Althusser and Education

Front matter

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David I. Backer

ALTHUSSER AND EDUCATION

Introduction

PartI Education as an Ideological State Apparatus: Eleven Rules

An Attempt to Interpret the Events of May

The Rule of Keys: Social Reproduction

The Rule of Hands: Relations of Production

The Rule of Special Thirds: Base and Superstructure The System, Toe, and Anchor Rules: ISA Basics

The Causality Rule: Grey Cows and Green Cheese The Struggle Rule: The Necessity of Contingency The School Rule

Part II The Common Sense about Althusser: Reassessing Critical Education The Three Critiques

Foundations of Critical Education: Apple and Giroux’s Indecision Roots of the Common Sense

A Frustrated Student: Ranciére and the ISAs

Formalization of the Provocation: Erben and Gleesen

Against Generality: Hirst

A Trotskyite Calling Stalin: Callinicos

The Eagle’s Apostasy: E. P. Thompson

Ashes and Promiscuity: Willis and Connell

101 107

113 121 123 viii Contents

Part III Structural Education: Toward an Althusserian Pedagogy 23 The Structure of Race in Education: From Hall to Leonardo

24 The Structure of Gender in Education: Wolpe, Barrett, Arnot, Deem, and Valli

25 Ideology in Struggle: Advances in Interpellation

Epilogue

129 143

155 169

179 187

193 203

Acknowledgments

This book started when Tyson Lewis recommended I read Jameson on Althusser's structural causality for my dissertation. After that I was hooked and there have been so many people that have helped, guided, and pushed me since.

Michael Apple, Raewyn Connell, and Zeus Leonardo provided essential background interviews, comments, and encouragement. Isaac Gottesman gave me feedback and guidance on the historical aspects of the research, while Asad Haider, G. M. Goshgarian, Warren Montag, and Dave Mesing helped keep me on track on the Althusser studies side.

Derek Ford has cheered me on since we were in graduate school, along with Brad Porfilio who, with Bill Reynolds, asked me to write a short book on Althusser for their series at Brill-Sense. I’m especially thankful they were flexible when I realized I was writing two books, The Gold and the Dross for them and then a longer manuscript that I eventually pitched to Mark Richardson, Derek Ford, and Tyson Lewis at Bloomsbury for the Radical Politics and Education Series. Everyone involved in these series and the publishers were generous and understanding as I muddled through how to set all this down on paper. The team at Bloomsbury has been great, particularly in their decision to make the book open access and in extending my deadline several times.

Jessica Lussier did a first full edit when I completed a draft of the manuscript and also helped with research on the Marxist feminist angle of the project. Kermit O. and Ash Yezulita have been amazing student assistants helping with edits and background research at different stages. Thanks to the Transformative Education and Social Change (TESC) program at West Chester University for providing them graduate assistantships and letting them work with me, and also generally supporting and advancing critical educational research in Philadelphia. Jason Wozniak and Dana Morrison, leaders of this program, are also my foundations team and have given me a constant resource of support, feedback, and opportunities to be eloquent about this project as it was underway. They both read drafts of chapters, shorter essays I published along the way, and have assigned my writing on ideology to their students in the TESC program and other classes.

I must also thank my students at Cleveland State University who helped me work through Althusser’s ideas, particularly those from China, Saudi Arabia, and Cleveland proper whose unique mixture of experiences and perspectives gave me a much deeper appreciation for the structure of education today.

John Elmore, to whom the book is dedicated, told me that I should go as far into critical education as I wanted to and not hold back due to a sense of impracticality or needing to pitch my work to a less critical audience when it came to the tenure process. His encouragement and the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies that he has helped foster at West Chester were central to this project x Acknowledgments continuing (he also kindly donated his research funds to pay for the index, completed with rigor by John Beauregard).

Kate Cairns has been a great thought partner, co-author, and friend during this project. She was willing to hear me out on many issues about Althusser and social reproduction, as well as contributing to numerous socialist feminist organizing projects. Kate connected us with Sue Ferguson, who also provided helpful background and perspective on social reproduction.

I started this project in the wake of Occupy Wall Street’s dissolution, but the friendships and connections I made there have lasted beyond the movement moment. Jason Wozniak, Winter Casuccio, Aleks Perisic, Jacques Laroche, Kylie Benton- Connell, Rodrigo Nunes, and Joe North have been constant comrades.

Jonathan Turcotte-Summers and Sam Rocha wrote a thoughtful and helpful review of my early work on Althusser that influenced the direction of this book. Richard Hudson-Miles wrote an equally helpful review pushing on several themes in The Gold and the Dross for which I have tried to account here. Wayne Ross published two pieces in Critical Education that were early sketches. Tony Carusi, Ken McGrew, Matthew Lampert, and Elen Kirkpatrick have helped me with their own work, comments, and thinking about Althusser and education. Pilar Gonalons Pons and Daniel Aldana Cohen have also been great friends, comrades, and dialogue partners along the way.

Finally, thanks to my partner Shelly Ronen for everything she is and does, particularly her strength, engagement, and support with this project. And thanks to Thisbe Ronen-Backer, a light in dark times, who was born while I was writing the book and whose epic cuteness aided its completion.

Introduction

A student or researcher interested in the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser’s theory of education might encounter a recent entry in the Encyclopedia of Educational Theory and Philosophy. According to the entry, Althusser’s theory of the ideological state apparatuses was an attempt to overcome economic determinism. However, the theory failed due to Althusser’s structuralism, which, the entry notes, was widely criticized for its functionalism and its denial of individual and group agency. The entry concludes that, according to Althusser's theory, students and teachers and others involved in education are “mere puppets of controlling coercive and ideological structures” (Morrow 2014: 708).

The entry’s author is Raymond A. Morrow, co-author of the seminal tome Social Theory and Education: A Critique of Social and Cultural Theories of Reproduction (1995), tracing the history of social reproduction theory and education that includes a full-fledged version of his entry’s interpretation of Althusser. Morrow is not alone in this interpretation. He follows a common sense about Althusser in the critical education literature more broadly. One can find a version of Morrow’s reading in early foundational texts by the field’s founders Michael Apple (Apple 1982, 1985, 2012) and Henry A. Giroux (1980a, 1980b, 1984, 2001) to more contemporary references. The consensus in the field, still prevalent today, is that while Althusser’s theory of ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) was an important attempt at understanding education in a capitalist society from a Marxist perspective, it ultimately failed because of its functionalism and inability to recognize the concrete agency of people in and around schools.

While this reading has an air of finality, in the same year Morrow's entry in the Encyclopedia was published, Althusser’s book On the Reproduction of Capitalism (2014) appeared for the first time in English translation. The significance of this translation should not be understated. The book is the full text from which Althusser’s (1970) famous essay on the ISAs was initially excerpted. That essay, called “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,’ has for more than a generation provided the definitive account of Althusser’s thinking about education; but the book from which it was excerpted was rarely mentioned in educational research literature, if ever. It was only available in French in 1993 and had not been available for English readers until sixty years after its excerpt was published.

Juxtaposing Morrow’s Encyclopedia entry on Althusser and On the Reproduction of Capitalism, published in the same year, broaches the question of revisiting Althusser's theory of education. Althusser is having something of a renaissance in the humanities and social sciences (Resch 1992; Montag 2002, 2013; McInerney 2005; Diefenbach et al. 2013; Sotiris 2014; Bargu 2015; Pfeifer 2015; Barker 2016; Nesbitt 2017) with several other new translations published (Althusser 2003, 2006, 2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2020), including the first full English translation of Reading Capital (2016). Part of this resurgence has focused specifically on the ISAs, ideology, and reproduction (Edwards 2007; Wolf 2008, 2013; Alloggio 2012; Macherey 2012; Gallas 2017; Beetz and Schwab 2018; Kukla 2018; Montag 2018; Sakellaropoulos 2019; Kirkpatrick 2020). While some early voices hinted at such a revision (Benadé 1984), the more recent return to Althusser has yet to hit educational research. Given that we have the full text from which the original expression of Althusser’s groundbreaking theory of education was excerpted, and given the new wave of interest in the theory, education scholars should be curious about the content of Althusser’s theory of education, how the common sense reading of it emerged in critical education, and whether that common sense holds up.

Althusser and Education looks at these issues. Following recent examinations of critical education’s presumptions and history (McGrew 2011; Gottesman 2016), this book is a clarificatory project for critical education, both regarding Althusser’s theory of education specifically, how it was critiqued, and how it was advanced; and examining assumptions, frameworks, and axioms in left education thinking more generally.

The book has three main parts. In Part I, “Education as an Ideological State Apparatus: Eleven Rules,’ I lay out Althusser’s theory of education by doing a close educational rereading of the ISAs essay as an excerpt of the book from which it was taken, On the Reproduction of Capitalism. The book provides much needed detail, clarification, and elaboration on the notes toward an investigation that Althusser made in the ISAs essay fifty years ago. From this educational rereading of the ISAs essay, deepened by a reading of the book from which it was originally excerpted, I derive eleven rules of thumb for understanding Althusser’s theory of education in its fullness. These rules cover major themes in the theory like social reproduction, relation of production, structural causality, apparatus, and so on. Table 1 lists these rules and the theoretical terms to which they apply.

The rules are best summarized as follows. Social reproduction for Althusser is the key to the key to production, the process of maintaining the continuity of dominance for the relations of production preferred by the ruling class (distinctly Marxist as compared to earlier references to the concept, like Durkheim [2005]). These relations of production are how people have their hands on the means of production and thus define an economy. Relations of production set out positions which people occupy, or functions that they bear, but crucially for Althusser these positions exist immanently rather than transcendently. The ruling class cannot maintain their preferred relations of production solely through economic power, they need state power too. According to Marx, the state is a superstructure exerting the kind of downward-facing force needed to keep certain relations of production dominant now and over time.

Introduction 3

Table 1 Eleven Rules of Thumb for Understanding Althusser's Theory of Education

Rule Concept Term Keys Labor is the key to production. Reproduction is the key Social reproduction to labor.

Hands A relation of production is how people have their hands Relations of production on the means of production.

Competence | Competencies are both qualifications in know-how/basic Education skills and submissiveness to dominant ideology.

Special Thirds The base and two superstructures each exert a Base-superstructure special third of the total force of a social formation. model Quantitatively they are equal but qualitatively they are relatively autonomous to one another, exerting forces depending on practices’ indices of effectivity.

System An ISA is a system of organizations, institutions, and ISA practices—not one of these in particular.

Toe the line | Apparatuses (whether repressive or ideological) function Apparatus to the extent that, when push comes to shove, people toe the line in social life.

Anchor Practices provide material support for ideologies—they Material practices anchor ideologies—but ideologies do not “overflow” practices, or wholly determine them.

School The scholastic apparatus is the number one ISA in Education modern capitalist societies.

Causality Simple and linear concepts of causality are inadequate for Structural causality a class struggle approach to society. To think that A causes B causes C is Stalinist fustian thinking that creates a false sameness amidst uneven diversity and complexity.

Struggle ISAs realize struggle. They exert force and are exerted Struggle upon by other forces in a social formation. ISAs are in and of class struggle.

Go Ideology is what makes people go all by themselves; how Ideology they tend to follow marching orders all on their own.

In Althusser's rendering, building on a distinction from Gramsci, there are two superstructures: ideological and repressive, the former manifesting as imagined relations to real conditions while the latter works through violence. These two apparatuses are relatively autonomous from one another and from the economy, each exerting a special third of the total social force in the society. The ideological state apparatuses are themselves composed of systems of institutions. These institutions reproduce dominant ideology to the extent that people in them toe a dominant line. Toeing a line in this case means engaging in certain practices that anchor aspects of (and thereby reproduce) the dominant relations of production. Education is the number one ideological state apparatus in modern capitalist societies since it instructs so many young people in skills and submission to the dominant ideology. In schools, students learn to go all by themselves and toe the line without a cop in their heads or the immediate threat of violence. This recruitment, which occurs through what Althusser calls interpellation, does not happen because there are a group of evil priests or diabolical leaders pulling peoples’ strings like puppeteers, but rather occurs largely unconsciously in the everyday experience of class struggle.

All these claims regarding school and reproduction of the relations of production rely on a particular concept of causality, since apparatuses in this theory are a means for intervening in society, exerting a force toward some group’ interest. Following a Spinozist ontological turn, Althusser's concept of causality is structural rather than linear or expressive, distinctive for its emphasis on unevenness and complexity, refusing the fustian (or unclear) thought that—as Althusser cites Hegel citing Schelling (1988)—sees all cows as grey in the night. According to this structural concept of causality, ideologies do not determine institutions but rather the other way around. While class struggle impacts schools, it does so via primary ideologies external to them and secondary ideologies from within them, the latter tending to be specific to their context. In this sense, schools contribute to the larger class struggle. Insurgent classes have used ideology as a weapon and won victories against the ruling class, making the ISAs a site of struggle.

The first part of the book explains each of these rules using textual evidence and arguments Althusser sketched in the ISAs essay and detailed with many more premises and elaboration in On the Reproduction of Capitalism. The rules form a basic framework for Althusser's theory of education, incorporating crucial philosophical and political premises that undergird the idea that education is an ideological state apparatus. In general, I find that the theory is a dynamic and profoundly influential Marxist theory of education whose immanent structural framework emphasizes schools’ complex contribution to class struggle, from the large-scale relative autonomy of schools in Althusser’s conception of the base-superstructure model to the significance of smallscale everyday school gestures in his concept of interpellation.

The theory was taken up in a different way in education, however. The common sense about Althusser remains stubbornly in place. Left education literatures inherit that interpretation today in the form of the critiques mentioned at the outset, of which Morrow’s entry is just one example. In Part II, “Ihe Common Sense about Althusser: Reassessing Critical Education,’ I trace the provenance of this common sense. Using Morrow and Torres'’s (1995) history of social reproduction theory as a guide, I begin with two founders of critical education Michael Apple and Henry Giroux, looking at references to Althusser in their early publications leading up to Giroux’s (2001) Theory and Resistance in Education and Apple’s (1985) Education and Power. When it came to Althusser, I find a mixture of reverence and repulsion, with accompanying indecision and reversals in their readings. I call these readings the Foundations of Critical Education, since the texts which include these inconsistent readings of Althusser did so much to construct the presumptions on which critical education is founded, like the dichotomy between reproduction and resistance.

I also find that Giroux and Apples readings relied on a number of other interpretations. Giroux went so far as to say that these interpretations were so definitive as to not require his further attention. As part of their larger project to contrast critical education from neo-Marxist education, they leaned on a line of critique against Althusser running from Jacques Ranciére (2011), Michael Erben and Denis

Introduction 5

Gleeson (1975), Alex Callinicos (1976), Paul Hirst (1976), E. P. Thompson (1978), R. W. Connell (1979), and ending with Paul Willis’s reading (1981a). While Giroux writes that Althusser has already been interpreted by these authors so we do not have to, I delve into these texts to reconstruct the line of critique on which Giroux and Apple relied (but also informed other similar critiques like that by Clarke [1980]). I do some historical work to contextualize these critiques and their authors, summarize their arguments, and show how each account has limitations that Apple and Giroux (and those who followed them like Morrow and Torres) failed to consider. I use two tests for this reassessment of the texts Apple and Giroux cited. The first test is whether the text has an argument. The second test is whether that argument poses significant issues for the framework set out in Part I.

Generally, the common sense about Althusser in critical education and the line of critique on which it rests are composed of three planks: the critique from functionalism, the critique from agency, and the critique from tragedy. The first characterizes Althusser’s theory as being part of a school of social theory, functionalism, which is at odds with basic premises of Marxism. This critique points to functionalism’s tendency to understand social phenomena as having simple and clear purposes in maintaining equilibrium, and its rootedness in non-Marxist trends of intellectual history as a point against Althusser. Functionalism’s focus on cohesion and order is ultimately bourgeois, says the critique, and thus so is Althusser’s theory.

Perhaps more devastating, however, is the second plank: that Althusser’s theory does not provide a proper concept of agency. According to this critique from agency, the theory is at best silent on the question of freedom and at worst antithetical to any notion of it. On this view, Althusser’s theory renders social forces so strong that they determine the thoughts, actions, and group activity of individuals (such as student organizers, teachers, and the entire working class) or whole institutions (such as schools). Finally, the last critique is that from tragedy. While Althusser's theory is a worthy attempt to de-Stalinize Marxism, it ultimately fails to do so on its own terms.

I find that only one of the texts composing this line of critique passes both tests mentioned earlier, R. W. Connell’s critique from promiscuity. I do not find many arguments convincing in the texts themselves that Althusser’s theory of education is functionalist, lacks an account of agency, or fails on its own terms. Yet my account in Part II is not meant to be, and cannot be, exhaustive. The purpose is show that there is much to be desired in the line of critique cited by Apple and Giroux in their configuration of critical education, and that critical education researchers should accordingly reconsider presumptions in the paradigm (e.g., like the reproduction-resistance dichotomy).

The line of critique generally speaking is also vulnerable to a reductio ad absurdum argument when it comes to those scholars who applied Althusser’s theory. If we assume the line of critique is true, we would expect there to be little worthy Marxist research inspired by Althusser. We might even expect to see non-Marxists, nonactivists, bourgeois functionalists, and those committed to capitalist determinism taking up the claims. These claims would reduce social phenomena to their usefulness in maintaining equilibrium, leaving out notions of agency and class struggle. But this is far from the case. In Part III, I present a line of scholarship providing ample evidence to the contrary. This line of scholarship also provides resources to respond to a question that has emerged recently in Altusserian studies of education (Hudson-Miles 2021; Lewis 2017): what would an Althusserian pedagogy look like?

Paulo Freire (1970), perhaps the most famous and important figure in critical education, wrote that Althusser’s theory of overdetermination “prevents us from falling into mechanistic explanations or, what is worse, mechanistic action” (216). This brief mention shows that a figure such as Freire understood Althusser's theory as nonmechanistic rather than functionalist and helpful for thinking through political action, rather than leaving out a notion of agency. The passage from Freire gestures toward a line of thinking produced by a diverse group of researchers by race, gender, and nationality that offer meaningful applications, extensions, and constructive readings of Althusser’s theory of education. Focusing on advancements in structure, reproduction, race, gender, and ideology I argue that this line of advance—distinct from the line of critique—converges on a distinct paradigm for left education thinking I call structural education, which furnishes resources for a properly Althusserian pedagogy

Stuart Hall’s work is an undercurrent running throughout the line of advance. His writing on the theory of articulation, race/class, and encoding/decoding, provide a theoretical underpinning for many of the line of advance’s insights for education, particularly true in Zeus Leonardo’ (2009) work on whiteness and education. In terms of structural thinking about education, Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet’s (1973) The Capitalist School in France is a paradigm case of little-considered texts inspired by Althusser's theory of education. (I did not have time or space to consider carefully all such texts I found, such as Vasconi [1974], which deserves translation and careful study). Looking at data from the French school system between 1968 and 1973, the authors use a framework that understands schools as part of an ideological state apparatus that are determined by and determine class struggle in a social formation. Baudelot and Establet critique ideologies of school to show that this apparently unified system is actually an uneven, bifurcated network structured along class lines. I show how the book’s argument is original research to which Althusser's theory of education gave rise.

Other examples of texts in the line of advance include Richard Johnson (2018) who, in 1979, charted an interesting synthesis between Althusserian and Thompsonian arguments when it comes to social reproduction, offering a concept of reproduction-in-struggle. Nicos Poulantzas’s (1978) claims about education in the opening essay of Classes and Contemporary Capitalism takes up the theme of causality and pointing to the stupidity of the bourgeois education problematic that understands schools as the cause of inequality. Rather, critiquing prominent stratification theories, he asserts the opposite: an unequal structure is what causes schools to be as they are, not the other way around.

American political economist of education Martin Carnoy (1982; Carnoy and Levin 1985) clarifies this premise further in his early work on education and the state from the 1980s. Putting Althusser and Poulantzas’s thinking into context with Marx and Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci, Carnoy advances a theory of mediation. This theory claims that education—as part of the state—softens contradictions and struggles in the base. This theory also includes key contradictions in schools’ contribution to

Introduction 7 class struggle as a mediator: such as the problem of over-education, the symbol of democracy, grade inflation, and underemployment.

The Althusserian theory also inspired a little-studied (Lussier and Backer 2020) cohort of Marxist feminist research on gender/class and education. AnnMarie Wolpe (1978, 1995) is a great example. A liberation fighter with the African National Congress who, among other things, helped her husband (a comrade of Nelson Mandela) escape from prison, uses Althusser to build out Poulantzas’s insights on structural determination to analyze girls’ education. She also uses the theory of the ISAs to think through issues in South African Bantu education (Wolpe 1995).

Other examples include Michèle Barrett’s (2014) well-known theory of dual systems, a uniquely historical theory of how patriarchy articulates with capitalist exploitation in educational practice. Barrett devotes an entire chapter of the landmark Women's Oppression Today to education spelling out this thinking, which I examine. I then look to a cohort of Marxist feminist education researchers who built on Althusser’s research, providing examples of Barrett’s historical approach to the articulation of patriarchy and capitalism in education. Madeleine Arnot (1982) offered a political economy of girls’ education focusing on docility. Rosemary Deem (2012), in her history of gender and education in Women and Schooling, provides examples of gendered/ classed interpellations from the history of school policy, curriculum, and practice. The American educational researcher Linda Valli (1986) put Althusser’s theory to use in analyzing gender/class in a vocational education program focused on girls becoming clerical workers. Like Deem, Valli’s study provides a case study of interpellations into what this cohort of Marxist feminists called the sexual division of labor.

Finally, Althusser’s theory inspired advances in thinking about ideology, specifically his landmark concept of interpellation. Stuart Hall (1985) made significant advances. He famously claimed that there are no guarantees in ideology, which emerges from his reading of Althusser’s concept of uneven development. Hall (2001) applied these ideas in another seminal essay on encoding/decoding messages in media, putting forward the idea that codes get negotiated in the process of their being issued as interpellations to recruit for dominant relations of production, leaving space for oppositional codes to emerge either through misunderstanding or creative rearticulation. These essays provide a clear and distinct account of contingency, freedom, and contradiction in Althusserian structuralism.

While Hall does not explicitly extend the concept of interpellation to cover oppositional and negotiated codes, Jean-Jacques Lecercle (2006) wrote of the notion of counter-interpellation to this end, naming what is perhaps implicit in Hall. Lecercle’s counter-interpellation refers to the taking up and taking on of interpellations that shifts a balance of forces, insulting the insult of an interpellation of dominant ideology. The concept has important implications for critical education (Backer 2018). Yet interpellation has been taken in still other directions in educational theory. Tyson Lewis (2017), in his provocative reading of early vs. late Althusser, conceived of disinterpellation, a moment of suspension between interpellation and counter-interpellation, which Lewis claims is more educative than counter-interpellation. Consistent with Hall’s findings regarding the power of creative misunderstanding, and the space of possibility between the coded message and its decoding, the literary theorist James Martel (2017) has elaborated the concept of misinterpellation, or when recruitment misfires, breaks down, or has unintended consequences. He cites the cases of Haitian revolutionaries misinterpreting the French calls for universal dignity and Third World revolutionaries responding to Woodrow Wilson's call for sovereignty, pointing to the ways interpellations are subject to the anarchy of everyday life. These developments and augmentations together form a set of resources from which theorists could construct an Althusserian pedagogy.

In the Conclusion, I draw together the findings of each part of the book to put forward one account of that pedagogy by using the structural education framework initiated by Althusser's theory of education, extended by the line of advance, and challenged by the line of critique. This framework is distinct from critical education and makes different insights possible in left educational thinking. Painting in broad strokes critical education has two main principles: (1) a critique of dehumanization that, when thoroughly followed, can lead to liberation, (2) centering human experience against systems via the agency inherent in cultural practices. The line of critique against Althusser from Ranciére and Thompson to Giroux and Apple covers the second premise of the critical framework for education.

Reflecting on the eleven rules and the line of advance, I contrast critical education with structural education. Thus the reassessment of Althusser’s theory, how it was advanced, and the foundations of critical education and its line of critique, at minimum, is an occasion to explore other frameworks like the structural, particularly given the new resurgence of socialism into the mainstream in the United States and elsewhere. In the Epilogue, I sketch how this framework has helped me in my own teaching, organizing, and research, a set of practices which I characterize as belonging to an Althusserian pedagogy, and invite critiques of my interpretation of Althusser set out in the text.

Two related notes. First, this book on Althusser is not intuitively Althusserian in style. I have chosen to maintain what I take to be a straightforward, academic, and semi-descriptive tone throughout the text. With this style, I hope to give Althusser's ideas a hearing with audiences beyond that of Althusserian studies (relatedly, due to space constraints, I have not been able to properly trace the philosophical influences on Althusser from Gramsci, Spinoza, Lacan, and others). There is a case to be made for this style as consistent with Althusser’s project of returning to texts, listening carefully, and close interpretation, as well as engaging with the specific terrain one confronts in one’s moment. But readers will notice a difference, which is intentional as a contribution to Althusser studies. I have found that authors can sometimes use a certain speculary mode of expression when writing about Althusser that teeters into the unhelpful. This style may be weighed down by obscure references or technical-poetic voicing such that it becomes inscrutable at best and at worst impractical pedagogically, intellectually, and politically. This is not a critique of any account specifically but rather a stylistic preference I developed while writing this book. Finally, while Althusser's writing certainly fits this description, as Derrida scholar Samir Haddad has pointed out, we must understand this sort of writing as inhabiting a style dominant in élite French universities, particularly in the humanities, during the time when Althusser was attending school and university. I did not have this curricular and pedagogical upbringing and see nothing essentially Althusserian about mimicking it.