Louis Althusser Quotes

18 quotes in 343 categories

• However much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain…
• Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.
• 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.
• Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.
• If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’
• Whatseems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems…
• To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.
• The rejection of all abstract formalism. Materialism reminds every science of its real source: the world men transform. No science can, whether in its history…
• 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,)…
• 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…
• The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production
• 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.…
• It is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts,
• The economic class struggle is a struggle against inessanlty intensified exploitation: not only against the brutal material form of exploitation, capitalism's tendency to reduce wages,…
• In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.
• Philosophy is, in the last instance, class struggle in the field of theory.
• 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,…
• 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…

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