Louis Althusser > Quotes

“In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists: And Other Essays

“Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”
― Louis Althusser

“One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our daily pudding!”
― Louis Althusser

“Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“...Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“[T]he economic class struggle is a struggle against inessanlty intensified exploitation: not only against the brutal material form of exploitation, capitalism's tendency to reduce wages, and against the class 'techniques' for increasing productivity... but also around the question of the technical-social division of labor that prevails om enterprises, and against bourgeois ideology and repression.”
― Louis Althusser

“There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“In reality 'we' have never been alone. Communists are never alone.”
― Louis Althusser

“For it is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts (without in the least seeming to, since they are ‘self­-evident’) which we cannot not recognize and before which we have the inevitable and eminently natural reaction of exclaiming (aloud or in ‘the silence of consciousness’): ‘That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“To philosophise with open eyes is to philosophise in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousness and obviousness, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the 'still small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!”
― Louis Althusser

“Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’. It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself (unless one is really a Spinozist or a Marxist, which, in this matter, is to be exactly the same thing). Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).”
― Louis Althusser, On Ideology

“the end is the beginning and the beginning the end. The content is thus a circle; it is the discovery of the self in the other extreme, now recognized as the self’s very essence.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.”
― Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism

“The time has come in which the overriding preoccupation of bourgeois philosophers and littérateurs is the following question: ‘What does the truth have to be for the Communists to be wrong? What does Marx have to be for the Communists to be wrong?’ Thus it is that our bourgeois politicians and philosophers fabricate the truth and the events they need to condemn their adversary the more forcefully.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Pascal says more or less: "Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“Dans tout mon langage, dans tout mon langage avec toi, il y a eu dès le début ce noyau de silence. Je ne dis pas cela pour me charger ni pour décharger qui que ce soit. L’effort que me coûte d’écrire ces mots me garantit une sorte de paix, au-delà de tout jugement. C’est ainsi, ce noyau de silence était en moi, il faisait partie de moi. Je l’ai, lui aussi, apporté avec tout le reste dans notre histoire et comme je ne pouvais rien contre lui, il y a pris sa place, s’est installé et s’est imposé. Je faisais naturellement semblant de ne pas le voir mais il était là. Je le recouvrais de discours de protection, diversion, il était toujours là, parfois invisible, parfois tacitement oublié, mais toujours là. Il ne trompait personne parmi les intéressés. Il ne te trompait pas, en tout cas malgré tous les efforts pour conclure avec lui et moi à demi-mots, un pacte d’oubli. Au fond de tout tu l’as accepté avec moi, mais tu ne l’as jamais accepté ; tu ne pouvais pas. Tu as fait tout ton possible en ton pouvoir pour le réduire, puis pour l’oublier. Un moment est venu où tu n’as plus pu résister au silence que par le silence, par un second silence sans aucun rapport avec le premier mais un silence.
Un silenzio l’unico modo di non tacere.”
― Louis Althusser

“it is the masses who make history.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“philosophy is fundamentally political.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays

“Hegelian Logic is cavernous: it is Plato stood on his head, the world turned topsy turvy. No longer is the Logos the body of truth, and the world its shadow on the wall; now it is the inner shadow of the true world. Plato proceeds from the shadow to the body, Hegel from the body to the shadow, which is not recognized as a shadow until the end.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Há, portanto, uma causa para a transposição imaginária das condições de existência reais; essa causa é a existência de um pequeno grupo de homens cínicos que assentam sua dominação e sua exploração do "povo" sobre uma representação falseada do mundo, imaginada por eles para subjugar os espíritos pela dominação de sua imaginação.”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“A reprodução das relações de produção não pode deixar de ser o empreendimento de uma classe. Ela se realiza ao longo de uma luta de classes que opõe a classe dominante à classe explorada.”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“We were straightfacedly told that, to understand the Phenomenology and the Encyclopædia, we had to go back to Abraham, Isaac, and the desert. Today it is all too obvious this sort of exegesis was merely a manoeuvre.”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings

“Se os aparelhos ideológicos de Estado têm a função de inculcar a ideologia dominante, isso quer dizer que existe resistência; se há resistência, é porque há luta; e essa lura é, em definitivo, o eco direto ou indireto, próximo ou, em geral, longínquo, da luta de classes.”
― Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses

“as Marx said, to ‘interpret the world’. It becomes a weapon with which ‘to change it’: revolution.”
― Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays