Althusser and the Problem of Historical Individuality

Ted Stolze Abstract: Louis Althusser once raised an important theoretical problem for Marxists of how to understand “the historical forms of the existence of individuality,” but he failed to provide an adequate solution to this problem. By contrast, fellow French communist philosopher Lucien Sève has criticized Althusser’s approach and provided a full-fledged and compelling theory of historical individuality, which helps to shore up a major weakness in Althusser’s famous formulation that “ideology interpellates individuals as subjects.” By trying to understand what an individual is, Marxists can better reclaim the concrete individuals who are subject to, and subjected by, the process of interpellation, and thereby more successfully disrupt this process. I test this claim by investigating the case of the first-century historical individual Simeon bar Yonah (better known as Simon Peter).