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In any event, we now learn that Althusser had been in and out of
mental institutions all his life - at least fifteen times, he states at one
point - but maybe much more often if we were to add up the separate
instances he recalls throughout the book. This fact in itself is not shock–
ing. But it makes us wonder why his friends, and these included com–
munists and fellow-travellers, insisted on keeping their theoretician's state
of mind such a closely guarded state secret. (Because Althusser is so bru–
tally honest he ought to be diagnosed as sane. And yet, when he tells us
that this "succession of memories by association [includes] hallucinations .
. . las] facts, " we have our doubts.)
In the first sentence to the introduction, his former fellow student
and neighbor at the Ecole Normale, Douglas Johnson, calls Althusser
"one of the most original and controversial of French intellectuals: with
Antonio Gramsci he was the most influential of Western thinkers on
Marxism." Although this statement is superficially correct, it leaves out
that Althusser pitted himself against reformist, humanist and existential
Marxists, social democrats and socialists, and that, with the help of a
"structuralist" rereading, he promised to discover the "scientific" Marx
by focusing on Marx's later works alone. Raymond Aron ranked him as
the "second-best" imaginary Marxist, immediately after Sartre. Obviously,
"Althusser usually aroused strong feelings," and more so after the killing.
However, contrary to Althusser's and Johnson's assumption that the
newspapers kept commenting on the killing because it provided food for
scandal-mongering, they were inquiring why he seemed to be getting
away with murder thanks to powerful friends and his position at the
Ecole Normale. Although his general influence had declined, he retained
enough of an international coterie which still believed that his allegedly
subjectless "theoretical practice" might engender a new universal con–
sCIOusness.
In 1968, the most radical students had followed Althusser's thought
in initiating a revolutionary movement and, soon thereafter, had faced
his silence rather than his support. Johnson calls that "the mistake of his–
tory," because Althusser "believed that the student movement [that]
touched off the general strike should not cause one to imagine that ...
[it] was more important than the workers' movement." He goes on to
discuss this point in line with the position then taken by Helene, and by
the officials of the Communist Party - without ever differentiating be–
tween history as event and history as the making of the coming revolu–
tion, or referring to anything more than "difficulties in the theory."
Still, Douglas is insightful when he locates the key to Althusser's imper–
sonal philosophy in the conflicts he had within the Communist Party and
