This author doesn't like him (I don't either), but he points out some things I did not know:
He’d done precious little of the donkeywork required of a professor of philosophy. As he admitted in that posthumously-published memoir, though he’d been the École’s go-to guy for counsel on the most abstruse philosophical ackamarackus, he’d actually been winging it for years. He hadn’t, it turned out, read all that much. “I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well,” he wrote, before descending into a more confessional mode: “Spinoza a little, Aristotle not at all . . . Kant not at all, Hegel a little.” A little is right. For his thesis on Hegel, Althusser actually made up quotations that were never spotted by his tutor, Gaston Bachelard.
Above all, though, Althusser was unfamiliar with the bulk of Marx’s work. That’s right. The guy who found fame with books called For Marx and Reading Capital, had read about as much Marx as Margaret Thatcher had. Though he followed Bachelard in arguing that The German Ideology represents an “epistemological break” in Marx’s thought (as it does: it’s the book in which Marx abandons Hegelian idealism), Althusser later admitted that he was unsure how he’d arrived at that conclusion because the only bits of Marx he’d glanced at all predated The German Ideology.
Alas, the author of this anti-Althusser polemic doesn't realize that Marx did indeed understand his theory as a scientific (wissenschaftlich) one, the aim of which was to explain social and economic transformations through history. "Positivist fealty" is thrown around as a term of abuse, and Popper is actually mentioned as someone who actually had an interesting objection to Marx (Popper understood even less about Marx than Althusser). So most of this essay is garbage, but the facts about Althusser (if that's what they are) are interesting.
(Thanks to Paul Horwitz for the pointer.)
UPDATE: Christopher Byron, a PhD student at the University of Georgia writing on Marx's theory of exploitation, writes with a useful point about the preceding:
I am not an Althusserian, my thesis rejects most of his work, but nevertheless, we need to be careful here. It is true that Althusser confessed to being a fraud at the end of his life. However, he was also clinically mad at that point, so how reliable is that confession? I reached out to professor Warren Montag who has done a lot of good scholarship on Althusser and has visited his archives. He informed me that in fact if you go through Althusser's books, it's transparently clear he read Kant, Hegel, Marx, etc etc., closely, with copious notes, manuscript drafts, marginalia comments etc. Moreover, if you read reports by his students like Derrida (Yes I know Derrida sucks!) and Foucault, among others, they all praise him for being consummate in his knowledge of the canon. Moreover, if you read some of his manuscripts that are now being published (e.g., how to be a marxist in philosophy) it's clear he's well read. So although Althusser said he hadn't read Vol I-III, he lied, or forgot, or lost his mind. Montag says his handwriting is all over his copies of Vol I-III. Although he said he never read Kant, or Hegel, he lied, or forgot, or lost his mind. I'm not defending Althusserian theory, but I do want to defend him from the claim that he got away with decades of lying and fakery.
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