Editing Louis Althusser (section)

===Romantic life===
Althusser was such a homebody that biographer William S. Lewis affirmed, "Althusser had known only home, school, and P.O.W. camp" by the time he met his future wife.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} In contrast, when he first met Rytmann in 1946, she was a former member of the French resistance and a Communist activist.<!--{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} --> After fighting along with [[Jean Beaufret]] in the group "Service Périclès", she joined the PCF.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} However, she was expelled from the party accused of being a double agent for the [[Gestapo]],{{sfnm|1a1=Althusser|1y=1992|1p=109|2a1=Elliott|2y=2006|2p=329}} for "[[Trotskyism|Trotskyist]] deviation" and "crimes", which probably referred to the execution of former [[Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy|Nazi collaborators]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} Although high-ranking party officials instructed him to sever relations with Rytmann,{{sfn|Elliott|2006|pp=39–40, note 112}} Althusser tried to restore her reputation in the PCF for a long time by making inquiries into her wartime activities.<!--{{sfn|Lewis|2014}}  --> Although he did not succeed in reinserting her into the party, his relationship with Rytmann nonetheless deepened during this period.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} Their relationship "was traumatic from the outset, so Althusser claims", wrote Elliott.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Among the reasons were his almost total inexperience with women and the fact she was eight years older than him.{{sfn|Lewis|2014}}

{{rquote|right|I had never embraced a woman, and above all I had never been embraced by a woman (at age thirty!). Desire mounted in me, we made love on the bed, it was new, exciting, exalting, and violent. When she (Hélène) had left, an abysm of anguish opened up in me, never again to close.|Althusser, ''L'avenir dure longtemps''{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=116–117}} }}

His feelings toward her were contradictory from the very beginning; it is suggested that the strong emotional impact she caused in him led him to deep depression.{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Roudinesco wrote that, for Althusser, Rytmann represented the opposite of himself: she had been in the Resistance while he was remote from the anti-Nazi combat; she was a Jew who carried the stamp of the [[Holocaust]], whereas he, despite his conversion to Marxism, never escaped the formative effect of Catholicism; she suffered under Stalinism at the very moment when he was joining the party; and, in opposition to his petit-bourgeois background, her childhood was not prosperous—at the age of 13 she became the sexual abuse victim of a family doctor who, in addition to the abuse, instructed her to give her terminally ill parents a dose of [[morphine]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}} However, this story could have been invented by Althusser, who admitted to incorporating "imagined memories" into his "traumabiography."<ref>{{cite journal|url=https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n24/john-sturrock/the-paris-strangler |title=The Paris Strangler |issue=24 |journal=[[London Review of Books]] |date=17 December 1992 |volume=14 |access-date=11 August 2020|last1=Sturrock |first1=John }}</ref><ref>{{cite journal |last=Dupuis-Déri |first=Francis |author-link1=Francis Dupuis-Déri |date=2015 |title=La banalité du mâle. Louis Althusser a tué sa conjointe, Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, qui voulait le quitter= |trans-title=The banality of the male. Louis Althusser killed his wife, Hélène Rytmann-Legotien, who wanted to leave him |language=fr |journal=[[Nouvelles Questions Féministes]] |volume=34 |issue=1 |pages=84–101 |doi=10.3917/nqf.341.0084 |doi-access=free }}</ref> According to Roudinesco, she embodied for Althusser his "displaced conscience", "pitiless superego", "damned part", "black animality".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=116}}

Althusser considered that Rytmann gave him "a world of solidarity and struggle, a world of reasoned action,&nbsp;... a world of courage".{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} According to him, they performed an indispensable maternal and paternal function for one another: "She loved me as a mother loves a child{{nbsp}}... and at the same time like a good father in that she introduced me&nbsp;... to the real world, that vast arena I had never been able to enter.&nbsp;... Through her desire for me she also initiated me&nbsp;... into my role as a man, into my masculinity. She loved me as a woman loves a man!"{{sfn|Elliott|2006|p=328}} Roudinesco argued that Rytmann represented for him "the sublimated figure of his own hated mother to whom he remained attached all his life". In his autobiography, he wrote: "If I was dazzled by Hélène's love and the miraculous privilege of knowing her and having her in my life, I tried to give that back to her in my own way, intensely and, if I may put it this way, ''as a religious offering'', as I had done for my mother."{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=117}}

Although Althusser was really in love with Rytmann,{{sfn|Lewis|2014}} he also had affairs with other women. Roudinesco commented that "unlike Hélène, the other women loved by Louis Althusser were generally of great physical beauty and sometimes exceptionally sensitive to intellectual dialogue".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=117}} She gives as an example of the latter case a woman named Claire Z., with whom he had a long relationship until he was forty-two.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=172}} They broke up when he met Franca Madonia, a philosopher, translator, and playwright from a well-off Italian bourgeois family from [[Romagna]].{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=118, 172}} Madonia was married to Mino, whose sister Giovanna was married to the Communist painter Leonardo Cremonini. Every summer the two families gathered in a residence in the village of [[Bertinoro]], and, according to Roudinesco, "It was in this magical setting&nbsp;... that Louis Althusser fell in love with Franca, discovering through her everything he had missed in his own childhood and that he lacked in Paris: a real family, an art of living, a new manner of thinking, speaking, desiring".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=118}} She influenced him to appreciate modern theatre ([[Luigi Pirandello]], [[Bertolt Brecht]], [[Samuel Beckett]]), and, Roudinesco wrote, also on his detachment of Stalinism and "his finest texts (''For Marx'' especially) but also his most important concepts".{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|pp=118–119}} In her company in Italy in 1961, as Elliott affirmed, was also when he "truly discovered" Machiavelli.{{sfn|Elliott|2001|p=xiv}} Between 1961 and 1965, they exchanged letters and telephone calls, and they also went on trips together, in which they talked about the current events, politics, and theory, as well as made confidences on the happiness and unhappiness of daily life.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=119}} However, Madonia had an explosive reaction when Althusser tried to make her Rytmann's friend, and seek to bring Mino into their meetings.{{sfn|Roudinesco|2008|p=119}} They nevertheless continued to exchange letters until 1973; these were published in 1998 into an 800-page book ''Lettres à Franca''.{{sfnm|1a1=Elliott|1y=2006|p=319|2a1=Roudinesco|2y=2008|2p=117}}