The thinker who found a new continent in Marx: founder of structural Marxism
“Ideology 'hails' the individual — like a policeman shouting 'Hey, you there!' — and the moment one turns around, one becomes a subject.” — 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'
French Marxist philosopher who argued an 'epistemological break' separates Marx's scientific works from his early humanism, founding structural Marxism through concepts of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) and overdetermination. As philosophy professor at the École Normale Supérieure, he taught a generation of French intellectuals: Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Badiou among them. He sought to fill the theoretical vacuum of Stalinism, and despite tensions with the Communist Party and lifelong mental illness, he pushed postwar Marxism to the center of philosophy. His strangling of his wife Hélène Rytmann during a psychotic episode in 1980 long overshadowed his intellectual legacy.
Career Timeline
- 1945Enters ENS, studies under Gaston Bachelard
- 1948Appointed philosophy tutor at the ENS
- 1948Joins the French Communist Party (PCF)
- 1954Secrétaire de l'école littéraire at the ENS
- 1965Publishes For Marx and Reading Capital — founding structural Marxism
- 1968Hospitalized during May 68 — "Of what use is Althusser?" graffitied on walls
- 1970Publishes 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses'
- 1976Openly opposes PCF's abandonment of the dictatorship of the proletariat
- 1980Strangles his wife Hélène Rytmann during a psychotic episode — declared unfit for trial
- 1990Dies of a heart attack in psychiatric care
Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses
Althusser's theory of ideology found its most complete expression in 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,' published in the journal La Pensée in 1970. Just as Marx's Capital analyzed the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, this essay analyzes how society reproduces its dominant relations of production through ideology.
Althusser distinguishes between the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA: the army, police, courts, prisons) and the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs: the school, church, family, media, trade unions, culture, etc.). The RSA functions by violence, while ISAs function by ideology. In any society, the ruling class must hold state power, and this power is maintained through the combined operation of RSAs and ISAs. In capitalist society, Althusser argues, the educational ISA has replaced the church as the dominant ISA.
The theory's centerpiece is the concept of 'interpellation.' Just as a police officer shouting 'Hey, you there!' transforms a pedestrian into a subject in the moment they turn around, ideology always-already interpellates individuals as subjects. We practice our subjection in the very act of recognizing ourselves as free subjects. Ideology is not a set of ideas but a material practice, crystallized in the formula: 'ideology has a material existence.' It exists in apparatuses and their practices.
Althusser criticizes the classical Marxist theory of the state for remaining at a merely 'descriptive' stage, arguing that the state and ideology must be rethought from the standpoint of reproduction. The ISA concept has been widely appropriated in cultural studies, feminism, postcolonial theory, and the sociology of education, decisively influencing the ideology theories of Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler.