Althusser’s Lesson represents the foundations of Jacques Rancière’s theoretical project. It marks the moment at which he emerges from the tutelage of his mentor, Louis Althusser, and begins to outline the themes he will go on to develop in his later writings. Here Rancière is already working out a non-economic and non-Marxist understanding of politics.
Labors of Imagination Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser
This book is a major new study of the doctrines of productivity and interest in Romanticism and classical political economy. The author argues that the widespread contemporary embrace of cultural historicism and the rejection of nineteenth-century conceptions of agency have hindered our study of aesthetics and politics
Today We Are In A Position To Return To Althusser S Work In A New Way, And Make A New Assessment Of It, Writes Frederic Jameson In His Introduction To This New Edition Of Louis Althusser S Lenin And Philosophy. No Figure Loomed Larger Than Althusser In Marxist Thought In The West During The 1960S And 70S The Decades In Which The Soviet Model Was Discredited In The West And New Avenues Opened Up In Marxist Philosophy And Politics. Althusser Stood Out For His Attempt To Define A Marxist Philosophy That Was Rigorous, Scientific, And Revolutionary.
Louis Althusser is perhaps better remembered for strangling his wife to death during a fit of temporary insanity than for most of his writings (with the possible exception of his essay on the "ideological state apparatus," an explication of normalizing social institutions that has become standard fare in academic postmodernism), but he was one of the key figures in postwar French philosophy. Writings on Psychoanalysis is a collection of essays, article drafts, and correspondence that displays the extent of his intellectual grappling with Freud's writings and with contemporary psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, a former friend whom Althusser would gradually come to view as a "magnificent and pitiful Harlequin." (Two of the pieces here deal with the 1980 conference at which Althusser vehemently broke with Lacan, ostensibly over the latter's stifling position of dominance among their colleagues.) Writings on Psychoanalysis is a bit heavy-going and theoretical in places, but of unique historical interest.