Beyond the “Repressive Hypothesis”: “Subject-” and “Libido-Effect” in Althusser

Abstract

The essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (ISAs) contains a famous statement about ideology in relation to the psychoanalytic problematic: namely, that “ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious.” However, Althusser does not offer any further clarification on this parallelism. Further, in a letter from the late 1970s, he states that he has “stopped short … before the question … about the ‘relations’ between ideology (or concrete ideological formations) and the unconscious.” But in a text that precedes the ISA essay, “Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses,” published posthumously, Althusser tried to develop exactly a theory of the articulation of the ideological and of the unconscious, using a new set of concepts. In this text he combined systematically and for the first time what, borrowing a term from Balibar, could be called an “ontology of relations,” with the categories of the “encounter” and “taking hold.”

Key Words:

• Desire
• Discourse
• Ideology
• Interpellation
• Unconscious

Notes

1 In the essay, another parallelism remains implicit: the parallelism between Lacan’s return to Freud and Althusser’s return to Marx. This parallelism is explicitly stated in a letter to Lacan: “That is what I wanted to communicate, in advance, in abbreviated form, by speaking of Marx’s revolution (rejection of homo economicus, rejection of any philosophical “subject”) and of Freud’s revolution, which you have restored, if not given, to us (rejection of any homo psychologicus)” (Althusser [1976] 1993, 274). For a general evaluation of the Althusser-Lacan relationship, see Montag (2013, 118–40). For Althusser’s relationship to psychoanalysis, see Gillot (2009) and Collazo (2011).

2 Quoted in the introduction by Corpet and Matheron (1996, 4–5).

3 For a detailed presentation of the project of this group, see Matheron’s foreword to Althusser ([1976] 1993). In a letter to Franca Madonia, Althusser (1998, 710) affirms that he is working with Duroux on this text.

4 On this, see the penetrating remarks in Toto (2012). Also see Bruschi (2014).

5 This is a very important point that marks an important distance from Lacan (together with the refusal, in the third note, of the concept of the subject of the unconscious) and can justify why in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” there is a reference to Freud and Spinoza but not to Lacan. For a development of this subject, see Morfino and Pippa (forthcoming) where we argue that the use of Spinozist categories produces a different return to Freud. In particular, the Spinozist concept of the imaginary as transindividual material allows Althusser on the one hand to distance himself from the Lacanian reduction of the “law of culture,” of the “law’s order,” to the dimension of language and on the other hand to supersede the Lacanian concepts of the imaginary and symbolic orders. See also Pippa (2015) and Montag (1991). On Althusser’s interpretation of Spinoza’s concept of the imaginary, see Montag (2013, 126–30). In this sense, it would be very interesting to confront this return to Freud through Spinoza with Lacan’s second return to Freud, in which the reference to structural linguistics is supplemented with Marx’s critique of political economy. See Tomšič (2015).

6 In a letter to Franca on the three notes, Althusser (1998, 712) explicitly quotes the Spinozist concept of “essence singulière.”