Althusser's Marxism without a Knowing Subject

The quest for unassailable “foundations” for knowledge has preoccupied Western thinkers at least since Descartes. Without some such foundation or Archimedian standpoint, it was argued, our knowledge of the external world as well as our basis for moral and political judgment would fall prey to relativism, historicism, and ultimately nihilism. Recently, though, this Cartesian quest for foundations has come under attack from some of the most powerful minds of our age. In this article I examine the contribution of Louis Althusser to this current of thought and assess whether his critique of foundationalist epistemologies and ethics can avoid the pitfalls of relativism. Althusser is compared to other thinkers who share his anti-Cartesian persuasion (Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault) and is criticized for his use of a kind of structuralism to abolish the “knowing subject” as the locus of thought and action. I conclude that Althusser's “antihumanism” has produced a convenient ideology for a new class of Marxist intellectuals to exert their claims to power over ordinary human agents who have been reduced to “bearers” or “supports” of certain systemic, structural relations.