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Rethinking Marxism

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Althusser's Catholic Marxism

Roland Boer

To cite this Article Boer, Roland(2007) 'Althusser's Catholic Marxism', Rethinking Marxism, 19: 4, 469 486 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08935690701571128 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08935690701571128

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RETHINKING MARXISM

VOLUME 19

NUMBER 4

(OCTOBER 2007)

Althussers Catholic Marxism

Roland Boer
What role do Louis Althussers early theological essays play in his later work? Quite a lot, I argue in this article. By following through the shift in four key essays from 1946 to 1951, we can trace not only Althussers reluctant abandonment of the Roman Catholic Church, but also the emergence of patterns of thought that would stay with him in his later, fully Marxist period. On the one hand, he would continue to universalize in a fashion he picked up from the Catholic Churchs own practice of universalizing, especially in his arguments concerning ideology. On the other hand, the Church would become the absent cause of his later work, permeating it through allusions, examples, and longer arguments, especially the effort to historicize it and then recast it as idealism. Key Words: Louis Althusser, Ideology, Theology, Roman Catholic Church, Marxism

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Only a religion can pretend to say everything. */Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists

More than one critic has passed over Louis Althussers early theological texts in embarrassed silence.1 They have only followed Althussers lead for, after his break with the Church, his rejection of religion seemed complete. I want to argue that such an assumption leaves critical appreciation of Althusser stunted, as the relationship between his early theological phase and his later Marxism is far more complex. In what follows I pursue three lines of argument. The first is to trace the gradual breakdown of Althussers attempted alliance between progressive Roman Catholicism and Marxism, a breakdown that led to his opting for Marxism over against the Church. Second, across this break, some of the formal elements of his theological writings made their way into his later work. In fact, the break smoothed their passage, displacing and reshaping them for service in Althussers Marxism. The most glaring example is the shift from Catholic to Marxist universalism. In fact, the Church is like
1. See, among others, Callinicos (1976), Elliott (1987), and Clarke et al. (1980). Margaret Majumbar (1995) passes by this phase with embarrassed brevity, preferring to begin with the moment he joined the Parti communiste francais (PCF). ISSN 0893-5696 print/1475-8059 online/07/040469-18 2007 Association for Economic and Social Analysis DOI: 10.1080/08935690701571128

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Althussers famous absent cause: the expulsion of the Church from his life and work enabled the Church to permeate all his work in a new form. This is the source of what I will call his Catholic blind spot, the inability to see the specificity of his particular form of universalizing. Finally, the religious content*/allusions, examples, and longer arguments*/of Althussers later works begins to make much more sense in light of the theological texts. At the level of content, I focus on the science-versus-idealism distinction that he develops after his break from the Church, and the theory of ideology in his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.

End of an Alliance

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I remember this period as a time when perhaps I had a religious vocation which fizzled out and a certain predisposition to ecclesiastical eloquence (pour le loquence eccle siastique ). */Althusser, The Future Lasts a Long Time

Over four crucial essays between 1946 and 1951, when he was in the process of joining the Communist party, we can trace Althussers increasingly despairing efforts to build an alliance between progressive Catholicism and Marxism.2 In these essays we find an Althusser whose thoughts flow within the theoretical, social, and historical context of a Catholic France. Thus, his theology is overtly institutional, so much so that at the moment of apostasy he does not reject Christianity, or God, or cease to believe in what the Bible says to him: he rejects the Church. And Althusser could never quite escape one institution or another, whether church, university (Catholic or the Sorbonne), mental hospital, or the Communist party, with its overwhelming concern for orthodoxy and orthopraxis (1990, 63; 1996, 32). But let me look more closely at these four essays and follow the path of the failed alliance as well as some hints of his later Marxist concerns. The first is The International of Decent Feelings (Althusser 1997, 21/35; 1994a, 35/57), written for and rejected by the Catholic journal Cahiers de notre jeunesse . Here already is a bold and lucid Althusser, but one who brings together Christian and Communist arguments in an effort at alliance. At the same time, the alliance between the two enacts a slippage of certain key elements from Althussers Christianity to his Communism. I will identify these elements as I proceed. Thus, in The International of Decent Feelings, Althusser polemicizes against the Christian apocalyptic habit of reading for the signs of the times in World War II and
2. They are The International of Decent Feelings (1997, 21/35; 1994a, 35/57), A Matter of Fact (1997, 185/96; 1994a, 261/75), On Conjugal Obscenity (1997, 231/40; 1994a, 327/39), and his letter to Jean Lacroix (1997, 197/230; 1994a, 277/325). On Conjugal Obscenity remained unpublished until after his death, and is found in the first volume of Ecrits philosophiques et politiques (1994a). The letter to Lacroix was also unpublished until this 1994 collection.

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the cold war. The war itself becomes both sin and Gods wrathful punishment, the concentration camps are the Last Judgment, the Moscow trials are the Passion, the atomic bomb is the will of God, and the equality of death before the bomb is equivalent to equality before God. Against these moves Althusser makes both Marxist and theological arguments. But first, he makes sure that progressive Christians and Communists stand shoulder to shoulder. There are both the the man who is not a Christian (lhomme non Chre tien ) and the Christian who does not usurp Gods place (le chre tien qui nusurpe pas la place de Dieu) (1994a, 42/3). Later we have non-Christians and, occasionally, Christians as well (non-chre tiens et de chre tiens parfois ) (43). I hardly need to point out who is the Communist here and who the desirable Christian. Although they stand together, their arguments are a little different. A Marxist will criticize the popular postwar notions of the proletariat of fear and the proletariat of the human condition in terms of class. Both phrases refer to the effort by some in the churches to claim that everybody was exploited by the fear of the atomic bomb and, therefore, they were all like Marxs proletariat. However, Althussers Marxist point is that such a generalizing of class difference, taking up the term proletariat in order to speak of humanity as a whole, serves to deny the specific political content of the proletariat. For them, the threat of war or the atomic bomb does not change the exploitation and poverty of their everyday lives (1997, 31; 1994a, 49). The rather orthodox Christian side of Althusser argues a little differently. Here he resorts to a theological critique of idolatry. Thus, he reads the apocalyptic postwar mood in terms of the New Testament warnings against false prophets. He takes the paradoxical biblical warnings of Mark 13 (especially verse 22) and Matthew 24/Luke 21 to heart: the false prophets themselves are a mark of the Last Days although they themselves are false precisely because they predict the long awaited End (1997, 28; 1994a, 44). But this is only the first step, for the real problem with idolatry is that it replaces God with idols. For the New Testament, argues Althusser, the ultimate form of idolatry is the elevation of oneself in Gods place: When we merely invoke the Lord, we serve, not the Lord we invoke, but another whom we do not (1997, 30; 1994a, 47). But just when we suspect that Marxism and theology in this essay*/one concerned with class and the other with idolatry*/are beginning to separate, Althusser brings them together again. Now he argues that these false prophets, these men who elevate themselves into Gods place, do not see the real problem: namely, exploitation of the proletariat under capitalism. What they miss is the nature of socialism. They seek socialism without class struggle, a verbal, moralizing socialism (1997, 30; 1994a, 48). There is, however, a tension between Marxist and Christian positions in Althussers argument. This tension shows up in his focus on the proletariat and class struggle: is not Althussers Marxist argument (concern with the proletariat) in conflict with his Christian argument (idolatry must be avoided)? The problem is that, although he says his position is a properly Christian one free from idolatry, putting ones trust in the proletariat become precisely the idolatry he identified earlier. The tension between class and idolatry in this essay is a specific example of the deeper one between Christian and Marxist positions. If his theological concerns come from what may be called an ontological reserve, refusing to

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identify fully with any human cause for fear of idolatry, then his Marxist focus takes the political plunge and identifies with the proletariat. Althusser could hold onto an alliance between the two only by denying the tension*/by arguing from what he feels is a united position. By the time of the next essay, A Matter of Fact (1997, 185/96; 1994a, 261/75), he would still hold to an alliance, but now only on the basis of a reformed Church. Three months after he joined the Communist party in November 1948, this essay was published by the religious community Jeunesse de lEglise, with whom he stayed in close touch, in a cahier entitled The Captive Gospel . In it, Althusser argues that the Church is in a woeful state: it requires far-reaching reform if it is ever to communicate the Gospel in a language understood by the people of today. The problem: the Church hangs on to feudal and early capitalist structures and an obsolete conceptual universe without which it cannot imagine its existence (1997, 186; 1994a, 263; see the detail in 1997, 187/93; 1994a, 263/72). The solution: the emancipation of the Church from feudal and capitalist structures, which will lead to a revived, authentic religious life. Here the alliance is still strong, for Althusser looks for the external liberation of the Church through alliance with the world-changing force of the proletariat, while the reclamation of religious life must take place through the isolated and far-flung radical cells within the Church: groups like Jeunesse de lEglise, the later base communities of Latin America, and some of the elements of the Catholic Action movement*/rural and urban youth, students, workers, managers, bosses, and so on. These are two arms of a broad, emancipatory program, but one that now has the proletariat at its center, and, in this worldhistorical movement, the socially progressive Christian must play an active part. Since he is still open to authentic renewal within the Church, Althusser holds that religion is not, a priori, a form of alienation (1997, 194/5; 1994a, 274). Here we find extraordinary statements, at least in light of the well-known later Althusser: The Church will live thanks to those who, through struggle and in struggle, are once again discovering that the Word was born among men and dwelt among them*/and who are already preparing a humane place for it amongst men (1997, 195; 1994a, 275). Yet there are some changes. The proletariat becomes central for any change, and he begins speaking of theology as ideology. Ultimately this will be to the detriment of the former but, in an intriguing paragraph (1997, 188/9; 1994a, 265/6), we already see the complexity of Althussers developing theory of ideology: the medieval structures at the heart of the Church enable people within it to hold to outmoded ideological (that is, theological) formations, but those structures only continue to exist because that outmoded ideology (again, theology) keeps the structures in place. Many of the arguments from A Matter of Fact will return in his famous essay on ideological state apparatuses, including the medieval nature of the Church, the complex dialectic of ideology, and its distinctive, theological stamp. Another feature that will return in his later work is what might be termed Althussers catholic blind spot. He writes of universal form, all men, policies on a global scale, the immense world of the Church, and so on (1997, 186, 191, 195; 1994a, 262, 269, 275). There is, in other words, a single, global Christian Church and its problems are global problems. But Althusser does not seem to realize that he

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follows the deep logic of the Catholic Church, which is to universalize in a pattern of exclusion and absorption. The Church maintains the claim to be catholic by absorbing what is mildly unorthodox and by excluding as heretical what does not fit its definition of catholic. Further, in Althussers case, such universalizing comes from the very specific base of the French Roman Catholic Church. The following description is a dead giveaway: the Churchs conceptual universe, theology, and moral system, its theory of the family, of education, of Catholic action, of the parish, etc. (1997, 194). The items on this list are by no means universal to Christian churches, but are limited to a specific part of the Church*/the Roman Catholic one. Thus, the major Protestant and Orthodox branches do not share Catholic action, nor do they agree in terms of church government (parish), or education, or family, or indeed moral systems or theology. In short, the conceptual universe of which he speaks is a distinctly Roman Catholic one. Even more, it is a list from a particular time and place*/namely, France in the mid-twentieth century. The giveaway is Catholic action, which developed in the early twentieth century and took on different forms in different countries. While in Italy Catholic action was far more political, in France, where the Roman Catholic Church was not sanctioned by the state, Catholic action focused on inner, spiritual well-being. In Althussers thought, this specifically French Catholic combination becomes all too swiftly the universal Church. So far, Althussers early theological essays work for a fragile Socialist-Christian alliance, although it is really an alliance that calls on the fringe and experimental groups of the Catholic left. If he calls upon such groups in A Matter of Fact to join with the Communists and the proletariat to effect social change as well as an internal transformation of the Church, in the extraordinary On Conjugal Obscenity (1997, 231/40; 1994a, 327/39) another such group comes in for unrelenting criticism. In this essay he tracks the ambivalence and hypocrisy of the public theology of marriage in the French Roman Catholic Church. What seemed to be a radical move from the 1930s onward*/dragging marriage and sex out into the open and stressing mutual pleasure and enjoyment*/was actually viciously reactionary. In response to social and cultural effects of the 1920s, this public theology of marriage seemed to be radical in its efforts both to talk about sex openly and to stress the pleasure of conjugal sex over against traditional Roman Catholic doctrines stress on procreation. The problem is that such a valorization of sex also valued large broods of children and the domestic sphere. Althusser is no prude: the obscenity in question was not the public nature of the movement or even the conjunction of sex and the spirit, but the way its apparently radical edge served to reinforce the most reactionary aspects of Roman Catholic positions on marriage. Bearing and raising children is no longer a duty of Roman Catholic families; it now becomes part of the public sacrament of marriage. Women, who had begun to have other options, found themselves tied to the long labor of pregnancy, birth, and care for endless numbers of offspring, precisely through an ideology of sexual and spiritual equality. A glimpse of liberation, now channeled into the public affront (for traditional Catholics) of the sacramentalization of sex, folds back to reinforce the most reactionary of Catholic positions on the family and the subjugation of women, except that now the women in question acted in the misguided belief that theirs was a radical path. Emancipation is a new form of servitude, except that now it is public. The Church still holds sway: the power that

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lifted the interdict is the one that established it: the authority that makes the laws can also unmake them (1997, 239; 1994a 338). There is little that redeems the Church here. The alliance, it seems, is slipping. But what Althusser has done is to highlight, perhaps for the first time, a complex pattern of oppression that takes on the appearance of freedom from oppression. He would use such an insight on more than one occasion later on, especially with regard to the enemy: Church, idealism, liberalism, and so on. But here Althussers concern is still the Church, and there is no salvation outside that institution. However critical, he is still within. His intellectual departure, however, is marked by the long, legendary letter to his former teacher, Jean Lacroix. Here we find that the alliance he long sought to hold together finally falls apart when he is forced to deal directly with the relationship between Roman Catholicism and Marxism. Mainly a response to Lacroixs book Marxisme, Existentialisme, Personnalisme (1950), the interesting parts come toward the close (Althusser 1997, 211/20; 1994a, 295/308). Here theology and Marxism finally take their separate paths but, in this process, he makes two points on which I want to dwell. First, he argues himself to the point where Marxism and theology are incompatible for both theological and institutional reasons. The argument goes as follows: Theology is the ideology of the institution of the Church. That Church is fundamentally medieval in world-view, as he had pointed out in A Matter of Fact, and the mark of that world-view is scholasticism. Scholastic theology is characterized by the tendency to blend theology with philosophy. For Althusser, however, the only way forward for the Church is a deep reform that sheds such a medieval world-view. The implication is that it would also then shed scholastic theology, a shedding that would mean a separation of theology and philosophy. In the letter to Lacroix, Althusser berates Lacroix for attempting to reform theology within the heritage of scholasticism; that is, he tried to do so with the blend of philosophy and theology intact. For Althusser, this is unacceptable. Stop being such a scholastic, Althusser suggests, and stop mixing theology and philosophy (1997, 206; 1994a, 288). For instance, if Lacroix is going to be a proud theologian, then he should openly register both the absolute transcendence and immanence of God (1997, 216; 1994a, 302/3). In short, Althusser wants a theology that asserts key positions without the taint of philosophy*/(divine) judgment, history and eternity, transcendence and immanence, and truth itself. The problem with such a radical separation of theology and philosophy is that by this stage Althusser has already hitched himself to philosophy: a Marxist philosophy that elaborates the truths of the proletariat. The reformed theology that he calls on Lacroix to produce is one he can no longer follow, for such a theology will reform itself by separating from philosophy. By definition, if theology can proceed only by breaking with philosophy, then Althusser the philosopher can no longer have anything to do with it. Nor for that matter can he hold to the institution for which that theology is the world-view, no matter how reformed. In other words, the only possibility for keeping Marxism (philosophy) and theology together is by means of some form of scholasticism. But once he works through the implications of reform of the Church, which also means reform from scholasticism, the possibility of such an alliance passes.

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Second, Althusser signals to his former teacher the catholic paradox of his own move from the Church and into the PCF. [I]n actively rallying to the working class, we have not only not repudiated what had been our reasons for living, but have liberated them by fully realizing them. I think we deserve our future, even from Wildes point of view, in that we have not disregarded our past: We have watched our past grow inside us and bear fruit in a manner beyond the hopes of our youth. The Christian I once was has in no way abjured his Christian values, but now I live them (this is an . . . historical, not a divine judgement!), whereas earlier I aspired to live them. (1997, 221; 1994a, 308/9)
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This marks a decisive moment in the long transition from Christian to Marxist commitment, and it is more astute than the obvious point that Catholic Action provided the path for so many from Church to PCF.3 However, there is more here than meets the eye for, despite himself, Althusser provides us not merely with an unwitting recognition of his own inescapable (small-c) catholicism, but also its mechanism. And he does so by means of the blind spot I have been tracking in these early writings. The values of which he writes are those of love, hope, and faith, the radical political and moral code of the Beatitudes and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5/7). But what Althussers comments obscure is what is so persistent in his thought*/namely, the catholicism that remained. In other words, what Althusser regards as the realization of Christian values in his Communism*/those that could not be realized when he was a Christian*/includes the Catholic context he imbibed. In fact, I want to go further than this: the notion of Christian values is a sleight of hand for catholicism itself. Over these early writings then, I have tracked the gradual collapse of the troubled alliance Althusser sought to establish between radical Catholicism and Marxism*/the shift from someone comfortable with theological arguments to someone highly critical, preferring in the end that theology and philosophy keep to their own spheres. But I have also been on the lookout for elements that he could not so easily forget along with his youthful enthusiasm for the Church. And these are his inescapable catholicity (his catholic blind spot), characterized by an assumed universalism from very particular concerns, a historicizing of the influence of the Church, a theory of ideology that is stamped with theology, and an awareness of the complex patterns by which a political and ideological enemy maintains control by managing opposition.
3. In fact the Church, via its chaplains and encyclicals, made their own militants aware of the social question, of which most of us were totally ignorant. Of course, once we recognized that there was a social question and that the remedies proposed were ridiculous, it did not take much, in my case the profound political vision of Pere Hours, for us to explore what lay behind ` the wooly-minded slogans of the Catholic Church and rapidly convert to Marxism before joining the Communist Party! (Althusser 1994b, 205; 1992, 197).

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Shadow Boxing: History and Idealism

Despite the signs of the first fully Marxist essay of a couple of years later (see On Marxism from 1953 [Althusser 1997, 241/57]), the Church would hardly disappear from Althussers writings. He would make two moves to deal with it: historicize, or see it in a new guise as idealism. First, he would continue to historicize the Church as a medieval institution. However, in attempting to account for the decline of the Church in capitalism (its ideological role was taken over by education), Althusser is also historicizing a particular theoretical element of his thought. Second, in his later work, the Churchs place is also taken by idealism, which becomes the real enemy of Marxism. As the world outlook of liberalism, idealism provides the only context within which religion is essential. In both these arguments we find the division between theology and Marxism, now in terms of idealism versus science, and the insight that first arose in his analysis of the Church: namely, the complex patterns of managing opposition. Let me focus first on his modes of historicizing the Church, particularly in the famous essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation) (1971, 121/73). Althussers historicizing of the Church may be read as an allegory for his own departure from the Church, modeled on the way Marx broke with his humanist reliance on Feuerbachs Essence of Christianity to become properly scientific (1990, 233). What strikes me about the Ideology essay is the way he concentrates on the Church and education out of the longer list of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)*/religious, educational, family, legal, political, trade union, communications, and cultural. Thus, he argues that the educational ISA (rather than the more obvious political ISA), with its system of public and private schools, is the dominant form under capitalism (1971, 152). A devastating demystification of the nature of education, the significance of Althussers concern with this ISA is in what it replaces: the Church. He argues that under feudalism the Church was as natural, indispensable, and generous as the school is today. In the same way that the school is now coupled with the family, so the Church once made a highly effective ideological force with the family. Here lies the historicizing move Althusser makes with regard to the Church. In the Middle Ages, when the various ISAs were fewer, the religious ISA (the Church) undertook a variety of functions that have separated into different ISAs under capitalism, especially education and culture. Other ISAs operated, such as the political, proto/trade union (guilds and associations), publishing, and communications, although these were developing out of the Church. Yet, by concentrating within itself the religious, educational, communications, and cultural functions, the Church was dominant. However, the historical narrative of the usurpation of the Church is also Althussers strategy for quarantining and distancing the Church from his own life. It is no accident that all ideological struggle, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, starting with the first shocks of the Reformation, was concentrated in an anti-clerical and anti-religious struggle; rather this is the function precisely of the dominant position of the religious ideological State apparatus (1997, 151). The process he

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describes of the attack on the Church, the reduction of its power, dissolution of its functions after the French Revolution, and replacement with another dominant ISA implicitly takes on a positive role in his analysis. The long struggle, with its advances and setbacks, was directed at taking over the Churchs functions. This struggle was necessary for the political hegemony of the bourgeoisie as well as the ideological hegemony indispensable to the reproduction of capitalist relations of production (1971, 152). This then brings him to the educational ISA, the successful bourgeois replacement of the Church. Having removed the Church as a dominant ISA, the bourgeoisie has performed a distinctly useful task for Althusser. That he is also hostile to the bourgeoisie puts the Church at a double remove. And all of this Althusser casts in a historical narrative.4 As far as he is concerned, the Church is well past its dominance, both historically and personally. Or perhaps not, for he cannot desist from speaking about the Church: it is surprising how often the militant pioneer of a scientific Marxist philosophy returns to speak of the Church. It turns up again in his analyses of idealism. In fact, in this analysis, two items from Althussers early work appear: first, the division between theology and Marxism in the letter to Lacroix, but now as the opposition of idealism-cum-religion to science; and second, the subtle patterns of ideological control by the Church in his essay On Conjugal Obscenity (1997, 231/40; 1994a, 327/39) (in the very act of appearing to provide emancipation, it actually asserts its domination more strongly). The Church is, in short, all-pervasive. Althusser developed a similar analysis of idealism, the world outlook of liberalism. In the same way that his criticism in On Conjugal Obscenity is an effort both to exorcise a demon and understand the enemy, so also in his effort to understand idealism he seeks both to expunge liberalism from Marxism and to gain a strategic advantage. I am interested at this point in a specific argument to be found in the lectures entitled Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists (1990, 69/165), one of his most sustained analyses of idealism. What he ends up with in this text is a great conflict between the small cohort of true science and vast army of religion, for religion will turn out to be the underlying logic of idealism. What we thought was a humanistic tradition that eschewed religion turns out to be another form of religion*/religion being a code for Christianity in a universalizing move. Let us see how he gets there. He begins by identifying the spiritual complement of the world outlook of idealism. For Althusser, this bourgeois world outlook is economism or technocracy; the spiritual complement is ethical idealism or humanism. Neither is necessarily religious and indeed both, springing from the Enlightenment, carry a strong nonreligious component. (In taking on humanism we are also in the territory of exorcising the humanist demon from Marx and the bane of Utopian socialism.)5 But
4. Other comments carry on the same pattern. For instance, see his distancing of the Church as a medieval institution in his discussions of Montesquieu (1977, 21; 1959, 10) and Machiavelli (1999, 69). 5. For Althusser, Utopian socialist doctrine proposes socialist goals for human action . . . based on non-scientific principles, deriving from religious, moral or juridical, i.e. ideological principles (1990, 3; see further 1977, 225 n. 6; 1965, 231 2 n. 6).

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my interest here is how such a spiritual complement becomes explicitly religious in the face of scientific crises. According to Althusser, scientific crises (for instance, Greek mathematics or modern physics) produce three characteristic responses. First, science keeps its head and treats the crisis as a test or episode, well within the perimeters of science (this will later become Element One). Or second, science goes off the deep end and sees a huge crisis that brings out either a religious response, discerning a divine surprise in the crisis, or a spiritualist response that appears more tempered. And third, there are those who unwittingly engage in the philosophy of science, attacking the bad philosophy of materialism in the name of a better idealist philosophy, such as British empiricism (both these second and third responses will become Element Two). The first option is the minority response, the second the extreme, and the third appears moderate, although it brings out the truth of the conflict between materialist and idealist positions. But Althussers main concern is with the second response: we have known since Pascal and Kant that behind the borders assigned science by philosophy there lurks religion (1990, 111). Science itself comes into question, and the crisis is read as a timely warning that science should remain within its boundaries. Beyond those boundaries, religion holds sway. As his discussion moves on, we get a series of shuffles and moves. Initially, the second, extreme response was the territory of both spiritualists and religion, but before long the spiritualists take over the third response, which used to be idealist. Subsequently, this slippage will allow Althusser to subsume the spiritualists under religion for, in the end, spiritualism is merely a variation on religion. The spiritualists are, after all, the historical successors to the religious philosophers of science. Among the spiritualists are Bergson, Bruschvicg, and Ricoeur, as well as humanist Marxists like Garaudy, with their variations on the ultimate categories of freedom and the human spirit, as the successors to religious philosophers of science. In other words, the fallback position of moral philosophy, the preferred mode of the spiritualist philosophers of science, is in fact religion (1990, 126). What, then, is the function of distinguishing three responses to scientific crises: intrascientific, religious/spiritualist, and idealist? In an extraordinary process of shifting allegiances and realignments, Althusser has had the spiritualists occupy the territory of the idealists, then subsumed these spiritualist philosophers under religion. What we end up with is science versus religion. When he moves on to identify what he calls Element One and Element Two*/the great philosophical class divide between materialist and idealist philosophies of science*/they can be nothing other than science versus religion. Both are spontaneous philosophies of the scientists. One, characteristic of a smaller group of scientists, holds to the material existence of the object of scientific knowledge, the objectivity of the knowledge produced and the validity of the scientific method. The other comes from outside, imposing spiritualist or idealist and thereby, ultimately, religious categories on science. Not only is this the great theoretical class struggle of philosophy, but it is also a signal of the subtle means by which religion is still a potent force. Science versus religion is but a reworking of his old distinction in the letter to Jean Lacroix between Marxism and theology.

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The Absent Cause of the Church

Thus far I have been tracing the persistence of references and allusions to the Church in Althussers later writing, along with some of the deeper patterns of thinking that he first developed in his theological writings. All this comes to a climax, however, in the essay I have already touched upon, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Here we have nothing less than, to use Althussers own terms, the absent cause of the Church itself. He will perpetually try to contain the Church, or religion, here as a practical ideology, but it always breaks its bonds.6 Let us look at three elements: the argument that ideology is eternal; the thesis that ideology has a material existence; and the interpellation narrative.7 The argument that ideology is eternal is glaringly obvious, although Althusser makes the effort to connect his argument with Freuds assumption of an eternal unconscious: If eternal means, not transcendent to all (temporal) history, but omnipresent, transhistorical 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 (1971, 161; emphasis in original). But there is more than meets the eye here. The implicit logic of such an appropriation is not the smuggling in of theology but the realization of an internal logic about theology itself: deliberations on the nature of God actually speak of something else. And that something else is the ideology of which God is a feature: it is not God himself who is omnipresent, transhistorical, and immutable, but rather the ideology in which God has a place. But this is to favor religious ideology over all other forms, and indeed, Althusser himself will do that soon enough. The general definition of this eternal ideology is the famous ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence (1971, 162; see also 1990, 24/5). Yet, this is merely the first thesis on the structure and functioning of ideology. With the second thesis*/ideology has a material existence*/we find theology at the forefront. This section of the essay has drawn the occasional commentator to point to the extremely Spinozist form of his argument (Montag 1995) for, as Althusser comments only a few pages later, to be a Spinozist or a Marxist . . . is to be exactly the same thing (1971, 175). In particular, Althusser echoes Spinozas argument that the cause can exist only in its effects, that God cannot be an external force, a creator who acts on the basis of an intention and plan. Rather, God is an immanent cause, inconceivable without his creation, whose intentions and decrees can exist only as they are actualized in
6. Along with ethics, law, politics, and aesthetics, religion is one of the practical ideologies (1971, 18; 1998, 152/3). As for practical ideologies, they are complex formations which shape notions-representations-images into behaviour-conduct-attitude-gestures. The ensemble functions as practical norms that govern the attitude and concrete positions men adopt towards the real objects and real problems of their social and individual existence, and towards their history (1990, 83). 7. The contrast with the Ideological State Apparatuses essay and the discussion of ideology in Marxism and Humanism (1969, 221 47; 1965, 225 49) couldnt be sharper, for in the latter essay the pages devoted to ideology (1969, 231 6; 1965 238 43) mention most of his main points without any reference to the Church.

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that creation: God could not have been prior to his decrees nor can he be without them (Spinozas proposition 33, scholium 2, quoted by Montag 1995, 63). So also with ideology, which is immanent in its practices and apparatuses and cannot exist apart from them. It is hardly a coincidence, then, that the explication of this thesis on the material existence of ideology should move all too readily into theological language. Thus, in arguing for the material, rather than spiritual, existence of ideology, he moves to particular or practical ideologies (religious, ethical, aesthetic, etc.), each of which not only has a history but a location in an apparatus, an ISA and its practices. But Althusser takes his general definition*/the representation of the imaginary relations to real conditions*/into this specific realm and gives the example of the Church. This reversion is almost inevitable given the Spinozist roots of this thesis. The individual belief in God*/an ideological conceptual device (1971, 167)*/ produces the material attitude of the subject: mass, kneeling, praying, confession, penance, repentance, and so on. Here Althusser locates ideology in the ideological State apparatus. This ideology talks of actions; I shall talk of actions inserted into practices . And I shall point out that these practices are governed by the rituals in which these practices are inscribed, within the material existence of an ideological apparatus, be it only a small part of that apparatus: a small mass in a small church, a funeral, a minor match at a sports club, a school day, a political party meeting, etc. (1971, 168). His final move is to take a materialist slant on Pascals formula, whereby the practices themselves */ kneeling, praying, etc */ generate belief. Thus, a religious ideology can exist with rules, rites, etc., but without a systematic theology; the advent of theology represents a degree of theoretical systematization of religious ideology (1990, 27). Yet even this materialist move requires yet another religious example: over against Pascals scandalous response to the libertine (namely, that belief will follow practice), Althusser misreads Pascal in a Spinozist fashion to point to the impossibility of separating ideas and beliefs from their material actions and rituals, so that they are always already inserted into practices and cannot exist without them (Montag 1995, 67/9). It seems as though Althusser cannot get rid of the Church. Or rather, what he has rejected leaves its marks all over him. In the case of the ideology essay, the recurring example is the Church, yet it is not mere example for it recurs too often in the essay to remain in that category. Rather, I would suggest that the form of the two theses on ideology*/representations of imaginary relations and material existence*/is analogous to the theological distinction between belief and practice, especially in the Roman Catholic Church with its emphasis on ritual and practice. In other words, the favored example of the Church hints at a deeper connection with his theory: the range and complexities of theological thought provide Althusser with the conceptual tools necessary for recasting the theory of ideology. The final part of the ideology essay, the famous and much used interpellation section, maintains the focus on religious questions. What is almost always neglected by those who discuss this section of the essay is the extended example from Christian religious ideology. This final example has languished, even in the critical

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literature, in singular obscurity.8 Yet the two sections*/the interpellation narrative and the religious example*/belong inextricably together, for the interpellation narrative begins a final argument that is incomplete without the misnamed example. Thus, the interpellation narrative attempts to deal with the dialectical interplay of ideology and the subject: ideology constitutes the subject, but cannot exist without the subject. The metaphor Althusser selects is that of interpellation or hailing. Yet the narrative is also an endeavor at understanding ideology in the context of the all-pervasive presence of ideology, the inability to escape ideology even in an analysis of ideology. Thus, the interpellation narrative is not an effort at escape but one that recognizes that pervasiveness. I shall then suggest that 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, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: Hey, you there! Assuming that the theoretical scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will turn around. By this one-hundred-andeighty-degree physical conversion, he becomes a subject . Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was really addressed to him, and that was really him who was hailed (and not someone else). Experience shows that the practical telecommunication of hailing is such that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by guilt feelings, despite the large numbers who have something on their consciences. (1971, 174) Althusser is keen to stress that the narrative sequence gives a false before-andafter effect, for ideology is the same thing as the hailing of individuals as subjects. That is, individuals are always already interpellated by ideology as subjects, and so individuals are always already subjects. However, the argument does not stop here for, in the example, he takes up religious ideology to develop the argument further. Despite appearances, it is not a specific example with its own variations for the formal structure of all ideology is always the same (177).9 Although the call of Moses appears as the biblical exemplar, Althusser takes up a distinctly Roman Catholic instance of ideology hailing individuals. The implicitly catholic tone of the well-known text I quoted above emerges clearly in the following, which deserves fuller quotation precisely because it is less well known.
8. See, for instance, the glancing comments of Ricoeur (1994, 64), Barrett (1991, 101), Pepper (1995), Montag (1995), Rushdy (1992), and Albiac (1998). 9. In fact, in Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation: Ideology and Ideological Struggle (1990, 1 42), Althusser argues that religion is the first form of ideology (25), after which moral, juridical, aesthetic, political, and philosophical forms appear.

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The Christian religious ideology says something like I address myself to you, a human individual called Peter (every individual is called by his name, in the passive sense, it is never he who provides his own name), in order to tell you that God exists and that you are answerable to Him. It adds: God addresses Himself to you through my voice . . . It says: this is who you are: you are Peter! This is your origin, you were created by God for all eternity, although you were born in the 1920th year of Our Lord! This is your place in the world! This is what you must do! By these means, if you observe the law of love you will be saved, you, Peter, and will become part of the Glorious Body of Christ! Etc.

Althusser continues: Now this is quite a familiar and banal discourse, but at the same time a surprising one. Surprising because if we consider that religious ideology is indeed addressed to individuals, in order to transform them into subjects, by interpellating the individual, Peter, in order to make him a subject, free to obey or disobey the appeal, i.e. Gods commandments; if it calls these individuals by their names, thus recognizing that they are always-already interpellated as subjects with a personal identity (to the extent that Pascals Christ says: It is for you that I have shed this drop of my blood!); if it interpellates them in such a way that the subject responds: Yes, it is really me! if it obtains from them the recognition that they really do occupy the place it designates for them as theirs in the world, a fixed residence: It really is me; I am here, a worker, a boss or a soldier! in this vale of tears; if it obtains from them the recognition of a destination (eternal life or damnation) according to the respect or contempt they show to Gods Commandments, Law become Love*/if everything does happen in this way (in the practices of the well-known rituals of baptism, confirmation, communion, confession and extreme unction, etc. ), we should note that all this procedure to set up Christian religious subjects is dominated by a strange phenomenon: the fact that there can only be such a multitude of possible religious subjects on the absolute condition that there is a Unique, Absolute, Other Subject, i.e. God. (177/8) Might not the second passage be read as a commentary on the first? Either on the street or kneeling in Church, the second instance fills in much of the detail that the cryptic first passage leaves open. Apart from their both being narratives of interpellation, at the center of the first is the physical conversion, the turning around of the subject at the moment of interpellation, a redirection that runs at so many levels: turning around in the street, religious conversion, the awareness upon such a conversion that it has always been so and that ones former direction was mistaken. The second passage assumes such a conversion, now explicating it in terms of the address by God to an individual. Or rather, it is the address of Christian religious ideology to an individual, claiming that God speaks to him through such an ideology, constituting God and the individual as subjects in the process itself.

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I cannot stress the Catholic saturation of the second passage enough. God addresses the individual through religious ideology*/that is, the Church; the sample name is none other than Peter. There is the implicit liturgical moment of confirmation when a new name is given and the person consciously recognizes the call of the Church; there are the rituals or sacraments themselves*/baptism, confirmation, communion, confession and especially extreme unction. There is the emphasis on obeying the commandments, the Law of Love; and there is the quotation from Pascal, who had already appeared earlier. Althusser has made it rather easy for me here, for the Christian religious ideology in question is none other than Roman Catholic. But in order to see how this translates all too readily into Althussers catholicity, let me trace the rest of the argument. This religious ideology calls a particular person who, created by God, must respond to this call. God speaks to this person through the Bible and Church and, if this subject responds to the law of love, he will have eternal life and so on. However, religious ideology has many subjects that all relate to or mirror God, a singular Subject (capital S). These then relate to each other except that, in Christian ideology, the Subject also becomes the small-s subject*/Christ*/in order to present an example of salvation for the many subjects. The point here is that all ideology has a mirror structure*/duplication of Subject into subjects and Subject into subjectSubject*/that is centered in the Absolute Subject. Since religious ideology has multiple subjects, a single Subject (God), and a relationship posited between the two, Althusser argues that all ideology has the following features: 1. the interpellation of individuals as subjects; 2. their subjection to the Subject; 3. the mutual recognition of subjects and Subject, the subjects recognition of each other, and finally the subjects recognition of himself; 4. the absolute guarantee that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen*/so be it. (1971, 181) The universal claim (all ideology), along with the final Amen and its translation, the rush of the paragraph-long sentence in the previous quotation, but above all the identification of the one, absolutely other Subject at the center of any ideology*/all these suggest a desire to say everything about ideology. Far from being an example, the final catholic section of the essay takes the discussion of interpellation to its conclusion: the famous hailing in the street example gets us only as far as point one in the preceding quotation. Althusser can only draw the remaining points from the discussion of religion. When this quadruple system is in play, subjects can operate perfectly well, without supervision. Through ideology and the rituals of the ISAs, subjects recognize the existing state of affairs and operate within them. All of which leads Althusser to his final formulation: the individual 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 (182).

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Only through the religious example, which is absolutely necessary to Athussers argument, can he reach an answer to a question he posed somewhat earlier: why do people seek to represent their imaginary relationship with their real conditions of existence? The answer comes only at the end: so that they can work and live normally*/that is, freely subject themselves to the Subject. Even here Althusser draws on a paradox from the tradition of Christian theology: namely, the tension between free will and determinism, cast in a specifically Roman Catholic form. Although most traditions attempt to hold the relation in some balance, however paradoxical, the emphasis tends to fall on one or the other. Thus, the Jansenists tended toward a position similar to Calvin, that free will could be possible only within the doctrine of predestination. It seems to me that Althusser follows a Jansenist line here: ideology operates successfully when subjects believe they are submitting of their own free will, even though ideology predetermines them to arrive at precisely this position. In the end, Althusser can develop his theory of ideology only by passing through ecclesiological and theological arguments. In other words, the intricacies of theological materials, particularly in their Roman Catholic form, provide the breakthrough and depth that his theory provides. He can then extrapolate from the Christian form of ideology to argue that Subject can also designate State, Duty, Justice, and so on. In all this, Althusser has taken his universalizing logic even further: not content to move from Roman Catholic Church to Church universal, he takes another step toward ideology as universal and eternal in itself. But he can do so only through theology.

Conclusion
Althusser is a catholic Marxist, sliding between the catholicity of the Church itself, especially the Roman Catholic Church, and the internationalism of Marxism that worked itself out in the specific dynamics of a particular nation-state. In other words, as I have argued, Althussers Marxist catholicity becomes the necessary feature of his rejection of the Roman Catholic Church. Although he perpetually tried to reject or contain the Church as an item of feudal history, as an item of practical ideology, and so on, the repressed kept returning. But let me close on the vexed question of (auto)biography. I have left this until last since biography looms so large in the critical literature, from the murder of his wife Helene, to depression and the manic productivity of a bipolar psychological state. At ` first sight, biography everywhere confirms the continued presence of the Church in his work, all the way from his training by such Catholic intellectuals as Jean Guitton, Jean Lacroix, and Joseph Hours (Pere Hours) at the Lycee du Parc at Lyons through his ` involvement in and continued connections with the Catholic left to statements such as I kept my faith for a long time, until 1947 or thereabouts (1994b, 205; 1992, 198; see further 1994b, 92/6, 123, 162, 205/6, 305/6, 315, 346; 1992, 83/8, 144, 154/8, 197, 299, 309, 338; Matheron 1997; Breton 1993). Autobiography is, of course, the most treacherous ground upon which to base an argument for Althussers Catholic Marxism, even though Douglas Johnson does his

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best in the introduction to The Future Lasts a Long Time (Johnson 1994). Rather than playing the game of determining the fantasy from the facts of his life,10 let me use an incident Althusser represents from his time at the lycee in Lyons under the highly influential Jean Guitton, with whom he maintained contact. After failing his first assignment, he learned to write on the vaguest of topics with clarity and conviction. Guitton had given us the subject: Reality and fiction . I was struggling in vain to get a few vague ideas into my head and again feeling completely lost when one of the older boys came up with some sheets of paper in his hand. Here, have these. They might help you. Anyway, theyre on the same subject. It was true; Guitton must have set the same subject the previous year and the older boy mischievously gave me Guittons own fair copy. I was certainly filled with shame but my despair was even greater. Without a moments hesitation I took the teachers fair copy, retained most of it (the overall plan, the development of the ideas, and the conclusion), and reworked it as best I could in my own way */in other words, what I had managed to grasp of Guittons approach, including his style of writing. When Guitton gave the essays back to us in class, he seemed quite amazed and showered me with sincere praise. How had I made such progress in such a short time! I came top with seventeen out of twenty. (1994b, 92; 1992, 84; emphasis mine) The result: Althusser became the prize pupil, Guittons favorite, one of the few to gain access to the Ecole normale superieure, all through a supreme act of deception and artifice (1994b, 93; 1992, 85). An allegory for the Church in Althussers work and life, reworked as best he could in his own way?

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References
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10. In this respect, I would merely be replicating the detailed biography of Moulier Boutang (1992, especially 99/171).

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