On the Centrality of the Subject: French Marxism and the Sève-Althusser Correspondence

By the 1960s Louis Althusser and Lucien Sève were two leading philosophers in the French Communist Party. Their aim was to build a stronger theoretical foundation for the party by returning to the letter of Marx’s texts and purging French Marxism of its idealist tendencies. They soon came to disagree, however, over basic issues—of dialectics, structure, crisis—and especially over questions of subjectivity and humanism. Whereas Althusser hoped to “decenter” the subject and break with all notions of humanism, Sève believed that Marxism was constituted as a “theory of personality,” a new kind of humanism that provided insight into the psychological structures of capitalism. Using their recently published correspondence as a frame, this article examines how Althusser and Sève generated distinct models for understanding the role of the individual in society and helped shape the French Communist Party’s theory and strategy in the 1960s and 1970s.