The Man Who Didn't Exist: The Case of Louis Althusser

On the morning of November 16, 1980, the eminent Parisian philosopher and Communist intellectual, Louis Althusser, burst from his shuttered apartment at the École Normale Supérieure in a state of confusion and disarray, calling to his friend and physician Pierre Étienne that he had strangled his wife Hélène. The body of the victim lay across their bed peacefully, without any indication of struggle, perplexing those arriving on the scene and instilling a mystery reinforced by Althusser's own amnesia, as he brooded in isolation at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, the site of his first admission for manic-depressive psychosis in 1947. To the dismay of many, the court ruled that because of his mental illness he was not to be legally charged, leaving events behind the murder unexamined and open to speculation. Partly for this reason, Althusser wrote a remarkable autobiography, L'Avenir dure longtemps (1985), with the intent of throwing light on this sad final chapter of his history. ¹

Aside from its relevance to forensic psychiatry, this document, with its strange mixture of fact, fantasy, and delusion, raises fascinating questions about human behavior, the nature of the self, and mental illness. Because of the public nature of his apparent act of madness, which Althusser placed in the context of his private psychic reality, as well as in the context of his philosophy of history and subjectivity, the autobiography bears comparison to that of Presiding Judge Schreber, mined by Freud (1911) for his theory of paranoia. It demonstrates what is at once most familiar to clinicians (the repetitive phenomenology of a major mental disorder) and most unfathomable (the unique case)—all the more so since Althusser had undergone years of biological treatments and psychoanalytic therapy, and written with real insight on these subjects.

Althusser was one of those unfortunates who poignantly express a sense of lacking "an authentic existence of my own" (1985, 107). He felt disembodied and unreal, attributing this deficiency to a maternal gaze that looked through him towards another person, his deceased namesake. "Death was inscribed in me from the beginning," he writes. "I wanted to destroy myself at any price because, from the start, I did not exist" (306). From this self-perception flowed Althusser's fascination with an anthropology of the void. He echoed the structuralist pronouncement of "the death of man" and developed a conception of history without subjects, a theory of beginnings from "the nothingness of cause, of essence, and of origin" (492). In his ultimate formulations, there was no place for agency, cohesive selfhood, or intentionality. The materialist philosopher, he declared, is like one who boards a moving train by accident, "not knowing where it is going or where he is headed" (480). Above all, he asked in the autobiography, could he be held responsible for the death of the person around whom his life had revolved for over thirty years?

Biography

Louis Althusser was born in a small Algerian town on October 16, 1918, the son of a father of Alsatian background, Charles Althusser, who made a successful career in banking, starting as an adolescent on the lowest rung, and a French mother, Lucienne Berger. ² He had a younger sister Georgette, to whom he seems to have been devoted and who also suffered severe depressions. The family saga is emphasized in The Future Lasts Forever and The Facts (1976b), another autobiography written four years before the murder. The latter title, undoubtedly ironic since the account incorporates fictitious material, alerts us to the perennial difficulty in distinguishing between subjective truth and objective (consensual) reality.

In The Future Lasts Forever, Althusser repeatedly insists on his role in his mother's unconscious as the replacement for her lost love, his deceased uncle Louis. The original Louis Althusser was, like his nephew, a brilliant lycée student in Algiers preparing for entry into a prestigious national academy when he was drafted...