Althusser, Louise Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays.
"A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.
"Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the revolution."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.
"There exists a word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings,
"One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one."
Althusser, Louis. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987.
"However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present."
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.
"Ideology has very little to do with "consciousness".... It is profoundly unconscious."
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. 1962.
"…what is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations which they live."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.
"…an ideology always exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices. This existence is material."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.
"…those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology." He goes on to say, "It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. . . . ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality)."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.
"This last note gives us the meaning of this ambiguity, which is merely a reflection of the effect which produces it: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e., in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself."
Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: La Pensee. 1970.
Althusser, Louis and Ben Brewster (Translator). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." in: Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971.
