Is Althusser the pinnacle of materialist theory?

Well ultimately you should take any author with a grain of salt but thats besides the point. Yes his philosophy inspired Butler and w/e, however his philosophy is also the jumping off point for people like Badiou, Wolff/Resnick, Cockshott, and many others. If you think he is BS try reading:

its pretty good. its written after that whole wife incident (most of it anyway)

Garbage post.

What Althusser was trying to do was finding which elements of Marxist thought was internally coherent and consistent, so as to apply it to Marxist thought itself. Hence the phrase, more Marxist than Marx. The 'epistemological break' is merely a phase he identifies as when Marx changed his views on certain subjects. It would be hard to claim that's dubious because there's readily available examples of differences between young Marx and old Marx. I mean, c'mon, who doesn't change his views as they get older.

On whether Althusser read Marx, Althusser's autobiography was written while he was in a mental asylum and is not really an authoritative text.

On the subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he was friends with Lacan and he borrows some basic elements from Freud, like 'overdetermination' but overall his thought does not rely much on psychoanalysis.

this makes absolutely no sense

you think Marx doesn't contradict himself or make mistakes?

This dude looks utterly miserable in every pic he's in. Has he ever smiled?

there are infinite ways to find elements of whatever text that are 'internally coherent and consistent', and apply them to the text itself. This is quasi religious logic, Marx himself said he was not a Marxist and his philosophy was developed together with the political struggles of his day. Althusser represents an impoverishment and fetishisation of marxist theory. structures don't take to the barricades.

Not this shit again.

Give me an example from Althusser, I'll show you why you're wrong. Otherwise, you're just projecting.

ok i get it, the wife strangling frenchman was a prophet who rendered Marx himself obsolete

*blocks your path*

Well this is shaping up to be more enthralling than the great Ali Ibn Abi Talib vs Abu Bakr debate so far.

Correction: Marx changes his whole methodology, and from this follows the change in his views on certain subjects.

literally "but Marx was bourgoisie!" tier.

The pinnacle of Hegelian Marxist materialism maybe. But that's like sitting on top of a dried up pile of shit.

just no. read althusser

althusser fully seized the divine revelation Marx could only hint at.

How can you be a Marxist but not a Hegelian? Was Althusser opposed to dialectics or something?

Not so fast quasi-religious, determinist tool!

….why humanism is good… speak

It's almost as if you don't know what you are talking about.

It confirms my human biases, for one.

Can someone link PDFs of his works?? (Especially intoductory ones)

SEE:

Here you go, comrades: mega.nz/#F!jFUzTACC!7nzlQWiXnm1dbY3xMjlQpw

The closest thing I can get for you: 4shared.com/office/eRApAsRice/Introducing_Alain_Badiou__A_Gr.html

What's Althusser good for? how was he not an apologist for the French Communist Party and the institutional academy? how is muh death of the human subject not dodgy intellectual history?

abahlali.org/files/Althussers Lesson.pdf

how is 'antihumanism' good? The whole notion rests on an oversimplified intellectual history of the enlightenment. Not to mention the elitist and academicist implications that follow from it. I find the case for humanism more convincing, that's all. I'd rather avoid the rut of party dogma and rejecting 80% of what Marx wrote because it is not 'orthodox' enough

marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1965/marx-humanism.htm

He was a brilliant theorist, but a nitpicking faggot that removed all Hegelianism to turn Marxism into some kind of sociology.

You cannot really have Marxism without Hegel, Marx like Hegel recognized the movement of societies is the movement of power structures motivated by ideas. In Marx this form of power struggle takes the form of class struggle, and it was the proletariat as the heir of history because they were the producers/workers , and the capitalists with their accumulation economy as way to combat this historical dialectical transformation.

But Marxism without this dialectical process is empty, it is reduced to the oppression of workers by the state and everything being anti-proletarian ideology. On this point althusser profoundly misunderstood both Marx and Gramsci. In fact both of them understood that in the end the workers would take over the state not merely by rejecting the ruling ideology, but by realising their historical role, supplanting with their own culture and then BECOMING the state.A lot of useless critical theory and identity politics comes from Althusser because they reduced and mystified this struggle ,into struggles of ideology and took shallow psychoanalytic theories not challenge the ruling dominant ideology . The Frankfurt school was much less divisive in this respect because they believed that the root problems of authoritarianism did not lie in the state per se, but was identified in the way society was structured, this was that produced alienation of the worker from his labour and his fellow beings. This was a deadlock of authoritarianism that unless revolution or complete change in social organization happened it would never change. But in Althusser, where everyone is an interpellated subjectivity this problem disappears and we are left once more with an impossible and idiotic struggle that produces either compromise (virtually all of the post-war socialist parties) and an idiotic alliance of state apparatuses with gays, feminists, minorities etc.

meh, you can learn more from the people who btfo'd althusser than from althusser himself. he was wrong about almost everything but wrong in often interesting and insightful ways. Wittgenstein was a fan of self hating jewish antisemite woman hater Otto Weininger's tracts for the same reason.

rosswolfe.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/e-p-thompson-the-poverty-of-theory-or-an-orrery-of-errors.pdf

Althusser doesn't conceive of ideological as "opressive" nor does he see the state (of the ideological state apparatus) as centered, a union is just as much of an ideological state apparatus as the system of education. For Althusser ideology is subjectivity and has no history; interpellation is the process of subjectification, not something externally imposed by a state on the proletarian subject which appears as given. You read Althusser as if he had a humanist conception of the subject.
What do you mean? Althusser doesn't view the state as a single point from which ideology emanates nor is revolution a simple toppling of the state (see: marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/overdetermination.htm). The rest of your post is just attacking Althusser for not being Hegelian without actually engaging with his work.

🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧Thompson's🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 attack on Althusser is just common sense Anglo jabs against theory and fetishization of the positive manifestation of the proletariat (a misreading of Marx) mixed in with moralism. His attacks on Althusser as a Stalinist serve no purpose other than to cement Thompson's status as a radical in the austere environment of the English left.

unlike the french eurocommunist left, which is good and pure

Fortunately the French left existed beyond the official party, and has shown itself in May '68 which the party was unable to respond to.

and that includes Althusser, who condemned the revolutionaries as 'petty bourgeoisie' who needed to calm down, attend his lectures, stop worrying and learn to love the party.

Excellent post. I just recently stumbled upon Thompson. What a huge fucking hypocrate that guy is.

Althusser's and the Althusserians' assessment of '68 is obviously wrong, however, this is not because of their supposed love for the party but in spite of it - taking classical Marxism to the limits of its radicality, they had a critical relation to the party but still saw it as the best possible vehicle for radical politics. That this was (obviously) wrong doesn't condemn the push Althusser made in developing classical Marxism, instead it clearly shows the insufficiency of classical Marxist modes of praxis and thought, which is really the strong point of Ranciere's analysis.

No, Ranciere is