Louis Althusser
Louis Althusser
Louis Pierre Althusserwas a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy...
NationalityAlgerian
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth16 October 1918
CountryAlgeria
Louis Althusser quotes about
philosophy struggle class
Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
real individual existence
Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
littles consciousness ideology
Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.
eye dark sun
To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.
war philosophy battle
In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
fighting philosopher theory
If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’
real men rejection
The rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history or its object, grasp its own origins within itself or constitute itself as a closed world, exhaustively defined by internal rules. Materialism refers every science and every activity to the reality they depend on, even if this dependence is masked by a great many abstract mediations: mathematics as well as logic, aesthetics as well as ethics and politics.
reproduction productions ultimate
The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production
firsts forgotten should
Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.
struggle unique simple
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.
struggle class division-of-labor
The 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.
philosophy goal battle
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.
self facts characteristics
It is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts,
struggle class enemy
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle