Louis Althusser

One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by…

— Louis Althusser

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the…

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

The economic class struggle is a struggle against inessanlty intensified exploitation: not only against the brutal material form of exploitation, capitalism's tendency…

— Louis Althusser

In truth, ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness', even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly…

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

“The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really…

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

Whatseems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place…

— Louis Althusser

“Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics:…

— Louis Althusser

“There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part,…

— Louis Althusser

The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

Relations of production are first reproduced by the materiality of the processes of production and circulation. But it should not be forgotten…

— Louis Althusser

“There is no such thing as an innocent reading, we must ask what reading we are guilty of.”

— Louis Althusser

Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst…

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights…

— Louis Althusser

However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their…

— Louis Althusser

“A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions…

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

The rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether…

— Louis Althusser

Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which…

— Louis Althusser