Louis Althusser
13 quotes
Biography
Louis Pierre Althusser was a French Marxist philosopher who studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became professor of philosophy. Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness.
"In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible."
"You know what Lenin says about 'intellectuals'. Individually certain of them may (politically) be declared revolutionaries, and courageous ones. But as a mass, they remain 'incorrigibly' petty-bourgeois in ideology."
"To become 'ideologists of the working class' (Lenin), 'organic intellectuals' of the proletariat (Gramsci), intellectuals have to carry out a radical revolution in their ideas: a long, painful and difficult re-education. An endless external and internal struggle."
"Class instinct is subjective and spontaneous. ... To arrive at proletarian class positions, the class instinct of proletarians only needs to be educated; the class instinct of the petty bourgeoisie, and hence of intellectuals, has, on the contrary, to be revolutionized."
"The number-one philosophical battle therefore takes place on the frontier between the scientific and the ideological. There the idealist philosophies which exploit the sciences struggle against the materialist philosophies which serve the sciences."
"The proletariat must seize state power in order to destroy the existing bourgeois state apparatus and, in a first phase, replace it with a quite different, proletarian, state apparatus, then in later phases set in motion a radical process, that of the destruction of the state."
"I shall call Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) a certain number of realities which present themselves to the immediate observer in the form of distinct and specialized institutions: ..."
"But someone is bound to question ... by what right I regard as Ideological State Apparatuses, institutions which for the most part do not possess public status, but are quite simply private institutions. As a conscious Marxist, Gramsci already forestalled this objection in one sentence. The distinction between the public and the private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its ‘authority’. The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is ‘above the law’: the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are ‘public’ or ‘private’. What matters is how they function."
"While speaking in ideology, and from within ideology we have to outline a discourse which tries to break with ideology, in order to dare to be the beginning of a scientific (i.e. subject-less) discourse on ideology."
"All ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject. ... ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’"
"Lewis has written that "man makes history." Althusser unleashes a pamphlet at him maintaining that such is not the case: "Ce sont les masses qui font l'histoire." I challenge anyone to find a social scientist outside the Marxist camp who can seriously pose a problem of this type."
"Ideology... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence."
"There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of."