June 18, 2018:
In his final period, roughly 1977-87, Althusser produced a very radical reading of the absences, silences, and antagonisms within the mature Marx's mature Marxism. He attempted sketches of some of what needed to be done for Marxism to overcome these limits while continuing to meaningfully evolve, focusing particularly on the definition of materialism. He published next to nothing of this work, so that contemporaries were again left with a distorted understanding of his evolution. The only English collection published in these years was Essays in Self-Criticism, which never made it out of hardback and was all but impossible to find — I first bought it around 2000 from a dealer of rare books. The posthumous and surprising collection Philosophy of the Encounter appeared in 2006.