Louis Althusser Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Richard Block

SOURCE: "Second Reads: Althusser Reading Marx Reading Hegel (After 1989)," in Boundary 2, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 211-33.

In the following essay, Block analyzes the relationships between the works of Althusser, Marx, and Hegel.

The English translation of Louis Althusser's Le future dure longtemps presents a curiosity. Longtemps, for the most part, has been rendered as forever, as if, after 1989, the promise of Althusserian Marxism had been displaced into an irretrievable or unrealizable future. One need only refer to the many recent dismissive reviews of the book to note how such judgments extend to Althusser's thought in general. Martin Bright, for example, writes that "in the present political atmosphere it is hard to imagine the excitement that was once generated by books with titles such as For Marx and Reading Capital." George Steiner remarks that "it is likely that Althusser's writings on Hegel and Marx are...
(read more)