lewis a. kirshner - the man who didn't exist; the case of louis althusser

7/27/2019 Lewis a. Kirshner - The Man Who Didn't Exist; The Case of Louis Althusser

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211Lewis A. Kirshner

American Imago, Vol. 60, No. 2, 211239. 2003 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

211

LEWIS A. KIRSHNER

The Man Who Didnt Exist:

The Case of Louis Althusser

On the morning of November 16, 1980, the eminentParisian philosopher and Communist intellectual, LouisAlthusser, burst from his shuttered apartment at the cole

Normale Suprieurein a state of confusion and disarray, calling tohis friend and physician Pierre tienne that he had strangledhis wife Hlne. The body of the victim lay across their bedpeacefully, without any indication of struggle, perplexing thosearriving on the scene and instilling a mystery reinforced byAlthussers own amnesia, as he brooded in isolation at theSainte-Anne Hospital, the site of his first admission for manic-depressive psychosis in 1947. To the dismay of many, the courtruled that because of his mental illness he was not to be legallycharged, leaving events behind the murder unexamined andopen to speculation. Partly for this reason, Althusser wrote aremarkable autobiography, LAvenir dure longtemps(1985), withthe intent of throwing light on this sad final chapter of hishistory.1

Aside from its relevance to forensic psychiatry, this docu-ment, with its strange mixture of fact, fantasy, and delusion,raises fascinating questions about human behavior, the natureof the self, and mental illness. Because of the public nature ofhis apparent act of madness, which Althusser placed in thecontext of his private psychic reality, as well as in the context ofhis philosophy of history and subjectivity, the autobiography

bears comparison to that of Presiding Judge Schreber, minedby Freud (1911) for his theory of paranoia. It demonstrateswhat is at once most familiar to clinicians (the repetitivephenomenology of a major mental disorder) and most unfath-omable (the unique case)all the more so since Althusser hadundergone years of biological treatments and psychoanalytictherapy, and written with real insight on these subjects.


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212 The Case of Louis Althusser

Althusser was one of those unfortunates who poignantlyexpress a sense of lacking an authentic existence of my own(1985, 107). He felt disembodied and unreal, attributing thisdeficiency to a maternal gaze that looked through him towardsanother person, his deceased namesake. Death was inscribedin me from the beginning, he writes. I wanted to destroymyself at any price because, from the start, I did not exist(306). From this self-perception flowed Althussers fascinationwith an anthropology of the void. He echoed the structuralistpronouncement of the death of man and developed aconception of history without subjects, a theory of beginnings

from the nothingness of cause, of essence, and of origin(492). In his ultimate formulations, there was no place foragency, cohesive selfhood, or intentionality. The materialistphilosopher, he declared, is like one who boards a movingtrain by accident, not knowing where it is going or where he isheaded (480). Above all, he asked in the autobiography,could he be held responsible for the death of the personaround whom his life had revolved for over thirty years?

Biography

Louis Althusser was born in a small Algerian town onOctober 16, 1918, the son of a father of Alsatian background,Charles Althusser, who made a successful career in banking,starting as an adolescent on the lowest rung, and a Frenchmother, Lucienne Berger.2 He had a younger sister Georgette,to whom he seems to have been devoted and who also sufferedsevere depressions. The family saga is emphasized in The FutureLasts Forever and The Facts (1976b), another autobiographywritten four years before the murder. The latter title, undoubt-edly ironic since the account incorporates fictitious material,alerts us to the perennial difficulty in distinguishing betweensubjective truth and objective (consensual) reality.

In The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser repeatedly insists onhis role in his mothers unconscious as the replacement for herlost love, his deceased uncle Louis. The original Louis Althusserwas, like his nephew, a brilliantlycestudent in Algiers prepar-


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ing for entry into a prestigious national academy when he wasdrafted in 1914. Killed in battle, he left a grieving family (hewas his mothers favorite) and a bereft fiance, LucienneBerger. Into this vacated place stepped the older brother,Charles, who, following the biblical custom of levirate mar-riage, became the substitute groom and, nine months later, thefather of another Louis. Before his birth, Althusser concluded,his destiny had been determined by two inescapable facts: hisfunction as an embodiment of his mothers desire for herdeceased fianc, and his fathers resentment of that samefavored younger brother. Lacan might have said that the dice

were already thrown for him. But the facts become murkywhen we read the devastating 1964 letter by Hlne Rytman, inwhich she laid out the dynamics of this family constellation,along with a detailed analysis of Althussers infancy in thehostile milieu of a North African colony.3 Althusser substan-tially concurred with her account, but it needs to be viewedwith caution given Rytmans part in Althussers story; herdesires were far from altruistic and she apparently had atendency to think in paranoid terms.

Many readers of his autobiography, including de Marty

(1999), Rosset (1992), and de Pommier (1998), have beenconvinced that Althusser was a pathetic wreck of a person,stunted in his emotional development and never genuinelyexisting as a true subject. To be sure, there was always anelement of contrivance and ruse in Althusser, who deliberatelyplayed the psychiatric victim, but he undeniably also hadsevere psychiatric problems. In addition to numerous docu-mented episodes of mental illness beginning in 1947, Althusserwas from childhood on inhibited and insecure, vulnerable toboth success and failure, which could alike induce extremeanxiety, withdrawal, or depression. Revealing evidence of hisfrailty is provided by his stunted sexual development. This heblamed on two interventions by his mother, the first of which,Boutang suggests (1992, 82), may never have occurred. In oneepisode, his mother is said to have objected during Althussersadolescence to his visiting a female acquaintance; and inanother, to have commented on the stain of a nocturnalemission. Whatever the reality of these incidents, he displayed


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a near-phobic avoidance of women as a young man andclaimed not to have masturbated until age twenty-seven. Rytmanwas, in fact, his first sexual partner, and their liaison directlypreceded the depression that culminated in his first hospital-ization.

Despite his difficulties, the young Althusser possessedmany strengths and excelled in diverse areas. He was a brilliantstudent, artistic, athletic, a talented violinist, and, in general,engaged in the real world. Perhaps most important, he had theability to form close friendships. From all appearances, hisrelationships with his family did not take on their bleak cast at

least until the 1964 letter from Rytman, and possibly muchlater. In the autobiography, which reflects her influence, hecomplains of his fathers failure to make any meaningfulconnection with him, a situation worsened by an emotionalschism between his parents that left them living almost com-pletely disconnected lives. Only the kindly maternal grandfa-ther, Pierre Berger, idealized in Althussers portrait, offeredwarmth and contact. But the heavy artillery is reserved for hismother, who is described as cold, emasculating, phobic, andcontrolling. If the evidence gathered by Boutang suggests that

this one-dimensional portrayal was in part a product of thecolossal effort at self-justification that inspired Althussersautobiographical project, this qualification ironically vindi-cates Althussers own philosophical claim that the sense of alife can only be emergent, never determined by the past.

As a youth, Althusser was deeply involved in Catholic faithand devotion. His piety echoed that of his mother, whoappears to have exhibited an idiosyncratic religiosity andhabits of hygiene, which, as time went on, evolved into franklyobsessional and psychosomatic symptoms. At Lyon, as a lycestudent, Althusser participated in religious retreats, favoredobservant professors, and moved in conservative Catholic,monarchist circles. In the late 1930s, however, through theinfluence of his teacher Jean Guitton, he was drawn to theCatholic workers movement. His subsequent break with theChurch and its left-wing humanist politics was gradual, and it isnot clear when his faith was lost. Certainly, he remained apracticing Catholic until well after World War Two.


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Althussers fledgling career, like that of his namesake ageneration earlier, was interrupted in 1940 by the outbreak ofhostilities in Europe. Inducted alongside his classmates, heserved briefly with an artillery unit in Bretagne. Its surrenderled to his removal to a POW work camp in Germany, where hewas confined for almost five years. Althussers failure to at-tempt the escape that was on every prisoners mind thence-forth occupied an important place in his self-analysis. Heattributed his paralysis to a fear of danger and a need forprotection, which kept him inside the stalag. When, finally, hedid seek to gain repatriation by counterfeiting certification as

a nurse, he failed to remove a crucial page from his officialrecord, which exposed his ruse. There was always a sense ofsecurity to be found on the inside for the fragile Althusser,who was able to make strong friendships and do useful workwithin the confines of the all-male camp.

There is a parallel between Althussers wartime intern-ment and his relations to the Church, to the cole NormaleSuprieure, where he resided for most of his adult life, and, mostdramatically, to the French Communist Party. Towards each ofthese institutions he evidenced an amalgam of profound

loyalty and radical alienation. His unresolved ambivalencerequired the security of an ideological structure (the fantasy ofbeing contained) and the freedom to be critical of thatstructure. He resembles the severely narcissistic patients whofind psychic equilibrium in what Arnold Modell (1984) hastermed the sphere within a sphere. They maintain a tenuousself-cohesion by remaining within the envelope of a protectiveobject towards which they profess indifference or hostility.Although Althussers ambivalence towards his containing per-sons and institutions at times seemed to verge on bad faith, italso seems clear that his psychic survival required the supportof an ideal object represented by these containers.

During captivity, Althusser wrote to family members, read,and kept a daily journal, in which a hiatus in early 1941 isviewed by Boutang as indicating the first episode of depres-sion. His major crisis of religious belief probably occurredabout two years later. According to Boutang, Althusser admit-ted to having lost his faith in the camp, although he remained


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for many years a practicing Roman Catholic. As a seventeen-year-old, Althusser wrote in a letter to his closest friend, Paulde Gaudemar, I am not stable, passing through successive andeven absolutely opposing states of mind. . . . If I did not havewhat I call my profound beliefs I would be pathetic. . . .Without my religious faith, my parents, and my friend close tome, I would be a sorry person (quoted in Boutang 1992, 82).Enthralled at nineteen by a lecture on Islamic mysticism, heexpressed in his journal a need to immerse himself no lessintensely in Christianity as an all-encompassing religion(134), and his lycethesis was consecrated to the God of Faith

(119).After the war, Althusser began to advocate the participa-

tion of Christians in the Communist party, on whose claim tocarry the banner of history his faith increasingly came to lean.Arriving in Paris, he enrolled in the cole Normale Suprieure,where he would spend the next thirty-four years, first as astudent, then as a professor. He prepared his diplme dtudessuprieuresroughly equivalent to a masters thesison Hegelin 1947 and opened contacts with left-wing Catholic groups,writing for their publications. In 1948, he joined the Commu-

nist Party. Upon completing his agrgation in philosophyacompetitive examination qualifying one as a professorin thesame year, he was offered a position at thecole, launching hiscareer as a politically engaged intellectual.

Althussers move leftward owed much to the influence ofHlne Rytman, whom he met near the end of 1946. Ten yearshis senior, she was an intense and passionate woman who hada tangled history of involvement with the French resistanceand the Communist Party, with which she became embroiledin a struggle to be readmitted as a member. She initiatedAlthusser into a new world of sexuality and emotional inti-macy.

Althusser and Rytman developed an instant complicity,based in large measure on their shared identification with theworking class and a commitment to revolutionary change. Hewas far from unique in replacing religious idealism with apolitical and ideological one, and it seems probable that hewas heading towards Communism with or without Rytman.


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There was an obvious irony in the maverick Althussers beingable to join the French Communist Party, while she, a truebeliever, remained excluded. Matheron (1994) states that itwould have been surprising, given the historical context, hadAlthusser not been a Stalinist during the postwar period. Acertain logic led him to accept the Party as the only possiblevehicle for revolutionary transformation of European civiliza-tion, while the void at the heart of his increasingly formalreligious commitment demanded a new set of ideals as abulwark against the madness by which he felt threatened.

Althusser needed to adhere body and soul to a representa-

tion of an ideal. Boutang (1992, 21821) suggests that thedepression of 1943 may have been either the cause or (morelikely) the effect of a loss of his link to God, which confrontedhim with an unbridgeable Augustinian distance from thedivine. De Pommier (1998) proposes the Lacanian hypothesisthat God for Althusser was a third term, a figure of separa-tion, functioning in the symbolic role for which his father hadbeen disqualified by his mothers love for his dead brother. DePommier sees Althussers psychopathology as springing fromhis continuous effort to escape an identification with the

imaginary phallus, that is, to stop trying to fill the lack in hisdepressed mother by serving as a replacement for her lostobject, but without ever being able to accomplish this sym-bolic castration because of the absence of a true father to aidhim in the task of separation. From this perspective, all theinstitutions that came to represent the third term of thepaternal function were bound to fall short. Althusser em-braced, then undermined, each one in turn, caught in anunconscious compulsion to repeat his basic dilemma.

Althusser articulated his disenchantment with organizedreligion in two posthumously published documents. The firstis a seventy-page letter written in late 1949 to his Lyonnaisspiritual guide, Jean LaCroix, in which he rejected religiousfaith (and with it his former relationship of discipleship) as thebasis for social and political action. The affective tone was oneof extreme ambivalence towards LaCroix, who never ceased tosupport his former student.4 The second document bearing onhis evolution away from religious humanism is the 1951 essay,


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On Conjugal Obscenity. From what might today be describedas a radical feminist perspective, Althusser attacked the Churchsefforts to promote a spiritual partnership between husbandand wife on the basis of a religious vision. He could notconceive that a couple might find fulfillment in a shareddevotion to spiritual ideals in spite ofor even because oftemporal renunciations. He rightly condemned the expecta-tion that women who marry must sacrifice opportunities forintellectual and creative growth, but he did not grasp thatbalancing professional achievement with emotional satisfac-tion could be important for both partners. This lack of balance

goes to the heart of his long and stormy relationship withRytman. Throughout their lives together, Althusser repeatedlyturned elsewhere for emotional and sexual satisfaction, prob-ably never coming to terms with his dependency on a strongwoman with her own burden of problems.5

These two essays display the eloquence of Althussersrhetoric, which took on a rapturous quality at times. Hisidealism was, however, saved from an extreme moralism by hisadherence to logical structure, occasionally the simulacrum ofbanal Communist propaganda, but more often a rigorous

version of Marxist theory and philosophy. His analytical giftenabled him to step back from a polemic with hypomanic andfanatical overtones to engage in sharp intellectual debate. Inhis essays, we can trace the evolution of his ideal object fromGod and religion to the proletariat and Communism. Later,psychoanalysis was to enter the picture, and, as always, hisidealizations had to be represented by a hero or master, withwhom he entertained an ambivalent relationship. Althusseroscillated between submissive humility, which does not seem tohave been simply a pose, and grandiosity, leading him todethrone his objects by becoming what he called a father tothe father (1985, 193), since he could not long tolerateanyone else in this paternal role.

Consistent with his self-definition as a nonperson frombirth, Althusser regarded himself as an intellectual fraud orimposter, a fate that received its ultimate seal in the juridicalnon-lieu that exculpated him from criminal responsibility inthe death of his wife. Indeed, he claimed (1985, 21821) neverto have read many of the authors about whom he wrote. He


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described his scholarly method as one of listening to hearsayand then taking core samplescarottesof the works in ques-tion, from which he was able to make astute generalizationsabout the whole. Perhaps this disparaging characterizationcontains a kernel of truth, but it is not borne out by thecontent of his many published and unpublished papers, to saynothing of the annotated volumes in his personal library.Certainly, beginning at the lyce where he prepared for hisexaminations to enter the cole Normale Suprieure, Althusserwas marked out as possessing the character and intellect of afuture member of the French elite. From at least his twenties,

however, this exceptional talent was at the mercy of escalatingrecurrences of manic depression.

Despite his mood swings, Althusser established lastingrelationships with a number of important figures at the coleNormale Suprieure. Among others, Foucault and Derrida stud-ied with him, as did Andr Green, whom he befriended. Hewas a caring and responsible mentor who kept his political andpersonal rivalries from impinging on his faculty duties. EvenRosset, who is far from admiring, writes that Althusser was themost devoted, informed, and liberal of masters (1992, 12).

By the 1960s, the timid philosopher was becoming widelyknown internationally.Most notably, he developed an alliance with Jacques

Lacan, of whose theories he was an enthusiastic supporter andwhom he brought into thecole Normale Suprieure, an amazingfeat given the hostility to psychoanalysis of the French Commu-nist Party and much of the French academic world at that time.In many respects, these new commitments displaced his formerpolitical ones, which were shaken by his disagreements withthe Party hierarchy over Rytmans ostracism in 1950 (or,according to some accounts, 1951) and his own later heresieswith respect to Marxist theory. In 1964, he entered treatmentwith a non-Lacanian analyst, Ren Diatkine, which lasted morethan fifteen years. Unfortunately, Diatkines treatment, whichincluded medications and hospital stays, proved unsuccessful,and Althusser suffered his most serious episode of depressionat the age of sixty-two, resulting in the tragedy that cast hismadness in its definitive form and stamped his reputation as amurderer.


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The circumstances of the catastrophe were as follows. Inthe course of a highly productive period of creative work,Althusser developed symptoms of an inflamed esophagus,diagnosed as a hiatal hernia. After a routine surgical proce-dure in April 1980, he awoke with restless anxiety that pro-gressed into a severe depression. Since his youth, Althusserhad been sensitive to physical ailments, a castration anxiety inits most elemental form. Althusser always blamed his depres-sions on medical problems, and after his release from wartimecaptivity he had referred to his little physical miseries (Boutang1992, 222), only much later acknowledging his fears of sexual

impotence. His first hospital admission in the stalag hadfollowed an inguinal hernia. Now, his alarmed physicians toldhim that he was displaying classic symptoms of melancholia(Althusser 1985, 274). He was rehospitalized and variousmedications were tried, one of which may have led to a toxicdelirium. In any event, he suffered symptoms of profoundregression, confusion, and paranoia. Upon discharge, he wasnot fully recovered, and his relationship with Rytman disinte-grated into a destructive stalemate of shared despair and self-hatred from which she tried, according to Althussers autobi-

ography, to extricate herself, only to arouse in him the keenestseparation anxiety.As the couple turned inwards, isolated in their apartment

on the rue dUlm, Althusser slid further downhill. Diatkine,who by then had reluctantly become Rytmans therapist aswell, urged rehospitalization, allegedly against her opposition.An urgent letter he sent to Rytman was apparently neverdelivered. From here, the facts are unknown, Althusser claim-ing amnesia for the events. There was no evidence of astruggle. The philosopher came to his senses while his fatiguedarms massaged the inert neck of his wife, as he had often doneat her request. His account paints a picture of her complicityin the strangulation, as though she had wished to be releasedfrom their shared inferno by being murdered, a suicide by aninterposed person (1985, 285).

The strangeness of this scenario recounted by Althusser isaugmented by seeming to have been lifted from two dreams hehad transcribed sixteen years earlier. The first dream followedhis receipt of Rytmans 1964 letter about his familial pathol-


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ogythe same letter that, in the guise of helpful analysis, gaverise to a paranoid explanation for Althussers illness that hadnot previously been indicated in either his correspondence orpersonal conversation, but which may have steered his ambiva-lence towards a destructive hate. He responded that the lettertouched him to the quick (1985, 422) and that, like thelightning, it illuminates and it kills (428). In his dream,Althusser was obliged to murder a complicit sistera sort ofpathetic communion by sacrificewith her accord (429). In asecond dream, a man-father had murdered his wife, al-though there were exculpatory features. In his associations, he

brought up his lack of support for Rytman during her trial bya Communist-front peace council, which had voted to excludeher as an agent provocateurafter she recommended sabotagingmunitions trains at a Paris railway station. The record of thetwo dreams was discovered by a friend among Althusserspapers four years after his murder of Rytman. Sections wereunderlined in the version he showed to Diatkine, but we donot have any record of their conversations.

Intellectual Contributions

It is beyond the scope of this article to evaluate thetheoretical contributions of Louis Althusser. One striking factis the sheer quantity of material that he withheld from publica-tion, though under the direction of Franois Matheron andOlivier Corpet much of it has appeared posthumously. Despitebeing exceedingly critical of his own work, as well as frequentlyincapacitated by depression, Althusser produced a series ofimportant studies, as well as privately circulated writings, all ofwhich contributed to a legendary reputation. His readers can-not fail to be struck by a powerful intellect wielding a vigorousand eloquent style. Althusser had wide-ranging interests, but hisoriginality rests largely on his reading of Marx and, especially,the structural theory that organized that interpretation.

Whoever speaks of Marx must inevitably speak of Hegeland the tradition of German idealist philosophy. Hegel hadgained renewed attention in France just before World WarTwo, when Jean Hyppolite published his translation of the


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Phenomenology of Spirit (see dHondt 1991). Its reception wasfacilitated by Alexandre Kojve, a German-trained Russian,who from 1933 to 1939 devoted a seminar to this magisterialwork for an audience that included Hyppolite, Lacan, andMerleau-Ponty. Althusser initially valued Kojves work onHegel, which was published in 1947, although he later de-clared that Kojeve knew strictly nothing (1985, 199) of eitherHegel or Marx. Lacan was influenced by Kojves interpreta-tion, and his emphasis on the struggle for recognition as thefundamental desire of the subject can be traced to Hegelsparable of the master-slave dialectic.6 The themes of self-

formation through the mediation of the other and the needfor recognition by the other must have resonated withAlthussers fragile self. Yet if vestiges of the intellectual pathwayleading from Hegel through Kojve to Lacan can be found inAlthussers diagnosis of his mothers failure to acknowledge hisseparate identity, he never made these connections explicit.

For all his denials, Althusser had read Hegel in Germanand can be said to have been engaged in a life-long strugglewith the great philosopher. Like the Christianity of his youthand the Communism of his maturity, Althussers encounter

with Hegel was marked by ambivalence; the idealism of thePhenomenologyand its belief in the inexorability of the historicalprocess exercised both a powerful appeal and a deep unease.On the negative side, the later Hegel seemed to justify theperpetuation of a feudal-like system in Germany under KaiserFriedrich Wilhelm. At the same time, by approaching historyas a dialectic, in which ideology played a decisive role, Hegelcreated a powerful instrument for a revolutionary assault onbourgeois democracy from beneath.

In his 1947 masters thesis, Althusser had argued thatHegels awareness of the material existence of mankind inconcrete historical forms meant the abolition of a metaphysi-cal logic driving history. For the young Althusser, this rejectionof transcendence justified a humanistic Marxist concern forthe oppressed:

The entire revolutionary effort could be considered asthe taking possession of the transcendent by the empiri-cal, of the form by the contents. This is why the Marxist


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movement is a materialism . . . but also a humanism. . . .Revolutionary action can conceive, at least formally, ofthe coming to be of the human totality reconciled withits own structure. (1947, 222)

But Althussers attempt to harmonize Marxist praxis withHegelian theoryin keeping with the self-representation ofthe French Communist Partywas abandoned in his maturework, in which he likewise repudiated his erstwhile Catholicsocial and theological commitments.

Long before his rejection of utopian Marxism, Althusser

was hostile to the notion that Marx had built upon aninherited Hegelianism. In the standard account, Feuerbachhad corrected Hegels individualism by redefining man as theensemble of his social relationships. From here, it seemed onlya short step to Marxs identification of the class struggle as thetrue subject of the historical dialectic. The later Althusserargued, however, that Marx had broken decisively with boththinkers by abandoning a humanistic focus on the individualsubject of history. What counted instead was structure, deter-mined by economic relationships and modes of production;

the changing forms of human consciousness were the effectsof this structure, not its cause. By his advocacy of a structuralistapproach, Althusser rendered expendable the notion of aconscious subject as the agent of history.

Roudinesco (1994) observes that structuralism seemed tooffer a scientific approach to the human sciences by elevat-ing theory and analysis over unreflective observation. It al-lowed one to go beneath the psychological and phenomeno-logical levels of experience to uncover underlying causes. Theindividual subject could now be seen as a historical constructbelonging to a particular time and social class. For this reason,Althusser rejected the attempt by progressive Communists toharmonize Marxs early humanistic ideals with his later empha-sis on class struggle. Instead, he argued, Marx represented aprodigious tearing away from his origins in replacing indi-viduals with societies as the true subjects of history. In anotorious phrase, he insisted that Marx had effected a dis-placement that dispensed with the theoretical services of aconcept of man (1965, 255).


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With this finely chiseled interpretation of an antihumanistMarx, Althusser was transformed from an obscure philosopherwith political enthusiasms into an intellectual star who rodethe structuralist wave with Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, Foucault, andLacan. Yet this very breakthrough got him into trouble withthe French Communist Party, which, in a humanistic turn, wasnow denouncing the Stalinist-Chinese revisionism that theyaccused Althusser of fomenting. He began to assume hispreferred position as an internal critic. Still later, his structural-ism led him to reject altogether any notion of an inherentlogic to history, which he described as a process without a

subject or purpose (1985, 243), determined only by thefortuitous concatenation of events. Despite class conflict, hecame to believe, it was not inevitable that social change wouldproceed from a dialectic of contradiction. The suffering prole-tariat remained important for him, but he did not address whyone should continue to struggle in its behalf or remain aCommunist.7

In his impressive study, de Marty (1999) makes a greatdeal of the denial of the individual subject as a definingfeature of Althussers work and madness. But Althusser be-

longed to a generation of eminent thinkers who did not havemuch use for liberal humanism; and others, such as Foucault,were even more vociferous in their denunciations than he. Thereare, moreover, cogent arguments against taking the perspectiveof the subject as the best means of understanding history orbiography, not the least important of which are Freuds. Thus,Althussers contribution to structuralist theory needs to beassessed on its own merits, not as a symptom of his pathology.

What seems genuinely symptomatic is Althussers refusalto acknowledge a persistent concern with his own subjectivity.One wonders whether, had he continued to live and work, hemight have revised his antihumanist positions. Although hecontinued to call himself a materialist and to identify withrevolutionary politics, Althusser discarded most of Marxisttheory, and his materialism was tempered by a recognition ofthe independence of ideology from economic arrangements.In a 1966 paper on the cultural revolution in China, hedescribed ideology not as an epiphenomenon but as thecement binding societies.8 A coherent system of beliefs was


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Althusser wrote, in the form of an absence or a negative, andhe went on to criticize Freuds concept of a substantiveunconscious from a Hegelian perspective (1947, 275). Possiblythis interest was reinforced by his own clinical experiences ofdepression, and certainly by his narcoanalysisa therapy usinga drug such as sodium pentothal to facilitate memorywhichbegan with Laurent Stevenin about 1950. Roudinesco says thathe discovered psychoanalysis by way of the mirror of his ownmadness (1986, 376). In any event, he began reading psycho-analytic texts after the War and gave a lecture on child analysisin 1959 (see Corpet and Matheron 1993, 1). Despite his

denials, Althusser clearly used Freudian concepts in his think-ing. This appropriation took three forms: (1) the applicationof psychoanalytic analogies and metaphors to philosophy; (2)efforts to integrate Freudian and Marxist theories of society;and (3) explorations of the status of psychoanalysis as a sciencegrowing out of his encounter with Lacan.

According to Roudinesco, after Lacans schismatic groupof analysts had founded a new society, the French Psychoana-lytic Association, in the 1950s, Althusser began to read Lacanspublications in La psychanalyse. His laudatory discussion of

Lacans work in a 1963 article, Philosophy and the HumanSciences, brought him to the attention of the master, then inthe throes of his inquisition by the International Psychoana-lytic Association (Corpet and Matheron 1993, 7). Althusserorganized a seminar on psychoanalysis at the cole NormaleSuprieure in 196364, published his well-known essay Freudand Lacan in La nouvelle critiquein 1964, and invited Lacan tomove his own seminar to the cole Normaleafter his expulsionfrom the International Psychoanalytic Association that sameyear. Although in The Facts he claimed to have attendedLacans seminar only once, Althusser was familiar with thelatterscrits(1966), an annotated copy of which was found inhis library. He credited Lacan with grasping the essential inFreud, namely, the essential role of theory in advancingscientific knowledge. What could be viewed as either a mea-sure of his genius or excessive intellectualism was Althussersinsistence that psychoanalysis move beyond being a colloca-tion of impressive findings and useful techniques towards thestatus of a genuinely scientific theory.


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Althusser again took up the question of psychoanalysis asa science in an undelivered paper for a 1979 symposium on theunconscious at Tbilisi in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Repub-lic, though written several years earlier. While recognizing thenecessity of integration with other disciplines, Althusser (1976a)continued to advocate the specificity of psychoanalysis as ascience of the unconscious. After first praising Lacans attemptat mediation between an outmoded biophysical theory ofpsychoanalysis and current scientific and philosophical mod-els, Althusser stringently criticized the results of Lacans project,which he described as teetering on the pedestal of its uncer-

tain theses (92). Instead of a scientific theory of the uncon-scious, he wrote, Lacan had given a fantastic philosophy ofpsychoanalysis that duped everybody. Althusser withdrew thispaper in reaction to the alarm of his associates, notablyRoudinesco, and the name of Lacan disappeared from therevised version, On Marx and Freud (1976c).

In On Marx and Freud, Althusser confronted the offi-cial Communist opposition to psychoanalysis, observing thatpart of the resistance was indeed unconscious. He laudedFreud and Marx for instituting radical breaks with their

predecessors that made them illegitimate children withoutfathers. Both treated their objects of studythe individual andsociety, respectivelyas ensembles without a center. Marxsdiscovery of the dialectical opposition of classes had under-mined the metaphor of society as a seamless fabric, whileFreuds conception of a decentered subject, riven by anunconscious, refuted the idealism of a unified self. The ego isnot master in its own house, as Freud had proclaimed andLacan amplified. Yet Althusser was forced to admit that Freudstherapeutic effort was focused on strengthening the egoscontrol over its destiny. Freuds determinism and commitmentto uncovering causal factors clashed with Althussers philoso-phy of the aleatory.

Despite Althussers antideterminism in theory, he ac-cepted the importance of early life experiences in shaping theperson. He understood how drives and early mothering worktogether to create an embodied subject, and he was moreinterested than either Lacan or Freud in the impact of familyrelationships. This inconsistency is reflected in his quotation


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(1985) from Gramsci that if we cannot predict, we can in acertain measure foresee (526). This statement is anotherexample of his fudging of a crucial issue. As de Marty (1999) hasnoted, Althussers autobiography portrays him as a victim offorces outside his control, as though his life were the unfoldingof an implacable destiny. Yet in a strange postscript, he reassertsthe indeterminate nature of existence, demoting the murderto the chance eruption of an event devoid of real meaning.

Although de Marty trenchantly analyzes Althussers eva-sions, he is too quick to dismiss the way in which he exempli-fies the inevitably paradoxical conceptualization of the subject

or self in psychoanalysis. As Allen Wheelis (1973) wrote yearsago, there is a realm of freedom and a realm of determinism,depending on ones point of observation, both being necessaryto any useful account of human experience. Individuals areresponsible for what they have become, yet they are at thesame time caught in unconscious patterns of repetition. Clini-cal psychoanalysis aims at enlarging the scope of freedomthrough a reconstructive reliving of early experiences and thesubjective assumption of a path already taken. This ambiguityis criticized by Sartre in Being and Nothingness(1943), where he

attacks the Freudian unconscious as a form of bad faith. Heproposes instead the concept of the for itself, a self that takesresponsibility for its ethical choices: Man being condemnedto be free carries the weight of the whole world on hisshoulders. He is responsible for the world and for himself as away of being (55354).9

Although Althusser shared the structuralist antipathy tothe bourgeois idealization of the individual and regardedtraditional humanism as an ideology serving class interests, heconcluded For Marx on an almost Sartrean note: Men livetheir ideologies as their world itself, as a mixture of relationto the real and an imaginary relation (men are free) (1965,246). He justified the Communist Partys usage of the notionsof individual freedom and socialist humanism as a game ofwords (243), but claimed that this appropriation was notcynical because history would eventually provide the termswith a new content. He thereby postponed the problem to anindefinite future, which he still believed was being constructedin the Soviet Union.


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Althussers self-analysis in The Future Lasts Foreverfounderson the shoals of his hostility to the individual person as sourceof meaning. The presentation of his tragedy as due to ahistorically determined lack of a personal self contradicts boththe extreme antihumanism of his early Stalinist politics and hislater fantasy of a history without subjects. Even at the end hecould not accept that, whatever deficits he might have sufferedas an embodied self, his actions had consequences. If thecategory of man as individual subject were nothing morethan a bourgeois illusion, then the man who never existedcould be only a virtual murderer.

Contrary to Althusser, I would submit that psychoanalysis,perhaps like Marxism, sits ambiguously between humanismand science. A narrow version of Freudian determinism isobviously untenable, even though we have a sense of characteras a destiny that unfolds outside our command. Likewise, thereis no entity we could label as the subject or the self, and yetwe are bound to fall back on such constructs, and even on thenotion of conscious agency. As Althusser (1955) recognized,the debate is ultimately about how a philosophy of realism canbe applied to history or, analogously, to psychoanalysis. That is,

for the realist or scientist, there must be a truth beyond ideas.Althusser (1985) was fond of quoting Spinozas aphorism,The concept of the dog does not bark (244). For Lacan, whatlay beyond conscious experience was the materiality of lan-guage, the signifier that carries the subject helplessly in itswake. Although Althusser initially accepted this formulation,in the end he found the source of human actions in theconjoncture, the accidental association of events at an unpredict-able moment.

Although he admired Lacan, Althusser did not choose aLacanian analyst, a fact cited by de Pommier (1998, 135) asevidence of his ambivalence. He came to see Lacan as a fraud,yet his autobiography is saturated with Lacanian interpreta-tions. Something made Althusser keep his distance fromLacan, despiteor perhaps because ofhis initial idealiza-tion. His choice of therapist may have been influenced byDiatkines specialization in child analysis, as well as by therecommendation of Nicole Alphandery, a Communist psycho-analyst alleged by Althusser to have been in love with him after


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the War (1985, 141, 169). There were also parallels betweenhis ideas and Diatkines. The latter, for example, opposedpsychic determinism by declaring that a psychotic break hadsomething aleatory about it. Still, Althussers relationship withDiatkine repeated his attempt to become father to the father(1985, 193). Thus, he noted his analysts problems of counter-transference, notably in being too accommodating to him,though Althusser also conveyed his love and appreciation forDiatkine. Diatkine was justly criticized after the murder byBoutang (1997) for agreeing to treat Rytman concurrently,and also arraigned by de Pommier (1998, 13537) for failing

to address the underlying structural deficit in Althusser. But itis doubtful whether any analyst could have severed the Lacanianknot of a symbolic past, an imaginary present, and the real ofa serious illness.

The Man Who Didnt Exist

Althusser manifestly suffered from a severe form of bipo-lar disorder, yet most persons with this condition do not share

his painful sense of nonbeing, become murderers, or developa bleak version of materialistic philosophy. So psychiatry in theend does not take us very far in understanding his case. If thesense of a genuine existence derives from the connection ofthe desiring subject to a set of ideals that gives coherence andmeaning, Althusser was unable to sustain such a bond. Nodoubt psychosis can produce a disruption of the symbolicworld, but Althusser did not exhibit overt paranoid fanaticismor delusion. Above all, he was an intellectual, committed torigorous thought and the careful investigation of reality,values that likely helped him to preserve his grasp on sanity.

To make more sense of Althussers struggle with his idealsand the ambivalent way he related to people and institutions,we need to look once again at the emotional dilemmas withwhich he was confronted and the context in which theyunfolded. Abundant evidence points to Althussers narcissisticvulnerability and sensitivity, and supports the notion that hesought the position of a sphere within a sphere as a solutionto his difficulty in sustaining a cohesive self in the face of his


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own desires and those of others. I believe that Althussers earlyself-diagnosis was correct. He required his religious faith tosurvive, as well as living people to represent that faith. Hefound many such icons or idols, yet the faith did not hold. Aswe have seen, he moved from pious Catholicism throughmilitant Christian-Marxist humanism to hard-line Commu-nism. Along the way, psychoanalysis, via the charismatic figureof Lacan, played an important role.

None of these movements was able to bear the weightAlthusser placed on them. His idealistic visions of Christianity,Communism, and psychoanalysis went beyondand even at

times contradictedtheir ideologies; and he became in theprocess a subversive adherent, working to transform the insti-tutions in question into something they could not become. Ofcourse, the world is not lacking in disillusioning experiences,and many people have lost their political and religious faithwithout catastrophic consequences. World War Two and theensuing Cold War-period produced a crisis of disillusionmentthat stimulated an efflorescence of creative thought through-out Europe. Althusser was caught up heart and soul in thisupheaval, which spurred his most original work, but perhaps in

the end he was broken by it.Althusser was one of those comparatively rare individualswho in their discomfort with what exists want to change theworld. This aspiration is associated with intellectual brilliance,a touch of grandiosity, and coming of age at a particularhistoric moment. In Lacanian terms, we might speak of thenecessity of locating for oneself a place within the Symbolicorder. In times of upheaval, some individuals seem called torepresent or articulate the forces at play and to influence thepassage of a society from one era to another. What summonsthem to come forward must be quite complex; perhapsAlthussers philosophy of the conjuncture is as satisfying anexplanation as any other. For all his antihumanism, Althusserwas paradoxically attracted to the individual genius as a moverof history. He was finally not to become such a major figurehimself, but, in retrospect, appears rather as the symptom ofan age filled with utopian and revolutionary ferment, butwhich failed to produce a substantial change in ideology or


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society. We might charitably say that he rode the structuralistwave to its crest and then contributed to its crash. His idealismdrew him towards a metatheory, while keeping him groundedin the disastrous politics of the French Communist Party and,for a long time, a posture of sycophancy towards the USSR.

It was clear to Althusser that the leaders of the FrenchCommunist Party could never really accept him, never see himas anything other than a sometimes desirable, sometimestroublesome, intellectual adornment. Communist ideology,however admirable in its pursuit of liberation and equality, wasbadly flawed, as he never failed to observe, and even Marxist

theory did not hold together very well. To be sure, he re-mained committed to intellectual work, and thecole NormaleSuprieure consecrated that activity, yet Althusser could notresist criticizing the obsessiveness and triviality of his ownendeavors. Taking the long view, he wondered, what point didacademic study have, notably of philosophy, which he dispar-aged as blah blah and telling tales? Something more solid,something scientific and anchored in reality, seemed calledfor, not only by Althusser, but by a generation seeking a newideological cement after Communism. During the late 1950s

and early 1960s, French thinkers were transforming manydisciplines, and a revised form of psychoanalysis seemed tooffer an ethics and a scientific vision to a society whoseinstitutions were in disarray. Lacan, as the inspired geniusbehind this shift, may have represented an alter ego toAlthussers own grandiose aspirations, as Sollers suggested inFemmes(1983), in which the megalomaniacal character repre-senting Lacan suggests dividing the world between their twodomains, the psychic and the political.

When Althusser ultimately became disillusioned withLacan, did his intellect burn through the theory, as the Tbilisitexts suggest, or was the personal factor crucial? Clearly, Lacandid not reciprocate the enthusiasm and warmth of Althussersinitial letters in 1963, and he seemed to take for grantedAlthussers support for the relocation of his seminar to thecole Normale. Althussers later attitude was expressed in hisaccount of the suicide of Lucien Sebag, a brilliant Marxistanalysand of Lacans, in 1974. He was appalled by Lacans self-


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protective demeanor when he informed him of the suicide.According to Althusser (1985), Lacan announced that he hadbeen obliged to drop Sebag as a patient for technical reasonsbecause Sebag had fallen in love with his daughter, Judith(212). Althusser did not ask why Lacan had failed to hospital-ize his suicidal patient. He added:

I have very often wondered what he would have done inmy own case had I been one of his patients and whetherhe would have left me without protection so as not toinfringe the slightest analytic rule . . . rules which in the

mind of Freud were never imperatives without otherrecourse. Let me be forgiven, if it is possible, for havingaccurately reported this, but through the unhappy Sebag,whom I loved a lot, and Judith, whom I knew fairly well,the story also concerned me. (213)

Through his account of Sebags death Althusser spells out theimperative to protect his own vulnerable self. Objects ofidealization are beacons that can guide and illuminate, butthey become blinding if approached too closely. Most of his

pupils and patients (including Diatkine) survived Lacan quitewell, for which that particular master must deserve somecredit. However, I believe that being rebuffed by his hero wasdamaging for Althusser, just as coming too near might havebeen.

A final disillusioning experience with Lacan came morethan fifteen years after Sebags suicide (see Althusser 1980).Lacan had decided for obscure reasons to dissolve his analytictraining program, thecole Freudienne de Paris, summoning hisfollowers to a gathering at the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques atwhich this decision would be debated. Althussers behavior atthis meeting was puzzling. After all, what was it to him that thislatest incarnation of a Lacan-dominated institution was aboutto go the way of its predecessors? No doubt it would be rebornin other forms. Yet Althusser was beside himself, frightenedand enraged, as he gained uninvited access to the stormyassembly of psychoanalysts, which, in his agitation, he feltcompelled to address. He fulminated against the foolishness ofthe political machinations of Lacans followers and for the


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welfare of the proletariat of patients. Althusser knew well thatindividuals draw their sustenance from social systems, and thatwhen institutions or their representatives are discredited, thework suffers and the profession begins to crumble. The fragil-ity of symbolic structures meant that, for Althusser, a great dealwas at stake, not least his own well-being as an analysand. IfLacanianism was rotten and Freudianism held hostage byrevisionist Americans, what hope was there for himself to becured?

Althusser was torn between two impossible alternatives:the grandiose role of the hero, and the nonperson who is a

conjuncture of external forces. The search for a father whocould support a symbolic identification brought him to Spinoza,Nietzsche, Freud, and many others. Unfortunately, this at-tempt to install a symbolic father failed. His successions ofheroes functioned rather to sustain an omnipotent ideal self bywhich Althusser tried to fill the chronic emptiness from whichhe suffered. In the end, his quest for this imaginary object, andits impossible promise of wholeness and perfection, provedself-destructive.

In attempting to make sense of the murder of Hlne

Rytman, I suggest that her role as carrier of the Communistideal that nourished Althusser for so long and that bound thecouple together may have been a key. In the void of hisdepression, she provided both an explanation and a cure. Shebecame, like the Church or the cole Normale, the containingsphere that held Althussers fragile self. Perhaps she replaced(and realized that she replaced) his parents in that role, whichwas bound up with his Catholic faith. As Modell (1984)explains, overly intense feelings for the transferential objectcan explode the inner sphere. The subjects tenuous protec-tion against the antithetical threats of loss and merger, and theprimitive anxieties these threats arouse, cannot survive theintrusion of emotions into the virtual space that buffers thecontained from the container.

Throughout his life, Althusser seemed incapable of cop-ing with strong sexual or aggressive feelings. Although itremains unclear whether he came to enjoy sexual intercoursein his adult years, he certainly kept his women at arms length.The initial eruption of passionate emotion after his seduc-


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tion by Rytman was too much for him to bear, and analogoussituations of overstimulationin his affairs with Claire (whoselast name has been kept confidential) and with Franca Madonia,for exampletriggered depressive relapses. Similarly, the pub-lication of his works on Marx, which brought him so muchattention, left Althusser overwhelmed by fear and self-doubt,precipitating a recurrence of his illness. When Althusser feltexposed either to the critical gaze of the world or to unmedi-ated contact with the other, the effect was a liberating butfrightening bursting of his bubble, leaving vulnerable thesurface of a shakily bound self. As Modells formulation would

suggest, the relationship between Rytman and Althusser oscil-lated between an insupportable distance and a destructivecloseness, compounded at the end by their isolation in theirsmall apartment.

Lacans meeting at the Hotel Saint-Jacques occurred inMay 1980. That summer, Althusser underwent hiatal herniasurgery. In the fall, he and Rytman disregarded Diatkinesrecommendation that he be hospitalized and closeted them-selves at home. In October, she died at his hands, and anotherintellectual idol, now floridly psychotic, was about to be

toppled by an outraged press and public. If Althussers agita-tion in the presence of his former hero, whom he now saw in amore sinister light and who treated his interruption cavalierly,was a reflection of the threat to his psychic stability posed bythe dissolution of thecole Freudienne, perhaps it indicated thecollapse of the structure Freud-Lacan-Marx that, in guise of anego ideal, had long supported his damaged self. In stranglingRytman, he attacked his ultimate intellectual and emotionalcontainer, which could no longer shield him from despair.

After the murder, a gravely ill Althusser buried himselfonce again in a series of psychiatric hospitals for a lengthyperiod, only to reemerge in a new existence, for the first timehaving his own independent apartment, on the door of whichhe affixed the name of Pierre Berger, his idealized maternalgrandfather. Althusser died of a heart attack on October 25,1990. He declared in an optimistic note at the end of theautobiography that he had finally come into his own, found aself, and learned to love and appreciate others:


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I think I have learned what it is to love, not to take theinitiative of self-promotion and exaggeration, but to beattentive to the other, to respect her desire and herrhythms, to ask for nothing and to receive each gift as asurprise of life, and to be capable of the same gift andsurprise for the other, without inflicting the slightestduress [la moindre violence]. In sum, simply freedom. Solife can still be beautiful. I am sixty-seven years old, but,at last, I, who never had a childhood, because I was neverloved for myself, feel young as never before, even if thisbusiness must soon be concluded. Yes, the future lasts a

long time. (1985, 3078)306 Harvard St.

Cambridge, MA [email protected]

Notes

1. The title of the English translation is The Future Lasts Forever(Althusser 1992),rather than the more literal The Future Lasts a Long Time.

2. For the material in this section I am indebted to the magisterial biography ofBoutang (1992) and to the editorial notes of Corpet and Matheron in Althussersautobiography (1985), writings on psychoanalysis (1993), and collected philo-

sophical and political writings (1994a).3. For example, she referred to the compromise by which his mother accom-plished her conjugal duties, preserving a relationship with her imaginaryhusband, while removing Charles from his function as father (Rytman 1964,419).

4. Althussers rebellion escalated in 1953 when he delivered a party-line, Stalinistapologetic in the presence of his former mentor in Lyon (Boutang 1992, 48687).

5. One version of this story, fictionalized in Philippe Sollerss novel Femmes(1983)itself a remarkable socio-historical document of the 1970shas amuch-abused character representing Althusser finally striking back against amonster-shrew of a spouse.

6. Borch-Jacobsen (1990) documents the many connections between Lacansthought and Kojves Hegel.

7. The nihilism of Althussers condemnation of the concept of man as illusory

and fetishistic can be seen in his Response to John Lewis(1972).8. This paper, On the Cultural Revolution, in the Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes, no.11, is contained in the journal of the Communist Student association of thecoleNormale Suprioure.

9. Sartres attempt to reconcile an antibourgeois humanism with a radical indi-vidualism was derided by Althusser in a February 2, 1964, letter to FrancaMadonia as a happy psychosis. He was appalled by Sartres claims in The Wordsnot to have had an Oedipus complex or a super-ego: I can only see a lash in theface to impose silence on this imposture (Althusser 1998, 51819).


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Corpet, Olivier, and Franois Matheron. 1993. Introduction to Althusser 1993, pp. 112.

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dHondt, Jacques. 1991. Le destin franais de loeuvre [The French destiny of thework]. Magazine Litteraire, 293:3032.

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James H. Nichols, Jr. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.Lacan, Jacques. 1966.crits. Paris: ditions du Seuil.de Marty, ric. 1999. Louis Althusser, un sujet sans procs. Anatomie dun pass trs rcent

[Louis Althusser, A Subject without a Trial: Anatomy of a Very Recent Past]Paris: Gallimard.

Matheron, Franois. 1994. Introduction to Althusser 1994a, pp. 521.Modell, Arnold. 1984. Psychoanalysis in a New Context. New York: International

Universities Press.de Pommier, Gerard. 1998. Louis du Nant. La mlancolie dAlthusser [Louis of

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Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.. 1994. Jacques Lacan. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1997.

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lewis a. kirshner - the man who didn't exist; the case of louis althusser

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