Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals. Though the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.

Whether or not literary criticism should be considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing, is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism^[1] draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.

Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their criticism in broadly circulating periodicals such as the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker.

History of literary criticism[link]

Aristotle's Poetics clearly defines aspects of literature and introduces many literary terms still used today.

Classical and medieval criticism[link]

Literary criticism has probably existed for as long as literature. In the 4th century BC Aristotle wrote the Poetics, a typology and description of literary forms with many specific criticisms of contemporary works of art. Poetics developed for the first time the concepts of mimesis and catharsis, which are still crucial in literary study. Plato's attacks on poetry as imitative, secondary, and false were formative as well. Around the same time, Bharata Muni, in his Natya Shastra, wrote literary criticism on ancient Indian literature and Sanskrit drama.

Later classical and medieval criticism often focused on religious texts, and the several long religious traditions of hermeneutics and textual exegesis have had a profound influence on the study of secular texts. This was particularly the case for the literary traditions of the three Abrahamic religions: Jewish literature, Christian literature and Islamic literature.

Literary criticism was also employed in other forms of medieval Arabic literature and Arabic poetry from the 9th century, notably by Al-Jahiz in his al-Bayan wa-'l-tabyin and al-Hayawan, and by Abdullah ibn al-Mu'tazz in his Kitab al-Badi.^[2]

Key texts[link]

Renaissance criticism[link]

The literary criticism of the Renaissance developed classical ideas of unity of form and content into literary neoclassicism, proclaiming literature as central to culture, entrusting the poet and the author with preservation of a long literary tradition. The birth of Renaissance criticism was in 1498, with the recovery of classic texts, most notably, Giorgio Valla's Latin translation of Aristotle's Poetics. The work of Aristotle, especially Poetics, was the most important influence upon literary criticism until the late eighteenth century. Lodovico Castelvetro was one of the most influential Renaissance critics who wrote commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics in 1570.

Key texts[link]

• Lodovico Castelvetro: The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explained
• Philip Sidney: An Apology for Poetry
• Jacopo Mazzoni: On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante
• Torquato Tasso: Discourses on the Heroic Poem
• Francis Bacon: The Advancement of Learning
• Henry Reynolds: Mythomystes

Enlightenment criticism[link]

This section requires expansion.

Key texts[link]

19th-century criticism[link]

The British Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century introduced new aesthetic ideas to literary study, including the idea that the object of literature need not always be beautiful, noble, or perfect, but that literature itself could elevate a common subject to the level of the sublime. German Romanticism, which followed closely after the late development of German classicism, emphasized an aesthetic of fragmentation that can appear startlingly modern to the reader of English literature, and valued Witz – that is, "wit" or "humor" of a certain sort – more highly than the serious Anglophone Romanticism. The late nineteenth century brought renown to authors known more for critical writing than for their own literary work, such as Matthew Arnold.

Key texts[link]

The New Criticism[link]

However important all of these aesthetic movements were as antecedents, current ideas about literary criticism derive almost entirely from the new direction taken in the early twentieth century. Early in the century the school of criticism known as Russian Formalism, and slightly later the New Criticism in Britain and America, came to dominate the study and discussion of literature. Both schools emphasized the close reading of texts, elevating it far above generalizing discussion and speculation about either authorial intention (to say nothing of the author's psychology or biography, which became almost taboo subjects) or reader response. This emphasis on form and precise attention to "the words themselves" has persisted, after the decline of these critical doctrines themselves.

Theory[link]

In 1957 Northrop Frye published the influential Anatomy of Criticism. In his works Frye noted that some critics tend to embrace an ideology, and to judge literary pieces on the basis of their adherence to such ideology. This has been a highly influential viewpoint among modern conservative thinkers. E. Michael Jones in Degenerate Moderns argues that Stanley Fish was influenced by his adulterous affairs to reject classic literature that condemned adultery.^[3]

In the British and American literary establishment, the New Criticism was more or less dominant until the late 1960s. Around that time Anglo-American university literature departments began to witness a rise of a more explicitly philosophical literary theory, influenced by structuralism, then post-structuralism, and other kinds of Continental philosophy. It continued until the mid-1980s, when interest in "theory" peaked. Many later critics, though undoubtedly still influenced by theoretical work, have been comfortable simply interpreting literature rather than writing explicitly about methodology and philosophical presumptions.

Key 20th-century texts[link]

History of the Book[link]

Related to other forms of literary criticism, the history of the book is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry drawing on the methods of bibliography, cultural history, history of literature, and media theory. Principally concerned with the production, circulation, and reception of texts and their material forms, book history seeks to connect forms of textuality with their material aspects.

Among the issues within the history of literature with which book history can be seen to intersect are: the development of authorship as a profession, the formation of reading audiences, the constraints of censorship and copyright, and the economics of literary form.

The current state of literary criticism[link]

Today interest in literary theory and Continental philosophy coexists in university literature departments with a more conservative literary criticism which the New Critics would probably have approved of. Disagreements over the goals and methods of literary criticism, which characterized both sides taken by critics during the "rise" of theory, have declined. Many critics feel that they now have a great plurality of methods and approaches from which to choose.

Some critics work largely with theoretical texts, while others read traditional literature; interest in the literary canon is still great, but many critics are also interested in minority and women's literatures, while some critics influenced by cultural studies read popular texts like comic books or pulp/genre fiction. Ecocritics have drawn connections between literature and the natural sciences. Darwinian literary studies studies literature in the context of evolutionary influences on human nature. Many literary critics also work in film criticism or media studies. Some write intellectual history; others bring the results and methods of social history to bear on reading literature.

Questions to the value of academic criticism[link]

The value of literary criticism has been questioned by some prominent artists. Vladimir Nabokov argued that good readers don't read books, and particularly literary masterpieces, "for the academic purpose of indulging in generalizations".^[4] Stephen J. Joyce, grandson of James Joyce, at a 1986 academic conference of Joyceans in Copenhagen, said “If my grandfather was here, he would have died laughing ... Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be picked up, read, and enjoyed by virtually anybody without scholarly guides, theories, and intricate explanations, as can Ulysses, if you forget about all the hue and cry." And he questioned if anything is added to the legacy of Joyce's art, by the 261 books of literary criticism stored by the Library of Congress; he summed up that Academics are "people who want to brand this great work with their mark. I don’t accept that."^[5]

See also[link]

• Category:Literary critics
• Comparative Literature
• Genre studies
• History of the Book
• Poetic tradition
• Terry Eagleton

References[link]

External links[link]

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Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is an American writer and academic, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.

Life and career[link]

Background and education[link]

Menand was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised around Boston, Massachusetts. His mother was a historian, who wrote a biography of Samuel Adams. Menand's father, Louis Menand III, taught political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His grandfather and great-grandfather owned the Louis Menand House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.^[1] The village of Menands, New York, is named after his great-grandfather, a famous 19th Century horticulturalist.

A graduate of Pomona College, Menand attended Harvard Law School for one year (1973-1974) before he left to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1980.

Print and the Academy[link]

Menand thereafter taught at Princeton University and held staff positions at The New Republic and The New Yorker. He served as Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York before accepting a post at Harvard in 2003.

Menand published his first book, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, in 1987. His long-anticipated second book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, includes detailed biographical material on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. It received the Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2002 Francis Parkman Prize, and The Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2002, Menand published American Studies, a collection of essays on prominent figures in American culture.

Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. His principal field of academic interest is 19th and 20th century American cultural history. He contributes to The New Yorker, for which he remains a staff writer, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

Books[link]

• Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Context, 1987, New York: Oxford University Press
• The Future of Academic Freedom, (editor), 1996, Chicago: U of Chicago Press
• Pragmatism: A Reader, (editor), 1997, New York: Vintage
• The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, 2001, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-19963-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-374-52849-7 (paperback)
• American Studies, 2002, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-10434-4 (hardcover)
• The Marketplace of Ideas, 2010, New York: W. W. Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-06275-5

See also[link]

• Pragmatism
• William James
• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

References[link]

External links[link]

• The Essential Menand : books, articles, and everything Louis Menand
• Harvard University Department of English faculty listing for Menand
• CUNY profile of Menand (former faculty post)
• Menand's humorous exegesis of The Cat in the Hat on NPR's All Things Considered (link to Windows Media and RealMedia audio)
• Louis Menand on writing -(in the New Yorker)
• "Cat People: What Dr. Seuss really taught us" -(in the New Yorker)
• Remembering the Last Hero Critique of Menand's New Yorker review of "Wild Bill Donovan" by Douglas Waller from The Harvard Crimson
• This Week in Media Rogues Article from The New York Observer about Louis Menand's review of "Wild Bill Donovan" in The New Yorker

Interviews[link]

• Louis Menand on Reforming U.S. Universities from NPR's All Things Considered (Air Date: 1/18/10)
• Menand interview on The Metaphysical Club on All Things Considered (link to WM and RM audio)
• "New New York Intellectual: An Interview with Louis Menand" in the Minnesota Review, (June 1, 2001). archived URL retrieved August 10, 2006

Terry Eagleton holding one of his books after a talk in Mechanics' Institute, Manchester in 2008

Terence Francis Eagleton FBA (born 22 February 1943, Salford) is a British literary theorist and critic, who is regarded as one of Britain's most influential living literary critics.^[1][2] Eagleton currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the Lancaster University, and as a former Visiting Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Formerly Eagleton was Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992–2001) and John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester until 2008. In the Fall 2009 semester, Dr Eagleton returned to the University of Notre Dame as a Distinguished Visitor in the Department of English.^[3]

He has written more than forty books, including Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983);^[4] The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996).

Professor Eagleton delivered Yale University's 2008 Terry Lectures and gave a Gifford Lecture in March 2010, titled The God Debate.^[5] He gave the 2010 Richard Price Memorial Lecture at the historically radical Newington Green Unitarian Church, speaking on "The New Atheism and the War on Terror".^[6]

Early years[link]

Eagleton grew up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Salford, England, with roots in County Galway. His mother's side of the family had strong republican sympathies. He served as an altar boy at a local Carmelite convent where he was responsible for escorting novice nuns taking their vows, a role referred to in the title of his memoir The Gatekeeper.^[7]

Education and academia[link]

He was educated at De La Salle College, a Roman Catholic grammar school in Salford. He later attended Trinity College, Cambridge,^[8] where he earned both his M.A. and Ph.D..

He became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. Having spent some years at Oxford at Wadham College, Linacre College and St Catherine's College, he was John Edward Taylor Professor of Cultural Theory at the University of Manchester until he was forcibly retired in 2008.^[9]

Career[link]

At Cambridge, Eagleton was a student of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. He began his literary studies with the 19th and 20th centuries, then conformed to the stringent academic Marxism of the 1970s. He then published an attack on his mentor Williams's relation to the Marxist tradition in the pages of the New Left Review, in the mode of the French critic Louis Althusser. During the 1960s, he became involved with the left-wing Catholic group Slant, authoring a number of theological articles (including A Marxist Interpretation of Benediction), as well as a book Towards a New Left Theology. His most recent publications suggest a renewed interest in theological themes. Another significant theoretical influence on Eagleton is psychoanalysis. He has been an advocate of Slavoj Žižek's work.^{[citation needed]}

Published thought[link]

Theory[link]

Literary Theory: an Introduction (1983, revised 1996), probably his best-known work, traces the history of the study of texts, from the Romantics of the nineteenth century to the postmodernists of the later twentieth century. Eagleton's thought remains firmly rooted in the Marxist tradition; he has also produced critical work on such more recent modes of thought as structuralism, Lacanian analysis, and deconstruction. As his memoir The Gatekeeper demonstrates, Eagleton's Marxism is far from a merely theoretical pursuit. He was active in both the International Socialists and Workers' Socialist League whilst in Oxford. He continues to provide political commentary for publications such as the New Statesman, Red Pepper and The Guardian.^{[citation needed]}

After Theory (2003) represents a kind of about-face: an indictment of current cultural and literary theory, and what Eagleton regards as the bastardisation of both. He does not, however, conclude that the interdisciplinary study of literature and culture that comprises Theory is without merit. In fact, Eagleton argues that such a merging is effective in opening cultural study to a wider range of significant topics. His indictment instead centers on "relativism"—theorists' and postmodernity's rejection of absolutes. He concludes that an absolute does exist: Every person lives in a body that cannot be owned because nothing was done to acquire it, and nothing (besides suicide) can be done to be rid of it. Our bodies and their subsequent deaths provide the absolute around which humankind can focus its actions.

Religion and Football[link]

In October 2006, Eagleton produced a critique of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion in the London Review of Books. Eagleton begins by questioning Dawkins's methodology and understanding: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology". Eagleton further writes, "Nor does [Dawkins] understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us."^[10] He concludes by suggesting Dawkins has not been attacking organised faith so much as a sort of rhetorical straw man: "Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals."^[10]

Although many of his texts include aspects of philosophical debate, Eagleton himself states, "Perhaps I should add that I am not myself a philosopher, a fact which I am sure some of my reviewers will point out in any case."^[11]

During the 2010 Football World Cup, Eagleton described the mass following of football as an impediment to political change. He wrote in The Guardian, "for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine. Its icon is the impeccably Tory, slavishly conformist Beckham." Eagleton concluded: "Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished. And any political outfit that tried it on would have about as much chance of power as the chief executive of BP has in taking over from Oprah Winfrey."^[12]

Terry Lectures[link]

In April 2008 Eagleton delivered Yale University's Terry Lectures with the title of his subject being, Faith and Fundamentalism: Is belief in Richard Dawkins necessary for salvation? constituting a continuation of the critique he had begun in The London Review of Books. Introducing his first lecture with an admission of ignorance of both theology and science Eagleton goes on to affirm, "All I can claim in this respect, alas, is that I think I may know just about enough theology to be able to spot when someone like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens -- a couplet I shall henceforth reduce for convenience to the solitary signifier Ditchkins -- is talking out of the back of his neck."^[13][14]

Eagleton's Terry lectures were published in 2009, in Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

Criticism of Martin and Kingsley Amis[link]

In late 2007, a critique of Martin Amis included in the introduction to a 2007 edition of Eagleton's book Ideology was widely reprinted in the British press. In it, Eagleton took issue with Amis' widely-quoted writings on "Islamism", directing particular attention to one specific passage:

What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge—don’t you have it?—to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation—further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction on their part

Eagleton criticised Amis for the passage, and expressed surprise as to its source, stating: "[these are] not the ramblings of a British National Party thug ... but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world." Eagleton drew a connection between Amis and his father (the novelist Kingsley Amis). The younger writer, Eagleton went on to write, had learnt more from his father — whom Eagleton described as "a racist, anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals" and "reactionary" — than merely "how to turn a shapely phrase". Eagleton went on to argue that "there is something rather stomach-churning at the sight of those such as Amis and his political allies, champions of a civilisation that for centuries has wreaked untold carnage throughout the world, shrieking for illegal measures when they find themselves for the first time on the sticky end of the same treatment".^[15]

The essay became a cause célèbre in British literary circles. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a commentator for The Independent, wrote an editorial about the affair; Amis responded via open letter, calling Eagleton "an ideological relict" who would be "unable to get out of bed in the morning without the dual guidance of God and Karl Marx".^[16] Amis said that the view Eagleton attributed to him as his considered opinion was in fact his spoken description of a tempting urge, in relation to the need to "raise the price" of terrorist actions.

Eagleton's personal comments on Amis' father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, prompted a further response from Kingsley's widow, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard wrote to The Daily Telegraph, noting that for a supposed "anti-semitic homophobe", it was peculiar that the only guests at the Howard-Amis nuptials should have been either Jewish or gay.^[17] As Howard explained, "Kingsley was never a racist, nor an anti-Semitic boor. Our four great friends who witnessed our wedding were three Jews and one homosexual." In a later interview, Howard added: 'I have never even heard of this man Eagleton. But he seems to be a rather lethal combination of a Roman Catholic and a Marxist ... He strikes me as like a spitting cobra: if you get within his range he'll unleash some poison.' ^[18]

Eagleton defended his comments about Martin and Kingsley Amis by article in The Guardian, claiming that the main bone of contention — the substance of Amis' remarks and views — had been lost amid the media furore.^[15]

Critical reactions[link]

William Deresiewicz wrote of After Theory, Eagleton's book, as follows:

"[I]s it that hard to explain what Eagleton's up to? The prolificness, the self-plagiarism, the snappy, highly consumable prose and, of course, the sales figures: Eagleton wishes for capitalism's demise, but as long as it's here, he plans to do as well as he can out of it. Someone who owns three homes shouldn't be preaching self-sacrifice, and someone whose careerism at Oxbridge was legendary shouldn't be telling interviewers of his longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the Open University."^[19]

Novelist and critic David Lodge, writing in the May 2004 New York Review of Books on Theory and After Theory, concluded:

Some of Theory's achievements are genuine and permanent additions to knowledge, or intellectual self-knowledge. Eagleton is quite right to assert that we can never go back to a state of pre-Theory innocence about the transparency of language or the ideological neutrality of interpretation ... But like all fashions it was bound to have a limited life of novelty and vitality, and we are now living through its decadence without any clear indication of what will supersede it. Theory has, in short, become boringly predictable to many people who were once enthusiastic about it, and that After Theory is most interesting when its focus is furthest from its nominal subject is perhaps evidence that Terry Eagleton is now bored by it too.^[20]

Publications[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Terry Eagleton

• "High Priest of Lit Crit", The Guardian February 2, 2002 – profile on the publication of his memoir, The Gatekeeper
• Some articles by Eagleton from the London Review of Books
• Article on socialism
• "The roots of terror"
• Terry Eagleton at Contemporary Writers
• Tim Adams, "The Armchair Revolutionary" (interview), The Observer, 16 December 2007
• Dawkins/Eagleton knol by Klaus Rohde
• Jonathan Derbyshire, "The Task of the Critic: Terry Eagleton in Dialogue" (interview), New Statesman, March 11, 2010
• Terry Eagleton, "In Praise of Marx" (article), The Chronicle Review, April 10, 2011

Stefan Collini (born 1947) is an English literary critic and academic who is Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge. He has contributed essays to such publications as The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation and the London Review of Books.

Works (incomplete)[link]

• That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Intellectual History (1983) with John Burrow and Donald Winch
• Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (1991)
• The Two Cultures, by C.P. Snow, introduction by Stefan Collini (1993)
• Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait (1994)
• English Pasts: Essays in history and culture (1999)
• "'No Bullshit' Bullshit." London Review of Books. 23 January 2003. (accessed October 29, 2009).
• Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (2006)
• Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics (2009)
• "Modernism and the little magazines." The Times Literary Supplement. 7 October 2009. (accessed October 8, 2009).
• What Are Universities For?, Penguin (23 February 2012)

External links[link]

• Stefan Collini, University of Cambridge
• Contributor page at the London Review of Books
• Contributor page at The Nation
• Journalisted page
• Review of What Are Universities For?The Oxonian Review, 23 April 2012.

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Louis Pierre Althusser (French pronunciation: [altyˈsɛʁ]; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.

Althusser was a longtime member—although sometimes a strong critic—of the French Communist Party. His arguments and thesis were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the "cult of personality" and of ideology.

Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism.

Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. During one of his bouts, he killed his wife by strangling her.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Althusser wrote two autobiographies. The first, L'Avenir dure longtemps ("The Future Lasts a Long Time"), is published in the United States as "The Future Lasts Forever", in a single volume with Althusser's other, shorter, earlier autobiography, "The Facts". They are not straightforward autobiographies and cannot be treated as such (at least without provisions) for purposes of strict biographical information.

Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pieds-noirs family.^[1] He was named after his paternal uncle who had been killed in the First World War. Althusser alleged that his mother had intended to marry his uncle, and married his father only because of the brother's demise. Althusser also alleges that his mother treated him as a substitute for his deceased uncle, to which he attributed deep psychological damage.

Following the death of his father, Althusser moved from Algiers with his mother and younger sister to Marseilles, where he spent the rest of his childhood. He joined the Roman Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Etudiante Chrétienne in 1937.^[1] Althusser performed brilliantly at school at the Lycée du Parc in Lyon and was accepted to the elite École normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris.^[1] However, he found himself enlisted in the run-up to World War II, and like most French soldiers following the Fall of France Althusser was interned in a German prisoner of war camp. Here, his move towards Communism was to begin. He remained in the camp for the rest of the war, and this experience further contributed to his lifelong bouts of mental instability.^[1]

Health[link]

After the war, Althusser was able finally to attend ENS.^[1] However, he was in poor health, both mentally and physically. In 1947 he received electroconvulsive therapy. Althusser would from this point suffer from periodic mental illness for the rest of his life. The ENS was sympathetic, however, allowing him to reside in his own room in the school infirmary. Althusser lived at the ENS in the Rue d'Ulm for decades, except for periods of hospitalization.

Post-War[link]

In 1946, Althusser met Hélène Rytman, a revolutionary of Lithuanian-Jewish origin and eight years his senior.^[1] She remained his companion, and eventually his wife, until her death, at his hands, in 1980.

Formerly a devout if left-wing Catholic, Althusser joined the French Communist Party (PCF) in 1948,^[1] a time when others such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty were losing sympathy for the party. That same year, Althusser passed the agrégation in philosophy with a dissertation on Hegel, which allowed him to become a tutor at the ENS.^[1]

De-Stalinisation[link]

With the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev began the process of "de-Stalinisation". For many Marxists—including the PCF's leading theoretician Roger Garaudy and the pre-eminent existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre—this meant the recovery of the humanist roots of Marx's thought, and the opening of a dialogue between Marxists and moderate socialists, existentialists, and Christians.^[2] Althusser, however, opposed this trend, proffering a "theoretical anti-humanism" and sympathising with the criticisms made by the Communist Party of China, albeit cautiously and being careful not to identify himself with Maoism. His stance during this period earned him notoriety within the PCF and he was attacked by its secretary-general Waldeck Rochet. As a philosopher, he was treading another path, which would later lead him to "aleatory materialism"; however, this did not stop him from defending Marxist orthodox thought in relation to his own position and work, such as in his 1973 reply to John Lewis.

Despite the involvement of many of his students in the events of May 1968, Althusser initially greeted these developments with silence.^[1] He was later to parallel the official PCF line in describing the students as victim to "infantile" leftism. As a result, Althusser was attacked by many former supporters.^[1] In response to these criticisms, he revised some of his positions, claiming that his earlier writings contained mistakes, and a significant shift in emphasis was seen in his later works.

1980s[link]

On 16 November 1980, Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène, to death, following a period of mental instability.^[1] There were no witnesses, and the exact circumstances are debated, with some claiming it was deliberate, others accidental. Althusser himself claimed not to have a clear memory of the event, saying that while he was massaging his wife's neck, he discovered he had strangled her. Althusser was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility, and he was not tried, but instead committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital. Althusser remained in hospital until 1983. Upon release, he moved to northern Paris and lived reclusively, seeing few people. He continued to work and write, but published little. A notable exception is his autobiography, L'Avenir dure longtemps, in which Althusser describes the killing (among other topics).^[1] He died of a heart attack on 22 October 1990 at the age of 72. Much of his post-1980 work has been published posthumously.

Thought[link]

Louis Althusser

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,^[3] 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,^[4] borrowing a term from the philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard.^[5] 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".^[6] 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^[7] (an idea closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony).^[8]

Althusser is also widely known as a theorist of ideology. His best-known essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation",^[9] 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).

The epistemological break[link]

Althusser's contention is that Marx's thought has been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He fiercely condemns various interpretations of Marx's works—historicism,^[10] idealism, and economism—on the grounds that they fail to realise that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx has constructed a revolutionary view of social change. These errors, he believes, result from the notion that Marx's entire body of work can be understood as a coherent whole. Rather, Althusser holds, Marx's thought contains a radical "epistemological break". Although the works of the young Marx are bound by the categories of German philosophy and classical political economy, with The German Ideology (written in 1845) there is a sudden and unprecedented departure.^[11] This "break" represents a shift in Marx's work to a fundamentally different "problematic", i.e., a different set of central propositions and questions posed, a different theoretical framework.^[12] The problem, according to Althusser, is compounded by the fact that even Marx himself does not fully comprehend the significance of his own work, being able to communicate it only obliquely and tentatively. The shift can be revealed only by way of a careful and sensitive "symptomatic reading".^[13] Thus, Althusser's project is to help us fully grasp the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory, giving as much attention to what is not said as to the explicit. Althusser holds that Marx has discovered a "continent of knowledge", History, analogous to the contributions of Thales to mathematics, Galileo to physics,^[14] or, better, Freud's psychoanalysis,^[15] in that the structure of his theory is unlike anything posited by his predecessors.

Althusser believes that Marx's work is fundamentally incompatible with its antecedents because it is built on a groundbreaking epistemology that rejects the distinction between subject and object. In opposition to empiricism, Althusser claims that Marx's philosophy, dialectical materialism, counters the theory of knowledge as vision with a theory of knowledge as production.^[16] On the empiricist view, a knowing subject encounters a real object and uncovers its essence by means of abstraction.^[17] On the assumption that thought has a direct engagement with reality, or an unmediated vision of a "real" object, the empiricist believes that the truth of knowledge lies in the correspondence of a subject's thought to an object that is external to thought itself.^[18] By contrast, Althusser claims to find latent in Marx's work a view of knowledge as "theoretical practice". For Althusser, theoretical practice takes place entirely within the realm of thought, working upon theoretical objects and never coming into direct contact with the real object that it aims to know.^[19] Knowledge is not discovered, but rather produced by way of three "Generalities": (1) the "raw material" of pre-scientific ideas, abstractions and facts; (2) a conceptual framework (or "problematic") brought to bear upon these; and (3) the finished product of a transformed theoretical entity, concrete knowledge.^[20] On this view, the validity of knowledge is not guaranteed by its correspondence to something external to itself; because Marx's historical materialism is a science, it contains its own internal methods of proof.^[21] It is therefore not governed by the interests of society, class, ideology, or politics, and is distinct from the economic superstructure.

In addition to its unique epistemology, Marx's theory is built on concepts—such as forces and relations of production—that have no counterpart in classical political economy.^[22] Even when existing terms are adopted—for example, the theory of surplus value that combines David Ricardo's concepts of rent, profit, and interest—their meaning and relation to other concepts in the theory is significantly different.^[23] However, more fundamental to Marx's "break" is a rejection of homo economicus, or the idea, held by the classical economists, that the needs of individuals can be treated as a fact or "given" independent of any economic organisation. For the classical economists, such individual needs can serve as a premise for a theory explaining the character of a mode of production and as an independent starting point for a theory about society.^[24] Where political economy explains economic systems as a response to individual needs, Marx's analysis accounts for a wider range of social phenomena in terms of the parts they play in a structured whole. Consequently, Marx's Capital has greater explanatory power than does political economy in that it provides both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of a whole society. In Althusser's view, Marx does not simply argue that human needs are largely created by their social environment and thus vary with time and place; rather, he abandons the very idea that there can be a theory about what people are like that is prior to any theory about how they come to be that way.^[25]

Although Althusser steadfastly holds onto the claim of its existence,^[26] he later asserts that the turning point's occurrence around 1845 is not so clearly defined, as traces of humanism, historicism, and Hegelianism are to be found in Capital.^[27] He even goes so far as to state that only Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme^[28] and some marginal notes on a book by Adolph Wagner^[29] are fully free from humanist ideology.^[30] In line with this, Althusser replaces his earlier definition of Marx's philosophy as the "theory of theoretical practice" with a new belief in "politics in the field of history"^[31] and "class struggle in theory".^[32] Althusser considers the epistemological break to be a process instead of a clearly defined event, the product of incessant struggle against ideology. The distinction between ideology and science or philosophy is thus not assured once and for all by the epistemological break.^[33]

Levels and practices[link]

Because of Marx's belief that the individual is a product of society, it is, in Althusser’s view, pointless to try to build a social theory on a prior conception of the individual. The subject of observation is not individual human elements, but rather "structure". As he sees it, Marx does not explain society by appealing to the properties of individual persons—their beliefs, desires, preferences, and judgements—but rather defines society as a set of fixed "levels"^[34] and "practices".^[35] He uses this analysis to defend Marx's historical materialism against the charge that it crudely posits a base (economic level) and superstructure (culture/politics) "rising upon it" and then attempts to explain all aspects of the superstructure by appealing to features of the (economic) base (the well known architectural metaphor). For Althusser, it is a mistake to attribute this economic determinist view to Marx: as much as he criticises the idea that a social theory can be founded on an historical conception of human needs, so does he critique the idea that economic practice can be used in isolation to explain other aspects of society.^[36] Althusser believes that both the base and the superstructure are interdependent, although he keeps to the classic Marxist materialist understanding of the determination of the base "in the last instance" (albeit with some extension and revision). The advantage of levels and practices over individuals as a starting point is that although each practice is only a part of a complex whole of society, a practice is a whole in itself in that it consists of a number of different kinds of parts; economic practice, for example, contains raw materials, tools, individual persons, etc., all united in a process of production.^[37]

Althusser conceives of society as an interconnected collection of these wholes—economic practice, ideological practice, and politico-legal practice. Although each practice has a degree of relative autonomy, together they make up one complex, structured whole (social formation).^[38] In his view, all levels and practices are dependent on each other. For example, amongst the relations of production of capitalist societies are the buying and selling of labour power by capitalists and workers. These relations are part of economic practice, but can only exist within the context of a legal system which establishes individual agents as buyers and sellers; furthermore, the arrangement must be maintained by political and ideological means.^[39] From this it can be seen that aspects of economic practice depend on the superstructure and vice versa.^[40] For him this was the moment of reproduction and constituted the important role of the superstructure.

Contradiction and overdetermination[link]

An analysis understood in terms of interdependent levels and practices helps us to conceive of how society is organised, but also allows us to comprehend social change and thus provides a theory of history. Althusser explains the reproduction of the relations of production by reference to aspects of ideological and political practice; conversely, the emergence of new production relations can be explained by the failure of these mechanisms. Marx's theory seems to posit a system in which an imbalance in two parts could lead to compensatory adjustments at other levels, or sometimes to a major reorganisation of the whole. To develop this idea, Althusser relies on the concepts of contradiction and non-contradiction, which he claims are illuminated by their relation to a complex structured whole. Practices are contradictory when they "grate" on one another and non-contradictory when they support one another. Althusser elaborates on these concepts by reference to Lenin's analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917.^[41]

Lenin posited that in spite of widespread discontent throughout Europe in the early 20th century, Russia was the country in which revolution occurred because it contained all the contradictions possible within a single state at the time.^[42] It was, in his words, the "weakest link in a chain of imperialist states".^[43] He explained the revolution in relation to two groups of circumstances: firstly, the existence within Russia of large-scale exploitation in cities, mining districts, etc., a disparity between urban industrialisation and medieval conditions in the countryside, and a lack of unity amongst the ruling class; secondly, a foreign policy which played into the hands of revolutionaries, such as the elites who had been exiled by the Tsar and had become sophisticated socialists.^[44]

For Althusser, this example reinforces his claim that Marx's explanation of social change is more complex than the result of a single contradiction between the forces and the relations of production.^[45] The differences between events in Russia and Western Europe highlight that a contradiction between forces and relations of production may be necessary, but not sufficient, to bring about revolution.^[46] The circumstances that produced revolution in Russia, mentioned above, were heterogeneous, and cannot be seen to be aspects of one large contradiction.^[47] Each was a contradiction within a particular social totality, at a different structural level of social practice. From this, Althusser concludes that Marx's concept of contradiction is inseparable from the concept of a complex structured social whole. In order to emphasise that changes in social structures relate to numerous contradictions, Althusser describes these changes as "overdetermined", using a term taken from Sigmund Freud.^[48] This interpretation allows us to account for the way in which many different circumstances may play a part in the course of events, and how these circumstances may combine to produce unexpected social changes or "ruptures".^[47]

However, Althusser does not mean to say that the events that determine social changes all have the same causal status. While a part of a complex whole, economic practice is, in his view, a "structure in dominance": it plays a major part in determining the relations between other spheres, and has more effect on them than they have on it. The most prominent aspect of society (the religious aspect in feudal formations and the economic aspect in capitalist ones) is called the "dominant instance", and is in turn determined "in the last instance" by the economy. For Althusser, the economic practice of a society determines which other aspect of that society dominates the society as a whole.

Althusser's arguably more complex and materialist (than other Marxisms) understanding of contradiction in terms of the dialectic attempts to rid Marxism of the influence and vestiges of Hegelian (idealist) dialectics, and is a component part of his general anti-humanist position.

Ideological state apparatuses[link]

Because Althusser held that a person's desires, choices, intentions, preferences, judgements, and so forth are the products of social practices, he believed it necessary to conceive of how society makes the individual in its own image. Within capitalist societies, the human individual is generally regarded as a subject endowed with the property of being a self-conscious, "responsible" agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts. For Althusser, however, a person's capacity for perceiving him or herself in this way is not innate or given. Rather, it is acquired within the structure of established social practices, which impose on individuals the role (forme) of a subject.^[49] Social practices both determine the characteristics of the individual and give him or her an idea of the range of properties that he or she can have, and of the limits of each individual. Althusser argues that many of our roles and activities are given to us by social practice: for example, the production of steelworkers is a part of economic practice, while the production of lawyers is part of politico-legal practice. However, other characteristics of individuals, such as their beliefs about the good life or their metaphysical reflections on the nature of the self, do not easily fit into these categories.

In Althusser's view, our values, desires, and preferences are inculcated in us by ideological practice, the sphere which has the defining property of constituting individuals as subjects.^[50] Ideological practice consists of an assortment of institutions called "Ideological State Apparatuses" (ISAs), which include the family, the media, religious organisations, and most importantly in capitalist societies, the education system, as well as the received ideas that they propagate.^[51] There is, however, no single ISA that produces in us the belief that we are self-conscious agents. Instead, we derive this belief in the course of learning what it is to be a daughter, a schoolchild, black, a steelworker, a councillor, and so forth.

Despite its many institutional forms, the function and structure of ideology is unchanging and present throughout history;^[52] as Althusser states, "ideology has no history".^[53] All ideologies constitute a subject, even though he or she may differ according to each particular ideology. Memorably, Althusser illustrates this with the concept of "hailing" or "interpellation," which draws heavily from Lacan and his concept of the Mirror Stage.^[54] He compares ideology to a policeman shouting "Hey you there!" toward a person walking on the street. Upon hearing this call, the person responds by turning around and in doing so, is transformed into a subject.^[55] The person is conscious of their being a subject and aware of the other person. Thus, for Althusser, being aware of other people is a form of ideology. Within that, Althusser sees subjectivity as a type of ideology. The person being hailed recognizes him or herself as the subject of the hail, and knows to respond.^[56] Althusser calls this recognition a "mis-recognition" (méconnaissance),^[57] because it works retroactively: a material individual is always already an ideological subject, even before he or she is born.^[58] The "transformation" of an individual into a subject has always already happened; Althusser here acknowledges a debt to Spinoza's theory of immanence.^[58] To highlight this, Althusser offers the example of Christian religious ideology, embodied in the Voice of God, instructing a person on what his place in the world is and what he must do to be reconciled with Christ.^[59] From this, Althusser draws the point that in order for that person to identify himself as a Christian, he must first already be a subject; that is, by responding to God's call and following His rules, he affirms himself as a free agent, the author of the acts for which he assumes responsibility.^[60] We cannot recognize ourselves outside of ideology, and in fact, our very actions reach out to this overarching structure. For Althusser, we acquire our identities by seeing ourselves mirrored in ideologies.^[61]

Further, Althusser advances two theses on ideology: "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence";^[62] and "Ideology has a material existence".^[63] The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based.

The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious "representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses. Central to the view of individuals as responsible subjects is the notion of an explanatory link between belief and action, that

For Althusser, this is yet another effect of social practice:

These material rituals may be compared with Bourdieu's concept of habitus. ISAs may also anticipate Foucault's disciplinary institutions, which provide a critical rethinking of Althusser.

Althusser also recognized the role played by what he termed the "Repressive State Apparatus" (RSA).^[66] According to Althusser, the basic function of the RSA (heads of state, government, police, courts, army, etc.) is to intervene and act in favour of the ruling class by repressing the ruled class through violent and coercive means. The RSA is controlled by the ruling class, because more often than not, the ruling class possesses state power.^[67] He accentuates the differences between the RSA and the ISAs as follows:

1. The RSA functions as a unified entity (an organized whole) as opposed to the ISA, which is diverse and plural. However, what unites the disparate ISAs is the fact that they are ultimately controlled by the ruling ideology.

2. The RSA functions predominantly by means of repression and violence and secondarily by ideology, whereas the ISAs function predominantly by ideology and secondarily by repression and violence. The ISAs function in a concealed and a symbolic manner.^[68]

At times when individuals and groups pose a threat to the dominant order, the state invokes the Repressive State Apparatus. The most benign measures taken by the RSA are the systems of law and courts, where putatively public contractual language is invoked in order to govern individual and collective behaviour. As threats to the dominant order mount, the state turns to increasingly physical and severe measures in response: incarceration, police force, and ultimately military intervention.

Perry Anderson, in his essay "Considerations on Western Marxism", writes that

"despite the huge popularity gained by the concept in many circles, ISA as a concept was never theorised by Althusser himself in any serious manner. It was merely conceived as a conjunctural and temporary tool to challenge the contemporary liberalism within the French Communist Party. A further elaboration of the concept in the hands of Nicos Paulantzas was easily demolished by Ralph Miliband in the exchanges over the pages of New Left Review. For, if all the institutions of civil society are conceptualised as part of the state, then a mere electoral victory of a left wing student organisation in a University can also be said to be a victory over a part of the state!"^{[citation needed]}

Reception and influence[link]

Although Althusser's theories were born of an attempt to defend what some saw as Communist orthodoxy, the eclecticism of his influences—drawing equally from contemporary structuralism, philosophy of science, and psychoanalysis as from thinkers in the Marxist tradition—reflected a move away from the intellectual isolation of the Stalin-era. Furthermore, his thought was symptomatic both of Marxism's growing academic respectability and of a push towards emphasising Marx's legacy as a philosopher rather than only as an economist or sociologist. Tony Judt saw this as a criticism of Althusser's work, saying he removed Marxism "altogether from the realm of history, politics and experience, and thereby ... render[ed] it invulnerable to any criticism of the empirical sort."^[69] Judt was a trenchant critic. In his March 1994 “New Republic” review of Althusser’s memoirs he wrote “One puts down this depressing book with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment. How could it be that so many intelligent and educated people were taken in by this man? Even if we allow that his manic fancies met some widespread need in the sixties, how are we to account for the continuing fascination that he exercises in certain circles today?”

Althusser has had broad influence in the areas of Marxist philosophy and post-structuralism: interpellation has been popularised and adapted by the feminist philosopher and critic Judith Butler; the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses has been of interest to Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek; the attempt to view history as a process without a subject garnered sympathy from Jacques Derrida; historical materialism was defended as a coherent doctrine from the standpoint of analytic philosophy by G. A. Cohen;^[70] the interest in structure and agency sparked by Althusser was to play a role in Anthony Giddens's theory of structuration; Althusser was vehemently attacked by British historian E. P. Thompson in his book The Poverty of Theory.^[71]

Althusser's influence is also seen in the work of economists Richard D. Wolff and Stephen Resnick, who have interpreted that Marx's mature works hold a conception of class different from the normally understood ones. For them, in Marx class refers not to a group of people (for example, those that own the means of production versus those that do not), but to a process involving the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor. Their emphasis on class as a process is consistent with their reading and use of Althusser's concept of overdetermination in terms of understanding agents and objects as the site of multiple determinations.

Althusser's work has also been criticized from a number of angles. In a 1971 paper for Socialist Register, Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski^[72] undertook a detailed critique of structural Marxism, arguing that the concept was seriously flawed on three main points:

I will argue that the whole of Althusser's theory is made up of the following elements: 1. common sense banalities expressed with the help of unnecessarily complicated neologisms; 2. traditional Marxist concepts that are vague and ambiguous in Marx himself (or in Engels) and which remain, after Althusser's explanation, exactly as vague and ambiguous as they were before; 3. some striking historical inexactitudes.

Kolakowski further argued that, despite Althusser's claims of scientific rigour, structural Marxism was unfalsifiable and thus unscientific, and was best understood as a quasi-religious ideology. In 1980, sociologist Axel van der Berg^[73] described Kolakowski's critique as "devastating", proving that "Althusser retains the orthodox radical rhetoric by simply severing all connections with verifiable facts".

Legacy[link]

Since his death, the reassessment of Althusser's work and influence has been ongoing. The first wave of retrospective critiques and interventions ("drawing up a balance sheet") began outside of Althusser's own country, France, because, as Etienne Balibar pointed out in 1988, "there is an absolute taboo now suppressing the name of this man and the meaning of his writings."^[74] Balibar's remarks were made at the "Althusserian Legacy" Conference organized at SUNY Stony Brook by Michael Sprinker. The proceedings of this conference were published in September 1992 as the Althusserian Legacy and included contributions from Balibar, Alex Callinicos, Michele Barrett, Alain Lipietz, Warren Montag, and Gregory Elliott, among others. It also included an obituary and an extensive interview with Jacques Derrida.^[74]

Eventually, a colloquium was organized in France at the University of Paris VIII by Sylvain Lazarus on May 27, 1992. The general title was Politique et philosophie dans l'oeuvre de Louis Althusser, the proceedings of which were published in 1993.^[75]

In retrospect, Althusser's continuing importance and influence can be seen through his students.^[1] A dramatic example of this points to the editors and contributors of the 1960s journal Cahiers pour l'Analyse:

This influence continues to guide some of today's most significant and provocative philosophical work, as many of these same students became eminent intellectuals in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Alain Badiou,^[1] Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière in philosophy, Pierre Macherey in literary criticism and Nicos Poulantzas in sociology. The prominent Guevarist Régis Debray also studied under Althusser, as did the aforementioned Derrida (with whom he at one time shared an office at the ENS), noted philosopher Michel Foucault,^[1] and the pre-eminent Lacanian psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller.

Badiou has lectured and spoken on Althusser on several occasions in France, Brazil, and Austria since Althusser's death. Badiou has written many studies, including "Althusser: Subjectivity without a Subject", published in his book Metapolitics in 2005. Most recently, Althusser's work has been given prominence again through the interventions of Warren Montag and his circle; see for example the special issue of borderlands e-journal edited by David McInerney (Althusser & Us) and "Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal", edited by Montag. (See "External links" below for access to both of these journals.)

As late as 2011 Althusser continued to spark controversy and debate with the publication in August of that year of Jacques Rancière's first book, Althusser's Lesson (1974). It marked the first time this groundbreaking work was to appear in its entirety in an English translation.

Selected bibliography[link]

Original works in English translation

• Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
• For Marx.
• Reading Capital (with Étienne Balibar, Pierre Macherey, etc.).
• The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. ed. François Matheron; trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 1997.
• Essays in Self-Criticism.
• Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists.
• Machiavelli and Us.
• Politics and History.
• The Humanist Controversy and Other Texts.
• Writings on Psychoanalysis.
• The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (Extract in Critical Inquiry)
• Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, trans. and ed. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, 2006.

Selected articles in translation

• “Our Jean-Jacques Rousseau”. TELOS 44 (Summer 1980). New York: Telos Press

Further reading[link]