Recommendations
Books Like Lire Le Capital by Louis Althusser
Works that read a founding text against the grain of its own myth
Althusser reads Capital to find what Marx said despite himself — extracting a science from a text that presented itself as something else. These works share that same symptomatic reading: going behind the official account to find the theoretical rupture underneath.
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Buy on AmazonPour Marx
by Louis Althusser
The more accessible Althusser — the epistemological break, overdetermination, and theoretical practice in shorter essays; the essential companion and prerequisite to Lire Le Capital
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Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État
by Louis Althusser
The most widely read Althusser text — ISAs (school, church, family) vs. RSAs (army, police); how capitalist relations of production are reproduced through ideology; the most directly applicable
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Buy on AmazonSurveiller et punir
by Michel Foucault
The genealogical counterpart — Foucault analyzing power/knowledge where Althusser analyzes ideology; both show how subjects are produced through institutional practices
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Buy on AmazonThe German Ideology
by Karl Marx
Marx's own text — reading The German Ideology after Althusser gives a direct experience of the epistemological break Althusser is arguing for; the young humanist Marx vs. the mature scientific one
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Buy on AmazonL'Avenir dure longtemps
by Louis Althusser
The Future Lasts Forever — the posthumous autobiography; Althusser's account of his life and of the killing; one of the most extraordinary intellectual self-examinations in French literature
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Buy on AmazonMythologies
by Roland Barthes
The semiological counterpart to Althusser's ideology theory — both are analyzing how bourgeois culture naturalizes its power relations; the Barthes approach is literary, the Althusser approach is philosophical
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Buy on AmazonLa Leçon d'Althusser
by Jacques Rancière
Rancière's break with Althusser — the student who denounced the master after 1968; the critique of Althusserian theory from a position of equality that Rancière developed into his political philosophy
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Gramsci's Prison Notebooks
by Antonio Gramsci
The Italian Marxist counterpart — Gramsci's theory of hegemony and the organic intellectual; the comparison with Althusser's ISAs shows the Italian and French traditions of Western Marxism
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