Louis Althusser sounds like an anagram, which is fitting because his books read like clues to a crossword so cryptic it would have defeated Alan Turing. In the introductory note to History and Imperialism its editor and translator, G.M. Goshgarian, talks of “a certain carelessness of expression” in Althusser’s work, adding that “Marx and History” “is the only one of these writings to have been seriously revised”.
Revised? Seriously? Here is a sentence from that essay: “The dialectic is the play that the last instance opens up between itself and other ‘instances’, but this dialectic is materialist: it is not played out up in the air, it is played out in the play opened up by the last instance, which is material.”
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