Althusser’s Italian intervention on the state, the party, and the crisis of Marxist theory
What the Work Is
Discutere lo Stato is a book by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser that first appeared in 1978. It was published in Italy and belongs to the wave of political and theoretical writing Althusser produced in the late 1970s, when he was engaged in sustained criticism of Eurocommunism and of the strategic direction taken by the French Communist Party. The work is associated with a conference Althusser attended in Venice in 1977 on the theme of power and opposition in post-revolutionary societies, and with the Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto, which provided him a platform to develop new ideas in that period.
What the Book Is About
At its core, Discutere lo Stato concerns the problem of the state in Marxist theory and revolutionary politics. The book is bound up with Althusser’s argument, developed in these years, that there was no adequate Marxist theory of the state and that such a theory needed to be constructed. In the text, he criticized the notion of a “government party” and defended instead the notion of a revolutionary party that stands “out of state.” The work thus belongs to Althusser’s broader late-1970s effort to rethink what a revolutionary politics could mean in the conditions of Western Europe, at a moment when many communist parties were moving toward parliamentary and governmental strategies.
Key Ideas and Themes
The central theme of Discutere lo Stato is the relationship between the revolutionary party and the state. Althusser rejected the idea that a communist party should understand itself as a party of government — that is, as a force whose horizon is the administration of the existing state. Against this, he upheld the conception of a party positioned outside the state, a formulation that signals his insistence that revolutionary politics cannot be reduced to winning control of state institutions.
This argument was developed in the context of Althusser’s wider polemic against Eurocommunism. In the mid- and late 1970s, European communist parties, including the French Communist Party, had begun to argue that a peaceful transition to socialism was possible in Western Europe. Althusser regarded this as a new opportunistic version of Marxist humanism, and he contested the party leadership’s decision at its twenty-second congress in 1976 to abandon the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. His objection was not only political but theoretical: he held that the party had shown contempt for materialist theory by suppressing what he considered a scientific concept.
The book also connects to Althusser’s claim, elaborated in the abandoned 1978 manuscript “Marx in his Limits,” that no Marxist theory of the state existed. This was a striking and self-critical position for a thinker who had spent the 1960s presenting Marxism as a science. The recognition of a gap in Marxist theory — the absence of a developed theory of the state — was, for Althusser, not a reason for despair but an opening: he stressed that something vital and alive could be liberated by the crisis of Marxism, and that Marxism, originally reflecting only Marx’s own time, needed to be completed by a theory of the state.
A further theme running through the work is the nature of the crisis of Marxism itself. Althusser treated this crisis as an opportunity for renewal rather than simply as a defeat. The perception of Marxism as a historically bounded theory — one that required extension and revision — was, in his view, a productive insight. Discutere lo Stato belongs to this moment of reassessment, in which Althusser was re-examining the theoretical foundations of the tradition he had done so much to shape.
Structure and Approach
The material available does not describe the internal organization of Discutere lo Stato in detail. What can be said is that the book emerged from Althusser’s engagement with Italian intellectual and political circles in the late 1970s, particularly through the Venice conference and through Il manifesto. It is a work of political and theoretical intervention rather than a systematic treatise, written in the context of live debates within and around European communism.
Significance and Influence
Discutere lo Stato is significant as a document of Althusser’s late political thought, a phase in which he turned sharply against the strategic orientations of the major Western communist parties and pressed the case for a more radical conception of revolutionary politics. Its criticism of the “government party” and its defense of a party “out of state” mark a distinctive position within the debates over Eurocommunism that preoccupied the European left in the late 1970s. The book also reflects Althusser’s growing conviction that Marxist theory lacked an adequate account of the state — a conviction that would shape his final years of work and that stands as one of his most consequential late theoretical claims.
The author of Discutere lo Stato was born Louis Pierre Althusser on 16 October 1918 in Birmendreïs, near Algiers, in French Algeria, into a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace. His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk; his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, was a devout Catholic and a schoolteacher. In 1930 the family moved to Marseille, where his father was to direct the Compagnie Algérienne bank branch, and Althusser spent the rest of his childhood there, excelling at the Lycée Saint-Charles and joining a scout group. A second displacement came in 1936, when he settled in Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc, where he was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, and wanted to be a Trappist.
After two years of khâgne under Jean Guitton at the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure in July 1939, but his attendance was deferred when he was drafted into the French Army in September of that year. Captured by the Germans at Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein for the five remaining years of the war, where he was first assigned to hard labour and later reassigned to the infirmary after falling ill, an occupation that allowed him to read philosophy and literature. He later described the camp’s experiences of solidarity, political action, and community as the moment he first understood the idea of communism, recalling: “It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit—and that I actually met a communist”. The camp experience also affected his lifelong bouts of mental instability, reflected in a constant depression that lasted until the end of his life; the psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco argued that the absurd war experience was essential for his philosophical thought.
Resuming his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare for the agrégation, Althusser met the sociologist Hélène Rytmann in 1946, a Jewish former French Resistance member with whom he was in a relationship until he killed her by strangulation in 1980. That same year he began a close friendship with Jacques Martin, a translator of Hegel and Hölderlin, who was influential on Althusser’s interest in the bibliography of Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem, and Hegel, and to whom Althusser dedicated his first book. Although he remained a Catholic, Althusser became more associated with left-wing groups, joining the “worker-priests” movement and embracing a synthesis of Christian and Marxist thought. His 1947 DES thesis, written under Gaston Bachelard’s supervision and based on The Phenomenology of Spirit, was titled “On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel”; according to the researcher Gregory Elliott, Althusser was a Hegelian at that time, but only for a short period.
In 1948 Althusser was approved to teach in secondary schools but instead became a tutor at the ENS, and in 1954 he became secrétaire de l’école litteraire. He was deeply influential at the ENS through the lectures and conferences he organized with the participation of leading French philosophers such as Jacques Lacan, and he influenced a generation of French philosophers; among his students were Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, and Michel Serres. In total, he spent 35 years at the ENS, working there until November 1980. Parallel to his academic life, he joined the French Communist Party in October 1948, declaring, “Communism was in the air in 1945, after the German defeat, the victory at Stalingrad, and the hopes and lessons of the Resistance.” He was primarily active in the “Peace Movement” section and kept his Catholic beliefs for a few years; in 1949 he published in L’Évangile captif, the tenth book of the Jeunesse de l’Église, an article on the historic situation of Catholicism, writing about the relationship between the Catholic Church and the labour movement and advocating both social emancipation and the Church’s “religious reconquest”. Initially afraid of joining the party because of the ENS’s opposition to communists, he did so when he was made a tutor, and he even created at the ENS the Cercle Politzer, a Marxist study group.
In the early 1950s Althusser distanced himself from his youthful political and philosophical ideals and from Hegel, whose teachings he considered a “bourgeois” philosophy. From 1948 he studied the history of philosophy and gave lectures on it, the first about Plato in 1949; in 1949–1950 he lectured on René Descartes and wrote a thesis titled “Politics and Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century” and a small study on Rousseau’s “Second Discourse”, presented to Jean Hyppolite and Vladimir Jankélévitch in 1950 but rejected. His first book was Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire in 1959. He lectured on Rousseau from 1950 to 1955 and then changed his focus to the philosophy of history, also studying Voltaire, Condorcet, and Helvétius; this course and others on Machiavelli (1962), seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy (1965–1966), Locke (1971), and Hobbes (1971–1972) were later edited and published by François Matheron in 2006. From 1953 to 1960 he did not often publish on Marxist themes.
Althusser resumed his Marxist-related publications in 1960, when he translated, edited, and published a collection directed by Hyppolite about Ludwig Feuerbach’s works, an endeavour aimed at identifying Feuerbach’s influence on Marx’s early writings. This spurred him to write “On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions” (1961), published in La Pensée, the first in a series of articles later collected in For Marx. In 1964 he published “Freud and Lacan” in La Nouvelle Critique, which greatly influenced Freudo-Marxist thought, and he invited Lacan to a lecture on Baruch Spinoza and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. He began conducting seminars at the ENS on “On the Young Marx” (1961–1962), “The Origins of Structuralism” (1962–1963), “Lacan and Psychoanalysis” (1963–1964), and “Reading Capital” (1964–1965), all aimed at a “return to Marx” and attended by a new generation of students. For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, brought him international fame; he supported a structuralist view of Marx’s work, influenced by Cavaillès and Canguilhem, affirming that Marx laid the “cornerstones” of a new science incomparable to all non-Marxist thought. He defended what he called “theoretical anti-humanism” as an alternative to both Stalinism and Marxist humanism.
Key events in the theoretical struggle took place in 1966. In January, at a conference of communist philosophers in Choisy-le-Roi, Roger Garaudy, the official philosopher of the party, read an indictment opposing “theoretical anti-humanism”; in March, at Argenteuil, the theses of Garaudy and Althusser were formally examined by the PCF Central Committee, chaired by Louis Aragon, and the Party decided to keep Garaudy’s position as the official one. The general secretary Waldeck Rochet said that “Communism without humanism would not be Communism”. Althusser was not publicly censured nor expelled, but the party’s continued support of Garaudy resulted in a further reduction of his influence in the party. Also in 1966 he published “On the ‘Social Contract'” and “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract” in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, and in 1967 he wrote “The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy”, submitted to the Soviet journal Voprossi Filosofii, which did not accept it but which was published a year later in a Hungarian journal. In 1967–1968 he and his students organized an ENS course titled “Philosophy Course for Scientists”, interrupted by the May 1968 events, some of whose material was reused in his 1974 book Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. Another significant work from this period was “Lenin and Philosophy”, a lecture first presented in February 1968 at the French Society of Philosophy.
During May 1968 Althusser was hospitalized because of a depressive breakdown and was absent from the Latin Quarter. His initial silence was met with criticism by the protesters, who wrote on walls: “Of what use is Althusser?” He was ambivalent about the movement: he was not supportive of it and criticized it as an “ideological revolt of the mass”, adopting the PCF official argument that an “infantile disorder” of anarchistic utopianism had infiltrated the student movement, yet he also called it “the most significant event in Western history since the Resistance and the victory over Nazism” and wanted to reconcile the students and the PCF. The Maoist journal La Cause du peuple called him a revisionist, and he was condemned by former students, mainly by Jacques Rancière. Afterward he went through a phase of “self-criticism” that resulted in Essays in Self-criticism (1974), in which he revisited some of his old positions, including his support of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
In 1969 Althusser started an unfinished work only released in 1995 as Sur la reproduction; from these early manuscripts he developed “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, published in La Pensée in 1970, which became very influential on ideology discussions. In the same year he wrote “Marxism and Class Struggle” as the foreword to The Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism by his former student, the Chilean Marxist sociologist Marta Harnecker. By this time he was very popular in Latin America, where some leftist activists and intellectuals saw him almost as a new Marx, although his work was the subject of heated debates and sharp criticism; some of his works were translated into Spanish before English, and others were released in book format first in Spanish and then in French. At the turn from the 1960s to the 1970s, For Marx (1969) and Reading Capital (1970) were translated into English, disseminating his ideas among English-speaking Marxists.
In the early 1970s the PCF, like most European communist parties, was in a period of internal conflicts on strategic orientation against the backdrop of the emergence of Eurocommunism, and Althusserian structuralist Marxism was one of the more or less defined strategic lines. Althusser participated in various public events of the PCF, most notably the 1973 public debate “Communists, Intellectuals and Culture”. In a lecture given to the Union of Communist Students in 1976, he criticized above all the form in which the decision to abandon the dictatorship of the proletariat had been taken; according to Althusser, echoing his notion of “French misery” exposed in For Marx, the party demonstrated a contempt for materialist theory when it suppressed a “scientific concept”. This struggle ultimately resulted in the debacle of the fraction “Union of the Left” and an open letter written by Althusser and five other intellectuals asking for “a real political discussion in the PCF”. In 1978 he published a series of articles in Le Monde under the title “What Must Change in the Party”, published between 25 and 28 April and expanded and reprinted in May 1978 by François Maspero as the book Ce qui ne peut plus durer dans le parti communiste. Between 1977 and 1978 he mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF.
During the 1970s Althusser’s institutional roles at the ENS increased, but he still edited and published his and other works in the series Théorie with François Maspero; among the essays published was “Response to John Lewis”, a 1973 reply to an English Communist’s defence of Marxist humanism. In 1975 he concluded his Doctorat d’État at the University of Picardie and acquired the right to direct research on the basis of his previously published work; some time after this recognition, he married Hélène Rytmann. In 1976 he compiled several essays written between 1964 and 1975 to publish Positions. These years were a period in which his work was very intermittent: he gave a conference titled “The Transformation of Philosophy” in Granada and then Madrid in March 1976, and the same year gave a lecture in Catalonia titled “Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international”, in which he outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle. He also started a rereading of Machiavelli that would influence his later work, working between 1975 and 1976 on “Machiavel et nous”, a draft based on a 1972 lecture and only published posthumously, and writing for the National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled “Machiavelli’s Solitude” (1977). In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok to write for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi, he drafted a presentation titled “The Discovery of Dr. Freud”; after sending it to Chertok and some friends, he was unsettled by the criticism he received from Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, and by December he wrote a new essay, “On Marx and Freud”. He could not attend the event in 1979 and asked Chertok to replace the texts, but Chertok published the first without his consent; this became a public “affair” in 1984 when Althusser finally noticed it upon Chertok’s republication of it in a book titled Dialogue franco-soviétique, sur la psychanalyse.
After the PCF and the left were defeated in the French legislative elections of 1978, Althusser’s bouts of depression became more severe and frequent. In March 1980 he interrupted the dissolution session of the École Freudienne de Paris and, “in the name of the analysts”, called Lacan a “beautiful and pitiful harlequin.” Later he underwent a hiatal hernia-removal surgery as he had difficulties breathing while eating; according to Althusser himself, the operation caused his physical and mental state to deteriorate, and he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. He later recalled: “I wanted not only to destroy myself physically but to wipe out all trace of my time on earth: in particular, to destroy every last one of my books and all my notes, and burn the École Normale, and also, ‘if possible,’ suppress Hélène herself while I still could.” After the surgery, in May, he was hospitalized for most of the summer in a Parisian clinic; his condition did not improve, but in early October he was sent home. Upon returning, he wanted to get away from the ENS and even proposed to buy Roudinesco’s house. He and Rytmann were also convinced about the “human decline”, and he tried to talk to Pope John Paul II through his former professor Jean Guitton. Most of the time, however, he and his wife spent locked in their ENS apartment. In the fall of 1980, Althusser’s psychiatrist René Diatkine, who by now was also treating Rytmann, recommended that Althusser be hospitalized, but the couple refused.
On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled Rytmann in their ENS room. He himself reported the murder to the doctor in residence, who contacted psychiatric institutions; even before the police arrived, the doctor and the director of the ENS decided to hospitalize him in the Sainte-Anne hospital, and a psychiatric examination was conducted on him. Due to his mental state, Althusser was deemed not to understand the charges or the process to which he was to be submitted, so he remained at the hospital. The psychiatric assessment concluded he should not be criminally charged, based on article 64 of the French Penal Code, which stated that “there is neither crime nor delict where the suspect was in a state of dementia at the time of the action”. The report said Althusser killed Rytmann in the course of an acute crisis of melancholy, without even realizing it, and that the “wife-murder by manual strangulation was committed without any additional violence, in the course of [an] iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression.” As a result, he lost his civil rights, entrusted to a representative of the law, and was forbidden to sign any documents. In February 1981, the court ruled Althusser as having been mentally irresponsible when he committed the murder, therefore he could not be prosecuted and was not charged. Nonetheless, a warrant of confinement was subsequently issued by the Paris police prefecture; the Ministry of National Education mandated his retirement from the ENS; and the ENS requested his family and friends to clear out his apartment. In June he was transferred to the L’Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine.
The murder of Rytmann attracted much media attention, and there were several requests to treat Althusser as an ordinary criminal. The newspaper Minute, journalist Dominique Jamet, and Minister of Justice Alain Peyrefitte were among those who accused Althusser of having “privileges” because he was a Communist. From this point of view, Roudinesco wrote, Althusser was three times a criminal: first, the philosopher had legitimated the current of thought judged responsible for the Gulag; second, he praised the Chinese Cultural Revolution as an alternative to both capitalism and Stalinism; and finally because he had, it was said, corrupted the elite of French youth by introducing the cult of a criminal ideology into the heart of one of the best French institutions. The philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff went further, claiming Althusser taught his students to perceive crimes positively, as akin to a revolution. Five years after the murder, a critique by Le Monde‘s Claude Sarraute would have a great impact on Althusser; she compared his case to the situation of Issei Sagawa, who killed and cannibalized a woman in France but whose psychiatric diagnosis absolved him, and criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about
