blurb by Didier Eribon describes the autobiography as “magnificent” and explains that “madness [is] the inevitable price of philosophy.” It is a conclusion whose deductive logic and historical accuracy are truly in the Althusserian tradition; but Eribon is a French journalist who has made a career of playing the fawning hyena to the preening lions of Parisian intellectual life, and he is not representative.
In the United States, however, there are still university research centers that devote time and money to the study of Althusser’s thought, and mount expensive conferences at which professors lecture one another earnestly about “Althusserianism” in everything from linguistics to hermeneutics. Meanwhile respectable English-language publishers continue to market books with titles like The Althusserian Legacy ; Althusser and the Detour of Theory ; Reading Althusser ; Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory ; and (inevitably) Althusser and Feminism : most of them unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.
Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant—or was about to discover something significant—when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult, and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his “smallest gestures and inflections.”
Althusser’s work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions, and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser’s musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?
This review of Louis Althusser’s memoirs first appeared in the New Republic in March 1994. As a footnote to my comments on the curious cult of Althusser in British and American academia, readers may be interested to learn that courses devoted to his thought are still on offer in many universities, my own included.
Part Three
LOST IN TRANSITION: PLACES AND MEMORIES
CHAPTER XIV
The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters
Belgium gets a bad press. A small country—the size of Wales, with a population of just ten million—it rarely attracts foreign notice; when it does, the sentiment it arouses is usually scorn, sometimes distaste. Charles Baudelaire, who lived there briefly in the 1860s, devoted considerable splenetic attention to the country. His ruminations on Belgium and its people occupy 152 pages of the Oeuvres Complètes ; Belgium, he concluded, is what France might have become had it been left in the hands of the bourgeoisie. 1 Karl Marx, writing in a different key, dismissed Belgium as a paradise for capitalists. Many other exiles and émigrés have passed through the country; few have had much good to say of it.
I am neither an exile nor an émigré, but I too had the occasion recently to spend an extended period in Belgium. Unlike most temporary visitors to the country, however, I was not in Brussels, but in a small Flemish village not far from Bruges; and in contrast to most of Belgium’s transitory foreign residents today, I could claim at least a slender bond to the place since my
In the United States, however, there are still university research centers that devote time and money to the study of Althusser’s thought, and mount expensive conferences at which professors lecture one another earnestly about “Althusserianism” in everything from linguistics to hermeneutics. Meanwhile respectable English-language publishers continue to market books with titles like The Althusserian Legacy ; Althusser and the Detour of Theory ; Reading Althusser ; Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory ; and (inevitably) Althusser and Feminism : most of them unreadable excursions into the Higher Drivel.
Althusser was not a charlatan. He himself really believed that he had discovered something significant—or was about to discover something significant—when his illness struck. It is not because he was mad that he was a mediocre philosopher; indeed, the recognition of his own intellectual mediocrity may have contributed to his depressions, and thence to his loss of sanity. If there is something humiliating about the Althusserian episode in intellectual history then, the humiliation is not his alone. He was a guru, complete with texts, a cult, and true believers; and he showed occasional insight into the pathos of his followers, noting that they imitated his “smallest gestures and inflections.”
Althusser’s work and his life, with his drugs, his analysts, his self-pity, his illusions, and his moods, take on a curiously hermetic quality. He comes to resemble some minor medieval scholastic, desperately scrabbling around in categories of his own imagining. But even the most obscure theological speculation usually had as its goal something of significance. From Althusser’s musings, however, nothing followed. They were not subject to proof and they had no intelligible worldly application, except as abstruse political apologetics. What does it say about modern academic life that such a figure can have trapped teachers and students for so long in the cage of his insane fictions, and traps them still?
This review of Louis Althusser’s memoirs first appeared in the New Republic in March 1994. As a footnote to my comments on the curious cult of Althusser in British and American academia, readers may be interested to learn that courses devoted to his thought are still on offer in many universities, my own included.
Part Three
LOST IN TRANSITION: PLACES AND MEMORIES
CHAPTER XIV
The Stateless State: Why Belgium Matters
Belgium gets a bad press. A small country—the size of Wales, with a population of just ten million—it rarely attracts foreign notice; when it does, the sentiment it arouses is usually scorn, sometimes distaste. Charles Baudelaire, who lived there briefly in the 1860s, devoted considerable splenetic attention to the country. His ruminations on Belgium and its people occupy 152 pages of the Oeuvres Complètes ; Belgium, he concluded, is what France might have become had it been left in the hands of the bourgeoisie. 1 Karl Marx, writing in a different key, dismissed Belgium as a paradise for capitalists. Many other exiles and émigrés have passed through the country; few have had much good to say of it.
I am neither an exile nor an émigré, but I too had the occasion recently to spend an extended period in Belgium. Unlike most temporary visitors to the country, however, I was not in Brussels, but in a small Flemish village not far from Bruges; and in contrast to most of Belgium’s transitory foreign residents today, I could claim at least a slender bond to the place since my
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