cover image The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir

The Future Lasts Forever: A Memoir

Louis Althusser. New Press, $25 (365pp) ISBN 978-1-56584-087-4

French Marxist philosopher Althusser (1918-1990) was a manic-depressive with a long history of mental instability and constant medication. In 1980 he strangled his wife Helene; the murder was officially ascribed to temporary insanity, and after two years in a mental hospital he was set free. In this strained, painful memoir, written in 1985, Althusser attempts to persuade the world of his innocence through a convoluted psychoanalytical self-analysis. He writes of his castrating, sadistic mother who was brutalized by his authoritarian father, a bank manager. We learn of the philosopher's ordeal in a German prisoner-of-war camp during WW II, of violent quarrels with Helene and an analyst, and of his suicidal depression after her death. Also included is an autobiographical sketch from 1976 which discusses his boyhood in Algiers and Marseilles and the evolution of his political thought and communist politics. (Jan.)