unflattering to their author. They are clearly an attempt on Althusser’s part to make sense of his madness, and to that extent they are indeed revealing; by his own account he wrote them “to free myself from the murder and above all from the dubious effects of having been declared unfit to plead” (it is ironic that their posthumous impact on any unprejudiced reader will surely be to confirm the original forensic diagnosis). As a genre, however, they really come closer to magical realism. The book, especially a short early draft incongruously titled “The Facts,” is full of fantasies and imagined achievements, so much so that it is sometimes hard to disentangle the fictive Althusser from the rather mundane creature whose sad story emerges in these pages.
That story is soon told. Althusser was born in 1918, the eldest child of middle-class French parents in Algeria. His father was a banker whose career took him back to Marseilles in Louis’s adolescent years. The young Althusser had an utterly uneventful early career. Academically promising, he was sent to the lycée in Lyon to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale. He passed the exam, but had to postpone his higher education when he was drafted into the army in 1939. Like many French soldiers, he had a futile war; his company was rounded up by the Germans in 1940, and he spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp. About the only interesting thing that seems to have happened to him there was that he learned, somewhat belatedly, the pleasures of masturbation (he was not to make love for the first time until he was twenty-nine).
Finally admitted to the École upon his return to France, Althusser did well there, coming in second in the national philosophy examinations. Having spent his adolescence and his youth as an active young Catholic, he discovered left-wing politics at the École and joined the Communist Party in 1948, which was about the time when other young intellectuals, nauseated and shocked by its Stalinist culture and tactics, were beginning to leave it. Shortly after graduating, Althusser obtained a teaching post at the École and settled into the quiet, secure life of an academic philosopher. He was to stay in the same post until being forcibly retired in the aftermath of the scandal that ended his career.
It was during his student years that Althusser met his future wife, Hélène Légotien (she had abandoned her family name, Rytmann, during the war), a woman nine years his senior who had played an active part in the Communist Resistance. As he acknowledges in his memoir, it was a troubled relationship. They were held together by bonds of mutual destructiveness. By 1980, he writes, “the two of us were shut up together in our own private hell.” Hélène seems to have been an unhappy woman, insecure, tormented, and bitter—and with good reason. The Communist Party abandoned her after the war, falsely accusing her of some obscure act of betrayal during the Resistance. Uneasy with her own immigrant Jewish background, and desperate for the love and attention of her husband, she put up with his moods, his women friends, and his colleagues, most of whom looked down on her from the very great height of their own vaunted intellectual standing. She was clearly not a person comfortable with herself or others; and Althusser’s own bizarre personality can only have made matters worse.
For what emerges clearly from his own account is that Althusser was always a deeply troubled person. This memoir is warped and curdled by his morbid self-pity, by his insecurity and the repeated invocation of Lacanian clichés to account for his troubles. Indeed, the book’s main theme is his own psychological and social inadequacy, a defect for which he naturally holds his parents responsible, in equal parts. His mother’s insistence on naming him for a dead uncle is blamed for his lifelong sense of “not existing”: Louis being homonymic with the
That story is soon told. Althusser was born in 1918, the eldest child of middle-class French parents in Algeria. His father was a banker whose career took him back to Marseilles in Louis’s adolescent years. The young Althusser had an utterly uneventful early career. Academically promising, he was sent to the lycée in Lyon to prepare for the entrance exam to the École Normale. He passed the exam, but had to postpone his higher education when he was drafted into the army in 1939. Like many French soldiers, he had a futile war; his company was rounded up by the Germans in 1940, and he spent the next five years in a prisoner of war camp. About the only interesting thing that seems to have happened to him there was that he learned, somewhat belatedly, the pleasures of masturbation (he was not to make love for the first time until he was twenty-nine).
Finally admitted to the École upon his return to France, Althusser did well there, coming in second in the national philosophy examinations. Having spent his adolescence and his youth as an active young Catholic, he discovered left-wing politics at the École and joined the Communist Party in 1948, which was about the time when other young intellectuals, nauseated and shocked by its Stalinist culture and tactics, were beginning to leave it. Shortly after graduating, Althusser obtained a teaching post at the École and settled into the quiet, secure life of an academic philosopher. He was to stay in the same post until being forcibly retired in the aftermath of the scandal that ended his career.
It was during his student years that Althusser met his future wife, Hélène Légotien (she had abandoned her family name, Rytmann, during the war), a woman nine years his senior who had played an active part in the Communist Resistance. As he acknowledges in his memoir, it was a troubled relationship. They were held together by bonds of mutual destructiveness. By 1980, he writes, “the two of us were shut up together in our own private hell.” Hélène seems to have been an unhappy woman, insecure, tormented, and bitter—and with good reason. The Communist Party abandoned her after the war, falsely accusing her of some obscure act of betrayal during the Resistance. Uneasy with her own immigrant Jewish background, and desperate for the love and attention of her husband, she put up with his moods, his women friends, and his colleagues, most of whom looked down on her from the very great height of their own vaunted intellectual standing. She was clearly not a person comfortable with herself or others; and Althusser’s own bizarre personality can only have made matters worse.
For what emerges clearly from his own account is that Althusser was always a deeply troubled person. This memoir is warped and curdled by his morbid self-pity, by his insecurity and the repeated invocation of Lacanian clichés to account for his troubles. Indeed, the book’s main theme is his own psychological and social inadequacy, a defect for which he naturally holds his parents responsible, in equal parts. His mother’s insistence on naming him for a dead uncle is blamed for his lifelong sense of “not existing”: Louis being homonymic with the
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