Louis Althusser was a prominent French philosopher of the late twentieth century. His works include seminal writings on Marx, and the relation between post-war Marxist thought and other emerging discourses across the humanities (namely, structuralism). His works include, For Marx and Reading Capital. G. M. Goshgarian translates fiction and philosophy from French, German and Armenian into English. He is the editor and translator of several volumes of Althusser's work, including How to Be a Marxist in Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2017).
This book presents us Louis Althusser at his very best. Written in a style that is genuinely accessible to the non-philosophers while still accumulating one brilliant insight after another for the specialists, this previously unpublished manuscript tackles some of the most fundamental questions of all times: What is philosophy? How did it first arise? What is its relation to religion, to science, and to politics? In what way is philosophy the class struggle in theory? Why does this struggle take the repeated form of a split between two practices of philosophy, one idealist and the other materialist? And how can we develop a new, aleatory understanding of materialism after Marx? * Bruno Bosteels, Visiting Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society Colum Professor Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures & Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA *