BiblioVault - Books about Althusser

Althusser and Feminism

Alison Assiter

Pluto Press, 1990

Althusser and His Contemporaries

Philosophy's Perpetual War

Warren Montag

Duke University Press, 2013

Althusser and His Contemporaries alters and expands understanding of Louis Althusser and French philosophy of the 1960s and 1970s. Thousands of pages of previously unpublished work from different periods of Althusser's career have been made available in French since his death in 1990. Based on meticulous study of the philosopher's posthumous publications, as well as his unpublished manuscripts, lecture notes, letters, and marginalia, Warren Montag provides a thoroughgoing reevaluation of Althusser's philosophical project. Montag shows that the theorist was intensely engaged with the work of his contemporaries, particularly Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan. Examining Althusser's philosophy as a series of encounters with his peers' thought, Montag contends that Althusser's major philosophical confrontations revolved around three themes: structure, subject, and beginnings and endings. Reading Althusser reading his contemporaries, Montag sheds new light on structuralism, poststructuralism, and the extraordinary moment of French thought in the 1960s and 1970s.

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Althusser, The Infinite Farewell

Emilio de Ipola

Duke University Press, 2018

In Althusser, The Infinite Farewell—originally published in Spanish and appearing here in English for the first time—Emilio de Ípola contends that Althusser’s oeuvre is divided between two fundamentally different and at times contradictory projects. The first is the familiar Althusser, that of For Marx and Reading Capital. Symptomatically reading these canonical texts alongside Althusser’s lesser-known writings, de Ípola reveals a second, subterranean current of thought that flows throughout Althusser’s classic formulations and which only gains explicit expression in his later works. This subterranean current leads Althusser to move toward an aleatory materialism, or a materialism of the encounter. By explicating this key aspect of Althusser’s theoretical practice, de Ípola revitalizes classic debates concerning major theoretico-political topics, including the relationship between Marxism, structuralism, and psychoanalysis; the difference between ideology, philosophy, and science; and the role of contingency and subjectivity in political encounters and social transformation. In so doing, he underscores Althusser’s continuing importance to political theory and Marxist and post-Marxist thought.

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A Future for Marxism?

Althusser, the Analytical Turn and the Revival of Socialist Theory

Andrew Levine

Pluto Press, 2003

Not long ago, Marxist philosophy flourished. Yet in recent years theorists have turned away from Marxism. This book aims to revive Marxist theory, and show how it offers a rich foundation for radical socialist thinking in the forseeable future.

To do this, Andrew Levine examines two recent departures in Marxist thought -- Althusserian and Analytical Marxism. The former is currently defunct; the latter, very nearly so. He assesses the shortcomings of each, while emphasising their considerable, and still timely, merits. The discussion is framed against an analysis of socialism's place in the political life of the past two centuries. Levine assesses the apparent historical defeat of the Left generally since the consolidation of the Reagan-Thatcher era and speculates on current signs of renewal.

He argues that both Althusserian and analytical Marxism represent new and deeply important philosophical departures within the Marxist tradition as they force a rethinking of Marxism's scientific and political project. For all their differences in style and substance, these strains of Marxist thought share important thematic and sociological features and Levine concludes that both traditions provide a legacy upon which a revived Left can build.

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