Marxists’ Prehistory

Abstract

The story is well known: Althusser was a devoted Catholic. He started his political life as a Christian, a member of Roman Catholic Church. The status of the Church in France is radically different from other Roman Catholic Churches in Europe, especially with regard to countries like Italy, where the Church was always political in the sense that it exercised its influence on the political life of the country, and France, where due to the legacy of the French Revolution and its aftermath, the role of the Church was highly limited and it could exercise its power only within the institution itself. Althusser’s intellectual course begins with Catholicism, under the influence of his friend Jean Guitton, a Catholic priest, who was perhaps the most important person in Althusser’s intellectual growth. Althusser remained a Catholic for the rest of his life, even after joining the French Communist Party. What did change was his relation to the Church, which he “abandoned in 1947 or thereabouts.” However, he maintained a kind of fidelity to Catholicism; also at the moment of apostasy, Althusser does not reject God or Christianity, but only the “really existing” Christian institution. Roland Boer noted that Althusser “could not seem to exist without one institution or another,” whether it was Church, concentration camp, Party, university, or mental hospital. It is interesting to recall that in his intervention back in 1980, at a gathering in which Lacan was to dissolve his École Freudienne de Paris, Althusser writes: “I had evoked my experience of two organizations other than the one whose meeting I was attending, namely, the Catholic church and the French Communist party.” Boer is right to argue that for Althusser, “Catholic Action was a recruiting ground for the French Communist Party.” Here lies the “embarrassing” moment of Althusser with regard to his followers and disciples: most of them do not mention his affiliation with the Church or his Catholic past, as if that marks a past that has to be repressed or forgotten, an embarrassment that has to be, at best, not talked about. When that phase is discussed, it is very seldom examined, but it is usually mentioned as a “historical fact” along with many other facts of Althusser’s life. The main difficulty remains in abandoning the understanding of his relation to the institutions as purely accidental or a simple coincidence that has no deeper meaning. Indeed, it might not have a deeper meaning, but it certainly calls for an analysis of this split between the belief (in all its forms) and the objectification of the belief itself. The simplest and all-too-fashionable way would be to account for Althusser’s relation or dependence on the institutions through Foucault’s concept of discipline, which indeed is a certain type of power, exercised through different sorts of instruments, techniques, targets, and so forth. As such, it can be taken over by an institution (specialized or not) or by an apparatus, which is the same concept as Althusser’s “ideological state apparatuses.” However, in contrast to Althusser, Foucault “understands by the term ‘apparatus’ a sort of shall we say formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.” Although Althusser praised Foucault in his Introduction to Reading Capital, a Foucauldian reading of Althusser’s predicament clearly shows the limits of Foucault’s oeuvre itself. In addressing the primacy of Althusser over Foucault, Žižek writes:Contrary to Foucault’s procedure, the advantage of Althusser’s, according to Žižek