Lessons on Rousseau pdf

Louis Pierre Althusser (French: 16 October 1918 – 22 October 1990) was a French Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.Althusser was a long-time member and sometimes a strong critic of the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français, PCF). His arguments and theses were set against the threats that he saw attacking the theoretical foundations of Marxism. These included both the influence of empiricism on Marxist theory, and humanist and reformist socialist orientations which manifested as divisions in the European communist parties, as well as the problem of the cult of personality and of ideology. Althusser is commonly referred to as a structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he was critical of many aspects of structuralism.Althusser's life was marked by periods of intense mental illness. In 1980, he killed his wife, the sociologist Hélène Rytmann, by strangling her. He was declared unfit to stand trial due to insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital for three years. He did little further academic work, dying in 1990.

Lessons on Rousseau pdf by Louis Althusser

The renowned French theorist dissects the leading Enlightenment philosopher
Althusser delivered these lectures on Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality at the École normale supérieure in Paris in 1972. They are fascinating for two reasons. First, they gave rise to a new generation of Rousseau scholars, attentive not just to Rousseau’s ideas, but also to those of his concepts that were buried beneath metaphors or fictional situations and characters. Second, we are now discovering that the “late Althusser’s” theses about aleatory materialism and the need to break with the strict determinism of theories of history in order to devise a new philosophy “for Marx” were being worked out well before 1985 in this reading of Rousseau dating from twelve years earlier, which introduces into Rousseau’s text the ideas of the void, the accident, the take, and the necessity of contingency.
"THE TEXT THAT FOLLOWS is a faithful transcription of a course that Althusser gave in 1972 at the Paris École normale supérieure for students preparing to sit the agrégation. It is based on a tape recording made with Althusser’s permission; he agreed to have a microphone placed on his lectern. Only a few words have been left out of the transcription: words that mark a hesitation (‘well’, ‘uh’, and so on), repetitions of the same word, and a few bits and pieces of sentences that were lost because a few seconds were needed to change the audio cassette. The reader may consult the original recording, which has been made available to the public by the Fondation Gabriel Péri."