Althusser Louis - 1996;2008;

Early in The Future Lasts Forever, Louis Althusser's memoir of a life of Marxist theory that came to a sudden halt with the strangling of his wife (in what was determined to be a bout of temporary insanity), the author shares with his readers a persistent adolescent fantasy: his wish to have the first name Jacques. He proceeds to read the name almost as a rebus: J would indicate a jet of sperm; the deep a would bind Louis (become "Jacques") to his father Charles; the terminal ques would become a phallic queue or tail; and the whole would hint at those peasant revolts known in French as Jacqueries. This volume, which assembles materials charting Althusser's intense and ambivalent relation with the thought and career ofJacques Lacan, might well be viewed as the germination of that seminal fantasy.

For Althusser's influential reading of Marx was in crucial respects an effort to interpret his thought in a manner congruent with Lacan's reading of Freud. Lacan's Freud was a virtuoso rendition of the (falsely) dualist myth of Narcissus in counterpoint with the triangular rhythms of Oedipus, as though the treble part in some turn-of-the-century mit- teleuropdische suite had been written in 2/4 time and the bass in 3/4. Althusser, it now appears, tried something similar. The Lacanian narcissistic-imaginary became the Althusserian realm of ideology, a world of mirror reflections and edifying humanist myths, culminating in what Kundera would call the Grand March-in 2/4 time-of utopian revolution.

The Lacanian Oedipal, on the other hand, became the gateway to structure and/as the touchstone of (intellectual) maturity. Althusser would chide Lacan for his fidelity to Levi-Strauss and would insist that his notion of structure, in its irreducible dispersion, was not LeviStraussian at all. When Deleuze and Guattari did their best to show that the 3/4 oompah-pah of Lacan's Oedipal polka might be subject to ridicule, Althusser may have felt unthreatened. (Foucault, after all, had not yet opened the second-counter-Marxian-front in the antistructuralist offensive.) But the fact that the crucial break between the "ideological" (humanist) youth of Marx and his structural(ist) maturity might be figured as an epistemological cut, or coupure, was unmistakable: more than an influence from Bachelard, who spoke of epistemological "obstacles," the notion of a crucial discontinuity or cut figuring the leap into structure was a borrowing and transformation of the "castration complex" of Lacan's Freud. Jac-ques indeed....

As for the "Jacquerie," the radical political import ascribed to Lacan's undertaking, here is Althusser in a letter to Lacan of 1o December 1963, during the heady first days of their alliance: "One can always escape the financial and social effects of a social revolution.... [But] I am speaking of a different revolution, the one you are preparing without [your adversaries] knowing it, one from which no sea in the world will ever be able to protect them, and no respectability, whether capitalist or socialist, the one that will deprive them of the security of their Imaginary ..." The true revolution, beyond "socialist" respectability, was to be by way of analytic theory.