The historian of madness Michel Foucault found and published in 1974 an upbeat first-person account of his crime written by a 19th-century French murderer: Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma soeur et monfrère ..., a statement precious, in Foucauldian terms, as a rare public instance of the normally suppressed discourse of madness. Now, from the man who coached Foucault in philosophy, we have another bold and engrossing first-person work which could have borne the title 'Moi Louis Althusser ayant étranglé ma femme ... ', for L'Avenir dure longtemps is the garlanded Marxist philosopher's long essay in explanation of how he came to strangle his wife late in 1980. Pierre Rivière's was the extrovert testimony of a rube, a deranged Norman farmboy and literary simpleton: Althusser's is infinitely more adroit, the manipulative product of a theoretical intelligence turned lovingly in on itself, and a pre-emptive exercise in the discourse more on than of madness.

LRB 17 December 1992 | PDF Download