Louis Althusser
French philosopherWikipedia
56
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24
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22
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Search complete. 56 mentions across 24 episodes found for "Louis Althusser".
Oct 28, 2026
Richard WolffGUEST
They don't want to tarnish, they don't want to split, but they are right behind there developing their own notion of what socialism is that is picking up the the Global South definitions, the old European traditions.
Richard WolffGUEST
I'm asked to teach courses in which what the students want to learn is have me explain to them what Rosa Luxemburg had to say, or what Antonio Gramsci had to say, or what Louis Althusser had to say.
Richard WolffGUEST
They're rediscovering, or maybe I should be more accurate, they are discovering all of this history And that is important and going to develop a diversified socialism here that you will find more recognizable looking at it from the standpoint of Europe or the global south.
Afshin RattansiHOST
And how is the military-industrial complex in your country going to take this so far elite-level formation? How is the military-industrial complex going to take it? And was it important that Israel and the genocide in Palestine obviously had a big influence over catalyzing this movement in terms of, well, just look at American Jews who now don't favor Israel.
DavidHOST
I learned how to write computer code and now i'm out of a job because the machines can do it do it for me cheater no it's good stuff it's good stuff i do love it though i've always always been interested in that i think it's i think it's a good thing It's an under-discussed thing, shall we say.
DavidHOST
Louis Althusser.
DavidHOST
Althusser.
speaker_1UNKNOWN
Here we go.
Nathan GorelickGUEST
And I think the ethical and political valences of the argument, as I understand them, really are, they stand on their own.
Daniel TuttHOST
So I want to enter into the picture here by making, drawing out a distinction that we are pretty familiar with vis-a-vis Slavoj Žižek's work, but also Louis Althusser, and to some extent Lacan.
Daniel TuttHOST
And this is the distinction around ideology.
Daniel TuttHOST
And you make an argument that the novel plays a particular or is sort of constrained.
Wes CecilHOST
This is A, unsubtle, B, ahistorical, as we'll discuss in a moment, and C, I guess it makes good movies, I don't know, or good TV shows or whatever they do.
Wes CecilHOST
But you also have this notion, from other thinkers, by the way, who've explored this, so just some other language that you may encounter if you're interested in this, is like Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony, ideology in the state apparatus, which is Althusser, which I think is a great, Althusser in particular is good at reflecting on, The ideology, which is what you get from like Jameson and Zizek, which is to say this narrative of capitalism that takes over your mind, but Althusser sort of adds this other layer where he talks about how the state, like literally state apparatus, right, the functions of the state, police, courts, these sorts of things, intervene to make that necessary and sustained.
Wes CecilHOST
And so if you read, like, Jameson and Zizek, this seems to be a more passive, cultural sort of, it just happens, whereas for Althusser and Gramsci to a certain extent, Althusser to a great extent, Gramsci to a certain extent, no, no, no, this is an active state intervention that takes place.
Wes CecilHOST
And so you can decide, you know, you can read them and go, oh, no, I think this is more the state, or maybe it was more the state in the 50s and 60s, or coming from a communist world, but now...
Wes CecilHOST
It's the, you know, in the capitalist world, it's more just a passive consumer or society that does this.
22 MINS LATER
Wes CecilHOST
And so when you make that leap, it's transformative because, again, it's opposed to all of the structures that we've been talking about.
Wes CecilHOST
And you can see this very clearly.
Wes CecilHOST
Again, if you look at Zizek or, you know, again, Althusser, Marcuse, Gramsci, it's all similar in that sense.
JimmyGUEST
But in one of the issues I have from that Soviet publication, they write about alternative paths to Marxism in the West.
JimmyGUEST
It was Lukacs, Althusser, and, of course, Antonio Gramsci.
JimmyGUEST
But Gramsci's the one that everybody writes about, all the different parts, all the different subsections and subdivisions and spinoff groups from the Communist Party.
JimmyGUEST
They all work in Gramsci.
Michael YoungGUEST
But it tends to neglect the fact that, in fact, students of whatever social class can actually acquire knowledge that empowers them.
Michael YoungGUEST
So that in a sense, somebody like Paulo Freire is talking about the emancipatory potential of knowledge, whereas in fact, somebody like Althusser and Bourdieu is talking about dominating power of
Will BrehmHOST
knowledge.
Michael YoungGUEST
So there are two very, very different notions of knowledge.
David A. HughesGUEST
I also mentioned in my talk, famous historians like Charles and Mary Beard, very influential in the first half of the 20th century, and then just edged out again.
David A. HughesGUEST
Or you can think about I mean, there was a time back in the 1970s, 1980s, Where there were some quite famous historians, Perry Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Louis Althusser, David Harvey, a bit later, Emanuel Wallerstein, people like this.
David A. HughesGUEST
You wouldn't necessarily call them Marxists, but they weren't afraid to talk about class in their work and they were widely read and cited.
David A. HughesGUEST
But again, all of that has kind of fallen away now.
Douglas LainHOST
Is there an Althusserian point of view here when it comes to ideology? What is he referring to, really, when he talks about bourgeois ideology?
Spencer LeonardGUEST
Althusserianism in terms of the strong break the epistemological break between liberalism or human, what Althusser calls humanism, and Marxist science.
Spencer LeonardGUEST
This notion that these are two different things, and there's a choice.
Spencer LeonardGUEST
You can be a liberal or you can be a Marxist.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
I was looking for a useful theory that might get me to a better story.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
A theory that would enable me to talk about the changing relationship between culture, I started out with rock and roll, and politics, right? I started out with the recognition that the question of affect was becoming what Althusser might have called a problematic or Foucault.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
It was becoming what I've called a problem space.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
That is, there were increasing discourses and discussions about questions of alienation, suicide, identity crises in the 50s and 60s.
8 MINS LATER
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
On the other hand, if you tried to understand Trump's last election, you'll be overwhelmed with the detail.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
I think it was Roland Barthes who talked about the impossible science of the concrete.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
But Marx and Althusser both talk about the impossibility of understanding the world by thinking about individual subjects.
Lawrence GrossbergGUEST
It's interesting, and it tells you something, and it may be something useful.
DanHOST
And what that means is we're not going to talk about ideology at all.
DanHOST
And that's where I'm like, you guys got to read Althusser on the materiality of ideology because you can't You cannot have a model for understanding the world that pretends that the active project of constructing ideology does not play a significant role in it.
DanHOST
Like, why do they spend billions and billions of dollars on that shit if it's not that important?
JohnHOST
Well, the reason I think that so many people end up painting themselves into a corner and down some incredibly hyper-specific, maybe not usefully hyper-specific corner of a particular ideology is because I think there's this scientism instinct where we on the left think, okay, We're approaching this rationally.
JohnHOST
It's weird, but I think in my personal estimation, the two best relationships you can have with a philosophical writer or author or thinker are rival and nemesis.
JohnHOST
Those are the most productive ones.
DanHOST
Because like, look, obviously I'm a big fan of like Althusser, but there's plenty of stuff that I'm like, no, this was, you went on a wrong direction here.
DanHOST
And then also towards the end of his life, he literally went nuts and killed his wife.
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