Thought
Althusser's earlier works include the influential volume Reading Capital, which collects the work of Althusser and his students in an intensive philosophical rereading of Karl Marx's Capital. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as "critique of political economy", and on its object. The current English edition of this work includes only the essays of Althusser and Étienne Balibar, while the original French edition contains additional contributions from Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, and Roger Establet.
Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained influential in Marxist philosophy. The introduction to his collection For Marx proposes a great "epistemological break" between Marx's early writings (1840–45) and his later, properly Marxist texts, borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. His essay "Marxism and Humanism" is a strong statement of anti-humanism in Marxist theory, condemning ideas like "human potential" and "species-being", which are often put forth by Marxists, as outgrowths of a bourgeois ideology of "humanity". His essay "Contradiction and Overdetermination" borrows the concept of overdetermination from psychoanalysis, in order to replace the idea of "contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causality in political situations (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony.)
Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology. His best-known essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation", establishes the concept of ideology. Althusser's theory of ideology draws on Marx and Gramsci, but also on Freud's and Lacan's concepts of the unconscious and mirror-phase respectively, and describes the structures and systems that enable the concept of the self. These structures, for Althusser, are both agents of repression and inevitable: it is impossible to escape ideology, to not be subjected to it.
Althusser's thought went through an evolution in his lifetime, and has been the subject of argument and debate, especially within Marxism and specifically concerning his theory of knowledge (epistemology).
Read more about this topic: Louis Althusser
Famous quotes containing the word thought:
“People who begin sentences with “I may be old-fashioned but—” are usually not only old-fashioned but wrong. I never thought the time would come when I should catch myself leading off with that crack. But I feel it coming on right now.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)
“In the case of scandal, as in that of robbery, the receiver is always thought as bad as the thief.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)