Althusser's theory of ideology has outlived the Marxism it defended
Louis Althusser built the concept of interpellation to protect a scientific reading of 'Capital'. The science was abandoned; the street scene went everywhere. A reckoning with what survives, what does not, and the killing that the profession spent forty years learning how to describe.
A man is walking down a street. Behind him someone shouts, "Hey, you there!" He turns round, and in turning he becomes somebody: "by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject." He turns, Louis Althusser explains, because he has recognised that "it was really him who was hailed" and not somebody else. The passage fills about a page of an essay published in 1970 in La Pensée, the French Communist Party's theoretical review, and translated by Ben Brewster the following year for Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. It is now the most reproduced thought-experiment in the humanities that involves neither a cave nor a tram.
It was written for a cause that has lapsed. From Pour Marx and Lire le Capital — both Maspero, 1965 — Althusser's purpose was to show that Capital contains a science, buried under a generation of humanist commentary about alienation and the whole man. The hailing scene is a minor illustrative move inside that operation, and the operation failed: almost nobody now defends the claim that historical materialism is a science in the sense he meant, on the model of Greek mathematics or Galilean physics. The illustration, meanwhile, went everywhere — film theory, media studies, the sociology of education, gender theory, and lately the literature on recommendation systems.
That asymmetry is the interesting thing about him: a philosopher builds an apparatus to defend a thesis, the thesis collapses, and one component proves portable enough to be carried off by people with no stake in the argument. Any honest account has also to deal with the fact that in November 1980 he strangled his wife.
The scene in the street is a fiction, and Althusser says so#
Almost every classroom summary gets the decisive move backwards. Interpellation is taught as an event: here is a person, the hail arrives, the person is converted into a subject. Althusser denies this a few paragraphs after telling the story.
Naturally for the convenience and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a temporal succession.
And then, flatly: "But in reality these things happen without any succession." The existence of ideology and the hailing of individuals as subjects "are one and the same thing", and the conclusion is that "individuals are always-already subjects". There is no pre-ideological person in the street waiting to be called. The scene is stagecraft, offered and withdrawn.
Richard Rorty asked philosophy to stop pretending it could underwrite science, morals and politics, and to settle instead for making cruelty harder to ignore. Thirty years on, with the strongman passage from Achieving Our Country quoted in every election, the question is whether his liberal ironist can still hold the line.
This removes the possibility of a restoration. Were there a moment of capture there could in principle be a moment of release; Althusser closes that door. Ideology "has no history", and it "has no outside (for itself), but at the same time it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)".
It also creates a difficulty, since a claim about what is always already the case, with no outside, is hard to disconfirm. Judith Butler pressed the sharpest version of the problem in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford University Press, 1997), in the chapter "Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All". Her question is disarmingly simple: why does he turn? Something in the addressee must already be disposed to answer, and that readiness cannot be explained by the hail, since the hail is what it was meant to explain.
Ideology is a lived relation, not a set of false beliefs#
The definitional sentence of the 1970 essay is the one worth memorising: "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence."
"Imaginary" misleads in English. Althusser is not saying that ideology is make-believe, a fiction a well-briefed person could see through. He uses the word in its Lacanian register, as the order of images and identifications in which a self is assembled; his essay "Freud and Lacan" had appeared in La Nouvelle Critique in 1964, and it is the most enthusiastic thing he ever wrote about anybody. The 1970 essay never names Lacan, which has permitted some loose talk, but the structure is unmistakable. Ideology is "speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure": the subject recognises itself in an image addressed to it, and the recognition is the mechanism.
This separates him from the older Marxist account of ideology as false consciousness, and from the assumption that error yields to information. What people have is a working accommodation with the wage relation rather than a mistaken belief about it. You cannot refute a routine. Readers coming from Marx on commodity fetishism will see the family resemblance, though Althusser resisted the genealogy.
An apparatus that accounts for everything accounts for nothing#
Against the classical Marxist state — police, army, courts, prisons, government — Althusser sets a second set of institutions: religious, educational, familial, legal, political, trade-union, communications and cultural. The first he calls the Repressive State Apparatus, the second the Ideological State Apparatuses. The one "functions 'by violence'", he writes, the others "'by ideology'". He adds the qualification most summaries drop: each works predominantly in one register and secondarily in the other. Schools punish; prisons preach.
Then comes the claim that made the essay famous in education faculties. In mature capitalism the dominant ISA is no longer the church but the school: "the School-Family couple has replaced the Church-Family couple." In the France of 1970, with the laïcité settlement barely seventy years old and the church schools a live political sore, that was not a bland observation.
The standard objection is that the framework explains too much. Institutions are identified by the reproduction they secure, and since every surviving institution in a surviving order contributes to its survival, the theory cannot fail. A school that turns out docile clerks reproduces the relations of production; a school that turns out radicals reproduces them too, by furnishing a safety valve. A theory with no counter-example is not doing empirical work. A quieter version of the doubt has resurfaced in Vivek Chibber's The Class Matrix (Harvard University Press, 2022), which argues that working-class acquiescence owes less to ideological consent than to resignation before material compulsion: people turn up because they need the wage, and ideology arrives afterwards to explain it.
Behind that lies the great polemic, E. P. Thompson's The Poverty of Theory: or an Orrery of Errors (Merlin Press, 1978), which deserves better than the name-check it usually receives. Thompson's charge concerns method, not schools. Althusserianism, he argues, is idealism in materialist costume: knowledge emerges "wholly within thought, by means of its own theoretical self-extrapolation", never disciplined by evidence it did not itself select, so that the result is "a sealed system within which concepts endlessly circulate", mistaken for a science. He added a political charge, in the terms of a man who had left the Communist Party over Hungary: Althusserianism was "the attempt to reconstruct Stalinism at the level of theory". Perry Anderson's reply, Arguments within English Marxism (Verso, 1980), concedes more than Thompson's admirers notice.
The break has not survived contact with the manuscripts#
Althusser's founding thesis was that Marx's writing contains an epistemological break, dated to around 1845, separating the young philosopher of alienation and species-being from the mature theorist of the mode of production. The concept is Gaston Bachelard's, from the tradition of French historical epistemology that also produced Georges Canguilhem, and Althusser never pretended otherwise: a science is founded when it breaks with the ideological notions out of which it emerged.
As Marx scholarship the thesis has aged badly, and it is worth saying so plainly. The Grundrisse, written in 1857 and 1858, was first published in Moscow between 1939 and 1941, reissued in Berlin in 1953 and translated into English by Martin Nicolaus only in 1973, after the break thesis had done its work. It is saturated with the categories the break was supposed to have left behind: alienation, objectification, a frankly Hegelian method of presentation. So are the manuscripts of 1861 to 1863. Lucien Sève accused Althusser of manufacturing an artificial bibliographical break, and the charge is hard to answer.
He did not simply dig in. Eléments d'autocritique (Hachette, 1974), translated by Grahame Lock in Essays in Self-Criticism (New Left Books, 1976), retracts the temptation to let philosophy settle in advance what only historical work could settle, and softens the break into a process. The weak version — something changes in Marx's method after 1857 — remains serviceable. The strong one does not.
The programme the break served was theoretical antihumanism: there is no human essence prior to and independent of social relations, and conceptions of human nature are themselves produced to secure the reproduction of those relations. History is a process without a subject.
Supporting it is overdetermination, introduced in "Contradiction and Overdetermination" of 1962. A social contradiction is never simple; it is inflected by the others it operates among, so the economic contradiction never appears in a pure state. The term is borrowed, as Althusser says openly, from other disciplines, and its home is Freud's Traumdeutung of 1900, where Überdeterminierung names the condensation of several dream-thoughts into one image. Society, on the analogy, is a structured whole with a dominant element, and which element dominates shifts with the conjuncture.
Which produces the sentence everyone quotes and almost nobody sources: "From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never comes." It reads as a flourish. It is exegesis. Engels, writing to Joseph Bloch in 1890, had insisted that the economic factor determines only in the last instance and that the superstructure exercises its own influence on historical struggles; "more than this", he wrote, "neither Marx nor I have ever asserted". Althusser is quoting Engels back at an orthodoxy that used Engels as a licence for economic determinism.
His own students turned the apparatus on him. Jacques Rancière, who had written a chapter of Lire le Capital, argued in La Leçon d'Althusser (Gallimard, 1974; translated by Emiliano Battista as Althusser's Lesson, Continuum, 2011) that Althusserianism had become a philosophy of order — an apology for the division between those who know and those who are known about, dressed in revolutionary language and useful chiefly to professors. A bibliographical fact sharpens it. Rancière, Pierre Macherey and Roger Establet all wrote chapters of Lire le Capital; Brewster's 1970 translation omitted all three, and the complete text reached English only in 2016. For half a century the founding book of structural Marxism circulated in English with the students taken out.
It is raining: the late Althusser against the early one#
The part of the story that gets skipped begins after the catastrophe. In 1982, in and out of psychiatric care, Althusser wrote a manuscript found among his papers and published as "Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre" in Écrits philosophiques et politiques I (Stock/IMEC, 1994), and in English as "The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter", translated by G. M. Goshgarian in Philosophy of the Encounter (Verso, 2006). It opens with rain.
Its content is Epicurean. In the atomism of Epicurus, and in Lucretius's De rerum natura, atoms fall through the void in parallel and, left alone, would never meet. What produces a world is the clinamen: a minute swerve, at no fixed time and in no fixed place, which sends one atom into another, and the collisions pile up, and the pile-up takes hold. Nothing guarantees the swerve, and nothing guarantees that an encounter will last. Althusser reads an underground history of materialism — Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Marx against himself — as a philosophy of the encounter rather than of essence.
Set that beside 1965 and the contrast is stark. The earlier Althusser wants structures that reproduce themselves; the later one wants contingency and the fact that things could have failed to happen. Whether that repudiates the system or surfaces something latent in it is a live argument, and the texts are too fragmentary for it to be settled. What can be said is that the philosopher taught as the theorist of iron structure spent his last years writing about the swerve.
On 16 November 1980, in his flat at the École Normale Supérieure on the rue d'Ulm, Louis Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, crushing her larynx. He went to the school doctor and said what he had done.
She was not a footnote to him. Born in Paris on 15 October 1910 to a Jewish family of Russian and Lithuanian origin, eight years his senior, she refused to wear the yellow star under the Occupation and joined the Resistance, taking the cover name Legotien and working in the Périclès network; she kept the name for the rest of her life. Her relations with the French Communist Party afterwards were bitter and are disputed, accounts variously reporting expulsion and refusal of membership amid allegations about summary justice against collaborators in Lyon. She wrote on cinema in the mid-1950s, worked as a sociologist of development at SÉDÉS from 1959 to 1975, and in 1979 and 1980 was surveying workers at Port-de-Bouc, near Marseille. Lucie Rondeau du Noyer's essay for Mediapart of 16 November 2022, reprinted by Verso, is the best short corrective to accounts in which Rytmann is only the object of a sentence about her husband.
There was no trial. Psychiatric experts concluded that he had acted in an acute melancholic crisis, and in January 1981 the investigating judge issued a non-lieu under Article 64 of the French penal code, which provided that there is neither crime nor offence where the accused was in a state of dementia at the time of the act. Article 64, a survival from the Napoleonic code of 1810, was superseded in 1994. Althusser was held at Sainte-Anne, then at the Eau-Vive clinic at Soisy-sur-Seine, until 1983. He died on 22 October 1990 at La Verrière.
In 1985 he wrote an account of his life and of the killing. L'avenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les faits appeared from Stock and IMEC in 1992, and in English as The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir, translated by Richard Veasey (The New Press, 1993) — a title that promotes the French "lasts a long time" to something grander than Althusser wrote. The difficulty is specific. A philosopher who spent his career showing that subjects are effects of structures, and that the sense of authoring one's acts is ideology's illusion, produced a first-person account of his own worst act in which he figures at times as the patient of his history rather than its agent. Some readers find an unflinching self-examination; others a plea in mitigation.
The profession's handling belongs to the record too. For most of two decades the Anglophone reception disposed of the killing in a subordinate clause and moved on. That convention is under attack: Francis Dupuis-Déri's Killer Althusser: The Banality of Men, translated by Mélissa Bull (Between the Lines, 2025), argues that the death was depoliticised, the killer effectively exonerated by intellectual friends, and Rytmann erased. The strongest reply is that the psychiatric finding was a finding, reached by clinicians under a provision of French law applied to thousands of defendants with no academic standing whatever. Both things can be true: that the process was regular, and that the culture around it behaved badly.
Althusser is being read again for reasons that have little to do with any of this. He is being read because of the address that begins "For you".
The recommendation feed does something that looks uncannily like interpellation. It does not describe you to a third party; it speaks to you, continuously, in the second person, and what it says is a claim about who you are. The claim is partly self-fulfilling, since what you are shown shapes what you watch, and what you watch is the evidence for the next claim. Althusser's contribution, stripped of the Marxist scaffolding, is that an address of this kind does not report a subject but manufactures one. The idea is in use: in work on algorithmic profiling, on automation and autonomy, and in the argument over Deleuze's control vocabulary.
Where the analogy breaks is worth equal care. Pierre Macherey, writing in Radical Philosophy 173 in 2012, observed that Althusser's hail works precisely because its source is behind you and unseen, an anonymous voice from offstage. On that reading the algorithm fits well enough. But the policeman's hail is public, and the recognition it compels happens before witnesses, whereas the feed's address is private and different for every phone. It also carries a threat, enforced if necessary by the Repressive State Apparatus; a recommendation carries none. And Althusser's subject is constituted once and for all, whereas the profile is revised hourly, which is modulation rather than moulding, in the sense Gilles Deleuze gave those words in his "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (L'Autre journal, May 1990), where "individuals have become 'dividuals', and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks'."
The harder point is Butler's. Interpellation requires that the addressee be disposed to turn. If people attend to their phones not because they recognise an authority addressing them but for duller reasons — boredom, habit, the engineering of the notification — then interpellation is the wrong instrument, and reaching for it substitutes a distinguished vocabulary for an explanation. On his own account of what science demands, Althusser would have wanted to know what would show the parallel false; he never managed that for the ISAs either.
What survives him is a question rather than a theory in the strong sense he wanted: not whether the address to you is accurate, but what it does to you by being addressed. It travels without the machinery it came wrapped in — without the break, without the science of Capital, without the last instance that never arrives. It came into the world as a piece of theatre, and Althusser was the first to say so.
Confucius is a name most readers know and few can place. This profile introduces the philosopher behind it: his ideas of ren, ritual, the exemplary person and the rectification of names; his claim that good government begins in character; and the compiled, argued-over text we call the Analects.
Analytic philosophy tells its origin story as an escape from F. H. Bradley, the Merton recluse who died on 18 September 1924. But the regress argument about relations in Appearance and Reality was never answered, only bypassed, and the ethics of Ethical Studies anticipated the communitarian turn by a century.
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