etienne balibar

A LT H U S S E R

AND THE RUE D’ULM

I
undertook to write this obituary of Louis Althusser for the
alumni of the École Normale Supérieure in 1993, nearly three
years after the thinker’s death; and not without hesitations and
delays.1 The moment happened to coincide with yet another
change of fortune in the media image of our comrade, as the post-
humous publication of two autobiographical texts had once more drawn
attention, not without some commotion, to the fate of the ‘caïman of the
rue d’Ulm’.2 This reawakening of curiosity about a man who had seemed
forgotten, his writings virtually out of print, no doubt coincided with the
lifting of certain taboos and the end of a latency period. For Althusser
had been famous two times over: first, in the 1960s and 70s, as a Marxist
philosopher and, with Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault and Barthes, an
emblematic figure of ‘French structuralism’; and second, for a few weeks
at the end of 1980, as the unfortunate and scandalous protagonist of an
unexpected fait divers, the murder of his wife Hélène, within the very
walls of the École. By 1993, it seemed, enough time had passed for inter-
est and nostalgia to appear, along with the need to explain events that
now belonged to history.

It was nevertheless unclear whether this type of curiosity could lead to

a lucid comprehension of Althusser’s personality and intellectual role.
Of course, it is neither possible nor desirable that there should be una-
nimity on such matters; but one might hope that they would at least
be discussed on the basis of all the available facts, and of judgements
independently reached. The time of writing, when testimony was still
available from several generations of Althusser’s colleagues, students,
comrades, interlocutors, friends and adversaries, seemed a favourable
moment for shedding light not simply on the fate of a man, however

new left review 58 july aug 2009 91

92 nlr 58

exceptional or abnormal, but on the institutions and organizations with

which his existence was so closely interwoven.3

I should like therefore to make clear from the start what such a ‘notice’
will not be: neither a personal testimony, which would have been out of
place in the Annuaire and would have required more space; nor a biog-
raphy, to complement, confirm or correct the texts recently published,
something for which I was not qualified; nor a formal presentation of
Althusser’s theoretical work; nor, finally, a detailed analysis of the role
that, for more than thirty years, he played in the life of the École, and
that it in turn played in his. Rather, it is intended as a reminder of the
facts, followed by some reflections and hypotheses.

Career

Born on 16 October 1918 in Birmandreis, a suburb of Algiers, into a

family of office workers and petty officials—his father, Charles, ended
a career spent almost entirely in North Africa as head of the Marseilles
office of the Compagnie Algérienne de Banque—Louis Althusser
attended lycée in Marseilles, and prepared for the competitive exami-
nation to the ens in the khâgne at Lyon, where his teachers notably
included, for philosophy, Jean Guitton and Jean Lacroix, and for history,

1
This essay is adapted from an obituary notice for Louis Althusser, written at the
request of Jean Châtelet of the Association Amicale de Secours des Anciens Elèves
de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure. It first appeared in the Association’s 1993 Annuaire,
and annotated by the author in 2006, when it was published on the website of the
Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine.
2
‘L’avenir dure longtemps’ and ‘Les faits’, written respectively in 1985 and 1976,
were published as L’avenir dure longtemps suivi de Les Faits, Paris 1992, and in
English as The Future Lasts a Long Time and The Facts, London 1993. In what fol-
lows I draw on the first volume of the life by Yann Moulier Boutang: Louis Althusser,
une biographie, Paris 1992.
3
Althusser’s personal archives—manuscripts, correspondence, recorded lectures,
administrative files, etc—were deposited by his heirs with the Institut Mémoires de
l’Édition Contemporaine (imec) at St-Germain-La-Blanche-Herbe. Contributions
by a number of people who knew or collaborated with Althusser, in France and
abroad, have now been added to this material, to make a ‘Fonds Althusser’ available
to researchers. I will take this opportunity to correct an erroneous idea that has
agitated some of our colleagues: the École did not refuse to host a Fonds Althusser.
It would in any case not have had the opportunity, as the negotiations between the
imec and Althusser’s heirs were completed before discussions between the latter
and the Bibliothèque de l’ens had got beyond an exploratory stage.
balibar: Althusser 93

Joseph Hours. In his view these three masters of state education, rep-
resentatives of distinct tendencies in Catholic thought, had a profound
influence on his intellectual formation. Successful in the 1939 competi-
tion, Althusser was mobilized before the start of the academic year. He
was taken prisoner with his artillery regiment in Brittany, and sent to a
prisoner-of-war camp in Germany—Stalag xa, in Schleswig-Holstein—
where he was to spend the rest of the War. He returned to his studies in
October 1945. There followed a few uncertain months, in which it seems
that Jean Baillou, deputy director of the École, helped to reassure him
that it would be possible to overcome this dreadful six-year ‘interrup-
tion’. Althusser obtained his diplôme d’études supérieures with an essay on
‘The notion of content in Hegel’s philosophy’ under the supervision of
Gaston Bachelard, coming second in the 1948 agrégation. Close friend-
ship and intellectual affinity linked him both to Jacques Martin (class of
1941, translator of Hegel and Hermann Hesse, who committed suicide
in 1963) and to Michel Foucault (class of 1946).

In the year that he graduated Althusser was appointed caïman in philoso-

phy, succeeding Georges Gusdorf. He held this post without interruption
until 1980, with the rank of agrégé-répétiteur, then maître-assistant and
maître de conférences—first on his own, then together with Jacques
Derrida and Bernard Pautrat. From 1950 he was also secretary of the
humanities department of the École, and in this capacity played an active
part, alongside successive directors, in the management and orientation
of the establishment.4 In 1975 he defended a doctorat d’État thesis at the
Université de Picardie, before a jury made up of Bernard Rousset, Yvon
Belaval, Madeleine Barthélémy-Madaule, Jacques D’Hondt and Pierre
Vilar.5 After the murder of his wife on 16 November 1980, the judicial
non-lieu pronouncing him unfit to plead under Article 64 of the Penal
Code, on the basis of psychiatric evidence from Drs Brion, Diederich and
Ropert, and the confinement order obtained by the Prefecture of Police,
he retired from his post. The administration of the École then asked
his friends to empty the apartment that he had occupied for more than
twenty years in the south-west corner of the ground floor of the main
building, opposite the infirmary where his friend Dr Étienne lived.

4
The Fonds Althusser contains a full series of notes taken at both the École’s ‘small’
and ‘large’ councils, which undoubtedly form a source of primary importance for
future historians of the École in the post-war years.
5
See the ‘Soutenance d’Amiens’, republished in Positions, Paris 1976; translated as ‘Is
it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, in Essays in Self-Criticism, London 1976.
94 nlr 58

The last ten years of Althusser’s life were spent in various psychiatric
establishments—the Hôpital Sainte-Anne; ‘L’eau vive’ hospital of the
13th arrondissement at Soisy-sur-Seine; the Marcel Rivière centre at La
Verrière—initially under a regime of administrative detention, then as a
voluntary patient; or else at the apartment he had acquired with a view to
his retirement on the rue Lucien-Leuwen, in the 20th arrondissement,
where he notably stayed for a long and almost uninterrupted period
from 1984 to 1986. Treated by various doctors, he was now visited
only by a few friends, old or new, but never left alone. Michelle Loi and
Stanislas Breton, in particular, took the responsibility of providing him
with constant company.

These facts are enough to give an idea of the strength of the link—for
all its problematic aspects—between Althusser and the École. This tie,
‘physical’ as much as ‘moral’, is probably unique in the history of the
ens; notwithstanding the case of Lucien Herr, often compared with
Althusser in this respect, though he never actually lived on the premises,
or some of the great directors of its scientific laboratories, such as Yves
Rocard, Albert Kirrmann, Alfred Kastler or Jean Brossel.

Teacher

The first point to stress is the continuity of Althusser’s work with his
philosophy students. His official role was to prepare them for the
agrégation, over which he always took particular care. He did not gener-
ally develop very close relationships with his students—with individual
exceptions—until the final year. Through to the early 1960s, his influ-
ence on successive doctoral candidates essentially took the form of
corrections, revision classes and conversations that constituted a kind
of ‘tutoring’ in the English style; and lectures—exceptionally clear,
condensed and meticulously prepared—on the set authors and those
philosophers he particularly favoured, notably Machiavelli, Malebranche,
Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Feuerbach.6
The many different directions taken by his students—among them,

6
One can get a sense of the lectures from the essay on Rousseau, ‘Sur le Contrat
social (les Décalages)’, carefully edited but very close to the lecture on which it was
based, which appeared in Cahiers pour l’Analyse 8, autumn 1967, translated in Politics
and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, London 1972; and especially
from the volume edited by François Matheron: Louis Althusser, Politique et Histoire
de Machiavel à Marx: Cours à l’École Normale Supérieure, 1955–1972, Paris 2006.
balibar: Althusser 95

most of the great names of the University and of contemporary French

philosophy—testify to the fertility of this teaching and the intellectual
freedom it afforded.

Without ever abandoning this fundamental work, from the 1960s he

added a new element, of a rather different character. Having started
to publish his own writings—on Montesquieu in 1959, Feuerbach
in 1960, the essays ‘On the young Marx’ and ‘Contradiction and
Overdetermination’ in 1961 and 62, as well as ‘Philosophie et sciences
humaines’ in 19637—Althusser was approached by philosophy students
from different years and asked to organize a course open to a wider audi-
ence. He did so in the form of ‘seminars’, in which he intervened only
as primus inter pares, but whose impact would be decisive for a whole
generation. The series began in 1961–62 with ‘The Young Marx’, contin-
uing in 1962–63 with ‘The Origins of Structuralism’, in 1963–64 with
‘Lacan and Psychoanalysis’, and culminating in 1964–65 with ‘Reading
Capital’, the basis for the collective work of that title. At this point the
situation changed again: Althusser had become famous in the space
of a few months as the inspirer of a philosophical ‘school’, ephemeral
enough, but which gave rise to heated political polemics; he soon aban-
doned this type of activity in favour of other initiatives. Even before 1968,
and a fortiori afterwards, he returned to a more traditional preparation of
students for the agrégation; restricted lecture courses and increasingly,
due to his illness, the simple marking of essays.8

A second aspect of Althusser’s activity at the École was linked to the first:
that of a true director of studies in philosophy, sometimes on his own
and at others working with two exceptional collaborators and friends: the

7
See ‘Montesquieu: Politics and History’, in Politics and History. The presentation
accompanying his translation of Feuerbach, published as Manifestes philosophiques,
and the essays ‘On the Young Marx’ and ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’,
appear in For Marx, London 1969.
8
It has been said—generally by those ignorant of the chronological and sympto-
matic details—that for a long time the École ‘protected’ Althusser, whether in the
sense of tolerating unofficial absences or of turning a blind eye to pathological
behaviour. It is true that the widespread sympathy felt for Althusser at the École
ensured a certain discretion—not the same as secrecy—with respect to the depres-
sive crises which his sense of dignity forbore to publicize. For the rest, his teaching
obligations, far from seeming a burden, were clearly a source of pleasure and a
stabilizing factor for him; they could be arranged for convenient times, and his
administrative responsibilities shared out or delegated when he was on leave.
96 nlr 58

director of the school, Jean Hyppolite, and then his colleague, Jacques
Derrida.9 At a time when the École, or at least its humanities division,
was still officially no more than a hall of residence combined with a
library, specializing in preparing students for the agrégation, Althusser
sought to develop, by means of lectures and seminars, the basis for a
genuine training in research and for a proper ‘philosophical life’.10 The
questions covered ranged from the history of philosophy and episte-
mology to aesthetics, linguistics and sociology. Althusser was acutely
aware of the importance of the ‘human sciences’. A declared opponent
of positivism and a central protagonist in contemporary episodes of the
Methodenstreit, he saw a double guarantee at stake in keeping close rela-
tions between these disciplines and philosophy—of realism for the latter,
and of resistance to their own technicist imperialism for the others. His
organizational work aimed at making the École an animating centre for
a philosophy that was ‘living’, not ‘academic’, and open to international
discussions—not against the University, whence all these contributions
came, but alongside it, and operating more freely than it would have
in some of the University’s structures. For a number of years it was a
notable success. Without denying the importance of other contributions,
special mention should be made of Althusser’s role in inviting Lacan to
hold his seminar in psychoanalysis at the École, starting in 1964.

There is a third aspect of Althusser’s pedagogic activity, in the broadest

sense of the term, on which it seems all the more important to insist in
that it relates to a vocation of the École at risk of being forgotten by stu-
dents and teachers alike, or endangered by the atmosphere of the times.
This was the systematic organization of opportunities for encounter and
intellectual exchange—of a common formation—for both ‘humanities’
and ‘science’ students. It is not surprising that the impulse for this should
come from a philosopher, although clearly nothing would have come of
it without requests, interest and collaboration from teachers, researchers
and students in other disciplines. Besides, in this respect Althusser was
following, albeit in his own manner, the path suggested by Hyppolite.

9
Another memorable collaboration was with the logician Roger Martin, the École
librarian, which continued after Martin’s appointment to the Université Paris-V.
10
Those he invited as guest lecturers, or whose visits he organized at the request of
his students, included Gueroult, Canguilhem and Beaufret, de Gandillac, Vuillemin,
Granger, Laplanche, Birault, Aubenque, Derathé, Culioli, Foucault, Serres, Vernant,
Bourdieu, Bettelheim, Guillermit, Stanislas Breton, Deleuze, Passeron, Touraine,
Meillassoux, Brunschwig, Teyssèdre, Matheron, Pessel, Joly, Bouveresse, Raymond,
Negri and Linhart.
balibar: Althusser 97

Among the initiatives he took were the lectures in pure mathematics for
‘humanities’ students and, above all, the ‘Philosophy course for scientists’
of 1967–68, which he ran with the assistance of a group of his former
students (Pierre Macherey, myself, François Regnault, Michel Pêcheux
and Alain Badiou, as well as Michel Fichant, a student of Canguilhem at
the Sorbonne); and which, until the ‘May events’, attracted a very large
audience in the Salle Dussane, both from within the École and beyond.11
A few years later, Althusser was the moving spirit behind the ‘Philosophy
and Mathematics’ seminar, run by Maurice Loi in collaboration with
Maurice Caveing, Pierre Cartier and René Thom, and which continues
to this day. These initiatives obviously benefited from an ambience that
was exceptionally favourable to epistemology and to critical reflection on
scientific practices, as well as from the prestige and conviction of their
promoter. They are a good illustration of Althusser’s vocation as a passeur
or ‘mediator’ between the components of the university.

Philosopher

At this point it seems appropriate to give some indications on

Althusser’s personal work, developed entirely within the walls of 45, rue
d’Ulm.12 Independently of the value and style of his writing, its timely
or untimely character, some of its status was surely due to this setting.
Yet the majority of its readers and interlocutors came from somewhere
altogether different.

The work, of course, is limited in quantity, at least in terms of texts pub-

lished in Althusser’s lifetime. (Several remained unpublished, although
more or less complete; but they do not represent the mass imagined
by some commentators, intrigued by the ‘disproportion’ between the
ambition of the projects Althusser sketched out and the relatively small
number of his publications. Such guesses underestimate the obstacles to
creative activity posed by long periods of depression and recovery.) As we
know from numerous witnesses, the major essays were typically drafted
in a few days or even a few hours of uninterrupted work, facilitated by a
mood of exaltation—which is not to say that they were not based on any
preparatory study. Althusser’s assertions that he had ‘read nothing’, or

11
Parts of this course, edited by the lecturers involved, were published by Maspero
in its ‘Théorie’ collection. The set of original mimeographs is deposited in the ens
library, as well as at the imec.
12
With the exception of certain texts written on vacation, particularly in Italy, and in
the country house that he and his wife had acquired at Gordes in the Vaucluse.
98 nlr 58

had only a ‘makeshift’ philosophical formation, should be understood in

highly relative terms. On the other hand, it is certainly true that he always
took advantage of his exceptional ability to listen and his taste for theo-
retical conversation, to substitute oral exchanges for long bibliographic
investigation. Why read a book on your own, or wait for the publication
of an article, when you can have its author explain it to you in detail, and
seek the ‘centre’ of the problem together? This ‘method’ naturally had its
risks in terms of quid pro quo. It was facilitated by Althusser’s actually
living in the École, where his office occupied a ‘strategic’ position: you
went to the library to read, to his office to talk. This did not apply only to
philosophers: how many visitors, friends and former students, French
and foreign colleagues from across the world, found themselves thus
temporarily enrolled in what he sometimes called—in an expression
taken from the young Marx—the ‘party of the concept’?

To return to Althusser’s own work: although there are certain constant

preoccupations—or obsessions—running through it, based on pre-
dilections for particular thinkers and guided by continuous enquiry, it
nonetheless clearly divides into distinct periods. If we leave aside the
texts of his apprenticeship (such as the very brilliant diplôme d’études
supérieures),13 and the ‘youthful’ writings connected to his involve-
ment in Catholic movements, the first period—running up to the early
1960s—can in retrospect be considered as a phase of accumulation. This
culminated in the little book on Montesquieu. Althusser was at that time
preparing the thesis for his doctorat d’État—on ‘Politics and Philosophy
of the Eighteenth Century in France’, and on Rousseau’s Discourse on the
Origins of Inequality—under the supervision of Hyppolite and Vladimir
Jankélévitch. He had joined the pcf in 1948, but had always kept a dis-
tance from the ‘official’ productions of party Marxism (or else had not been
invited to contribute). Instead, he followed his own path of reflections on
the relations between Marxism and philosophy—in particular the notion
of alienation, and the ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-humanist’ tendencies in Marx’s
thought—and on the theoretical implications of psychoanalysis.14

13
Althusser’s paper, in fact a book, ‘Du contenu dans la pensée de G. W. F. Hegel’,
written in 1947, was published in the first volume of Écrits philosophiques et politiques,
Paris 1994, edited by François Matheron; translated as The Spectre of Hegel: Early
Writings, London and New York 1997.
14
This would lead in 1964 to the article ‘Freud and Lacan’, first published in La
Nouvelle Critique; and in English in nlr 1/55, May–June 1969. Elisabeth Roudinesco,
in particular, has shown the role this played in reorienting debates on Marxism,
anthropology and psychoanalysis in France.
balibar: Althusser 99

The second period—that of the 1960s, from his first article ‘On the
Young Marx’ through to the 1968 lecture ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, both
before and after Reading Capital—is the best known. It was undoubt-
edly also that of his strongest works, or at least the most finished, even
when they took a programmatic, interrogative form. Althusser was a
man of essays, of ‘notes for research’, of theses that were really hypoth-
eses, in accordance with one of his favourite sayings, attributed to
Napoleon, On s’engage . . . et puis on voit. It was these works that intro-
duced the notions of ‘symptomatic reading’, ‘epistemological break’,
‘overdetermination’, ‘structural causality’ and ‘theoretical practice’.
It was these works, too, whether one likes it or not, that established
a close connection between the twentieth-century transformations of
Marxism, philosophical ‘structuralism’—as an original alternative to
both naturalism and transcendental idealism, including the latter’s
phenomenological variant, as well as to logicism and historicism15—
and finally that form of historical epistemology known as ‘French’, i.e.,
rationalist and dialectical. (It is a good bet that this conjugation is the
source of the embarrassment expressed in many present judgements
on what has mistakenly been called la pensée 68.)

I have mentioned the context in which these works were developed. To

stress the cooperative aspects of Althusser’s thought, which went far
beyond the group of names listed in the collective publications, is not
to detract from its autonomy, nor to diminish his role as an initiating
‘motor’. Here was a good illustration of the proposition advanced by
Spinoza—to whom Althusser constantly referred—that individualiza-
tion and cooperation are not opposed terms, but correlative ones.16

Seventies

The ‘shock’ of 1968, experienced in absentia, belatedly prompted

Althusser to an intensive activity of correspondence and exchange

15
I use these expressions as shorthand; it is well known that almost all the pro-
tagonists of the ‘structuralist’ movement rejected this description at one time or
another, above all to preserve their respective originality.
16
This cooperation in part found expression in the ‘Théorie’ collection, which he
established and directed for François Maspero from 1965 to 1980. This included
books and essays by Alain Badiou, myself, Gérard Duménil, Bernard Edelman,
Michel Fichant, Françoise Gadet, Dominique Lecourt, Jean-Pierre Lefebvre,
Michelle Loi, Cesare Luporini, Pierre Macherey, Jean-Pierre Osier, Michel Pêcheux,
Pierre Raymond, Emmanuel Terray and André Tosel.
100 nlr 58

throughout the 1970s, indissociable from his many-sided engagement

with questions of the ‘educational apparatus’.17 It was no less clear,
after the event, that the ‘shock’ had also demolished a good part of the
foundations and conditions of realization for the politico-theoretical
project he had constructed in the 1960s. Althusser’s work now took
a new direction, but it also became far more fragmentary. This was
due to a number of factors, independent in themselves, but which ulti-
mately came to form an inextricable ‘knot’. Conceiving philosophy not
as speculation but as combat—Kant’s Kampfplatz, which he renamed
‘class struggle within theory’—he necessarily had to try to ‘rectify’ or
‘adjust’ his interventions in proportion to the effects they had produced,
or those he thought they had. At the same time, now that he had won
international renown—certain Latin American militants considering
him almost a new Marx—the pressures of political immediacy weighed
on him ever more heavily. He found himself involved in heated organi-
zational conflicts, inseparable from personal quarrels. His illness
grew worse, leading to longer and more frequent stays in clinics or
rest homes, in the course of which various chemical anti-depressive
combinations were tried out on him. This in itself destroyed any pos-
sibility of continuous work.

With hindsight it is tempting to suggest that these subjective vicissitudes

were simply one way of ‘living’ the successive stages in the decomposition
of Communism. For while Althusser loudly proclaimed the necessity and
autonomy of theory, his own intellectual activity was indissolubly linked
to the perspective of a ‘refoundation’ of the Communist movement: the
attempt to anticipate its reconstruction, at national and international lev-
els, on the far side of its present crisis. He found himself caught first in
the blows and counter-blows of the Sino-Soviet split, then in the polemic
over ‘Eurocommunism’ and the pcf’s official abandonment of the
notion of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. His alleged ‘theoreticism’ was
criticized from opposite sides, often in identical terms. The successive
self-criticisms he undertook might seem a regressive, even destructive
process. From a purely philosophical point of view, however, their result
was to reveal the themes of a philosophy of historical contingency—no
‘overdetermination’ without ‘underdetermination’—and the ‘materiality

17
The famous article on ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ (first pub-
lished in La Pensée, June 1970; English translation in Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays, London 1971), which was an extract from an unfinished and unpublished
text on ‘Law, State, Ideology’, attests to the strategic importance that Althusser
ascribed to the question of the educational institution at this time.
balibar: Althusser 101

of ideologies’ as an element in every practice, theoretical practice

included. The virtual convergence of these themes provides an outline
of what might have been the doctrine of a ‘second Althusser’, radical-
izing the critique of philosophies of the ‘constitutive subject’ and le sens
de l’histoire that had been characteristic of the first.18 This is why any
reductive interpretation—whether relying on political determinations or
psychiatric stereotypes—is almost certain to miss the mark.

It remains to describe Althusser’s activity in his final period, between

the end of his administrative confinement and the surgical operation
that led in 1987 to a new phase of deep melancholy, practically without
remission. A partial idea of this can be gleaned from an autobiographi-
cal text published in 1992, as well as from fragments of conversation
transcribed and published in Mexico by Fernanda Navarro.19 Now more
than ever, he was subject to alternating phases of exaltation and anxi-
ety. He was also caught between the dejection into which his isolation
had plunged him, and a sometimes violent desire to ‘raise the tomb-
stone’, that is, the ban on public expression that society de facto imposes
on murderers, whether they are considered responsible or not. He
attempted to reconstitute a milieu of interlocutors rather like those he
had welcomed to his office on the rue d’Ulm. Some of his friends coop-
erated in this, others refused to do so, or—like the present author—tried
awkwardly to strike a balance between what they believed ‘reasonable’
and what they saw as ‘delirious’ (or ‘imprudent’). It is unlikely that the
texts drafted during this period, whose publication has been announced
by Althusser’s heirs, will contain theoretical revelations. But there is no
reason to exclude what they may add to his œuvre; together with other
unpublished works, they will permit a fairer assessment of the reasons
for his influence.20

18
For a full bibliography of Althusser’s production during this period see Gregory
Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory, 2nd ed., Leiden 2006.
19
Filosofia y marxismo, Mexico City 1988; English translation in Philosophy of the
Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, London and New York 2006.
20
Since this obituary was written, numerous unpublished texts by Althusser have
appeared. They oblige me to correct the—apparently—negative import of this judge-
ment, especially with regard to the manuscript ‘Machiavel et nous’, which basically
dates from 1972. This was published in French in volume 2 of Écrits philosophiques
et politiques, Paris 1995, and in English as Machiavelli and Us, London and New York
1999. In addition, Althusser’s sketches on his ‘last philosophy’, which he called
‘aleatory materialism’ or ‘materialism of the encounter’, have given rise to a lively
body of interpretative work. See ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of
the Encounter’, in Philosophy of the Encounter.
102 nlr 58

Politics

I shall not attempt here to describe Althusser’s political positions and

activity as a whole, nor to explain their effects or the reactions they
provoked in France and abroad. This is a question of general history,
not just the history of intellectuals. It seems indispensable, however,
to try to characterize the profound influence they had on his relations
with the École. Although Althusser sought—through thought, travel,
personal relationships—not to be confined within it, in many respects
he considered the École as a political arena: both ‘macro-political’ and
‘micro-political’. This is something for which many people, both at the
time and since, would not forgive him—failing to see what this formula-
tion owed to a conjuncture of which Althusser was far more the product
than the instigator, or the way in which it expressed a long-standing,
latent truth. The ‘political’ relations of scholar and scholastic institution
may be experienced and practised in widely different ways, replete with
contradictions. These make themselves felt in the oscillation between,
on the one hand, the temptation to turn the—enclosed—university
setting into a substitute for the ‘real’ political stage; and on the other,
the attempt to open what has always been a privileged corps, selected
for professional–intellectual formation, onto a wider sphere of social
movements, opening a virtually borderless communication between
classes and nations.21 The question demands a level of critical reflec-
tion which, to date, has been sadly missing; above all with regard to the
inter-action between historical conjunctures, institutional dynamics and
individual personalities.

Like many of the intellectuals of his generation, Althusser joined the

Communist Party immediately after the war. He often described how
his first political activity—alongside the campaign for the Stockholm
Appeal—was to establish a student union branch at the École and win
the administration’s recognition of it. When he found himself charged

21
This dual tendency was further accentuated by some of Althusser’s disciples
(who quickly turned against him), such as the ‘Maoists’ of 1966–70, who evidently
dreamed of making the École into a kind of ‘red base’, along the lines of the facto-
ries in which the more consistent of their number would subsequently ‘establish’
themselves. This dream was in certain respects nothing more than a mirror-image
of the more recent technocratic project of using the Grandes Écoles as a ‘white base’
for militant neoliberalism; moreover, it went hand in hand with an astonishing
reverence for the ens and its history as an institution.
balibar: Althusser 103

with administrative responsibilities, even lower-level ones, rather than

an insoluble contradiction or the occasion for a ‘double game’ (for which
he was sometimes criticized), one might argue that he saw it as the
opportunity for elaborating and implementing an original conception
of politics within the institution. This was far removed from the method
of Marxist organizations, even when these followed the ‘mass line’, but
also from group dynamics or business management techniques, since
it combined a practice of constant negotiations with the idea that the
institution was riven by irreducible social antagonisms. Administrator,
teacher, but also militant—and a militant fiercely attached to his ‘base’—
Althusser found himself de facto at the point where all the categories in
the establishment converged, and at favourable moments he was able
to take effective advantage of this; though he also paid the price for it in
moments of personal and collective crisis.

Just as he worked ceaselessly for good communication between the

humanities and sciences at the École, so he also maintained relations of
trust, even friendship, with directors and colleagues in other disciplines,
and with the managerial and service staff. The Communist ‘cell’, of which
he was one of the main organizers, served at least as much as a circle for
reflection on the École’s everyday problems or larger goals as for general
political debate and public intervention, functioning largely independ-
ently of any outside organization.22 It proved to be better adapted to the
role of mediation and critical consciousness than other networks that
spanned the institution (trade-union, religious, even artistic and sport-
ing groups). Naturally, more detailed testimony would be needed in
order to delimit this reality within its epoch, and to appreciate its effects
without idealizing them. One would also need to know what it owed to
other personalities, beside Althusser, and to the atmosphere of the time:
the Cold War, the Algerian War, the student movement before and after
‘1968’; the Union of the Left. But the fact as such seems undeniable.

In many respects, Althusser’s comportment within the pcf was not dis-
similar from his stance within state education—or rather, within that
very atypical sector of state education constituted by a ‘higher’ estab-
lishment that was, for all concerned, a collectivity, a place of life. This
comparison seems to me at least as illuminating as that often made,

22
Despite the surveillance carried out on it by the missi dominici of the pcf leader-
ship in the years of ‘contestation’.
104 nlr 58

both generally and in Althusser’s case, between Communist organiz-

ing and the Catholic Church, from which he emerged. The Communist
Party has in common with the Church not only a messianic perspective,
including the idea of its own ‘imminent’ disappearance, but also the fact
of getting on with the sometimes sordid management of earthly reali-
ties. But it would not be wrong to say that, for Althusser, the Party was,
like the École, a place where the material necessity of an institution, in
which one constantly had to work towards its transformation, made itself
felt both in general and in particular, through the contradictory demands
of teaching and tactics, analyses and relations of force, collective action
for national stakes and personal influence. It is all the more remarkable
that Althusser, who never stopped practising this ‘double membership’,
seeking to intervene in the École as a Communist and in the Communist
Party as a normalien and a scholar, never confused or amalgamated the
two domains. One can reject his style and his choices, but one cannot
accuse him of practising any sort of ‘entryism’.

Throughout its history, the intellectual life of the École Normale—and

sometimes its institutional vicissitudes—has been marked by the politi-
cal debates of the day, in which its students and teachers have often been
fully engaged. The years from 1950 to 1980 only represent a particularly
rapid succession of challenges and turns in the situation. Althusser, an
independent Communist and then a critical one, constantly questioning
Party orthodoxy but never a real ‘dissident’, made his own choices—or
non-choices—in the face of the Cold War, the anti-colonial struggles,
the battles of parties or factions; as did his fellow-thinkers, students and
comrades. But he engaged from the École, and in a certain sense with the
École. This deeply ambivalent ‘complex’ demands analysis, yet renders
it very difficult indeed.

Private and public

At this point the question of Althusser’s ‘illness’ or ‘madness’ has to be

addressed. Psychiatrists have called the cyclical disturbances of mood
(exultation/anguish), which Althusser had suffered since his youth, or at
least since his return from war-time captivity, ‘manic-depressive psychosis’;
we may hope they know what they mean by that.23 Biographical writings,

23
The crisis in the course of which, following six months of treatment that proved
ineffective and perhaps made matters worse, Althusser strangled his wife ‘without
a struggle’, has been termed by experts an ‘acute melancholic episode’.
balibar: Althusser 105

and his own autobiographical ones, have offered various elements of

individual psychology and history relating to his family environment, his
childhood, his friendships, his sexuality, his married life, etc; but I shall
leave these aside here, since I lack the competence to assess their perti-
nence or bearing. What does clearly emerge from the facts, on the other
hand, is a ‘correspondence’ between Althusser’s practice, his political rep-
resentations and his uninterrupted residence (day and night!) at the École
over more than thirty years. Given that this came in the wake of five years
of captivity, which had immediately followed childhood and the ‘commu-
nity’ life, or something like it, he had experienced at lycée, one might
suggest that Althusser, either by dint of a personal subjective constitution
or due to circumstances (most likely, the interaction between the two),
was never really capable of forming any other ‘family’ than the expanded
community of the ens.24 The situation does not call for any value judge-
ment, whether or not veiled as a reference to ‘normality’ (in what way is
nuclear family life more ‘normal’ than life in a community?); but it clearly
involves constraints and repercussions all the stronger for being gener-
ally denied. What kind of ‘community’ is the École, or was it at that time?
This is the issue that Althusser’s life story forces us to face.25

The question is closely bound up with politics. The dramatic episodes

that marked the first years of Althusser’s commitment to Communism—
the injunction given him by the cell of École students to separate from
his partner, whom the party viewed as politically dangerous; the suicide
of his friend Claude Engelmann (class of 1949), a biologist and the cell’s
secretary, at the time of the Lysenko affair; the disapproval Foucault expe-
rienced on account of his homosexuality, etc—all involve the triple aspects
of politics, family (or quasi-family) and community. Exactly the same goes
for the late 1960s, when Althusser’s conflict with his closest disciples, all
normaliens in a certain sense ‘adopted’ by his wife and himself, over the
split in the Union des Étudiants Communistes would lead both sides to
the edge of the precipice. Was it very different, even if the drama was not
always visible (it was sometimes comedy), with the activities of the group

24
We might consider as a symptom of this failure the moment, in the late 1960s,
when Hélène Legotien-Rytmann, Althusser’s partner and future wife, came to live
with him in the apartment at the École, precisely because this seems to be no more
than the mundane decision of a couple. Althusser’s apartment was a private place
only in appearance. Or rather it became, with some others, a place of intense ‘priva-
tization’ of public space, and as such, the object of an uninterrupted ‘demand’.
25
This question is rarely posed for the ens, though it is frequently asked of the col-
leges of Oxford and Cambridge.
106 nlr 58

for thought and ‘intervention’ he attempted to establish with some of his

students and former students in the mid 1960s, and which he sought
several times to reconstitute after it had broken up?

None of this can be understood unless one begins by tracing the specific
context of the pseudo-familial community that the École constituted in
that period for those who lived there continuously, if only for a few
years.26 But none of it would be of much interest, either, if explanation
were restricted to conventional psychological or psychoanalytic notions
—Oedipus, repressed homosexuality, etc. What is at issue here is the
uncertainty of the dividing line between public and private, on which
our system of institutions theoretically rests. It turns out that this ques-
tion is a particularly insistent one within Althusser’s own thought. The
search for a ‘point of view’—theoretical, class-based—from which it
would be possible to analyse the origin, functions and modalities of the
difference between public and private spheres (should we, like Derrida,
say différance?), and consequently the manner in which this difference
governs the subjective position of individuals and groups, was the organ-
izing principle behind an essential part of Althusser’s work; perhaps the
most central part, if not the most developed.

For this reason I would like, in conclusion, to hazard a hypothesis. We

could stop at the image of Althusser as organizer of ‘passages’ between
sections of the École, of ‘mediations’ between functions; identifying
himself with the institution so as to provide a personal—no doubt
pathogenic—protection against the ‘outside world’; but also in order to
try to open it to the social conflicts and realities of the world, beyond the
expected ‘modernizing’ horizons—high public office, political careers,

26
On this subject, everything remains to be said. To speak of a ‘homosexual com-
munity’, as has been done, is very imprecise. In fact, the dominant milieu, that of
the homoioi—normaliens and archicubes (former students)—was by definition uni-
sexual (I am speaking of course of the École before the merger between the rue
d’Ulm and the rue de Sèvres). Those women who made their way into it, living
and working there, whether as domestic staff, librarians, sévriennes or compan-
ions, played a role as ambivalent as it was important; all the more, given that the
École was in no way monastic (nor military) in its mores. The cleavage between
homosexuality and heterosexuality clearly plays a role in the individualization of
personalities. But the real question lies elsewhere: it bears on the unconscious
articulation between these mores, demarcations, evolutions, and the propulsive
nature of the ‘links’ and ‘models’ that structure institutions such as the École, the
university, the civil service. We must admit that Althusser, like many others, never
pronounced on these problems.
balibar: Althusser 107

business, international and interdisciplinary research. Or we could take

a further step and suggest that, placed by fate (and held there indefi-
nitely by the ‘structure’) at the focal point of the tensions generated by
the coexistence of two distinct and yet indissociable places, private and
public, in what was outwardly a single institution, Althusser sought to
sublimate this situation, apparently privileged but in reality untenable,
in order to turn it into material for philosophical elaboration.

But one could also completely reverse the terms of the problem, and
suppose that Althusser sought out all the experiences that brought this
situation up against its limits, precisely in an attempt to understand its
ambivalence and its necessity. For him, then, the École would have been
only an ‘analyser’ of a much more general contradiction. To put it in his
language, it was, more than any other institution, the very model of the
‘ideological state apparatus’ that ‘interpellates individuals as subjects’.

Should the ens be grateful to him for this demonstration, or resent him
for it? Many of our colleagues, for whom the École is also symbolically a
part of themselves, will no doubt ask this, just as they will ask whether
the École should be obliged to Althusser for having made the name of
the ‘rue d’Ulm’ echo as far as the poblaciones of Chile and the campuses
of Japan and Australia, or whether he should be reproached for hav-
ing stamped it with infamy. But today, the question need not be posed
in such Manichean terms. Apart from the fact that he himself paid a
heavy price for his reasoning and his follies, the times have changed:
neither the family, nor philosophy, teaching, politics, nor community
are what they were thirty years ago. No one could any longer feel ‘at
home’ between the Pot, the infirmary and the Cour du Ruffin,27 no one
could imagine that the fate of the world was at stake in a seminar in the
Salle Cavaillès. Hence there is more freedom, to be sure, and less power.
The question of ‘theoretical practice’, subjectively and objectively, will be
raised in other places, perhaps; and certainly in other styles.

Translated by David Fernbach

27
Pot: the refectory, in the jargon of ens students, and Cour du Ruffin, one of
the internal courtyards, named after a former professor of physical education who
organized daily exercises there.