SOURCE: "Marx and murder: Althusser's demon and the flight from subjectivity," in TLS, No. 4669, September 25, 1992, pp. 3-4.

In the following review, Lilla discusses the implications that details from Althusser's life have on his work.

On a grey November morning in 1980, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife Hélène in their apartment at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Within hours he was whisked away by ambulance to a psychiatric hospital, where he was subsequently confined by court order after having been judged mentally unfit to stand trial for an act he said he could not remember. At the time, many in Paris suspected a plot by former normaliens to protect their former teacher and exculpate him. But soon it became known that Althusser had spent much of his adult life in states of severe depression and had divided his time almost equally between...