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The Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). The project was initiated by the German National Library and the American Library of Congress.

The aim is to link the national authority files (such as the German Name Authority File) to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record: receives a standard data number; contains the primary, "see", and "see also" records from the original records; and refers to the original authority records. The data are made available online and are available for research and data exchange/sharing. Data set updating uses the Open Archives Initiative protocol.

Participating libraries[link]

Libraries added for testing purposes[link]

See also[link]

• Universal Authority File (GND)

Library and information science portal

External links[link]

• viaf.org
• Expanding the concept of universal bibliographic control

This Library of Congress article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

Authority control is the practice of creating and maintaining index terms for bibliographic material in a catalog in library and information science. Authority control fulfills two important functions. First, it enables catalogers to disambiguate items with similar or identical headings. For example, two authors who happen to have published under the same name can be distinguished from each other by adding middle initials, birth and/or death (or flourished, if these are unknown) dates, or a descriptive epithet to the heading of one (or both) authors. Second, authority control is used by catalogers to collocate materials that logically belong together, although they present themselves differently. For example, authority records are used to establish uniform titles, which can collocate all versions of a given work together even when they are issued under different titles.

Although theoretically any piece of information on a given book is amenable to authority control, catalogers typically focus on authors and titles. Subject headings fulfill a function similar to authority records, although they are usually considered separately.

Authority records[link]

The most common way of enforcing authority control in a bibliographic catalog is to set up a separate index of authority records, which relates to and governs the headings used in the main catalog. This separate index is often referred to as an "authority file." It contains an indexable record of all decisions made by catalogers in a given library (or -- as is increasingly the case -- cataloguing consortium), which catalogers consult when making, or revising, decisions about headings.

It is to be remembered that the function of authority files is essentially organizational, rather than informational. That is to say, they (ideally) contain a sufficient amount of information to establish a given author or title as unique, while excluding information that, while perhaps interesting to a reader, does not contribute to this goal.

Although practices certainly vary internationally, in the English-speaking world, it is generally the case that a valid authority record must contain:

• A heading
• Any cross references
• Statement(s) of justification

Heading refers to the form of name (or title) that the cataloguer has chosen as the authorized form.

Cross references are other forms of the name (or title) that might appear in the catalog. There are two types of cross-references: see references, which reference forms of the name (or title) that have been deprecated in favor of the authorized form; and see also references, which point to other forms of the name (or title) that are authorized. See also references are most commonly used to point to earlier or later forms of a name (or title).

Statement(s) of justification: In addition to providing a heading and applicable references, a valid authority record should also contain a reference to whatever sources of information the cataloguer used to determine both the authorized and any deprecated forms of the name. This is usually done by citing the title and publication date of the source, the location of the name (or title) on that source, and the form in which it appears on that source.

An example authority record, for author Flann O'Brien, taken from the United States Library of Congress authorities files, is reproduced below. (The original record has been abbreviated somewhat for clarity):

O’Brien, Flann, 1911-1966

Na Gopaleen, Myles, 1911-1966
Knowall, George
Na gCopaleen, Myles, 1911-1966

His At Swim-Two-Birds ... 1939.
His The best of Myles, 1983: CIP t.p. (Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien))
His Myles away from Dublin, 1985: t.p. (Myles na Gopaleen (Flann O’Brien) selection from the 
column written for ... under the name of George Knowall)
Rhapsody in Stephen’s green, 1994: t.p. (Flann O’Brien (Myles na gCopaleen))

This example contains all the elements of a valid authority record: the first heading is the form of the name that the Library of Congress has chosen to be authoritative. In theory, every record in the catalog that represents a work by this author should have this form of the name as its author heading. What follows immediately below is a set of see references. These forms of the author's name will appear in the catalog, but only as transcriptions, not as headings. If a user queries the catalog under one of these variant forms of the author's name, she would receive the response: "See O’Brien, Flann, 1911-1966." (See also references, which point from one authorized heading to another authorized heading, are exceedingly rare for personal name authority records, although they often appear in name authority records for corporate bodies.) The final four entries in this record constitute the justification for this particular form of the name: it appeared in this form on the 1939 edition of the author's novel At Swim-Two-Birds, whereas the author's other noms de plume appeared on later publications.

Access control[link]

The act of choosing a single authorized heading to represent all forms of a name is often difficult, sometimes arbitrary and on occasion politically sensitive. An alternative is the idea of access control, where variant forms of a name are related without the endorsement of one particular form. See Linda Barnhart's Access Control Records: Prospects and Challenges from the 1996 OCLC conference 'Authority Control in the 21st Century'.

Authority control and cooperative cataloging[link]

Before the advent of digital OPACs and the Internet, the work of creating and maintaining a library's authority files was generally carried out by individual cataloging departments (if it was done at all). This meant that there could be a fair amount of disagreement among libraries over which form of a given name was considered authoritative; so long as a library's catalog was internally consistent, differences between catalogs did not matter greatly.

However, even before the Internet revolutionized the way libraries go about cataloging their materials, catalogers began moving toward the establishment of cooperative consortia, such as OCLC and RLIN in the United States, in which cataloging departments from libraries all over the world contributed their records to, and took their records from, a shared database. This development gave rise to the need for national standards for authority work.

In the United States, the primary organization for maintaining cataloging standards with respect to authority work operates under the aegis of the Library of Congress, and is known as the Name Authority Cooperative Program, or NACO^[1] Authority.

Standards[link]

• ISAAR (CPF) - International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families.^[2] Published by the International Council on Archives^[3]
• MARC standards for authority records in machine-readable format.^[4]
• Metadata Authority Description Schema (MADS), an XML schema for an authority element set that may be used to provide metadata about agents (people, organizations), events, and terms (topics, geographics, genres, etc.).
• Encoded Archival Context, an XML schema for authority records conforming to ISAAR(CPF)

See also[link]

• Universal Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei or GND), authority file by the German National Library
• Knowledge Organization Systems
• Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) for representation of thesauri, classification schemes, taxonomies, subject-heading systems, or any other type of structured controlled vocabulary.
• Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), an aggregation of authority files currently focused on personal and corporate names.

References[link]

External links[link]

• Library of Congress authorities records
• A description of authority control services as provided by Backstage Library Works
• A description of authority control services as provided by LTI
• A description of authorities processing services as provided by Marcive

Albert Camus

Portrait from New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, 1957
Born	(1913-11-07)7 November 1913 Dréan, El Taref, French Algeria
Died	4 January 1960(1960-01-04) (aged 46) Villeblevin, Yonne, Burgundy, France
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Absurdism
Main interests	Ethics, Humanity, Justice, Love, Politics
Influenced by Plotinus, Augustine of Hippo, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Victor Hugo, Pascal Pia, George Orwell, André Gide, Max Stirner, Sigmund Freud, Lev Shestov, Jean-Paul Sartre
Influenced Thomas Merton, Jacques Monod, Jean-Paul Sartre, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, Richard Wright, Charles Bukowski, Paul Auster

Albert Camus (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ kamy] ( listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.

Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label.^[1] In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."^[2]

In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.^[3]

Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times".^[4] He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award.^[5] He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.

Early years[link]

Albert Camus was born on 7 November 1913 in Dréan (then known as Mondovi) in French Algeria to a Pied-Noir family.^[6] His mother was of Spanish descent and was half-deaf.^[7] His father Lucien, a poor agricultural worker, died in the Battle of the Marne in 1914 during World War I, while serving as a member of the Zouave infantry regiment. Camus and his mother lived in poor conditions during his childhood in the Belcourt section of Algiers.

In 1923, Camus was accepted into the lycée and eventually he was admitted to the University of Algiers. After he contracted tuberculosis (TB) in 1930, he had to end his football activities (he had been a goalkeeper for the university team) and reduce his studies to part-time. To earn money, he also took odd jobs: as private tutor, car parts clerk and assistant at the Meteorological Institute. He completed his licence de philosophie (BA) in 1935; in May 1936, he successfully presented his thesis on Plotinus, Néo-Platonisme et Pensée Chrétienne (Neo-Platonism and Christian Thought), for his diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an M.A. thesis).

Camus joined the French Communist Party in the spring of 1935, seeing it as a way to "fight inequalities between Europeans and 'natives' in Algeria." He did not suggest he was a Marxist or that he had read Das Kapital, but did write that "[w]e might see communism as a springboard and asceticism that prepares the ground for more spiritual activities."^[8] In 1936, the independence-minded Algerian Communist Party (PCA) was founded. Camus joined the activities of the Algerian People's Party (Le Parti du Peuple Algérien), which got him into trouble with his Communist party comrades. As a result, in 1937 he was denounced as a Trotskyite and expelled from the party. Camus went on to be associated with the French anarchist movement.

The anarchist André Prudhommeaux first introduced him at a meeting in 1948 of the Cercle des Étudiants Anarchistes (Anarchist Student Circle) as a sympathiser familiar with anarchist thought. Camus wrote for anarchist publications such as Le Libertaire, La révolution Proletarienne and Solidaridad Obrera (Workers' Solidarity, the organ of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (National Confederation of Labor)). Camus stood with the anarchists when they expressed support for the uprising of 1953 in East Germany. He again allied with the anarchists in 1956, first in support of the workers’ uprising in Poznań, Poland, and then later in the year with the Hungarian Revolution.

In 1934, he married Simone Hie, a morphine addict, but the marriage ended as a consequence of infidelities on both sides. In 1935, he founded Théâtre du Travail (Worker's Theatre),^[9] renamed Théâtre de l'Equipe (Team's Theatre) in 1937. It lasted until 1939. From 1937 to 1939 he wrote for a socialist paper, Alger-Républicain. His work included an account of the peasants who lived in Kabylie in poor conditions, which apparently cost him his job. From 1939 to 1940, he briefly wrote for a similar paper, Soir-Republicain. He was rejected by the French army because of his TB.

In 1940, Camus married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician. Although he loved her, he had argued passionately against the institution of marriage, dismissing it as unnatural. Even after Francine gave birth to twins, Catherine and Jean, on 5 September 1945, he continued to joke to friends that he was not cut out for marriage. Camus conducted numerous affairs, particularly an irregular and eventually public affair with the Spanish-born actress Maria Casares. In the same year, Camus began to work for Paris-Soir magazine. In the first stage of World War II, the so-called Phoney War, Camus was a pacifist. In Paris during the Wehrmacht occupation, on 15 December 1941, Camus witnessed the execution of Gabriel Péri; it crystallized his revolt against the Germans. He moved to Bordeaux with the rest of the staff of Paris-Soir. In the same year he finished his first books, The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus. He returned briefly to Oran, Algeria in 1942.

Literary career[link]

During the war Camus joined the French Resistance cell Combat, which published an underground newspaper of the same name. This group worked against the Nazis, and in it Camus assumed the nom de guerre Beauchard. Camus became the paper's editor in 1943. He first met Sartre at the dress rehearsal of Sartre's play, The Flies, in June 1943. ^[10] When the Allies liberated Paris in August 1944, Camus witnessed and reported the last of the fighting. Soon after the event on 6 August 1945, he was one of the few French editors to publicly express opposition and disgust to the United States' dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. He resigned from Combat in 1947 when it became a commercial paper. After the war, Camus began frequenting the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris with Sartre and others. He also toured the United States to lecture about French thought. Although he leaned left, politically, his strong criticisms of Communist doctrine did not win him any friends in the Communist parties and eventually alienated Sartre.

In 1949 his TB returned and Camus lived in seclusion for two years. In 1951 he published The Rebel, a philosophical analysis of rebellion and revolution which expressed his rejection of communism. Upsetting many of his colleagues and contemporaries in France, the book brought about the final split with Sartre. The dour reception depressed Camus; he began to translate plays.

Camus's first significant contribution to philosophy was his idea of the absurd. He saw it as the result of our desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither, which he expressed in The Myth of Sisyphus and incorporated into many of his other works, such as The Stranger and The Plague. Despite his split from his "study partner", Sartre, some^[who?] still argue that Camus falls into the existentialist camp. He specifically rejected that label in his essay "Enigma" and elsewhere (see: The Lyrical and Critical Essays of Albert Camus). The current confusion arises in part because many recent applications of existentialism have much in common with many of Camus's practical ideas (see: Resistance, Rebellion, and Death). But, his personal understanding of the world (e.g. "a benign indifference", in The Stranger), and every vision he had for its progress (e.g. vanquishing the "adolescent furies" of history and society, in The Rebel) undoubtedly set him apart.

In the 1950s Camus devoted his efforts to human rights. In 1952 he resigned from his work for UNESCO when the UN accepted Spain as a member under the leadership of General Franco. In 1953 he criticized Soviet methods to crush a workers' strike in East Berlin. In 1956 he protested against similar methods in Poland (protests in Poznań) and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution in October.

The monument to Camus built in the small town of Villeblevin, France where he died in an automobile accident on 4 January 1960

Camus maintained his pacifism and resisted capital punishment anywhere in the world. He wrote an essay against capital punishment in collaboration with Arthur Koestler, the writer, intellectual and founder of the League Against Capital Punishment.

The bronze plaque on the monument to Camus in the town of Villeblevin, France. The plaque reads: "From the General Council of the Yonne Department, in homage to the writer Albert Camus whose remains laid in vigil at the Villeblevin town hall on the night of 4 to 5 January 1960."

When the Algerian War began in 1954, Camus was confronted with a moral dilemma. He identified with the pied-noirs such as his own parents and defended the French government's actions against the revolt. He argued that the Algerian uprising was an integral part of the 'new Arab imperialism' led by Egypt and an 'anti-Western' offensive orchestrated by Russia to 'encircle Europe' and 'isolate the United States'.^[11] Although favouring greater Algerian autonomy or even federation, though not full-scale independence, he believed that the pied-noirs and Arabs could co-exist. During the war he advocated a civil truce that would spare the civilians, which was rejected by both sides, who regarded it as foolish. Behind the scenes, he began to work for imprisoned Algerians who faced the death penalty.

From 1955 to 1956, Camus wrote for L'Express. In 1957 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times", not for his novel The Fall, published the previous year, but for his writings against capital punishment in the essay "Réflexions sur la Guillotine" (Reflections on the Guillotine). When he spoke to students at the University of Stockholm, he defended his apparent inactivity in the Algerian question; he stated that he was worried about what might happen to his mother, who still lived in Algeria. This led to further ostracism by French left-wing intellectuals.

Revolutionary Union Movement and Europe[link]

As he wrote in L'Homme révolté (in the chapter about "The Thought on Baxter"), Camus was a follower of the ancient Greek 'Solar Tradition' (la pensée solaire). In 1947–48 he founded the Revolutionary Union Movement (Groupes de liaison internationale – GLI)^[8] a trade union movement in the context of revolutionary syndicalism (Syndicalisme révolutionnaire). According to Olivier Todd, in his biography, 'Albert Camus, une vie', it was a group opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton. For more, see the book Alfred Rosmer et le mouvement révolutionnaire internationale by Christian Gras.

His colleagues were Nicolas Lazarévitch, Louis Mercier, Roger Lapeyre, Paul Chauvet, Auguste Largentier, Jean de Boë (see the article: "Nicolas Lazarévitch, Itinéraire d'un syndicaliste révolutionnaire" by Sylvain Boulouque in the review Communisme, n° 61, 2000). His main aim was to express the positive side of surrealism and existentialism, rejecting the negativity and the nihilism of André Breton.

From 1943, Albert Camus had correspondence with Altiero Spinelli who founded the European Federalist Movement in Milan—see Ventotene Manifesto and the book "Unire l'Europa, superare gli stati", Altiero Spinelli nel Partito d'Azione del Nord Italia e in Francia dal 1944 al 1945-annexed a letter by Altiero Spinelli to Albert Camus.

In 1944 Camus founded the "French Committee for the European Federation" (Comité Français pour la Féderation Européene – CFFE) declaring that Europe "can only evolve along the path of economic progress, democracy and peace if the nation states become a federation."

From 22–25 March 1945, the first conference of the European Federalist Movement was organised in Paris with the participation of Albert Camus, George Orwell, Emmanuel Mounier, Lewis Mumford, André Philip, Daniel Mayer, François Bondy and Altiero Spinelli (see the book The Biography of Europe by Pan Drakopoulos). This specific branch of the European Federalist Movement disintegrated in 1957 after Winston Churchill's ideas about the European integration rose to dominance.

Death[link]

Camus died on 4 January 1960 at the age of 46 in a car accident near Sens, in Le Grand Fossard in the small town of Villeblevin. In his coat pocket was an unused train ticket. He had planned to travel by train with his wife and children, but at the last minute he accepted his publisher's proposal to travel with him.^[12]

Albert Camus' gravestone

The driver of the Facel Vega car, Michel Gallimard, his publisher and close friend, also died in the accident.^[13] In August 2011, the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera reported a theory that the writer had been the victim of a Soviet plot, but Camus biographer Olivier Todd did not consider it credible.^[14] Camus was buried in the Lourmarin Cemetery, Lourmarin, Vaucluse, France.

He was survived by his wife and twin children, Catherine and Jean, who hold the copyrights to his work.

Two of Camus's works were published posthumously. The first, entitled A Happy Death (1970), featured a character named Patrice Mersault, comparable to The Stranger's Meursault. There is scholarly debate as to the relationship between the two books. The second was an unfinished novel, The First Man (1995), which Camus was writing before he died. The novel was an autobiographical work about his childhood in Algeria.

Summary of absurdism[link]

Many writers have addressed the Absurd, each with his or her own interpretation of what the Absurd is and what comprises its importance. For example, Sartre recognizes the absurdity of individual experience, while Kierkegaard explains that the absurdity of certain religious truths prevent us from reaching God rationally. Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a "philosopher of the absurd". He showed less interest in the Absurd shortly after publishing Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). To distinguish his ideas, scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd, when referring to "Camus' Absurd".

His early thoughts appeared in his first collection of essays, L'Envers et l'endroit (The Two Sides Of The Coin) in 1937. Absurd themes were expressed with more sophistication in his second collection of essays, Noces (Nuptials), in 1938. In these essays Camus reflects on the experience of the Absurd. In 1942 he published the story of a man living an absurd life as L'Étranger (The Stranger). In the same year he released Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), a literary essay on the Absurd. He also wrote a play about Caligula, a Roman Emperor, pursuing an absurd logic. The play was not performed until 1945.

The turning point in Camus' attitude to the Absurd occurs in a collection of four letters to an anonymous German friend, written between July 1943 and July 1944. The first was published in the Revue Libre in 1943, the second in the Cahiers de Libération in 1944, and the third in the newspaper Libertés, in 1945. The four letters were published as Lettres à un ami allemand (Letters to a German Friend) in 1945, and were included in the collection Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.

Ideas on the Absurd[link]

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In his writings Camus presented the reader with dualisms: happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. His aim was to emphasize the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality. He did this not to be morbid, but to reflect a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, this dualism becomes a paradox: We value our lives and existence so greatly, but at the same time we know we will eventually die, and ultimately our endeavours are meaningless. While we can live with a dualism (I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come), we cannot live with the paradox (I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless). In Le Mythe, Camus was interested in how we experience the Absurd and how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves?

In Le Mythe, Camus suggests that 'creation of meaning', would entail a logical leap or a kind of philosophical suicide in order to find psychological comfort. But Camus wants to know if he can live with what logic and lucidity has uncovered – if one can build a foundation on what one knows and nothing more. Creation of meaning is not a viable alternative but a logical leap and an evasion of the problem. He gives examples of how others would seem to make this kind of leap. The alternative option, namely suicide, would entail another kind of leap, where one attempts to kill absurdity by destroying one of its terms (the human being). Camus points out, however, that there is no more meaning in death than there is in life, and that it simply evades the problem yet again. Camus concludes, that we must instead 'entertain' both death and the absurd, while never agreeing to their terms.

Meursault, the absurdist hero of L'Étranger, has killed a man and is scheduled to be executed. Caligula ends up admitting his absurd logic was wrong and is killed by an assassination he has deliberately brought about. However, while Camus possibly suggests that Caligula's absurd reasoning is wrong, the play's anti-hero does get the last word, as the author similarly exalts Meursault's final moments.

Camus made a significant contribution to a viewpoint of the Absurd, and always rejected nihilism as a valid response.

"If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning." Second Letter to a German Friend, December 1943.

Camus' understanding of the Absurd promotes public debate; his various offerings entice us to think about the Absurd and offer our own contribution. Concepts such as cooperation, joint effort and solidarity are of key importance to Camus, though they are most likely sources of 'relative' versus 'absolute' meaning.

Religious beliefs and absurdism[link]

While writing his thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine of Hippo, Camus became very strongly influenced by their works, especially that of St. Augustine. In his work, Confessions (consisting of 13 books), Augustine promotes the idea of a connection between God and the rest of the world. Camus identified with the idea that a personal experience could become a reference point for his philosophical and literary writings. Although he considered himself an atheist,^{[citation needed]} Camus later came to tout the idea that the absence of religious belief can simultaneously be accompanied by a longing for "salvation and meaning". This line of thinking presented an ostensible paradox and became a major thread in defining the idea of absurdism in Camus' writings.^[15]

Opposition to totalitarianism[link]

Throughout his life, Camus spoke out against and actively opposed totalitarianism in its many forms.^[16] Early on, Camus was active within the French Resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II, even directing the famous Resistance journal, Combat. On the French collaboration with Nazi occupiers he wrote: "Now the only moral value is courage, which is useful here for judging the puppets and chatterboxes who pretend to speak in the name of the people."^[17] After liberation, Camus remarked, "This country does not need a Talleyrand, but a Saint-Just."^[18] The reality of the bloody postwar tribunals soon changed his mind: Camus publicly reversed himself and became a lifelong opponent of capital punishment.^[18]

Camus' well-known falling out with Sartre is linked to this opposition to totalitarianism. Camus detected a reflexive totalitarianism in the mass politics espoused by Sartre in the name of radical Marxism. This was apparent in his work L'Homme Révolté (The Rebel) which not only was an assault on the Soviet police state, but also questioned the very nature of mass revolutionary politics. Camus continued to speak out against the atrocities of the Soviet Union, a sentiment captured in his 1957 speech, The Blood of the Hungarians, commemorating the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, an uprising crushed in a bloody assault by the Red Army.

Football[link]

Camus was once asked by his friend Charles Poncet which he preferred, football or the theatre. Camus is said to have replied, "Football, without hesitation."^[19]

Camus played as goalkeeper for Racing Universitaire d'Alger (RUA won both the North African Champions Cup and the North African Cup twice each in the 1930s) junior team from 1928–30.^[20] The sense of team spirit, fraternity, and common purpose appealed to Camus enormously.^[21] In match reports Camus would often attract positive comment for playing with passion and courage. Any aspirations in football disappeared at age 17, upon contracting tuberculosis—then incurable, Camus was bedridden for long and painful periods.

When Camus was asked in the 1950s by an alumni sports magazine for a few words regarding his time with the RUA, his response included the following:

After many years during which I saw many things, what I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport and learned it in the RUA.^[19]

Camus was referring to a sort of simplistic morality he wrote about in his early essays, the principle of sticking up for your friends, of valuing bravery and fair-play. Camus' belief was that political and religious authorities try to confuse us with over-complicated moral systems to make things appear more complex than they really are, potentially to serve their own needs.

Works[link]

Novels[link]

• The Stranger (L'Étranger, often translated as The Outsider) (1942)
• The Plague (La Peste) (1947)
• The Fall (La Chute) (1956)
• A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse) (written 1936–1938, published posthumously 1971)
• The First Man (Le premier homme) (incomplete, published posthumously 1995)

Short stories[link]

• Exile and the Kingdom (L'exil et le royaume) (collection) (1957)
  • "The Adulterous Woman" ("La Femme adultère")
  • "The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" ("Le Renégat ou un esprit confus")
  • "The Silent Men" ("Les Muets")
  • "The Guest" ("L'Hôte")
  • "Jonas or the Artist at Work" ("Jonas ou l’artiste au travail")
  • "The Growing Stone" ("La Pierre qui pousse")

Non-fiction books[link]

• Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism (1935)
• Betwixt and Between (L'envers et l'endroit, also translated as The Wrong Side and the Right Side) (Collection, 1937)
• Nuptials (Noces) (1938)
• The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe) (1942)
• The Rebel (L'Homme révolté) (1951)
• Notebooks 1935–1942 (Carnets, mai 1935 — fevrier 1942) (1962)
• Notebooks 1943–1951 (1965)
• Notebooks 1951–1959 (2008) Published as "Carnets Tome III : Mars 1951 – December 1959" (1989)

Plays[link]

• Caligula (performed 1945, written 1938)
• Requiem for a Nun (Requiem pour une nonne, adapted from William Faulkner's novel by the same name) (1956)
• The Misunderstanding (Le Malentendu) (1944)
• The State of Siege (L' Etat de Siege) (1948)
• The Just Assassins (Les Justes) (1949)
• The Possessed (Les Possédés, adapted from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel by the same name) (1959)

Essays[link]

• Create Dangerously (Essay on Realism and Artistic Creation) (1957)
• The Ancient Greek Tragedy (Parnassos lecture in Greece) (1956)
• The Crisis of Man (Lecture at Columbia University) (1946)
• Why Spain? (Essay for the theatrical play L' Etat de Siege) (1948)
• Reflections on the Guillotine (Réflexions sur la guillotine) (Extended essay, 1957)
• Neither Victims Nor Executioners (Combat) (1946)

Collected essays[link]

• Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1961) – a collection of essays selected by the author.
• Lyrical and Critical Essays (1970)
• Youthful Writings (1976)
• Between Hell and Reason: Essays from the Resistance Newspaper "Combat", 1944–1947 (1991)
• Camus at "Combat": Writing 1944–1947 (2005)
• Albert Camus Contre la Peine de Mort (2011)

References[link]

• Albert Camus: A Biography (1979), by Herbert R. Lottman. University of Michigan

Further reading[link]

• Camus (1959), by Germaine Brée ISBN 1-122-01570-4
• Camus (1966), by Adele King ISBN 0-05-001423-4
• Camus: vida e obra (1970), by Vicente de Paulo Barretto.
• Albert Camus: A Biography (1997), by Herbert R. Lottman (ISBN 3-927258-06-7)
• Albert Camus and the Minister (2000), by Howard E. Mumma (ISBN 1-55725-246-7)
• Albert Camus, The Artist in the Arena (1965), by Emmett Parker (OCLC 342770)
• Albert Camus, A Study of His Work (1957), by Philip Malcolm Waller Thody (OCLC 342101)
• Albert Camus: A Life (2000), by Olivier Todd (ISBN 0-7867-0739-9)
• Albert Camus: Kunst und Moral, by Heiner Wittmann (ISBN 3-631-39525-6)
• Ethics and Creativity in the Political thought of Simone Weil and Albert Camus 2004, by Dr. John Randolph LeBlanc (ISBN 978-0-7734-6567-1)
• The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir (1954) Winner of the 1954 Goncourt Prize; Camus himself states that he is "the hero" of the book in his Notebooks 1951-1959.
• Camus, A Romance (2009), by Elizabeth Hawes (ISBN 978-0802118899)

Since 2009[link]

• (English) Heiner Wittmann : Sartre and Camus in Aesthetics. The Challenge of Freedom. Hrsg. v. Dirk Hoeges. Dialoghi/Dialogues. Literatur und Kultur Italiens und Frankreichs, Band 13, Frankfurt/M 2009 (ISBN 978-3-631-58693-8)
• Jacques Ferrandez, L'Hôte : D'après l'œuvre d'Albert Camus, éditions Gallimard-Jeunesse, Collection Fétiche, 13 novembre 2009, 62 pages, (ISBN 2-07-062870-1)
• José Lenzini, Les derniers jours de la vie d'Albert Camus, Éditions Actes Sud, Collection Romans et nouvelles, octobre 2009, (ISBN 2742786295)
• Dolorès Lyotard, Albert Camus contemporain, Éditions Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, Collection Objet, 218 pages, 5 novembre 2009, (ISBN 2757401114)
• Albert Camus et René Char, La Postérité du soleil, Éditions Gallimard, Collection Blanche, 20 novembre 2009, avec des photographies de Henriette Grindat, 79 pages, (ISBN 2070127788)
• Jeanyves Guérin, Dictionnaire Albert Camus, Éditions Robert Laffont, Collection Bouquins, 19 novembre 2009, 992 pages, (ISBN 2221-10734-8)
• Catherine Camus, Albert Camus, Solitaire et Solidaire, Éditions Michel-Lafon, 2009
• José Lenzini, Camus et l'Algérie, Éditions Édisud, Collection Les Écritures, 11 janvier 2010, 159 pages, (ISBN 2744908517)
• Virgil Tanase, Camus, Éditions Gallimard, Collection Folio Biographies, 21 janvier 2010, 410 pages, (ISBN 2070344320)
• Alain Vircondelet, Albert Camus, fils d’Alger, Éditions Fayard, 2010
• Jean-Luc Moreau, Camus l'intouchable, Polémiques et complicités, Éditions Écriture-Éd. Neige, 2010 (ISBN 978-2909240961)
• Ève Morisi, Albert Camus contre la peine de mort, préface de Robert Badinter, Éditions Gallimard, 6 octobre 2011, 351 pages, (ISBN 2070135543)
• (English) Brent C. Sleasman, Albert Camus's Philosophy of Communication: Making Sense in an Age of Absurdity, 2011 (ISBN 978-1604977912)

Articles and conferences[link]

• Heiner Wittmann, Camus et Sartre : deux littéraires-philosophes, conférence présentée lors d’une Journée d’études à la Maison Henri Heine sur la littérature et la morale, 15 décembre 2005
• Guy Dumur, Les silences d'Albert Camus, Médecine française, 1948
• Francis Jeanson, Albert Camus ou l'âme révoltée, Les Temps modernes, 1952
• Jean Négroni, Albert Camus et le théâtre de l'Équipe, Revue d'histoire du théâtre, 1960
• Pierre Nguyen-Van-Huy, La métaphysique du bonheur chez Albert Camus, Neuchâtel, La Baconnière, 1962
• Bernard Pingaud, La voix de Camus, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1971

Documents and testimonies[link]

• « L’ordre libertaire, la vie philosophique d’Albert Camus », de Michel Onfray, Flammarion, 596 pages, 2012
• Camus et Sartre, Amitié et combat, Aronson Ronald, éditions Alvik, 2005
• Albert Camus et l'Espagne, Édisud, septembre 2005
• Pierre Zima, L'indifférence romanesque : Sartre, Moravia, Camus, éditions L'Harmattan, mars 2005
• Albert Camus et les écritures algériennes. Quelles traces ?,Édisud, 2004
• Arnaud Corbic, Camus - L'absurde, la révolte, l'amour, Les Éditions de l'Atelier, 2003
• Albert Camus et les écritures du XXe siècle, Collectif, Artois Presse Université, 2003 (Colloque de Cergy 2002
• Audisio, Camus, Roblès, frères de Soleil, Collectif, Édisud, 2003
• En commune présence : Albert Camus et René Char, Collectif, édition Folle Avoine, 2003
• Écriture autobiographique et Carnets : Albert Camus, Jean Grenier, Louis Guilloux, Collectif, édition Folle Avoine, 2003
• Denis Salas, Albert Camus, la juste révolte, éditions Michalon, 2002
• Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi, Camus à Combat, Cahiers Albert Camus n°8, Gallimard, 2002
• Emmanuel Roblès, Camus, frère de soleil, éditions Le Seuil, 1995
• Histoire d'un livre : l'Etranger d'Albert Camus, Collectif, éditions Imec, 1991

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Albert Camus

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Albert Camus

• Albert Camus on In Our Time at the BBC. (listen now)
• Many books of Albert Camus available, in French, in Les Classiques des sciences sociales.
• Albert Camus' Week: Excerpts, articles, interviews and videos on the website of the Prague Writers' Festival
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1957) Link
• "Accidental Friends" the story of the Camus-Sartre friendship and very public breakup
• Interview with daughter Catherine – 3AM
• Another interview with daughter Catherine – Spike
• The Logic of Existential Meaning
• Albert Camus Society UK
• Université McGill: le roman selon les romanciers (French) Inventory and analysis of Albert Camus' non-novelistic writings
• Camus 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.
• Camus Interview with Prof. Jean-Marie Apostolides, from the radio program Entitled Opinions
• Works by Albert Camus on Open Library at the Internet Archive
• (French) Pierre Michel, Albert Camus et Octave MirbeauPDF (640 KB)

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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]

• Althusser: A Critical Reader (ed. Gregory Elliott).
• Anderson, Perry, Considerations on Western Marxism
• Callinicos, Alex, Althusser's Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 1976).
• Elliott, Gregory, Althusser: The Detour of Theory by (New York: Verso, 1987); (republished by Haymarket Books, 2009)
• Ferretter, Luke, "Louis Althusser" (London and New York: Routledge, 2006)
• James, Susan, 'Louis Althusser' in Skinner, Q. (ed.) The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences
• Judt, Tony, "The Paris Strangler," in The New Republic, Vol. 210, No. 10, March 7, 1994, pp. 33–7.
• Waters, Malcolm, Modern Sociological Theory, 1994, page 116.
• Lewis, William, Louis Althusser and the Traditions of French Marxism. Lexington books, 2005. (link)
• McInerney, David (ed.), Althusser & Us, special issue of borderlands e-journal, October 2005. (link)
• Warren Montag, Louis Althusser, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003.
• Resch, Robert Paul. Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1992. (link)
• Élisabeth Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida, Columbia University Press, New York, 2008.
• Heartfield, James, The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, Sheffield Hallam UP, 2002 ^[77]
• Lahtinen, Mikko, "Politics and Philosophy: Niccolò Machiavelli and Louis Althusser's Aleatory Materialism", Brill, 2009 (forthcoming in paperback via Haymarket, 2011).
• Thomas, Peter D., "The Gramscian Moment: Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism", Brill, 2009 (forthcoming in paperback via Haymarket, 2011).

External links[link]

• The Louis Althusser Internet Archive at Marxists.org
• Louis Althusser (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Texts by or on Althusser at Generation-Online
• Texts on Althusser on the site of the Sorbonne Marx Seminar
• Texts from Althusser & texts about him - in French on Multitudes website.
• Décalages: An Althusser Studies Journal
• (French) Le récit autofictionnel L’avenir dure longtemps de Louis Althusser. Manipuler pour mieux pouvoir (s’)expliquer.

Endnotes[link]