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Saturday 26 May 2012

Notebook

He had been absent during the events of May 1968, and had showed little interest in the political developments of that year. His only direct comment on the “failed revolution” of 1968 was characteristic and revealing: “When revolt ends in defeat without the workers being massacred, it is not necessarily a good thing for the working class which has no martyrs to mourn or commemorate." Even his erstwhile colleagues admitted he had nothing new to offer in a decade that saw the publication in France of “The Gulag Archipelago”, the tragedy in Cambodia, the eclipse of Mao, and the stead loss of radical faith among a generation of French intellectuals. Had matters been left there, Althusser could have looked forward to a peaceful and obscure old age, a curious relic of a bizarre but forgotten era.

But then, on November 16, 1980, he murdered his wife Hélène in their apartment at the École Normale. Or, as the jacket copy of The New Press’s translations of his memoir coyly puts it “while massaging his wife’s neck [he] discovered he had strangled her.”

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