Louis Althusser

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Stranglehold

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SOURCE: "Stranglehold," in The New Yorker, Vol. LXX, No. 1, February 21, 1994, pp. 115-19.

[In the following review, Steiner asserts that the scandal surrounding Althusser's life has overshadowed his work.]

There are moments when bad taste is the last refuge of common sense. Let me be in bad taste. Perhaps philosophers should strangle their wives. The name of Socrates' wife has passed into the language as that of an ignorant shrew. Philosophy is an unworldly, abstruse, often egomaniacal obsession. The body is an enemy to absolute logic or metaphysical speculation. The thinker inhabits fictions of purity, of reasoned propositions as sharp as white light. Marriage is about roughage, bills, garbage disposal, and noise. There is something vulgar, almost absurd, in the notion of a Mrs. Plato or a Mme. Descartes, or of Wittgenstein on a honeymoon. Perhaps Louis Althusser was enacting a necessary axiom or logical proof when, on the morning of November 16, 1980, he throttled his wife.

But the master ironist, the joker, is life itself. It is likely that Althusser's writings on Hegel and Marx are already fading into cold dust. Paradoxically, what has vitality in his work is only his collapse into murder and derangement. It is this hideous coda which continues to fascinate, to inspire biography, and to motivate the publication—and, now, the translation into English—of Althusser's apologetic memoir. In French, the title is L'Avenir Dure Longtemps. The English title is a gross mistranslation, longtemps being, very precisely, not "forever." Either way, the title is more than a touch pretentious and vacuous, as is so much of Althusser's philosophic prose. The haunting marvel, and what will endure longtemps, is the initial two and a half pages. I know of no document like them. Ideally, they ought to be cited in full.

"I shall describe what happened—between two zones of darkness, the unknown one from which I was emerging and the one I was about to enter. Here is the scene of the murder just as I experienced it," they begin, and Althusser sets down his recollection with uncanny detail. Often he would massage the neck of his wife, Hélène, he explains. This time, he was massaging the front of her neck:

I pressed my thumbs into the hollow at the top of her breastbone and then, still pressing, slowly moved them both, one to the left, the other to the right, up towards her ears where the flesh was hard. I continued massaging her in a V-shape. The muscles in my forearms began to feel very tired; I was aware that they always did when I was massaging.

Hélène's face was calm and motionless; her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling.

Never before had Louis Althusser "looked into the face of someone who had been strangled." Utter terror seized him. He screamed "I've strangled Hélène!" and rushed into the empty courtyard (it was a Sunday) of the École Normale, France's hothouse of intellect, in which he made his almost legendary home. He roused the school doctor: "I kept on screaming that I had strangled Hélène and pulled him by the collar of his dressing-gown insisting he come and see her, otherwise I would burn the École down. Étienne did not believe me, saying 'It's impossible.'" Alone for a moment back in his apartment, Althusser took a strip from the tattered window curtains—the couple cultivated deprivation—and "placed it diagonally across Hélène's chest, from her right shoulder to her left breast." A curious gesture: part academic decoration—the hood of an honorary degree—and part pathetic valediction. The doctor came, and gave Althusser an injection. In Althusser's study "someone (I do not know who) was removing books I had borrowed from the École library." This is a Shakespearean touch, unendurably exact in its intimations of academic priorities. What is mere homicide compared with unreturned library books?

The assassin sank into darkness. He came to in Sainte-Anne's, the hospital for the mentally diseased, "I am not sure when." The French mandarinate had swung into action. Normaliens are the freemasonry of cultural politics. The Minister of Justice was, of course, an alumnus. By the time the police arrived, Althusser had been spirited to bleak safety. No warrant could be served on a man in a state of total mental collapse. Two months after the murder, legal proceedings were dropped. The philosopher stayed in mental hospitals until 1983. He was then allowed to live alone in the north of Paris, seeing a very few faithful friends and acolytes. Rumor has it that he would now and again stroll the gray streets and call out to passersby, "I am the great Althusser!" He died, of cardiac failure, in a clinic outside Paris on October 22, 1990; he was seventy-two. During the years of isolation and twilight, he composed voluminous autobiographical texts, this book among them. They qualify, correct, and embellish one another. But the same cry of questioning despair rings through them: "Why did I kill Hélène? I cannot find any coherent answer. Nor can the psychiatrists who are now my familiars and contact with reality. Reader, can you?" And it is that cry and the overwhelming truth of the narrative of the deed which compel attention.

Who was le grand Althusser, and what formed him? A conventional bourgeois background; fervent Catholicism during adolescence and early manhood; the characteristic Gallic reflex of seeking out confessors and "masters of thought" among his teachers. Captured in June of 1940, at the age of twenty-one, Althusser spent more than four and a half years as a prisoner of war in a Lager in Schleswig-Holstein. Material on this period is still to be published, but it may well have been during this long captivity that the first shadows fell. So far as is known, Althusser strove for neither repatriation nor escape. His attitude appears to have been one of resignation and inertia. The truth or the strategic legend of an enduring fatigue—a melancholy and miasma of the soul—caused by these years of impotence attached itself to the rest of Althusser's career. At the École Normale, which he entered after the war, Althusser found a cadre and a climate of sensibility uniquely fitted to his gifts. After completing his studies, he rapidly established himself as a tutor in philosophy and a master in residence. In each successive class, or promotion, many of the most brilliant students clustered around the young guru. His tutorials and seminars acquired an almost mystical aura. Some students, however, were repelled. In a recently published memoir by one of them, an incisive French metaphysician, we read, "It was obvious to me from the start that Louis Althusser was mad."

In a twofold motion emblematic of the later nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties in the Paris intelligentsia, Althusser joined the Communist Party and went into analysis. As a student at the École, he had undergone bouts of electroshock therapy. Black depressions alternated with periods of formidable, charismatic literary and pedagogic activity. A public debate in which Althusser pulverized Sartre (the detested father figure) established his celebrity at large. With the publication, in 1965, of Pour Marx and Lire "Le Capital," two tracts put together with members of his seminars, Althusser's influence was at its greatest. It declined rapidly, owing both to the derisive hostility of official French Communism and to Althusser's ambiguous—indeed, inert—role during the 1968 student uprising.

In 1946, during one of his periods of weariness and enervation, Althusser had met Hélène Rytmann, who in the Resistance had taken the name Légotien. The facts of this crucial relationship remain opaque despite—or, rather, because of—the volume of narrative and conjecture it has generated. Poignantly, Althusser tells of their shared misère, of the bruising needs that bound them. If one reads his recollections closely, it appears that she initiated him sexually and represented the only substantive eros in a life otherwise cloistered. Yann Moulier Boutang, the first volume of whose devoted but scrupulously penetrating biography of Althusser has already appeared, says otherwise. There were other and contrastively radiant women in Althusser's life, Moulier Boutang writes, but Hélène's insane suffering when she sensed or stumbled on these episodes only served to augment her devouring grip. Ugly, neurotic, obsessional in every way, Hélène was also fascinating in her asceticism, in her courage, in her uncompromising intellectuality. (Imagine trying to live with Simone Weil.) Althusser's dependence on her was that of an addict. She ruled his life. Around 1970, she simply moved into his quarters at the École. In what Althusser calls his "hypomanic states," he would turn fiercely on his guardian demon, only to come back to her in penitential despair. A long inferno out of Strindberg, but manifestly indispensable to both parties.

To make matters worse, Hélène had been excluded from the Party. The circumstances are murky in the extreme. (Moulier Boutang hints at fresh light in his second volume.) In any event, this anathema paralyzed Hélène. She demanded of Althusser that he sacrifice whatever time, energies, political pressures he could to her reinstatement. Did he himself know the facts? Gossip—and outside the Vatican there is none more venomous than that in the Communist Party labyrinths—hinted at some unauthorized, possibly sadistic vendetta in which Comrade Légotien had been critically implicated just before or just after the Liberation in Lyons. Whatever the facts, Althusser failed to obtain reparation or Party amnesty for her. This, in turn, aggravated his own sense of isolation and the hysterical litigations between them. Yet his worship remained unshaken. According to him, Hélène's language was more inventive than that of James Joyce. "The softness of her laugh was irresistible." (Others recall an acid cackle.) "Through her ability to listen, her understanding of the human heart, and her genius for understanding she was indeed the equal of the greatest who lived." A classic tale of the unreason of love sings through these pages:

But what moved me more than anything were her hands, which never changed. They had been fashioned by work and bore the marks of hard physical labour, yet her touch had a wonderful tenderness which betrayed her heartbreak and helplessness. They were the hands of a poor, wretched old woman who had nothing and no one to turn to yet who found it in her heart to go on giving. I was filled with such sorrow at the suffering engraved on them. I have often wept into these hands and they have often made me weep, though I never told her why. I feared it would cause her pain.

Hélène, my Hélène …

Here is an historical but genuine descendant of Augustine and Rousseau. If anything of Althusser persists, it will be passages such as this.

In his professional life, Althusser set out to prove that Marxism had been misread not only by the bureaucrats of Stalinism and by the French Communist Party but by philosophers everywhere. It was not an ideology at all, he maintained, but a rigorous scientific theory (in the sense in which econometrics may be held to be the rigorous scientific theory of our social structure and conduct): Marxism yielded laws of material and social evolution as predictive as those being discovered by Lévi-Strauss in structural anthropology, by Chomsky in generative grammar, by Lacan in psychoanalysis. What mattered more was that such laws entailed political actions—they underwrote a revolutionary praxis as systematic as that of thermodynamic reactions. Political adventurism, "spontaneism," libertarian rhetoric, and the hot air of "humanism" were the enemy. Althusser's disciples thrilled to the promise of a true science of revolution. Cannily, Althusser's style of exposition melds that spice of obscurity essential to recent French doctrines with a contemptuous harshness. His works are "little red books" on a magisterial, canonic level. The very fact that the Party poured derision on these "ivory tower vaporings" only increased their spell.

The misreading is, largely, Althusser's. Marxism is not, and has never been, a rigorous science. Its predictions and theoretical dogma have in the main turned out to be false. Marxism is, rather, a messianic dream of immanent justice. Its source is twofold: the Judaic prophetic vision of human redemption, and the millenarian promise of the French Revolution and European Romanticism. Marx's peers are not the exact scientists but the panoptic dreamers of historical progress and fulfillment, such as Hugo, Michelet, and Wagner. Pace Althusser, it is Marx's incensed humanism that has inspired millions of men and women even unto sacrificial death, and it is the recent collapse of that humanistic impulse that has left a black hole in the history of hope.

Did Althusser himself come to realize this? There is substantial testimony that during his late years of dishevelment he tried for some kind of arrangement with the Roman Catholicism of his youth. In 1979, he sought an audience with John Paul II. There is method in the madness. In their doctrinal absolutism, their organization, and their altruistic ideals, Catholicism and utopian Marxism are akin. But then there is hardly an issue on which Althusser did not exhibit divided, possibly schizophrenic sentiments. Various modes of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy punctuated his wretched state. He published a collection of turgid meditations on psychoanalysis, accompanied by letters exchanged with Lacan, and for a long time Lacan was a key presence. Yet in 1980 Althusser turned on the magus with public ferocity.

That Louis Althusser possessed intellectual and pedagogic powers of an unusual order is obvious. So is the role that he played, albeit briefly, in the life of the mind of a certain French élite during the nineteen-sixties. His writings on Montesquieu, on the continuities between the early and the mature Marx, on the perennial dilemma of the relations between Marxist theories of history and current political practice, especially in regard to the industrial working class, exercise a certain authority, even where they are arbitrary and wrong-headed. The claim that he was among the most influential of Western thinkers on Marxism was for a decade certainly arguable. Today, it has all but faded. And what subsists, as the mere fact of this translation for readers who will never have glanced at the theoretical works of Althusser makes plain, is the piteous scandal of the life.

Why did Althusser kill Hélène?

There can be, as he says over and over in wild desolation, no coherent, summarizing answer. Douglas Johnson, an old friend, reports in the book's informative introduction that Althusser was a sleepwalker, and may have acted wholly unaware, repeating, this time fatally, the massage he frequently used to relieve Hélène's nervous tension. Others whisper that Hélène had decided to end their hermetic coexistence, and Althusser felt he could never endure the break. Romantic conjecture has it that Althusser's love for Hélène had reached pathological excess—that, apprehensive of his own darkening condition, he made certain that they would be together, and singular to one another, always. A few disenchanted observers have hinted that Althusser could no longer stand his companion's crazed possessiveness and the incessant blame she heaped on him for his failure to obtain her reintegration into the Party. She clawed at him until he snapped.

I have no knowledge of the matter. Perhaps each of these hypotheses is partly right. Or could it be that a man inebriate with abstraction, with the elixir of naked thought, will come to perceive that for him the only viable marriage is that with solitude?

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