Althusser´s Lesson

Rancière´s analysis of Althusserian Marxism unfolds against this background: what is the relationship between the return to order and the enthusiasm which greeted the publication of Althusser´s Reply to John Lewis in 1973? How to explain the rehabilitation of a philosophy that had been declared ´dead and buried on the barricades of May 68´? What had changed? The answer to this question takes the form of a genealogy of Althusserianism that is, simultaneously, an account of the emergence of militant student movements in the ´60s, of the arrival of Maoism in France, and of how May 68 rearranged all the pieces anew.