Ah, un instant, s'il vous plait. There is a qualifier. The first "full-scale" nonprofit. Je vois. The little qualifiers, they help with the big lies, n'est-ce pas?
Cependant, merci, merci, Press Nouveau, for helping the nasty "large, commercial publishing houses" in the arduous project of insisting that the rest of us don't exist. A little Corpse curse on you.
Louis Althusser was the Marxist philosopher who turned French Marxist thinking away from party "diamat" toward a new loosely structuralist approach which emphasized neither the vulgar mechanisms of Stalin nor the weepy "humanism" of the neo-Hegelians. He introduced the still useful concept of the ISA--Ideological State Apparatus (notably the education apparatus) through which subjects were "interpellated" as ruling class or proletariat. Whether they liked it or not.
In 1980, in an act which concluded a life of manic depression, Althusser strangled his wife, Helene. The Future Lasts Forever is Althusser's account of both his madness and the inexplicable murder of the woman to whom he was devoted.
Following the murder, Althusser was found legally "incompetent" and committed to mental institutions where, it was universally expected, he would observe a guilty silence. But the very thing which most distressed Althusser was the expectation of silence. He was not allowed to speak at trial because there was no trial. He was, however, in no way comfortable with his "luck." The Future Lasts Forever, his last "little book," was a way for him to claim speech, claim the right to represent himself rather than merely endure the representations of his scandal in the media.
Intriguing as well for those of us familiar with his philosophical work is the idea that at last from the funereal darkness of the ISA and its notorious anti-humanism comes a very anguished human voice. How would the master philosopher of politics (understood as the abject interpellation of Subjects into the Symbolic order) represent his own despair? How would he who had denied all appeals to the pathos of an agrieved humanity represent his own pathos?
Althusser does not address this irony. Nonetheless, there are many intriguing moments. For example, Althusser treats his own behavior in a very detached way, as if his conduct were a sort of rumor. He writes, "I do not know what exactly I put Helene through (I do know, however, that I was truly capable of the most terrible things), but she told me...that in her eyes I was a monster."
As well as a personal confession, this is an interesting commentary on the subject in Althusser's philosophy: he's only dimly aware of the reason for his placement in the symbolic order, and he is incapable of individually claiming responsibility for it.
Althusser had three refuges: the Ecole, clinics and anti-depressant drugs. All of them were versions of the State Apparatus, and all of them provided structures in which he felt "safe". In fact, in this book drugs become the State Apparatus par excellence because they are the ultimate expression of the notion that the human is purely a consequence of its structural (in this case, pharmaceutical) qualities.
Thus Althusser is able to dramatize, in a way that is all too human, the impossible pathos of the repressive structures he spent his life studying. As it is for the rest of us, Althusser's fellow institutionalized, Althusser demonstrates how we energetically conspire in our own defeat.
Would that the New Press were half as aware of its own contradictory and complicitous relations to the State.