It's been about 25 years since I last read (and reread) this work. "For Marx" and its contextual paradigm influenced me profoundly and contributed vital strands that have formed the course of my life. I think the key theme in Althusser's work and the trend of Marxism of which it is a part is to assert that a high order of thought is needed to be of real benefit to the underdog. I feel Althussers effort (as is Marxism) is a noble if preliminary effort in what can only be termed an epochal effort to consciously rise from the mire of human life dominated by topdogs. What was useful to Marxism of that time was to really take seriously the importance of Psychoanalysis and the pervasive presence of the Uncounscious. Another helpful idea is that of the multi-valenced quality of "social formation" in Contradiction and Overdetermination. Although my philosophical horizons are not defined by Marxism these days, much of Marxism, especially the currents populated by the likes of Althusser, Poulantzas, Gramsci etc. has an honored place in my intellectual tool kit. I feel that the wish to consciously transform our life in a benefical way may be assisted by the likes of Althusser et al, though in and of itself this is not enough.

This collection of essays includes the seminal moments of many concepts still alive in Marxism and academia at large. The essays on "Contradiction and Overdetermination", "On the Young Marx", "Marxism and Humanism", and on the 1844 Manuscripts deserve to be revisited by a wider audience today in light of the growing interest in Marxism informed by post-structuralist thought. Much of Derrida's work owes an unacknowledged debt to the interpretations presented here (e.g. Althusser's concept of overdetermination, and his principled anti-humanism). Highly recommended to those interested in Marxist philosophy.

Any serious reader of Louis the Horrible is well versed in the Althusserian arsenal of stock concepts and phrases: ISAs, interpellation, and the loathesome and under-informed "structuralist Marxism". A veritable Althusserian scholarship, however, will need to take into account the nuances and subtleties of thought presented by Althusser in "Pour Marx"; I am thinking especially of "Contradiction and Overdetermination". Let's recast Althusser and go from there - we simply cannot leave him to the vulgar academic public which presents a grossly reductive version of his intellectual legacy based on various myths of academia; an academia that relegates him to the abyss of the bygone "heyday of structuralism".

Despite being quite a hefty tome, this is one of the best social theory books I've read in a long time. Lack of time prevents me from a quick discussion of the main themes of the book but if you're after a study that clearly sets out the ideas of Althusser and his followers, while critically defending them against postmodern and 'Marxist' polemics, and making the case for Althusser's continued relevance to revolutionary working class politics then this book is for you.

This is an excellent text if you are interested in having your reality turned on its head. I have used this reference in almost every paper I have written since beginning my path down the winding road of critical theory. I recommend it to anyone who thinks about why we think the way we do, anyone interested in hegemony, and anyone who thinks something is wrong with our world but s/he feels s/he just can't put a finger on what it is. This is a foundational text for anyone studying literary theory or philosophy. It contains the famous I.S.A. essay, a must read for anyone who functions metacognitively!

I think that ¡°Machiavelli & Us¡± displays three kinds of virtues (not virtu in the book). The first, it¡¯s an answer about arguments and complaints that existing works of Louis Althusser¡¯s have not sufficiently reflected the emphasis Althusser himself put in his lectures. The second, this book suggests that transition of Marxism is not in search of alternative philosophical materialism, but in political practice with and in the working masses, refuting the Bolshevik implicitness of Gopal Balakrishnan, Greogory Elliot. The three, though we've not have close analysis and study of this book yet, it is certain that except early works as like ¡°For Marx¡±; ¡°Reading Capital¡± he had not given a full page of his work to like this coherent matter, putting this book in an interesting position. And most of all we can see this book reflecting political, philosophical change or transition of him is passing through familiar or unfamiliar words, themes, and thesis. All of these kinds of virtues invite a dead warrior to make us practice, and struggle.

It's almost impossible to understand Marx's specific theoretical and methodological positions 150 years after. Not because they're exceptionally difficult, rather that they've been obfuscated by generations of pro- and anti- ideologues. Althusser's project is to reconstruct Marx's theoretical practices at a very high level of rigor, clarifying, for example, the specific differences between Hegel's understanding of "dialectics" and Marx's. In doing so he produces a series of new concepts: "structure in dominance", "overdetermination", "problematic", "epistemological break", "combinatory" and others. While none of these *terms* is present in Marx's writing, the things they refer to definitely are. In turn, this labor makes it possible to clearly understand the theoretical differences between Marx's early works and his mature ones; that is, between his "Feuerbachian" youth and his Marxist maturity. This is a difficult work, but a profoundly rewarding one for those interested in what it is that makes Marx Marx.

Professor Payne takes extremely heavy texts, such as S/Z and makes them easier to understand. He has an extraordinary grasp of the subject matter that translates well to the classroom. I had the pleasure of taking his seminar in literary theory at Bucknell, and this book was one of the required texts.

This contains one of Althusser's late writings on materialism, which might be read profitably alongside "Machiavelli and Us". The train metaphor is especially useful, and Althusser here rejects -- as he did increasingly after 1967 -- any idea of materialism as a philosophy of the primacy of matter over ideas, and grounds it in the thesis of the materiality of ideology, or that "the imaginary exists only in its effects" ... As far as the claims made by Althusser regarding his abilities and knowledge in the text, or his criticisms of his books, these need to be read in light of his quest of self-annihilation, and this genre of autobiography -- and the authority which readers conventionally regard it to have regarding the 'truth' -- provides the best means of achieving that end. Warren Montag's essay on the autobiography, which can be found in Callari, Cullenberg & Biewener (eds), "Marxism in the Postmodern Age" (1992) is essential reading for anyone tempted to take Althusser's confessions at face value.

A review in New Republic by Tony Judt of Althusser's posthumous The Future Lasts Forever implements what might be called the standard reactionary reading of that "curious" autobiographical document. Judt was, at least initially, correct in refusing to read the text as a "Rousseau-like confession", although he claims, and not incidentally, that Althusser would have us read it as such. Curiously enough, however, Althusser cites the exact reason as Judt for encouraging readers to repress the inclination to read the memoir as his Rousseaudian "Confession": he is simply not up to the challenge, at least in the sense that he has no pretensions concerning originality and philosophical profundity. Rather than Rousseau, Althusser sounds more like a victim of a Stalinist inquisition: all he has to do is to confess his guilt, explain in vulgar psychologistic terms his aberrant psychoanalytic constitution. He would have been wise to adopt the Deleuzian stance of, "I have nothing to admit" - who cares if Althusser only studied Vol. 1 of Das Kapital? This would be the effective hystericization of Judt's position in his review. Thus, it is not that he overidentifies with Althusser, takes him too literally, but that he does not identify with him enough - that is, we must take Althusser at his word when he says, "Alas, I am no Rousseau".

I like Althusser. He was the first to try to fit the esoteric Heidegger, as presented by Jean Hyppolite in Logic and Existence, together with Marx. There had been attempts (by Sartre and Henri Lefebvre) to put the explicit Heidegger together with Marx, but no one was buying it, since the German thinker disavowed humanism. Hence Althusser's rather bizarre (to contemporary eyes at least) claim that you need to READ Marx correctly, that is find all the esoteric truths in Capital, to have a revolution.

Althusser was a depressive all his life. His illness prevented him from entering into les evenements of 1968, where he might have actually done some good. But he was also a manic. His books have the sort of obsessive compulsive features you only find with people on amphetimines. Those who say that this memoir is just a depressive trying to commit suicide aren't taking Althusser as he was diagnosed. He was also capable of limitless affirmation of life.

And we find Althusser making some pretty huge affirmations in this book. He liked the USSR in the post-Stalin era. Since the people of Russia are so much worse off under the system that they have now (arguably the world is, both for their infamous Mafia and the lack of a check on US hegemony), this is probably not a bad thing. His argument as to how the people of the USSR really were free in every way except politics is specious (it's sort of like saying the people of the USSR were free in every way except the one that counts), but its very speciousness smacks of a manic affirmation.

He also says that he never had sex until he was 29. This apparently was because he was disgusted with sex. He says something like "We have bodies! And they have sex organs!" He went on to be quite the ladies man, even conquering women in front of his wife. Which means that he affirmed, like a good Deleuzian, life in all its ugly glory.

Then there's his last work on Machiavelli. Or is it his last work on himself? Machiavelli formalized the relations between king, nobility and people. Just as Althusser formalized Marx's discussions of class relations and structures in Reading Capital. The fact that he's pulled this off so convincingly in Machiavelli and Us, and the fact that the people who have made a career out of riding on his coattails totally missed it, implies to me that he successfully became-other/imperceptible. In the same way that both Bataille and Sartre missed the point of Genet means that Genet did successfully become-other (as per Derrida's Glas).

As a last point to consider, for those who see this book as just the sorry chronicle of someone who had better shut up before he gives the entire game away, look at the books he did claim to read. He read all three volumes of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. I know of no one else who can make that claim. I barely made it half way through the Grundrisse before I gave up. Since he's so humble about his actual reading of Capital (didn't get past the first volume and didn't get the theory of fetishism in the first 50 pages), he probably really did read TSV.

It's true that after this book Althusser was shunned by French intellectuals. It was, as a French student of Badiou wrote, a form of social suicide. BUT that wasn't what Althusser intended to do with this book. Or not only that.

If you're a Marxist and you liked Althusser, you can always enjoy Etienne Balibar who has at last fitted together the esoteric Heidegger with Marx in his Marxism and Philosophy. That was what dear old crazy Louis was trying to do all along.

The long-lasting controversy over "form" and "content" passes down from Plato. Then, it emerged in the French academics. Writings on Psychoanalys is a text, attempting to fusing the two diverse viewpoints into a wholeness. Initiating from the Freudian and Lacanian, Althusser justifies that the methodology of psychoanalysis is scientific. It's the same of Roland Barthes's The Structuralist Activity in which he takes off the verbal attack from the social Marxists, such as Satre. In the second stance, he appropriates and readapts Lacanian theory to the socail "symptoms" as a psychoanalyst to an analysand. On the one hand, he regulates and justifies for Lacan that psychoanalysis is aculturalistic and not scientific. On the other, it strengthens and expands the scope of Lacanian theory from an individual to an whole society even thouth there are some unjustificabilities within Althusser's appropriation.

Writings on Psychoanalysis is a text that first of all deals with Freudian and Lacanian theories. Louis Althusser, as his later books exhibit, elaborates his transformation of Lacanian theories, probing through the social "symptoms" as a psychoanalyst does to a patient. On the one hand, he justifies for Lacan who is often attacked upon his ignorance of the dimension of curlure and society. For the latter puts too much emphasis on the "parole" and the "languge"--structure or form. Althusser, at once a social Marxist and psychoanalyst, sucessfully, readapts Lacan's theories to the society and takes off the verbal attack upon Lacan. On the other, as to Althusser, there seemingly exists no contradictions in a socialist and psychoanalyst even though some critics hold the opposite opinions. Apart from the monumental landmark of this book, Althusser "sublimes" us into another scope of meditation and the applicability of psychoanalysis.