6
The Man Who Didn't Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser

LOUIS ALTHUSSER (1918-1990) WAS A PROMINENT MARXIST PHILOSOpher and student of psychoanalytic theory whose writings had a major impact on the Left in France and other countries. As the epitome of the committed intellectual endeavoring to address the inequities of the world, his teaching and actions inspired his students at the elite ÉEcole Normale Superieure and at the Sorbonne for over 20 years. His scholarly books and articles had a private counterpart in a contrapuntal personal reflection in letters and conversations about his own fragile subjectivity. The chapter opening quotation from a letter to his lover Franca Madonia (Althusser, 1998), which summarized his awareness of the motive for his passionate involvement with the works of Machiavelli, is a good example. The Prince as a subject, emerging in a chance concatenation of events as from nothing to found a new state, was an alter ego for Althusser, who struggled with his own unformed "state." From a young age, he was tortured by a painful sense of unreality, eventually seeking help in two lengthy therapies after a series of mental breakdowns that would today be diagnosed as Bipolar Disorder.

The nadir of this disturbance was reached on the morning of November 16, 1980, with the bizarre strangulation of his wife, Helene Rytmann, a crime for which he was never tried because of mental illness. Five years afterward, in L'Avenir Dure Longtemps, an autobiography baring his soul to the public, Althusser sought to explain and justify himself by retracing the path that had led him to this tragic point.¹ The project seems in many respects equivalent to that of Senatsprasident Schreber, mined by Freud for his theory of psychosis. It offers a demonstration of what is at once most familiar to clinicians (the repetitive phenomenology of a major mental disorder) and unfathomable (the unique individual case), and presents the strange dichotomy in Althusser's writings between his psychoanalytic reading of his individual fate as a subject determined by a history and the more radical and nihilistic philosophy of pure chance and self-creation that he found in Machiavelli.

Althusser (1985a) wrote poignantly of attempting to appear to be what he could not be, lacking "an authentic existence of my own" (p. 107). He felt disembodied and unreal, attributing his deficiency to an originary maternal gaze that looked through him toward another person, his deceased namesake. "Death was inscribed from the beginning in me," he wrote. "I wanted to destroy myself at any price because, since always, I did not exist" (p. 306). In the view of some commentators (see de Pommier, 1998; de Marty, 1999), Althusser's fascination with a philosophy of the void, of nothingness, flowed from this self-perception. After rejecting his early Catholic, then Marxist humanism, he developed a brutal form of materialism, finally pronouncing the structuralist verdict of "the death of man" and proposing in his last papers a philosophy of history without subjects, a theory of origins from "the nothingness of cause, of essence, and of origin" (Althusser, 1985b, p. 492). In this ultimate conception, there was no place for agency, a cohesive project of selfhood, or intentionality. The materialist philosopher, he declared, was one who boards a moving train by accident, "not knowing where it is going or where he is headed" (p. 480). Of course, there can be no "explaining away" the insights of a brilliant philosopher like Althusser, whose ideas have obviously been shared by many unafflicted thinkers and that often strike one as a profound knowledge. Freud (1917) wrote of the melancholic that he possesses a keener eye for the truth than others, very near to self-knowledge, but wondered why a man must become ill to discover this truth. The autobiography does, however, leave one with the disturbing sense of a bad-faith program of self-justification.

Biography²

Louis Althusser was born in 1918 in a small Algerian town, the son of an Alsacian banker, Charles Althusser, and a French mother, Lucienne Berger. He had one younger sister, Georgette, who also suffered severe depressions. The family saga was emphasized, to put it mildly, in his two autobiographical works (there was an earlier effort, Les Faits, 1976a) in which he insisted upon his place in his mother's unconscious as the replacement for a lost love, that for his deceased uncle Louis, for whom he was named. The original Louis Althusser was preparing to enter an elite academy when he was drafted and eventually killed in battle, leaving a bereft fiancee, Lucienne. Into his vacated place stepped an older brother, Charles, who became the replacement groom and, nine months later, the father of another Louis. By this sole act, Althusser concluded, his destiny was already determined by the place he came to occupy as signifier of his dead namesake, the desire of his mother and his father's rival. Lacan might have said that the dice were already thrown for him before his birth, and, without any doubt, Althusser's familiarity with Lacanian concepts, along with his own experiences as a patient, contributed substantially to his conclusions.

Reading Althusser's autobiography, one would have to be convinced that he was a pathetic wreck of a nonperson, stunted in emotional development from earliest childhood and never existing as a true subject. The harshness of his relentless self-reproaches does resemble Freud's portrait of the melancholic, but there was always an element of contrivance and ruse in Althusser, who in part played the part of a psychiatric victim. Nonetheless, there is no dispute that Althusser had terrible psychiatric and emotional problems. Apart from his documented episodes of mental illness, beginning at Sainte Anne Hospital in 1947, Althusser was from childhood an inhibited and insecure man, extremely vulnerable to criticism, failure, or success, as well to physical ailments, any of which might provoke extreme anxiety, withdrawal, or depression. Another indication of his frailty was a stunted sexual development, which he blamed on two subjectively emasculating interventions by his mother during his adolescence. She is said to have objected to his visiting a female acquaintance and to have uttered comments about the stain of a nocturnal emission. Be that as it may, he did display a near-phobic avoidance of women as a young man, and claimed not to have masturbated until age 27. Helene Rytman, his eventual wife, was, in fact, his first sexual partner, and their liaison triggered the depression that culminated in his initial hospitalization.

All the same, the youthful Althusser showed many strengths and excelled in many areas. From the first, he was a brilliant student, drew well, enjoyed athletic pursuits, was a talented violinist, and, in general, was more engaged in the real world than he would have his readers believe. Perhaps more important, he had the ability to form close friendships. His biography does show that he suffered from the lack of a warm relationship with a stiff, old-fashioned sort of father, a situation worsened by the extreme emotional schism between the parents. For her part, his mother was obsessed with health and religion in an eccentric manner long before the onset of her own serious depressive illness. On the other hand, his biographer, Boutang, cites signs of warmth and concern between father and son, and Althusser's letters from captivity evidenced a conventional family devotion, which raises questions about his claim that Charles never loved his offspring and thereby refused the symbolic paternal function.

As a youth, Althusser was deeply involved in Catholic religious observance. In this he echoed the piety of his familial and social milieu. At Lyon, as a lycée student, he participated actively in religious retreats and moved in conservative Catholic and monarchist circles, but, after the war, he was attracted to the progressive Catholic workers' movement. Eventually, he broke with the Church and its left wing of humanist politics, although it is not clear when his religious faith was finally abandoned or lost. The reasons for his progression toward the Left were probably not very different from those of many French Catholics in the wake of fascism and the cold war, disatisfied with the status quo and seeking a more just society. No doubt Althusser's intense religious belief sustained him for many years, gradually to be replaced in fervor by a commitment to the new ideology and politics of the French Communist Party (PCF).

One document bearing on his evolution away from religious humanism is a posthumously published paper entitled, "On Conjugal Obscenity" (Sur l'Obscenité Conjugale; Althusser, 1951). In this work, from what might in later years have been described as a radical feminist perspective, he attacked the Church's efforts to promote a spiritual partnership between husband and wife on the basis of a shared religious vision. With respect to his argument, two comments might be in order. First, Althusser could not seem to conceive that a couple might find fulfillment in shared devotion to religious ideals in spite of, or even because of, necessary secular renunciations. He recognized the potential sacrifice on the part of the married woman of opportunities for intellectual or creative growth but apparently not the importance of balancing productive achievement with emotional satisfaction (for both partners). Second, this lack of balance goes to the heart of his long and stormy relationship with his partner, Hélène. Certainly, their shared commitment to communism, an ideal which Hélène pursued with passion, was the basis of a relationship that did not seek children nor the customary accoutrements of bourgeois married life. Yet, throughout their lives together, Althusser needed to turn to other women for emotional and sexual satisfaction, perhaps unable to come to terms with his dependency upon a single woman. Later, in an unpublished piece, he attacked feminism (as a movement), making it clear that he regarded women as holding power over men.

In the autobiography, he spoke of his mother as brutalized by an insensitive, domineering father, and one can infer from these comments an identification with her, which Althusser certainly resisted. As I will elaborate, the failure of a symbolic paternal identification left Althusser in an imaginary dual relation with a mother who could seem by turns weak and defective or all-powerful, hence a series of unsuccessful attempts to triangulate or to create a symbolic third to provide a space for separation and subjectivization. His portrayal of his mother (although he noted the difference between his internal parents and the real ones) was rather monstrous, and suggests the threat of fusion and the narcissistic hatred analyzed by Lacan as part of the mirror relationship. This dynamic seems intrinsic to Althusser's subsequent relationships with other women as well. Possibly, what Boutang (1997) suggested as a suppressed incestuous dynamic with his sister, Georgette, also played a role in these repetitions.

Althusser's fledgling academic career was interrupted by war. He was inducted with his fellow lycéens and assigned to an artillery unit until the French surrender and his removal to a prisoner of war work camp in Germany, where he was to remain almost five years. From this point, his failure to attempt the escape that was on every prisoner's mind occupied an important place in his autobiography and self-analysis. When he did make an effort to falsify his records to pass as a nurse, entitling him to return to occupied France, he commited a careless mistake, which sabotaged his plan. He attributed his behavior to a fear of danger and a need for protection, which kept him from leaving the stalag. There was always a kind of security to be found "on the inside" for a fragile spirit like Althusser who, moreover, was able to make strong friendships and do useful work within the confines of the all-male camp. Other authors have commented at length on his analogous relationship to other institutions, beginning with the Church and extending to the École Normale Supérieure, where he was to reside for most of his adult life, and, most dramatically, with the French Communist Party.

A critical insider, who took his distance from the institutions within which he functioned, Althusser seemed to require the paradoxical status of adherence and transcendance, a kind of "having it both ways." Although no one could have been a more dedicated professor, he mocked the pretensions of philosophy as "blah-blah." A lifelong member of the PCF, he came to contest most of its major ideological positions. Something analogous occurred in his important male relationships in which he insisted that he could never accept a master, a standoff repeated in the case of his own analyst, René Diatkine, which he called his impossible ambition to be "father to the father." With women, a passionate approach followed by flight or equivocation seems to have been characteristic, a graphic example of which was his touching and exasperating correspondence with Franca Madonia. She appeared in his early letters as the answer to everything, yet he could not commit to making a life with her. As in another intense love affair with Claire, he could not give up Hélène, whom he tried to incorporate impossibly into each new relationship. Sometimes his behavior in exposing Hélène to these women was quite callous, which he acknowledged; yet, although he could treat her quite abusively, he also needed her as a protective object, someone who buffered all other important commitments.

There was a peculiar dynamic at work in Althusser that extended beyond a simple conflict of ambivalence. One could speculate that in his quest to shore up an enfeebled self, Althusser required relationships with powerful others, but these must have also posed a serious threat. Like the severely narcissistic patients described by Modell (1984), who find a point of psychic equilibrium in the position he called "the sphere within a sphere" (p. 34), Althusser may have maintained a kind of imaginary self-cohesion by remaining within the protective envelope of a person or institution toward which he could profess independence. The sphere is a compromise between total isolation and dangerous confrontation with an object who might invalidate and negate one's existence. Thus he could not sustain closeness with the friends and teachers who might have served as mentors, nor with the women who loved him, all sacrificed to a grandiose fantasy of self-creation and self-sufficiency. In restaging this pattern, Althusser may have attempted to locate a "third" of separation to free him from imaginary identification with his mother, but, in every case, the person or institution he chose became assimilated into the old mirroring structure that had to be resisted—hence his tenuous solution to become the "outsider-insider," or "father to the father," simultaneously remaining within (contained in the dual relation) and beyond.

Following repatriation, Althusser began graduate studies in philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), where he spent the next 34 years. Upon acceptance of his thesis on Hegel in 1949, he was offered a faculty position. In 1948, he had joined the Communist Party. In the eyes of many, his progressive move leftward owed everything to the influence of Hélène Rytmann, whom he had met toward the end of 1946. They developed an instant complicity, based in large part on their shared identification with the working class and a commitment to revolutionary change, but it seems highly probable that Althusser was heading irresistibly toward communism with or without her. A certain logical rigor led him to accept the party as the sole viable vehicle for the revolutionary transformation of European civilization. At a deeper level, the void at the heart of an increasingly formal religious commitment may have compelled a replacement as a bulwark against the madness by which he sensed himself threatened.³ More than most, Althusser needed to adhere body and soul to a representation of an ideal. His lycée thesis, consecrated to the God of Faith (Boutang, 1992), may have been the high-water mark of this devotion. Boutang concludes that Althusser dropped the sanctified language of his youth after a depression in 1943 in the stalag. In his despair, Althusser may have lost his vital link to God, suddenly facing the unbridgeable Augustinian gap.

What might have been the consequences of this loss? Here, we can share de Pommier's (1998) Lacanian hypothesis that God for Althusser functioned as "a third term," a god of separation, occupying a role for which his father had been already forever disqualified. For Lacan, when the paternal function is assumed by the actual father and supported by the mother, the internalization of a symbolic law institutes an ego ideal, freeing the child from the impasse of the mirror stage of dyadic relations. The ego ideal represents an inscription of a sign and, later, signifiers of the father, which install an identification (Lacan, 1960-1961). As I interpret this process, what becomes internalized on the basis of an inaugural identificatory trace is a set of narratives or, perhaps, multimodal representations, which permit translation between intrapsychic experience and inter subjective speech. Symbolic representations of affect in the form of model situations and narratives are crucial in channeling private emotions into sharable discourse that others can understand and respond to. The third term of Lacan itself refers to a mediating function between subject and unfamiliar others, creating what Winnicott might have named a transitional space, imbued simultaneously with personal and public meanings. From this perspective, the various people or institutions that Althusser sought as replacements for this deficient function were bound to fall short.

The circumstances of the murder were as follows. In the course of a highly productive period, Althusser developed symptoms of a hiatal hernia. After a routine surgical procedure, he awoke with restless anxiety that soon progressed into a severe depression. His alarmed physicians told him that he was now displaying classic symptoms of melancholia for the first time. He was rehospitalized and various medications were tried, one of which may have induced a toxic delirium. He recounted symptoms of profound regression, confusion, and paranoia. Upon discharge home in the company of Hélène, he was not fully recovered, and their relationship seemed to disintegrate into a destructive configuration of shared despair and self-hatred from which she tried, according to his autobiography, to extricate herself, only to arouse the keenest separation anxiety on the part of her husband. Diatkine, who had by then reluctantly become Hélène's psychotherapist, urged rehospitalization. From this point, the facts are unknown, Althusser claiming amnesia for the crucial events. There was no evidence of a struggle. The philosopher came to his senses while feeling fatigue in his arms as he gently massaged the inert neck of his wife, as he had often done at her request. The picture he painted in his account was one of her complicity in the strangulation, as though she had wished a release from their shared inferno—un suicide par personne interposée.⁴

The strangeness of the scenario recounted by Althusser was all the more eerie for seeming to have been lifted in almost unmodified form from a dream he had transcribed 16 years earlier. The dream followed closely upon the receipt of a letter from Hélène, insensitively diagnosing his family's pathology. Obviously stung, he had written back to her that the letter "touched him to the quick" that, like the lightning, "it illuminates and it kills" (Althusser, 1964, p. 428). In his dream, Althusser had to murder a complicit sister in "a sort of pathetic communion by sacrifice" (p. 429). The recorded dream was discovered by a friend four years after the actual murder. Even earlier, in 1961, in a letter to Franca (Althusser, 1998), he had written that Hèléne called for help while refusing help, "almost like a battered child" (p. 72), and that she defended herself against the person coming to her aid as though he were going to strangle her!

Intellectual Contributions

Commentators have attempted to link Althusser's crime and psychopathology to his theoretical positions, notably the evolution of an antisubjectivist philosophy from what originally had been a set of humanist ideals. We can trace this passage in his passionate rereading of Marx and, especially, the structural theory that organized his interpretation. Who speaks of Marx must inevitably talk about Hegel and the tradition of German idealist philosophy in which Althusser was expert, and, in many respects, he could be said to have been engaged in a lifelong struggle with the legacy of the great philosopher. Like so many of his important relationships, Althusser's encounter with Hegel was one of ambivalence, as if the exalted idealism of the Phenomenology and its belief in the inexorability of the historical dialectic exercised both a powerful appeal and a repugnance, just as the Christian faith of his youth and the communism of his maturity. In his master's thesis, Althusser (1947) developed an original argument in which Hegel's awareness of the material existence of mankind in specific historical forms had replaced a metaphysical conception of history. For the youthful Althusser, this philosophical materialism provided a framework from which a Marxist humanist concern for the oppressed could derive its justification.

This exalted attempt to harmonize Marxist praxis with Hegelian humanism was to come to an abrupt close.

In a manner reminiscent of his loss of religious faith, Althusser rejected the Marxist appropriation of Hegel's myth of the dialectic of history, concluding that Marxist dialectics was simply bad philosophy. Even earlier, however, he had become hostile to the common notion that Marx had built upon inherited Hegelianism (via the philosophy of Feuerbach), a seemingly inescapable proposition that Althusser was at pains to refute. Instead, he argued that Marx broke decisively with both thinkers, totally abandoning a humanistic focus on the individual subject as the agent of history. In what is by now a familiar structuralist move, he insisted that history in the form of structures of economic relationships and modes of production created the forms of human subjectivity. The conscious subject was an effect and not the center or cause of historical process. In this formulation, the concept of an independent, individual subject was seen as a historical construction belonging to a particular time and social class. Althusser (1968) asserted that Marx represented "a prodigious tearing away from his origins" (p. 80), turning from individuals toward societies as the true subjects of history. This "displacement," he wrote in a notorious phrase, dispensed with "the theoretical services of a concept of man" (p. 256). Here as elsewhere, Althusser's single-minded focus on structural forces ignored their dynamic relationship with the individual subject, who thereby became an epiphenomenon.⁵ Could this theory have been a reflection of a personal struggle to grasp his own life objectively—that is, as a psychiatric patient determined by a "condition"—and subjectively—as a unique psychological subject? This question touches upon the roots of his early interest in psychoanalysis.

Unusual for his time, Althusser began reading a variety of psychoanalytic texts as a student, citing Freud in his own thesis. Lacan came to his attention in the 1950s, when Althusser began to read his publications in a new review, La psycbanalyse. In 1963, he mentioned Lacan's work positively in an article, which brought him to the attention of the master, then in the throes of his traumatic inquisition by the International Psychoanalytic Association. Althusser lectured and organized a seminar on psychoanalysis at the ENS, publishing his well-known text, "Freud et Lacan" in the Marxist review Nouvelle Critique, at the end of 1964. That same year, he invited the excommunicated Lacan to bring his seminar to the ENS. Although Althusser reported only once attending Lacan's seminar, he was familiar with the Écrits, an annotated copy of which was found in his library. His articles credited Lacan with grasping the essential in Freud, and here he broached what would be developed with utter consistency in his subsequent writings, namely the role of theory in advancing scientific knowledge. In what could be viewed as either a measure of his genius or a kind of excessive intellectualism, Althusser insisted on the profound importance for psychoanalysis of moving beyond the status of a mere collection of interesting observations, empirical findings, and practical manipulations of technique toward a comprehensive theory.

In "Freud and Lacan," written for a mainly hostile, leftist audience, Althusser (1964) performed a combined ideological critique of the institutional functions of psychoanalysis, especially its revisionist American versions, which he condemned, and an "epistemological elucidation" of its original concepts, which he defended. These concepts had to do above all with a new object, the unconscious, of what he termed a new science, psychoanalysis, unlike the other human sciences. Against the revisionist vision of a normal ego shaped by evolution to fit an expectable reality, Althusser situated the coming to be of the human subject as an uncertain journey, an "eruption," which emerged from and split the natural order. At this time, he closely followed Lacan's reading of Freud, notably around the structuring function of language in producing a divided subject. With this development, he saw the possibility for a science of psychoanalysis, provided that the lingering traces of ideology and of ritual could be separated from true theoretical understanding.

More than 10 years later, Althusser again took up this issue in two papers to be submitted to a groundbreaking symposium in the USSR on the theme of "the unconscious." Here he articulated a problem that in some ways remains at the heart of the current state of psychoanalysis. That is, is psychoanalysis a simple practice "occasionally yielding results," to be understood, at best, as a variant of neurobiology, developmental psychology, and related fields or, at worst, as mere technique without a theory? Although Althusser recognized the necessity of integration with other disciplines, he upheld the importance of a unique science of the unconscious. In this respect, Althusser (1976b) first praised Lacan's contribution as an attempt at mediation between an outmoded biophysical theory of psychoanalysis and current scientific and philosophical models. The tone then shifted to one of stringent criticism of the results of Lacan's project, which he described as "teetering on the pedestal of its uncertain theses" (p. 92). He wrote that instead of a scientific theory of the unconscious, Lacan had given us a "fantastic" philosophy of psychoanalysis, which basically "duped everybody." Althusser withdrew his first paper in reaction to fierce criticisms by his associates, notably Elisabeth Roudinesco (see Althusser, 1976c), and Lacan disappeared from Althusser's second submission, "On Marx and Freud" (1976d).

Although Althusser's conception of psychoanalysis owed a great deal to Lacan, he also understood how drives (in the Freudian sense, 1985a, pp. 121-122) and early mothering (in the Winnicottian sense [p. 238]) work toward creating an embodied subject. Eventually, he became disillusioned with Lacan, and this must have had important consequences for him. Did his high-intensity intellect burn its way through Lacanism, or was the personal factor crucial? Clearly, Lacan never reciprocated the enthusiasm and warmth conveyed in Althusser's letters to him, while profiting from his influence to conduct his seminar at the ENS.

Some of Althusser's sentiments were expressed in his account of the suicide of his student, Lucien Sebag, who was an analysand of Lacan. Lacan's demeanor when he came to inform him of the event appalled Althusser. He confided that he had been obliged to drop Sebag as a patient "for technical reasons" (Althusser, 1985a), because Sebag had fallen in love with Lacan's daughter, Judith. Althusser wrote that he restrained himself from asking Lacan why he had not hospitalized his suicidal patient. He commented,

Here, Althusser spelled out his need for protection of his own vulnerable self. Disillusionment with a former hero must have been damaging for him, just as coming too close might have been. Instead, he maintained his familiar "insider-outsider" position in relation to Lacanian psychoanalysis, choosing for himself a Freudian analyst who had left Lacan. In the end, he was thrown back from his religious teachers and the Church, the PCF, and Lacan onto Helene as his most reliable, if deeply flawed, protective sphere.

There was a final disillusioning experience with Lacan more than 15 years after Sebag's suicide. Lacan had decided for his own obscure reasons to dissolve his analytic training program, the École Freudienne, summoning his followers to a gathering at a Paris hotel. Althusser's puzzling behavior at this meeting, which had absolutely nothing to do with him personally or professionally, bears study. After all, what was it to him that this latest incarnation of a Lacan-dominated institution was about to go the way of its predecessors? No doubt that it would soon be reborn in other forms. Yet Althusser was beside himself, as he gained uninvited access to the stormy assembly of analysts. Althusser's (1980) argument was against the foolishness and political manipulation of Lacan's followers and for the welfare of the proletariat of patients, whose fates he felt were in some sense at stake in this debacle. In what sense? Analysts and patients would continue to work together in offices and clinics regardless of the institutional politics of the profession, which change all the time. Yet Althusser knew better than most that individuals draw their sustenance from social systems, and that when an institution is discredited, the work itself eventually suffers. Human social arrangements are fragile, so that, for Althusser, a great deal was at stake, not the least important of which was his own well-being as an analysand. At the meeting of the Ecole, the symbolic containing sphere of psychoanalysis was shattering before his eyes. If Lacanian politics had turned rotten and Freudianism was held hostage by the revisionist Americans, what hope remained for him to be cured?

The core psychoanalytic problem addressed by Althusser, that of the proper conceptualization of the human subject, rests on a paradox. One can hold that individuals are responsible for what they become, perhaps in terms of their earliest psychic choices, yet at the same time are caught in unconscious patterns laid down outside their subjective awareness. It is a paradox implicit in clinical psychoanalysis, which aims at enlarging the scope of freedom through a reconstructive reliving of early experience and the subjective assumption of a path already taken. This is the ambiguity criticized with some success by Sartre in his discussion of bad faith, where he performed a kind of reductio ad absurdum on the Freudian unconscious. In its place, he proposed his concept of the pour soi (for itself), the self as pure project, which takes responsibility for itself in the inevitability of choice. Althusser, like the other structuralists, was profoundly antipathetic to Sartre's idealization of the individual agent, which he called "a happy psychosis." For Sartre (1943), freedom was the basic human condition to be accepted. "Man being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders: he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being" (pp. 553-554). For Althusser, this position repeated the fallacy of conceiving of the individual subject as a unity and as the point of departure for knowledge. Although he recognized that psychoanalysis is a theory of the individual mind (the unconscious belongs to the individual) and that ideologies involve unconscious fantasies, he refused to accept the subjectivity Lacan based upon the signifier—on the human transformation from natural creature to symbolic subject in the realm of language. At this point, it might be said that Althusser's self-analysis came apart on the shoals of his refusal to accept that history is made by man, however blindly or carelessly (see the criticism by John Lewis, 1972, and his response; Althusser, 1973). What Althusser presented as his personal tragedy of the absence of an embodied self was undermined by the antihumanism of his former Stalinist politics and his final conception of a history without subjects.

Contrary to Althusser, we could admit that psychoanalysis, perhaps like Marxism, sits ambiguously between humanism and science, and there are many indications that it has begun to assume that paradox, even as it struggles uneasily with its problem of self-definition. Of course, Althusser, Sartre, and Lacan were correct. There is no en-soi (in-itself) in the unconscious. That interpretation of Freudian determinism is untenable. Even though we have a sense of character as destiny unfolding outside our command, there is no script for it. Likewise, there is no entity we could isolate as "the subject" or "the self," yet we seem bound to fall back on some such construct, even on the notion of an experiencing subject, anathema as it is to structuralist thought. As Althusser (1955) wrote in relation to a disagreement between Paul Ricoeur and Raymond Aron, this is a debate about how a philosophy of realism can be applied to history or, analogously, to psychoanalysis. That is, concepts and ideas, like Freudian constructs about "the mental apparatus," must refer to something in the real. For the scientific realist, there must be a truth beyond the idea. Althusser was fond of quoting Spinoza's epigram, "the concept of the dog that does not bark." For Lacan, the beyond of conscious experience was not in the physical body but in the materiality of language, in the signifier, which carried the desiring subject helplessly in its wake.⁶ Althusser rejected this model of a subject pursuing her unique desire, locating the source of human actions in the accidental conjoncture of events, which unpredictably gels or "takes" as a transient shape without significance or cause.

The Man who Didn't Exist

How can we understand Althusser's refusal of subjective responsibility? Certainly he was an sick man, with a severe form of bipolar illness, yet most persons with this diagnosis do not suffer from his painful sense of a lack of existence, nor become murderers, nor develop a bleak philosophy like his version of materialism (however valid in some sense it may be). So psychiatry in the end does not take us very far in understanding his case. If, the sense of a genuine existence derives from the suturing of the embodied, desiring subject to a set of ideals, to a symbolic framework beyond the self that gives coherence and meaning, Althusser's difficulties may be traceable in part to his failure to sustain this connection. Many details of his history suggest Althusser's exquisite narcissistic vulnerability and would seem to support the formulation made earlier of his "sphere within a sphere" position as a specific solution to a precarious psychic condition. We could also speak of his difficulty sustaining a cohesive self or of supporting his existence as a speaking subject in the face of his own unmediated desires and the desires of others. Althusser sought out intense relationships and permitted himself to acknowledge great emotional dependency on them (and not in an exclusively manipulative way), but he needed to maintain a safe distance. Indeed, it seems most characteristic of him to have pursued such bonds from his earliest youth. I believe that Althusser's early self-diagnosis was correct. He required his religious faith to survive, and he needed living people to represent that faith. He found many such, and yet the faith did not hold. As we have seen, he moved from a pious Catholicism toward a humanistic Marxist-Christian militancy and, finally, to communism of the pure et dure variety. Along the way, psychoanalysis, via the charismatic figure of Jacques Lacan, came to play for him an important role.

Probably, none of these institutions were able to bear the weight Althusser needed to place on them. He formulated idealistic visions of Christianity, communism, and psychoanalysis that went beyond, or even at times flatly contradicted the ideologies of those institutions, and he became in the process a kind of subversive adherent, working to transform them into something they could not become. Althusser was one of those comparatively rare individuals who, in their discomfort with what exists, want to change the world. This aspiration is usually associated with intellectual brilliance, a touch of grandiosity, and a coming-of-age at a particular historic moment, all of which describe him. Beyond these generic explanatory factors, we must turn to the underlying "contents" of his thought—the problem of finding viable ideals, their internalization in the form of an ego ideal, and their role in sustaining a connection to a broader cultural framework that can support the individual subject. In Lacanian terms, we might speak of the human necessity of locating a singular place within the symbolic order.

Lacking the symbolic identification that might have installed an ego ideal, Althusser needed to rely upon an imaginary other who could support cohesion by mirroring, provided that this other could be kept at a manageable distance. At the same time, I have argued, he unsuccessfully sought a true "third" for symbolic identification, foreclosed by his particular family history (the disqualification of his father). Failing to achieve this, he was left in the pseudo self-sufficient position of the inner sphere, a grandiose imaginary self, requiring a containing other person or institution whose importance he could deny. Modell's (1984) description suggests that a powerful affective charge—too strong feelings for the object— can burst the inner bubble. The subject's fractured shell is then unable to resist the overwhelming intrusion of needs and emotions into the virtual space that buffers the contained from the containing objects. Hélène may have performed this container function for Althusser through her incarnation of the Communist ideal, all the purer for being outside of the Party herself. Their relationship could be characterized as consisting of an oscillation between an insupportable distance and an unbearable and destructive closeness. In strangling her, he may have been attacking that personified container, which could no longer contain or protect him from his empty melancholy.

¹The complex history of this document published posthumously is recounted in the Preface to L'Avenir Dure Longtemps, by Olivier Corpet and Yann Boutang (1992).

²For the material in this section I am indebted to the magisterial biographic study by Yann Moulier Boutang (1992) and to notes by O. Corpet, Y. M. Boutang, and Francois Matheron in the autobiography (Corpet and Boutang, 1992), collected philosophical and political writings (Corpet and Matheron, 1996), and writings on psychoanalysis (Matheron, 1995).

³The importance of the term void (vide) for Althusser cannot be underestimated, playing both a negative and positive role. His efforts to work out a non-Hegelian function for negativity as the site of the surgissement (eruption) of self-creation and the paradoxical relationship of this void to Lacan's concepts of full and empty speech are discussed by Matheron (1997).

⁴The phrase suicide par personne interposée (suicide by an intermediary), recalls Althusser's "Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse," (1966) in which he defined four modes of subjectivity (or "effects-of-subject") in the third of which, aesthetic discourse, subjectivity was present via personnes interposées (see Žižek, 1994, for a discussion of this problematic of Althusserian subjectivity). This association with an aesthetic concept makes the murder a theatrical gesture in which Althusser did not participate as a subject of his own unconscious or desire.

⁵See, for example, Althusser's Réponse à John Lewis (1973), in which he deemed the category of "man" illusory and fetishistic. Lewis (1972), a British Marxist, had stated that "the best cure for a toothache is not to cut off the patient's head" (p. 24).

⁶This formulation is not quite right in the context of Lacan's later writings, which treat the concept of the real, including the real of the body, more systematically. Language or the symbolic depend ultimately upon this real, albeit in an indirect manner.