18

The theory of ideology and the

theory of the unconscious
Pascale Gillot
I
n Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Althusser claims that he intends to propound
a theory of Ideology in general, in the same sense that Freud propounded, at the turn of
the twentieth century, a theory of the Unconscious.
1
Such a theory of Ideology is said to be
a general theory, in contradistinction with what would be a theory of ideologies, depending
on the particular imaginary formations belonging to the various societies in the course of
history. It means that Ideology in general is considered through its omnihistoric reality, what
Althusser calls its eternity, that it is endowed as such with a specic reality and universal
laws, representing its own causal effectivity. It also entails an important renewal of the
traditional topographical representation, in Marx, of the relation between infrastructure and
superstructure: the latter being composed, according to the Preface to the Contribution to The
Critique of Political Economy,
2
of two elements: the political-legal sphere (the states institu-
tions) and the ideology itself, identied with the realm of conscious representations (ideas,
beliefs, moral norms, philosophy, religion, and so on). In particular, the Althusserian insistence
upon the limits of the Marxian metaphor of the edice (the topography, or topique) leads to a
specic and new reading of traditional notions such as the determination in the last instance
(of superstructure by infrastructure), dened as a determination in the last instance alone, or
the relative autonomy of superstructure.
3

The omni-historical reality, or necessity, of ideology, its fundamental irreducibility, is due to
the fact that each form of society, whatever it may be even a communist society, that would
have got rid of the mechanisms of exploitation generates or secrets away its system of
representations, ideas, beliefs: an imaginary (complex, doubly speculary) relation to reality.
For, as already established in For Marx, ideology is the necessary element in which the life of
human societies takes place, and therefore constitutes an essential structure in the historical
life of societies in general.
4
According to Althusser, this structural necessity, neglected in
traditional Marxist studies, must on the contrary be recognised and understood. Thus he is led
to a materialism of the imaginary. Following a Spinozistic path (the theory of the First Level
of Knowledge in Ethica), such a materialism rejects the assimilation of ideology to a simple
kind of error or ignorance
5
, that is, to a mere reection or echo of the real life identied
290 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
with the sphere of production, infrastructure. It claims that its specic or material reality, far
from being identical to the illusory realm of conscious representations, is expressed by the
unconscious structures that found, in every human society, the ideas, beliefs and states of
mind of the individuals. Indeed, the Althusserian denition of Ideology, as expounded in early
works like For Marx, insists on its systematicity, which appears to be linked to its own causal
effectivity: to its own logique, in Althusserian terminology, . . . an ideology is a system (with its
own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the
case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.
6
Such a characterisation of the systematicity of the imaginary obviously means an important
inection in the conceptualisation of ideology: it is no longer the arbitrary and fantastic realm
of consciousness. Particularly signicant, in this respect, is Althussers reactivation and philo-
sophical reworking of the original Marxian statement, ideology has no history. In the plainly
positivist context in which The German Ideology is inserted, this expression would simply
mean that ideology, just like metaphysics, has no reality of its own, and lacks internal causality.
7

In a word, ideology is dened as an imaginary construction, just like dream was by the authors
before Freud: that is, as a nonsensical phenomenon arbitrarily built up from diurnal practices.
The very comparison between ideology and dream is undoubtedly strategic, at this point, since
it authorises Althusser to renew the Copernican Revolution of the Traumdeutung. Just as the
Freudian perspective considers dreams to be endowed with a specic logic and causality, the
very causality inherent to the Unconscious as system, so too must ideology, far from consti-
tuting a ghostly universe, or even the real world upside-down, be understood through its own
causality and systematicity.
That is why the Marxian assertion, ideology has no history, becomes a positive thesis
in the Althusserian shift: in such a specic causality and autonomous reality consists the
non-historicity, namely the eternity of ideology, grasped in its new, non-mechanistic denition:
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 Freuds
expression word for word, and write ideology is eternal, exactly like the unconscious. And
I add that I nd this comparison theoretically justied by the fact that the eternity of the
unconscious is not unrelated to the eternity of ideology in general.
8

Its conceptual relation to the dream in the Freudian understanding, and to the Unconscious,
implies that ideology is endowed with an effectivity, as might be conceived through a
comparison with the dream-work rst theorised in the Traumdeutung. In Chapters Six and
Seven of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud gives a systematic account for the particular
intelligibility of the dream. It involves the conceptualisation of the process leading from the
latent thoughts to the manifest content, namely the primary process, which is said to be
specic to the Unconscious system (Ucs), and consists of two main devices: condensation
and displacement.
9
Besides condensation and displacement, which play a fundamental
role in the dream-work, Freud lists other characteristics linked to the primary process:
absence of negation or doubt, indifference to the laws of conscious thought (the principle of
non-contradiction), and timelessness.
10
But these characteristics do not imply that unconscious
phenomena, such as the dream, are deprived of any logic. On the contrary, this Unconscious
(Ucs) logic is quite specic and autonomous, and forms a system. Besides, the characteristic
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 291
timelessness at work in the Ucs system, closely related to the indestructibility of desire (in
particular the infantile desire at the very source of dream-activity), is irreducible to the linear
temporality inherent to the Preconscious (Pcs) and Conscious (Cs) systems.
This conceptualisation of Unconscious causality may therefore throw a new light on the
eternity of ideology. Eternity means, of course, necessity, but also refers to a specic sort
of causality, a structural causality, as stated at the time of Reading Capital.
11
This structural
causality implies the effectivity of a structure (Ideology/Unconscious) upon its elements, the
structure being nothing outside its effects, but also, according Althussers vocabulary, the
effectivity of an absent cause: such an absence being due not to the supposed exteriority
of the structure-cause with respect to its elements-effects, but rather, on the contrary, to its
very interiority, or immanence, to its own effects. The structural causality implicitly at work
in Marxs texts has two sources: Spinoza (the concept of immanent causality in the rst part
of the Ethics), and, quite remarkably, Lacan himself (as read by Jacques-Alain Miller), having
developed the concept of a metonymic causality, a term which refers to Lacans under-
standing of the Freudian dream-work and primary process through the categories of metaphor
and metonymy.
12
One may then postulate, as Michel Pcheux did, that the articulation between
Ideology and Unconscious, although incomplete in Althussers original perspective, never-
theless lies in a crucial homology between the structural causality implied in the formations of
the Unconscious (dream, lapsus, neurotic symptoms. . .) and the structural causality involved
in ideological effects (the obviousness of being a subject, or the subject-effect) character-
istic of any social formation. According to Pcheux, what these two structures, Unconscious
and Ideology, have in common is precisely their own dissimulation (as absent causes) within
their very functioning, such a dissimulation being the condition of the so-called subjective
obviousnesses by which the subject is constituted.
13
This renewed, anti-positivist conceptualisation of ideology, as the crucial detour by
psychoanalysis and the Freudian theory of the Unconscious demonstrates, furthermore
involves an obvious but nevertheless strategic consequence. Indeed, it leads to a radical break
with the traditional Marxian equivalence between Ideology and Consciousness or Conscious
Representation. In Marx, particularly in The German Ideology, the nothingness of ideology,
its non-effectivity, seemed to be directly proportional to its identication with Consciousness.
Thus the Marxian critique of the constitutive illusions of consciousness, implied by the
rejection of idealist theories of history, meant ipso facto a disqualication of ideology itself, as
part of a superstructure determined by the infrastructure real life as a certain (mechanistic)
reading of the Marxian topique shows. However, the Althusserian rupture with this traditional
conceptual equivalence between ideology and consciousness (or conscious representations),
entails a remarkable re-evaluation of the powers of ideology; just as, in the Freudian eld,
the refusal of the classic identication of psychism with the sphere of conscious thinking
entailed the epistemological re-evaluation of the dream, thus reassigned to the logic of the
Unconscious system.
Such a theoretical rupture, one must add, is already obvious in For Marx, when Althusser
afrms, against the traditional inscription of ideology within the region of consciousness,
that
In truth, ideology has very little to do with consciousness, even supposing this term to have
an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a
292 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
reected form (as in pre-Marxist philosophy) . . . [I]deology is a matter of the lived relation
between men and their world. This relation, that only appears as conscious on condition that
it is unconscious, in the same way only seems to be simple on condition that it is complex,
that it is not a simple relation but a relation between relations, a second degree relation.
14

Such a conceptual disqualication of the category of Consciousness entails another decisive
consequence: namely, the complete rethinking of what the I and the Subject are, against the
mythology of an hegemonic, transparent and self-knowing subjectivity.
Interpellation, subjectivation and subjection
Althussers original theory of ideology appears to be constitutively linked to the topic of subject
and subjective identity, since the very notion of interpellation, namely interpellation-as-subject
[interpellation en sujet] stands at its core.
15
The axiom, Ideology Interpellates Individuals as
Subjects
16
, underlines the main function of ideology considered in its Althusserian denition:
that is, the constitution of individuals as subjects, the subjectivation-process, through the
mechanism of interpellation. Indeed, if there is no ideology except by the subject and for
subjects, one must admit a particularly intricate relation between subject and ideology. It
is necessary to admit some kind of double implication at this level: thus the problematic of
subjectivity and subjective identity is now reassigned to the new theoretical framework repre-
sented by the materialism of the imaginary, and the claim about the materiality of ideology,
entailed by the famous Althusserian concept of the ideological state-apparatus.
17
The very
materiality of ideology, the materiality of the imaginary, implied in the formula Ideology has
a material existence implies that ideology, conscious representations, beliefs, and so on, do
not exist outside an apparatus and its practices, as against the ideological notion of ideology,
which asserts the prior spiritual existence of such representations in the subjects mind, as
a cause of his actions. On the contrary, the ideas of an individual are his material actions
inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves dened by
the material ideological state-apparatus from which the ideas of that subject derive.
18
Hence the crucial reference, in Althussers text, to Pascals famous analysis of the social
ritual of prayer. In Fragment 233 of the Penses, in the context of the demonstration of the pari
(wager), Pascal seems to propound an extraordinary inversion of the ideological explanation of
the order of things, namely, of the causal link between social material practices and conscious
representations. Faith, religious belief, appears to be derived from the subjects gestures and
bodily inscription within a social code, namely the prayer, the act of kneeling down, taking
the holy water, attending the Mass, and so on, such that the spiritual account for the link
between mental inner life and bodily action within social institutions is invalidated. However,
the Althusserian claim regarding the materiality of ideology should not be conceived (no more
than the Pascalian analysis just mentioned) in a positivist or mechanistic way, which would
imply some automatic cause-to-effect relationship between bodily action and mental activity.
First of all, this bodily action, or gesture, is socially inscribed, such that the material practice
at issue cannot be reduced to an individual, purely physical action, only explicable through the
mechanical laws of motion and rest. The materiality at issue, here, is not that of a paving stone
or a rie.
19

THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 293
Second, as the statement regarding an identity between the individuals ideas and his
actions demonstrates, the epistemological model at stake here is not causal consequen-
tiality between body and mind but rather the Spinozistic model of a strict simultaneity
between mental events and bodily events.
20
Thus the materialism of the imaginary, which
Althusser borrows from Spinoza, does not seem to imply the secondary or epiphenomenal
character of mental states, representations and subjective life. Rather and the claim seems
to be already at work in the Pascalian text, through the importance afforded to the concept
of social practice
21
this non-mechanistic materialism, far from being reductionist or even
behaviourist, admits the effectivity of mental activity and subjectivity, while asserting its
always-already social and public existence. What this habitus model refutes, rather, is the
traditional mentalist framework according to which representations, ideas, beliefs, and so on
rst exist in the individual mind, in an inner and private realm, and are then expressed and
externalised in the social-public world. In this respect, the habitus model would imply the
disqualication of what Gilbert Ryle called the antithesis of inner and outer, an antithesis that
would, indeed, represent the core of the Cartesian doctrine as to the relationship between
mind and world.
22
Generally speaking, the Spinozistic-Althusserian epistemological invalidation of the
interiority/exteriority model of understanding the connection between representations and
(socially-determined) actions is of strategic importance. It undermines the alleged necessity
of explaining to put it in the terms of Althusserian theory the transition from ideological
state-apparatuses to the psychic life of the interpellated subject. Indeed, the reality of the
ideological state-apparatuses is no more external than the subjectivity of the interpellated
subject is internal, and the problem of knowing how ideological state-apparatuses might be
internalised by the ideological subject; that is, following Slavoj ieks criticism, the problem
that accounting, in the Althusserian theory of interpellation, for the subjectivation- or subjec-
tivisation- process, might be founded upon some misleading premisses.
23
Be that as it may, the subject, in its Althusserian denition, is explicitly dened as the
constitutive category of all ideology. Since ideology is eternal, so too should be the category
of subject, despite, one must add, its privileged link to bourgeois ideology and early-modern
philosophy. It is, therefore, no longer, or at least not only, an historically-determined category,
that could only have emerged in the seventeenth century; rather, it is now endowed with
some kind of eternity, the very eternity of ideology itself. Eternity, here, means some sort
of conceptual necessity, which seems to imply the impossibility of getting rid of the category
of subject. As far as this conceptual necessity is concerned, the latter category appears to be
quite different from other ideological categories, such as, for example, the category of man.
Althussers theoretical anti-humanism and anti-psychologism, consequently, do not imply the
rejection of the very notion of subject or subjectivity. Here lies the particular character of the
Althusserian critique regarding the philosophy of consciousness and of subject, which does
not lead to the complete abandon of the concept of subject, but rather to its radical re-elabo-
ration: in this case it implies, in appearance at least, a complete inversion of the classical,
Cartesian understanding of the thinking I and of its main characteristics.
In Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (IISA), we may read the well-known formulas
that establish the Althusserian theory of interpellation, such as ideology has always-already
interpellated individuals as subjects, or individuals are always-already subjects.
24
These state-
ments suggest a few remarks for the purpose of our analysis.
294 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
First of all, the constitution-as-subject is essentially founded on the universal interpel-
lation-mechanism, which is dened as the fundamental mechanism of ideology. To become
a subject means, in this respect, to be hailed or interpellated as such. The Althusserian
theoretical theatre of being hailed by the police (Hey, you there!), enforces the unorthodox
view as regards the tradition of early-modern philosophy according to which the consti-
tution-as-subject cannot be conceived other than as a fundamental subjection-process.
Subjects are always-already hailed (in the ideological sphere) namely, subjected insofar as
such an interpellation-mechanism does not take place within a temporal frame, but is always-
already at work; just as individuals, strictly speaking, are always-already summoned to be
subjects, and do not become subjects in that sense.
25
The absence of temporal succession
is presented as a consequence of the very necessity of the subjection-subjectivation process,
since the human, historical world is by denition an ideological one, since ideology, whatever
forms it might take, constitutes the element in which every human individual, even before
being born, lives and acts. Indeed, Althusser species: Thus ideology hails or interpellates
individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which
I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated
individuals as subjects . . .
26
It seems, then, that at this point we encounter the famous circularity problem supposedly
at work within the Althusserian theory of interpellation, as emphasised by many authors.
27
If
interpellation (being hailed by the police, or the divine performative call that the Subject-God
exerts upon the subject in the example of religious ideology in IISA) constitutes the subject
as subject, then on the other hand it appears that the addressee of such an interpellation, the
individual who turns round and responds to the call, recognises himself as its destinataire
(addressee), as though the subject had always-already existed, even before being hailed. Yet,
the widespread hypothesis of a Mnchhausen effect in the Althusserian theory of subjecti-
vation appears to leave aside two signicant theses involved in such a theory.
First, as Michel Pcheux claries, such a Mnchhausen effect regards the subject only in
its idealist denition as primary subject: it denes the subjective illusion of being a constituting
subject. In the Althusserian theory, on the contrary, the subject is understood as a necessary
effect of the preconstructed [un effet de prconstruit], that is, as a paradoxical causa sui,
produced as a result. This contradiction is, indeed, fundamental in the constitution of the
subject as other than himself, namely as a speaking subject necessarily divided between the
subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enunciated, in reference to the Lacanian
theory explicitly mentioned by Pcheux that claims that the subject is by denition grasped
into the symbolic network of shifting effects, and into the signier process.
28
The paradox
of constitution-into-subject seems to affect the imaginary ego more than it does the subject
inscribed into the Symbolic order in its Lacanian acceptance.
Second, the circularity problem emerges only in the eld of a problematic of the origin: when
was the subject constituted?; what is prior to what; subject, or interpellation?; and so on. Yet
this problematic of the origin is rejected by Althusser, precisely through the proposed short-
circuit between subjective identity and interpellation. It may be that Althusser aims, through
such a short-circuit device, to show that the question of the origin of the subject has no sense,
for the subject cannot stand for its own origin [causa sui] independently of the ideological-
symbolic interpellation, for it has always-already existed as inscribed into the Symbolic order,
as a constituted subject. In the last instance, the circularity of the subjectivation-process draws
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 295
back to the circularity of the Symbolic order itself, or the Law of Culture described in the
article Freud and Lacan.
29
The Law of Culture, according to Althusser, who refers to Lacan,
necessarily precedes itself, according to a retroactiveness structure which indicates that it is
the very condition for humanisation-subjectivation, and that it has no outside, no origin and
no end, just like ideology itself. Thus, ultimately, it is senseless to ask ourselves when human
society began to exist, or to search for an origin of society, since society, or culture, does not
emerge from any prior state of nature. This absence of transition or continuity between culture
and nature, human order and non-human order, was already demonstrated by Rousseau in
the Discours sur lorigine et les fondements de lingalit parmi les hommes: a reference
that constitutes, together with the writings of Lacan in the 1950s, an important source for
the Althusserian understanding of ideology and the Law of Culture. Such a Rousseauist,
anti-contractualist theory is particularly important as regards the Althusserian claim that the
fundamental problem lies not in knowing how the little human being will transform itself as
a subject, for, in reality, it is Culture itself that constantly precedes itself, absorbing what will
become a human subject.
30
The subjective recognition, the obviousness of being a free, unique, irreplaceable
subject, thus presupposes some fundamental misrecognition, which is the other name for
this (unknowing) submission to ideology.
31
This recognition of ones subjective identity may
be seen, indeed, as the elementary ideological effect: it occurs only on the terrain of this
misrecognition, which is its necessary corollary: that is, the very ignorance of the fact that it is,
precisely, an ideological effect; not the effect of a free, transparent will, but rather the effect
of determined interpellation and subjection mechanism that always operates inside ideology.
In this respect, the limits of this recognition of oneself-as-subject could be identied with the
very limits of consciousness itself. The misrecognition seems to concern, rst and foremost,
the very ideological nature of this self-recognition as subject. It also concerns, simultaneously,
the necessity of such a recognition, disguised by a misleading belief in a free or voluntary
acceptance, since (almost) all of us are always-already subjects.
The recognition/misrecognition structure, then, insofar as it reveals the very limits and insuf-
ciencies of Consciousness in the subjective life and existence of individuals, may ultimately
be related to the notion of a decentred subject, a subject that recognises itself-as-subject
through its subjection to the Absolute Subject, God, at the centre. This is shown through the
privileged example of religious ideology in IISA, and particularly the interpellation of Moses
by God in the Exodus. Hence the apparently anti-Cartesian formula: There are no subjects
except by and for their subjection.
32
In that double respect, the Althusserian approach to
subjectivity appears to be strongly indebted to the Lacanian understanding of the Subject (as
the Subject of the Unconscious), which entails its distinction from the imaginary dimension of
the ego [moi]. The recognition/misrecognition structure, and the notion of a decentred subject,
indeed stand at the core of Lacans perspective. They serve as the basis for the author of the
crits in his reactivation and extension of the Freudian Ichspaltung. From the early 1960s,
Althusser considered Lacans work to be of very great importance, and the author of For Marx,
who helped Lacan to hold his seminar at the cole Normale Suprieure from 1964 onwards,
repeatedly acknowledged his debt to the latter.
33
He thus wrote a decisive paper, Freud and
Lacan which in several crucial aspects anticipates the claims about ideology and interpellation-
as-subject developed in IISA. Most of the analyses in IISA regarding the subjectivation-process,
and the relationship between subjectivation and subjection presupposed by the concept of
296 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
interpellation, were prepared in 1964. Rather signicantly, in the French edition of 1976, the
text of IISA is preceded by Freud and Lacan;
34
and the nal lines of Freud and Lacan are
dedicated to the topic of ideology, insofar as it deals with the structure de la mconnaissance,
the structure of misrecognition.
The Law of Culture and the Symbolic order:
Althusser and Lacan
In the 1970 text IISA, the very ideological necessity for the individual to be a subject, at stake
in the claim that individuals are always-already subjects, is given a vitally-important illustration,
namely the social rituals that surround the expectation of a birth. Even before being born, the
child is pre-appointed to become a subject, submitted to the primacy of this fundamental
ideological constraint, embedded, for example, in the familial ideological state-apparatus. The
explicit reference to Freud, who would have shown, in the study of such birth-rituals, that
individuals are always abstract with respect to the subjects they always-already are, here
plays a strategic role. Thus, following Althusser, it is certain in advance that [the unborn child]
will bear its Fathers Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable. Before
its birth, the child is therefore always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the
specic familial ideological conguration in which it is expected once it has been conceived.
35
This analysis of the forced subjectivation of the child is remarkably indebted to psycho-
analytical theory. It is linked, indeed, to the Freudian theory of the childs development,
which addresses the pre-genital and genital stages of sexuality under the grip of the
Unconscious. It marks, then, the causal effectivity of the Unconscious or Symbolic order in the
subjectivation-process, contrary to any kind of biological reading of the Freudian theory of the
stages in the childs development. Thus, one might say, the grip of the Unconscious and the
grip of Ideology (the ideological constraint) could be seen as theoretically equivalent at this
level (being appointed as a subject). Once again, what seems to be at work, here, is psycho-
analytical theory considered as radically distinct from any sort of psychologism or biologism,
that is, principally, through its understanding as propounded by Lacan in the 1950s and 1960s.
Such a hypothesis, moreover, may be conrmed by the Althusserian reference to the Fathers
name, the Lacanian concept related to the topic of the Symbolic order.
As a matter of fact, this same question of the childs development and of its humanisation
under the grip of the Law of Culture, insofar as it involves the question of subjectivation
as addressed through a psychoanalytical framework, represents the theoretical object of a
previous text published by Althusser in 19645, under the title Freud et Lacan.
36
The main
question discussed in this article is that related to the specic object of psychoanalysis, the
epistemological issue at stake being the scientic status of psychoanalysis and its differen-
tiation from other disciplines, such as biology or psychology of course, but also from human
sciences such as history, sociology, anthropology, and even philosophy. The recourse to the
Lacanian return to Freud appears, then, to be necessary and strategic in this regard, for it
represents the most systematic attempt to depsychologise psychoanalysis (as demonstrated,
among other things, by the ght against the theoreticians of ego psychology), and to dene
in a new and adequate framework, as represented in particular by modern linguistics, the
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 297
specic scienticity of psychoanalysis, opened up by Freuds revolutionary discovery of the
Unconscious.
The very object of psychoanalysis, then, Althusser claims, is nothing but the Unconscious
itself, studied more particularly through its effects on the coercive process of humanisation-
subjectivation exerted on the small child, namely the extraordinary adventure which from birth
to the liquidation of the Oedipal phase transforms a small animal conceived by a man and a
woman into a small human child.
37
This process of humanisation, by which the new-born infant, the small animal, is (always-
already) transformed into a human child, under the necessary grip of human culture, is
synonymous with a process of subjectivation. At the same time, it is characterised as a
war, the implacable war fought by human culture to force the newborn child to submit to
the Law of Culture. Such a war is evoked in a striking passage from Freud and Lacan: this
war consists, for humanity, of bearing children as culture in human culture: a war which is
continually declared in each of its sons.
38
To become human, therefore, means to become a
subject, subjected to human culture, a thesis that is later entailed in the assertion in IISA that
man is an ideological animal by nature.
39
Psychoanalysis, then, deals with the effects of this constrained process, since this consti-
tutive subjection and coercion are exerted by what Althusser calls the Law of Culture: this is
an explicit adoption of the Lacanian concept of Symbolic order, designating the effects of the
Unconscious itself on human subjects. The necessary antecedence of Law in the constitution
of human subjectivity, dened as an effect of subjection, is a claim already developed by Lacan.
According to the Althusserian reading, Lacan demonstrates the effectiveness of the Order,
the Law, that has been lying in wait for each infant born since before his birth, and seizes him
before his rst cry, assigning to him his place and role, and hence his xed destination . . . This
is the beginning, and has always been the beginning, even where there is no living father, of
the ofcial presence of the Father (who is Law), hence of the Order of the human signier, i.e.
of the Law of Culture . . .
40
The overwhelming presence of the Father, here, refers to the same Lacanian concept of
the Fathers name that is, the support of the symbolic function a concept to which the
1970 text IISA directly alluded. The primacy of the Unconscious itself in human existence, the
Unconscious redened by Lacan through its necessary relationship to Language (the Others
discourse, the discourse of the Unconscious), can then be understood as the primacy of
the Symbolic order; the Law being, for the author of The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis, identical to a Language order.
41

The Symbolic order and its effects omnipresent in Freud and Lacan, reactivated by
Althusser under the name of the Law of Culture, and thus exported and used to understand
the very functioning of ideology, was already at the core of Lacans writings in the 1950s. It
plays a strategic function, of course, in the Lacanian linguistic and structuralist approach to
the Unconscious, as shown for example by the use and extension of the Jakobsonian deni-
tions of metaphor and metonymy to the study of condensation and displacement in the
Freudian theory of dream-work.
42
Symbolic order, in Lacans perspective, is clearly the mark of
the necessary grip of language on man; thus the human individual is constitutively submitted
or subjected, before his birth and after his death, to the Symbolic order, to the Unconscious
structured like a language,
43
and to its effectivity as far as subjectivity and subjective condition
are concerned. The return to Freud, in this sense, aims at underlining the radicality of Freuds
298 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
discovery, which was that of the eld of the effects, in mans nature, of his relations to the
symbolic order and the fact that their meaning goes all the way back to the most radical
instances of symbolization in being.
The taking-into-account of such a discovery implies then the recognition of man as a
paradoxical symbolic animal: Symbols in fact envelop the life of man with a network so total
that they join together those who are going to engender him by bone and esh before he
comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth, along with the gifts of the stars, if
not the gift of the fairies, the shape of his destiny; so total that they provide the words that will
make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place
where he is not yet and beyond his very death.
44
The transliteration of the Lacanian text by Althusser in his 19645 article is remarkable. The
reference to psychoanalytical theory appears to be crucial for the linking between the three
processes characteristic of human culture (that is, ideology itself): humanisation, subjecti-
vation and subjection. The Law of Culture denes the power of the Symbolic order in the
human eld, which is the specic realm of ideology in its Althusserian conceptualisation.
The elusive subject: between
Symbolic and Imaginary orders
The Althusserian return to Marx is nourished, according to Althussers own numerous state-
ments, by the Lacanian return to Freud. More precisely, insofar as our topic is concerned, the
Lacanian inuence upon the Althusserian approach to ideology and subjectivity can be particu-
larly found and analysed through two strategic claims about the nature of the I, the Subject
of the Unconscious, namely the recognition/misrecognition structure, and the concept of a
decentred subject.
For Althusser, as we have seen, the constitution of the subject takes place within the
general framework of a recognition/misrecognition structure, which he has actually borrowed,
as he himself acknowledges, from Lacan.
45
The recognition/misrecognition structure plays a
fundamental role in the Lacanian explanation of the constitution of subjective identity, from
The Mirror Stage of 1949, a text that introduces the function of misrecognition, to later texts
written in the 1960s, asserting the ambiguity of un mconnatre essentiel au me connatre.
46
With such a claim, Lacan underlines, of course, the impossibility of immediate self-
knowledge and transparency to oneself in the frame of subjective life. He is thus led to draw
a conceptual distinction between the imaginary ego [moi], whose reconnaissance (recog-
nition) in the mirror is marked by the seal of alienation, and the subject [le sujet, Je], whose
identication with the specular image is misleading from beginning to end, and condemned
to failure.
47
The Lacanian reactivation and extension of the Freudian Ichspaltung gives birth to
the original view of a split, decentred and empty subject. The always-unaccomplished identi-
cations of the subject, which deal with the fundamental differentiation between symbolic
and imaginary orders, suggest that the subject, in the last instance, cannot be reduced to
the mirages and illusions of conscious life, just as the I [Ich] cannot be reduced to the ego
in its imaginary dimension. The Lacanian denition of the subject as being the Subject of the
Unconscious, namely as a non-egological I, thus seems to take place within an anti-Cartesian
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 299
shift already at work in The Mirror Stage. Particularly eloquent is the beginning of the article,
regarding the I function in the experience psychoanalysis provides us of it: such an experience,
Lacan declares, sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.
48

Althussers anti-Cartesianism, of course, could only be comforted by such a statement, and
the radical break it implies with the classical metaphysics of the subject. The critique regarding
the philosophical notion of a self-sufciency of consciousness,
49
the rejection of the notion of
an autonomous ego
50
such as it was used, for example, in the ego psychology perspective,
especially in Anna Freuds writings, would even seem to authorise the classication of Lacans
perspective within the eld of the philosophies of concept that aim at the complete rejection
of the Cartesian conceptualisation of the thinking I.
Lacans insistence upon the dead ends and mirages of egological autonomy and
consciousness entails the theoretical necessity of conceiving the Unconscious as irreducible
to any form of non-consciousness: hence, the reading of the second topography [topique] in
Freud as an attempt to get rid of the very notion of consciousness, even under the form of
its negation.
51
The constitutive self-opacity of the I, as a result, draws the lines of a consti-
tuted subject, a subject subjected to the Other (The Symbolic order, the discourse of the
Unconscious as discourse of the Other). The Freudian shift, in that respect, lays the basis for
the non-egological notion of a divided, decentred subject,
52
in antagonism, on a rst reading,
with the Cartesian res cogitans.
This very topic, the eccentricity of the Subject to himself, as a synonym for his subjection,
is also at the core, of course, of the Althusserian perspective. In IISA, especially in the
example of religious ideology (God interpellating Moses in the Exodus), the distinction
asserted between the subject and the Subject plays a crucial role in the Althusserian view of
ideology as being doubly speculary as against the Feuerbachian perspective about the simple
specularity of religious alienation, in which the subject is situated at the centre.
53
The claim
about the double specularity of ideology, correlating to interpellation and subjection, entails
the representation of a subject necessarily subjected to a Subject occupying the centre,
an Absolute subject.
54
As a consequence, the traditional ego, dened in early-modern
philosophy through the categories of transparent reexivity, interiority and immediate self-
knowledge, an ego that would represent the very centre of psychic activity, no longer appears
to have any theoretical relevance. Althussers oft-asserted Spinozism cannot but reject entirely
the Cartesian denition of the thought-process (namely, subjectivity in general) as a process
that would take place in ourselves in nobis, as Descartes writes in the Second Set of
Replies to the Objections that is, in some kind of inner scene or inner theatre, indeed the
mind-ego, also dened through its opposition and irreducibility to the constitutive exteriority
of the res extensa.
Subjective condition, in that regard, can no longer be conceived following the model of a
sovereign consciousness, and the Althusserian claim as to the duplication of the Subject into
subjects and of the Subject itself into a subject-Subject is situated within a theoretical line
beginning with the Lacanian analysis of the Freudian Ichspaltung. The critique regarding the
traditional philosophical notion of an omnipotent, autonomous ego that is, of a constituting
subject undoubtedly draws a strong convergence between the Althusserian and the Lacanian
perspectives. Nevertheless, it seems that, generally speaking, the Althusserian approach to
subjectivity reveals itself to be much more intricate, and includes some signicant reworking
of the psychoanalytical (Lacanian) treatment of the question of the subject.
300 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
First of all, Althussers remarkable delity to the Spinozistic heritage,
55
and his constant
difdence towards the metaphysical, teleological categories to which he counterposes the
concept of process without a subject, entail an ambivalence towards the philosophical use of
the Subject category. On the one hand, of course, this category stands at the core of his theory
of ideology, and the analysis of the subjectivation-process represents one of its salient points.
However, on the other hand, the philosophical category of Subject, together with the correl-
ative categories of Origin and End, appears to him as possibly confusing and still dangerously
close to the classical notions of consciousness or ego, regarding which he produces a frontal
criticism. Symptomatic, in that sense, is his almost constant reluctance to make recourse to
the notion of the Subject of the Unconscious
56
, which, on the contrary, has a decisive function
in the Lacanian battle against psychologism and the postulates of ego-psychology.
Upon a more precise reading of IISA, one is struck by an ambivalence of a similar type. In
this text, the characterisation of subjective constitution or identity seems to oscillate between
the necessity of the split subject, and the illusions of consciousness: that is, using Lacanian
concepts, between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. We reach here a nodal difculty at work
in the Althusserian conception of subjective identity, and of ideology itself. Under a rst
aspect, as we have already analysed, the primacy of the Law of Culture, in the constitution-
interpellation-as-subject process, places ideology, and the category of subject itself, on the
side of Symbolic order. Such a claim was already at work, as we have mentioned, in For
Marx, with the view that ideology did not deal with conscious representations, but rather with
Unconscious structures and socially pre-determined ctional supports. The critique regarding
the insufciencies of traditional Marxist theory of ideology (identied with the mirages of
consciousness, a camera obscura, a mere inversion of real life) was based precisely upon
this conceptual differentiation between consciousness (and its illusions) and ideology; thus the
psychoanalytical category of Unconscious could be considered relevant for the understanding
of the necessity of ideological existence, that is of the existence of men as interpellated
subjects.
Yet under a second aspect, the Althusserian view on subjectivity-as-subjection, especially in
IISA, makes important use of the concept of consciousness, analysed in a critical framework
through its constitutive limits, alienations and illusions.
Therefore, one may conclude, the eccentricity of subjectivity is often (but not always)
reduced, in Althussers approach, to the eccentricity and false powers of consciousness itself,
which is not at all the case in Lacans perspective. This point is particularly important as far
as the decisive example of religious ideology is concerned. This passage in IISA is of great
importance, as we have seen, in the denition of a divided, constituted and subjected subjec-
tivity (through the very distinction between subject and Subject). But it is also remarkable
that the Althusserian understanding of the recognition/misrecognition function in this precise
context, quite unlike the theoretical line of Lacans crits, seems to proceed from the general
rejection of the tradition of the philosophies of consciousness. It is deeply inuenced by the
philosophical legacy of Jean Cavaills (developed by Georges Canguilhem), who had explicitly
counterposed a philosophy of concept [philosophie du concept] to the epistemological dead
ends of a philosophy of consciousness [philosophie de la conscience].
57
Thus, in the case of
religious ideology, the typical ideological recognition/misrecognition function concerns the
individual insofar as he is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to
the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e.
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 301
in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection all by himself. There are
no subjects except by and for their subjection. That is why they work all by themselves.
58
Signicantly, the subjection-mechanism is here described in accordance with the
problematic of free will, grasped in a Spinozistic sense. The subjected subject misrecognises
his own subjection, his subjection to the law, or Gods commandments; and this subjection is
disguised by the mask of free will, the illusions of which are precisely identical to the illusions
of the autonomous ego. The interpellated subject, then, is very often understood as an ego,
a decentred and divided ego of course, essentially opaque to itself: these opacities, however,
are nothing but the false obviousnesses of consciousness (immediate and transparent self-
knowledge, free will), described by Althusser as the elementary ideological effect.
It appears, then, that Althusser, much unlike Lacan, does not always maintain a strict
conceptual distinction between subject and ego, just as he does not seem to attribute to the
category of subject a complete theoretical value. From this conceptual uctuation between
the concepts of subject and ego also follows a sort of hesitation in the very characterisation of
ideology itself. Ideology is on certain occasions dened as a Symbolic order, in relation to an
Unconscious structure, and on other occasions it is conceived as an Imaginary one: the inter-
pellated subject seen as prisoner of the illusions of egological autonomy and consciousness.
This crucial divergence from the Lacanian return to Freuds discovery may be symptomatic of
Althussers persistent theoretical unease with the very category of subject. In the last instance,
however, such a difdence or unease may be enlightened by the explicit opposition Althusser
displays towards Cartesian philosophy, and by his symmetrical consistent attachment to
the Spinozistic legacy. Such an anti-Cartesianism may also explain, under many aspects, his
reluctance to adopt the Lacanian concept of a Subject of the Unconscious. There is, in other
words, a strong disagreement between Lacan and Althusser concerning the reception of
Descartess philosophy, especially the Cartesian conceptualisation of the thinking I, or Cogito.
For the author of the crits, the traditional reading of the Cartesian subject as a psycho-
logical ego, or as a subject dened by the function of consciousness, is totally misleading. The
Cartesian I, on the contrary, reveals itself, and to itself, in the very vertigo of radical doubt,
maximal uncertainty; far from being a sujet des profondeurs, the Cogito must be understood
as the pure subject of science. It stands for this empty subject, the necessary, antago-
nistic correlate of science, a subject rather than a moi dened through its punctual and
vanishing relationship to knowledge. Such a renewed, non-egological reading of the Cogito
leads Lacan to draw a conceptual continuity between the Cartesian subject, the subject of
science, and the Subject of the Unconscious, namely the Ich, the subject caught up in a
constituting division.
59
The split subject, the Subject of the Unconscious that psychoanalysis
deals with, is nothing but the Subject of science. Thus the Cartesian subject, far from being
reducible to a circumscribed moment in the history of philosophy, still constitutes the relevant
paradigm for contemporaneous subjectivity. This extraordinary linking, in Science and Truth,
already at work in his 1964 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, between the
Freudian Ichspaltung, the Subject of the Unconscious, and the Cartesian subject, leads to a
remarkable distinction between the concept of Subject and the concept of ego-moi.
For Althusser, on the contrary, the Cartesian subject, identied with the Subject of truth
and objectivity that is, the subject of knowledge remains a fallacious concept, insofar as
it is taken up within a contestable understanding of what the cut between truth and error is
a crucial misunderstanding of the epistemological break. Descartes, according to Althusser,
302 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
simply counterposes error to truth, as though the former were the mere negation of the latter
and remained outside of truth; he does not thematise the relation of error to this outside. The
effective cut between truth and error is not adequately comprehended, but is reduced to an
exclusion, a partition [partage], and this partition is then seen as the result of a judgement,
the judgement made by a Subject, a thinking Ego, the Subject of Truth.
60
According to this
genealogy, the Subject of knowledge, the Subject of science, should not be reduced to the
psychological ego, that is, to the Subject of error; yet its very transparency to its own epistemic
procedures and operations is a mistaken claim, inherent to this philosophy of consciousness
founded upon a misconception of what the knowledge-process is. To the Cartesian Cogito,
then, Althusser counterposes the Spinozistic model of thinking and knowledge as production,
that is, according to the famous formula of the veritas norma sui, et falsi,
61
as a process in
which the Subject of objectivity, the Subject of knowledge, is suppressed: a process which
will become, in the Althusserian terminology, the well-known process without a subject.
62
To conclude, we may go back to Althussers continuous attempt, from his earlier texts
to his last writings about aleatory materialism, to rediscover and give new life to Spinozas
understanding of what thought and knowledge are: an extraordinary, non-Cartesian theory
of the mind, a unique refutation of the subject of truth [sujet de vrit] and of the modern
problematic of the theory of knowledge as representation representation for a subject a
theory that would have been hidden and buried for centuries in the history of philosophy.
63

Althusser thus seems to be led in the last instance to some kind of reduction of the modern
Subject to the aporiai of egology and even psychology. The category of Subject, as a result,
could not legitimately survive the historical moment of bourgeois philosophy: it even repre-
sents, as we have seen, the central category of imaginary illusion in such a philosophy, built
as it is upon the foundation of the legal ideology of the Subject.
64
Consequently, the Lacanian
Subject of the Unconscious could not constitute, any more than the Cartesian Subject of
science, an admissible category within this theoretical framework.
Yet at the same time and this is the central topic of our analysis the category of subject
is necessary and indispensable to any effective theory of what ideology is, considered through
its fundamental omnihistoricity. This inner tension, in Althussers work, between these two
views regarding the question of the subject should not be articially reduced. It demonstrates,
on the contrary, that the attempt to conceive a constituted subject, a non-egological and
non-psychological subjectivity, also represents a still-vivid and stimulating path in philosophy
and social sciences. This programme of constituting a non-subjectivist theory of subjectivity
in the elds of history, philosophy and linguistics was rst followed, for example, by Michel
Pcheux in the 1970s with the analysis of discourse, opening a stimulating exchange between
the Althusserian insights about ideology and interpellation as the production of a subject-
effect [effet-sujet], and the linguistic interrogation regarding the production of meaning within
discursivity. This programme remains a contemporary one for those who are concerned with
the materialist claim according to which subject and meaning, for instance, are not prior to
their inscription in the effectiveness of social devices, the symbolic, human order represented
by the Law of Culture.
65
In the last instance, the uctuation of the Althusserian theory of ideology between the
Symbolic and the Imaginary, can be understood other than as the symptom of its failure or
aporia. It could be seen, rather, as the objective acknowledgement that, in the very process of
interpellation-subjectivisation, something resists the symbolisation, a leftover that marks the
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 303
traumatic and constitutive inadequacy of the individual with its symbolic identity. This could be
the meaning of the extraordinary pages from Freud and Lacan devoted to the war represented
by the constitution of humanity in and through the Symbolic order.
66
This war is the other name
for the traumatic kernel and lack at the very heart of subjective identity that Althusser, reading
Lacan, had precisely identied, regarding the forced humanisation-subjectivation of the human
child.
67
Notes
1 See Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 161: I believe I am
justied, hypothetically at least, in proposing a theory of ideology in general, in the sense that
Freud presented a theory of the unconscious in general. For a recent study of this analogy
between the Althusserian theory of ideology and the Freudian theory of the unconscious, see
Gillot 2009.
2 See Marx 1989.
3 On the general issue of ideology in Althussers reading of Marxian philosophy, see Bourdin
2008.
4 See Althusser 1969a, p. 232.
5 See Althusser 1976a, p. 136.
6 Althusser 1969a, p. 231.
7 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 159.
8 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 161.
9 See Freud 195374, (The Interpretation of Dreams [1900]) Volume IV, p. 277309. See also
Freud 195374 (Papers on Metapsychology [1915], The Unconscious, V) Volume XIV, p. 186.
10 See Freud 195374 (Papers on Metapsychology, The Unconscious, V) Volume XIV, p. 187.
11 See Althusser and Balibar 1970, pp. 18894.
12 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 188, n. 45.
13 See Pcheux 1982, in particular pp. 83129. In the 1970s Michel Pcheux developed
Althusserian insights regarding ideology and subjective interpellation within the anti-idealist
framework of an analysis of discourse, at the intersection between philosophy and linguistics.
14 Althusser 1969a, p. 2313.
15 The constitutive ambiguity of the French formula, interpellation en sujet, is at the root of two
possible English translations, interpellation as subject, or interpellation into subject. This
ambiguity, which manifests an apparent circularity in the conceptualisation of a constituted-
interpellated subject which would, however, always-already exist as the addressee of the
interpellation is stressed by Rastko Monik (Monik 1993, p. 13956). Monik understands
this as the sign of a theoretical tension, in Althussers theory of interpellation, between the
(symbolic) subjectivation-process, and the (imaginary) identication-process. Monik proposes
to solve such a tension which would also refer to a tension, within the subjectivation-process,
between the universal and the singular, the social and the individual through the Lacanian
concept of a point de capiton (quilting-point), in relation to the Freudian concept of fantasy.
16

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 170.

17 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, pp. 16670.
18 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 169.
19 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 166.
304 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
20 See the Ethica by Spinoza, Part III, Proposition II, Demonstration and Scholium.
21 See the concept of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, in explicit relationship to these
Pascalian insights, in Bourdieu 1980.
22 See Ryle 1949.
23 Concerning the critiques addressed to the Althusserian theory of ideology and subjectivisation,
see iek 2008, pp. 43-4, and Dolar 1993, p. 2. On this interiority/exteriority issue, see also the
criticism of Mladen Dolars analysis by Judith Butler, in Butler 1997, pp. 12024.
24 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, pp. 1756.
25 . . . in reality these things happen without any succession. The existence of ideology and the
hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing (Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, pp. 1745).
26

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 175.

27 See, in particular, iek 2008, Introduction, p. xxv, and, with a different approach, insisting
on the paradigmatic importance of the religious example in the Althusserian theory of
interpellation, Butler 1997, pp. 11015.
28 Pcheux 1982, pp. 1039.
29 Freud and Lacan Althusser 1971a, originally published in 19645.
30 Althusser 1996c, p. 91: By the action of culture alone can the little human child be inserted
within culture as such. What we are confronted with, therefore, is not the process of
humanisation of the little child, but, rather, the constant action of culture upon a little being
extraneous to culture, and transformed by culture into a human being. [. . .] As a matter of fact,
culture constantly precedes itself, absorbing in this way what will become a human subject.
31

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 172. The ambivalent
structure if ideology, reconnaissance/mconnaissance, also operates in the mechanism of the
mirror recognition of the Subject and of the individuals interpellated as subjects, at work in
religious ideology. Moses is interpellated by his name (Moses!), and thus constituted in his
subjective, unique identity, and at the same time subjected to the Absolute Subject, God, in
the Exodus (pp. 17982).
32 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 182.
33 In 1963 Althusser had already written: Marx based his theory on the rejection of the myth of
the homo oeconomicus, Freud based his theory on the rejection of the myth of the homo
psychologicus. Lacan has seen and understood Freuds liberating rupture. He has understood it
in the fullest sense of the term, taking it rigorously at its word and forcing it to produce its own
consequences, without concessions or quarter. It may be that, like everyone else, he errs in the
detail or even the choice of his philosophical bearings; but we owe him the essential (Freud
and Lacan in Althusser 1971a, p. 195). At the beginning of Reading Capital, Althusser relates
his symptomatic reading of Marx to the Lacanian return to Freud as its source (From Capital
to Marxs Philosophy, in Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 16).
34 Althusser 1976b.
35

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 176.

36

Freud and Lacan in Althusser 1971a.

37 Freud and Lacan in Althusser 1971a, p. 205.
38 Freud and Lacan in Althusser 1971a, p. 206.
39 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 171.
40 Freud and Lacan in Althusser 1971a, pp. 21112.
41 Lacan 2006, p. 229.
42 Lacan 2006, pp. 4246.
THE THEORY OF IDEOLOGY AND THE THEORY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 305
43 Lacan 1977, p. 20.
44 Lacan 2006, pp. 22731.
45 See in particular Althusser 1995a, p. 107n. 3. This text by Althusser, entitled Sur la
reproduction, was not published during his lifetime, and constitutes a kind of preparation or
longer version (Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a).
46 Here arises the ambiguity of a misrecognizing that is essential to knowing myself [un
mconnatre essentiel au me connatre] (Lacan 2006, p. 684).
47 That is why, for instance, Lacan underlines the ambiguity and inadequacy of the English
translation of Ich with Ego as far as the Freudian second topography is concerned. He thus
proclaims that Freud in fact wrote Das Ich und das Es [The Ego and the Id] in order to maintain
the fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as
constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identications (Lacan 2006, p. 347).
48 Lacan 2006, p. 75.
49 Lacan 2006, p. 80.
50 Lacan 2006, pp. 6845.
51 Thus, Lacan claims that in the Freudian eld, the words notwithstanding, consciousness is a
characteristic that is . . . obsolete to us in grounding the unconscious for we cannot ground it
on the negation of consciousness (Lacan 2006, p. 676).
52 For Lacan, the very truth Freud discovered deals with the selfs radical eccentricity with
respect to itself that man is faced with. (The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or
Reason since Freud [1957], Lacan 2006, p. 435).
53 See Althusser 19945 Volume 2, pp. 172244.
54 See Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 180: We observe that
the structure of all ideology, interpellating individuals as subjects in the name of a Unique
and Absolute Subject is speculary, i.e. a mirror-structure, and doubly speculary . . . Such a
characterisation of ideology as being doubly specular invalidates the hypothesis according to
which ideology, as dened in IISA, would merely operate within the imaginary register, and
not within the symbolic. It also entails the impossibility of counterposing the Freud and Lacan
text and the IISA text, as though this supposed duality implied the very duality between the
symbolic and the imaginary orders. On the subject-Subject structure, and its inscription in the
symbolic order, see Pcheux 1982, pp. 11314.
55 See for example Althusser 1976a, pp. 13241.
56 One exception may lie in the rst of the Trois notes sur la thorie des discours, which seems
to recognise the theoretical value of notions such as the subject-of-science effect, and the
subject-of-unconscious effect. But these notions are quickly abandoned by Althusser, who
registers his disagreement with Lacan on these topics, as demonstrated by his Lettre denvoi
to the Trois Notes (28 October 1966). See Althusser 1993c, pp. 11754.
57 Cavaills 2008, p. 90. Foucault follows this insight by Cavaills when he asserts the famous
dividing line between a philosophy of experience, of sense and of subject, and a philosophy of
knowledge, of rationality and of concept (See Foucaults Foreword in Canguilhem 1978, p. i).
58 Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses in Althusser 1971a, p. 182.
59 Science and Truth [19656], Lacan 2006, pp. 7268.
60 Concerning the Althusserian analysis of the Cartesian subject as subject of knowledge, see
Althusser 1996c, pp. 11518.
61 Spinoza, Ethica, Part II, Propositio 43, Scholium.
62 See in particular, on that matter, the Althusserian reading concerning the Spinozistic
understanding of the idea vera, of its non-assignable origin, and of the concatenation of true
306 ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER
ideas, in the De Intellectus Emendatione: In afrming that what is true is the sign of itself
and of what is false, Spinoza avoided any problematic which depended on a criterion of truth
. . . Once he has set aside the (idealist) temptations of a theory of knowledge, Spinoza then
says that what is true identies itself, not as a Presence, but as a Product, in the double
sense of the term product (result of the work of a process which discovers it), as it
emerges in its own production (Althusser 1976a, p. 137).
63 Althusser 1996c, p. 115.
64 Althusser 1976a, p. 136.
65 For a defence of the Althusserian concept of the ideological subject-effect, based upon a
critique towards ieks claim about a subjectivity prior to interpellation, see Robert Pfaller
1998, pp. 22546.
66 It is specically this crucial text, Freud and Lacan that seems to be left aside by the authors
who maintain, on the contrary, that Althusser, in his theory of interpellation and subjectivity,
ignored this traumatic kernel related to the death-drive. See iek 2008, pp. 425, and Dolar
1993, pp. 2, 6.
67

Freud and Lacan in Althusser 1971a, pp. 2056.