Quotes from Louis Althusser

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

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

In truth, ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness', even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.

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 compromised and caught up in the outside world.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating! So what! We are interested in the mechanism that ensures that it really is a pudding we are eating and not a poached baby elephant, though we think we are eating our daily pudding!

Everything that happens in philosophy has, in the last instance, not only political consequences in theory, but also political consequences in politics: in the political class struggle.

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

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

T]he 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, and against the class 'techniques' for increasing productivity... but also around the question of the technical-social division of labor that prevails om enterprises, and against bourgeois ideology and repression.

In reality 'we' have never been alone. Communists are never alone.

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

It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are 'obviousnesses') obviousness and obviousness, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the 'still small voice of conscience'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!

I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practiced, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible, one occupies the place of the impossible.

For it is characteristic of ideology to impose self-evident facts as self-evident facts (without in the least seeming to, since they are 'self­-evident') which we cannot not recognize and before which we have the inevitable and eminently natural reaction of exclaiming (aloud or in 'the silence of consciousness'): 'That's obvious! That's right! That's true!

The time has come in which the overriding preoccupation of bourgeois philosophers and littérateurs is the following question: 'What does the truth have to be for the Communists to be wrong? What does Marx have to be for the Communists to be wrong?' Thus it is that our bourgeois politicians and philosophers fabricate the truth and the events they need to condemn their adversary the more forcefully.

Há, portanto, uma causa para a transposição imaginária das condições de existência reais; essa causa é a existência de um pequeno grupo de homens cínicos que assentam sua dominação e sua exploração do "povo" sobre uma representação falseada do mundo, imaginada por eles para subjugar os espíritos pela dominação de sua imaginação.