Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was born in the forest pavilion of Birmandreis, 15 kilometers from Algiers, to French parents. In 1939, he passed the entrance exam for the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), but in September of the same year, he was captured by advancing German troops and spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. In 1950, he became a member of the French Communist Party (PCF), one of the largest communist parties in Europe at the time. Having already renounced the intense Catholic upbringing he had as a young man (before the war, he was a member of Action Catholique), he joined the PCF, believing it to be the most effective vehicle for overthrowing capitalism due to its historical significance and broad social representation. At the same time, he was highly critical of Soviet Marxism, which the party also represented. He formed a group of intellectuals and theoretical members of the PCF, who were oriented towards the reconstruction of Marxism across various scientific fields (Etienne Balibar in philosophy, Pierre Macherey in literary theory, Nicos Poulantzas in the field of state-politics, Tor in psychoanalysis, Charles Bettelheim in economics, Boudelot and Establet in education, Linard in labor movement issues). The theoretical principles of Althusser and his group are codified as "Structural Marxism," a distinct trend within the broader framework of Western Marxism. In the later years of his life, he suffered from manic depression, and in 1980, during a lapse, he strangled his partner of 34 years, Hélène Rytmann, in their home, without any awareness of his actions, leading to his confinement in a psychiatric hospital. For a decade, he experienced recurring bouts of depression, until he eventually died of a heart attack on October 16, 1990. This marked the definitive end of the theoretical journey of a great leftist philosopher and intellectual. In his archive, which was donated by his sole heir—his nephew François Bondard—to the Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives (IMEC), an autobiographical text written in 1985 titled "The Future Lasts a Long Time" was discovered. It was published in France two years after his death, along with a 1976 text titled "The Facts."