ʻWe do not publish our own drafts, that is, our own mistakes, but we do sometimes publish other peopleʼs.ʼ
– Louis Althusser, 1963

‘What use is Althusser?’ The question rhetorically posed on the Left Bank in 1968, as structures took to the streets, invites reactions other than the blunt rien of (some of) those who recently marked the thirtieth anniversary of their Maydays. When a selection from his correspondence is published this autumn, a posthumous edition of Althusserʼs oeuvre will be nearing completion that provides copious matter for sustained reflection and informed reaction. Yet if, as David Macey observed here three years ago, ʻ[t]he death of the philosopher has led to a resurrection of his writingsʼ, then it is a cause for regret that the main effect of one of them – the ʻwild analysisʼ of LʼAvenir dure longtemps – has been more or less to eclipse the others. For it has furnished false warrant for aversion from, or recrimination against, the philosophico-political history in which Althusser was a subject, as a deranged process with a murderous telos. 1 Redressing the balance of the reception in the English-speaking world to date is a task for future work, by many hands. For now, at the risk of the bland trailing the blind, no more than a rudimentary inventory and overview, with some side glances at the gathering secondary literature, will be atttempted.

The philosopher in his laboratory

What does the posthumous edition comprise? In sum, eight volumes, totalling approximately three thousand pages (or half as much again as Althusser authorized during his lifetime), about one-third of which has been translated into English to date. Drawn from the archives deposited at the Institut mémoires de lʼédition contemporaine (IMEC) in Paris, and individually or jointly edited with admirable diligence by Olivier Corpet, Yann Moulier Boutang and François Matheron, they may be classified as follows:

(1) Two volumes of autobiographical writings issued in 1992 – the two memoirs (1985/1976) presented in LʼAvenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les Faits , and the prison-camp notebooks and correspondence (1940–45) assembled in the Journal de captivité. An expanded version of LʼAvenir, including other autobiographical texts as well as three chapters omitted from the ʻconfes – sionsʼ, appeared in 1994. A slack English translation of the first edition had been marketed in the UK the year before by a mid-Atlantic conglomerate. Unfathomably, the US version renders the Gaullist obiter dictum of Althusserʼs title The Future Lasts Forever.

(2) Two volumes of psychoanalytical writings – Ecrits sur la psychanalyse, from correspondence with Jacques Lacan commenced in 1963 to Althusserʼs interventions in the controversy over the dissolution of the Ecole freudienne de Paris (1980), published in 1993; and Psychanalyse et sciences humaines, the text of two seminar presentations from 1963–64, released in 1996. An abridged English edition of the Ecrits from Columbia came out the same year as the seminars.

(3) Four volumes of philosophical and political writings. The first, Ecrits philosophiques et politiques: Tome I (1994), retrieved the bulk of the ʻearly writingsʼ (1946–50), translated by Verso last year; an unfinished manuscript on the ʻcrisis of Marxismʼ (1978); and extracts from the late Althusserʼs speculations as to a ʻSubterranean Current of the Materialism of the Encounterʼ (1982). The second, entitled Sur la philosophie (1994), collects interviews and correspondence with Fernanda Navarro (1984–87) ruminating on the ʻaleatory materialismʼ mooted in 1982. A third volume – Sur la reproduction (1995) – is composed of the 1969 book on ʻThe Reproduction of the Relations of Productionʼ from which ʻIdeology and Ideological […]