First, a brief introduction to Althusser: A French philosopher, 1918-1990. He is the author of "Defending Marx" and "Reading Capital". Highly respected by the New Left, its ideological theory has a deep influence, especially Marxist philosophical theory has also had a great impact on the mainland, but these evaluations are often accompanied by a "stain": wife killing.
On November 16, 1980, it was a Sunday. Where: In the apartment of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, in a room where they don't often stay as a couple, Althusser stands in front of the bed in his pajamas, while his wife, Elena, also lies on her back in pajamas. He sat on his knees next to his wife and began to massage her neck, a technique he had learned in the prisoner of war camp, and he would often massage and massage the neck of his wife, but this time the massage was on the front of the neck, this time Aldusser was very tired, he saw Alana's face motionless, looking serene, his eyes staring at the ceiling, unusually calm.
Althusser was suddenly startled, writing in his autobiography: "Her eyes stared endlessly, especially with a small tip of the tongue between her teeth and lips, which seemed unusually calm and calm. Sure, I've seen some dead people, but I've never seen the faces of people who have been strangled. Yet I knew it was a strangled woman. How is this possible? I stood up straight and shouted: I strangled Elena!
Elena was strangled to death by Althusser without the slightest resistance, as if unconsciously seduced, and Althusser also accepted the desire of this great other. She suffered from mental anguish, just like Althusser, and they both had a miserable childhood and unforgettable upbringings.
Elena was unwelcome from birth, her mother wanted a boy, and what she saw in front of her was this dark and savage girl, her mother hated her and never breastfed her, and all of Elena's requests for breastfeeding were rejected, in this case, all of her rough and savage defense mechanisms were able to survive, but he still had a gentle and kind father, an ordinary vegetable shop owner, but legend has it that she was sexually assaulted by her father, which is unknown, but it is certain that she "killed" her father with her own hands.
When she was ten years old, her father had cancer, her brother and sister had lived independently and would not care about the affairs here, and her mother did not care, she was the only one to take care of her father. I don't know if it was luck or bad luck, at this time there was a "good doctor": Delcroix, Elena loved him very much, because when she was most helpless, when the huge pressure was about to crush her, he reached out, for Elena, this was the only thing she relied on at that time, and this "good doctor", the person she trusted the most, tried to play with her panties and sexual organs, and it felt like the only friend in the world abandoned her, and she could only accept it. Later, Elena continued to take care of her father, and when her father was in the most pain, the "good doctor" forced her to inject him with a large dose of morphine, so that her father was killed by her "evil daughter".
But it wasn't over, and a year later, her mother also had cancer, and the "good doctor" had Elena inject her mother with a deadly injection in the same way, so that both father and mother died at the hands of her "evil daughter", who was thirteen years old.
She began wandering alone, finding a job to make ends meet, and later managed to go to school, to the Sorbonne City for a few classes, where she met her first real friend: Emily, a philosopher who was passionate about Spinoza and Hegel. She was also a Communist, who later left for the Soviet Union, but was arrested and thrown into prison in Siberia, where a bullet hit her in the neck and she was executed. Emily was the first to see that she possessed intelligence and generosity beneath her unruly exterior, and her thoughts deeply influenced Elena, from whom Elena learned that philosophy was fateful and indispensable to politics, and that under her influence she had become a member of the Communist Party and achieved great fame.
In 1930, when she was twenty years old, just after joining the Communist Party, near the Citroën factory in the XV arrondissement of Paris, she braved the fascist storm to set up a sales point for the workers of The Zeitung, which made her popular among the workers and frightened the fascists, because she was so determined and brave. Later, she also participated in many hand-to-hand combat against fascism and has always stood firmly with the working class. It was not until she went underground in 1939 that she lost all contact with the party. And this communist years of struggle against fascism is also the reason why Althusser was greatly attracted later, although the two of them were also Communists, but the difference was that Elena had an incomparably rich practical experience, and Althusser was only a "paper soldier" in a sense, so Althusser was deeply attracted to her after their first encounter in 1946, for Althusser she was a capitalized woman, a perfect communist.
The two of them began to understand each other, felt sorry for each other, and gradually the two of them found that they both had the same loneliness and despair, the same anxiety, the same suffering.
Althusser's mother was originally his uncle's fiancée, but his uncle died in battle, so according to the biblical system of widowhood, the father married his mother directly. This was undoubtedly a disaster for her mother, who later gave birth to Althusser, who gave him the same name as her uncle: Louis. Althusser, and then treated him like a dead uncle.
His mother was a man who was indifferent to anything, but loyal to the castration of little Althusser, and in one bath, the mother pointed to the lower body of little Althusser and said: "Look at you there are two holes in your body, and your sister has three holes." This made little Althusser feel extremely ashamed, and later his mother's various "obscene" behaviors towards him, which made Althusser have a repressed disgust for "sex". When he grew up, Althusser wanted to fall in love, but his mother said: You are eighteen, the family is nineteen, the age difference is too inappropriate, which once again castrates Althusser. (It cannot be said that the mother had no love for him, except that this love was directed at the dead man behind him: his uncle.) It wasn't until the age of 27 that Althusser had his first masturbation and thirty that he had his first sexual love, the first sexual love with Elena.
After Althusser and Elena met for the first time, they developed a brotherhood. However, at this time, Elena was extremely poor, because she had lost almost all her friends, she was used as a spy within the Communist Organization, lost contact with the party, and later, she began to give the film director Jean. Reano as an assistant but Jean. However, Rayano was never willing to put her name on the subtitles of the movie, so the relationship with him broke down.
She then went on to join a very important resistance movement: "Liberation of the South". In order to send intelligence, money, and weapons from Switzerland to France, she served as Schilla's agent in France, which made her aware of many resistance fighters and literati, of whom Aragon and Arluia were most closely related. He was also familiar with Lacan, who was living in Nice with Lacan's lover Sylvia. Lacan then recognizes Elena in his interactions with Sylvia, and Lacan often confides in Elena endlessly, in the sense that Elena is Lacan's analyst, and Lacan also agrees with her ability to listen and says to her personally: You could have become a psychoanalyst
After 1945, the war was over, and these friends disappeared, in short, some died and some no longer "loved" her. She made ends meet by selling manuscripts of aragonese and Arulya's early writings, and slept on the top floor of a hotel, in a dilapidated servant's room. It also aroused Althusser's desire to save and protect her, and perhaps this was also a reason for being attracted to her. But it was also only attraction, as if attracted by her communist experience, that had not yet made him fall in love with Elena, at least as Althusser said in his autobiography.
Before their relationship, Elena was proactive and often called him, and Althusser always avoided it, because Althusser did not like to be passive in the relationship, which meant that the recurrence of the relationship with his mother made him anxious.
In order to avoid the active overtures, Althusser even brought another female companion to provoke her, suggesting that she already had someone I liked and so on, and the lovely Lena not only did not flinch, but more exaggerated, just in a small room in the infirmary, Alenna took the initiative to kiss Althusser, this was the first time he was kissed by a woman, and he had never kissed a woman before. (But when he kissed a man, he met a two-meter-tall gay lover who covered him and loved him during his years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and then when the war ended, the lover abandoned him and found a woman to love, to which Althusser angrily said: You don't want to marry that woman.) This kiss directly made Althusser burn, and he began to take the initiative to have sex with Elena, and for this time of sex, Althusser commented: Novelty, stimulation, soul-destroying, violent!
But this first experience of sexual love also led directly to Althusser's first psychotic attack, because sex and death are the two real things that are the violators of most of the mental subject structure. After the attack, he was sent to the Santa Ana Psychiatric Hospital, where Elena secretly visited him at the small window of the hospital and comforted him, and after a while, she was rescued from the psychiatric hospital.
After that, Althusser began a crazy sex pattern, a man who had never had a relationship with a woman in thirty years, and who had been exposed to men, whether it was his good friend Paul or his prisoner-of-war camp lover. The feminine dimension was his first contact, and he showed a capitalized man's masculinity through violent and manic love, and also achieved revenge on her mother, because the castration of her mother in childhood was to prevent him from becoming a man, and the mother was in a sense to own his sexual organs, and claimed that the thing was given to him by the mother, which was a kind of transducerial rape.
After Althusser achieved revenge on his mother, the interaction mode with Elena also changed, he became the active party, and Elena became the passive party, although later Elena changed again, but at least now she is kind and warm to Althusser, which directly brings Althusser the latitude of an ideal mother, and at the same time, because Elena is eight years older than him, has a wealth of life experience, whenever she tells the story of the struggle against the Nazis, it will always make Althusser impressed, This has the ideal father dimension to bring Althusser back to reality. Undoubtedly, this was the perfect woman, a woman who capitalized Althusser and made her anxious at the same time.
Elena is actually a person with countless childhood traumas, she also has anxiety, she is also afraid that she will become a bad woman, afraid of becoming the "evil woman" who killed her parents. And this anxiety Althusser could not respond, because he was weak and powerless in this position. Elena's anxiety is like her mother's anxiety, and her mother's anxiety is directly invested in Althusser to castrate her. So there is no doubt that Althusser awakens this castration in the face of Elena's anxiety, so it is impossible to respond. So when they're having sex, Elena often says, "Tell me something, right?" At this time, Althusser could not say anything.
Later they began to quarrel, the scene of relatives and friends marveled, Elena wanted Althusser to respond to fill her anxiety, and Aldusser wanted to achieve revenge on her mother in Elena's body, he began to provoke Elena, blatantly flirting with other women in front of her, the language was extremely vulgar, and even went directly to the public bathroom to make love, he would also steal things in major stores to show Elena, and even had plans to rob banks to steal submarines, in short, all kinds of demons, to find little three, little four. And she also wanted Elena to admit it, and later she did acquiesce to Althusser's cheating behavior, after all, Althusser threatened suicide at every turn, and his mental condition was getting worse and worse.
Although Althusser has also been doing psychoanalysis, his most trusted psychoanalyst, Jacques. Martin committed suicide. This was undoubtedly a heavy blow to him, because after he strangled Elena with his own hands, it was Jacques in his mind. Martin's suicide.
Later he was looking for a new analyst, but this analyst was also Elena's: Diatkin. This is undoubtedly another psychoanalytic act of incest, turning the hell of two into a hell of three.
Coincidentally, this analyst is anti-Lacan, perhaps this is not a coincidence, but Althusser deliberately chose this way, because the relationship between Althusser and Lacan is very special, and Althusser, as a long-term patient, has also been analyzed by Lacan. Later, Through Althusser's introduction, Lacan held a seminar at the High School of Paris, and was a person who directly promoted Lacan's cause, and Lacan's theory also directly influenced his philosophy, especially ideological theory. Later, Althusser said that he and Lacan had a mirror image relationship. So his choice of an anti-Lacan analyst is in a way a provocation against Lacan, like a provocation against Elena.
Elena began to have symptoms of mental problems in 1975, which I think was caused by the overly provocative behavior with Althusser. It is said that on a beach, Althusser openly took a female companion to swim in the sea, and Elena could not swim, so she could only watch him play with the woman, and even made love, but the waves were turbulent, and the weak Althusser almost drowned, or the female companion rescued him, and then Elena said to the rescued Althusser: To me, you are dead.
Later, they did not mention this beach incident, maybe for Elena, Althusser was really dead at that time, so she began to pay attention to her own latitude, no longer always endured Althusser's demonization, so she also began to do all kinds of demonization, began to have mental problems, after all, she also had a deep trauma. Elena started moving all the time and then committed suicide, much like Althusser.
They also have the problem of depression, as they did in the beginning: they have the same suffering, but if both sides go to pain, then who will be the comforter? From this point of view, such a marriage is like a hellish marriage.
After Elena's demonization began, her suicidal tendencies were also severe. Then another offender of a psychotic episode appeared: death. That is, Elena constantly presented himself with suicidal desires, and Althusser unconsciously accepted this desire, so that afternoon, he strangled Elena with his own hands, thus completing an altruistic suicide.
At this point, a philosopher, a good teacher, a Marxist, all these identities have been erased by the masses. Later, he was admitted to santa ana hospital, and when he saw the reporter comparing him to Kazuharu Sagawa (a man-eating demon), he decided to write an autobiography of "Coming to Japan" to complete an analysis of himself.
Althusser killed Elena, and at the same time killed himself, the greater other in his spirit, and Elena, as a person with capital letters, undoubtedly occupied that position. So just after he killed his wife, he found that he had always been a person who revolved around himself, and his love with Elena was only playing with himself, playing with his own big other, and indulging in this pleasure, and he poured all his libido into himself, self-centered. (at least in a loving relationship)
Althusser does not know what love is and how to love a person, his love for others is only a weight exchange, that is, I love you means that you will also love me, which is always for yourself. And when he realized what love was, he had already paid a terrible price.
Finally, to quote a passage from Althusser in "The Long Coming to Japan": Life, despite its tragedies, can still be beautiful. I'm 67 years old and my youth is gone, but I finally feel like I'm being loved for myself. I felt like I had never been so young, even when it was all over. Yes, after all, it is a long time to come to Japan.
Love is not to take the initiative in order to constantly exaggerate yourself, but to care for others, is to have the ability to respect the desires and rhythms of others, not to ask for anything, but to learn to accept, to accept gifts as a surprise in life.