Books
Althusser's Madness: Theory or Practice?
THE FUTURE LASTS FOREVER. A MEMOIR. By
Louis Althusser.
The New Press. $25.00.
From this lucid and gripping memoir the average American reader
would not realize that Louis Althusser, "the world-renowned French
philosopher" who murdered his wife on November 16, 1980, was the
preeminent theoretician of the Communist Party in the 1960s and 1970s,
or that he incited the French student revolts of 1968. Nor would any–
one familiar with his distinctive and heavy theoretical prose have thought
him capable of producing such a lyrical and allusive account of his lonely
life. His allusions begin with the title,
L'avenir dure longtemps,
correctly
translated as lasting "a long time" rather than "forever." Is he referring
to his future without Helene Rytman, the life-long companion he had
killed, or to the ideal future he foresaw and that took so long in arriv–
ing - the dream of freedom in the communist world he had dedicated
his life to bring about? (The book consists of the autobiography featured
in the title [1986] and another one,
The Facts
[1976], both written be–
fore the disintegration of the Soviet Union.) Or has the fact that being
declared insane saved him from the murder trial which might well have
become a take-off on a Stalinist-type show trial and would at least have
touched on the irreparable flaws in his theoretical enterprise? If ever we
will get any answers to these questions, Althusser's memoirs do not pro–
vide them.
The casual reader will keep wondering whether Althusser was mad
when he kept massaging his wife's neck until she stopped breathing, or
whether the fact that his fingers left no mark on her is an indication that
he had planned her death. But the reader familiar with Michel
Foucault's publication of another memoir,
I, Pierre Riviere, having killed
my mother, my sister and my brother .
.. ,
will wonder whether Althusser
purposely emu lated Riviere who, in confinement in 1831, wrote the tale
of the murders he committed. (Riviere had confessed, but the jurors at
his trial could not decide whether he had been mad or had committed a
crime.) A1thusser's doctors and intimates rushed him into a mental clinic
even before the police arrived. Did he get such special treatment because
he had been one of the foremost guides of France's left intelligentsia, or
because some of its luminaries at the time of the murder had leading po–
sitions in government?
