New Edition
LENIN AND PHILOSOPHY
AND OTHER ESSAYS
by Louis
Althusser
Introduction by Fredric Jameson
“An extremely
valuable collection of essays.”
—CHOICE
“Today we are in a position to return to Althusser’s work in a new
way, and make a new assessment of it,” writes Fredric Jameson in his
Introduction to this new edition of Louis Althusser’s Lenin and
Philosophy.
No figure loomed larger than Althusser in Marxist thought in the West during
the 1960s and 70s—the decades in which the Soviet model was discredited in
the West and new avenues opened up in Marxist philosophy and politics.
Althusser stood out for his attempt to define a Marxist philosophy that was
rigorous, scientific, and revolutionary. In the process he set new standards of
argumentation for Marxist theory.
As Jameson shows in his introduction, the essays that had so massive and
fertile an influence in those decades continue to speak to us today. From these
essays there emerges a conception of Marxism as something more and other than a
philosophy, whose “concepts are also forms of practice, so that one cannot
simply debate them in a disinterested philosophical way without the
uncomfortable intervention of practical positions and commitments.”
This classic work covers the broad range of Althusser's interests and
contributions in philosophy, economics, pyschology, aesthetics, and politics.
It includes his major essay on “Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses.” This path-breaking analysis of ideology has inspired a range
of recent approaches to this field, which remains central to our own time.
Lenin and Philosophy also contains Althusser’s essay on
Lenin’s study of Hegel; “Freud and Lacan” his “Letter on
Art,” and “Cremonini, Painter of the Abstract”. The book opens
with a 1968 interview in which he discusses his personal, political and
intellectual history.
LOUIS ALTHUSSER
(1918 - 1990) studied at the École Normale
Supérieure in Paris, and taught philosophy there from 1948. His books
include For Marx and Reading Capital, both initially published in
1965, and Machiavelli and Us, published posthumously in 1999. He was a
member of the French Communist Party and an independent voice within the French
left.
FREDRIC JAMESON is the
pre-eminent Marxist writer on literature and culture today. His recent works
include Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and
The Cultural Turn. He is chair of the Program in Literature at Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina.
If you have any technical comments or suggestions, about this web site,
please send e-mail to our Webmaster
 |
