Introduction & Biography of Althusser
Introduction
Although he refused to be labeled as a structuralist, Louis Althusser is noted for influencing structuralism by using his writing to elaborate on ideas first proposed by Karl Marx. While Marx relates all aspects of human life to the base or superstructure of economic production, Althusser envisions the base as one of three processes (economic practice, politico-legal practice and ideological practice). Focusing on how ideology manifests itself within capitalist society, Althusser endeavoured to develop a systematic theory of how a supposedly abstract system perpetuates itself through its living inhabitants.
The purpose of this site is threefold. Its principle objective is to introduce undergraduate students to Althusser’s notions of ideology and his inter-related concepts of interpellation and state apparatuses. However, the site is also designed to help students begin to locate Althusser’s work within disciplines related to English Studies, such as cultural studies and media theory, as well as to introduce the possibility of resistance to ideology.
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Biography of Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser was born in 1918 in French-occupied Algeria. His education was put on hold when he entered the military in 1940. Captured and held as a prisoner-of-war in Germany for five years, Althusser eventually returned to the Ecole Normale to complete a master’s thesis on Hegel in 1948 (Norton 1476). Shortly thereafter he took a faculty position and joined the French Communist Party, a membership which he would maintain until his death.
t.jpg) Althusser’s first important works, For Marx and Reading Capital, appeared in the 1960s. Both works represent Althusser’s re-reading of Western Marxist theory, introducing an anti-humanistic perspective that influenced postmodern and post-structuralist theory by “emphasiz[ing] the scientific aspects of Marxism, in particular its investigation of how societal structures determine lived experience” (Norton 1476).
Despite his great scholarly success, Althusser’s traumatic war experiences continued to haunt him. He suffered from clinical depression that prevented him from fully completing the larger project from which one of his seminal essays, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” is drawn. His depression eventually progressed into mania, and in 1980, he strangled his wife while he was in a state of delusion. He would thereafter keep a low profile until his death in 1990.
Although Althusser ended his life at a low point, his work has nevertheless had a significant impact; his ideas have disseminated through various fields such as cultural studies, media theory, and sociology (Norton 1478).
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A collaboration by Arze-Bravo, Murray, Robertson, and Tunzelman
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