Mick Hartley

Louis Althusser was one of the big names in the French theory that came to exert such a hold over intellectuals and academics in the latter years of the last century. He was a Marxist and a structuralist – a winning combination – and employed the usual impenetrable jargon to bewitch his audience. From "Marx and History", for instance:

“The dialectic is the play that the last instance opens up between itself and other ‘instances’, but this dialectic is materialist: it is not played out up in the air, it is played out in the play opened up by the last instance, which is material.”

He also, in 1980, murdered his wife, sociologist Hélène Rytmann:

'Kneeling beside her, poised over her body, I am massaging her neck. I have often massaged her in silence, the nape of her neck, the small of her back: I learned the technique from a fellow prisoner of war, little Clerc, a professional footballer, an expert in everything.

'But this time it's the front of her neck that I'm massaging. I place my two thumbs on the hollow of flesh round the top of the breastbone and, applying pressure, one thumb to the right, the other aslant to the left, I slowly reach the harder zone beneath the ears. I massage in a V. I feel a great muscular fatigue in my forearms; they ache whenever I give a massage.

'Helene's features are serene and motionless, her open eyes gazing up at the ceiling.

'And suddenly I'm terror- stricken: her eyes have glazed over as if for ever and a tiny portion of her tongue is visible, strange and calm, between her lips and her teeth.

'I've seen dead people before, to be sure, but never in my life have I seen the face of a strangled woman. I nevertheless know she's been strangled. But how? I stand up and I cry out, 'I've strangled Helene''

Those are the opening lines of his L'Avenir dure longtemps, an autobiographical memoir which was only published posthumously.

He was never tried for the murder:

Because the crime had been committed in a fit of depression, and perhaps also because of the criminal's eminence – acknowledged even by those institutions of state to which his writings could scarcely have been less congenial – Althusser was spared the ordeal of a public trial. He was interned in various clinics and lived on, ostensibly a hopeless case, forgotten by all but a handful of close friends, until his death in 1990 at the age of 73.

Apart from the description of the murder, the memoir also contained a terrible admission…that he was, in fact, an intellectual fraud:

In one astonishing passage, which is likely to have destroyed his reputation for ever, Althusser reveals how ill-read he really was: the possessor of thousands of books of which he now claims to have opened only a few hundred. His expertise in philosophy, in the history of ideas, was sketchy at best: 'I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well, Spinoza a little, Aristotle not at all; Plato and Pascal quite well, Kant not at all, Hegel a little.' He was not even particularly conversant with Marx, having read only his early works when he came to write his own seminal Marxist texts. What he was blessed (or cursed) with was an infallible knack for extrapolating from commentaries and occasionally from no more than casual conversations those ideas and intuitions that he knew he would be able to exploit and develop in his own writings. He relates how he contrived to impress his first teacher, the Catholic theologian Jean Guitton, with a paper whose guiding principles he had simply filched from Guitton's own corrections of a fellow student's essay, and how he concocted fake quotations in the thesis he wrote for another major contemporary philosopher, Gaston Bachelard.

Althusser appears to have lived out his whole adult life in the terror that his inadequacy as a thinker, his fraudulence (the word he himself uses), would sooner or later be exposed to his colleagues, his disciples and his enemies.

Not, of course, that such an admission has stopped his disciples, such as Slavoj Žižek, from continuing to cite the great thinker.

Christopher Bray, in The Critic, reviews a new Althusser book, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986, and declares – in a deeply unscholarly but unarguably accurate formulation – that the man was, in fact, "an out and out whack-job". And he supplies us with more detail from that memoir:

Following Hélène’s death, Althusser published no more books of philosophical/political theory. But after his death a memoir came out in which, in best Freudian style, he blamed what had happened on his upbringing. His mother’s first love, after whom he was named, had perished in the First World War. Subsequently, she married the man’s brother, who went on to father young Louis. Alas, Althusser says, he never got over having been named after a dead man. It had led, he said, to his lifelong sense of “not existing”. Worse, since in French “Louis” is pronounced exactly the same as the word for “he”, he had never thought of himself as an individual proper.

Louis = lui. I'd never thought of it before. It explains a lot about the French. Well, some French. Though I don't suppose it bothered Louis XIV too much.