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What role do Louis Althusser's 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 Althusser's 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 Church's 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
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 Althusser's early theological texts in embarrassed silence.1 They have only followed Althusser's 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 Althusser's 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 Althusser's Marxism. The most glaring example is the shift from Catholic to Marxist universalism. In fact, the Church is like Althusser's 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...