On November 16, 1980, Louis Althusser, while massaging his wife's neck, discovered that he had strangled her. The world-renowned French philosopher was immediately confined to an insane asylum where he authored this memoir--a profound yet subtle exercise in documenting madness from the inside.
"Louis Althusser was one of the most original and controversial of French intellectuals: with Antonio Gramsci he was the most influential of western thinkers on Marxism. His career as a philosopher had been spent entirely at the prestigious institution of the Ecole normale superieure and his fame was associated with the seminars that he held in that part of the University of Paris. But after Sunday, November 16th 1980, his name became known to a wider public in France. At eight or nine that morning he ran from his rooms into the courtyard of the Ecole, wearing a dressing-gown over his pyjamas. He was shouting dementedly: 'My wife is dead, my wife is dead', he cried again and again and again. The resident doctor at the Ecole normale, Doctor Etienne, was called and came immediately. He found that she was indeed dead. But by then Althusser was shouting, 'I killed my wife, I strangled her, I've killed her'. He was in a terrible state of confusion and excitement, and as he wandered about his screams attracted considerable attention, especially from students who stood around, bewil- dered, not knowing what they could, or should, do."