The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir [Paperback]

Louis Althusser (Author), Olivier Corpet (Author), Yann Moulier Boutang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1995

The Future Lasts Forever is the famous French philosopher Louis Althusser's memoir written during his years of confinement in a mental hospital after murdering his wife. Reminiscent to many readers of Strindberg's Diary of a Madman and Styron's Darkness Visible, The Future Lasts Forever is a profound yet subtle exercise in documenting madness from the inside. This paperback edition also includes Althusser's earlier autobiographical essay "The Facts," as well as a preface by Douglas Johnson, Emeritus Professor of French at London University.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

French philosopher Althusser's memoirs, written during his stay in a mental hospital after murdering his wife, offer to explain the roots of his madness.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Althusser (1918-90) made a minor mark in 20th-century French intellectual history with his teachings on Marxism. Outside the academy, he may be better known as the professor who murdered his wife and then spent time in the insane asylum rather than standing trial. The current volume brings together two pieces that are personal rather than philosophical: "The Future Lasts a Long Time" was written some years after his wife's death in 1980 but reaches back to detail Althusser's childhood and adolescence; "The Facts," written in 1976, covers that distant past more quickly and pithily. While these two memoirs are well presented, and the former does provide an interesting view of the murder, this publication does nothing to advance philosophical scholarship. Casual readers of contemporary biography may be interested.
- Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The; 1st trade paper printing edition (April 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565842782
• ISBN-13: 978-1565842786
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,059,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self-annihilation or self-apotheosis?, May 31, 2003

By 

"yogsothoth666" (Saturn VB) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (Paperback)

I like Althusser. He was the first to try to fit the esoteric Heidegger, as presented by Jean Hyppolite in Logic and Existence, together with Marx. There had been attempts (by Sartre and Henri Lefebvre) to put the explicit Heidegger together with Marx, but no one was buying it, since the German thinker disavowed humanism. Hence Althusser's rather bizarre (to contemporary eyes at least) claim that you need to READ Marx correctly, that is find all the esoteric truths in Capital, to have a revolution.

Althusser was a depressive all his life. His illness prevented him from entering into les evenements of 1968, where he might have actually done some good. But he was also a manic. His books have the sort of obsessive compulsive features you only find with people on amphetimines. Those who say that this memoir is just a depressive trying to commit suicide aren't taking Althusser as he was diagnosed. He was also capable of limitless affirmation of life.

And we find Althusser making some pretty huge affirmations in this book. He liked the USSR in the post-Stalin era. Since the people of Russia are so much worse off under the system that they have now (arguably the world is, both for their infamous Mafia and the lack of a check on US hegemony), this is probably not a bad thing. His argument as to how the people of the USSR really were free in every way except politics is specious (it's sort of like saying the people of the USSR were free in every way except the one that counts), but its very speciousness smacks of a manic affirmation.

He also says that he never had sex until he was 29. This apparently was because he was disgusted with sex. He says something like "We have bodies! And they have sex organs!" He went on to be quite the ladies man, even conquering women in front of his wife. Which means that he affirmed, like a good Deleuzian, life in all its ugly glory.

Then there's his last work on Machiavelli. Or is it his last work on himself? Machiavelli formalized the relations between king, nobility and people. Just as Althusser formalized Marx's discussions of class relations and structures in Reading Capital. The fact that he's pulled this off so convincingly in Machiavelli and Us, and the fact that the people who have made a career out of riding on his coattails totally missed it, implies to me that he successfully became-other/imperceptible. In the same way that both Bataille and Sartre missed the point of Genet means that Genet did successfully become-other (as per Derrida's Glas).

As a last point to consider, for those who see this book as just the sorry chronicle of someone who had better shut up before he gives the entire game away, look at the books he did claim to read. He read all three volumes of Marx's Theories of Surplus Value. I know of no one else who can make that claim. I barely made it half way through the Grundrisse before I gave up. Since he's so humble about his actual reading of Capital (didn't get past the first volume and didn't get the theory of fetishism in the first 50 pages), he probably really did read TSV.

It's true that after this book Althusser was shunned by French intellectuals. It was, as a French student of Badiou wrote, a form of social suicide. BUT that wasn't what Althusser intended to do with this book. Or not only that.

If you're a Marxist and you liked Althusser, you can always enjoy Etienne Balibar who has at last fitted together the esoteric Heidegger with Marx in his Marxism and Philosophy. That was what dear old crazy Louis was trying to do all along.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Peering into the Abyss, December 5, 2007

By 

Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (Paperback)

Althusser became one of the most respected and interesting philosophers of Marxism in France during the 1950's and 60's, which is no small accomplishment considering the fact that practically every intellectual was writing about Marx at the same time. In all honesty, I find his work to be of rather mixed value. I have found his structuralist interpretations of Capital to be extremely insightful, as well as his work on Marx's 'epistemological break,' though his Freudian and Lacanian readings of Marx suffer from the kind of overwrought intellectualizing that was fashionable at the time. However, this memoir is an extraordinary read. We are given painful descriptions of his struggle with bipolar disorder, culminating infamously with the murder of his wife during an hallucinatory episode. Althusser does not apologize for this terrible action, but he does attempt to explain it. He maintains that the killing of his wife was the manifestation of a kind of "suicide via a third party," if you will. For those who worry about the apparent morbidity of this material, the memoir also includes excellent commentary on his political involvements such as his work with the French Communist Party as well as reflections on the May uprising of 68. We are also provided wonderful reflections on private conversations with intellectual giants like Foucault. An excellent read.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dear Stalin: "Alas, ... [he is] no Rousseau", March 28, 2000

By 

B.J. Packett II (Annapolis, MD) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir (Paperback)

A review in New Republic by Tony Judt of Althusser's posthumous The Future Lasts Forever implements what might be called the standard reactionary reading of that "curious" autobiographical document. Judt was, at least initially, correct in refusing to read the text as a "Rousseau-like confession", although he claims, and not incidentally, that Althusser would have us read it as such. Curiously enough, however, Althusser cites the exact reason as Judt for encouraging readers to repress the inclination to read the memoir as his Rousseaudian "Confession": he is simply not up to the challenge, at least in the sense that he has no pretensions concerning originality and philosophical profundity. Rather than Rousseau, Althusser sounds more like a victim of a Stalinist inquisition: all he has to do is to confess his guilt, explain in vulgar psychologistic terms his aberrant psychoanalytic constitution. He would have been wise to adopt the Deleuzian stance of, "I have nothing to admit" - who cares if Althusser only studied Vol. 1 of Das Kapital? This would be the effective hystericization of Judt's position in his review. Thus, it is not that he overidentifies with Althusser, takes him too literally, but that he does not identify with him enough - that is, we must take Althusser at his word when he says, "Alas, I am no Rousseau".