Zuern 2010

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‘My Own Thoughts in My Own Body’:

Corporeality, Responsibility, and Truth
in Louis Althusser's Life Writing
John Zuern
Published online: 06 Nov 2010.
To cite this article: John Zuern (2010) ‘My Own Thoughts in My Own Body’: Corporeality,
Responsibility, and Truth in Louis Althusser's Life Writing, Life Writing, 7:3, 259-283, DOI:
10.1080/14484528.2010.514144
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Life Writing VOLUME 7 NUMBER 3 (DECEMBER 2010)
‘My Own Thoughts in My Own

Body’: Corporeality,
Responsibility, and Truth in
Louis Althusser’s Life Writing
John Zuern
Downloaded by [North Dakota State University] at 08:26 29 October 2014
Would it not be better to speak of the past as clearly and precisely as possible, an
act rare, if not unthinkable, among philosophers, saying what happened and in
what ways we went wrong? (Louis Althusser, letter to Pierre Macherey, 21
February 19731)
In the opening chapter of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, the

philosopher Alain Badiou includes Louis Althusser, his former teacher at the École
Normale Supérieure, as one of a trio of eminent thinkers*/the other two are
Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan*/who have decisively contested ‘the idea of a
natural or spiritual identity of Man, and with it, as a consequence, the very
foundation of an ‘‘ethical’’ doctrine in today’s sense of the word’ (6). Defending
these three against the charge that their anti-humanist theories of subjectivity
foster a debilitating fatalism and a cynical, even in-human orientation to the
suffering of others, Badiou asserts that ‘all three were*/each in his own way, and
far more than those who uphold the cause of ‘‘ethics’’ and ‘‘human rights’’
today*/the attentive and courageous militants of a cause’ (6). He links
Althusser’s cause, the redefinition of ‘a genuinely emancipatory politics’ (6/7),
with his own philosophical endeavor to show how entrenched regimes of
knowledge, including our self-satisfied models of personal and political virtue,
ultimately hamper our capacity to act responsibly in accordance with truth. In
pursuit of this project, Badiou seeks to recover the radical philosophical and
political potential of la pensée ’68, a legacy many thinkers have sought to
discredit in the name of a rejuvenated, rehabilitated humanism*/a humanism
Badiou, in turn, decries as sophistical, disingenuous, and potentially vicious.
In the case of Althusser, Badiou’s salvage operation must contend not only with
the prevailing negative assessments of anti-humanism among scholars but also
with the sensational scandal that continues to cloud Althusser’s reputation inside
and outside the academy. On the morning of November 16, 1980, Althusser
ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/10/030259-25

# 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2010.514144
260 ZUERN
strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in their apartment at the École Normale
Supérieure. He admitted responsibility for her death, yet he was unable to give a
clear account of what had happened. After a panel of court-appointed
psychiatrists determined that at the time of the murder Althusser had suffered
an ‘iatrogenic hallucinatory episode complicated by melancholic depression’
(qtd. in Roudinesco 101), the court ruled a non-lieu, essentially declaring the
philosopher unfit to plead.2 The decision spared Althusser a criminal trial but
stripped him of legal rights. He was confined to mental health institutions for
most his remaining years and died of heart failure on October 22, 1990. Given this
course of events, at least some of Badiou’s readers are apt to question the claim
that Althusser has anything to offer a reformulation of our ‘understanding of
evil,’ apart, perhaps, from providing an example of it.

When Badiou’s Ethics appeared in France in 1993, l’affair Althusser was back
in the news, revived by the appearance in 1992 of the first volume of Yann
Moulier Boutang’s Louis Althusser: Une Biographie and three posthumously
published autobiographical texts by Althusser.3 These are the Journal de
Captivité, an edition of the three notebooks Althusser kept during his internment
as a prisoner of war in a German labor camp from June 1940 to May 1945; The
Facts, composed in 1976, a sardonic, often chatty account of his childhood, his
education, his development as a philosopher, and his psychiatric problems; and
The Future Lasts a Long Time, the fullest and most critically challenging of
Althusser’s self-narrations, written in 1985, five years after Hélène’s death, in
response to a scurrilous reference to his case in an article in Le Monde.4 This last
text, which was published with The Facts in a single volume, draws upon and
expands the materials contained in the Journal de Captivité and The Facts. As
might be expected from a document in which Althusser tries to provide the
testimony he had been unable to submit in the course of a trial, the narrative of
The Future Lasts a Long Time circles obsessively around the murder of Hélène,
an event that remains for Althusser ‘an unfathomable night which I have never
been able to fathom’ (253). This void in Althusser’s consciousness generates the
dark energy and moral complexity of the philosopher’s final effort at self-
representation. His inability (or refusal) to make sense of his act of violence*/
and, in making sense of it, to assume full responsibility for it*/has been the
central focus of the wide-ranging critical reception of his autobiographical
works.
In this essay I examine Althusser’s life writing within the context of current
scholarship on the ethics of autobiography and in the broader context of the
ongoing radicalisation of the philosophical discipline of ethics that projects like
Badiou’s have set in motion. I suggest that, precisely because Althusser’s often
anguished attempt at self-narration lies on the outer limits of the genre of
academic autobiography, it offers an especially productive challenge to the
conceptual frameworks within which we examine the life writing of intellectuals.
Furthermore, because we cannot read Althusser’s texts without engaging serious
questions of ethics, I suggest that finding adequate ways to respond to these
questions as they relate to Althusser’s work might give us insight into the more
MY OWN THOUGHTS IN MY OWN BODY 261
general ethical issues autobiographers and their readers are compelled to

address. I also argue that bringing Badiou’s redefinitions of the categories of
truth and responsibility to bear on our consideration of the ethics of autobio-
graphy opens the way toward a conception of the ethical dimension of Althusser’s
self-narration, and perhaps of self-narration in general, that can accommodate
those aspects of moral life*/embodiment, for example*/that notions of a self-
directed will, rational choice, and universal codes of conduct cannot adequately
explain.
In an attempt to characterise at least one of the crucial ethical problems that
occupies Althusser throughout his autobiographical project, including the
materials that predate his killing of Hélène, I focus on the recurring juxtaposition
of rationality and corporeality in all three of Althusser’s life-writing texts. The

mind-body theme emerges in the prison-camp notebooks as a familiar dualism
attributable to the Catholicism of his youth; in his later works, after his reading
of Spinoza, Marx, and Freud leads him to reject any notion of a transcendental
‘spirit’, this idealist dualism gives way to the radically materialist formulation of
a body ‘capable of thinking’ (Future 218). Though primarily a utopian idea,
insofar as it allows Althusser to assimilate the work of intellectuals like himself
with the physical labor and political activism that were the cornerstones of his
Marxist worldview, this fusion of thought and corporeality never fully divests
itself of the anxiety and distrust toward the body that is abundantly evident in
Althusser’s earlier descriptions of his lived experience. The ethical potentia of
his body is double-edged. Corporeality appears as the domain in which Althusser
can take charge of himself as a moral agent*/to be embodied is to be
responsible*/and, at the same time, the body is, on his own account, the
domain in which he cataclysmically loses control. In The Facts and especially in
The Future Lasts a Long Time, the image of the ‘the body’s own thought’ (Future
241) reveals itself to be the fragile fulcrum on which Althusser’s prodigious
intellectual capacities struggle to counterbalance the incapacitating clinical
depression that dogged him throughout his adult life. The fulcrum ultimately
collapses under the weight of the moral problem Althusser grapples with in The
Future, in which he tries to characterise, for himself as much as for his readers,
the nature of his responsibility for his wife’s death, an event in which Althusser’s
body indeed appears to have ‘thought for itself’, with irrevocable consequences.
If, as we read The Future Lasts a Long Time, we take its author’s ultimately
futile struggle to command what he calls ‘my own thoughts in my own body’
(Future 77) as the lodestone of our own ethical orientation to his self-narration,
we are challenged to come to terms with the epistemological impasses created
by the psycho-physiological disruptions Althusser suffered as well as with the
ethical conundrums that emerge from these gaps in his self-knowledge. Unless
we do come to terms with these problems, our responses to The Future*/
including pity and contempt*/will amount to little more than what Althusser
himself, in his critique of Marxist humanism, calls ‘ideological prises de parti in
favour of certain moral, religious and political ‘‘values,’’ and, by way of those
values, certain political institutions, certain moral and religious prejudices, and
262 ZUERN
the prejudice of morality and religion’ (‘The Humanist Controversy’ 274).5

Althusser’s disturbing texts invite us to reconsider what we expect from
autobiographies, especially autobiographies of intellectuals, and to consider
closely how we assess the ethical import of such works. Although we may decide,
in the end, to reassert a particular set of moral values in regard to Althusser’s
self-representation, perhaps even to condemn him as cowardly, duplicitous, or
vicious in any number of other ways, we must take seriously the real obstacles he
encounters when he tries to theorise and depict his own experience. Doing so will
allow us, in turn, to take seriously the criteria by which we arrive at our
judgments of him and, furthermore, to gain a valuable perspective on the
potential of ideology (Althusser’s term) and sophism (Badiou’s term) to impede
our moral evaluations of life-writing texts and the lives of their writers.
I begin by summarising Paul John Eakin’s influential discussion of the ethics of
life writing, in which he isolates three ethical violations of which autobiogra-
phers can be accused; I then briefly review the critical reception of Althusser’s
autobiographical texts, pointing out how readers have explicitly and implicitly
accused Althusser of committing at least two of these violations. Turning to
Althusser’s texts, I take up the question of Althusser’s truthfulness, comparing
passages in The Facts and The Future in which he tells the story of an imaginary
escape from the German prison camp. I move on to the more troubling question
of Althusser’s ‘abnormality’, tracing the theme of the body as the locus of both
capacity and incapacitation as it develops from the prison diaries to The Future. I
conclude by returning to Badiou, whose philosophy provides an alternative*/
though still limited*/perspective on Althusser’s intellectual and moral predica-
ment as a philosopher-autobiographer and on the ethical implications of the
texts he has left us.
Autobiography and Ethics
In recent years a number of leading scholars in the field of life-writing studies

have turned their attention to the ethical dimensions of autobiography.
Prompted in part by the accusations of misconduct directed at high-profile
autobiographers like Richard Frey, Kathryn Harrison, Rigoberta Menchù, and
Binjamin Wilkomirski, this development also reflects the ‘turn to ethics’ that
over the past two decades has been gaining momentum in the broader domains of
literary and cultural studies.6 In an important contribution to the discussion, Paul
John Eakin isolates the three ethical violations with which autobiographers are
commonly charged: they can fail to tell the truth, they can fail to respect the
privacy of others, and they can fail ‘to display normative models of personhood’
(‘Breaking Rules’ 114). Eakin notes that those who commit the third violation
often wind up confined in institutions, and that it is as much an existential
transgression as a legal one: ‘with this last rule, it’s not so much a question of
what one has done but of what one is: one is judged by others to be lacking in the
very nature of one’s being in a profound and disabling way’ (119). The implicit
rules of self-representation, then, govern not only one’s activity as a writer but
also one’s status as a member of human society. Being able to tell one’s story in a
coherent and acceptable way is the sine qua non of being able to be coherent and
acceptable. Noting the moral dimensions of each of these ways of breaking these
rules, Eakin concludes that ‘ethics is the deep subject of autobiographical
discourse’ (123). As we will see, evaluations of Althusser’s unruly autobiogra-
phical texts, from the most condemning to the most compassionate, have had to
engage their disturbing ethical ramifications.
Eakin’s examples of people who transgress the third rule are patients with
Korsakov’s syndrome, Alzheimer’s disease, and other severe brain disorders
(123). Although Althusser’s intractable clinical depression did not prevent him
from assembling his life experiences into a narrative, his disability*/and in
particular the drug-induced psychosis that evidently precipitated his killing of
Hélène*/did ultimately make it impossible for him to produce a narrative that
adequately accounts for his ‘abnormal’ behaviour. In his study of depression
narratives, Lee Zimmerman focuses on narrators’ efforts to deal with the fact
that from a medical standpoint the causes of depression are still largely
unknown, a situation that complicates the impulse to make their experience
of the disease ‘meaningful’ in terms of their life stories. Zimmerman is
suspicious of writers who claim to have achieved a ‘final knowledge’ of their
disease and thus offer the reassurance*/false, for many sufferers*/that
depression can ultimately be overcome. Zimmerman’s description of the
palpable desperation that contradicts the confident tone of William Styron’s
depression-to-recovery narrative in Darkness Visible partially applies to Althus-
ser’s The Future. Like Styron’s, Althusser’s narrative appears to be ‘haunted by
the failure of coherence that its ostensible mastery would locate safely in the
past’ (Zimmerman 473). Althusser’s claim that his role in his wife’s death
remains ‘an unfathomable night’ conflicts with the cobbled-together psycho-
analytic explanations that conclude The Future, where he interprets the
incident either as an act of self-destruction in which he destroyed the very
thing that gave his life meaning or a ‘suicide by proxy’ in which he unconsciously
fulfilled his depressed partner’s own wish to end her life. Despite the optimism
of the last lines of the text, a remark of Charles de Gaulle’s to André Malraux
from which Althusser adopts the title of his book, their orientation toward a
future that its writer will not live to see suggests that Althusser’s ‘failure of
coherence’ is still very much in the present, and that his lifelong attempts at
narrative mastery have not succeeded.
Treatment-resistant depression interferes with the professional lives of all its
sufferers; for intellectuals, whose inescapable workplace is the mind, the
anguish can be particularly exquisite. All of Althusser’s life-writing texts contain
evidence that he turned to self-narration as a means of coping with the
alienation and despair brought on by his illness, even in his student days, long
before any formal diagnosis. Recounting his difficult transition to his new school
in Lyon in the early 1930s, he writes:
264 ZUERN
At the time I kept a diary . . . and each day started a new page by summoning the
‘will to power,’ an expression I had picked up somewhere and which gave me the
resolve to escape from the void I was in and to assert myself by means of a hollow
will which could not take the place of what nature had given me. (91)
Comparably, among the many enigmatic entries in his prison-camp notebooks,

one, on October 29, 1941, contains only a single line: ‘I write this evening,
perhaps for the first time, in order to eradicate my demons’ (71).7 The following
entry, dated November 11, was written in the camp infirmary. It describes the
sensation of existential inertia that was to be a hallmark of Althusser’s life-long
depression, along with the self-abasement that over the years would become
increasingly savage:
Extreme anguish, the impossibility of living that one knows all too well. I sense
the truth of Gide’s comment about the caterpillar who never becomes a
butterfly, the perpetual, ‘continual’ knowledge I have of my extreme, impudent,
feeble limitations is to me more a failure to act than an incitement. If I don’t
know my limitations, I will overstep the bounds. In sum, I have lived up to now
without knowing what it was worth. (71/72)
Throughout Althusser’s writings about his personal life, the experience of an

existential void*/an experience, moreover, that his philosophical commitments
prevented him from assuaging by way of Existentialist appeals to absolute
freedom in the midst of absurdity*/is a conspicuous leitmotif. Indeed, his
biographer Boutang sees ‘the impossibility of being a subject’ (18) as the kernel
of Althusser’s life’s work, in both philosophical and autobiographical arenas.
If, as James O’Roarke asserts in a line that echoes Eakin, ‘the inevitable
metadiscourse of autobiography is ethics’ (14), how do we situate Louis Althusser
and his life writing within this metadiscourse? His is certainly a case in which
‘intentions are not always transparent, consequences are not always predictable,
and responsibility*/which depends on these two opaque, often uncontrollable,
and sometimes incommensurate variables*/is not always easy to assign’ (15).
Given the gravity of his personal actions, however, as well as the magnitude of his
influence as a professional scholar, are we wrong to expect more accountability
from him than his autobiography provides? Is it unfair to question the utility of his
antihumanist philosophy if even he cannot wield it to interpret his own violence
toward another human being, or, worse, if we see it serving him as little more
than a shaky alibi? Althusser’s autobiography compels us, in a particularly
dramatic way, to think through what Cynthia Franklin has called ‘the contra-
dictions and allure that reinstantiating humanism holds for many poststructur-
alist critics,’ and to consider ‘how such tensions provide insights into the
difficulties we have in contemporary academic culture with negotiating not only
the crisis in the humanities, but also the personal and the professional or
political, the experiential and the theoretical, and the individual and the
institutional’ (4). As we watch Althusser struggle to accommodate his inexplic-
able act of murder within a coherent account of his personal and professional
life, he emerges as an intellectual suspended between the extremes of an

unattainable rationality that would grant him a synoptic understanding*/a
‘theory’*/of his actions and an inaccessible corporeality, an obdurate opacity in
his lived experience that confounds any rational explanation. Observing his
conflict in our role as professional readers, we ourselves confront the powerful
appeal, as well as the limitations, of whatever theories, humanist or otherwise,
we bring to bear on the narrative traces of another person’s existence.
Althusser on Trial
Virtually everyone who has written about The Future Lasts a Long Time has noted
its paradoxical status as a self-analysis conducted by one of our foremost critics
of the self-aware human subject. Reviewing the book in The Guardian, Edward
Fox writes:
the future study of Althusser’s work will now inevitably be conducted in the light
of his autobiography, a rare account of the psychological setting of a philosophy.
. . . In Althusser’s case there is an obvious irony in his being a philosopher whose
work denied the validity of human subjectivity ending up in the strange
existential predicament of being deprived of legal personhood. It is as if he
had fallen into a black hole of his own making.
For many, this irony provokes a moral response, casting suspicion not only on
Althusser’s credibility as a witness to his personal life but also on the viability of
his philosophy. The philosopher’s recourse to autobiography is interpreted as a
betrayal of his philosophy’s basic principles, a compromise indicating that
Althusser was only a fair-weather anti-humanist who, in the face of over-
whelming guilt and self-pity, fled back into the bosom of voluntarism, psycholo-
gism, and even sentimentality. Éric Marty, for example, submits that the very
genre of autobiography forces Althusser to adopt the classical narrative of the
destiny of an exceptional individual and thus to run afoul of his own critique of
individualism (35/36). For Lewis Kirschner, the self-representation Althusser
undertakes in The Future:
founders on the shoals of his hostility to the individual person as a source of

meaning. The presentation of his tragedy as due to a historically determined lack
of a personal self contradicts both the extreme antihumanism of his early
Stalinist politics and his later fantasy of a history without subjects. Even at the
end, he could not accept that, whatever deficits he might have suffered as an
‘embodied self,’ his actions had consequences. (230)
Kirschner’s scolding conclusion encapsulates the charge of a threefold moral

failure that is levelled against Althusser, with varying emphases, in great deal of
the critical reception of The Future, in which Althusser allegedly fails to live up
266 ZUERN
to his own theory, to produce an honest account of his life, and to take sufficient
responsibility for his monstrous act.
In some instances, critics go so far as to insinuate a causal connection between
Althusser’s critique of the human subject and his killing of Hélène. At the end of
his generally sympathetic introduction to the English translation of The Future,8
Douglas Johnson, who knew Althusser at the École Normale, wonders if we ‘can
we consider the fate of the Althussers without reflecting on the type of
philosophy that made Louis Althusser famous? Did its impersonal nature have
an effect on his behaviour?’ (xi). More stridently, Marty’s book-length study of the
implications of the murder for Althusser’s philosophical legacy argues that
Althusser’s madness made it impossible for him ever to tell the truth, a failing
that makes his autobiography and this theory alike unworthy of our trust; for
Marty, we might say that Eakin’s third autobiographical infraction implies the
first. Though he does not refer to Philippe Lejeune’s famous formulation, Marty’s
elaboration of his point turns on the notion of a contract between reader and
writer. ‘Human discourses,’ he argues, ‘function upon highly diverse codes of
accreditation, allowing different pacts of reading to invest them with value and
credibility by way of highly complex games of reception’ (209), and in the case of
both Althusser and his philosophy, these pacts are abrogated. The spectacle of
the collapse of Althusserianism fascinates us, Marty argues, ‘because it touches
upon that which constitutes the very essence of human speech: its credibility’
(209).9 With many writers, the implicit rules of narrative discourse permit the
reader to establish a stable orientation to the text, so that even unreliable and
mad narrators, as long as they obey the generic codes of unreliability, and as long
as their madness reveals some kind of method, ‘allow us to inhabit their speech
in a provisional way*/even if we are suspicious about it*/and offer us the
possibility of entrusting ourselves to it without too much naı̈veté’ (209). Unlike
other philosophers, for example Nietzsche and Artaud, for whom mental illness
serves as a font of artistic creativity and philosophical innovation, Althusser fails,
in Marty’s eyes, to put his madness to good use.
Not all readers of Althusser’s self-narrations have judged him so harshly.
Commenting on The Future in the afterword to the 2006 edition of his influential
study Althusser: The Detour of Theory, originally published in 1987, Gregory
Elliott insists that notwithstanding the sensational diversion of Althusser’s
autobiography, we must continue to take Althusser ‘at his work, rather than at
his word,’ pointing out that ‘autobiography is as much rhetoric as record; and
hence, art (or artlessness) hiding art, a compromise formation between
biographical ‘facts’ and literary conventions’ (323). Elliott goes on suggest that
readers of Althusser’s autobiographical texts*/especially those motivated by
their own skepticism about the validity of Althusser’s philosophy*/would do well
to recall a passage in Reading Capital in which Althusser remarks, in regard to his
own engagement with Marx’s works, ‘there is no such thing as an innocent
reading’ (qtd. in Elliott 324). A number of other critics have found ways to uphold
the value of Althusser’s philosophy in view of, and not in spite of, his troubling
self-representations. Warren Montag, for example, finds in the autobiographies
an ‘alternative Althusser’ who complicates the received view of him as a

somewhat rigid structuralist, ‘an aleatory Althusser ever haunted by the void,
the madman whose madness is his truth, a madman for whom truth is itself a kind
of madness, a delusion by which we defend against the abyss that surrounds us’
(Louis Althusser 13). For Dennis Porter, The Future ‘in effect, updates the
existentialist ethics of Sartre to imply that we are the sum not only of our acts
but also of our unconscious desire and of our obsessive fantasms as well as of
those who marked us in our infancy’ (255). While Porter complains that
Althusser’s autobiography fails to resolve the tension between psychoanalytic
and Marxist explanations for his life experiences and does not take the literary
form of autobiography seriously enough, he sees the autobiographies as an
outgrowth, rather than a foil, of Althusser’s philosophy. One of Althusser’s most

fair-minded readers, Leigh Gilmore, also finds connections between the auto-
biographer and the philosopher, asking, ‘what is interpellation, arguably
Althusser’s best-known concept, if not a trope of autobiography?’ (42). For
Gilmore, the value of The Future lies in Althusser’s effort ‘to make sufficiently
public and shareable what would otherwise be relegated to the realm of mad and
criminal subjectivity, uttered by the dissonant other to whom one need not
listen’ (43). I will return later to Gilmore’s important insights about our criteria
for truthfulness in such ‘limit-cases’ of autobiographical writing.
Two readers in particular, Elizabeth Roudinesco and Irène Fenoglio, have
recently published nuanced treatments of Althusser’s case. In her chapter on
Althusser in Philosophy in Turbulent Times, Roudinesco systematically critiques
the frenzied media responses to the publication of The Future, asserting that
‘this unnameable text, unique in the annals of philosophy, was logically bound to
make anyone who ventured to comment upon it rave deliriously themselves’
(123). As the biographer of Jacques Lacan and a long-time associate of
Althusser’s, Roudinesco commands a certain amount of insider information,
which she elegantly deploys to locate the fate of Althusser (and his reputation)
not only in the intellectual milieu in which he worked but also in the culture of
psychoanalysis and psychiatry in which he sought relief from his disease. More
important, though, she arrives at a reading of The Future that respects
Althusser’s objective, doomed as it may have been, to account for his violent
act. In Roudinesco’s view, it is ‘because Althusser was willing to confront, in
writing, the murder scene*/or rather the reality of this unnameable scene*/that
he could render an accounting, after the fact, of his intellectual destiny’ (128,
emphasis in original). Though Roudinesco is not directly concerned with ethical
questions, her point supports a position I develop later in this essay, where I
assert that Althusser’s literary and philosophical confrontation with the
cognitively impenetrable ‘reality’ of his experience is a key component of the
ethics of his autobiography.
Roudinesco’s insights into the personal and cultural histories that shaped
Althusser’s autobiographical writings prove even more enlightening when we
read them alongside Irène Fenoglio’s remarkable comparative study of the
manuscripts of The Facts and The Future in the archives of the Institut Mémoires
268 ZUERN
de l’Edition Contemporaine. Painstakingly examining the revisions, erasures,

marginal notes, mistakes, and inconsistencies in Althusser’s typescripts, Fenoglio
undertakes a linguistic and psychoanalytic analysis of Althusser’s writing as a
material practice. She characterises these texts as the ‘auto-graphy’ [auto-
graphie] of the traumatic experience that separates, historically and linguisti-
cally, the two manuscripts. With its focus on the materiality of Althusser’s
autobiography, Fenoglio’s methodology allows her to pursue her analysis within
the horizon of the materialism to which Althusser himself was committed, and
her conclusions offer us an Althusser who very much ‘lives up’ to his theory,
insofar as his manuscripts bear witness to his suspension with a matrix of pre-
existing linguistic and social forces over which he had very limited command.
Unlike most readers, Fenoglio does not view Althusser as a strange outlier among
autobiographers; for her, ‘the nature of these texts engages an interrogation of
the notion of autobiography itself’ (25). Althusser’s self-narrative stands as a
testament to ‘the way the tragedy of a human condition*/that of a being turned
toward social and collective stakes*/inscribes itself, in spite of him, in spite of
the control over his text and the successively repeated corrections, on the page,
on the pages he himself has presented to our reading’ (35). Fengolio’s argument
here suggests that in failing to subscribe to ‘the normative models of
personhood,’ as Eakin calls them, Althusser inscribes in his autobiography the
trauma of his own interpellation and the traces of his resistance to the very
apparatuses that are reproducing themselves within him.
Regardless of the positions they take in regard to Althusser’s autobiography, all
commentators have had to reckon with his apparent failure to comply with the
autobiographer’s presumed obligation to report the truth and to conform to
accepted models of personhood. Turning now to Althusser’s texts, I will examine
the implications of those failures in relation to his dense interweaving of the
themes of corporeality, responsibility, and truth. Althusser does indeed break the
rules, but it is not at all clear that following the rules would have led him to
produce a ‘truer’ or more morally gratifying story.
‘If I Am to Be Wholly Truthful . . .’
Early in The Future Althusser appears to sidestep the autobiographical pact by

distancing himself from all the familiar forms of life writing: ‘what follows is not
a diary, not my memoirs, not an autobiography’ (29). Both The Facts and The
Future self-consciously buck the conventions of autobiographical genres; The
Facts, in particular, is replete with tall tales about wild kleptomaniac sprees and
meetings with famous figures like the pope and Charles de Gaulle. ‘My name is
Pierre Berger,’ Althusser declares in the opening of this text, only to admit
immediately, ‘Actually, that is not true’ (289). The confessional figure of
metanoia*/the gainsaying of what one has just said*/pervades both versions of
the autobiography, and in each instance it is difficult to determine how much
these retractions reflect Althusser’s ludic approach to self-narration and how
much they are symptoms of his neurotic image of himself as an imposter.10 To

some extent, certainly, Althusser seeks to overcome what Leigh Gilmore calls
‘autobiography’s impediments’ to a writer’s working-through of traumatic
experiences, which for Gilmore ‘consist of its almost legalistic definition of
truth-telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and
verifiable, even in the presence of some ambivalence about those criteria’ (3). It
is certainly clear that Althusser’s philosophical critique of the pretensions of
traditional empiricism extended to his approach to recounting ‘the facts’ of his
life. In the Journal de Captivité, recalling a joking conversation with his prison-
camp associate Robert Costes, he writes, ‘the truest stories are surely those
which have never happened’ (149).
In one of the most notorious examples of his authorial game of deception-and-

confession, Althusser adopts this anti-empiricist notion of a ‘true fiction’ for the
telling of his own life story. In both The Facts and The Future, Althusser recalls
devising a plan to escape from Stalag XA, where he spent the entirety of WWII.
According to the account in The Facts, Althusser and his close friend Robert Daël
observed that after an escape the camp guards went on high alert for three
weeks; if the escapee was not recaptured during that time, the security
precautions return to their normal levels. He and Daël reasoned that if they
hid somewhere inside the camp to make it appear they had escaped and waited
until the general alert had died down, they could then slip away after the guards
had given up the search. Althusser describes in great detail how he and Daël
carried out the scheme, including their ultimate betrayal by ‘a minor post-office
official’ in the neighbouring village, only to confess in the next paragraph that it
was all a fabrication: ‘If I am to be wholly truthful, I should add that I have
described things exactly as we planned them, but that we never left the camp’
(319). He goes on to reflect on the theme of the tensions between intellectual
solutions and practical outcomes, which he sees as consistent with the pattern of
his later career: ‘in principle solving the problem was itself sufficient reward. I
did not forget it once I got back to philosophy, since it is the nub of all
philosophical (as well as political and military) problems: how to escape the
circle while remaining with in it’ (319).
A decade later, when he revises this story in The Future Lasts a Long Time, the
scope has tellingly narrowed, reflecting perhaps the isolation and sense of
persecution of his life in the mid-1980s. Though the elements are the same, he
dispenses with the elaborate fiction of the escape and moves directly to a more
personal, psychological, and self-deprecating interpretation:
Though I perfected my plan, I did not carry it out, but simply prided myself on the
fact that I had ‘found the solution.’ Having proved that I could do it, there was no
need to put it into practice. I have often thought since that the solution came
from deep within me, combining a fear of danger and the absolute need for
security to produce a fictitious act of bravery. If my friend Rancière had known
about this ‘episode’ when he reproached me at a much later date for criticising
the Communist Party in order to remain within it, I believe it would have given
him food for thought. (108/109)
270 ZUERN
Rather than an emblem of philosophical work in general, the failure to

implement the plan is interpreted here as a sign of individual weakness and as
the forerunner of personal battles within professional and political life.11
These passages exemplify a common structure in the autobiographical writing
of intellectuals: Althusser recalls a concrete event from the distant past, unpacks
or at least weighs its emotional baggage, then relates it to a more recent aspect
of his professional life. The critical response to these passages, in turn, has
exemplified the interpretive temptations intellectual autobiographies dangle in
front of our eyes. It has been hard for some critics not to read stories like this one
typologically, especially when the writer himself hints at typological*/and
etiological*/relationships between early and later life events. For example, in

their introduction to the Journal de Captivité, the editors Olivier Corpet and
Yann Mouier Boutang speculate that for Althusser ‘the camp prefigures the École
Normale, a kind of prolonged ‘‘first year,’’ with neither exams nor preoccupa-
tions with the future, the shadow of the camp inhabited by the parade of demons
which were so difficult for him to escape’ (ix/x). In his biography of Althusser,
Boutang plays out this typological reading in more sweeping terms: ‘Doesn’t this
captivity in which one hatches Cartesian escape plots in order to choose not to
choose, to take action by way of submitting, and to extricate oneself with a
pirouette of words amount to an anticipatory anagram of the whole existence
that was to come?’ (174). And in a characteristically acerbic assessment, Marty
asserts that the strange passivity of Althusser’s ‘theoretical’ escape plan, at once
delusional and self-congratulatory, not only explains his later relationship with
the Communist Party but is also the paradigm of his entire career, of his
philosophy, and of his mental illness. In the camp as in the École, Marty alleges,
Althusser was ‘the master of masters, like the madman who is convinced that he
is the director of the hospital where he is confined, but who carefully keeps the
secret the better to enjoy it in silence’ (161). Althusser’s chronic, neurotic
incapacity to take decisive action, Marty concludes, ultimately unravels in an
action that escapes his control: the murder of Hélène (162).
It may not be entirely unfair to read episodes like the unrealised escape plan
as emblems of what E.P. Thompson famously called ‘the poverty of theory’, and
even sympathetic readers like Roudinesco have noted that Althusser’s rhetorical
militancy often went hand in hand with an actual timidity: ‘his body, so present in
the elaboration of thought, fainted away whenever the risk arose of a
confrontation with real events’ (128). Yet to look only at incidents in which
Althusser sacrifices concrete action to abstract thought is to overlook other
aspects of his autobiography that complicate our assessment of how his life
experience, in particular his experience of embodiment, informs his philosophy
and shapes his self-concept. If we look back to the notebooks he kept in the
prisoner-of-war camp, we find a number of entries in which the young Althusser
is already grappling with the relationship between thought and action, and the
idea of a productive but unstable intersection of mind and body that surfaces
repeatedly in his later life writing.
Corporeality, Capacity, and Incapacitation
Many entries in the Journal de Captivité set up a romantic contrast between

physical labour and the intellect. On October 10, 1941, describing the hard
labour his captors require of him, Althusser writes, ‘even reduced to its most
stripped-down expression, gesture of the shovel and the pitchfork, simple work
possesses particular graces. Simplicity, totally stripped of calculation, of
preparation, of artifice, this pure gesture, without shadow, without regret,
which gives itself entirely. All that so far from the life of the intelligence!’ (67).
Rather than privileging intellect, as one might expect from an aspiring normalien
thrown in among farmers and labourers, Althusser often emphasises the moral
superiority of physical prowess as a corrective to the vicissitudes of cogitation.

Describing a soccer match in an entry on August 16, 1942, he writes:
One never has enough physical confidence*/myself above all. But when one has
it, it is immediate, decisive. That’s why, when I can do it successfully, I love to
play. It’s a way for me to choose the straight line, to prefer it to all the detours of
reflection, doubt, and scruples. (102)
At the same time, his reflections on this body-mind duality begin to hint at more
troubling dimensions.
Earlier in 1942, on April 15, he makes a note, ‘Moral confidence given by
physical confidence,’ which we might interpret simply as a version of mens sana
in corpore sano if the following lines did not reveal the double edge of this
maxim: ‘[I’ve] known this distress of no longer being confident in its spiritual
bulwark, of not compensating for the betrayal of the physical with the stability of
the spirit. [I] am set up in such a way that on this fragile foundation on which I
live I am at the mercy of an abdication, however temporary, of the body’ (89).
The Journal also gives us glimpses of the early stages of the simile Althusser, in
his later work, would seek to turn into a homology: the intuition that writing,
thinking, and intellectual work in general is like physical labour becomes for the
older Althusser the conviction that intellectual work is labour, and by extension
that theory is a site of revolutionary struggle. On June 19, 1944, he writes:
My subject, when I write, is to me as much a prized possession [bien] as the field

is to the farmer. Force of habit that binds the spirit to the place of its thoughts,
the man to the place of his labors. And just like the one who defends his prized
possession with his arms, I defend my subject with all the powers of discourse.
Eternal law of the human condition, that man awakens one morning the prisoner
of his choice. (175)
The quick shift from the positive valence of the ‘binding’ of spirit to the grimmer
image of imprisonment points to the ambivalence the body-mind relationship
provoked in Althusser, for whom, in his 20s, the body was already a pivot-point of
his self-concept, at once a source of self-possession and perilously weak link.
272 ZUERN
These and many other entries in the Journal de Captivité appear to justify
Althusser’s claim, in both The Facts and The Future, that his discovery as a young
man of the interplay between mental ability and physical agility prepared him for
his profound engagement with the materialism of Marxist theory. In the early
sections of these texts, he looks back to his boyhood, when he discovered in
tennis, swimming, and cycling a way to ‘distinguish my own techniques visibly
and effectively from those of the family, and if not yet to ‘have my own thoughts
in my own body’ [penser par moi-même dans mon corps], at least to seek to take
charge of my own body for myself according to my own desires. In this way I
began to break free of the rules and norms set by the family’ (77). Later, when he
describes his conversion to Marxism, Althusser returns to this idea that ‘thinking
for oneself in one’s body’ is a crucial to overcoming the ideological conditioning

of the family and other state apparatuses.12 In Chapter 18 of The Future, he tells
us ‘when I ‘came into contact with’ Marxism, I subscribed to it with my body’ [ce
fut par mon corps que j’y adhérai]’ (214). He goes on to say that ‘in Marxism and
Marxist theory I discovered a system of thought which acknowledged the primacy
of the bodily activity, and labour over passive, speculative consciousness and I
thought of this relationship as materialism itself’ (215, emphasis in original).
Conjoining Marx with Benedict de Spinoza, Althusser comes to view the body ‘as
a potentia, both as a force (fortitudo) and as an opening onto the world
(generositas), a disinterested gift’ (218). For him:
the discovery that a person could take control of his body and in the process think
freely and powerfully, in other words with and in that body . . . really excited me,
as it confirmed what I had truly experienced for myself. (218/219)
As hard as it might be to identify with many of Althusser’s states of mind, what

scholar has not taken pleasure in the sensuality of ideas, the passion of thought,
the abrupt and joyful experiences of insight that resuscitate the eroticism latent
in the metaphor of ‘conception?’ By the same token, of course, those of us who
are subject to attacks of anxiety and panic in connection with our intellectual
performances as writers, speakers, and teachers recognise the razor’s edge that
divides the thrill of thinking from the sudden triggering of the autonomic fight-
or-flight response. As Althusser amply illustrates, the nimblest of minds provides
only a partial defense against the body’s unpredictability.
Althusser’s paeans to the body are counterbalanced by his depictions of the
body as an obstacle and a blind spot, as we see in his descriptions of bouts of
depression and mania, long stays in hospitals, the electroshock and drug
therapies that never fully succeeded in treating his condition, and, most
dramatically, that pivotal moment in which Althusser completely lost whatever
mastery he might have had over ‘his own thoughts in his own body’ and killed
Hélène. Most grippingly, in Chapter 20 of The Future, recounting the events that
led up to the strangulation of Hélène, Althusser writes of a terrifying loss of
control over his body brought on, ostensibly, by the combined effects of
antidepressant drugs and the post-anesthesia disorientation following surgery
for a hiatal hernia. Within ten pages, we see a complete reversal of Althusser’s
treatment of the body. At the end of Chapter 19, he writes of Spinoza’s:
remarkable conception of the body, which possesses ‘powers unknown to us,’ and
of the mens (spirit) which becomes ever more liberated as the body develops the
activity of its conatus, its virtus or fortitudo. Spinoza thus offered me a bodily
concept of thought, or rather of thinking with the body, or better still the body’s
own thought. This intuition made a direct link between the experience I had of
appropriating and of ‘reconstituting’ my body, and to the development of my
thinking and my intellectual interests. (241)
His account in Chapter 20 of the disturbance to ‘the ‘biological balance’ of my

body’ (249) in the days leading up to Hélène’s death could not stand in starker
contrast to this optimistic vision:
I lapsed into semi-consciousness and was at times wholly unconscious and in a

confused mental state. I was no longer able to control the movements of my
body, was constantly falling down, and vomiting all the time . . . My speech was
confused, to the extent that I often used one word when I meant another, as were
my perceptions which I could no longer follow or connect. I was, a fortiori,
unable to write and the things I said were nothing but ravings. (249)
It seems that as Althusser drew nearer to the ‘unfathomable night’ of November

16, 1980, his physical and psychological suffering exposed the shadow side of the
body’s unknowable powers: as Friedrich Nietzsche had insisted a century earlier,
corporeal processes and drives also constitute irremediable opacities in our self-
awareness that in turn incapacitate our knowledge of the world we inhabit.
‘What does man really know about himself?’ Nietzsche asks in his famous 1873
essay ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’. He continues: ‘Does nature not
keep him in ignorance about most things, even about his own body, in order to
detain and lock him up in within a proud deceitful consciousness, removed from
the coils of the intestines, the rapid flow of the bloodstream, the intricate
vibration of the fibres?’ (254). To compensate for their blindness to the realities
of their physical, animal existence, Nietzsche argues, human beings, and above
all philosophers, elaborate ‘lies’, illusions that function in society as reliable
truths*/and as foundations for moral decisions*/only by way of the same kind of
unreflective consensus the Marxist tradition designates as ‘hegemony’. From this
perspective, if philosophers have any moral obligations at all, they are obliged to
embrace the unfounded nature of all morality and, more vitally, to improvise on
prevailing ‘truths’ so as to produce less pernicious and more life-affirming ‘lies’.
As Elizabeth Grosz explains, for Nietzsche ‘philosophy is a product of the body’s
impulses that have mistaken themselves for psyche or mind’ (126). Grosz’s offers
an example how such ‘mistakes’ can mobilise philosophical thought is especially
apt, if also ironic, in the context of Althusser’s case: ‘to posit a ‘doer’ beyond the
‘deed’ is a useful or enabling fiction, a fantasy that helps to explain the body’s
drive to expansion, to life, to joy’ (126). We can read The Future Lasts a Long
274 ZUERN
Time as Althusser’s faltering effort to account for his actions by way of just such
an enabling fiction, one that attempts to bridge the considerable gap between a
Nietzschean (and Spinozist) celebration of the body as the inescapable substrate
of thought, life, and joy and Althusser’s own experience of his unknowable yet
undeniably powerful body as an epistemological black hole and a moral void.
Perhaps nowhere in The Future is the double-edged nature of the ‘body
capable of thinking’ so chillingly revealed as in a strange collocation of words
that appears three times in the text*/once with a radically different meaning. In
Chapter 18, celebrating Spinoza’s concept of the interpenetration of the body
and the soul, Althusser writes that these entities are ‘as inseparable as the lips
and the teeth’ [unis comme les lèvres et les dents] (218). The key words of this
simile have occurred before and will return later, inverted and grimly literalised:
in the opening chapter, describing the sight of Hélène’s body when he finally
comes to consciousness after the murder, Althusser reports, ‘I noticed the tip of
her tongue was showing between her teeth and lips, strange and still’ [surtout
voici qu’un bref bout de langue repose, insolite et paisible, entre ses dents et
ses lèvres] (16). When he returns to this scene in Chapter 20, Althusser claims he
would not have realised Hélène was dead except for ‘her motionless eyes and the
pitiful tip of her tongue showing between her teeth and lips’ [sauf à l’immobilité
de ses yeux et à ce pauvre bout de langue entre les dents et les lèvres] (254).
This transposition of ‘lips and teeth’ from a positively inflected figuration of
Spinoza’s concept into a grisly material description of Hélène’s corpse seems to
qualify as one of the ‘psychic movements of writing’ (18) that Fenoglio so
painstakingly traces in Althusser’s manuscripts, a tiny node in the complex
conceptual web in which body, consciousness, action, writing, and responsibility
are enmeshed in Althusser’s autobiographical discourse.
Comparing The Facts and The Future, Fenoglio enlists the Lacanian concept of
the Real to characterise the two texts as ‘irremediably separated’ by the killing
of Hélène, which she characterises as ‘a passage into a void [passage à vide]*/a
void of language but a plentitude of the real’ (191, emphasis in original).
Whereas in the The Facts Althusser assumes a ‘posture of mastery’, to Fenoglio
his authorial stance in The Future is ‘a posture of authentically accepted
subjective failure’ (191). Within the Lacanian framework Fenoglio introduces
here, the literally ‘senseless’ violence Althusser exercised against Hélène
represents the shattering eruption of the Real*/pure physis inaccessible to any
logos*/into his unfolding process of subject-formation. It follows, then, that his
attempt in The Future Lasts a Long Time to make sense of this event*/and, in its
rough wake, to stabilise his subjectivity for himself as much as for any
audience*/constitutes an incessant and always inadequate marshalling of the
Symbolic in the service of the Imaginary’s incessant and always inconclusive
negotiations with the Real. What coalesces amidst these transactions, for the
writer and the reader alike, is the virtual reality called Louis Althusser.
Éric Marty also takes up a Lacanian line of argument, employing the
psychoanalytic model to call Althusser’s trustworthiness into question. ‘Murder
condemns the murderer to the irremediable loss of all credibility,’ Marty avows,
‘insofar as it irreversibly interrupts the dialogue between the symbolic and the
imaginary*/this intimate and infinite dialectic that never concludes except in the
form of a question*/it returns to the most hermetic enclosure there is, that of
the real’ (220). It is hard to disagree with the basic structure of this analysis;
Althusser certainly fails to render a conventionally coherent symbolic represen-
tation of his Real act of murder. Marty, however, appears to characterise this
failure to overcome incomprehensibility as an essentially moral flaw. Having
violated Eakin’s autobiographical rule number three, Marty seems to imply,
Althusser can’t possibly adhere to rule number one; his horrifying brush with the
Real does not exempt him from his responsibility to tell the truth.
For Fenoglio, in contrast, it is precisely in the material traces of his struggle
with the Symbolic that Althusser fulfills his responsibility and accedes to an
authenticity that is not only a matter of reliable accounting but also of ‘allowing
the gestural movements of non-mastery in one’s autographic writing to be
visible, and not intentionally hiding them’ (189). Had he not produced a text that
revealed itself ‘as processual and hesitant, accidental, eventalized,’ Fenoglio
argues, ‘Althusser would remain ‘‘irresponsible,’’ imprisoned in his ‘‘passage to
action’’ [passage à l’acte]. In taking it upon himself to write his own splitting-
apart, in making visible his divided writing, in speaking his incomprehension, he
performatively fulfills himself as a subject’ (195). Fenoglio’s formulation of a
‘processual’ and ‘eventalized’ writing is drawn in part from Alain Badiou’s
concepts of the ‘truth process’ and the ‘event’ (see Fenoglio 152), and her
assertion that Althusser arrives, by way of his text, at a responsible subjectivity
also owes something to the ethical implications of Badiou’s work. Following
Fenoglio’s lead and returning to Badiou’s Ethics may help us elaborate a
perspective on the ethics of The Future that shifts the emphasis from Althusser’s
inevitable failure to adhere to norms of truth and personhood to his paradoxical
fidelity, not only to the specific principles of his philosophy but also to the
problem*/the putting in question the idea of the human subject as an agent of
history*/that spurred him to philosophise in the first place.
From Failure to Fidelity
‘Philosophy is always the breaking of a mirror,’ Badiou writes in Conditions,

recruiting a metaphor with profound implications for our reading of any
philosopher’s autobiography. ‘This mirror is the surface of language, onto which
the sophist reduces all the things that philosophy treats in its act. If the
philosopher sets his gaze solely on this surface, his double, the sophist, will
emerge, and he may take himself to be one’ (25). To meet the criteria of Badiou’s
‘ethics of philosophy’ (25), philosophers must not rest content with the
prescribed categories of thought within any given tradition but must commit
themselves to the philosophical consequences of an ‘event’ that escapes the
parameters of already-existing knowledge. For Badiou, ‘a truth is always that
which makes a hole in a knowledge’ (Being and Event 327), and the ethical
276 ZUERN
philosopher is the one who occupies a position of rigorous ‘fidelity’ to this

shattering truth. Badiou’s brief paean to Althusser in the opening of his Ethics
implies that Althusser, in his work as a philosopher, succeeded in breaking the
sophistical mirror, thus opening the way to a truth that overwhelmed pre-existing
philosophies of subjectivity and society. It remains to be seen, however, whether
Althusser has anything close to this kind of success in his work as an
autobiographer.
In the specific context of Althusser’s life writing, Badiou’s image of the
duplicitous mirror does seem to capture Althusser’s paradoxical, aporetic
situation as he attempts to represent himself morally as the agent responsible
for Hélène’s death, an ‘inconceivable’ event that eludes any ready-to-hand
medical, legal, and philosophical explanation. The killing of Hélène would thus
be the central truth of Althusser’s last autobiography insofar as it is the primary
force behind the thinking that generates The Future Lasts a Long Time. Is it
possible, then, to view this text as a testimony to Althusser’s fidelity to the truth
of his act, a truth that demands that he confront, in a way as visceral as was his
first encounter with Spinoza and Marx, the void of subjectivity and surplus of
corporeality his own philosophy has posited?
In their theories of human subjectivity, both Althusser and Badiou assume that
human beings begin life in a state of ‘raw’ animality*/the human species, Badiou
remarks, is ‘mortal and predatory’ (Ethics 11). Any recognisably ‘human’
characteristics emerge only through a process of subject-formation over which
human individuals themselves have no control. In the essay ‘Freud and Lacan’
Althusser identifies the true object of psychoanalytic theory as ‘the ‘‘effects’’,
prolonged into the surviving adult, of the extraordinary adventure which from
birth to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms a small animal conceived
by a man and a woman into a small human child’ (205). His famous formulation
‘all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects’
(‘Ideology’ 173) owes essential features to Lacan’s account of this simultaneously
enabling and constraining ‘humanizing’ adventure.13 Althusser’s recurring
emphasis on the body’s capacity for thought-as-action in The Future indicates
that Althusser, throughout his life, perceived corporeality as a kind of resistant
residue in the interpellated subject, a surplus that can potentially provide a
foundation for the emancipation of the subject from its bondage to ideology. As
Caroline Williams argues, for Althusser ‘the body contains a power as potentia
(but also as élan: opening to the world, free gift) which may exceed ideology’s
function to dominate and control’ (76). As we have already seen, the dark side of
this utopian vision of the body’s potential becomes apparent in The Future Lasts
a Long Time: by exceeding ideology’s grasp, the body can also exceed any
explanation, any ‘science’, and potentially any control whatsoever: nothing
guarantees that the exorbitance of corporeality will have salubrious effects.
As a dimension of our existence lying partially beyond our self-awareness,
the body constitutes a thing-hood that simultaneously grounds and threatens
our human self-hood. Our embodiment amounts to a truth we can never fully
tell. For Badiou, as for Althusser, our animal corporeality represents at once the
limit of ‘humanity’ and the materials from which our humanity is elaborated.
Embodiment allows us to exercise*/we might say, to make Good upon*/the
‘singular, aleatory, and partial ability, which identifies [us] philosophically as
human, within the animal sphere’ (Ethics 132). Badiou goes beyond Althusser’s
model of interpellation, which takes for granted the primacy of the State and
its historically established ideological apparatuses in the production of
subjects, to imagine a process of subject-formation in which none of the
components can be presupposed in advance. In Badiou’s model, neither subject
nor apparatus pre-exist the process: ‘there is only a particular kind of animal,
convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject*/or rather, to enter
into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment,

everything he is*/his body, his abilities*/is called upon to enable the passing of
a truth along its path’ (Ethics 40). Not only is Badiou’s image of the emergence
of subjectivity no longer locked into the historically predetermined reproduc-
tive ‘manufacturing’ of subjects proposed by Althusser’s model of interpella-
tion, but his concept of ‘fidelity’ advances a way of imagining an emancipation
from ideological conditioning that does not depend upon a scientific, synoptic
‘theory’ of the whole*/the stumbling block of Althusser’s philosophical
ambitions. Fidelity relies rather on a courageous seizure of*/and receptivity
to seizure by*/the particular material components of a singular situation as
they are put into play through the force of an unpredictable, disruptive event.14
Both ‘situation’ and ‘event’ operate as technical terms in Badiou’s philosophy.
‘Situation’ denotes an aggregation of multiple elements, each in itself infinitely
multiple, which achieves only a provisional structure and stability through the
exertion of the specific forms of knowledge and power*/definitions, categories,
laws, values*/that make up the ‘state’ of the situation. ‘The state,’ explains
Peter Hallward, ‘is what classifies and separates the elements of its situation,
arranges them into groups, distributes them in a order that suits the logic of
domination prevalent in that situation’ (272/273).15 Although they allow us to
recognise our present situation and orient ourselves within it, Badiou asserts that
none of the techniques of explanation and justification that shore up the state
can ever arrive at a ‘truth’. Truth emerges only in the cataclysmic, catalytic
‘event,’ which for Badiou ‘brings to pass ‘‘something other’’ than the situation,
opinions, instituted knowledges’ (Ethics 67). The event exposes the state’s
inability to maintain its totalising hold over all the situation’s components and,
more crucially, reveals potential new configurations of those components*/
which include the subjectivities of the human beings involved*/that would have
been invisible prior to the event.
To read The Future from Badiou’s perspective, our thinking would have to
accommodate a notion of ‘truth’ that privileges neither the objective evidence
in Althusser’s case nor his own subjective trustworthiness. Instead, we would
have to concentrate on the disruptive event that summons Althusser into a
course of action and, more important, Althusser’s capacity to act in accordance
with the radically game-changing effects of that event. Following Badiou:
278 ZUERN
we must suppose, then, that whatever convokes someone to the composition of a

subject is something extra, something that happens in situations as something
that they and the usual way of behaving in them cannot account for. Let us say
that a subject, which goes beyond the animal . . .needs something to have
happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in
‘what there is’. (Ethics 41)
Something ‘extra’ certainly happens in Althusser’s life, something that he, at

least, cannot reduce to an ordinary explanation. When we read The Future, we
witness a person using all the resources at his disposal, which in this case include
some of the most influential developments in late-twentieth-century Continental
philosophy, to ‘pull himself together’ after a shattering, inexplicable disruption*/
and finding those resources inadequate. From this viewpoint, those elements of
Althusser’s life writing that deliberately or unwittingly break the autobiographi-
cal pact would not reflect Althusser’s own failure to tell the truth as much as
they would signal the failure of the available modes of self-representation to
accommodate the kind of profound fracture of subjectivity Althusser appears to
have undergone. As Colin Davis notes, throughout The Future ‘perplexity refuses
to give way to the urge for knowledge, and the resistance to clarity retains its
own kind of insight’ (126). Although he is in many ways a self-indulgent author,
Althusser resists indulging in off-the-shelf solutions to the philosophical,
psychological, and moral problems he explores. As a result, he produces one of
the ‘dubious accounts by dubious subjects’ that Leigh Gilmore has included
among the limit-cases of autobiography. In our attempt to understand and
evaluate life writing texts like Althusser’s, Gilmore proposes that ‘our reliance on
the facticity of autobiography may become less relevant and it certainly becomes
less secure, as the subject who emerges is no less a self-invention than in
Rousseau or Franklin, yet not the representative we might embrace’ (42). Rather
than interpreting the perplexity that pervades The Future as a sign of Althusser’s
philosophical failure and lack of moral resolve, we might, following Badiou, take
it as evidence of his commitment to the ‘composition of a subject’, to a self-
(re)invention without recourse to any predetermined protocols of self-mastery or
self-consistency*/that is, as the sign of his fidelity to a truth that exceeds his
situation.
At the same time, it is important to recognise that Althusser’s killing of
Hélène, devastating as its aftermath was for him personally, does not technically
qualify as one of the rare, world-historical ‘events’ Badiou’s philosophy seeks to
identify, which include, for example, the Cultural Revolution in China and
Schoenberg’s introduction of the twelve-tone scale (see Ethics 41). If anything in
Althusser’s life comes close to this kind of event, it would be his intervention into
Marxist philosophy, and in particular his contributions to a materialist theory of
the processes that give rise to human subjectivity. It is precisely this
philosophical legacy, and not so much the man’s personal reputation, that
Badiou seeks to ransom from those ‘countless obscene onlookers for whom
Althusser has become a mere pathological case bequeathed to the collectors of
unusual psyches’ (Metapolitics 58). For Badiou The Future Lasts a Long Time
does not figure prominently*/if it figures at all*/in the Althusserian canon, and
Badiou’s philosophy provides no magic key for interpreting that strange text.
Nevertheless, Badiou’s resolutely antihumanist orientation to the notion of
human subjectivity, and in particular his emphasis on the contingent, unpredict-
able ‘convocation’ and ‘composition’ of the subject, at once illuminates and
complicates our questions about the moral dimensions of Althusser’s autobio-
graphy. If, as some critics have suggested, the wounds Althusser attempts to
suture in The Future Lasts a Long Time are largely his own guilty conscience and
the injuries to his ego inflicted by the non-lieu and the Le Monde article, we can
ground our diagnosis, as well as the judgments associated with it, in a readily
available moral psychology. If, however, Althusser’s wounds include something
like the ‘hole in knowledge’ Badiou designates as the truth to which the
philosopher must remain faithful if he is to act responsibly in his role, we cannot
rest so easy in our predetermined concepts and values. Even if we do not
ultimately adopt Badiou’s highly abstract models of truth and responsibility for
our ongoing efforts to develop a workable ethics of autobiography, his thinking
does caution us to pause before defaulting to conventional*/and perhaps
sophistical*/codes of autobiographical conduct as we scrutinise the moral
implications of any writer’s acts of self-representation. As Paul John Eakin has
argued, ‘judgments about damaged selves are not necessarily the result of some
easily objectified principles, but rather the consequence of affect’s agency in
the observer. If this is the case, then the ethical issues involved in such
judgments become quite complex, and our responsibilities not easily deter-
mined’ (121).
Though not many of them are as damaged as Althusser, all autobiographers*/
and all readers*/are, like him, suspended between an unattainable rationality
and an inaccessible corporeality; even if psychic and somatic obstacles are not in
the foreground of the narrative, the writer’s ability to recall events, to disclose
motivations, and to assess emotional responses is circumscribed by a corporeal
horizon that is always hazy. The antihumanist legacy of Althusser and Badiou asks
us to consider how individual human beings come to recognise themselves as
individuals and how*/in the context of specific historical conjunctures that are
essentially ‘meaningless’ and ‘amoral’*/they actively embody that individuality,
investing it with meaning and moral value, and assume (in both senses) ‘their
own thoughts in their own bodies’. At the same time, this tradition emphasises
that none of us can give a complete, ‘true’ account of this process; as Althusser’s
case illustrates, while thought can materialise only in the body, the body also
stands in the way of any exhaustive self-awareness.
If Badiou’s work offers any guidance toward a responsible criticism of morally
challenging autobiographies like Althusser’s, his contribution may come in the
form of an austere critical humility, not only in the face of the other imperfect
human beings who purport to reveal themselves in autobiographical narratives,
but also in the face of the imperfect act of self-revelation itself, an act
perpetrated and perpetuated within a discursive ‘situation’ we at least partly
share with the writer and in which we, as soon as we begin reading, are
280 ZUERN
implicated. Adopting this kind of humility, we might be compelled to account

more thoroughly for how we ourselves are convoked to the composition of our
critical subjectivities by our encounters with extraordinary life writing texts like
The Future Lasts a Long Time. Consequently, we might discover how much we
owe our fidelity, as readers, as academics, intellectuals, and, more broadly, as
embodied subjects with at times ambiguous and conflicting responsibilities, to
the rigors of this complicit witnessing. As Althusser knew, if we want to become
responsible readers who can do justice to a text’s overdetermined meanings, we
need to recognise that precisely because there is no such thing as an innocent
reading, ‘we must say what reading we are guilty of’ (Reading Capital 14).
Acknowledgements
I want to thank Cynthia G. Franklin, Laura E. Lyons, Kieko Matteson, and the
anonymous reiewers for Life Writing for their generous and exceedingly helpful
commentary on earlier versions of this essay.
Notes
[1] Warren Montag cites this letter in his introduction to In a Materialist Way: Selected
Essays by Pierre Macherey (12).
[2] Roudinesco provides a thorough description of the events following the murder,
including details about his psychiatric evaluation and the terms of the non-lieu
(99/102).
[3] A vast archive of unpublished materials also came to light after Althusser’s death
and is gradually being edited and released. For an inventory of the most important
of these texts, see Elliott (318/319).
[4] The Le Monde article, written by Claude Sarraute and entitled ‘Petite faim’, ran on
March 14, 1985. It reported on Issei Sagawa’s cannibalistic murder of a young woman
in the Netherlands, his extradition to Japan, where he was not convicted, and his
subsequent life there as a celebrity. Sarroute lists Althusser along with the aristocrat
Thibault d’Orleans, who left France after the suspicious death of his child, as
examples of high-profile figures whose influence with authorities allows them to
elude punishment for their crimes. See the account of the genesis of The Future
Lasts a Long Time in Yves Corpet and Yann Moulier Boutang’s introduction to the
French edition of that text (ii). Elizabeth Roudinesco gives a more detailed analysis
of Sarraute’s article in the context of international media responses to Rytman’s
death (98/99).
[5] Without implying this criticism, Craig Howes has noted the all-but-irresistible draw
of ‘theological master narratives’ for critics seeking to engage the ethical
dimensions of life writing (254).
[6] An important milestone in the ongoing discussion of ethics in life writing studies is
the collection of contributions to the 2002 colloquium on the topic at Indiana
University, The Ethics of Life Writing, edited by Paul John Eakin. For other recent
important interventions, see Thomas Couser’s Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life
Writing, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The
Ethics of Recognition, and James O’Rourke’s Sex, Lies, and Autobiography: The
Ethics of Confession.
[7] For sources available only in French, all translations are my own.
[8] The translation appeared in 1993 in the United Kingdom as The Future Lasts a Long
Time and in the United States with the more melodious but somewhat inaccurate
title The Future Lasts Forever. I refer throughout to the British edition; the
pagination of the two editions is identical.
[9] Marty later speculates that even if the thought of publishing The Future Lasts a Long
Time prior to his death had ever occurred to Althusser, he would have realised that
such a ‘transaction with the world’ was impossible in his case (235).
[10] Among the three ‘conscious ‘‘themes’’ of my depression’ Althusser includes the fear
of being revealed as ‘a worthless person who only existed through artifice and
deceit’ (144)*/an anxiety, usually in milder forms, with which many academics are
likely to identify. Althusser’s other two anxieties are the fear of being abandoned
and ‘the fear of being asked for love which felt like a threat that I might be ‘‘the
victim of someone’s advances’’’ (144).
[11] In 1974 Rancière, a former student of Althusser’s, did in fact publish La Leçon
d’Althusser, a highly critical book-length analysis of Althusser’s relation with the
PCF. For Rancière’s more recent reflections on Althusser’s philosophy, teaching, and
political engagement, see his interview with Peter Hallward in ‘‘Politics and
Aesthetics’’ (194/195).
[12] In ‘The Future of the Phallus: Time, Mastery, and the Male Body’ I discuss this image
of the body in Althusser’s autobiography in terms of its importance for his sense of
himself as a man; his ambivalence about the role of corporeality in his life is deeply
connected with his insecurity about his masculinity, sexual potency, and profes-
sional standing (67/72).
[13] A particularly important source is Lacan’s essay ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of
the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’. For a detailed treatment
of how Althusser adopts and adapts the Lacanian theory of subject formation, see
Williams (68/70; 105/106)
[14] In this context it is intriguing to note that in a letter to his parents from the prison
camp on April 10, 1943, Althusser reports that his taste for philosophy has returned
in a more focused [précis] form as ‘a taste that seized me more than I chose it’
(Journal 286).
[15] For a fuller description of how Badiou uses the terms ‘situation’ and ‘state’, see
Hallward (93/94).
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On: 29 October 2014, At: 08:26

‘My Own Thoughts in My Own Body’:

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2010.514144

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‘My Own Thoughts in My Own

In the opening chapter of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, the

ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/10/030259-25

evil,’ apart, perhaps, from providing an example of it.

general ethical issues autobiographers and their readers are compelled to

of rationality and corporeality in all three of Althusser’s life-writing texts. The

the prejudice of morality and religion’ (‘The Humanist Controversy’ 274).5

Autobiography and Ethics

In recent years a number of leading scholars in the field of life-writing studies

Comparably, among the many enigmatic entries in his prison-camp notebooks,

Throughout Althusser’s writings about his personal life, the experience of an

life, he emerges as an intellectual suspended between the extremes of an

founders on the shoals of his hostility to the individual person as a source of

Kirschner’s scolding conclusion encapsulates the charge of a threefold moral

an ‘alternative Althusser’ who complicates the received view of him as a

outgrowth, rather than a foil, of Althusser’s philosophy. One of Althusser’s most

de l’Edition Contemporaine. Painstakingly examining the revisions, erasures,

‘If I Am to Be Wholly Truthful . . .’

Early in The Future Althusser appears to sidestep the autobiographical pact by

much they are symptoms of his neurotic image of himself as an imposter.10 To

In one of the most notorious examples of his authorial game of deception-and-

Rather than an emblem of philosophical work in general, the failure to

etiological*/relationships between early and later life events. For example, in

Corporeality, Capacity, and Incapacitation

Many entries in the Journal de Captivité set up a romantic contrast between

superiority of physical prowess as a corrective to the vicissitudes of cogitation.

My subject, when I write, is to me as much a prized possession [bien] as the field

for oneself in one’s body’ is a crucial to overcoming the ideological conditioning

As hard as it might be to identify with many of Althusser’s states of mind, what

His account in Chapter 20 of the disturbance to ‘the ‘biological balance’ of my

I lapsed into semi-consciousness and was at times wholly unconscious and in a

It seems that as Althusser drew nearer to the ‘unfathomable night’ of November

From Failure to Fidelity

‘Philosophy is always the breaking of a mirror,’ Badiou writes in Conditions,

philosopher is the one who occupies a position of rigorous ‘fidelity’ to this

into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment,

we must suppose, then, that whatever convokes someone to the composition of a

Something ‘extra’ certainly happens in Althusser’s life, something that he, at

implicated. Adopting this kind of humility, we might be compelled to account

and Terrance MacMullan. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. 55/80.

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