Louis Althusser and the law of culture: the subject between the symbolic and the ideological

Abstract

Taking Louis Althusser’s philosophy as its guiding principle, this article is part of the debate on the rapprochement between Marxist theory and psychoanalytic discourse. Chronologically and systematically, we revisit Althusser’s work, trying to distinguish the continuities and deviations of his theoretical elaboration on the question of the subject, precisely in his dialogue with psychoanalysis. In his readings of Marx’s work, Althusser elaborates a series of innovative concepts, all of which are tributaries of a certain reception of Freud’s work, as well as being closely linked to the Lacanian thematisation of the symbolic order. In this dialogue, we seek to identify in Althusser the outline of an unfinished research programme that gains its synthesis in the Law of Culture: the challenge of thinking about the mediation between the subject of psychoanalysis (unthinkable outside the symbolic order) and the (ideologically interpellated) subject of social theory.