Louis Althusser’s Nonexistence

Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s life story begins in Algeria in 1918, as part of the French colonial diaspora. It ends in Paris, with him as the murderer of his elderly wife Hélène, occasionally stalking the city streets (when not in mental hospitals) and disconcerting bystanders by bellowing, Je suis le grand Althusser![1]

Perhaps he had to affirm his own name, and thereby his own existence, to himself, especially after his tragic moment of madness ended his wife’s life. The name he placed on his apartment was not his own but instead Pierre Berger, his maternal grandfather. Althusser commits a similar misdirection in the opening of his satirical 1976 memoir The Facts. “As the one who has organized everything, I should introduce myself straightaway. My name is Pierre Berger. Actually, that is not true.”[2]

Subject without a Place

Althusser’s identity and existence were ambivalent truths even and especially to himself. He once wrote that birth initiated “the long forced march that turns mammalian larvae into human children, that is, subjects.”[3] Althusser was most famous for his writings on “Marxist anti-humanism” from the 1960s, but his almost monomaniacal passion is this agony over being, and being human, and being a human subject who can say “I” and who is responsible for his actions. After his act of murder on November 18, 1980, to which he immediately and freely confessed, the French courts ruled that he was not responsible due to a fit of insanity. This judgement of non-lieu, the French phrase for a dismissal of charges (“no grounds”), was indubitably correct concerning Althusser’s state of mind, but it tormented him, burying him alive, he believed, in a literal non-lieu, a non-place, trapped between the dead and the living. Yet it was, in many ways, what his philosophy always promoted, a history of a life as a “process without a subject.”[4]

Certainly, Althusser’s reputation was at least for a while buried away. In 1985, “New Philosophers” Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut dismissed Althusser with a very French insult: his work “seems very dated and, like the Beatles’ music or Godard’s first films, inevitably evokes a recent but vanished past.”[5] Or, as philosophical provocateur and sometimes admirer Slavoj Žižek put it, summarizing what he heard from his professors, “You start with theoretical anti-humanism, and you end up strangling your wife.”[6]

Yet a mere two decades earlier, he was widely considered the most significant philosopher in Paris, who was almost single-handedly rescuing Marxism from its sclerotic intellectual state. One American graduate student recalled, “His name, his ideas, his books were everywhere.”[7] Among those whom he taught at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure (ENS) were Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, the latter of whom became a colleague who influenced Althusser in turn. Then-Maoist Bernard-Henri Lévy studied under Althusser, and, despite Lévy’s transformation into a “New Philosopher,” he recalls him with reverence: “Louis Althusser, my master; the one who taught me to write and to think,” to whom Lévy says he owes “everything!”[8]

Three factors made Althusser significant then and still important today: his theory of interpellation, his structuralist rewiring of Marx, and his appropriation of Freudian ideas (especially via Jacques Lacan). Although his reputation took an understandable hit after the murder, Althusser’s ideas have been recently resurgent. This renaissance is in part due to the influence of Žižek, who has found Althusser’s combination of Lacan and a Leninist-Maoist Marx interesting, if imperfect. Arguably, in America, Althusser’s influence never fully dimmed because of the impact of his concept of “interpellation” by “Ideological State Apparatuses” (or ISAs), upon which any good post-modern could expatiate.[9]

“Interpellation” explains how those larval individuals become “subjects” who can identify themselves as a certain person. This self-identification does not happen naturally, according to Althusser and his fellow travelers (such as Foucault). We are not naturally subjects; rather, we become subjects, through outside forces. Children are acted upon by cultural and ideological structures and transformed thereby into human beings.[10] For Althusser, these structures were ISAs, such as the police, who might call persons into existence as state subjects by yelling, “Hey, YOU!” Regardless of your guilt or innocence, you feel hailed, maybe turning around, or perhaps you point to yourself. “Me?” Your feelings and actions indicate that you have allowed the policeman to create you as a subject of the state, the “you” the policeman thinks you are. “You” are now something you were not before the yell.

ISAs are “ideological” in that they represent the systems of ideas arising from the ambient socio-economic culture rather than reality. Ideology is a reductive force that attempts to unite complex historical situations under a single, simple idea. Althusser gives a telling example: the “[Judeo-]Christian Religious Ideology,” based on Exodus 3. God “defines himself as the Subject par excellence, he who is through himself and for himself (‘I am that I am’).” God, as the all-encompassing Subject, makes little human subjects through subjecting them to his law. “Moses, interpellated, . . . recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God, a subject through the Subject and subjected to the subject.”^[11] Exodus’s Subject-God is a giant policeman, the ISA par excellence. The One-who-is makes others exist, but at the cost of their subjection. The liberation-narrative of Exodus here is flipped on its head, becoming a story of the move from one subjection to another—from a straightforward bondage in Egypt to a more internal and ideological enslavement. This structure of interpellation and all the other ISAs and ideologies are inescapable features of human existence.

Structure and Marxism

Althusser was not alone in his fascination with structures. Those in the mid-twentieth century finding importance in such systems were linked together across diverse disciplines and called “structuralists.” Structuralism focuses on the quasi-autonomous relations between the parts of any given structure, whether in language, myth, or economics. For example, according to Ferdinand de Saussure, “signifiers” such as words point to “signified” meanings within language rather than, as classical language theory had it, to things outside of the linguistic system. One need not think of these extra-structural things at all to crack the code of the system at play.

Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan became known as structuralists in the realm of theory, although all three complained about the label. Foucault presented human society as fundamentally structured by relations of power, while Lacan argued for a triple structure (the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real) as the psychological matrix of human life. Althusser emphasized the intertwined webs of production.

In these formulations, as the older existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre saw with alarm, the freedom of the individual person recedes in favor of often disguised processes that seem to claim all the agency that Sartre reserved for individual freedom. Such esotericism was part of the attraction of structuralism. Althusser, Foucault, and Lacan appeared to cast aside the veils concealing the mysterious workings of society and the psyche, albeit at the cost of sounding like Job’s messengers. All our thinking and desiring is the result of power; I, Foucault, alone have escaped the matrix to tell you!

What existentialists like Sartre feared came true in the 1960s and 1970s, as Foucault would influentially declare in 1966: “One can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” Structuralism emphasizes that the system speaks through me, rather than I myself speaking. In this way, structuralism launched the “death of man” or “the death of the subject” in post-modern English and philosophy departments everywhere. As Judith Butler put it some thirty years after structuralism’s heyday, “Speaking is always in some ways the speaking of a stranger through and as oneself, of a language that one never chose, that one does not find as an instrument to be used, but that one is, as it were, used by, expropriated in [it].”[12] Language speaks through and thereby uses me, not the other way around.

In this setting, Althusser won his renown in the 1960s by bringing a critical, structuralist lens to contemporary Marxist philosophies. On the one hand, he complained that contemporary, Soviet-inspired Marxist “humanism” was obsessed with the human subject and his humanity, in its quest to claim Communism’s superiority over all other political and economic structures. Only Communism could fulfill the human being! Althusser shrewdly noted the latent teleology here, in which an end inevitably would come out of an origin. But—despite Marx’s own words to the contrary—Althusser insisted that there was no end; history came from nothing and moved toward nothing. As a materialist, he was like “a man who gets on to a moving train without knowing either where it is coming from or where it is going.” Again, history can only be “a process without a subject . . . and without end.”[13] Marxist humanism was still too indebted to Judeo-Christianity and its language of genesis and end (or telos in Greek): “the structure of every genesis is always teleological.”[14] In this way, humanist Marxism remained “fundamentally religious.”[15]

On the other hand, the official “Diamat” philosophy of the USSR and its satellite Communist parties subscribed to a “dialectical materialism” that reduced everything to economic forces and historical inevitability, but it too did not rise to the level of truly scientific theory. As Marxist sociologist Ted Benton puts it, “The range of intellectual sources legitimated by ‘orthodox’ Marxism”—essentially, a smattering of texts from Marx and his Russian followers—“might allow at least a subsistence diet for economists, economic historians and even political theorists,” but it “spells near-starvation for the philosopher.”[16]

For Althusser, Marx’s true but forgotten revolution provided a theoretical banquet in the form of “scientific” historical materialism, developing from his insight that history is a history of production. If Thales’s discovery of math initiated Platonic philosophy, and Galileo’s discovery of modern physics created Cartesian philosophy, so did Marx’s discovery of the forces of production create Marxist philosophy. Further, these forces are not merely economic. The truly Marxist thinker cannot ignore the other kinds of production: educational, political, and ideological production, for example. In pursuing these questions, Althusser wished to re-found Marxism on its own “scientific” principles—a project that might mean criticizing Marx himself for being inconsistent and unscientific. Thus, the conclusion of a Communist-Party critic of Althusser rings true: “One of the most powerful Marxist thinkers of this century . . . was doubtless never exactly a Marxian.”[17]

The Interpellating Womb

Given his atheistic program, the fact that, in the 1930s and 40s, Althusser was a believing Catholic who contemplated becoming a Trappist monk might surprise his readers. He lost his faith during and after the war, which he spent mostly in a German POW camp. The camp was in many ways a protective womb to which Althusser was umbilically joined. Indeed, his life played out in a series of wombs: his family, the prison camp, the ENS, not to mention the lengthy periods spent in mental institutions. As a friend put it, the ENS “was, more than any other institution, the very model of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ that ‘interpellates individuals as subjects.’”[18] Or, as Althusser called it, it had “a maternal ambiance . . . like an amniotic fluid.”[19]

In recalling his time in the camp, Althusser recalled that he planned an elaborate escape yet never enacted it, an experience of primordial yet ineffectual rebellion against a uterine space. “I did not forget [the escape plan] once I got back to philosophy, since it is the nub of all philosophical problems: how to escape the circle while remaining within it.”[20] Althusser’s life and theory can be read as a history of the active deferral of birth from the circle, or at least the deferral of any birth not on his own terms. He resisted that “long forced march”—the “sole war without monuments,” he writes—that would transform his larval self into a subject.

“The absolute a priori question,” according to Althusser, is “whether to be born or not to be [le naître ou n’être pas], the aleatory abyss of the human itself in every child of man.”[21] In French, the middle words for “birth” and “not to be” are pronounced the same way. The “or” is ambiguous. Is he saying there is an alternative between birth and non-being? Or is he saying that birth itself is a kind of non-being? Either way, birth and coming into existence—“genesis,” which is “fundamentally religious”—are not positive things for Althusser, because humanity is an “aleatory abyss”: a random void that, paradoxically, comes to be in its forced march of enslavement.

In his own retold history, his birth pales in comparison to the significance of Pierre Berger, Althusser’s maternal grandfather. The only happy stretches of childhood, so he claims, occurred in Berger’s home in the French countryside. His mother and father, on the other hand, are remembered completely negatively, although his biographer casts doubt on that totalizing judgment.

According to Althusser, the family problems predated his conception. His mother Lucienne was originally engaged to a man named Louis Althusser. This Louis perished in the First World War, and his older brother Charles, in a fit of levirate legalism, married Lucienne. The distant Charles, although the younger Louis’s actual father, seemed more like a perverse Joseph, the unwilling foster-father within a marriage that, at least according to Althusser, should never have been. His own name, he claimed, “contained the sound of the third person pronoun (lui [pronounced like Louis]), which deprived me of any personality of my own, summoning as it did an anonymous other. It referred to my uncle, the man who stood behind me: ‘Lui’ was Louis. It was him my mother loved, not me.”[22]

This love for an absent man crippled his mother, he insisted. He recalled Lucienne as sexually frigid, as a “wound” and a “martyr,” held in being by yet in bondage to her memories of her deceased betrothed, while resistant to her sensual husband:[23] “When she looked at me, it was not me she saw, but another person, the other Louis.”[24] His strategy was Oedipal seduction. “I would seduce her by fulfilling her desires” and be the other Louis. Yet this childhood existence was a kind of non-being, the first of many uterine suffocations: “In seducing her I always had the impression I was not myself, that I didn’t really exist, that my existence depended solely on pretense, indeed was a pretense.”[25] From this narrative comes the conviction that the family is “that most frightful, appalling, and horrifying of all the ideological State apparatuses.”[26] Recall that ISAs hail one into existence; here, the familial structure hails the child into existence through the deformation of birth and by molding him into whatever fulfills the smothering maternal desires.

Women were ambivalent realities throughout his life. While describing these early years, Althusser shows a naïve enthusiasm for the idea of sexual repression. The reader wearies of being lectured on the phallic import of young Louis’s encounter with yet another asparagus stalk or erect mushroom. Yet it seems beyond doubt that he, in addition to being disabled by depressions and manic interludes—conditions he shared with his sister—was also morbidly repulsed by and yet obsessed with women, as the inescapable circle.

In 1946, Althusser met Hélène Rytman, a Communist and French-resistance fighter eight years his senior. So commenced the stormy relationship that ended only in 1980 with her strangulation at his hands. Hélène was undeniably difficult—moody, prone to rages—and Althusser’s circle distrusted her. One visiting philosopher “once asked one of the philosophers who had shared our table at meals whether we should call on Althusser. ‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘that woman who holds him [cette femme qui le tient] would not allow it.”[27]

Althusser’s last autobiography shows his deep conflicts over her. Even when praising her love for him, he cannot avoid painting her in ways reminiscent of his mother. He loves her, he writes, and yet he was compulsively driven to affairs that distressed her. But sometimes she seemed to enable them as well, as though she deserved this suffering. She too seems to be both wound and martyr, even to the point of seemingly asking for her own destruction at his literal hands, at least in Althusser’s telling of it, and in fact the murder scene showed no sign of struggle on her part.

He admits that Hélène felt like both mother and father to him.[28] Given this, it is startling that the person who first proposed the Oedipal reading of Althusser’s family was none other than Hélène, in a letter in 1964. A few weeks after reading this letter, Althusser had his first dream of murder, this time strangling his sister Georgette (with whom he had an intense relationship) as a kind of duty. He interpreted this dream as a fusion of murder and sex, of sex as a kind of oblation that destroys, and this whole, violent concoction he now believed to be bestowed upon him by his frigid mother.[29] See in this light, Hélène’s murder appears as a delayed Oedipal revolt against the merged parental unit. Althusser finally escaped the (s)mothering womb, albeit some sixty years late. Yet this birth into subjectivity was all that terrified him—the zombie-like non-existence of the non-lieu.

Strangling the Self vs. Receiving the Gift

In smothering Hélène, Althusser was perhaps fulfilling his deep desire to go behind the inadequate Charles and be the original Louis. His autobiography frequently speaks of wanting to become the “father of my father,” thereby reasserting dominance over the one who thrust him unwillingly into existence. This patricidal drive asserts itself in other ways, such as his warring relations with the French Communist Party (of which he was a longtime member) or his arrogant dressing-down of his own psychoanalyst, who was on the receiving end of two lengthy, written lectures on Lacan.

Such asserted superiority brings a sense of power, but it also undermined Althusser’s own position. The primordial father—like the despised divine Subject—is vulnerable to Oedipal violence. Just as the Father of all must be cast down from his ideological throne, so too was Althusser’s deicidal knife inevitably turned around onto himself, as the newly erected father. Lévy wonders if his teacher’s theory of the death of the subject could be interpreted as a personal narrative: “there’s that wretched subject buried under concepts and deemed to be non-existent: is it going to shut up, at last? pipe down? leave me alone, give me a bit of peace and quiet?”[30] While full of narcissistic self-pity, Althusser’s memoirs nevertheless seethe with self-contempt, even to the point of easily disproven falsifications of his academic record. He claims, for instance, to have read very little Marx, and hardly anything of Das Kapital, the subject of his famous co-authored book, Reading Capital. Yet his library contains these books with annotations in his hand. Le grand Althusser would not be so easily strangled.

His philosophical drive to eliminate origins and ends—“the ideology of genesis”—was more sustained. This ideology entails four elements, all false: “the process of engendering, the origin of the process, the end or term of the process, and the identity of the subject of the process of engendering.”[31] The ideology of genesis thus binds itself closely to the ideology of the family, in which the parents serve as the origin and the engendering of children its natural end, all of whom are “subjects” with identities. All this is falsely comforting, he argues, because it reinforces a person’s “right to be born,” a “right to his own existence.”[32] It means one is identifiable, “already bearing its name,” much like little Louis was destined to bear the name of dead Louis.[33] Genesis implies an untroubled view of history, as a linear movement of causes and effects, of relatively stable identities and purposes. The ideology of genesis mirrors that of ideological knowledge, which entails the birth in the mind of a concept—a “conception”—that reflects the geneses occurring within reality. This concept resembles the being it knows. “Knowledge is co-birth [la connaissance soit co-naissance].”[34]

Against this, Althusser argues, we need to break “with the religious complicity between Logos and Being.”[35] He proposes the “irruption” (surgissement) of reality out of a contradictory conjunction of heterogeneous elements. “The text of history is not a text in which a voice (the Logos) speaks, but the inaudible and illegible notation of the effect of a structure of structures.”[36] Herein lies the value of structure, which gives the productive mechanism of such “irruption” after generation is cast aside—even though it is not clear that substituting genesis with “irruption” actually erases the former. Nevertheless, according to Althusser, the structure produces its irruptions as an “eternal closed circuit . . . without center, without origin,” not needing history’s genesis and end; it is a circle and not a line, perhaps like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence.[37] Or, as he put it elsewhere, “The origin is trapped in a circle.” Even after he repudiated structuralism, Althusser’s late philosophy still depends upon this eternal closed circuit, the endless circulation from void to void. Once more, the womb enfolds all.

The man who doubted origins and ends, who doubted even his own existence, ended his life writing a philosophy of “aleatory materialism.” We have encountered the term “aleatory” before, when he described humanity as a random “void.” In his late philosophy, randomness defines the entire world, which now has “the void” as its origin and end. As a replacement for God, He-who-is, who calls (interpellating!) a world into being by sharing being with himself—against all this, Althusser poses a nothingness yawning as the secret negativity at the heart of existence.[38] I, Althusser, alone have escaped the matrix to tell you!

Despite all this, he could not help desiring to receive the world as a gift. He calls attention to Heidegger’s reflection on the German phrase es gibt, translated in English as “there is”: Es gibt Kaffee, or “There is coffee.” Following Heidegger, Althusser ponders the conflation of being and gift (gibt, from geben, to give). He concludes that “the world is a ‘gift’ that we have been given,” but not one that implies a Giver. Rather, the world simply is, as a matter of fact—a fait accompli.[39] An unpredictable encounter happened, and now there is a world, but there might not have been one, nor will there necessarily be one in the future. The world is what it is, end of story.

Althusser here comes both very close to and very far from the truth, in the pathos and freedom of his philosophizing far from the public’s gaze. He cannot resist the gravitational pull of being, despite his long mistrust of it, and he cannot avoid interpreting being in terms of a gift. Perhaps even his own, much-hated birth was a gift to him. Further, he is right to see the significance of nothingness, although he stumbles when trying to give nothingness divine powers.

In fact, the world does come from nothing; it is made ex nihilo, as his long-forgotten catechism would have told him. And the being God created always bears traces of that nihil, more than Althusser realized. As Thomas Aquinas said, “Being is complete and simple, yet non-subsistent.” Only substances, as individually existent things, “subsist,” or exist in themselves: this dragonfly, that woman. Being does not “subsist” like yet another thing, alongside these things. There is no subsisting “being,” just subsisting things.

Like most of his fellow-travelers, Althusser misinterprets “being” to be a block of stuff—a substance or thing, in other words. And, rightly, he sees that such “stuff” would be in competition with himself and with the contingency of the world that he so values. This stuff-being seems to stamp out individuals, forcing everything into a stifling uniformity. But he misunderstands. Being is instead that which enables all things to be; in classical language, being is the “actuality” of things. It is not stuff inside or under me; rather being is I myself, as existing. Individuals, and not being, are all that subsist in this world. Understood this way, being retains the “nothingness” as well as the gift-nature that Althusser sensed. Being is generous; it does not subsist, but I subsist because of it.

The world itself is generous, therefore, right down to its very existence. In this it reflects the generosity of its divine origin, the triune God. God the Father’s subsistence is nothing else than the pouring out of himself to the Son and the Spirit, and he marks his world with this self-gift. Rather than a Subject who subjects others, he calls them into the freedom of being and, yes, contingency. History is not a forced ride on God’s train, as Althusser feared, but neither is it a circle without origin or end. It is both contingent and purposive, like a drama. Will the actors perform their roles well? Will they abandon the stage in protest? The cosmic drama of providence can work with all these contingencies; the play will ultimately be a comedy. But individual actors may succumb to tragedy. “I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,” Macbeth despairs, “And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone.”

In the tragedy of Louis Althusser, can we spy another storyline? One in which a birth into existence as a human subject is not the initiation into lifelong subjection to the warped desires of others? But is instead a warm welcome into a generous world, in which existence does not have to be earned but is simply given freely? In that story, even Louis Althusser, called into existence, could find a place.

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