8 Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus

Aritra Bhattacharya

Introduction

 

In this module, we will go over the basic tenets of Althusser’s argument—his conceptualisation of the State; the difference between ideology in general as opposed to ideologies; the various types of ISAs and their changing nature; the role of ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in ensuring the reproduction of the relations of production; the process of subject formation in ideology; and the limitations of Althusser’s model.

 

Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was a French theorist and one of Europe’s leading intellectuals throughout the 1950s and 1960s. His essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (the ISA essay hereafter) has been one of the key texts in the social sciences and is important for the entry points it provides into understanding the process of formation of ‘subjects’ who conform to the expectations and demands set for them by the state.

 

The essay follows a pattern typical of “post-Marxist” thinkers, who worked with Marx’s ideas that still seem significant, and extended them in newer directions. Althusser himself was widely read in Freudian theory, as well as currents of structuralism and post-structuralism. All of these elements become visible as one reads the ISA essay.

 

In the ISA essay, Althusser addresses the question of how societies reproduce relations of production on the basis of which they function. This is an important question because, in the Marxist sense, relations of production are always relations of exploitation. How is it that relations of exploitation (production) are sustained over time, and despite ‘revolutions’, dominated groups often remain at the bottom of the table? How do the exploited continue to allow themselves to be exploited? In answering this question, Althusser develops the concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). In doing so, he modifies the Marxist theory of the State, adding ISAs as a distinct ‘arm’ of the State.

 

Let us begin by considering how Althusser develops his understanding of the modern capitalist state.

 

I.     The State and its apparatuses

 

The attempt to revise NCERT History textbooks while the NDA was in power at the Centre (1998-2004) might provide us with a useful illustration for discussing Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses. One might recall that the attempt to revise textbooks was carried out with the intent of correcting what the BJP saw as distortions introduced by Marxist historians who had come to dominate the social science academia since the 1970s. Through this exercise, the NDA also sought to highlight the roles of national leaders like Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, Sardar Patel and Lal Bahadur Shastri, supposedly ignored by the Congress.

 

That the effort to revise textbooks was criticised as an attempt to ‘saffronise History’ and was ultimately revoked once the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) assumed power in 2004 is perhaps besides the point here, in the context of this module. What is important is to keep in mind that the books that were sought to be revamped were part of the syllabi at the school-level—they were, in other words, part of what Althusser suggests is the core constituency of the Ideological State  Apparatuses—the educational apparatus. But what exactly are the Ideological State Apparatuses and what are their functions? In order to understand this, we must first concentrate on Althusser’s reworking of the classical Marxist notion of the State.

 

In the ISA essay, Althusser observes that, “The Marxist tradition is strict…the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a ‘machine’ of repression, which enables the ruling classes to ensure their domination over the working class [Althusser: 297].” He then goes on to outline the constituents of this “machine of repression” in the State apparatus: the police, the courts, the army, the prisons, the government, the administration. He says the State apparatus may survive ‘revolutions’ and collapses of State—a new dispensation merely takes over the running of this apparatus to suit its ends.

 

To the above, Althusser adds another dimension: the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). ISAs, he says, are clearly on the side of the (repressive) State apparatus, but must not be confused with it. In order to differentiate the two, Althusser uses the term Repressive State Apparatus (RSA) to refer to State Apparatus as in Marxist theory. He says that while RSAs function primarily through repression— punitive action against those who refuse to fall in line is very much part of RSAs—ISAs function primarily thorough ideology and only secondarily through repression. The key constituents of ISAs, according to Althusser, are:

 

–the religious ISA

–the educational ISA

–the family ISA

–the legal ISA

–the political ISA

–the trade-union ISA

–the communications ISA

–the cultural ISA

 

Despite the plurality of Ideological State Apparatuses, they are unified by the ideologies through which they function. In all the ISAs, the set of ideological discourses at work is always dominated by the ruling ideologies, which are the ideologies of the ruling classes of societies in which they have developed.

 

The role of the Repressive State Apparatus lies in securing by force the political conditions of the reproduction of relations of production, which in effect are relations of exploitation. For instance, in the Capitalist system, the police may detain a poor person who steals from a rich person, as the former has no right over the ‘hard-earned’ material possessions of the latter; the judiciary may then prosecute him, put him behind bars for several years.

 

ISAs, on the other hand, work behind this ‘shield’, to secure the reproduction of the relations of production. For instance, in the earlier example, ISAs, through lessons in morality and civics, would teach us not to steal, to respect the property of others, and to recognise that we have no rights over others’ properties even though they may possess much more than we do. It is apparent in the above examples that the ruling ideology is perpetuated through ISAs: in not taking away from the more rich, in being resigned to our poor status except attempting to change it through hard work, what is  ensured is that the relations of production—the relations between the exploited and the exploiters— remains intact.

 

Althusser considers the educational apparatus as the core of ISAs in the contemporary period; the educational apparatus has replaced the church of the medieval period in terms of many of its functions. In fact, while the church-family duo was the most important constituents of ISAs earlier, it has been replaced by the school-family duo in contemporary times. This is because the school ‘takes in’ children at their most impressionable age and subjects them to liberal doses of ruling ideology through subjects like history, civics, morals, philosophy etc. The school attempts to teach children ‘proper’ ways of behaviour, ways of talking, interacting, thinking and acting. The educational apparatus ‘ejects’ at every stage a group of individuals who are best suited to fulfil specific roles in capitalist society—at 16, most leave to become workers (they perform the role of the exploited, with a ‘highly developed’ ‘professional’ ‘ethical’ ‘civic’ ‘national’ and a-political consciousness); later, they leave to become lower and middle managers (they become, typically, the agents of exploitation, with an ability to give the workers orders and speak to them, ‘human relations’); yet later, they leave to become finance capitalists, managers, politicians and ‘professional ideologists’ (with the ability to give orders and enforce obedience ‘without discussion’)

1.

It will be wrong to assume, however, that ruling ideologies enjoy unfettered freedom in ISAs. Althusser notes that ISAs are the sites of (class) struggle, and it is not difficult to see why—ISAs, after all, are responsible for the formation of the ‘subject’ which lives the ideology in question through its practices (a discussion we will return to in detail later). In ensuring that a certain ideology makes its way into ISAs is to ensure that the all individuals who pass through the ISAs (everybody does) believes in that ideology, thereby ensuring the reproduction of the relations of production in keeping with that ideology. It is because of the crucial importance of ISAs that the church (the most powerful ideological apparatus) was the centre of all ‘revolutions’ at an earlier point in time, as evidenced during the Renaissance and Reformation. During those times, the church was the fulcrum around which a person’s life revolved. Gradually, the power of the church diminished, and specialised insitutions were formulated to fulfil the functions that were once the domain of the church.

 

Returning to our Indian example, it would not be wrong to suggest that today the school/education that is the primary location of struggle, as evidenced in the NDA’s attempt to revise History books. Through that effort, it could be argued, the NDA sought to make the ideology of Hindutva the backbone of the educational apparatus: this would ensure that the masses ‘ejected’ out of the apparatus would be ready to serve its interests, schooled in the discourse of Hindutva. The importance of the educational ISA is also borne out by the fact that entities like the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) have stressed on schools run by them. It is through their own schools that they sought to produce ‘subjects’ who would submit to the respective ideologies.

 

It is important to note here that the concept of ideology does not have a negative connotation. Ideologies might be positive or negative, depending on how we look at them. But it is not particular ideologies that Althusser is concerned with. Instead, his concept of ideology and its working in ISAs focusses on ideology in general.

II.   The contours of Ideology

 

Ideology is the way in which we understand our world. The stories that we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives are ideologies we live in—they are representations of the real that help us order our lives. They exist at the level of the common sense and are taken for granted. For instance, a businessman knows his life is a kind of competition, where he must be shrewd and intelligent to do well; a Christian thinks of life as a moral progression towards eternity.

 

Ideology has no history

 

Each one of such ideologies is marked by specific histories, specific struggles. Yet, Althusser concerns himself not with specific ideologies, but with ideology in general. This is because ideology has no History; in terms of structure and functioning, it the same throughout History, in its various manifestations. In that sense, ideology is omni-historical.

 

This conception of ideology is a departure from the Marxist connotation of ideology, present in The German Ideology, where ideology is pure illusion; an imaginary construction. Althusser, while speaking of the Marxian notion of ideology, likens it to the pre-Freudian notion of the dream. Before Freud, the dream was considered purely imaginary, empty, null and ‘arbitrarily stuck together’ (bricolage).

 

Marx’s notion of ideology resembles this bricolage; for Marx, ideology has no history of its own because it is constituted by the ‘day’s residues’, like a dream. For Marx, ideology has no history in the negative sense. For Althusser, on the other hand, ideology in general has no history in the positive sense—it has no history because it is omni-historcial. In this, Althusser likens his conception of ideology to the Freudian conception of the unconscious. Freud proposed the Freud’s proposition that the unconscious is eternal, i.e. that it has no history.

 

“If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, trans-historical and therefore immutable in form throughout the extent of history, I shall adopt Freud’s expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. And I add that I find this comparison theoretically justified by the fact that the eternity of the unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general,” writes Althusser [Althusse:229] .

 

Arriving at a precise notion of ideology in general is important for Althusser because this becomes the basis of his theory. Only ideology in general can help us theorise the workings if ISAs; in discussing particular ideologies, we will remain limited to descriptive theory. For Althusser, descriptive theory is the first phase of theory, and essentially a transitional one. For descriptive theory describes the situation as it is at one point in time. As such then, it is starting point, and one needs to develop the theory in a way that it goes beyond ‘description’.

 

Ideology=illusion/allusion

 

Like Marx, for Althusser too, ideology does not correspond to reality (in other words, it constitutes an illusion). Unlike Marx, however, ideology for Althusser makes an allusion to reality. Althusser says ideology makes an ‘allusion’ to historical reality while at the same time constituting an ‘illusion’ with   respect to that reality. It gives is a certain ‘knowledge’ and ‘recognition’ of our world, but at the same time, introduces us to its misrecognition.“What is represented in ideology is therefore not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations they live in,” writes Althusser.The task of ideology then is to sense mask our real conditions of existence through a representation of our imaginary relationship with the real conditions of existence. In ideology, one is never aware of one’s exploited of dominant status, for deprivation/ superiority is attributed to an imaginary construct. Consider the ideology that legitimised caste hierarchies: those at the bottom of the caste structure believed that their deprivation was a result of their ‘impure’ status, and owed to the fact that they had emerged from the feet of the creator God Brahma; while the purest Brahmins believed in their superiority as they had emerged from Brahma’s head. Note that in the Althusserian sense, everybody ‘lives in ideology’. It is not an instrumental discourse that the ruling classes/ groups conceive of in order to deceive the oppressed classes/ groups. Although a society’s ideology consists of the ideology of its dominant classes, all sections of the society must ‘believe in the myth’.Furthermore, the dominated classes can also produce their own ideologies, which may gradually become part of the society’s ideology, as various dominated groups are co-opted into the system. In this sense, therefore, ideology is a site for struggle. Through ideology, men do not represent their real conditions of existence to themselves; rather what they do is represent their relations to the real conditions of existence.

 

As the above example shows, ideology has a material existence, in the sense that it exists in an apparatus and its practices. Taking the example of the caste structure once again, the ideology of purity and pollution existed not merely in the consciousness of people, but in their day-to-day actions that were part of an elaborate set of rituals. Upper castes avoided touching/ being touched by lower castes, did not eat with lower castes, and considered marriage outside their caste groupings as polluting.

 

In fact, Althusser repeats, after Pascal: ‘Act as if you believe, pray, kneel down, and you shall believe,faith will arrive by itself’ [Althusser: 1995:239]. Writing in the introduction to Mapping Ideology2,

 

Slavoj says the implicit logic of Althusser’s argument is: ‘kneel down and you shall believe that you knelt down because of your belief—that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the ‘external’ ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation’ [Zizek:1994:8].

 

Zizek (1994) further delineates a similarity between Althusser and Michel Foucault; he says the Foucauldian counterparts to Ideological State Apparatuses are the disciplinary procedures that operate at the level of ‘micro-power’ and designate the point at which power inscribes itself into the body directly. However, Foucault never uses the term ‘ideology’ while speaking of these mechanisms of micro-power. He emphasises how power constitutes itself ‘from below’ and does not emanate from some unique summit (in the form of the Monarch or some other embodiment of Sovereignty).This summit, according to Foucault, emerges as the secondary effect of the plurality of micro-practices, of the complex network of their interrelations. ‘However, when he [Foucault] is compelled to display the concrete mechanism of this emergence, he resorts to the extremely suspect rhetoric of complexity, evoking the intricate network of lateral links, left and right, up and down . . . a clear case of patching up, since one can never arrive at Power this way,’ writes Zizek [Zizek:1994:9]. He says Althusser’s advantage over Foucault seems evident: ‘Althusser proceeds in exactly the opposite direction—from the very outset, he conceives these micro-procedures as parts of the ISA; that is to say, as mechanisms which, in order to be operative, to ‘seize’ the individual, always-already presuppose the massive presence of the state, the transferential relationship of the individual towards state power, or—in Althusser’s terms—towards the ideological big Other in whom the interpellation originates’ [ibid., 9].

 

That brings us to the other crucial aspect of Althusser’s conception of ISA: the notion of interpellation, or the fixing of subject positions.

 

III.  Interpellation and the subject

 

We have already mentioned that all of us ‘live in ideology’, and everybody believes in ideology. The free market economist believes in the ideology of the free market—in the promise of growth in urbanisation and industrialisation and the withdrawal of government from all functions save that as the facilitator for businesses—as does the daily wage labourer who migrates to the city for better prospects. The returns of this belief in ideology, however, is different for each group. This begs the following question: why would people continue to live in ideology even though it may be detrimental to their prospects? Why would the Dalit continue to believe in the ideology of purity and pollution, or why would the clerk in the office believe that he would never occupy the upper echelons of management because he lacks sufficient educational qualification?

 

Althusser says this is possible because ideology is crucial in the process of subject formation—a process that is part of the operation of ISAs. Ideological apparatuses constantly aid in the process of subject formation, and help create subjects who believe in the ideology. But how is this achieved? Althusser’s answer: through the act of interpellation or hailing.“Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects,” writes Althusser in the ISA essay [Althusser: 1995:229]. “Ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or transforms the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing.”He goes on to cite an example to show how the act of hailing constitutes the subject: A person (individual) walking on the road hears a cry, ‘Hey, you there!’ This is the everyday police hailing, hearing which the individual turns around. In the act of turning around, he becomes a ‘subject’, because he has recognised that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him. Through the act of hailing, the individual becomes a ‘subject’ in two ways, writes Luke Ferreter in ‘Althusser’ (2006:106): (we) become subjects in the philosophical sense – free and responsible centres of thought and action – and, in doing so, ensure that we remain subjects in the political sense – submissive to the ruling class.It is this submissive subject produced by the ISAs that ensures the reproduction of the relations of production. Experience shows that the hail hardly ever misses the person who is hailed. What takes

place here, on the street, seems to be outside ideology, and yet, in reality takes place in ideology. In other words, what takes place in ideology (the act of hailing or interpellation and the constitution of the subject, both at the same time) seems to take place outside ideology. This is why those who are in ideology believe themselves to be outside ideology.

 

Further, as ideology is without History, as it is eternal, Althusser (1995:245) says, “ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects.” In doing so, ISAs have always-already ensured that such ‘subjects’ are produced who ensure the reproduction of the relations of production even as they seek to reproduce themselves and their conditions of existence.

 

It could be argued, following Althusser, that modern capitalism, through its ISAs, interpellates individuals and creates ‘subjects’ out of them. These subjects identify themselves in ways that provide for the continuance of capitalist exploitation. ISAs serve capitalism by interpellating subjects within meaning systems that make them accept their exploitation.

 

 

IV. Questions of agency

 

Althusser’s conceptualisation of the subject is not without limitations. For, to turn around and answer the hail (interpellation) of the law is to grant the ideological apparatus the recognition that we occupy the place it has designated for us. The subject of ideology then is a mere puppet, conscious of beliefs produced by a set of practices over which it has no control. According to this schema, we exist as part of a mechanised reality, in which we are imprisoned in a web of rituals and ideology conceals from us our existence as ‘mindless automaton’. Althusser’s theory of ideology and subject formation denies any agency to the individual—immersed in a complex set of practices within the various ISAs, he becomes exactly what ideology wants to make of him. From this standpoint, it is difficult to see how ISAs may become the site of struggle, as Althusser insists they are.

 

In the ISA essay, Althusser says ISAs are “the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class   struggle.” He argues that since the class (or class alliance) in power cannot lay down the law in the  ISAs as easily as it can in the (repressive) State apparatus, “not only because the former ruling  classes are able to retain strong positions there for a long time, but also because the resistance of  the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the  utilisation of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.” However, he does not answer the crucial question: if subject positions are ‘fixed’ througinterpellation, how do the exploited classes find the wherewithal to express itself, to see through  ideology.

 

Further, Althusser’s argument that ISAs are the site of ‘bitter forms of class struggle’ assumes great importance when we examine Indian society. As has been argued, among others by Anand Teltumbde3 (2011), capitalism in India has built on previously existing divisions. Teltumbde provides examples of how caste has become substituted by class under capitalism—lower castes had been economically worse-off than the upper castes, and under capitalism, this division has become economised. We can see, therefore, how societies or ‘social formations’ comprise multiple interacting

 

structures—in case of India, instead of a purely capitalist class structure, we have elements of the earlier feudal casteist order, as well as vast numbers of people who exist as part of the informal sector. Following Althusser, these various groupings try to extert their influence on ISAs. Their influence in institutions like the family, religion and school is different. We therefore have a situation where an individual may be subject to several, often conflicting, instances of interpellation. How does one then account for the unity of ISAs, as Althusser posits?

 

Althusser’s interest in ideology as interpellation is shared by Roland Barthes. While writing in a different context about myths4, Barthes [2006:124-125] says: ‘‘For this interpellant speech is at the same time a frozen speech: at the moment of reaching me, it suspends itself, turns away and assumes the look of a generality: it stiffens, it makes itself look neutral and innocent5.” For Barthes, ideological interpellation takes place through a language that at the very moment of hailing an individual as its target suddenly repositions itself and speaks instead to a generic addressee, as if the personal trajectory of its call had been an illusion all along. Ideological language arrests us, “in both the physical and the legal sense of the term”.

 

Like Barthes, Althusser’s notion of interpellation also gets trapped in a language game; we must accept the rules of the language and its obviousness in order to be able to recognise ourselves. In the event that we may be made aware of the functioning of ideology, we may respond saying ‘That’s obvious’. Yet, the obviousness becomes obvious only with the utterance of those words. For Barthes and Althusser, the individual who becomes a subject is in a sense imprisoned by a discourse that may never speak to, for, or about it.

 

Further, as Judith Butler writes in The Psychic Life of Power, the “call” Althusser speaks of arrives severally and in implicit ways. Even if one were to accept that Althusser’s scene is allegorical, it is unclear what guarantees the fact that the individual would always-already turn around and be constituted as a subject. The turning around, for that matter, depends not only on the “voice” of the law, but also the responsiveness of the one hailed by the law. The turning around is not determined unilaterally of exclusively either by the law or the addressee—for although there would be no turning around without first having been hailed, there would also be no turning around without some readiness to turn. The question is why would the addressee turn around, when it involves accepting a certain guilt? For, let us remember that the call “Hey, you there!” in any situation elicits a turning around where one ascribes some wrongdoing and therefore guilt to oneself.

 

Butler says there must be something that may be gained despite the self-ascription of guilt. “The turn toward the law is not necessitated by the hailing; it is compelling, in a less than logical sense, because it promises identity,” she writes, adding “the readiness to accept guilt to gain a purchase on identity is linked to a highly religious scenario of a nominating call that comes from God and that constitutes the subject by appealing to a need for the law, an original guilt that the law promises to assuage through the conferral of identity”.

 

The theory of ideology here seems to be supported by a set of theological metaphors. Although Althusser introduces the Church as merely an example of interpellation at the end of the ISA essay, Butler contends that ideology in his terms cannot be thought except through the metaphorics of religious authority.

 

In the example of the Christian Religious Ideology, Althusser argues that the ‘subjects’ of the ideology

 

– Christians – are addressed or interpellated by the ISA of the Church. They are told that God exists, that He created them, shed His blood for them and tells them how they must behave in order to please Him. They are told that God became a human being like them, and that as human beings, they will become like God. It is through these terms that Christians understand themselves and act.

 

The act of interpellation in the Christian ideology is possible only because of the existence of an Absolute Subject, God. Within the Christian ISA, individuals become subjects when they are hailed by the Subject that precedes them.

 

Here we run into another problem, for Althusser argues all ideology ‘interpellates individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique and Absolute Subject’. It is difficult to see how, in other ideologies, a subject is posited that is ‘Absolute’ in the way that God is thought of as absolute in Christian theology.

 

In this module, we have dealt with a host of important concepts that have proved to be extremely useful in understanding the dynamics of a capitalist state as seen from a vantage point of a Marxist critique. We have looked at how Althusser has developed the critique of a modern capitalist state by bringing to the fore his concepts of RSA and ISA. Together these repressive and ideological apparatuses account for the continued reproduction of the modern state, under capitalism. Similarly, we have looked at how ideology functions as a critical tool that pervades the entire gamut of civil society institutions to produce a subject that is in keeping with the ideological requirements of the modern capitalist state. Further, Althusser introduces his concept of interpellation pointing to how subjects are created through the process of interpellation. It is through interpellation that the ideological apparatus is able to ensure the recognition that will occupy the place it has designated for us. If Althusser’s concept of the ISA and the RSA proved to have a decisive influence on Marxist thought in the sphere of modern capitalism, it was also critiqued by many for its mechanistic understanding of subject and agency, thereby ensuring that within the modern capitalist system, any attempt to understand individual and collective resistance would have to transcend the limitations of subject-agency as represented by the ideological state apparatus.

 

WEB LINKS

 

·      Cultural Theory: Althusser’s concept of Ideology , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz3YNMPMNzU

·      Marxists Archive, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/glossary.htm

·      On the Reproduction of Capitalism:Rereading Althusser, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMD75bNAGYo

·      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0gjy_dZQzY&list=PLug-vFp8R-f2XWBfuUIaG1uvdFjDg1g5y&index=46

·      Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophyon Althusser, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/althusser/

 

FURTHER READING

  • ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Louis Althusser (1989), Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, p170-186
  • The politics of culture: essays on ideology inFerretter, Luke (2006), Louis Althusser: Routledge Critical Thinkers, Taylor & Francis Routledge, p75-94
  • Ideology, Obviously in Mieszkowski, Jan (2006),Labors of Imagination: Aesthetics and Political Economy from Kant to Althusser, Fordham University Press, New York, p147-173
  • ‘Conscience Doth Make Subjects of Us All: Althusser’s Subjection’ inButler, Judith (1997), The Psychic
  • Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, p106-131
  • Barthes, Roland (1999), Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York.
  • AnandTeltumbde (2011), The Persistence of Caste: India’s Hidden Apartheid and the Khairlanji Murders, Zed Books
  • Introduction in Mapping Ideology, Edited by SlavojZizek, Verso, 1994
  • A great deal has been written on Louis Althusser and his theories. The best source of information on Althusser’s philosophy is his own published works, including Essays in