Open to New School faculty, staff, and students only; must have an @newschool.edu email address to register.

This talk considers the complicated legacy of Louis Althusser, a towering figure in French Marxism and, our speaker Robyn Marasco argues, a vital resource for political theory and feminism. Though the post-Althusserian landscape has been dominated by (psychoanalytic) debates about subjectivity, Marasco argues for a return to Althusser’s (Marxist) theory of the state and the “structuralist” dimensions of his thought. Further, she contends that Althusser’s idiosyncratic concept of ideology helps us to understand how the family functions politically, how it serves the project of the state, and how it reproduces a social and political order. The lecture will show family is a recurring theme in Althusser’s work, from his early writings on the Catholic Youth movement, to his reflections on the history of political thought, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, to his celebrated essay on ideology and ideological state apparatuses. A feminist reading allows us to place Althusser’s theory of ideology within a larger political and intellectual milieu that includes women. It also allows us to amplify the critique of patriarchy that is implied but underdeveloped in Althusser’s philosophy. Marasco considers the case of Althusser as an opportunity for the clarification of a feminist method, a way of reading inspired by his own method of symptomatic reading. Following Althusser, Marasco treats the family apparatus as “the state” in its most familiar and intimate form.

Speaker:
Robyn Marasco is Professor of Political Science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research has focused on developing the insights of critical theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis for political theory and interpretive social science. Her first book, The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia UP, 2015), reconstructs the emancipatory project of critical theory around the idea of negative dialectics. Her articles have appeared in leading journals in the humanities and social sciences, including American Journal of Political Science, Political Theory, New German Critique, Constellations, boundary2, Philosophy & Social Criticism, and Contemporary Political Theory. Professor Marasco was the guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest co-editor of a special issue of Rethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser”. She has also served as the chair of Foundations of Political Theory, the country’s largest professional organization for political theorists and a sub-section of the American Political Science Association. Prior to joining the faculty at Hunter and the Graduate Center, Professor Marasco taught political theory at Williams College. More recently, she was a Fellow at the Whitney Center for the Humanities at Yale University and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Her current book project, Elements of a Political Theory of the Family (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) recovers the distinctly political theory of the family in twentieth-century critical theory. Professor Marasco is co-editor of Polity, a journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association.