Louis Althusser

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Marx and murder: Althusser's demon and the flight from subjectivity

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SOURCE: "Marx and murder: Althusser's demon and the flight from subjectivity," in TLS, No. 4669, September 25, 1992, pp. 3-4.

[In the following review, Lilla discusses the implications that details from Althusser's life have on his work.]

On a grey November morning in 1980, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife Hélène in their apartment at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Within hours he was whisked away by ambulance to a psychiatric hospital, where he was subsequently confined by court order after having been judged mentally unfit to stand trial for an act he said he could not remember. At the time, many in Paris suspected a plot by former normaliens to protect their former teacher and exculpate him. But soon it became known that Althusser had spent much of his adult life in states of severe depression and had divided his time almost equally between the École and various psychiatric clinics. This revelation ensured that the case did not become an "affair", and it soon fell from public attention. At most, the Althusser murder was remembered along with Nicos Poulantzas's suicidal leap from the Tour Montparnasse and Michel Foucault's death from AIDS as another morbid episode in the dénouement of la pensée 68.

For all intents and purposes, Althusser's act was a murdersuicide. He took no part in public or professional life after the event, spent most of the next ten years in clinics, and died quietly in 1990. By then he was nearly forgotten, and not only because of the murder. Althusser's moment on the French public stage was actually quite short. It began noisily in 1965, when he published two highly influential books: Pour Marx, a collection of his essays, and a collaborative work with his students titled Lire le Capital. These works earned him a reputation as the leading philosophical Marxist of his generation. But by the late 1970s, after the publication of Solzhenitsyn's gulag books and the butchery of Cambodia, the French largely abandoned Marx. Althusser was still widely read and discussed by Italian and Latin American communists, and also revered by left-wing academics in America and Great Britain. But to the few thousand Parisians who constitute le monde entier of every French intellectual, he had already ceased to exist.

It came as some surprise, then, to learn that Althusser, his writings and his "act" had been heatedly debated in France last spring. Behind the commotion was the publication of no less than two Althusser autobiographies. The first, a short one called Les Faits written in 1975, is a riveting document mixing lucidity with moments of wild delirium in which Althusser recounts imaginary meetings with Pope John XXIII and de Gaulle, fantasies about robbing a bank, and fears of being pursued by the Red Brigades. The second memoir is a longer one entitled L'Avenir dure longtemps, and was composed in 1985 to "explain" how his early psychological experiences set the stage for his crime. It is a cagier and far more equivocal work. It is also something of a public disrobing, in which Althusser presents himself as an intellectual faker who had read little Marx, less Freud, and no Nietzsche. Accompanying these two very different memoirs was the first volume of a massive biography written by one of his students, Yann Moulier Boutang, and which gives yet a third account of his early life. A number of polemical articles have now been published on the new Althusser case, and Clément Rosset's slight book on the matter will probably be followed by other, more substantial ones.

The prurient interest in these Marxist "Mémoires d'outretombe" is obvious. But whatever one's view of Althusser's Marxism, there is good reason to be sceptical about using such material to conduct yet another investigation into the biographical sources of a philosopher's thought. After the Heidegger case (where the stakes are high) and the de Man case (where they were pitifully low), one wonders whether anything can be learned by picking over the bones of a relatively minor thinker who was, by all accounts, profoundly sick and dangerous.

Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Quite apart from their value as psychological documents—these are, after all, authentic diaries of an intelligent madman—the Althusser volumes permit a rare glimpse into the back-rooms of post-war French intellectual life. And like a number of recent biographies and memoirs, they confirm that the radical French philosophies of the period had less to do with grand history or our "postmodern" condition than with the shared obsessions of a small group of thinkers working in the highly centralized French context. Anyone interested in these thinkers will want to read the Althusser books, despite the atmosphere of scandal surrounding them, in order to familiarize himself with the intimate historical background to the way we think now.

Louis Althusser was born in his grandparents' Algerian home in 1918 and remained within the pied noir enclave there until 1930, when the family moved to Marseilles. As a young teenager he began to show signs of intellectual promise, and when the family moved to Lyons in 1936, he was able to enter one of the respectable provincial schools that prepare students for the École Normale. He did exceptionally well at Lyons, arriving near the top of his class and gaining the respectful friendship of his teachers. Foremost among these were the philosopher Jean Guitton and the conservative historian Jean Lacroix, strict Catholics both. Indeed, one of the revelations of Boutang's biography is the depth of Althusser's youthful attraction to monarchism and Catholicism, and the continuing presence of the latter in his private life until the early 1950s, well after his adherence to the Communist Party. By the time he left Lyons in 1939, he was like any other right-leaning, church-going boy of the period preparing to join the aristocracy of adolescence that has ruled France since the Third Republic.

Was Althusser's normal childhood? A great deal is made to rest on the question in these biographical writings, though they do surprisingly little to answer it persuasively. One reason is that Althusser himself paints two very different pictures of his early family life, the second under the burden of providing the psychological profile of a murderer. In the 1975 memoir, he portrays his parents as a stiff Catholic couple brought together almost by chance in a mistaken marriage and their family life as somewhat cold. Yet they were clearly devoted to him in their own awkward way, making the necessary sacrifices for his education and keeping up an unbroken correspondence after he left home. Excerpts from these letters collected by his biographer are not lacking in reciprocal affection.

As Boutang remarks, nothing on the surface of Althusser's childhood reflects an underlying Faulknerian chaos. So what is one to make of his 1985 memoir, which places most of the blame for his psychological distress—and, indirectly, for his criminal act—squarely on the shoulders of maman and papa? These pages are painful reading, combining as they do a reprehensible ingratitude with an utterly conventional analysis of his own sexual maturation (or lack thereof). It is astonishing to read a man famed for his intellectual sophistication and skepticism repeating the platitudes of his last psychoanalyst in the style of "Freud raconté aux jeunes filles". Perhaps Althusser, so steeped in Marxism, had lost the habit of considering human beings in any light other than that of class and ideology. He nearly says as much at the beginning of his second memoir, when he admits "surprise" at his inability to employ his earlier Marxist theoretical categories "pour comprendre ce qui m'est advenu". Such a confession by such a committed thinker is a troubling sign that vulgar Freudianism will outlast vulgar Marxism as an intellectual and cultural force in our time.

Whether Althusser's early family life was in fact the original source of his later psychological disintegration must remain forever in doubt. One important reason is that the natural course of his private and professional lives was abruptly altered by a singular historical event that neither Freudianism nor Marxism could explain: the Second World War. Although Althusser had been received into the École Normale for the fall of 1939, he was called into active military service before he could matriculate. By the spring of 1940, he had already been captured by the Germans and would remain in a Schleswig-Holstein prison camp until 1945. Althusser devotes surprisingly little reflection to this period in his memoirs, apart from noting his relative comfort and his first encounters with young men outside his class (including Communists). But Boutang finds evidence in letters and interviews that Althusser's depressions began here, and that he had already begun to withdraw into the care of doctors and the security of the hospital bed. It was during this period as well that he lost his religious faith, an event he passes over in silence.

Whatever the combination of causes may have been, it is clear that in late 1945 Althusser arrived in Paris a fragile, almost broken young man. And it was at this precise moment of psychological weakness that he entered into the three relationships that would define his adult existence. One of the virtues of Boutang's otherwise over-written biography is that he manages to establish the connections between these relations—with the École Normale, with his future wife Hélène Legotien, and with the Communist Party—and to show why they constituted a single, inseparable bloc in Althusser's mind.

Of the three, Althusser's dealings with the École were the most stable and satisfactory because they permitted him to fulfil his intellectual ambitions within strict psychological limitations. Those limitations already appeared midway through his second year at the École, when he fell into a menacing depression that required treatment. To their credit, the school authorities reacted quickly and placed him in a separate room in the infirmary, a room where he (like Michel Foucault after him) would frequently seek psychological refuge. Despite his mood swings, Althusser's brilliance soon made him a school favorite, and when the position of caïman in philosophy fell vacant in 1948, he received it without contest. Like everything else about the École Normale, the position of caïman is unique. It is not a professorship, since the École is not a university. Officially, its holder is simply responsible for supervising students' work in one field and preparing them for the national agrégation. The position demands only occasional teaching, and this schedule permitted Althusser to absent himself frequently for psychiatric treatment. Yet given the École's central place in French intellectual life, and the extreme importance placed on the philosophy agrégation, the philosophy caïman is by default one of the most powerful figures in the French intellectual establishment. This means that from 1948 until 1980, two generations of French philosophers and intellectuals passed under Althusser's manic-depressive tutelage.

Althusser was fortunate to have found an understanding "parent" in the École, for his relations with Hélène and the Communist Party were extremely rocky. As biographical writings attest, one is obliged to treat these two relationships together for reasons that are peculiar to Althusser's make-up. He and his future wife first met shortly after his arrival in Paris when he looked to be little more than a depressed, Catholic, conservative, and relatively unworldly young student. Hélène Legotien was his opposite in almost every respect—active, Jewish, Communist, and with more political experience than Althusser could ever hope to acquire. Several years his senior, she had been involved in left-wing politics since the 1930s, had worked for Jean Renoir, and had spent the war in the Resistance, where she befriended Albert Camus and Louis Aragon. Although the Liberation had left Hélène with more memories than prospects, she was the most exotic thing Althusser had ever encountered. Coup de foudre.

Althusser's relations with Hélène might have ended after she robbed him of his virginity in the École infirmary, had she not also (or so he thought) saved his life. When Althusser's depression was first diagnosed in Paris, he was nearly committed to an asylum, a prospect that understandably terrified him, since lifetime incarcerations were then not uncommon. Hélène refused to accept this diagnosis and secretly arranged a second examination with a doctor who recommended shock treatments, which seemed the lesser evil. These restored him to his senses, at least temporarily, and kept him a free man. After helping to liberate France, Hélène had, as it were, liberated Althusser. However sexually and ideologically promiscuous he would later become, Althusser would not forget these nearly simultaneous liberations, and in the following decades neither reason, common sense, nor an instinct for self-preservation could separate him from Hélène or the Party.

Who was Hélène Légotien? Boutang's portrait of her is anything but flattering. Very little can be confirmed about her past, except that she had abandoned her given name, Rytmann, in contempt of her Jewish roots. Boutang tells us repeatedly that she was physically unattractive, personally abrasive, and incapable of getting along with Althusser's students and friends. Althusser himself fought often and violently with her, and they were frequently separated. None the less, they always returned to his claustrophobic apartment at the École and continued to suffer there together until that November morning in 1980.

And suffer they did, both in private and public. Certainly the most historically significant chapters of the biography concern the Althussers' joint struggle with the PCF in the decade after the war, and in them Boutang does a good job of evoking the eerie Stalinist mentality of the period. The background to this little drama is still shrouded in mystery. It seems that immediately after the war the Party had refused Hélène admittance, charging her with involvement in gruesome "purification" murders in Lyons during the Liberation. Hélène steadfastly denied the charges, and Althusser of course believed her. (Boutang intimates that the Party may have known something.) For the rest of their lives together, the couple were engaged in the demeaning task of clearing her name and begging for admission. Letters were written, meetings held, but even Althusser's prestigious academic position failed to move the Party leaders. Humiliation followed humiliation. When, for example, a meeting of the local Communist cell was held on the question in 1950, Althusser actually voted against her out of Stalinist solidarity. ("Je le savais depuis longtemps, j'étais bien un lâche.") Later that year, Althusser himself was called before the cell of Communist students in the École to explain his liaison and was ordered to break with her. He agreed, only to recant the next day. (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Michel Foucault were both cell members at the time.)

Boutang's first volume breaks off in early 1956, three years before Althusser published his first book. This is a sensible stopping-point, since both the political situation and Althusser's public profile would change radically thereafter. For the French Communist Party, 1956 was a watershed: Khrushchev's secret speech, the failed Hungarian uprising, and the PCF's hesitant embrace of something called Communist "humanism". Althusser opposed such a reorientation of the Party, and it was this opposition in the name of a theoretically pure, anti-humanistic Marxism that would make his reputation over the following decade. The next volume will no doubt pay closer attention to Althusser's intellectual development during this period, to his doctrinal quarrels with the PCF, his discovery of a coupure between the early and late Marx, his "theory of theoretical practice", and his flirtations with Leninism, Maoism, and liberation theology. In short, it should present an Althusser more familiar to us.

Whether Boutang will find a similar coupure between the early and late Althusser remains to be seen. It is possible that his second volume will restore some lustre to the later philosophical writings in this way, but it is difficult to imagine how they can survive the brutal psychological reduction to which Althusser himself subjects their author. If his first memoir is to be believed, Althusserian Marxism is defensible, but its author was mad. If the second is to be believed, Althusserian Marxism did not exist, since Althusser was not responsible for his actions—not for his writings, nor for Hélène's murder. Perhaps his illness means that neither memoir should be believed, but then where does that leave us? The paradox of Althusser, like that of the Cretan liar, looks insoluble.

And in the end it may not matter. Althusserian Marxism was an ephemeral philosophical development unimaginable—indeed inexplicable—outside the petit monde of Paris in the 1960s and that unique intellectual Petri dish, the École Normale Supérieure. Yet the morality lurking behind this philosophy persists and has proved remarkably adaptable, as Althusser's own case shows. His earliest political teaching, elaborated in his writings on Marx, was that man is not the "subject" of historical activity but only the "bearer" of a history which ideology and social structures produce through him. This became an article of faith in la pensée 68, which sought to drive "subjectivity" and "humanism" from every intellectual domain. When Althusser's anti-humanistic Marx failed to enlighten him about the murder, he had no trouble changing horses and adopting an anti-humanistic Freud to make the same moral point: man is not his own subject.

In fact, Louis Althusser was not the subject of himself. He was possessed by something he could not control, a demon that tormented him for over forty years and drove him to kill the only person he loved. No one reading these doleful confessions will reach any other conclusion. But are we all so possessed? Althusser's work today appears as one extended effort to make us share his condition, to persuade us not only that modern capitalism mesmerizes through the "Ideological Apparatuses of the State", but, as he later puts it in his last memoir, that "the most terrible, unbearable, and frightening of all Ideological Apparatuses of the State is the family". Biography now permits us to see what a profoundly intimate meaning the philosophical flight from subjectivity and the attack on humanism had for Althusser, as it did for Foucault. Why their quest for self-erasure then found resonance among an entire generation of Western intellectuals is a puzzle which historians must confront when they come to write about the time in which we live.

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