Louis Althusser

Louis Pierre Althusser (, ; ; 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.

Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF).

His arguments and theses 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.

He later described himself as a social anarchist.

Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness.

In 1930, his family moved to the French city of Marseille as his father was to be the director of the Compagnie Algérienne (Algerian Banking Company) branch in the city.

Althusser spent the rest of his childhood there, excelling in his studies at the and joining a scout group.

This combination may have led him to adopt German Idealism and Hegelian thought, as did Martin's influence and a renewed interest in Hegel in the 1930s and 1940s in France.

A second displacement occurred in 1936 when Althusser settled in Lyon as a student at the Lycée du Parc.

Later he was accepted by the highly regarded higher-education establishment (grande école) École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris.

At the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was influenced by Catholic professors, joined the Catholic youth movement Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne, and wanted to be a Trappist.

His interest in Catholicism coexisted with his communist ideology, and some critics argued that his early Catholic introduction affected the way he interpreted Karl Marx.

After a two-year period of preparation (Khâgne) under Jean Guitton at the Lycée du Parc, Althusser was admitted into the ENS in July 1939.

But his attendance was deferred by many years because he was drafted into the French Army in September of that year in the run-up to World War II and, like most French soldiers following the Fall of France, was captured by the Germans.

Seized in Vannes in June 1940, he was held in a prisoner-of-war camp in Schleswig-Holstein, in Northern Germany, for the five remaining years of the war.

In the camp, he was at first drafted to hard labour but ultimately reassigned to work in the infirmary after falling ill.

This second occupation allowed him to read philosophy and literature.

In his memoirs, Althusser described the experiences of solidarity, political action, and community in the camp as the moment he first understood the idea of communism.

Althusser recalled: "It was in prison camp that I first heard Marxism discussed by a Parisian lawyer in transit—and that I actually met a communist".

His experience in the camp also affected his lifelong bouts of mental instability, reflected in constant depression that lasted until the end of life.

Psychoanalyst Élisabeth Roudinesco has argued that the absurd war experience was essential for Althusser's philosophical thought.

Althusser resumed his studies at the ENS in 1945 to prepare himself for the agrégation, an exam to teach philosophy in secondary schools.

In 1946, Althusser met sociologist Hélène Rytmann, a Jewish former French Resistance member with whom he was in a relationship until he killed her by strangulation in 1980.

That same year, he started a close friendly relationship with Jacques Martin, a translator of G. W. F. Hegel and Herman Hesse.

Martin, to whom Althusser dedicated his first book, would later commit suicide.

Martin was influential on Althusser's interest on reading the bibliography of Jean Cavaillès, Georges Canguilhem and Hegel.

Although Althusser remained a Catholic, he became more associated with left-wing groups, joining the "worker priests" movement and embracing a synthesis of Christian and Marxist thought.

In consonance, Althusser's master thesis to obtain his diplôme d'études supèrieures was "On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel" ("Du contenu dans la pensée de G. W. F. Hegel", 1947).

Based on The Phenomenology of Spirit, and under Gaston Bachelard's supervision, Althusser wrote a dissertation on how Marx's philosophy refused to withdraw from the Hegelian master–slave dialectic.

According to the researcher Gregory Elliott, Althusser was a Hegelian at that time but only for a short period.

In 1948, he was approved to teach in secondary schools but instead made a tutor at the ENS to help students prepare for their own agrégation.

His performance on the exam—he was the best ranked on the writing part and second on the oral module—guaranteed this change on his occupation.

In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her.

He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years.

He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.

Althusser was born in French Algeria in the town of Birmendreïs, near Algiers, to a pied-noir petit-bourgeois family from Alsace, France.

His father, Charles-Joseph Althusser, was a lieutenant in the French army and a bank clerk, while his mother, Lucienne Marthe Berger, a devout Roman Catholic, worked as a schoolteacher.

According to his own memoirs, his Algerian childhood was prosperous; historian Martin Jay said that Althusser, along with Albert Camus and Jacques Derrida, was "a product of the French colonial culture in Northern Africa."