Althusser’s late reckoning with the Marxist tradition he helped define
What the Work Is
Philosophy and Marxism is a collection of writings by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, published posthumously in 1994 as part of the two-volume Écrits philosophiques et politiques. The volume gathers texts from the later phase of Althusser’s career, when he was increasingly turning a critical eye on the Marxist theoretical tradition he had spent decades defending and reshaping. The collection includes the abandoned 1978 manuscript “Marx in His Limits” (“Marx dans ses limites”), in which Althusser argued that no adequate Marxist theory of the state had ever been produced.
What the Book Is About
The central concern of the material collected here is the state of Marxist theory itself — its gaps, its unresolved problems, and the crisis it was undergoing in the late 1970s. Rather than restating the structuralist reading of Marx that had made Althusser famous in the 1960s, these texts confront what Althusser saw as a fundamental absence at the heart of the Marxist tradition: a rigorous theory of the state. The book belongs to a period in which Althusser was breaking with some of his earlier certainties and questioning whether Marxism as it existed could account for the political realities of his time.
Key Ideas and Themes
The most significant argument developed in these pages is the claim that Marxism lacked a genuine theory of the state. In “Marx in His Limits,” Althusser contended that Marx himself had never produced a systematic account of the state, and that subsequent Marxist thinkers had failed to fill this void. This was not a minor scholarly observation but a challenge to the coherence of historical materialism as a complete science of society.
This argument connects to Althusser’s broader engagement with the crisis of Marxism, a theme he addressed in lectures and articles from the late 1970s. In a 1977 conference in Venice on power and opposition in post-revolutionary societies, Althusser stressed that something vital could be liberated by the crisis — specifically, the recognition that Marxism was originally a theory reflecting Marx’s own time and that it needed to be completed by a theory of the state. This was a striking admission from a thinker who had earlier presented Marxism as a science with firm foundations.
The volume also reflects Althusser’s critical stance toward Eurocommunism and the strategic direction of the French Communist Party. He opposed the party’s decision in 1976 to abandon the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, viewing this as a capitulation to what he called a new opportunistic version of Marxist humanism. For Althusser, the suppression of a scientific concept for political convenience demonstrated a contempt for materialist theory. His writings from this period insist that theoretical rigor cannot be sacrificed to tactical considerations, even when those considerations appear progressive.
Another thread running through the collection is Althusser’s evolving view of philosophy itself. He had long argued that philosophy is not a pure contemplation of eternal truths but is shaped by political and ideological struggles. In these later texts, this position takes on a more self-critical tone, as Althusser examines the limits of his own earlier formulations and the ways in which Marxist philosophy had failed to address the problems of the state and political power.
Structure and Approach
The writings collected in Philosophy and Marxism span the late 1970s and reflect Althusser’s characteristic method: close reading of texts, conceptual analysis, and polemical engagement with both allies and opponents. The abandoned manuscript “Marx in His Limits” is the centerpiece, but the volume also includes articles and lectures that Althusser produced during a period of intense political and theoretical ferment. The approach is not systematic exposition but rather intervention — Althusser writing against the grain of received Marxist orthodoxy, probing weaknesses, and demanding that the tradition confront what it had left unthought.
Significance and Influence
These texts belong to the final phase of Althusser’s intellectual life, before the personal tragedy of 1980 that ended his active career. They document a thinker in the process of revising his own legacy, moving away from the confident structuralism of For Marx and Reading Capital toward a more troubled and open-ended engagement with the Marxist tradition. The argument that Marxism lacks a theory of the state has since become a recognized problem in political philosophy, and Althusser’s late writings on this theme contributed to debates about the nature of political power that continue to resonate. The posthumous publication of these texts allowed readers to see a side of Althusser that had been largely hidden during his lifetime — not the architect of a system but a critic willing to acknowledge the incompleteness of the theoretical edifice he had helped to build.
The Venice conference on “Power and Opposition in Post-Revolutionary Societies” in 1977 provided Althusser with a platform, through the Italian Communist newspaper Il manifesto, to develop new ideas. His speeches there resulted in the articles “The Crisis of Marxism” (“La crisi del marxismo”) and “Marxism as a ‘finite’ theory.” The former was published as “Marxism Today” (“Marxismo oggi”) in the 1978 Italian Enciclopedia Europea. The latter text was included in a book published in Italy, Discutere lo Stato, in which Althusser criticized the notion of a “government party” and defended the notion of a revolutionary party “out of state.”
The 1976 Lectures and the Critique of Empiricism
In 1976, Althusser gave a conference titled “The Transformation of Philosophy” (“La transformation de la philosophie”) in two Spanish cities, first Granada and then Madrid, in March. The same year, he gave a lecture in Catalonia titled “Quelques questions de la crise de la théorie marxiste et du mouvement communiste international” (“Some Questions on the Crisis of Marxist Theory and the International Communist Movement”), in which he outlined empiricism as the main enemy of class struggle.
The Le Monde Articles and Ce qui ne peut plus durer
In 1977, Althusser published a series of articles in the newspaper Le Monde under the title “What Must Change in the Party.” Published between 25 and 28 April, they were 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, Althusser mainly elaborated texts criticizing Eurocommunism and the PCF. The struggle over the abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat ultimately resulted in the debacle of the fraction “Union of the Left” and an open letter written by Althusser and five other intellectuals in which they asked for “a real political discussion in the PCF.”
The Machiavelli Writings
Althusser started a rereading of Machiavelli that would influence his later work; he worked between 1975 and 1976 on “Machiavel et nous” (“Machiavelli and Us”), a draft, only published posthumously, based on a 1972 lecture, and also wrote for the National Foundation of Political Science a piece titled “Machiavelli’s Solitude” (“Solitude de Machiavel”, 1977).
The Freud Texts and the Chertok Affair
In Spring 1976, requested by Léon Chertok to write for the International Symposium on the Unconscious at Tbilisi, Althusser drafted a presentation titled “The Discovery of Dr. Freud” (“La découverte du docteur Freud”). After sending it to Chertok and some friends, he was unsettled by the criticism he received from Jacques Nassif and Roudinesco, and then, 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 by the time Chertok republished it in a book titled Dialogue franco-soviétique, sur la psychanalyse.
The 1980 Events and Their Aftermath
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, Althusser 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; in particular, he developed a persecution complex and suicidal thoughts. 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 ENS and even proposed to buy Roudinesco’s house. He and Rytmann were also convinced about the “human decline,” and so 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 Althusser’s wife Hélène 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 arrival, the doctor and the director of 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 to not 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 he 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 of the fact he was 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. Philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff went further on 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. Sarraute criticized the fact that, when prestigious names are involved, a lot is written about
