often undergoing psychiatric and chemotherapeutic treatment in clinics, including radical methods of treatment (electroshock). Althusser did not limit himself in doctor-prescribed medications and practiced self-medication, using various medicines in combination with alcohol. He also treated himself with the help of psychoanalysis. According to E. Roudinesco, from 1965 Althusser began undergoing regular sessions with the psychoanalyst René Diatkine, who was his attending physician until approximately 1987. The illness affected his scholarly productivity: for example, in 1962 the philosopher began writing a book on Machiavelli during a depressive episode and in the end spent 3 months in a clinic. During the events of May–June 1968 Althusser was accused of passivity, although he was undergoing treatment at that time. In 1976 Althusser calculated that of the past 30 years he had spent 15 in hospitals and psychiatric clinics.
In 1946 Althusser met his future wife — a former Resistance participant and left-wing activist, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, a Jew of Russian origin. They formalized their marriage only in 1976, after 30 years of living together. Hélène Rytmann participated in the Resistance with Jean Beaufret and joined the PCF. In the late 1940s she was expelled from the party for unclear reasons, formally accused of “Trotskyism” and “crimes.” Probably what was meant were the executions of former collaborators in which Hélène participated. Althusser long tried to restore Hélène’s reputation in the PCF, but unsuccessfully. By Althusser’s recollection, Hélène gave him “a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of motivated action… a world of courage.”
Hélène was 8 years older than him. These relations were painful and contradictory for the young and inexperienced Althusser from the very beginning. They had a strong emotional impact on him and led to deep depressions. Althusser’s life experience was limited to home, school and the camp, while Hélène traveled a great deal and was active in literary and radical circles. Hélène had suffered from PCF Stalinism, and at the very moment when Althusser was about to link his philosophical activity with the communist movement. As E. Roudinesco writes, for Althusser Hélène represented the opposite of himself: she was a Resistance participant, a Jew bearing the mark of the Holocaust, retaining within herself, despite Marxism, Catholicism. Her childhood had not been comfortable: at the age of 13 she became a victim of sexual violence by the family doctor, who, moreover, assigned Hélène to give her terminally ill parents doses of morphine. According to E. Roudinesco, Hélène embodied for Althusser “the repressed consciousness,” “the ruthless superego,” “the dark side,” “the animal principle.”
In the autobiography The Future Lasts a Long Time, written in 1985 and published posthumously, Althusser analyzed the preconditions of his illness with the help of psychoanalysis and found them in complex family relations, despite a comfortable childhood (half of the autobiography is devoted to this theme). Althusser believed that he had no genuine “I,” which was determined by the absence of real maternal love; his father was an emotionally restrained man and practically absent for his son. Althusser derived the family situation from events before his birth, which he learned about from his aunt: Lucienne Berger, his mother, was supposed to marry for love the brother of his father, Louis, who died in the First World War at Verdun (Charles, his father, was in turn engaged to Lucienne’s sister, Juliette). Both families followed the ancient custom of levirate; Lucienne married Charles, and the son was named in honor of the deceased Louis. In Althusser’s recollections this marriage was “madness,” not so much because of the submission to custom itself as because of the excessive submission as such, since no one forced Lucienne to marry Charles. As a result, Althusser’s mother did not love her son simply, but loved in him the long-dead Louis senior. The philosopher described his mother as a “castrating woman” (a term from psychoanalysis) who, under the influence of phobias, established a strict regime of social and sexual hygiene for Althusser and his sister Georgette. The “feeling of bottomless loneliness” Althusser could soften only thanks to communication with his mother’s parents, who lived in Morvan. Relations with his mother and the desire to earn her love, by his recollection, largely determined his adult life and scholarly career, including his entry into the ENS. According to the autobiography, the ENS was for Althusser a kind of refuge of intellectual purity from the big “dirty” world, which his mother so feared.
The facts of the autobiography are critically assessed by researchers. According to its publishers, The Future Lasts a Long Time represents an inseparable interweaving of fact and fiction. Althusser concentrated on describing family circumstances, without considering, for example, the influence of the ENS on his personality. The biographer Yann Moulier-Boutang, having conducted a thorough analysis of the early period of Althusser’s biography, concluded that the autobiography, written after the fact, interpreted events through the prism of life’s collapse. Moulier-Boutang considers that it was Hélène who played a key role in creating the “fatalist” presentation of the history of Althusser’s family, in many ways having formed such a vision of it as early as 1964. According to G. Elliott, the autobiography produces above all an impression of destruction and self-destruction. Althusser probably transferred the beginning of his constant depressions to a later (post-war) period, omitting earlier manifestations of the illness at school and in the camp.
Yann Moulier-Boutang links the depressions not only to events in his personal life but also to political disappointments. Althusser’s biographers draw attention to the internal culture of the ENS, which was an important factor influencing his political reflections and psychological state. According to Moulier-Boutang, from an early age Althusser formed a close psychological bond with his sister Georgette, and although he mentioned her infrequently in his autobiography, relations with her were an important element in his life. His sister also had depressions, and, despite the fact that brother and sister lived separately from each other almost all their adult lives, their depressions often coincided in time. In the 1960s Althusser had a close relationship with the Italian Franca Madonia, a philosopher.
In 1980, during an exacerbation of his illness, Althusser strangled his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990 in La Verrière, in the department of Yvelines. He spent the remainder of his life in seclusion, subjected to constant attacks from his opponents and the press.
Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation. His works stood at the intersection of the Marxist tradition and a number of tendencies of
