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.

— Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser Quotes

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!

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

Ideology has very little to do with ‘consciousness’ – it is profoundly unconscious.

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

If someone asks, ‘But what in the end is a philosopher?’ I would say ‘A philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.’

— Louis Althusser

The ultimate condition of production is therefore the reproduction of the conditions of production.

— Louis Althusser

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 are immediately present in these same processes.

— Louis Althusser
Firsts

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.

— Louis Althusser

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. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle.

— Louis Althusser

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.

— Louis Althusser

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

— Louis Althusser

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.

— Louis Althusser

In reality ‘we’ have never been alone. Communists are never alone.

— Louis Althusser
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