Louis Althusser Quotes

#1. Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.

Louis Althusser

#2. One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.

Louis Althusser

#3. Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten that ideological relations are immediately present in these same processes.

Louis Althusser

#4. The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our daily pudding!

Louis Althusser

#5. A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration.

Louis Althusser

#6. What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

Louis Althusser

#7. It is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts,

Louis Althusser

#8. Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.

Louis Althusser

#9. In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.

Louis Althusser

#10. Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.

Louis Althusser

#11. Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

Louis Althusser

#12. Ideology ... is indispensable in any society if men are to be formed, transformed and equipped to respond to the demands of their conditions of existence.

Louis Althusser

#13. The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production

Louis Althusser

#14. ...Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution.

Louis Althusser

#15. Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle

Louis Althusser

#16. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.

Louis Althusser

#17. To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.

Louis Althusser