22/07/2025
LOUIS ALTHUSSER ON PHILOSOPHY
"In the battle that is philosophy, all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible."
- Louis Althusser
๐ต Louis Althusser wrote 'Philosophy for Non-Philosophers' in 1977-78, near the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life. It constitutes a rigorious and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentrated presentation of its author's fundamental theses and a synthesis of his sprawling and desparate philosophical and political writings.
Here I share with you part of the brilliant introduction written by Warren Montag, on Althusser's perception of philosophy, as contained in the book -
A philosophy, if it is able to subject itself to a critique capable of accounting for its historical conditions of possibility, must begin by abandoning โthe philosophy of the philosophers in order to analyse concrete human practicesโ, a phrase that clearly places the philosophy of the philosophers (and what other philosophy is there?) outside the realm of concrete human practices, as if it is neither concrete nor a practice. Only if philosophy abandons โthe philosophy of the philosophersโ, that is, itself (which raises the question of what is abandoned and what or who performs the act of abandoning), can it undertake โthe perilous venture of making the Big Detour through non-philosophyโ (Althusser, 2017, 47), philosophyโs other, in order return to itself laden with the knowledge both of what philosophy is and what it might become. Non-philosophy must not be understood as the totality of what is not philosophy (that is, the philosophy of the philosophers), but rather as โeverything that the dominant idealist philosophy . . . has neglected, rejected, censored, or abandoned as the refuse of existence and history, as objects unworthy of its attentionโ (Althusser, 2017, 47). Both the idealist tendency in philosophy (and the materialist tendency insofar as it is compelled by an idealism able to borrow force from the existing order to take idealist questions as its own) have refused to examine such objects as matter, labour and even the body. The implicit identification of the philosophy of the philosophers with the dominant idealist philosophy allows Althusser to replace the notion of the conflict internal to philosophy with the image of a struggle between philosophy and non- philosophy, between an inside and an outside, with the result that philosophy is deprived of its contradictory character. The theoretical costs of such a manoeuvre are clear: Althusser charges that Spinoza, even Spinoza, โtalks about the body and says that its powers are unknown, but he says nothing about sexโ. From this, Althusser deduces that Spinoza (whose philosophy he had described only a few years earlier as โthe greatest lesson in heresy the world has ever seenโ) (Althusser, 1976, 132) had, despite appearances, made nothing more than โan insignifi cant detourโ, and, worse, a detour that would allow him the better โto fall back into lineโ (Althusser, 2017, 48). Because Spinoza never left the philosophy of the philosophers his words were emptied of their heretical or materialist sense and allowed to produce only apologetic effects.
Reference:
Louis Althusser, Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, Bloomsbury 2017