Louis Althusser’s seminars at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) are of course best known for the famous Reading Capital volume, which developed from his 1964-65 seminar. He ran seminars on the young Marx in 1961-62 and Lacan and psychoanalysis in 1963-64. I’ve written about his 1962-63 seminar before in The Archaeology of Foucault (pp. 14-15). This seminar was on structuralism, and Althusser spoke about Foucault and Lévi-Strauss. Among other contributions, Pierre Macherey spoke about Canguilhem – a piece which was published with an introduction by Althusser in 1964. Balibar’s notes from that seminar and some other materials are at IMEC, and I was able to use them back in 2020. 

Between 1967 and 1968 Louis Althusser and some of his students delivered a course at the ENS pitched as ‘philosophy for scientists’ or non-philosophers. Some parts of the course have been published, including Alain Badiou’s Le concept du modèle in 1969 and Michel Fichant and Michel Pécheux, Sur L’histoire des sciences shortly afterwards. Badiou’s text was reissued by Fayard in 2007 and translated as The Concept of Model by re:press that same year.

These early volumes indicate others to follow. In Badiou’s book the list reads:

1. Introduction (Louis Althusser)
2. Expérience et Expérimentation (Pierre Macherey and Etienne Balibar)
3. La «coupure épistémologique» (François Regnault, Michel Péchaux)
4. Le Concept de Modéle (Alain Badiou)
5. L’idée d’une histoire des sciences (Michel Fichant)
6. Conclusion provisoire

Between Badiou’s book and the Fichant and Pécheux one the structure of the series changed, with François Regnault withdrawing his contribution, and the third and fifth volumes being merged. Althusser’s Introduction was eventually published in 1974, as Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967), and was translated in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. The French text is, I think, out of print, but available on Gallica. More recently, G.M. Goshgarian has edited Althusser’s text Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes, and translated it as Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, but that is a later text which seems distinct from this project, although clearly linked to it in its approach.

Pierre Macherey is very good on the history of the course and the series, in a piece translated in Parrhesia in 2009. He indicates that a fifth lecture which Althusser planned for the concluding volume was published posthumously in Althusser’s Écrits philosophiques et politiques, under the title “Du coté de la philosophie”.

In that piece, Macherey mentions that the original roneotypes of the course materials are available at the ENS archives, donated by Balibar. They have also been made available online to read or download at archive.org

The ENS description reads:

Louis Althusser. Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques organisés à l’Ecole normale supérieure

Papier.  Documents ronéotypés.  175 f.  325 x 240 mm.

Cours organisés par Louis Althusser : 5 cours de Louis Althusser, 3 cours de Pierre Macherey, 3 cours d’Etienne Balibar, et 1 cours de François Regnault.

Some of the Althusser texts mentioned above, and the Badiou one, are reasonably well known. The Fichant and Pëcheux volume is interesting for some of the debates about epistemology and science with which Foucault and Canguilhem were involved. The availability of the archive material of the course means that there is more material for people to work with…

The books which did appear were all in the ‘Théorie’ series Althusser edited with François Maspero. I put together a list of the books in that series for this site back in 2022, and wrote a short history of the series for the Verso blog.

References

Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, Pierre Macherey, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Lire le Capital, Paris: François Maspero, two volumes, 1965; Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, London: Verso, 2016.

Louis Althusser, Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967), Paris: François Maspero,1974; “Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists”, trans. Warren Montag, in Gregory Elliott ed. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, London: Verso, 1990, 69–165.

Louis Althusser, Initiation à la philosophie pour les non-philosophes, ed. G.M. Goshgarian, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2014; Philosophy for Non-Philosophers, ed. and trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Louis Althusser, “Du coté de la philosophie (cinquième Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques”, Écrits philosophiques et politiques, ed. François Matheron, Paris, Stock/IMEC, 2 volumes, 1994, Vol II, 265-310.

Alain Badiou, Le concept du modèle, Paris: François Maspero, 1969, reissue Paris: Fayard, 2007; trans. The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, Melbourne: re:press, 2007.

Stuart Elden, “Louis Althusser’s Théorie series at François Maspero”, https://progressivegeographies.com/resources/louis-althussers-theorie-series-at-francois-maspero/

Stuart Elden, “Louis Althusser’s Théorie series at François Maspero: A Brief History”, Verso blog, March 2022, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/5304-louis-althusser-s-theorie-series-at-francois-maspero-a-brief-history

Stuart Elden, The Archaeology of Foucault, Cambridge: Polity, 2023.

Michel Fichant and Michel Pécheux, Sur L’histoire des sciences, Paris: François Maspero, 1969.

Pierre Macherey, “La Philosophie de la science de Georges Canguilhem”, La Pensée 113, 1964, 50-74.

Pierre Macherey, “Althusser and the Concept of the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists”, trans. Robin Mackay, Parrhesia 6, 2009, 14-27.

Archives

Louis Althusser, Cours de philosophie pour scientifiques organisés à l’Ecole normale supérieure, https://archive.org/details/ENS01_Ms0169/page/n1/mode/2up

Louis Althusser et. al. “Séminaire 1962-1963”, Fonds Louis Althusser, IMEC, 813ALT/40/4, 813ALT/40/5 and 813ALT/40/6

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This piece develops an earlier post about this course from January 2022. I’ve revised the text and expanded the references, in a similar style to what I’ve been doing with the ‘Sunday histories‘ posts.