Problems and Pseudo-Problems in Althusserian Science

This article looks at Louis Althusser’s unpublished criticism of Jean-Toussaint Desanti’s writings on epistemology in the 1960s and uses it as an inroad to discuss Althusser’s ambivalent relationship to science in his own work and Marxism more generally. Confusions abound, but in the end one comes away with a fuller understanding of Althusser’s po- lemical attitude to idealism and his partisan conception of philosophy