Louis Althusser and Merab Mamardashvili

ANNIE EPELBOIN THE CROSSED DESTINIES OR TWO PHILOSOPHERS: LOUIS ALTHUSSER AND MERAB MAMARDASHVILI The correspondence between the two philosophers lasted as long as did their friendship. It began shortly after their first meeting in Paris in 1966 and ended, it seems, in 1980, when Althusser was committed to a psychiatric hospital following the murder of his wife. The letters were at first sent very officially by post and addressed to the respective places of work, to Althusser at the École Normal Supérieure rue Ulm and to Mamardashvili1 at the Institute of the Workers Movement in Moscow.2 Later, as travel to the USSR became more frequent, their correspondence was transported by carriers, circumstance which permitted a relative freedom of content. I was thus their “go-between” from 1971 to 1977, during which years I frequently visited my friends in Moscow, in particular MM. I had made his acquaintance in 1971 by way of Italian friends during a course in which, as a young student in Slavic Studies, I was enrolled at the State University of Moscow (MGU). And it was MM who in turn introduced me to LA by requesting that I deliver to him a letter upon my return to Paris. The correspondence, the part which has been preserved, is located at the Althusser archives, which the philosopher’s heir entrusted in 1991 to the Memorial Institute of Contemporary Publication (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine: IMEC). It contains the letters, written in French to LA by MM, to which were added at the same time a group of letters by LA received by MM and entrusted to the IMEC by the latter’s daughter. The correspondence is unpublished, with the exception of one of LA’s letters to MM published by the IMEC in 1993 in the journal Futur antérieur (“Lettre à Merab,” p. 5). The collection is very incomplete, for a large number of letters have not, at this point, been recovered. It consists of eight letters dated between 1968 and 1970 and five letters dated between 1978 and 1980. Among the missing letters are, notably, those which I myself carried, and from which passages were occasionally read out to me. This corpus represents roughly twenty-five pages of tightly written text, sometimes type-written. Eight letters are written by LA, while six, generally shorter, are signed by MM. They retrace in outline the history of their friendship, first of all between two philosophers and then between to men, anxious to share their joys and pains. They also retrace the history of a misunderstanding which, I think, concerns not only two individuals, but the history of the twentieth century: an intense dialogue 1. In the following the names of Louis Althusser (LA) and Merab Mamardašvili (MM) will be replaced by their initials. For a short introduction to the life and work of MM, see the preface to Merab Mamardachvili, Méditations cartésiennes, trad. T. Page and L. Jurgenson, pref. Annie Epelboin, intr. Jean-Pierre Faye (Paris : Editions Solins Actes Sud, 1997). 2. This Institute hosted, thanks to its director I. Zamochkin, a number of faculty members who introduced critical theory trends in their lectures. Foreign researchers who came to the Institute to study Marxism were often disillusioned. grew between two people who, in spite of distance, were bound by friendship and mutual admiration, but it did not reach – far from it – a profound exchange of thought. This failure was due, above all, to the deafness of the French philosopher with regard to the information, however furtive, which arrived from Moscow. It was also caused by the laconism of MM’s style, which we will return to. LA’s engagement with the French Communist Party (Parti communiste français – PCF) cannot in itself serve as a sufficient explanation. Those who were close to LA, even without sharing his political infatuations, agree that there was a discontinuity which they discovered in their contact with him between the dry dogmatism of his writings and the exceptional personal warmth, the attentive and “disabused” ear that he lent to the stories recounted to him about life and the world. The discontinuity points in part – but not only – to the problem of LA’s mental illness, to the rift which dominated him, a rift between a most powerful intelligence and the capacity to entertain the most senseless ideas. In spite of this, the exchange of letters allows one to understand various nuances of the thought and attitude of the two thinkers with regard to philosophy, life and history. Merab Mamardashvili and France The initiative which lead to the dialogue came from MM and his love and great knowledge of French culture which goes back to his adolescence in Tbilisi. He expressed himself on various occasions concerning his “choice” of French thought and language.3 The years he spent in Prague beginning with 1961 were even more decisive than the reading of his youth. In the cosmopolitan and paradoxical milieu which was the editorial office of the journal Problems of Peace and Socialism, sat side by side “communists” of the most diverse sort, cynical, naive, hardened and disabused. Amongst those who “returned hence,” was the French journalist Pierre Bellefroid, who was a very close friend of MM during these years until his death. MM visited Bellefroid during his stay in France in 1989, a visit during which he did not wish to see LA, who had already been released from psychiatric hospital. According to Bellefroid, MM had visited France a number of times during his Prague years: at the beginning, in 1962-63, he made sure that he traveled on official business, but later dispensed with making such arrangements. This cost him a very serious reprimand from the authorities when he returned to Moscow where he was banned from international travel. LA arranged official invitations from the École Normale Supérieur (ENS) for him throughout the 1970’s, but to no effect. Upon his arrival in Prague, MM had only a bookish knowledge of French. He was quickly initiated into the spoken language with all of its plasticity and in particular the argot, thanks to his French friend, who wandered from café to café with him and provided him with a wide assortment of books, from Proust to detective novels, which MM consumed with gusto. Bellefroid also introduced MM to Céline and to erotic literature, and gave him a taste of jazz and French chansons. Bellefroid housed him at his place or with friends when MM came to France, sometimes without a visa. 3. See MM’s discussion in La pensée empêchée (Paris: Ed. De l’aube, 1991). (Interviews in French with Annie Epelboin, 1989). .

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