Mourning or melancholia? An Althusser tour
I'm extremely lucky to be spending some time in France as part of a sabbatical this fall. I've got a whole semester off just for research--no teaching or meetings. The whole concept of a sabbatical is amazing (we should all have them) and I'm grateful to have it as part of my job that every seven years I get about four months to pursue a project.
The project I proposed was to complete an English translation of a French book. The book is called L'ecole capitaliste en france [The Capitalist School in France] written by Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet in 1973. These authors were students of a philosopher named Louis Althusser, the most important Marxist theorist of education in the 20th century, whose thinking on education I spent several years researching and writing about.
This culminated in me publishing two books: a short book for anyone interesting in his thought, regardless of experience or level, called The Gold and the Dross: Althusser for Educators and then a longer, more technical rereading his educational theory from the ground up that traces its critical reception called Althusser and Education.
The trip to France started with a week on my own. I put together an Althusser tour for myself, starting with a few days in Paris, then visiting Caen, a medium-sized city in Normandy, where Althusser's archives are kept at an abbey. The whole experience was much more emotional than I anticipated.
At first I thought the feeling might be what Walter Benjamin called "Left melancholia," which Wendy Brown summarizes well:
Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms “Left,” “socialism,” “Marx,” or “movement.”
Melancholia is different than mourning because when you're mourning, it's clear and conscious what you're sad about. But with melancholia it's more general, less defined, a more abstract and unconscious sadness, which for the leftist is more about holding onto politics and positions rather than healing from the loss of actual or stuff. Was I feeling left mourning or melancholia on my Althusser tour?
It's not '68 anymore
When I was in Paris, I wanted to see where the "events of May 68" happened. It was important for everyone, but especially Althusser because it inspired him to publish his thinking on educational theory early because of it. These events also dramatically changed the relationship between him, his students, and left politics.
In the throws of the antiwar movement, high school and college students set off bombs in American corporate headquarters in Paris to protest the Vietnam war. Suspects were rounded up, which galvanized groups of college students to come to their defense. These groups increased in size and strength, and students shut down their campuses by occupying buildings and holding large demonstrations. The revolutionary students thought they could spark a general revolt--and they did.
Their actions started in Nanterre, outside Paris, then continued at the Sorbonne, in Paris itself. The students' work at the Sorbonne kept snowballing until the city's streets were erupting with rebellion, which police put down with brutal force. Unions joined to defend the students, some workers occupying their factories like the students occupied their schools, and suddenly 20% of the country's workforce was on strike. The Communist Party of France, which was a powerful force in government, was against this strike at first and Althusser stuck with that analysis, alienating him from students.
So I went to the Sorbonne to be there and remember. A fellow presenter at my conference had an appointment at the main campus and got me in, and it was amazing (I even saw a handwritten sign outside a room saying that students were taking the agregation for philosophy, the most difficult culminating test for the subject in the country if not the entire world).
Then I walked around the Latin Quarter where the rebellions centered, getting a sense of it and imagining what it was like. It was difficult because the city was so densely packed with tourists, cafes, shops, traffic, offices, and everything else. I couldn't imagine it all being shut down. It reminded me more of New York City after Giuliani and Bloomberg remade it in the Disneyified image of itself to sell the experience of being there. The events of 1968 were an entirely different time.
It's obviously not 1968 anymore--and there were significant rebellions just in the last few months over Macron's pension reforms--but I felt a sort of left-wing sadness nonetheless, but it was a specific sadness that would continue when I visited Althusser’s office and gravesite.
At the Rue d’Ulm
I'd read an obituary by another of his students, Etienne Balibar, who said Altusser worked at 45 Rue d'Ulm, an office and apartment next to the Ecole Normal Supiere’s library (incidentally, the same block where the scientist Louis Pasteur’s laboratory was located). Althusser had been there, living and working, for thirty years as a professor. Balibar suggests that Althusser’s interest in schools came from the fact that school, along with the Communist Party, was Althusser's whole world. Indeed, he didn’t have much else.
He’d had a rough upbringing, marked by the loss of his father in World War I before he was born, and then his being drafted in World War II just as he was about to go to college. Althusser was taken prisoner in 1940 and kept in a prison camp for five long years. He developed an intense mental illness, diagnosed then as “manic depressive psychosis,” that he suffered from the rest of his life, including going through electro-shock therapy.
His ability to form relationships was stunted, but by many accounts he was an attentive and effective teacher. He was married to Helene Rytman, a Jewish communist intellectual who had refused to wear the Nazi’s yellow star, fighting in the street resistance during the war, accumulating her own traumas, and disagreeing vociferously with the direction of the communist party as Stalin took power in the Soviet Union. Rytman and Althusser got married in the 1960s and were rarely apart. But this is where the story gets really awful.
The best telling is Richard Seymour’s, I think:
the facts of the murder are these. Following surgery for a hernia, he degenerated into severe depression. He was hospitalised, and subjected to various medications, none of which helped. He was discharged before fully recovered. He was constantly vomiting, losing his grip on language, in a state of mental derangement. He was experiencing suicidal ideation. Their analyst foresaw grave danger, and wrote to Rytman that he urgently needed to be hospitalised again. The letter did not arrive at its destination. In the dawn hours of 16th November 1980, Althusser was massaging her neck as he often had. He entered into a hallucinatory state. He came to his senses, and Rytman was staring ahead, her tongue protruding through her teeth. She had not screamed, and there were no bruises. Nonetheless, Althusser immediately knew what he had done, and ran out of the apartment screaming that he had strangled his wife.
Althusser was deemed unfit to stand trial, that the drugs and treatments had clouded his reason and made him not responsible for his actions. He was put under house arrest and wrote a tell-all memoir about it that was gruesome in detail and strange in its articulations, indicating he’d lost his mind. He died in 1990, just after the Soviet Union collapsed. There’s no trace of Althusser at the Rue d’Ulm. No plaques or notes. You can understand why. And maybe you can understand why it was hard to find his grave.
Viroflay
When I spent some time in Berlin a few years ago, it was fun to go to the cemetery where G.W.F Hegel and Herbert Marcuse were born. It adds so much depth to your understanding of the person and you can pay your respects to their memory and thought. I wanted to do the same with Althusser, but rather than a cemetery in the city where other famous people might be interred, I had to take an hour-long train ride west.
I found an old page reporting that he was buried at the veteran’s cemetery in the suburb of Viroflay. Althusser had fought and was a prisoner of war, perhaps this is why he’s buried there—though a few people I spoke to, when I told them this, still wondered why he was there.
After the train ride I walked 20 minutes through the suburb, then up a quiet road to the cemetery, a relatively small one in my experience but still with hundreds of graves. While the page had said Althusser was the most famous person buried in this cemetery, there were no signs pointing to his plot. After looking around I saw a terminal where you could enter someone’s name and get the grave number. Althusser is at number 238 in section 7 (in case you’re also looking and need to find this information). There was a numbered map of all the graves and, being a bit directionally challenged, I had a hard time finding it. But eventually I did.
Althusser is buried with his parents in this plot. I stood for a while, thinking of this man’s tumultuous life. I think I was mourning rather than experiencing melancholia. It was sad and awful and confusing. His life had been difficult, but also privileged, and he’d done something terrible, but he also wrote great philosophy that’s crucial for understanding school’s relationship with capitalism. I had spent years studying that philosophy and even now I apply it in my work on school finance.
Standing there, I realized that it was time to say goodbye to Althusser. So I put a pebble on the gravestone and took the train back to Paris.
Imec Archives
The final stop on my Althusser tour were the archives at Imec, in Caen, a 3.5 hour drive west of the city, where they keep all his files. I’d learned from another translator that you can stay the night at the archives, which are situated at an old abbey. They also feed you all three meals in a collective cafeteria where other scholars working and staying there eat. It sounded awesome. So I booked a night, rented a car, and went.
It didn’t disappoint. The abbey’s grounds have gardens and paths through little fields enclosed by ancient-looking walls. But the facilities are contemporary, the old blended magically with the new. I checked into my room, which was what I imagined a monk’s quarters might be like now, put down my stuff, and got to the archive itself, built into the old chapel on the abbey’s grounds.
As part of my reservation, I asked for a folio containing Althusser’s notes on his student’s book L'ecole, the one that I’d be translating. An archivist had prepared the folio and gave it to me. Sitting at one of the stations in the center of the chapel, I opened the folder to find Althusser’s own typed notes, giving his students detailed feedback on various chapters, going into great conceptual depth with their claims and helping them hammer out more careful articulations. It reminded me of the work that I do with doctoral students, leaving long comments in google docs or track changes. Except Althusser’s notes were done on a typewriter, with sections crossed out and additions made in the margins.
It was intimate, fascinating, and a little creepy to be holding the pages he wrote and edited and held himself. They were helpful in providing some context for the book, but not as helpful as I anticipated. I’d heard that he’d drafted one of the chapters of this book, but from the notes I don’t think that's true. He just read the drafts very carefully, as a teacher helping his students.
After a couple hours of reading and taking notes (you’re not allowed to scan or photograph archival material), I went to dinner and met some other French academics, following their conversation but not really able to participate (I can read French and understand when it’s spoken, but my speaking is horrendous). I was exhausted from the drive and went to my room.
In the dark, as I fell asleep, I felt haunted. I imagined Althusser’s ghost there in my room, floating around, confused about me and why I was there and also why he was there, what this place was and what we were all doing.
I knew it was in my head, but I also know it’s important to address fantasms directly, so in my thoughts I told him I’d done what I could and that I had to get on with my life and work, that I wasn’t sure there was much else I could do when it came to him specifically. He was unnerved but seemed to understand, evaporating as I fell asleep.
Mourning or melancholia?
Writing in 2000, Brown detailed the left's melancholia at the turn of the 21st century:
Certainly the losses, accountable and unaccountable, of the Left are many in our own time. The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and of the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labour and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism. And on the backs of these losses are still others: we are without a sense of international, and often even local, Left community; we are without conviction about the Truth of the social order; we are without a rich moral-political vision to guide and sustain political work. Thus we suffer with the sense not only of a lost movement but of a lost historical moment; we suffer with the sense not only of a lost theoretical and empirical coherence, but of a lost way of life and a lost course of pursuits.
Part of my sadness during the Althusser tour has to do with all this. It’s not the 20th century anymore, the socialist regimes have fallen, and the left is perpetually in a state of disarray. But right now we’re doing a bit better than Brown’s moment. There are left parties and movements wielding power in the UK, US, England, Spain, Brazil, Portugal, and elsewhere. It’s not much, but the DSA is alive and there are candidates getting elected to office, campaigns winning victories at local, state, and federal levels. A lot of young people are critical of capitalism, reading Marx, and participating in movements. There's never been more unionization and strikes in the US, particularly in the service sector. There’s also a thriving left mediasphere, and while there are debates and losses, there are also hints of coherence.
So I realized that my sadness on the Althusser tour wasn’t melancholic. I’m involved in campaigns and policy analyses, trying to help build up this inchoate left wing, using this newsletter as a space to figure out precisely what to change in education policy rather than pointlessly pine for some reified politics. Althusser’s life is just plain upsetting and this trip had been a mournful one, in both the upsetting and healing sense.