Louis Althusser: biography of this structuralist philosopher

The work of a multitude of thinkers and philosophers has contributed over the years to the development of knowledge and theoretical bodies that explain how the world and the society in which we live works, as is the case of Marxism, a philosophical, political and economic doctrine whose influence lasts until our days.

One of the characters who contributed to the analysis of the Marxist doctrine was the structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser, which we will talk about throughout the article, detailing his biography and his most outstanding works.

Who was Louis Althusser?

Louis Althusser (1918-1990), born in Algeria, he was a renowned Marxist philosopher and a leading academic supporter of the French Communist Party. Althusser is commonly known as a structural Marxist, despite the fact that both he and Michel Foucault They refused to be classified as authors of this philosophical current.

He studied in Paris, at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, where he eventually became a professor of philosophy. His arguments were a response to multiple threats to his ideological foundations, including the influence of empiricism and a growing interest in democratic socialist orientations and humanists.

Althusser believed that the theories of Karl Marx had been misinterpreted because they had been viewed as a single theoretical body of work, when instead In fact, Marx had experienced an "epistemological break" that separated his later work from his humanism. former. Althusser stated that Marx had developed an innovative historical theory that viewed the individual as a product of society, culture, and ideology.

Furthermore, Althusser claimed that Marx had analyzed society in terms of social and political units called "practices" rather than in terms of the individual. His ideas later influenced various 21st century thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, G.A. Cohen, Anthony Giddens, Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek, and several of his students became eminent intellectuals.

thought and works

Althusser's early works include the influential volume “To read Capital”, a collection of the work of Althusser and his students on an intense philosophical rereading of Karl Marx's “Capital”. The book reflects on the philosophical status of Marxist theory as a "critique of political economy" and on its object.

The project was somewhat analogous, within Marxism, to the return of contemporary psychoanalysis to Freud undertaken by Jacques Lacan, with whom Althusser was also involved (and with whom he shared moments of friendship and enmity at the same time). time). Several of Althusser's theoretical positions have remained highly influential in Marxist philosophy, although he sometimes deliberately exaggerated his arguments to provoke controversy.

In his essay "On the Young Marx" he borrows a term from the French philosopher of science, Gaston Bachelard, in proposing a great "epistemological break" between the first writings of Marx, with a more "Hegelian" style (of the philosophical system founded by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) and "feuerbachian" (alluding to Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, intellectual father of atheistic humanism) and his later texts, properly Marxist.

On the other hand, in another of his essays, "Marxism and Humanism", Althusser shows a strong declaration of anti-humanism applied to Marxist theory, condemning ideas such as the "human potential" and "species-being", which Marxists often propose as a consequence of a bourgeois ideology of humanity.

In the chapter "Contradiction and overdetermination" of his work "Marx's Theoretical Revolution" borrows the concept of overdetermination (the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at the same time). time) of psychoanalysis, to replace the idea of ​​"contradiction" with a more complex model of multiple causation in situations policies.

This last idea is closely related to Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony, which defines it as the sociopolitical power that derives from allow the "spontaneous consent" of the population through leadership or intellectual and moral authority, as used by subordinates of the State.

Althusser is also widely known as an ideology theorist., a concept based on Gramsci's theory of hegemony and that he establishes in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: notes towards an investigation”.

For Althusser, hegemony is entirely determined by political forces, while ideology is based on the concepts of Freud and Lacan of the unconscious and the mirror stage (the stage in which the child is for the first time capable of self-perceive).

The “epistemological break”

As we have commented at the beginning, Althusser considered that the thought of Marx had been fundamentally misunderstood and underestimated. He strongly condemned various interpretations of Marx's works on the grounds that they had not realized that with the "science of history", historical materialism, Marx had built a revolutionary vision of change social.

Althusser believed that these misinterpretations resulted from the mistaken notion that all of Marx's work could be understood as a coherent whole. Instead, Althusser argued that Marx's work contains a radical "epistemological break". Althusser's project was to help the world fully understand the originality and power of Marx's extraordinary theory., paying as much attention to what is not said as to what is explicit.

Still, Althusser maintained that Marx had discovered a "continent of knowledge." He compared Marx's ideas about history with the contributions of Thales to mathematics, Galileo to physics, or Freud to psychoanalysis, stating that the structure of his theory was different from anything proposed by his predecessors.

Althusser also believed that Marx's theory was based on concepts, such as the forces and relations of production, that had no counterpart in classical political economy. In addition to its unique structure, Marx's historical materialism had a different explanatory power than classical political economy. While political economy explained economic systems as a response to the needs individual, Marx's analysis took into account a broader range of social phenomena and their roles in a larger whole. structured.

Althusser concluded that "The Capital" he provided both a model of the economy and a description of the structure and development of an entire society. Likewise, he considered the epistemological break as a process rather than a clearly defined event.

He described Marxism and psychoanalysis as sciences that always had to fight against ideology, thus explaining the ruptures and later divisions, because the two objects of his analysis, the "class struggle" and the unconscious human mind, were divided and separated each other.