Whilst not being an intellectual power house (you could probably glean most of his insights from giving Pink Floyd’s The Wall another spin) Althusser certainly stands as a decent springboard for your own thought. Frankly the discussions of ideology were the least interesting, with Althusser’s discussions of the Subject/subject distinction (by being hailed by a policeman in the street, by being ‘picked out’ as it were, you are shown to always-already be inscribed as a subject within an ideological framework, your placement within the structure being forced upon you - Althusser dubs this process ‘interpellation’), of class struggle being the motor of history (contra humanist/petty-bourgeois attempts to portray Man as the maker of history, able to craft and transcend his position with the stuff/material of history, all utilised/co-opted as a smokescreen for ideological and economist purposes, even with thinkers such as Sartre who construe themselves as Marxist revolutionaries giving into these tendencies, unconsciously opening the door for a regressive kind of thought that throws up obstacles when it comes to a scientific knowledge of historical/dialectical materialism), however any and all of his discussions concerning God are incredibly weak and unconvincing, as he espouses a dull and unpalatable atheism that strikes one as markedly adolescent. His attempts to evade God as the Subject of history, as some philosophical concept as discardable as consciousness, substance, Reason etc. etc. are just bone headed, and I hope there’s an essay of his out there where he tackles ontotheology/the question of God more directly. Having now read a decent chunk of his Reading Capital I can confidently say that this is a far less nuanced and sophisticated output by Althusser, but I still had a blast working through it. It’s a real bummer that he strangled his wife though, and its terrible that he spent the rest of his life haunted by the fact that he was never convicted for it, that he could never assume responsibility for her death, even if it was ruled to have been due to hallucinations brought about by a new regiment of antipsychotics. Also my book started to fall apart due to this infernal fucking English heatwave, and I’ve had a hell of a time sticking it back together and sanding down the parts that stuck out - the Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses are out to get me folks, they’re shutting down free thought !!! ( )