Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), Ben Brewster translation, originally published 1971.
Here it is, at last! The ur-text, the point of origin, whence came all of those annoying people in college who described themselves as "Neo-Lacanian-Marxists." Here, reading this, one finally knows where they were getting this stuff, when they would bring off some strange and ungainly phrase, such as when an article in some specious humanities discipline apologizes to you in its opening sentence for being terribly "schematic" (a word that Althusser for unclear reasons always italicizes).
Before looking into this book, I knew Althusser only as one of the "theorists" whom E.P. Thompson thought ridiculous. If there was a great division between the humanistic and the structural Marxists, it was clear to me as a teenage Marxist that I should side with the former. Now that I am older and less of a Marxist of any stripe, however, E.P. Thompson seems quite as ridiculous in his own right; so maybe one should not be so hasty to take sides in that particular tussle, and should go back to both authors, or either, and see what can be learned from them, knowing full well that they will be ridiculous for long stretches.
And there's a lot here that does still strike one as ridiculous—or worse, as sinister. There is Althusser's chilling absolutism and determinism, for instance: his flatly-stated and apparently sincere belief that "The fusion of Marxist theory and the Workers' Movement is the most important event in the whole history of the class struggle, i.e. in practically the whole of human history." There is the fact that Althusser regards Marx (and later, it transpires) Freud, as pioneers of science who opened up new fields to systematic investigation in a way precisely analogous to how the ancients discovered mathematics or Galileo modern physics.
There is Althusser's railing against any religion, at the same time as he has plainly swallowed an enormous religious complex of his own. In his version of Marxism, we can find doctrines of sin and election if any there ever were. We have the author's wrestling with the stain of the "petty-bourgeois" "class position" of the intelligentsia, from which only a fortunate few (Marx, Lenin, etc.) are permitted to escape, thus allowed to receive the true knowledge by a sort of grace. There is the belief that the truths Althusser has to tell us can only be received by those who have themselves attained such a state.
(All of which decisively amounts to a doctrine of conversion. Don't believe me? Read this: "They must also make a real rupture, a real revolution in their consciousness, in order to move from the necessarily bourgeois or petty-bourgeois class instinct to proletarian class positions. It is extremely difficult but not absolutely impossible." As difficult as fitting a camel through the eye of a needle? Strait is the gate and narrow is the way, after all.)
There is Althusser's unconvincing image of Lenin as a kind of Christ figure, laughing among the fishermen of Capri—a "whole-hearted, open laugh" by which they "recognized him as one of their kind[.]" There is the near-mysticism and patronizing wonder with which he harps upon the fact that so many unschooled proletarians have been able to intuitively grasp the concepts of Marx's Capital, even as these truths have evaded the supposedly educated and "intellectual." He hath hid these things from the wise and revealed them unto babes.
One could go on with these sorts of parallels (the endless proof-texting is another one—the in-group assumption that if one can find a place where Lenin said X, that therefore makes X more true and convincing; and if Lenin said Y, and Y is wrong, then one has to somehow show that Lenin did not really mean Y, since it cannot be that Lenin was wrong, and so on).
The point in any case is that the implausible thing in Althusser, as in many another Marxist theorist, is not the diagnosis of the evils of capitalism or of the many traps and temptations of ideology. It's the dogmatic belief in a single, final, and transcendent solution to all these ills—and in the tendency, when asked for concrete evidences of the reality of this solution, to retreat behind a wall of faith and of the inaccessible communion of the saved—an unhelpful assertion that this knowledge is hid from the petty-bourgeois likes of you and me.
What then—if anything—makes this book worth reading? Why soldier through these 166 turgid pages? Partly to know what all the fuss is about, I suppose—to satisfy my curiosity as to what people have been getting from the tomes of "theory" all these years. But it is also to stir my own never-stilled-yet-slumbering Marxist conscience within.
For when Althusser speaks of the extortion of surplus-value and the relentless tendency of the capitalist system both to maximize profits by driving down wages and to expand to ever more distant parts of the world, deploying in its periphery methods of naked violence that it has long since suppressed and sublimated in the countries from which it originated, one knows he is on to something (even if one can't bring oneself to believe anymore in his particular proffered solution).
When he writes of the adult's gradual acculturation to the dominant ideology of capitalist society, his learning to adopt the "contrasting Virtues" of submissiveness to the reigning orthodoxy plus cynicism, mockery, and arrogance toward those which oppose it (and what other tone than this am I displaying in the present post?), one feels he has one's number (one has perhaps been "interpellated"—in Althusser's phrase—the method of direct "calling out" by which an ideology recruits and claims an individual as its own).
Of course, there is much strangeness in the fact that Althusser regards the educational system as the quintessential ideological apparatus of bourgeois capitalist society, and the philosophy teacher as the definitive example of a petty-bourgeois prop of the established order, yet it seems impossible to find a French philosophy teacher working in any education institution in Althusser's era who was not a Marxist just like him. There are the appallingly sordid details of his personal life, which I learned only after having finished the book, such as the fact that Althusser may well have escaped legal consequences for the murder of his wife due precisely to the privileges he enjoyed as a member of France's intellectual elite.
Never mind if the same critical analysis of self-seeking, submission to orthodoxy, and willingness to prostitute one's mind to the service of a reigning ideology—which Althusser wields so mercilessly against "bourgeois economists"—could not just as easily be turned against himself, his membership in a Marxist-Leninist party (he distances himself, conveniently, from Stalinism, but this—recall—is after the Soviet Union had already done the same; Althusser writes off the periods of terror and the gulag as so many products of Stalin's peculiar "cult of personality," rather than any inherent flaw in the Bolshevik authoritarian order, all of which is perfectly in keeping with the official "line" at the time), his position in the elite ranks of the French intelligentsia.
So be it! For so it goes with all doctrines of sin. The point is that what we see in the other, we could just as well find in ourselves, yet by criticizing it in another, one is forever pretending as if we were free of it ourselves. As Althusser himself observes, it is in the nature of every ideology to deny that it is ideological. "As is well known," he writes, "the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself." And Althusser himself is doing nothing other than this—exempting his own ideology from the charge of being ideological or self-interested, while happily leveling that same accusation against others. And of course, it is possible that in criticizing the ideology and the self-interest in him, I am trying to obscure its operations within myself—plucking the mote and ignoring the beam. And so the cycle goes on.
In reading through, I noted the following typographical errors:
Back cover: The introduction is attributed to "Frederic Jameson" (sic, should be "Fredric")
Front matter: Again misspells his name as "Frederic," in providing the library classification for the book.
p. 16 "'all by himself"" (second set of quotation marks should be only a single inverted comma)
p. 20 "thirty-year—long" (should be hyphen rather than em dash)
p. 35 "has to often been taken..." (sic, should be "too")
p. 39 "because the do not have to be partisan" (sic, should be "they")
p. 39 "Ever since philosophy: began" (sic)
p. 40 "the denegation of it real practice" (sic, should be "its")
p. 45 "Fondements de le Critique..." (sic, "critique" in French takes the feminine article; "de le" is not a phrase, it would be "du" if critique were a masculine noun).
p. 75 "What, when, was so interesting to Lenin..." (sic, should be "then")
p. 80 "the 1884 Manuscripts" (sic, should be 1844)
p. 85 "itself abstract it relation to" (sic, "in")
p. 86 "that ever social formation" (sic, "every")
p. 86 "I must therefore reproduce" (sic, should be "It" in context)
p. 102 "the ancestors or the modern political parties" (sic, "of")
p. 120 "wise en scene" (sic, "mise")
p. 120 "192th" (sic)
p. 129 "than Freud called the unconscious" (sic, "that")
p. 144 "fulfllment" (sic)
p. 148 "react an analytical theory" (sic, "on")
p. 150 "personalite" needs an accent aigu.
p. 151 "months time" is missing an apostrophe.
p. 152 "you writer that..." (sic, "write")
p. 153 "in the sense defined early" (sic, "earlier")
p. 158 "at the same, time" (sic)
p. 161 "at the dressing-table-do not see..." (sic, unnecessary hyphen)
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