Althusser's Lesson

Althusser’s Lesson represents the foundations of Jacques Rancire’s theoretical project. It marks the moment at which he emerges from the tutelage of his mentor, Louis Althusser, and begins to outline the themes he will go on to develop in his later writings. Here Rancire is already working out a non-economic and non-Marxist understanding of politics. The events of May 1968 confronted Althusser’s version of a Marxism of order with one of subversion that in one fell swoop rendered Althusser’s thought outdated. Yet, when Althusser finally broke his silence on this issue, with the publication in 1973 of 'A Response to John Lewis', he appeared simply to return to the ideas he had espoused and defended before 1968. Althusser’s Lesson is, in Rancire’s own words, ‘intended to be a commentary on a lesson: the lesson in Marxism that Louis Althusser gave John Lewis. It is intended as a reflection on what this lesson wants to teach us and what it in fact teaches us, not about Marxist theory itself, but about the present reality of Marxism’.