Althusser’s Relation to Hegel: French Hegelianism, Marxism, and Aleatory Materialism

This essay concerns the uneasy relationship between Althusser and Hegel that can be observed throughout Althusser’s oeuvre. In the 1960s Althusser pursued a rigorous project and tried to develop a systematic account of philosophy, history, and science from within Marxism—an account that would constitute a theoretical weapon against Hegelian idealism. Althusser’s arguments in For Marx and Reading “Capital” established his presence in French philosophical corners as a Marxist and anti-Hegelian thinker. However, in posthumous publications, Althusser’s relation to Hegel appears far more complicated than his simply being anti-Hegelian. By investigating this relationship from the lens of multiple encounters, this essay carves out two notions that emerged from these encounters, notions that we call “Althusserian”: philosophy as class struggle in theory and history as a process without a subject.