Books about Althusser from Amazon.com

A milestone in the development of post-war Marxist thought .
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No figure among the western Marxist theoreticians has loomed larger in the postwar period than Louis Althusser A rebel against the Catholic tradition in which he was raised, Althusser studied philosophy and later joined both the faculty of the Ecole normal superieure and the French Communist Party in 1948. Viewed as a "structuralist Marxist," Althusser was as much admired for his independence of intellect as he was for his rigorous defense of Marx. The latter was best illustrated in For Marx (1965), and Reading Capital (1968). These works, along with Lenin and Philosophy (1971) had an enormous influence on the New Left of the 1960s and continues to influence modern Marxist scholarship.

This classic work, which to date has sold more than 30,000 copies, covers the range of Louis Althusser's interests and contributions in philosophy, economics, psychology, aesthetics, and political science.

Marx, in Althusser's view, was subject in his earlier writings to the ruling ideology of his day. Thus for Althusser, the interpretation of Marx involves a repudiation of all efforts to draw from Marx's early writings a view of Marx as a "humanist" and "historicist."

Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser's essay on Lenin's study of Hegel; a major essay on the state, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," "Freud and Lacan: A letter on Art in Reply to André Daspre," and "Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract." The book opens with a 1968 interview in which Althusser discusses his personal, political, and intellectual history.

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A classic philosophical study on how political and cultural ideas come to dominate

"Verso's beautifully designed Radical Thinkers series, which brings together seminal works by leading left-wing intellectuals, is a sophisticated blend of theory and thought. The authors whose writings are included in the series have worked tirelessly to expose the mechanisms by which culture and knowledge are manufactured, managed and controlled."—Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman.
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Reading Capital presents Louis Althusser's systematic theory of a Marxism cleansed of all idealist and Hegelian notions. No reader interested in modern Marxism can afford to bypass this book. "One reads his passionate study with attention, even with excitement". Eric Hobsbawm, Times Literary Supplement..
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The Future Lasts Forever is the famous French philosopher Louis Althusser's memoir written during his years of confinement in a mental hospital after murdering his wife. Reminiscent to many readers of Strindberg's Diary of a Madman and Styron's Darkness Visible, The Future Lasts Forever is a profound yet subtle exercise in documenting madness from the inside. This paperback edition also includes Althusser's earlier autobiographical essay "The Facts," as well as a preface by Douglas Johnson, Emeritus Professor of French at London University. .
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From Althusser's most prolific period, this book is destined to become a classic

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a "philosophy of the encounter," which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought..
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There can be little doubt that Louis Althusser was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century and his work lives on in many of the concepts currently deployed in disciplines such as cultural studies, social theory and literary criticism.

Yet Althusser was also a leading intellectual in the French Communist Party and a foremost participant in the debates in the human sciences that are marked by the names of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan and Georges Canguilhem. His writings were major interventions in a specific political and theoretical conjuncture and it is this that this new collection of previously untranslated texts seeks to reflect.

Consisting of writings from the very height of Althusser's intellectual powers, during the period 1966-67, this book covers, amongst other themes, the critique of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, the theory of discourse and its relationship to psychoanalysis, the tasks of Marxist philosophy, and the famous "humanist controversy"..
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The groundbreaking Marxist philosopher provides unique appraisals of major writers .
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