In the aftermath of the social upheavals in Paris and around the world in the late 1960s, the prominent French philosopher Louis Althusser published his essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” The famous essay (subtitled “Notes Towards an Investigation”) inaugurated a project to advance a Marxist theory of the state and to distinguish repressive state organs like the police from more complex, ideological ones, like schools. Not merely an abstract theoretical analysis, such investigations were crucial in defining terrains of real political struggle. Althusser’s work in this period caused an immediate sensation within and beyond Marxist circles and remains, today, one of the most influential texts for radical theory in various forms. From cultural studies to feminist psychoanalysis, Althusser’s theory of ideology has shaped entire disciplines and schools of thought. How can we understand Althusser’s theory of ideology? And what do his distinctions and investigations teach us today?
This course provides an intensive introduction to Althusser’s theory of ideology through a close reading of his writings from this period, as well as key commentaries from Étienne Balibar, Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Warren Montag, and others. We will begin by situating Althusser’s concept of ideology in relation to the broader Marxist problematic of the state and social reproduction. We will consider the implications of Althusser’s distinctive approach to social reproduction, which deals not with subsistence labor but the apparatuses through which a social order reproduces itself from one day to the next. We will examine Althusser’s distinction between “repressive state apparatuses” (the military, the police, the system of law) and “ideological state apparatuses” (the family, the church, the school), as well as the complex relationship between them and the repression that underwrites all apparatuses of the state. Finally, we will look at Althusser’s theory of the subject in light of his broader account of the state and its powers, reflecting on his idiosyncratic integration of the lessons of Baruch Spinoza, Blaise Pascal, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan with those of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Antonio Gramsci.
