From Free Life, Issue 17, January 1993
ISSN: 0260 5112

Are some writers and intellectuals wicked or mad and does this affect the value of what they have to say? Anglo-Saxon scholars have traditionally avoided the argumentum ad hominem. What people create, intellectually or artistically, has usually been separated from questions of their moral character. A few years ago Paul Johnson's Intellectuals drew some very hostile criticism for violating this convention, discerning as it did an unedifying contradiction between the rotten lives and the political and moral prescriptions of hany famous scholars and writers.

Louis Althusser's recently published autobiography, however, reinforces the opposite view that intellectual criticism is often not personal enough. Althusser's writings, advanced in the Engish-speaking countries by academics who often thereby made their reputations, played a major part in this country in the pathology of modern sociology, in particular the near destruction of sociology of education.

This influence did not stem from an illuminating clarity. On the contrary, Althusser's work is dense and forbidding, obscurantist to the point of nightmare, though with flashes of crystal-clear malice. For example, in hls famous essay on education and ideology, he claims that the formal separation of the private and public realms is "a bourgeois distinction". Hatred of civilisation resounds in such words. In the autobiography we find the forbidding claim that communisn, if it comes about, wi11 be the abolition of market relations. Althusser still holds that Marxism is a ship which can carry us across the shit (sic) of reality. These admissions are at least frank; we cannot say we have not been warned.

In fact it is reality against which such fanatics are in revolt, regardless of the human consequences, The abolition of markets has catastrophic results, as a vast evidence attests. Althusser hates the facts, exhibiting from first to last a necessary condition of madness: an obsessive refusal to confront reality. He stands squarely in a tradition in which dishonesty and fanaticism merge, in an amalgam which is often not easily separable from insanity. His hero Marx thought nothing of abandoning statistical series when they proved theoretically inconvenient, for example when real wages moved up rather than as expected down.

In Althusser's life insanity and evil intertwine. The Autobiography reveals such sustained wickedness that our pity for his suffering wanes. Madness was his mediun, as with many of his contacts, including the wife he murdered. An abiding mania, a fantasy he says devoured him, was that he did not exist. Alas, his ontological presence was all too insistent. He was cruel and vindictive, a self-confessed liar, cheat ancd scrooge, though spending a fortune on pyschoanalysis. He endlessly humiliated his wife, even naking love to his conquests in front of her. He stole for devilment, dividing one holiday in Brittany between scouring the beaches for women and shoplifting.

The autobiography also reveals a charlatan, a world-famous Marxist at a time when he did not know Marx's writings well. He admits ignorance even of the history of philosophy, an extraordinary confession for a professor at the Ecole Normale Suprieure, His bottomless obsession with his own tortured person connects, by inversion, with the brand of Marxism he espoused. He sought release from inner horror, or to gain power over others, or both, in a version of Marx even more dehumanising than Marx's own, in which real persons, whom Althusser could not abide, vanish entirely in favour of bloodless abstractions.

Althusser was not, however, at all an isolated figure, The three most influential French Marxists since the Second World War have been Poulantzas, Althusser himself and Sartre. The first, who was paranoic, killed himself. The second killed his wife, and the third died in terror and degradation, his abiding legacy his contribution to today's destructive Third Worldism. Sartre too felt threatened by reality, often imagining he was pursued by crayfish. Nor is it only French theoretical Marxism which manifests this social projection of interior pain and misanthropy. Marx himself was a prime architect of the "hermeneutics of suspicion", the revolt against the world, the insistence that nothing is as it seems, that beneath all surfaces lie sinister, hidden powers. The proper vocabulary for such a disposition is unclear. There is no doubt, however, about the pathologies into which it merges: paranoia, megalomania, manic- depression.

It is hard to disagree with Solzhenitsin that Stalin was a terror-struck paranoic. Castro's marathon broadcasts are part of a wider manifest megalomania. Guevara's Sartre-like, bloodthirsty sentimentality, links with a seemingly ubiquitous tendency of Marxist movements to murder and chaos. It all suggests a pathology as ready for terrorism or despotic politics as for "philosophical" activity. Nor is Marxism proper the whole story, which concerns a wider anti-nomianism, especially apparent till recently in France. Some people, driven by discord within, seek to destroy the order without. Every cultural and moral canon must be overturned. So many celebrated Marxisant scholars are now known - soon after their deaths - to have shared Althusser's moral wilderness. Barthes and his rent-boys, Foucault with his violent homosexualism, were intellectual outragers and disrupters, their disreputable lives all of a piece with their intellectual attacks on tradition, their assault on the "bourgeois order", to use Sartre's impoverished coterm for civilisation itself. Nor does it put one on Derrida's side to learn that Althusser thought him the greatest modern French philosopher. Althusser and his friends and followers in the free countries have sought to overturn the art and wisdom of the ages. Their attempts to destroy literature and thought cannot be separated from their personal moral sickness.

Glaring intemittently through the ugly tale, is the long-standing moral bankruptcy of the French Communist Party. Althusser comes back repeatedly to this supine arm of the old Soviet Foreign Office, with its bullying of members, its internal squabbles and empty debates. Only the most perverse of people could have stayed with it through all its slavish adherence to Moscow. Althusser himself never abandoned either the Party or the Utopian fantasy. Indeed, as we ponder the unpleasant reality of France's radical intellectuals, we might usefully distinguish between the disenchanted mainstream, lodged despairingly in the common gutter, and the minority, perhaps even more deranged, who still thought they were looking at the stars.

Dennis O'Keeffe