June 7, 2018:
Althusser's relentless demotion of subjectivity and the subject is important, and, I think worth emphasizing, not unique to him at the time. Foucault, Derrida and much of contemporary French intellectual culture were trying to conceptualize anti-subjectivity in different ways. Again this isn't because they didn't value people. It's because the traditional emphasis since the Enlightenment on processes of individual cognition obscured the kinds of questions that are the most interesting. It isn't, What was Napoleon thinking at the Battle of Waterloo? It's, How is it possible that a man like Napoleon was empowered at all? Consider it: millions of French peasants had to agree to fight for him; hundreds of thousands of workers had to agree to manufacture arms and ammunition. Why didn't they all say no?