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

“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

“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

“[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

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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

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

“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

“...either the working class will succeed, by means of its class struggle, in imposing socialism, and we will set out on the Long March which, by way of the dictatorship of the proletariat, will lead to communism, or else it will fail (for a while or forever) and we will be doomed to ‘barbarism’, that is, the forms of decomposition and stagnation of imperialism itself.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“The latter is prepared by collective ownership of the means of production and by a whole series of arrangements: the plan, guarantees that control the labour market, a wage structure that tends to reduce wage differentials and, generally speaking, organizational measures that tend to prepare communal forms of the management of enterprises and of the nation (measures that aim to attenuate and then do away with the division of labour, the division between mental and manual labour, the division between town and country and so on).”
― Louis Althusser

“...in the classic conception of literary history, we necessarily have, first, a literary history with a conception of history that, basically, reduces history to chronicle. It’s altogether incapable of accounting, at its level, for the fact that an individual, who leads a life like everyone else and who lives in a time that unfolds the way every other time does, becomes, at a given point in time, the author of a work that’s called literary.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“...to understand the production of effect B, it is not enough to consider cause A (immediately preceding, or visibly related to effect B) in isolation, but, rather, cause A as an element of a structure in which it takes its place, hence as subject to the relations, the specific structural relations, that define the structure in question.”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“Since the present is the result of a past, the present imagines that it was the goal of the past! And Marx adds: ‘[and as this] latest form’ was ‘only rarely, and under quite definite conditions’, ‘capable of self-criticism’, it ‘conceives them in a one-sided manner’. To succeed in escaping from the teleological illusion and its effects, the ‘latest form’ must be capable of producing ‘its self-criticism’, that is, of seeing itself clearly.”
― Louis Althusser

“This last idea leads us to what I would call a counter-history, a negative history, as the ground and incidental costs of ‘positive’ history. History as it is commonly conceived is the history of results as stages in the becoming of the currently existing form, the history of the results retained by history: it is not the history of the non-results, of becomings without results and results without becoming, of abortive forms, repressed forms, dead forms...”
― Louis Althusser

“In the socialist social formation, we observe the following:

Labour-power continues to pass by way of the relative possession of the wage form, a commodity form. At the legal level, nothing about the relation of production of the capitalist mode of production has changed, in principle.

As for the means of production, the direct producers possess them not directly, but indirectly, by way of ‘collective property’ (the state, production co-operatives).”
― Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963-1986

“it can be argued that philosophy has not gone beyond Hegelianism, and that the struggles of our recent history are merely the conflict of Left against Right in Hegel...”
― Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings