Reading Order
Lire Le CapitalLire Le Capital Reading Order
Lire Le Capital (Reading Capital, 1965) by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière is the central document of structuralist Marxism — a collective reading of Marx's Capital that attempts to extract, through a 'symptomatic reading,' what Marx's text says despite itself, the theoretical rupture with Hegelian and humanist Marxism that Althusser believed Capital represented but had not yet explicitly formulated. Althusser's contribution includes the essay 'Du Capital à la philosophie de Marx,' which develops the concepts of 'symptomatic reading,' 'theoretical practice,' and the 'problematic' that would dominate French Marxist philosophy for a decade. The book appeared in the same year as Pour Marx, Althusser's collection of essays in which he developed the concept of the 'epistemological break' (coupure épistémologique) between the young, humanist Marx and the mature, scientific Marx of Capital. Althusser's structuralist Marxism was enormously influential in the 1960s and 1970s but was shattered, at least for his reputation, by the tragedy of 1980 in which he strangled his wife Hélène during a psychotic episode and spent the rest of his life in a psychiatric hospital.
Where to start
Read Pour Marx (1965) before Lire Le Capital — it is shorter, more accessible, and introduces the key concepts (epistemological break, overdetermination, ideological state apparatuses) that Lire Le Capital presupposes. Read Lire Le Capital at least in part: Althusser's introduction and the essay on Marx's object; Balibar's contribution on the concept of time. Read L'Avenir dure longtemps (1992, his posthumous autobiography) last.
Complete Lire Le Capital Book List
- 1Buy
Pour Marx
Louis Althusser·1965·Start here — shorter and more accessible than Lire Le Capital; introduces the epistemological break, overdetermination, and the other key concepts; the essential first Althusser - 2Buy
Lire Le Capital
Louis Althusser·1965·Reading Capital — the collective project; read at minimum Althusser's introduction and Balibar's essay on time; the central document of structuralist Marxism - 3Buy
Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État
Louis Althusser·1970·Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses — the most widely read Althusser text; ISAs (school, church, family) vs RSAs (army, police); the most directly applicable to cultural analysis - 4Buy
L'Avenir dure longtemps
Louis Althusser·1992·The Future Lasts Forever — the posthumous autobiography; Althusser's account of his life and of the killing of Hélène; one of the most extraordinary intellectual self-examinations in French literature - 5Buy
La Politique et l'histoire
Louis Althusser·1978·Politics and History — Althusser's lectures on Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, and Hegel; the most pedagogically accessible of the philosophical works; read after Pour Marx
Lire Le Capital — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the epistemological break in Althusser?
The 'coupure épistémologique' (epistemological break) is Althusser's central concept in Pour Marx (1965) — borrowed from the French philosopher of science Gaston Bachelard. Althusser argues that Marx's work underwent a fundamental break around 1845 (the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology) that separates the young, humanist Marx (who wrote the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in terms of human alienation, essence, and species-being) from the mature, scientific Marx (who wrote Capital in terms of modes of production, forces and relations of production, and social formations). For Althusser, the humanist Marx is a pre-scientific ideology; the mature Marx is a genuine science. The humanism of the young Marx should be discarded, not celebrated.
What are Ideological State Apparatuses?
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) are the concept developed in Althusser's 1970 essay 'Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'État' — the institutions that reproduce capitalist relations of production not through force (Repressive State Apparatuses: army, police, prison) but through ideology: the school, the church, the family, the media, the law. The school is the dominant ISA in capitalist societies: it reproduces the labor force by teaching children their appropriate position in the relations of production (workers learn to obey; managers learn to command) while appearing to teach neutral knowledge. The concept is one of the most widely used in cultural studies and media theory, because it provides a structural account of how ideology is reproduced without requiring a conspiracy theory.
What is symptomatic reading?
Symptomatic reading (lecture symptomale) is the method Althusser proposes in Lire Le Capital for reading theoretical texts — based on Lacan's concept of the symptom as that which a text says despite itself. A symptomatic reading does not read what a text consciously says but what it unconsciously produces — the problems it raises without solving, the questions it asks and then disavows, the silences and absences that mark the limits of its explicit thought. Althusser's reading of Capital seeks to identify what Capital says about its own theoretical presuppositions that Marx himself never explicitly articulated — the theory of the 'problematic' that determines what questions can be asked and what answers are possible within a given theoretical framework.
What happened to Althusser in 1980?
On 16 November 1980, Louis Althusser strangled his wife Hélène Rytmann during what he described as a psychotic episode — he said he suddenly realized what he was doing and it was too late. Hélène died. Althusser was found to be mentally unfit to stand trial (non-lieu pour abolition du discernement) and was committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, where he remained until 1983. He was never tried. The incident was a catastrophe for his reputation and for French structuralist Marxism more generally, which was already in crisis after the failures of 1968 and the revelations about Soviet communism. Althusser's posthumous autobiography L'Avenir dure longtemps (1992) is his account of the killing and of his life, and is one of the most extraordinary documents in French intellectual history.
What is the relationship between Althusser and Foucault?
Louis Althusser was Foucault's teacher at the École Normale Supérieure in the early 1950s, and Foucault joined the Communist Party on Althusser's recommendation. The two subsequently diverged: Foucault's genealogical analysis of power is not a Marxist theory and explicitly distances itself from class analysis and modes of production; Althusser's structuralist Marxism maintains the primacy of the economic and the centrality of the mode of production. But both share the rejection of humanist and historicist Marxism, the emphasis on structure over individual agency, and the influence of Bachelard's epistemology. Rancière, who was a contributor to Lire Le Capital, later broke with Althusser in La Leçon d'Althusser (1974) and developed a very different political philosophy based on the equality of intelligence.
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