SOURCE: "Breathless: Louis Althusser Loses His Grip," in Voice Literary Supplement, No. 123, March, 1994, p. 15.

In the following review, McLemee discusses the implications of Althusser's memoir, The Future Lasts Forever, on the reading of his work.

Marxism is dead, as everybody knows; so is Louis Althusser. And not for the first time, in either case. In 1978, after nearly two decades as the most provocative thinker in the French Communist Party, Althusser told a friend: "My universe of thought has been abolished. I can't think anymore." (No fate closer to death than that, for a philosopher.) The mind exhausted, his body lived on until 1990—collapsing sometime between the Berlin Wall and the Gorbachev regime.

In the interim, Althusser practically disappeared from public life. A popular book on "la pensée '68" relegated his ideas to the status of yesteryear's fad: Althusser's Marxism "irresistibly recalled a recent but evolved past, like...