Louis Althusser Free Essays - PhDessay.com.
Althusser does not agree with meaning of ideology as a serious of false impressions, stated by The German Ideology; but he seems to lean on the idea of representations. Ideology is conceived to be the structure of assumptions which form the imaginative world of groups. Althusser writes that ideology is “a representation of the imaginary relation of individuals to the real condition of.
Louis Althusser (1962). From The German Ideology onwards we know that such an undertaking would be meaningless. Anyone who claims purely and simply to have inverted speculative philosophy (to derive, for example, materialism) can never be more than philosophy’s Proudhon, its unconscious prisoner, just as Proudhon was the prisoner of bourgeois economics. We are now concerned with the.
Althusser's Theory Of Ideology Essay. 979 Words 4 Pages. Show More. Established on Marx 's claim that a social formation has to be maintained by reproduction of the conditions of production, Althusser is dedicated to improving the “Marxist theory” of the State from the point of view of reproduction. He believes that the reproduction of the relations of production is mainly secured by the.
In a later influential essay, “ Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1969), Althusser argued against traditional interpretations of Marx as an inveterate economic determinist by demonstrating the “quasi-autonomous” role accorded to politics, law, and ideology in Marx’s later writings.
In Althusser’s first thesis from his essay Ideology and the State, he says that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (Althusser, 1970, pg. 153). This statement demonstrates the imaginary relationship the individual has with ideology. The imaginary nature of this unique relationship stems from the fact that human beings do.
Often, especially amongst the British left, Althusser is seen as an elitist and irrelevant academic, but Althusser's attempt to think marxism with philosophy have implications for many an ideology. Althusser remains surprisingly popular as an introduction to Marx. His works like Pour Marx and the essays on over-determination and humanism.
In that essay Althusser redefines ideology - there was always something simple about it, as if the truth of our lifeworld were right behind some silly bourgeois veil; he emphasizes the materiality of ideology, how the Real of ideology is nothing but the fact that it is dependent on capitalism and its needs.