Activities and affiliations

Scholarship and theory Western Marxist theorists 1918–1990 ○ Died

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.