Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Text And Subject Position After Althusser, Antony Easthope

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Althusser's achievement is that he redefined Marxism. He reconceptualizes history and totality in terms of different times, construes knowledge as the outcome of a process of construction, and interprets subjectivity as an effect of ideology and unconscious processes. Unfortunately, Althusser's functionalist view of ideology claims that the subject recognizes itself as a subject because it duplicates— reflects—an absolute subject. However, Lacan's notion of the mirror stage remedies this fault. Lacan's subject always misrecognizes itself in a process of contradiction that threatens the stability of any given social order. Moreover, unlike Foucault's subject, which is limited in that subjectivity is folded …