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“... we have another bold and engrossing first-person work which could have borne the title ‘Moi Louis Althusser ayant étranglé ma femme ... ’, for L’Avenir dure longtemps is the garlanded Marxist philosopher’s long essay in explanation of how he came to strangle his wife late in 1980. Pierre Rivière’s was the extrovert testimony of a rube, a ...”

“... Is it easy to be a Marxist?’ Louis Althusser put this question to a crowded audience at the University of Picardy in 1975. Is it possible to be an Althusserian? The question has to be asked now. Althusserian Marxism has always been under threat, but since the tragic events of last November we are obliged to wonder whether the ruin of Althusser’s own life and career, as he faces a future necessarily bounded by the mental hospital, will also encompass the definitive destruction of his philosophical work ...”

“... talked of a ‘solidarity’ fashioned in more adversarial circumstances. At the same time, Louis Althusser was trying to revive the Party’s materialism with his notion of the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ that did capitalism’s work with powers that were distinctively their own. Bourdieu was drawn by this, too. In 1972, he recast his ...”

“... controversy and action. As a young man at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he sat at the feet of Louis Althusser; he trained in the use of assault weapons with Fidel Castro; he trod the thankless Bolivian forests with Che Guevara and served nearly four years in jail for his trouble. In Chile he was taken up by Salvador Allende and Pablo Neruda. Ten ...”

“... He tells us in a footnote that he has only just learned of the personal disaster which overtook Louis Althusser a decade ago (this in the context of a rather lenient judgment of Althusser’s work as ‘monstrously pseudo-philosophical’, which I was glad to see appearing under at least one of the rubrics of New ...”

“... get on too well. Derrida was the only member of the intelligentsia to visit his fellow Algerian Louis Althusser when he was locked up for killing his wife. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, doyens of the Frankfurt School, were avid consumers of Marx Brothers movies. There is even a reference to Sartre’s squint, as well as to the fact that Jameson ...”

“... professionals of both. In the context of May, Lacanianism had a special cachet. It was linked to Althusser’s Marxism and Dali’s Surrealism, both excellent credentials for a movement that found itself caught between Marx and street theatre. Anti-establishment and anti-American in his politics within the psychoanalytic movement. Lacan became the symbol of ...”

“... wave of neo-Marxist theory. As major influences, Sartre, Williams, Lukacs, Goldmann, Anderson, Althusser, Macherey, Benjamin, Derrida and the feminist movement have followed one another in quick succession. The Function of Criticism, hard on the heels of The Rape of Clarissa and Literary Theory: An Introduction, marks if anything an intensification of this ...”

“... Hitler – who were, in any case, only ‘arrested’ in the sense of being stopped. I proposed Louis Althusser, but was condescendingly told that an academic political theorist who strangled his wife hardly counted as famous in the terms we were using. (The first response of my tablemates was: ‘Who?’) ‘How about Fatty Arbuckle?’ someone ...”

“... has been or ever will be) at all troubled – or worse yet, influenced, or even worse, to invoke Louis Althusser, interpellated, which involves, basically, self-misrecognition – by all the ‘strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions’ that so many of us, myself included, have seen expressed in such work. And with that not so ...”

“... him as Tintin in Afghanistan. At the Ecole Normale Supérieure in the mid-1960s Lévy was one of Althusser’s star pupils. He then became a leading intellectual of the French Communist Party and the editor of its cultural magazine, Lettres françaises. A decade later he discovered the gulags. Why did it take him so long? Whatever the reason, he was part of ...”

“... he is not at his sharpest in the realm of ideas, and he is wrong to suggest that the disciples of Louis Althusser treated Marx’s Capital as though it were primarily a work of epistemology. Nor would Hegel’s Geist treat feminism, not least Marxist feminism, with such cold-eyed indifference, or consign one of the most fertile currents of modern Marxism ...”

“... close resemblance to the avalanche: Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida looks very much like a vast ledger full of entries for ‘people who have become things’. (Would Bouvard and Pécuchet feel or think any better if they found such a thing in the garden shed?) For most of its length the book has the ...”

“... emerged from a brief affair with Lévi-Straussian Structuralism into the glacial grip of Louis Althusser, moved straight through Gramsci to post-Marxism, dived into discourse theory and teetered on the brink of Post-Modernism. Hall himself, having left the Centre in 1979 for the Chair of Sociology at the Open University, became a leading analyst ...”

“... anthropologist in France, the other a student of philosophy in the States. For twenty years he and Louis Althusser had been the philosophy department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where he himself had gone to School. After Althusser’s disaster (he’d gone mad, killed his wife), Derrida had been ...”