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8. Ceci N'est Pas Un True Crime Podcast
64 Plays21 days ago
Helen introduces Sarah to the work of Louis Althusser.
The book Helen references several times, which is a great place to learn more if you're interested is Killer Althusser: The Banality of Men by Francis Dupuis-Déri.
Check out our patreon at https://patreon.com/OdiumSymposium.
Episode art by @canis_kunst on Instagram.
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Transcript
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
00:00:16
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! listen, you. Write a calling name. Let's get... Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
00:00:33
Speaker
some level of masochism.
Introduction to Odium Symposium
00:00:37
Speaker
Hi, I'm Helen. And I'm Sarah. And this is Odium Symposium. We read historical bigoted texts, mostly misogynist ones, but it varies.
00:00:47
Speaker
Yeah, and before we get started this week, i just want to thank our new Patreon subscriber, Alex. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, this week has been kind of a lot, lot of stuff going on in between all of the news we've seen. i actually recently have noticed I've been like drinking a lot less. And then I heard some friends were doing dry January and I was like, oh, this will be interesting.
Challenges of Dry January
00:01:08
Speaker
I'm going to try doing dry January. and I have never wanted to drink so badly in like the first week of January as like January 2026, like between the news. And then i already vented about it off the podcast, but I had this whole thing where I had to spit spent like I literally pulled an all nighter to do like grading and bureaucratic work and data entry to like handle some shit for an old class. And there's also some other personal stuff going down. It's just very like I picked a great January to try dry January. So it's been fun.
00:01:39
Speaker
This is okay. Wow. You didn't tell me about this before the podcast. I'm a little startled. I assumed you've just been drunk for the entire past 10 days. We've recorded, we're recording on January 10th, but, um, okay.
00:01:52
Speaker
All right. Just raw dogging reality. That sucks. sorry I mean, it's, it's been a pretty, it's been a pretty reality to, uh, anyway, do you know who Louie Althusser is?
00:02:04
Speaker
No idea.
Exploring Louis Althusser's Philosophy
00:02:05
Speaker
Okay, so one of my impulses behind this episode was that we've been doing a lot of either famous or obscure, like, explicit conservatives, right? And in some sense, this makes sense, right?
00:02:18
Speaker
Misogyny is sort of a... conservative ideology, right? Like a lot of the sources of misogyny we talk about come from this idea that there's, you know, traditional roles for women, or, you know, there's a bunch of different sources and getting into the diversity of those is part of the point of this podcast. But, you know, I'm not going to pretend to any any sort of centrism here and being like, oh, you know, both sides bad, whatever. Like, yeah.
00:02:41
Speaker
At the same time, i don't want to pretend that It is an exclusively, you know, it's exclusively a phenomenon of people who identify and call themselves conservatives. So today we're going to look at Louis Althusser, who is 20th century Marxist philosopher, kind of in the same cohort with like Foucault.
00:02:59
Speaker
a lot of these other like structuralist and post-structuralist Marxist thinkers. He's really contributed heavily to like the contemporary understanding of ideology. Like the stuff he talks about is usually talk called like structural Marxism.
00:03:13
Speaker
One of his big contributions, which has really like, even if he's not even explicitly cited in this a lot, this idea has been developed and has really taken hold across a lot of the humanities, across literary studies, across sociology.
00:03:26
Speaker
the idea of like ideology is something that marks theoretical concepts that even if you have sort of an abstract theoretical concept, it is sort of structured by the ideology that produced it, right? And this is something, you know, he obviously has something much more specific to say, but we're not really going to get into the specifics of his philosophy. The point of this is just to say he was hugely influential and he continues, like his thought continues to influence thought
Understanding Femicide
00:03:49
Speaker
today. We're not going to get into the details of like exactly what he said. It's obviously a lot more specific than the sort of vague outline that I just let out and and You know, the way that ideology structures discourse or so power structures discourse, all these things like Foucault talked about it and all these other guys talked about and they all kind of disagreed in different ways. And that's not really what this podcast is about.
00:04:08
Speaker
So or this podcast episode is about rather. So this my second question for you. do you know what a femicide is? Is it the murder of a woman?
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah. So it's this kind of relatively new sociological sociological concept. In its usage, it dates back to 1801. And it just meant like killing a woman.
00:04:29
Speaker
But it kind of reemerges in the 1970s as a sort of second wave feminist concept murder. killing a woman, usually to some extent for being a woman, right? Like there's gender aspect to the murder, right? So here is an excerpt from the feminist Diana Russell at the 1976 International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women in Belgium.
00:04:59
Speaker
we must realize that a lot of homicide is femicide. We must recognize the sexual politics of murder. From the burning of witches in the past, to the more recent widespread custom of female infanticide in many societies, to the killing of women for honor,
Critique of Femicide Research
00:05:17
Speaker
we realize that femicide has been going on a long time.
00:05:20
Speaker
But since it involves mere females, there was no name for it until Carol Orlok invented the word femicide. Yeah, so there's this feminist writer, car Carol Orlok, who in this sort of unpublished manifesto or this unpublished treatise uses this word femicide and it kind of takes hold and people start talking about it. And the idea of using the word femicide is to try to explicitly draw out the gendered aspects to these to to these killings, right? Like that there is a phenomenon where women specifically are being killed and it is for gendered reasons. And unless we actually pay attention to that, we are missing something important that needs to be studied and addressed and stopped.
00:05:58
Speaker
Makes perfect sense. There's some ambiguity between usage of it as like just the killing of women, how much it has to be sort of because they're women.
00:06:10
Speaker
And of course, it's sort of not interesting as a concept if you include like someone got extremely drunk and drove a car and couldn't, you know, was just completely blind drunk and then hit someone and that person happened to be a woman. Like that's not really the phenomenon that femicide is trying to study. So there is some aspect where it's like, it has to be sort of important that the victim was a woman in some way. um Often these are Yeah, we'll we'll get into sort of examples of those. The other thing that I noticed in a lot of this is that, you know, elsewhere in this, actually in this speech from Diana Russell, but then also across the usage of the word femicide, it's usually like, and it's it's a very second wave feminist thing. It's usually described as the killing of females by males because they are female.
00:06:54
Speaker
And I want to just come out and say, you know I'm a feminist. I think women can do femicide. i don't think this is an important distinction to make, or I think that's something that I wanted to question to bring up. Okay.
00:07:07
Speaker
There's also other ways that that kind of insistence on men killing women can obscure things that the term sounds like it's intended to examine. So for example,
00:07:19
Speaker
If you have a woman in prison and the conditions are sufficiently bad that she dies, we can think of that as homicide. We can think of that as femicide if there are gendered aspects. that That doesn't mean that a man's hand had to come out and stab the woman.
00:07:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, here's a sort of harrowing statistic. The most widespread form of femicide, this is from Wikipedia, the most widespread form of femicide in the world is committed by an intimate intimate partner of the female. This accounts for approximately 38.6% of all murders of women globally, which may be an undercount, according to 2022 study.
00:08:02
Speaker
That's completely in line with my expectations. Yeah, I think especially there, I think requiring that it be killing of a female by a male obscures the fact that non-male partners are also potential, you know, have this potential, right? Like toxic relationships exist across all sorts of relationship structures that aren't just a heterosexual one. And I think that is also important to keep keep in mind.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah, what you're saying, Helen, is that we're putting too much focus on men, and maybe the real issue here is toxic lesbians. I can't believe you just erased toxic non-binary people, Sarah.
00:08:41
Speaker
I'm getting canceled. You played the reverse Uno card on me and now I'm the one getting stuff in the garbage can. Anyway, a lot of research has been going into this. Not all of it is good research.
00:08:52
Speaker
I found this paper and it's not really relevant to what we want to talk about today, but I kind of needed to show it to you. So here's the title page and abstract if you want to just read Actually, just read the title.
00:09:05
Speaker
Female homicide victimization in Spain from 1910 to 2014. The price of equality? Oh, that disgusting. the price of equality question mark oh that is disgusting Yeah. And so I went through the paper and basically what they say is, look, femicide increased.
00:09:24
Speaker
So, okay. So the specifically they talk about female homicide victimization. And this is one of the interesting problems in this area of sociological research is that it's impossible to get data before like 1990 at the very earliest for femicides. If you specifically want to talk about this kind of killing of women for being women or killing of women that has some kind of gendered aspect to it, because that just wasn't recorded and it wasn't something that like the state was able to see.
00:09:51
Speaker
So they just look at female victims of homicide in general, and they notice that there is an increase in all the times when there wasn't a dictator in power because Spain had two different dictatorships or two different authoritarian governments in the 20th century.
00:10:08
Speaker
And it decreased during authoritarianism. And they posit as a theory that like, women being able to go out in the world and interact with people was actually increasing this rate of female homicide victimization, which, you know, the counter arguments here are evident, I think.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, there's quite a lot of counter arguments. And I think as far as the data goes, there's a huge gap from what does that mean and and and what are the other dynamics at play to go for to this phrase, the price of equality. Just, I hate academics. I think that's really the point of this. Like academia is a disease.
00:10:43
Speaker
I mean, we should mention something like, for example, crimes against women might be underreported under an authoritarian regime. I just don't want us to be doing the thing where we're like, this is so obvious.
00:10:54
Speaker
Reasons are too numerous to... Right. Of course, a liberal democracy for all of its flaws might actually be the sort of place where it is easier to see that murders are happening. Whereas in an authoritarian regime,
00:11:09
Speaker
where women are largely suffering under these very traditional roles and being forced into the home, it might be much easier to disappear a woman without the state even seeing it or caring.
00:11:21
Speaker
Yeah, definitely something to look into. So for us, I'm going to talk about some data in
The Murder of Helene Legosian
00:11:25
Speaker
France. The data in the U.S. is actually worse. We have very high, very high femicide rates in the U.S. I think it's like three per hundred thousand women every year.
00:11:34
Speaker
But in France, recently, as I could tell, a woman is killed by an intimate partner or ex-partner every three days. The number has stayed relatively stable since 1980. And in 1980,
00:11:48
Speaker
and in nineteen eighty One of those women was Louis Althusser's wife, Helen Legosian. that's what we're going to be talking about today. This Marxist philosopher murdered his wife.
00:12:01
Speaker
Okay, I was about to ask. It seems like subtext. Oh, yeah, that sucks. Yeah. Is he going to write about it? He wrote about it.
00:12:11
Speaker
Oh, no. He wrote a book in 1982, which we're going to get a lot more details about. And I think... oh You will feel simultaneously less bad and worse as you learn more details. The story's a lot weirder than you're imagining, I think.
00:12:26
Speaker
Okay. All right. I'm ready for some true odium. My heart is open. So here's kind of the opening. He wrote this book. that the title is translated into English as either the future lasts a long time or the future lasts forever.
00:12:42
Speaker
What follows down to the last detail is my precise memory of those events forever engraved on my mind through all my suffering. I shall describe what happened between two zones of darkness, the unknown one from which I was emerging and the one I was about to enter.
00:13:00
Speaker
Here is the scene of the murder just as I experienced it. Okay. All right. Yeah, we're looking at if I did it, except it's like I did it right in the first sentence that you're showing me here, by the way. He's emphasizing his own suffering in these events.
00:13:16
Speaker
Oh, he is. I'm already displeased with this man. So here's the problem. i really didn't know what to do about this next excerpt because it is his account of committing a murder, which is pretty bad and it's pretty bleak.
00:13:32
Speaker
It's kind of important. I think, for what we're talking about and to understand what happened to see his account.
00:13:43
Speaker
So yeah, this episode is going to get a little dark and there's kind of no way around that because we're talking about femicide. We're talking about like intimate partner murder and which is unfortunately an extremely common form of misogyny. So it's not something that I feel comfortable saying.
00:14:00
Speaker
That shouldn't be on the pod. But yeah, it's it's rough. It's going to be rough. Suddenly i was up and in my dressing gown at the foot of the bed in my flat at the Ecole Normale. The gray light of a November morning, it was almost nine o'clock on Sunday the 16th, filtered through the tall window to the left on to the end of the bed.
00:14:20
Speaker
The window is framed by a pair of very old empire red curtains, which had hung there a long time. tattered with age and burnt by the sun helene also in a dressing gown lay before me on her back her pelvis was resting on the edge of the bed her legs dangled on the carpet kneeling beside her leaning across her body i was massaging her neck i would often silently massage the nape of her neck and her back I learned the technique as a prisoner of war from Little Clerk, a professional footballer who was an expert at all sorts of things.
00:14:53
Speaker
But on this occasion, I was massaging the front of her neck. I pressed my thumbs into the hollow at the top of her breastbone and then, still pressing, slowly moved them both, one to the left, the other to the right, up towards her ears where the flesh was hard.
00:15:07
Speaker
I continued massaging her in a V-shape. The muscles in my forearms began to feel very tired. I was aware that they always did when I was massaging. Helene's face was calm and motionless. Her eyes were open and staring at the ceiling.
00:15:20
Speaker
Suddenly, i was terror struck. Her eyes stared interminably, and I noticed the tip of her tongue was showing between her teeth and lips, strange and still. I had seen dead bodies before, of course, but never in my life looked into the face of someone who had been strangled.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yet I knew she had been strangled. But how? I stood up and screamed, I've strangled Helene. a little bit of context here. He was, died he had schizophrenia and he had a lifelong kind of struggle with mental illness. He had been hospitalized before.
00:15:53
Speaker
He was in analysis for basically his whole life. Prior to this happening, he had tried like several different techniques of like he was, they had done like electroshock therapy, all these other kinds of attempts to like manage his schizophrenia or also his diagnosis kept evolving. So it's not straightforwardly just like, oh, he was schizophrenic. Like right after this, he says he runs downstairs to the resident doctor, the doctor, Dr. Etienne at the École Normale, where he was a professor.
00:16:22
Speaker
The doctor was aware of Althusser's history of mental illness, talks about going upstairs and seeing like no sign of struggle, being a little bit baffled by the scene. He ends up arranging with a local hospital to have Althusser taken there.
00:16:39
Speaker
When the cops show up, they look at the scene and then they go to question Althusser and the doctors at the hospital say he's not in a fit state to be questioned. So you can't be let in. A the like magistrate in charge of the case orders three psychiatric experts to examine Althusser because in France there's part of the penal code that you could have a designation of madness that would make you like unfit to be tried. And so they examined Althusser and based on the reports, the magistrate declared no standing.
00:17:10
Speaker
He then spent the next, so the charges were dropped. There was never like an investigation or a trial. He then spent the next three years in an institution He then goes to Paris after that.
00:17:22
Speaker
He writes this book in 1985. He just kind of has a miserable, lonely life for the rest of his life and then dies in 1990. Yeah, it's strange because with all that context, it's still so notable how absent he is from this account. He describes this murder of his wife as something that he was like, therefore, he notices his muscles get tired. He notices these things. Oh, I noticed I was massaging her and then I noticed she was dead.
00:17:51
Speaker
It's kind of harrowing to read. One motivated him to write this. Yeah, I think to answer that, I'll just have you read this next chunk. I hope my readers will forgive me.
00:18:02
Speaker
I am writing this book principally for my friends and for myself, if that is possible. My reasons will soon become clear. A long time after the drama occurred, the drama, the drama, the drama. Okay, trying to be chill.
00:18:18
Speaker
I learned that two of my close friends, doubtless not the only ones, had not wanted me to be declared unfit to plead. a decision based on the medico-legal opinions expressed by three experts at St. Anne's in the week following Helene's death.
00:18:32
Speaker
They would have preferred my case to come to court. Unfortunately, it was a pious wish on their part. I was in no fit state to take part in legal proceedings on account of my serious mental state, confusion, and hallucinations.
00:18:46
Speaker
The examining magistrate who visited me could not get me to say a word. What is more, I no longer enjoyed my freedom or my civic rights as I was automatically committed and under supervision on the orders of the prefect of police.
00:18:59
Speaker
Deprived of all choice, I was in fact the victim of an official procedure I could not escape, and to which i therefore had to submit. Such a procedure has its obvious advantages. It protects the accused, who is judged not to be responsible for his actions,
00:19:13
Speaker
but it conceals powerful disadvantages which are less obvious. Certainly, after such a long and trying experience, I am surprised by my own understanding attitude towards my friends. When I speak of that trying experience, I refer not just to the period of confinement, but to my life since then, and what I clearly see I shall be condemned to for the rest of my days, if I do not intervene personally and publicly to offer my own testimony.
00:19:39
Speaker
This wretched creature. Yeah. Oh, I hate him so much. Jesus fucking Christ. You self-obsessed piece of shit.
00:19:52
Speaker
Sorry. okay This podcast is not just about getting angry at our subjects. Yeah. So I'll try and tamp it down a little bit. I also, i have boundless contempt for true crime, Helen, and the reduction of cruelty to victims to a drama and to something in which the reader is invited to participate in as a catharsis to identify with, to enjoy the ugliness
00:20:31
Speaker
and the suffering inherent in that little frisson of the forbidden, it disgusts me. And so like I'm really struggling to express my contempt in a way that doesn't push us into that true crime territory in a way that feels sort of like vaguely analytic and sophisticated in the way that the podcast has been, or at least tried to be so far.
00:20:54
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely agree with that impulse away from true crime. I think we'll see in a lot of the excerpts I've picked. So this book is like 300 pages long, a little under 280 something.
00:21:07
Speaker
Quite a lot of it is like his relationship with Helene and then analyzing this thing. And then, you know, there's quite a lot about the murder itself and then the aftermath and him going to institution. And I've actually avoided a lot of those excerpts.
00:21:19
Speaker
um But another source that really helped me prepare for this and that I want to shout out because like I could not have done this episode without the massive amount of actual academic research that this actual academic did.
00:21:31
Speaker
There's this book which was written in French and then translated into English, Killer Althusser, The Banality of Men by Francis Depuidery. he is He teaches political science and feminist studies at the Université du Québec in Montreal.
00:21:47
Speaker
he is like I know we make we met we've in previous episodes made fun of like male feminists, but he's like actually a super cool feminist. I like this guy. Okay. My only knock against him is the French then. Yeah, exactly. Right. Like you can't win them all.
00:22:02
Speaker
Not to say that, you know, there's there's points in this book where i disagree with him and there's things I would criticize or I would, you know, I would not even necessarily criticize, but just disagree. And I would say or not, you know, this isn't saying like every word in this book I support. Like that's not what this recommendation means. But I think largely he does good research and made a really interesting analysis. And and so here's where i want to try to dive into this a little bit, that there's these kinds of two different narratives here. So when Althusser is talking about like the drama that occurred, which I totally agree with you, like the use of the word drama there is...
00:22:34
Speaker
like baffling and terrible. He's not just talking about this murder itself. This became like a huge news story. And it became a news story. This this narrative of the psychologization of the murder became like a big part of the public discourse.
00:22:51
Speaker
And I think what Francis de Puigdari argues really well is that this is sort of a big part of why he ultimately was declared unfit to stand and also like affected sort of the aftermath and the coverage understanding. And so part of what he wants to say, and I think we should stress here is like, this is not a case where we're saying this guy is, you know, I'm not even interested in litigating whether or not that was the right call.
00:23:15
Speaker
what it means to you know have been declared like in ah in a state of mental confusion and all these things, right? But he says it's a big social revealer about the ways like men work to protect each other and hide violence from women.
00:23:31
Speaker
So like a lot of these insights I'm sort of taking from here, I can't like cite every time because I just read this book and and thought about it along with this thing. And so definitely if you're interested in this, um I want a huge shout out to that because I think I've leaned on this more than I usually do for secondary research for our episodes.
00:23:48
Speaker
But he kind of moves on from this to make a couple different points about sort of why he's writing this book. And so one of them is this kind of like, oh, the the legal system is, you know, it's this public legal system, right? And it's important that it's public. And, you know, you go to trial and you get to say your piece.
00:24:10
Speaker
And like this process of justice happens. And so even though, you know, I was institutionalized, like I was also deprived of that. He makes a couple of what I would say are like maybe even good points, which is that when this declaration is passed of unfit to stand, you are institutionalized for an indefinite period of time.
00:24:29
Speaker
You are not given any opportunities to appeal anything. In fact, you are sort of declared a non-citizen and you like somebody else is declared your guardian. And i think this is going to also be like the subject of a future episode, because this is a huge issue right now.
Guardianship and Legal Process
00:24:47
Speaker
I mean, we've all seen there was like the big famous Britney Spears case, but the way that this kind of guardianship can be abused, and there's like really is a lack of legal process here.
00:24:55
Speaker
All of that said, this idea that that actually makes him the victim because he never got to take the stand and tell his side of the story. is infuriating.
00:25:07
Speaker
Like, what? Yeah, he's really upset about not having had the public stage during this. That really seems to be his grievance. He's like, oh, you bastard canceled me when I should have been the center of a circus.
00:25:26
Speaker
yeah, he was the subject of all this media attention, but he didn't get to say his piece during that. And so now he's writing this book to set the score.
00:25:37
Speaker
And one of the things that is a really common pattern in femicide is the murderer victimizing themself, right? This is something that sociologists of feminicide will talk about all over the place. Like one of the common rationalizations is, oh, they fell out of love. Oh, they had this sort of toxic dynamic, right? But we've seen, i mean, we saw it last week with Schoenwolf talking about women who shouldn't be seen as just pure victims because then, you know, you're letting them off for the the toxic environment that they're help creating.
00:26:15
Speaker
that leads to their abuse. Doing that in this kind of psychologized way and just allows you to like pretend to be a material, you know, a Marxist and still do that same bullshit.
00:26:30
Speaker
It's an appropriation of a legitimate avenue of critique in order to make oneself a victim. Right. Just in case you didn't think he was arrogant enough already, and because I want to lighten the mood a little bit by really pushing it over the edge, here he's going to end up writing this book, which is like an entire memoir that goes back to his childhood to explain his like psychological development and what led to this moment. goodness. Fucking God. Helen, you know how broke I am. I can't afford to punch my monitor.
00:26:59
Speaker
Come on. Here's like right before he explains why he's going to go back to his childhood, basically, to to tell you his life story. Alas, i am no Rousseau, but in planning to write about myself and the dramatic events I live through and live with still, I often thought about his unprecedented boldness.
00:27:20
Speaker
Not that I would ever claim, as he did at the beginning of the confessions, I am embarking on something which has never been done before. Certainly not. But I can, in all honesty, subscribe to the following declaration of his.
00:27:32
Speaker
I shall say openly what I did, what I thought, what I was. I would simply add, what I understood or believed I understood, what I no longer altogether control, but what I have become.
00:27:45
Speaker
I give notice that what follows is not a diary, not my memoirs, not an autobiography, and discarding everything else, I simply wanted to remember those emotional experiences which had an impact on me and helped shape my life, my life as I see it, and as others may, I think, see it too.
00:28:05
Speaker
I love the humility of admitting, I'm no Russo.
00:28:11
Speaker
well, and... but Once again, we have this guy who has just this incredibly magnified sense of the of the drama that his own life deserves to be understood as.
Althusser's Autobiography Motivations
00:28:24
Speaker
Unbelievable just like guy who thinks he's the main character energy. Yeah, so he he he literally goes back to like I was born and nineteen sort of all these details about where his family was from and his... My mother frustrated me when I tried to suck her breast and so I started thinking of her breast as a bad breast and then that gave me some thoughts about bad penises. yeah Yeah, I love that you think you're joking right now.
00:28:49
Speaker
Oh, God damn it. Eventually, like it starts to pick up into something that I started to piece together with what's going on in this book. He starts talking about his family history.
00:29:00
Speaker
So his mother, I didn't write down her name, which is a horrible lacuna here. She started having a sort of relationship with this man named Louis.
00:29:15
Speaker
He died in World War I. His brother comes back in 1917 to say he died in Verdun. She ends up marrying his brother. It turns out his brother was horribly abusive.
00:29:29
Speaker
he ah Louis Althusser talks about, like... memories that he got, like he talked to his aunt um and so understood that these were sort of formative events and then sort of pieces together like different things in his childhood in this way. But he says there were kind of these kind of three important axes where this happened.
00:29:46
Speaker
One is that the like her husband sexually abused her. One is that he like took all of her savings because at the time, of course, there was nothing, you know, a woman couldn't say like, oh, this is mine and not my husband's. So he like, she had some savings and he just took all of them and spent all of them.
00:30:06
Speaker
And he also insisted that she quit her job as a teacher so she could live at home and like raise children. And then he like went back to the front and continued to fight in World War I. Wow. Wonderful abusive pattern here.
00:30:18
Speaker
Abuse, deprive of resources, cut off from access to further resources. Yep. But I'm hoping he at least goes and dies in a war. Nope. He does not die in the war. He comes back. Yeah.
00:30:31
Speaker
So this is what Louis Althusser, who is named after the brother, has to say about this. Thereupon, he went back to the front, leaving my mother robbed, raped, and shattered, physically brutalized, deprived of the savings she had patiently accumulated something in reserve one never knows, sex and money are closely linked here, and cut off from the life she had begun to make for herself and to enjoy.
00:30:54
Speaker
My reason for giving these details is because they have almost certainly helped shape after the event, and so to confirm and reinforce in me unconsciously, The image I have of a martyred mother, bleeding like a wound.
00:31:07
Speaker
She was to become a suffering figure, condemned to a life of pain which she paraded in a reproachful way, and a martyr to her husband in her own home, her wounds clearly visible.
00:31:18
Speaker
She revealed herself to be a masochist, but also dreadfully sadistic. Both with regard to my father, who had taken Lewis's place, and was thus associated with his death, and to me, since she could not help wanting me dead as the Lewis she loved was dead.
00:31:34
Speaker
Confronted with her terrible pain, I constantly experienced a huge and profound sense of anguish and an urge to devote myself to her service, body, and soul, as an act of oblation in order to save myself from an imaginary sense of guilt and her from martyrdom and from her husband.
00:31:52
Speaker
I had the unshakable conviction that this was the supreme mission and meaning of my life. There's a lot going on here. Yeah. Oh, man. One of the things you could think about here, you know, Althusser wrote about these things called ideological state apparatuses. He talked constantly about like concept formation and ideology.
00:32:14
Speaker
And you can see like none of that is at play here. He's completely unable. He's doing the thing that that Shane Wolf did where he's noticing abuse. He's noticing this thing. And then he is completely unabashed.
00:32:26
Speaker
like turning it into psychoanalysis as a way to completely ignore like what's actually happening, right? it the reason i did this This taught me that women is suffering figure, is bleeding wound. One of the things that again, this this book Killer Althusser does, there' a whole chapter on like, you know, separating the philosopher from his work, where he says, look, like there's a lot of other philosophers you can look at. And I think it actually sort of does a disservice To pretend, you know, we should, oh, you can use his philosophy to analyze this thing because it's really just not that interesting. He's really just a misogynist here. I mean, this is just pretty garden variety misogyny and it's just, he has the academic training and background to write in this kind of,
00:33:10
Speaker
long-winded way about I saw my mother being abused. It taught me that being a woman means being abused and I wanted to like white knight for her, right? There's not really, right? What is the sense of oh, it was so painful for me to see it. it's It's again all about him, right? It's not about, she's totally absent from this account.
00:33:31
Speaker
You talked about how committers of femicide often make themselves the victim. And i just want to draw out that when you see this sort of thing in fiction, what often happens is that the man is forced to kill the woman, and there is a sense of martyrdom around her.
00:33:51
Speaker
So to give you two pop culture references here, ah the ending of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow is more or less forced to kill Daenerys Targaryen.
00:34:06
Speaker
It's a tragic thing, but it's a tragic thing because he has no other option, because she has been burnt at the pyre of her ambition to make the world better.
00:34:18
Speaker
And similarly, at the end of the third X-Man movie, more or less the same thing happens. And Jean Grey is killed by, I think, Wolverine.
00:34:30
Speaker
And it's the same setup. And putting this excerpt together... with the previous ones in which he is a victim, I almost see sort of like the same thing developing.
00:34:42
Speaker
Women exist to be tragically killed and abused by men. One of the books I was constantly thinking about while I was reading this book was Nabokov's Lolita, because that is also, it's fiction, but the main text of that book is an account from someone who we know is on trial for murder, writing the story of what led him there,
00:35:08
Speaker
in an attempt to exonerate him. And it also leads to all these things of, oh, this psychology, and this is why I had this opinion about women.
00:35:19
Speaker
This is not quite as well written as Lolita. Well, he's not quite ever so. The construction of the narrative voice to trick you into having any kind of sympathy for this monster is also done worse because it's not fiction. It's real.
00:35:37
Speaker
He talks a lot about... continuing in this pattern of you can see his obsession with sort of victimizing himself and making other people's pain about him. He has all these memories as a young child of like learning about the Crusades or learning about medieval torture and then having nightmares where he's the one in the Iron Maiden or whatever, right? Like he's trying to really impress that he was such a sensitive child that was you so imaginative. And so learning about all the horrors of the world was really traumatic for him.
00:36:07
Speaker
And at various times, he also directly accuses his mother of being somewhat responsible for this. He talks about his mother's phobias and his mother's fear of like the big dirty world and putting that on him.
00:36:21
Speaker
And so you really see this pattern of self-victimization throughout this narrative. I will say like... He talks a bit more about his childhood and like his father and his father was like, as he experienced as a young child, like very aloof and just angry all the time and would storm out and and then would yell at his mother and sometimes would abuse the mother. And it doesn't sound like it was a good childhood. Like I'm not saying actually his childhood was fine and he has no trauma to deal with.
00:36:47
Speaker
And it's also true that he was like, you know, diagnosed with depression pretty young age, like did go off to fight in world or actually, Let me bracket that. I didn't write down the details of his participation in World War II, but he did spend some time in a German prisoner of war camp.
00:37:01
Speaker
This exacerbated a lot of his psychological issues, and he was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. and he was you know He did go through a lot of shit. like I'm not trying to say... All of that is made up.
00:37:12
Speaker
And this is one of the things that I think I've i've struggled with a lot prepping this episode of of like how to really interpret this and what to really do with it. He gets to the end of his sort of early childhood development section. And this excerpt, please don't punch your monitors.
00:37:26
Speaker
Okay, I mean, I'm gonna do my best, but no promises. It is perhaps possible now to piece together and understand the contradictions, or rather the ambivalence, of the life to which I was condemned from my earliest years.
00:37:41
Speaker
ah Oh my god, okay. I'm powering through it. On the one hand, like, no. No, he's not about to say this. Okay. On the one hand, like all breastfed babies, I had physical, physiological, and erotic contact with my mother's body.
00:38:01
Speaker
She suckled me. and bestowed on me the warmth of her body, her skin, her hands, her face, her voice. i was intimately and erotically attached to my mother and loved her as every healthy, lively child loves its mother.
00:38:15
Speaker
ah can't believe this is happening. You basically told me earlier that this is going to happen. I still can't believe it's happening. But I knew early on, children are unbelievably perceptive about things which adults fail to see, though such perceptions are certainly not conscious.
00:38:30
Speaker
that my mother, whom I loved with all my heart, loved someone else through and beyond me, using my physical presence to remind her of a person who was absent, or rather seeing his presence through my absence.
00:38:43
Speaker
It was only later I discovered this person had been dead a long time. Some of those words are in italics. Who can say it when this actually occurred?
00:38:54
Speaker
Obviously, my own views on the matter were determined after the event, through the effects they had on me. These were repeated over and over in various highly intense emotional experiences, patterns which were inescapable and never changed.
00:39:09
Speaker
How, therefore, could I make my mother love me, since it wasn't actually me she loved? I was doomed to be merely a pale reflection, that of a dead man, perhaps even a dead person myself.
00:39:22
Speaker
Clearly, the only means I had of escaping this contradiction or ambivalence was to seduce my mother, as one might seduce a stranger one met, so that she would look at me and love me for myself.
00:39:35
Speaker
I wanted to seduce her not just as little boys are commonly said to want to sleep with their mothers, as Diderot pointed out, In my case, it was something much deeper because I sought to win my mother's affection in order that I might become the person she loved who was forever beyond me and sanctified by death.
00:39:53
Speaker
I would seduce her by fulfilling her desire. You fucking weird little creep. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah. So there's this thing he could be saying here, which is it was a weird childhood. He was named after this man who his mother had loved, who was dead, right? Because he was named for the brother that she was actually in love with. And seemed like they had a good relationship, at least according to like what Louis gleaned from hearing about his aunt talking about, et cetera, et cetera. And then
00:40:27
Speaker
She sort of, you know, he she had this son and she had this terrible husband who was like abusive and just classically like an awful abusive husband. And so she was kind of looking at her son and but especially because of the name Louis is implying, like seeing this like dead man that she loved.
00:40:47
Speaker
But it's it's again, it's so like ridiculous. We're starting to see this real theme here. You know, we talked about the self-victimization and the self-importance, but there's this other theme that I think we can also really talk about. And this is something that um Killer Althusser, this book, really wants to make the point, which is that the psychologization is depoliticization,
Psychologization of Narratives
00:41:04
Speaker
right? There is a story here where you say this woman was...
00:41:09
Speaker
isolated and miserable and abused and this is not a good situation to raise a child and it had negative effects on the child's upbringing like that's just kind of true but when you do this sort of analytic reading you are unable to see the political dimension, right? When you do this like psychoanalysis, like, oh, the mother's breast, and then I wanted to, you know, she saw through me to this dead man, and so I wanted to seduce her by fulfilling that desire to be with the dead man, but I also wanted her to fall in love with me, right? You're completely ignoring like the material politics of what's actually happening in the situation.
00:41:45
Speaker
And you sound really fucking weird when you say it too. I was going to put it a little bit less elegantly. Helen, this is all bullshit. This is masturbatory. He's taken this story of oppression and he's turned it into this opportunity for wanking pseudo-intellectual introspection. It's so navel-gazy. It's so disgusting. Ugh, this mewling little beta. hate this guy.
00:42:13
Speaker
So there's a really funny excerpt here because there's going to be another one a little bit later where I'm going to again, like I wanted to throw the book at the wall, except I was reading a PDF. So I couldn't. But he has a sister. She is sort of chronically has these illnesses. she has chicken pox. She has scarlet fever.
00:42:30
Speaker
So he is sent a away to go stay with the grandparents because these are really dangerous illnesses. And so he has this he spends this year living with his grandparents like in more rural France. And he he describes in one particular case going to visit his great grandmother.
00:42:45
Speaker
And she's been widowed for a long time. She lives alone, except she has a cow. So he as he put it, she lives in one room with her cow. And then he has this little anecdote about her.
00:42:57
Speaker
All of a sudden, I noticed my great-grandmother, who never let go of her great-gnarled stick, which she used for walking and on the cow, behaving in a very strange manner.
00:43:08
Speaker
She was standing bolt upright and did not say a word as a loud spurting noise issued from beneath her long black skirt. A clear stream ran past her feet. It took me a little while to realize that she was peeing standing up under her skirt without squatting down as women usually do, and that therefore she didn't have any knickers on.
00:43:26
Speaker
I was astounded to discover there were women men, unashamed of their sexuality, who went ahead and pissed in front of everybody, without shame or modesty, and without giving any warning whatsoever.
00:43:38
Speaker
What a revelation! Though she was kind to me, it was all rather confusing. This woman turned out to be a man. And what a man! Sleeping with her cow, looking after it, pissing like a man in front of every everyone, but without opening her flies and pulling out her cock, and without hiding behind a tree to do it.
00:43:55
Speaker
But she was also a woman, because she didn't have a man's cock. and showed she loved me albeit in a rather severe fashion, yet with the contained tenderness of a good mother.
00:44:06
Speaker
She was nothing like my father's mother. This surprising episode inspired no fear, but it did leave me puzzling about it for a long time. As might have been expected, my mother saw nothing and never mentioned it.
00:44:19
Speaker
How unaware she was of everything which affected me How many like media depictions of like seeing a woman and then being shocked because she's pissing standing up and then realizing, oh, that's a man. Have you seen in your life? Like, I'm pretty sure that happens in like episode one of How I Met Your Mother.
00:44:35
Speaker
it is such a common transphobic trope. And it's so funny to see it kind of smuggled in here. Peeing standing up makes you a man? actually, i saw a video earlier today about the correct ways for men to sit down.
00:44:52
Speaker
And if you do it wrong, you're no longer a man. i don't know I don't know that I have anything to say about this. this stuff Yeah, I just wanted to break up the like horror with like, yeah, he was a weird freak. I mean, what the fuck are you talking about? She was a woman man because she peed standing up, but she was also a woman because she didn't have a cock? Like...
00:45:14
Speaker
I mean, i guess if you're really small, it's okay to be confused about this because, you know, small children lack information about the world. There may be a little bit stupid, but like, this is something you grow out of. I'm, I can't fathom putting this in my biography unless I were trying to illustrate just being like,
00:45:35
Speaker
Yeah, my mom lived in poverty and she was uncultured. But that's that's not what he's talking about. He's like, yeah, I discovered my mom was a fucking tranny and it messed me up. And my mom didn't even give a shit that it messed me up.
00:45:49
Speaker
What a bitch. Yeah. It's gross and baffling. Okay, we get to the end of this section where he's with the grandparents and he describes... So his grandparents were farmers and so there's this like big rural celebration where all the farmers are gathering because there's like one big like threshing room where they're all bringing all their grain and then he has this... They're all drinking and hanging out and then...
00:46:12
Speaker
He's like, he's 12, I think at the time. And, you know, he's in the room and people are sort of starting to sing and they're discussing local politics and they're getting rowdier and drunker. And then they start goading each other into like offering him wine. And then eventually he has some of the wine and they're all, you know, congratulating him on being a man now because he had some wine.
00:46:32
Speaker
And then he ends it with this little passage, which I think is extremely revealing about the book. Faced with the truth, I now have to make a painful confession.
00:46:43
Speaker
I was not inside the great kitchen and therefore did not experience the wine drinking and the chaotic singing at firsthand. Though I certainly heard it from outside, just as I did the election as mayor of M. de Creux in place of the count, which took place in 1936 in the crowded town hall I dreamt it.
00:47:01
Speaker
That is to say, i simply had an intense desire for it to be real. It certainly could have happened. But for the sake of truth, I have to accept and present it for what it was in my memory.
00:47:12
Speaker
A sort of hallucination of my intense desire. I intend to stick closely to the facts throughout the succession of memories by association, but hallucinations are also facts.
00:47:24
Speaker
Okay, yeah, I was going to say, the more these excerpts go on, the less I trust his reliability as a narrator, just on factual grounds.
00:47:35
Speaker
And this is another great moment where I was thinking about Lolita again, because one of, I think, the most harrowing, okay, spoilers for Nabokov's Lolita, if you care, there's a sequence where he spends pages and pages and pages talking about how great it would be if Dolores' mother died so that he could just be with Dolores uninterrupted and blah, blah, blah, blah. blah And then he's like thinking about the different ways that he would kill her.
00:48:03
Speaker
And then finally, at some point, she discovers his diary where he's writing about all this and he's like fantasizing about her death and he's fantasizing about like being sexual with this woman's daughter.
00:48:14
Speaker
And she grabs these things and she like runs out and she's going to tell on him and then just by chance. She gets hit by a car. So convenient. And it's this like really ambiguous moment where Nabokov wants you to say like, oh, this guy's lying to me, right? Like as we read through this, we just have to accept that these just could be lies. And this is one of the things that I think is that, know, I thought a lot about The same things you were saying early on, like this isn't a true crime podcast. I am like morally opposed to the concept of the true crime podcast. At no point do I want to be sharing grisly details and trying to figure out like what's the truth and adjudicating like was this police officer who said this and what was this and what was really happening? Like that's not the point of any of this.
00:49:01
Speaker
And I have no reason to believe that any of this shit is true. This is a podcast where we talk about bigoted texts, and this is a pretty bigoted text.
00:49:12
Speaker
I think one of the things that, again, in this book, Killer Althusser, that de Puydery wants to say is people should spend less time like trying to figure who his wife Helene was is like totally lost from public discourse. it's Very hard to find information about her.
00:49:29
Speaker
We'll get back to that more a little bit at the end. But I thought like, oh, it's sort of in a way continuing this pattern of like centering him and his voice as we go through this. And of course, that's sort of the thing is that that's what we talk about. We talk about like bigoted people and like, you know,
00:49:45
Speaker
But I think it is like ah it is an interesting question here, right? Like how much do we really want to grapple with his account of their relationship? And so I sort of settled on almost not at all.
00:49:57
Speaker
So let's see. Helen, we're in a little bit of a pickle because i don't trust anything this guy says. I see it all as just an expression of his narcissism and self-involvement.
Skepticism of Self-Narratives
00:50:10
Speaker
But then like, what we talk about?
00:50:12
Speaker
Well, I have like two more very short excerpts and then I think I have something of an answer for that question. So, or, you know, he starts talking about being a teenager and developing like conscious awareness of his sexuality.
00:50:31
Speaker
He remembers when he's 13, he starts having wet dreams, which he writes about, of course, because of course this guy's going to write about his wet dreams. Sorry, you can't see this, but I just did one of the hardest eye rolls I've ever done in my life.
00:50:47
Speaker
So the thing he actually recounts is that after waking up and noticing one day that there were stains on the sheets, he's then actually like his mother drags him into the room and like points out the stains and says, you are a man, my son, with this like strange pride in her voice is how he describes it.
00:51:07
Speaker
Here is his response to that anecdote. I was overcome with shame and an unbearable sense of rebellion. My mother had dared to grub around in my sheets and had invaded my privacy, the most intimate part of my naked body. In other words, my sexual organs. Yeah, I got that.
00:51:26
Speaker
Just as if she had looked into my pants or grabbed hold of my penis to show it off as if it belonged to her. And she had a horror of sex. added to this she had forced herself which i strongly sensed as if it were her duty to point it out and comment on it in such an obscene manner instead of coming to terms with it myself she did it for me for the man i had become long before she realized it and for which I owed her nothing.
00:51:53
Speaker
What I felt at the time and still feel is that I was utterly degraded, morally speaking, and that her behavior was obscene. It was truly a form of rape and castration. I had been raped and castrated by my mother, who felt she had been raped by my father, but that was her affair, not mine.
00:52:10
Speaker
Family fate was indeed inescapable. But the horror of what happened was intensified by the fact that my mother perpetrated this obscenity and behaved so unnaturally in considering it to be her duty, whereas it should have been my father who did it.
00:52:25
Speaker
I went out without saying a word, slamming the door behind me, and wandered the streets feeling confused and enormously angry. I thought I knew how I felt entirely about this excerpt. And then we got to, it should have been my father who did it.
00:52:39
Speaker
Right? like Such swerve. Right. So there's all these like moments in here where like, okay, the turn of freight, first of all, again, the the move towards self-victimization, he himself is the victim of rape. He's talking about his mother who was the victim of rape. He's saying, I had been raped by my mother who felt she had been raped by my father, but that was her affair, right? It's, oh, that's not important here. It's such a just vile thing to say.
00:53:06
Speaker
Appropriating his mother's children in the direct way possible. Oh my god. I really get the sense that a lot of the subtext here is that he's blaming his mother for his father's conduct and for his father not being there for him.
00:53:25
Speaker
Do you get that sense? I think it's even stranger. i think his father is just totally absent from the narrative. He actually, I didn't clip it, but there's points in the book where he talks about like having been quote, essentially fatherless. Yeah. I mean, there we go that his, father' his father's conduct in that case is his father's absence.
00:53:45
Speaker
Right. there's There's no sense in which like, oh, his father holds any responsibility because he's just he's just not there. And so, of course, it's all on the mother, even the stuff which is actually his father's doing.
00:53:57
Speaker
Well, if this were about him missing his father, then there would be a sense of agency in that. Right. And he has to be the victim. He has to be tormented by his mother psychologically and physically because he has to be tormented by someone and his mother's around.
00:54:16
Speaker
Yeah. He starts talking about his like growing life. actual understanding of his sexuality and like he's attracted to women. And when he's 18, he falls for this woman named Simone.
00:54:28
Speaker
He says his mother eventually forbids him to see her because she was 19. It's not clear. And so their ages weren't appropriate. It's not clear if somehow like 18, 19 was an age gap thing, or if the mother is just saying they're both too young.
00:54:43
Speaker
Cause she does say like, Oh, you're too young to be falling in love anyway. It does seem One of the things he's saying in his account, which again, like who knows what the actual reality is because hallucinations are facts.
00:54:55
Speaker
But in the story he's telling, his mother is not, you know, super enlightened and great about her teenage son, like becoming a sexual being. And to whatever extent, it's impossible on the basis of this book to analyze like what actually happened and what actually was going on.
00:55:14
Speaker
He talks about like before he's forbidden from seeing her, he spends, he tries to spend all this time with her. They like go to the beach together, but of course it was like mid 20th century France. And so like, they're always being chaperoned by her younger sister. And he's like, oh, I couldn't really, you know, try to make any moves. But of course, like I would have been too cowardly to anyway. And then this incredible little story, which is just like,
00:55:36
Speaker
i can't I can't believe you put it in here. I would have been too cowardly to anyway. Okay, before I read this next excerpt, I think there's a resonance which is occurring to me, which is the sort of narcissistic introspection and cringing cowardliness of a Woody Allen.
00:55:55
Speaker
hey kind of get that sense a little bit. Yeah, I could see that. Okay, gonna read the excerpt now. I discovered one day that I could at least sprinkle handfuls of sand slowly between her breasts.
00:56:07
Speaker
The sand ran down her stomach and fell in a curve around her pubis. Simone then stood up, opened her legs, and pulled the crotch of her swimming costume so that the sand dropped to the ground.
00:56:18
Speaker
For a split second, I caught sight of the bare tops of her magnificent thighs, a profusion of black hair. And most important of all, the pink slit of her vagina.
00:56:30
Speaker
Cyclamen pink. Okay. What a weird guy. Yeah. i I don't think the reader needed to hear about that, to be honest. Yeah. And the listener probably didn't either, but I heard about it. So now you have to. Yeah. Ripped listener.
00:56:45
Speaker
Like, again, another pretty classic misogynist trope where it's like, oh, I'm scared of women, but I figured out this technique where I can trick her into showing her body.
00:56:59
Speaker
It's so gross. Yeah. You should be so much more scared of doing that. That should be so much less acceptable than, I don't know, like declaring your interest and asking for a consensual interaction. Like, oh, I hate this so much.
00:57:15
Speaker
He's definitely the most scurrilous creep that we've examined so far. So then his mother forbids him from seeing Simone. the The moment of her forbidding him is is also weird because he describes like hearing that she's at the beach and he gets on his bike and he's going to go see her. And then the mother asks, where are you going? And he's like, and it was understood between us that she didn't want me to see. But she did at another point say like, you're not to see this woman.
00:57:43
Speaker
But he's like, oh, then, you know, he panics and points in the other direction. He's like, oh I'm going into town. And then He gets on his bike and he's like sad the whole ride. like And he's like, and that's the moment that my mother like finally put her foot down. And it's like, that's kind of not what happened. Like you again are like kind of lying here. The the story you're telling, if i if I remove your interpretation of what everyone means by what they're saying, it's your mother asked where you were going and you said, I'm going into town.
00:58:07
Speaker
I can't believe my bitch mother asked where I was going. The reason I brought these two excerpts out are because he sort of gets to the end of this like childhood section and he has this to say. From that point on, two episodes were fused in my memory.
00:58:20
Speaker
The one when I felt raped. You are a man now, my son. And the other, when I was forbidden to see Simone, they confined with the feeling of disgust and repulsion I had as a child or projected back onto childhood in my memory at the sight of my mother's breasts, white neck and frizzy blonde hair.
00:58:39
Speaker
They were obscene. My feelings of repulsion and hatred were visceral. Yeah. So he basically just says like, I learned to hate my mother because of these two things got fused.
00:58:52
Speaker
Yeah. And just as easily we can interpret this as, this is why I learned to hate women. And it isn't. That's not true.
00:59:03
Speaker
That's not why he hates women. I don't know why he hates women, but this is myth-making. It's absolutely myth-making. It's not why he hates women. It's not really explanatory about why he hates his mother.
00:59:16
Speaker
So then he talks about, you know, leaving the house and blah, blah, blah, and he meets this woman, Helene. He talks about Helene's life. I don't really like, here's one of the big difficulties.
00:59:31
Speaker
Okay. Well, what I was able to tell, like not from this book and just doing some side research into who was this woman. She seemed cool. She was a Marxist sociologist. At some point she gets like kicked out of the like communist party of France for like being like a crypto Trotskyist.
00:59:48
Speaker
It's like a very strange, like inviting thing. Actually, part of how they get together is like Althusser tries to save her reputation and like argues for her. She also was Jewish. And during World War Two, she was a member of the French resistance.
01:00:03
Speaker
She seems like a cool lady. Yeah, she seems based. I don't really want to give any of the account of her life that's in this book because I feel like, yeah, I just don't want it. Like, I don't want to get the account of her life from the guy who killed her. Like, it's just not what we're going to do. So that's a lot of the book that we're just go to skip, even if, you know, a lot of it is probably factually just true.
01:00:20
Speaker
Which, by the way, we absolutely should not grant. Yeah. Anyway, he he gets together with this woman and and he talks about how much he loves her. And so here's culminating passage.
01:00:32
Speaker
I was so overwhelmed by Helene's love for me, by the wonderful privilege of knowing her, of loving her, and of sharing my life with her, that I tried my hardest to return that love, as a sort of offering, as I had done with my mother.
01:00:46
Speaker
It was impossible for me to see my mother as anything other than a martyr to my father, like an open, living wound. I've already mentioned how i always took her part, at the risk of openly confronting my father and driving him out.
01:01:00
Speaker
So, yeah, I skipped over these, but there's, like, different anecdotes where he talks about, like, standing up and, like, telling off his father to try to support his mother. But, of course, he doesn't... I mean, he doesn't actually stop any abuse happening.
01:01:13
Speaker
Which it's not incumbent on him to. He's a kid. Yeah, of course. But he... The point of that is just to say he has this, like, direct moment where... In the very moment where he's saying, like, oh, I love tallle he sang i loved loved...
01:01:29
Speaker
her and I wanted to return that love as an offering in exactly the same way that I wanted to, like he's, he's directly analogizing his relationship with her as a relationship with his mother. Right. He's, he's presenting this as an Oedipal situation and he's immediately bringing in. And then because I understood my mother as a martyr to my father, he doesn't explicitly say it in this text, but it's like, but he's saying that's why I murdered her.
01:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, of course. And again, i was going to bring put in some of these clips. and then I thought, you know what, like, I'm not even gonna let him get his words out here. He describes, and this is actually confirmed by other people writing about it, them having like a really rocky relationship where they were constantly getting in like huge fights that made their friends uncomfortable.
01:02:15
Speaker
Sure. I don't know that that's at all relevant. Well, here's my question. Can you imagine dating this guy and not murdering him? so Well, there you go So maybe it was self-defense. Maybe he is the victim. She was probably plotting to off him. I certainly would be.
01:02:35
Speaker
So interestingly, that's never one of the things that he goes for here. So just to zoom out a little bit, and we're actually doing pretty good on time. I definitely thought this part, all of this was going to take us a lot longer to get through, but there's sort of not really lot to say about a lot of these excerpts. It's kind of just like, it's bizarre.
01:02:56
Speaker
Why did he write this? I think- Oh, you don't want to do 10 minutes on the pink slit? God. You don't want to riff on that for a while? Yeah, this is what I was like messaging you like this is going to be kind of a dark episode. And I don't know if where it's really going to be like, you know, I don't know how we're going to fit it into our comedy podcast. Like this one is this one is pretty bleak.
01:03:16
Speaker
So just to kind of contextualize this a bit right around, like, while these psychiatric experts are doing this examination or possibly like on the day that the judge gives this order of no standing that that has the case dismissed, like Like there's an article in Le Mans, which is a big French newspaper, talking about the hypothesis of psychopathology that can explain a murder and explaining, you know, because it's not that often that a really high profile case like this gets one of these rulings. And so here's here's how it can be the case that like, oh, it's really like psychopathology that ends up having this thing be dismissed.
01:03:52
Speaker
Completely absent from that article is any kind of... social or feminist or like political insight, right?
01:04:03
Speaker
All of this narrative and ah we've seen so far, like throughout it, we've seen it dripping with misogyny. It's not just that in his own text, he's not analyzing himself as structurally engaging in misogyny. It's completely absent from the public discourse at the time. There's not really like journalists and then other philosophers. There's all these examples of like And I'm not trying to do the thing here where I'm like, oh, there's so many, we don't need to list them.
01:04:29
Speaker
i will point you to this book. I'll put the book in the show notes if you want to see examples of these philosophers. But people both helped construct and also echoed these descriptions of him as, you know, the victim of his own psychology. He's tormented. People talk about him. He, in this discussion where he talks about how it's worse to be institutionalized than to be imprisoned, he talks about feeling like he's a disappeared person. And he brings in some like Foucauldian analysis here.
01:05:00
Speaker
If I speak of this strange situation, it is because I have experienced it and to a certain extent experience it still. Even though I have been out of psychiatric hospital for two years, I am still a missing person for the public who have heard of me.
01:05:16
Speaker
I am neither alive nor dead, and, though I have not been buried, i am bodiless. I am simply missing, which was Foucault's splendid definition of madness.
01:05:28
Speaker
Yeah. So he really wants to paint himself as a victim of this system. you know He talks about, in contrast with someone who has died and whose death marks the end of the life of an individual who is then buried, a missing person runs the curious risk of reappearing as large as life, as happened in my case. He talks about how actually his fate is worse than dying because he simply disappeared.
01:05:52
Speaker
But it's so odious that to describe your fate as worse than death when the thing you're talking about is the woman you killed. Yeah, again, there's like a legitimate critique that's being hijacked here, being appropriated, talking about the the silencing of victims of state oppression being far more acceptable when that oppression is presented through a medical lens.
01:06:21
Speaker
Okay, fine. Great thing to talk about. That's not really what he's talking about here. He's talking about feeling deprived of his access to a sense of celebrity. He's really talking about being cancelled. And he's making himself out to be the sole victim because of that cancellation.
01:06:42
Speaker
It's really the only thing that matters to him. It could not be more clear at this point that he does not give fuck about Helene being dead. I think the one thing I would complicate that with is that it is the case...
01:06:56
Speaker
that he spent three years actually in the situation of being institutionalized and in a situation where his doctors were basically allowed to do whatever treatment on him they deemed appropriate without him having any recourse.
01:07:10
Speaker
And this is one thing that I also, i think it's tough to talk about sometimes because it's like- I mean, you're not disagreeing with me there. that's That's the legitimate critique i was talking about.
01:07:23
Speaker
But look at how in this excerpt, what he talks about is how he's still a missing person for the public who have heard of me. Yeah. I think I have a slightly different take, which I'll save for a little bit later.
01:07:36
Speaker
i don't like i disagree, but I just think my take is slightly different. But I'm kind of playing an unfair game because you know what's coming i sort of I know what all the reveals are. Okay, okay. I'll sit tight.
01:07:48
Speaker
But I will say for... most of prepping this episode, that was exactly my take. And I agree. Like, there is a self-serving aspect to this. And there is certainly a way in which, because he is he has this elite status, because he was Louis Althusser, because he was well-regarded, and because he was a you know he he enjoyed this power as a man, it is easy for him to elide the distance between having a voice...
01:08:18
Speaker
at all as like a citizen with rights and having a voice as someone who is able to get a book published whenever he wants. Those are different, but he doesn't really see those as different.
01:08:32
Speaker
So I want to pull out one excerpt from his account of this sort of relationship with Helene leading up to the murder. He goes into a lot of detail. he' He's hospitalized for a short period, and then they try electroconvulsive therapy, and then he's out of the hospital, and then he actually had some other...
01:08:51
Speaker
medical issues that required a surgery had like a hernia that he needed operated on and then that exacerbated some things and so things are getting and that he says like really was de deterior deteriorating and all of that is actually like in the record like that's not stuff he's making up but he describes this like increasingly isolated and paranoid and toxic relationship with helene and then he drops this little gem I do not know what exactly I put Helene through.
01:09:17
Speaker
i do know, however, that I was truly capable of the most terrible things. But she told me with a determination that terrified me that she could no longer live with me, that in her eyes i was a, quote, monster, end quote, and that she wanted to leave me for good.
01:09:32
Speaker
She began quite openly to look for a flat, but did not find one immediately. She then made practical arrangements, which I found unbearable. totally ignoring me, though I was still there in our own flat.
01:09:44
Speaker
She got up before me and disappeared for the whole day. If she happened to stay at home, she refused to talk to me and even to come face to face with me.
Althusser's Relationship with Helene
01:09:53
Speaker
She took refuge either in her bedroom or in the kitchen, slammed the doors and forbade me to enter.
01:09:58
Speaker
She refused to eat in my company. It was an extraordinary experience as if we were in hell with the two of us closeted together in a state of deliberately contrived solitude.
01:10:09
Speaker
Yeah, divorce sucks, man. The most common reason given by perpetrators a spousal homicide is an inability to accept marital separation.
01:10:20
Speaker
This is once again, a pretty straightforward misogynist story. She wanted to leave a few days later. i murdered her being wrapped up. as an experience of his mental anguish.
01:10:33
Speaker
What is the hell that she's putting him through? Not wanting to interact with him after she said she was going to leave. Yeah. Wanting to be left the fuck alone. He's got some other really gross passages where he talks about like always having this, you know, pathological fear of abandonment. And that's why he always kept a quote unquote reserve of women so that he couldn't feel abandoned. Like he always had these female friends. Yeah, it's pretty gross.
01:10:59
Speaker
But this was the narrative around the murder. Like people talked about him being victimized by his own psychology, basically. Like that's the that that's the dominant narrative that is played, right? Like his own psychological situation made him a victim.
01:11:16
Speaker
A little bit after this passage, he actually talks about like she eventually stops saying she's going to leave. And she actually says, oh, you're such a monster that the only way out is death.
01:11:29
Speaker
And I'm going to kill myself. And she starts leaving around like drugs that she supposedly has collected in order to kill herself with. And she's talking about, oh, don't we know this other guy who killed himself and how did he do it? Right. And she's like threatening suicide.
01:11:41
Speaker
And yeah, basically he's describing this like increasingly isolated, you know, for 10 days up until this murder, like they they didn't leave the apartment and they're yelling all the time and she's threatening suicide. And this excerpt is actually from another thing he wrote in 1983, I believe. It's not in the book. And he talks about this idea in the book, but um not so succinctly as he does in this other excerpt. The fact is, i strangled my wife, who meant everything to me, during an intense and unforeseeable state of mental confusion.
01:12:14
Speaker
She loved me so much, and since she could not go on living, she wanted to die. Unaware of what I was doing, and in a state of confusion, I must have, quote, done what she wanted, quote, which she did not resist, and which caused her death.
01:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, so not only is he the victim, but actually she wanted to die. Right. Okay. Now I'm seeing what's up with his earlier description of her strangely placid.
01:12:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That is a description which is confirmed by the doctor as well as the police who investigated the scene. And in fact, it wasn't until they did an autopsy that they were even sure that strangulation was the cause of murder.
01:12:57
Speaker
It is again, something where to say any more details or talk any more about that would put us in the genre of a true crime podcast. Yeah, there are speculations running through my head. i don't want to voice them.
01:13:11
Speaker
Yep. While I think utterly rejecting the possibility of this narrative that she wanted to die and he was doing what she wanted, because that's vile and reprehensible, I'm not entirely as sure that his account of his experience as being sort of consciously absent is necessarily a lie.
01:13:30
Speaker
i do think it is very likely on the basis of like psychiatric experts after the fact as well doing this analysis that he was in a severe state of mental confusion when it was not totally cognizant of what he was doing.
01:13:43
Speaker
That's something that I don't think is in conflict with saying that this was a misogynist femicide. And this book, Killer Althusser, which I keep referring to because it's so good, ends with this quote, the murder of Helen Legosian,
01:14:01
Speaker
was not an exceptional event. Louis Althusser was banal, just another woman killer. And largely, I agree with that. Like, I think, you know, it's unfortunate. You know, one of the things that makes true crime such a, you know, such a huge industry is that there's just a lot of cases of women being murdered that you can talk about.
01:14:20
Speaker
I don't know that we have to argue that he was sort of fully consciously planning to do this in order to argue that this was a misogynist murder, right? Like, I think that there's a tension here that is...
01:14:35
Speaker
I don't quite know how to feel about it. I certainly don't feel like we can adjudicate it at all on the basis of what Louis Althusser wrote in this book, especially because he says hallucinations are facts. So how can we trust that you know he has that one moment where he performs a sort of honesty and is like, okay, that didn't really happen, but I really wanted it to.
01:14:55
Speaker
how can we trust any of the other accounts in this book? The idea I want to kind of close with, and we have a couple more excerpts, where we're not quite done, but as we start thinking about wrapping this up, I feel like there's this tension in sort of our immediate understanding between sort of mainstream, psychologized reading of this, which is like an entirely depoliticized one, right? Like this understanding of like all these things he was going through in his mental distress, which completely ignore the undercurrent of violent misogyny.
01:15:22
Speaker
One reason that we kind of can't use this book, and and you know, one, there's not a ton of evidence that we can really dig into and in. one reason I also wanted to keep bringing up this book is in the epilogue of this book. So this book, Killer Althusser, was published in French.
01:15:37
Speaker
It was sort of, you know, it won some awards. It was sort of widely read in like this sort of niche feminist sociological circles that he's writing in. He ends up getting contacted by people who like knew Helene and in particular. So he has this epilogue in this English translation of the sort of aftermath and, you know other people talking about, you know, people who knew her and and trying to. And one of the goals he has with this book is like, let's try to rescue like her and her voice and who she was because she like did all these things that have been totally shrouded by Althusser's killing of her. And in fact, not only is what he's saying here making himself the victim
01:16:15
Speaker
by saying like, oh, it's worse for me because, you know, my fate is worse than death. But even in claiming that like his voice has been erased, here's this entire book he's written.
01:16:26
Speaker
And very few people know anything about this woman who he killed, right? Like all of her legacy is that she was murdered by Louis Althusser. So he's trying to say, we should start you know we should re-examine her work and we should like give her a voice and worry less about this guy's voice.
01:16:43
Speaker
But somebody actually contacted him who said that she went and they were doing some stuff. And there's like a letter where he described seeing her sort of far from Paris the day before she died.
01:16:56
Speaker
So this account of them not having left the apartment for 10 days It's just not true. And this is not something that the media was like aware of we're talking about.
01:17:07
Speaker
So with all the stuff I want to say about like, oh, I think he was going through this psychological break. And i I do think that there was this state of mental confusion. Like that doesn't mean like he's telling the truth or we should believe this account or any of these things.
01:17:20
Speaker
And I also, you know, and and I also think it doesn't means like, yeah, this is this is the folly of like, oh, let's figure out exactly what happened or let's do some true crime thing. I think it's like, unfortunately, the answer is what this guy wants to say, which is unfortunately like this kind of.
01:17:35
Speaker
Spousal homicide is just a common and banal occurrence and there's not like an exceptional reason or something that needs to happen here. Like it it shouldn't be banal. I'm not saying it's good that it is obviously, but yeah, I think that's kind of what I want to say about that.
01:17:51
Speaker
You know, let me also point out that a reputation for insight, introspection, just for being a public intellectual, is typically taken as exculpatory when it comes to crimes against women.
Intellectual Reputation and Misogyny
01:18:10
Speaker
This whole episode of been I've been thinking about in the early 60s, Norman Mailer stabbing his, i forget whether she was his wife or girlfriend, Adele Morales. um Well, he stabbed her um at a party in front of all the guests.
01:18:29
Speaker
He faced essentially no consequences. And he didn't really talk about it except obliquely later in poems, but his friends certainly did. And they were like, yeah, and she was a bitch.
01:18:43
Speaker
she had it coming. And that sentiment was buoyed by his reputation as someone who thinks deeply about the human spirit, who thinks deeply about human psychology.
01:18:56
Speaker
And so to me, this self-portrayal fits in very well with that method of defending oneself from the misogyny of one's actions.
01:19:07
Speaker
Yeah. And i guess part of what I'm saying is, Therefore, our response shouldn't be, oh, he's actually bad at having insight. He's actually bad. He's not perceptive or he's not a good
Critique of 'Killer Althusser'
01:19:23
Speaker
whatever. it's Although I'll say from the excerpts, he absolutely is. This is garbage.
01:19:29
Speaker
So yeah, I agree. This book is terrible. And I also don't think he's such a great writer. And as you've seen, He's quite long winded, like a lot of these excerpts are quite long because it kind of takes him a while to get to the point.
01:19:40
Speaker
I was really struggling with this book and like, why did he write it and what is it doing? And, you know, all the answers we talked about a little bit, but there's still a lot left to be explored about what is the purpose of this book in his mind. And it was really clarified for me at the very ending, like what's happening.
01:19:57
Speaker
So we're going to have, I've broken it up into pieces, but basically a long chunk of like maybe half of the last four pages of the book, probably a little bit less than that. And then think we'll actually be, we'll be wrapped up.
01:20:12
Speaker
I'm excited because in my Discord messages, I have the history of the last several excerpts. And just now, finally, the fucking pink slit excerpt just scrolled off my screen and I can stop reading it over and over as we talk.
01:20:27
Speaker
I showed this text to an old doctor friend of mine, who had known Helene and me for a very long time, and naturally I put to him the following question. What did take place between Helene and me on that Sunday, November 16th, which resulted in such an appalling murder?
01:20:43
Speaker
This, word for word, was his reply. I would argue that an extraordinary set of events came together, some of which were purely accidental, others not, yet the whole configuration could in no way have been foreseen, but might very easily have been avoided at little cost if, in my view, three things stand out.
01:21:04
Speaker
One, on the one hand, as three expert doctors have already pointed out, you were in a state of dementia, and therefore not accountable for your actions. You were suffering from mental confusion and hallucinations and were totally unaware of what you were doing both before and during the act.
Challenging Victim-Blaming Theories
01:21:21
Speaker
At a deeper level, you were in an acute state of melancholia and could therefore not be held responsible for what you did. This explains why you were declared unfit to plead, which is statutory in such cases.
01:21:34
Speaker
Two, on the other hand, one thing struck those conducting the police investigation. There was no trace of disorder in either of your two bedrooms. or on your own bed, nor was Helene's clothing in any disarray.
01:21:49
Speaker
Yeah, so he goes on at length about this this theory that she wanted it or not, or how we how they could determine whether that's true or not. And I just feel like it's really easy. It's just's just not true. like Just take as an axiom that people who are victims of murder are not... The murderer is not doing what they want. Uh, she wasn't asking for it.
01:22:09
Speaker
The most unfortunate aspect of this line of argument, very widespread because very comforting, it offers, after all, an indisputable cause, is the because, which creates an unchallengeable explanatory link.
01:22:23
Speaker
without in any way taking into account objectively uncertain elements. Now, all of us have unconscious, aggressive fantasies, indeed homicidal, murderous ones.
01:22:34
Speaker
If all those who had such fantasies were to carry them out, we would all inevitably, understand, become murderers. All of us. As it happens, the vast majority of people can live quite contentedly with even their homicidal fantasies.
01:22:48
Speaker
without ever realizing them in acts. Those who say, he killed her because he could no longer bear her, because, even if only unconsciously he wanted to be rid of her, understand nothing, or unaware of what they are saying.
01:23:04
Speaker
If they apply this logic to themselves, which is ultimately that of unconscious pre-meditation, And given that they are subject to the same logic of aggressive and murderous fantasies, and who is not, they would all have been put away long since, not in psychiatric hospitals, but in prisons.
01:23:22
Speaker
In the life of an individual, as in the life of a people, there is no definitive truth except that of hindsight after they are dead, once things have come to an irremediable end, as Sophocles so rightly said.
01:23:36
Speaker
No one above all the dead can then alter anything. So this is all a long quote from a psychoanalyst. I suppose we could workt wonder like, is he making this up? I don't think he is. I think that actually a doctor did tell him this.
Publication Context of 'Killer Althusser'
01:23:50
Speaker
He says it's word for word. I'll take it that it's paraphrased at best. Right, sure. I think it sort of dawned on me what this book is doing as I got to the end here and what he really means when he's talking about, oh, I didn't have a voice or, oh, and you know I've been living in torment these past few years.
01:24:09
Speaker
It's a weird fucking thing for a psychoanalyst to say like, oh, you can never really have a cause for people's behavior, right? What is the role of psychoanalysis here? Like as evinced by this psychoanalyst is complete moral nihilism.
01:24:23
Speaker
oh, if you murder someone, like everybody wants to murder someone. And and no one can really say like what the reason for actions is. And it's all so ambiguous.
01:24:34
Speaker
And here's sort of the last reveal that i that is why I... have not, you know, why I said I have a slightly different take. Althusser didn't publish this book. He wrote it in 1985.
01:24:46
Speaker
He read it and then he locked it in a drawer. It was published after he died. it was published in 1992. He died two years earlier. This to me changes the context of what this book is doing. I don't think necessarily it's straightforwardly about publicity and public fame.
01:25:03
Speaker
I think this absolutely like violent misogynist who was constantly trying to deal with like turmoil of like depression and schizophrenia by all these different like drugs and experimental therapies had a certainly had this like psychotic episode.
Psychoanalysis and Responsibility
01:25:23
Speaker
I don't want to say anything about what actually happened or anything like that. Again, by the like not doing true crime thing.
01:25:30
Speaker
And then he was kind of shoved into a hospital where for three years he had all these doctors telling him exactly this narrative of events at various times. And even after the like part where he talks about his mother breastfeeding him and all these things, he says, oh, this wasn't my understanding of the situation at the time. This is an understanding that I have retroactively in hindsight come to understand through analysis.
01:25:55
Speaker
So Some of the source of the odium is certainly him because he wrote this thing. And I think a big part of it is self-hatred. And I think to some extent, he felt bad about killing his wife.
01:26:11
Speaker
I think he should feel bad about killing his wife. And I think he was then told by all of these medical professionals and doctors over and over and over again, you are completely powerless in your life to do any of this, like to change any of this. This is all because of all of these events in your trauma. Let's talk about your mother. Let's talk about your childhood. And they produced...
01:26:32
Speaker
the man who wrote this book. I'm not trying to like exonerate him in any way for saying this. I'm trying to say like all of this misogyny is produced, right every text we've looked at is produced in a society. right There's like a structure that like allows these things to be produced.
01:26:47
Speaker
And he's like fallen into the grips of psychoanalyst psychoanalysis here. right and It's kind of funny for psychoanalysis to end up as our villain two episodes in a row.
01:26:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's why i was like, oh, this is fascinating that we kind of both did this. So here's the the very, very closing paragraphs of the book, which continues with the quote. And then he has like his end thing. So really, in order to understand the incomprehensible, you have to take into account uncertain and imponderable factors, of which there were so many in your case, but also the ambivalent nature of fantasies, which introduces a whole host of opposing possibilities.
01:27:29
Speaker
I have, I believe, put all the cards on the table, only some of which, the most obvious to any observer, are needed for one to argue that you were not responsible for your actions when you committed the murder.
01:27:40
Speaker
Having said that, you cannot prevent anyone from thinking differently. The essential thing is that you have explained yourself clearly and publicly for your own satisfaction. If there is anyone better informed, let them, if they wish, make something more of it.
01:27:55
Speaker
Anyway, I interpret this public account of your behavior as a way of taking responsibility again for yourself, your grief, and your life. As they said in ancient times, it is an actus ascende.
01:28:06
Speaker
an act of being. One final word. I hope those who think they know more or have more to say will not be afraid to do so. They can only help me live.
01:28:19
Speaker
Okay, a lot to say here actually. So first off, he wrote this book, he put it in a drawer, he never published it. I am going to go a bit against the beautiful narrative you were painting and say that after reading this, I am not convinced that this says so much about his motives.
Concept of Over-Determination
01:28:41
Speaker
It clearly says a lot, although I don't know what, about his reaction to reading what he had written. But it's entirely plausible that he wrote this book expecting it to be his public exculpation, his return to and defense of his celebrity.
01:28:57
Speaker
Second, Thinking about it more, not only is irresponsibility for your actions kind of an odd thing for a psychoanalyst to say, in a sense, it's almost the opposite of what psychoanalysis gets at. A huge theme of psychoanalysis is over-determination in which one has many causes, each of which is internal, is part of oneself, is something one has responsibility to untangle, examine, and if necessary, manage, destroy, resolve in order to move forward.
01:29:33
Speaker
A huge part of psychoanalysis is this concept of over-determination in which one's actions have many causes, all of which one is responsible for examining.
01:29:44
Speaker
for diffusing or resolving in a sense. Third, third, he says right here that this public account of your behavior is a way of taking responsibility for yourself, your grief, and your life.
01:29:58
Speaker
And everything in this book is about how he doesn't deserve any responsibility for what happened. about really isn't him, about how it's his mother, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:30:11
Speaker
Okay, that's all I had. Yeah, I think you're really spot on there. And I think this is kind of exactly, almost exactly what I wrote in my notes here, which is like, this doctor is saying, you're taking responsibility for yourself.
01:30:23
Speaker
And yeah, he's not taking responsibility at all. There's no responsibility here. And I agree with you that upon writing it, his motive was very likely, this is going to be my return to public, the public eye. And then he read it and he hated it and sort of at least was together enough to like read it and recognize what was happening.
01:30:40
Speaker
Good. I do think there's an element here where he's written elsewhere about his life. He has like an earlier autobiography, which I didn't really read much of. He writes this at i very likely sort of the height of his self-loathing.
01:30:55
Speaker
I'm not saying unjustified self-loathing. And I agree that it's very much a kind of self-loathing that is like the Woody Allen-esque figure you talked about earlier. It's someone who, it is a self-deprecation that is fused, right? It's the famous like Orson Welles thing about Woody Allen, right? It's a self-deprecation that's fused with like an ultimate and narcissism of like, oh, look at me.
01:31:19
Speaker
But when the doctor says to him, oh you know, this is an act of being, you're taking responsibility, Yeah, I don't want to in any way diminish that this guy is a vile misogynist. And I think actually part of what's interesting about, you know, you you were saying like this book is horribly written, right? Like the excerpts we've read are just terrible.
01:31:39
Speaker
his writing is not usually like this. And this is part of why I'm saying there's some something he's trying to work through, something he's trying to figure out, which honestly, it's just not that interesting to really figure out what it is because that's sort of not you know we're not trying to do the like get in his head game necessarily here. Well, I wonder if this book never got an editorial pass.
Misogyny and Psychoanalysis
01:32:02
Speaker
It's also possible. Also, I mean, a lot of his books are are like works of academic theory, and he was less so much like an academic past as like he was working through and in a slightly different form, right? This is this memoir is like is a different form, and people are often more sort of self-indulgent in this genre.
01:32:18
Speaker
But I do think it's this element of something in him... which he's clearly not able to really take responsibility for himself and what he wants to do and his desires, right? Everything is, he's always portraying himself at the whim of his desires, but something in him is kind of trying to balk at this like psychoanalytic thing, which is saying like, oh, you didn't actually do this. Like, it's not that I think he did feel bad, right? It's not, you know, when we said earlier, when I said I had a different take to your thing of like, he doesn't care at all about Helene. It's not that I think he necessarily did feel bad or didn't. I just think like,
01:32:52
Speaker
It's just not present in this book at all. And like, even if he did, i don't know, you take this guy who clearly a misogynist. I mean, and okay, just to really make that point, home like, there are earlier accounts and other things people talk about where before, you know, obviously, for a while, the Ecole Normale Supérieure was like male only, and then they sort of interred and allowed women in.
01:33:14
Speaker
But he would still hold seminars where he just like wouldn't let women in. And there's some other point where he may he has a note on some page where he talks about like, so this is in 1951, so years before.
01:33:27
Speaker
Feminism is above all an ideology which, declaring itself for the, quote, liberation of women, finds the essence of its means in the theoretical and practical denunciation of man as enemy number one, the, quote, machismo, the, quote, phallic, the holder of, quote, power in itself, in short, the, quote, secular responsible for the servitude, if not the exploitation of, quote, woman, which,
01:33:51
Speaker
which is now beginning to take its historical revenge. The systematic, quote, hatred of man of the male sex goes so far as to provoke the physical and social separation of certain groups of women in the rejection of the heterosexual act in the constitution of, quote, communities of women.
01:34:09
Speaker
Groups of women give themselves up to female homosexuality, not out of desire, but out of political conviction, and even accept the idea of artificial fertilization. the man is treated as enemy number one.
01:34:24
Speaker
Shona Wolf, someday man is going to approach you with a time machine. He's going to send you back in time and you're going to write this. Right? And so that's the thing.
01:34:36
Speaker
All of this talk about psychologization, right? The point I'm trying to make is not, oh, I don't think he was a misogynist. Oh, I don't think he's a narcissist. Oh, I don't think he's navel-gazy. And I don't think this book is terrible. Obviously, all those things are true.
01:34:47
Speaker
I think it is a huge... blight on the very concept of psychoanalysis that you have this tension. Why are we forced to choose between understanding that he was undergoing the psychological distress, that he was schizophrenic, that he was dealing with various traumas? I mean, we didn't even get into like him being in a prisoner of war camp.
01:35:07
Speaker
All of those things are true. At the same time, he's a vile misogynist and those things are coming together and causing him to do this murder. And these things should not be intentioned, right? Like I think it is actually right. This is why like psychoanalysis is the villain. And this is exactly what we were talking about with Schoenwolf in the last episode is like at the very moment that you're noticing the structure of abuse, as soon as you want to talk about someone's psychology, instead of understanding that there's a relationship between you know the material and the personal and there's the psychology is actually born out of these material circumstances. No, no, no. You just throw in this whole fucking, oh, the breast and the penis and the woman who's you know who's secretly a man because she pisses standing up.
01:35:50
Speaker
It's this whole shadow play that is just meant to completely obscure the structural force of misogyny that exists. So that's why i say my take is like a little bit different, but is not really in conflict with your take. It is sort of just a different way of saying it So that's my take on Louis Althusser. At some point, I'm going to have to express my positive thoughts about psychoanalysis because I have a few of them, but I definitely can't do it unprompted. I didn't go into researching the last episode expecting to find anything to like about it.
01:36:22
Speaker
And I came out of it not totally hostile, but we are definitely getting a view of the malignancy with which it can be employed and with which it can structure the thinking of people who are really into it.
01:36:38
Speaker
I think that that's right. And I think I'm also not necessarily categorically opposed to even Freudian insights, right? Like, and I said this in the last episode, I think even actually, wait, I think I might've said it in a tangent that caught cut, but I'm A lot of you know people that i that I'm sort of interested in and a lot of thinking about sort of the problems with Freudianism like still do accept this kind of big development of the notion of the unconscious and trying to pay attention to this kind of
01:37:10
Speaker
psychological undercurrent, right? this This notion of the subconscious and these like sort of this parallel cognition that's happening in your brain that you don't really have access to, but which structures your conscious experience. Like all those things I think are valuable and there's people who do them well, and there's people who have like, I think, interesting things to say about them.
01:37:27
Speaker
And it's just so often it becomes this instead. So often it becomes like, oh, he had this trauma and so therefore it's actually not misogyny.
01:37:37
Speaker
And I think it's one of the really sad and one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this, even though on some level like this is, you know, we we we maybe don't explicitly talk about it every episode, but every episode that we prep, we have sort of have a thought of like, why does this story matter? Why are we talking about this in our podcast? And I think one of the things that we will see and that we do see in society again and again is this notion of trauma as this kind of exonerating
Trauma Narratives and Misogyny
01:38:02
Speaker
thing. And I'm not trying to say you know I do think there's something complicated there and there's something to pay attention to. But I think that there is a way in which we often take like you know having experienced trauma and having you know whatever these official diagnoses are as sort of fully exonerative that there might be anything other odious about this person that like needs to be addressed. I mean, you we even talked about it in terms of like
01:38:23
Speaker
people excusing Elon Musk's fascism by like, oh, he has autism, right? Like it's everywhere. And this is a particularly, I think, malignant example of that. This guy kills his wife, but it's all because of his mental illness. And it has nothing to do with the obvious fact that he hates women.
01:38:40
Speaker
Well, okay, what you were saying about the subconscious, you described it as processes going on that we don't really have access to. And that's a concept that kind of like wasn't as examined as it was before Freud, but it did exist on some level. A big part of Freud's innovation is in describing the unconscious, which are mental processes that you don't have access to, but you could in principle, they are examinable.
01:39:09
Speaker
There are things that you, by implication, have some responsibility over. And that element of responsibility has been completely absent in the applications of psychoanalysis we've seen.
01:39:24
Speaker
Yeah, of course, the the the one of the big important insights is this technique of analysis, which is, as Freud describes, it meant to be a way of taking that kind of responsibility, right? So it's in a way, when we are saying we hate you know these applications of psychoanalysis, I mean, somebody who you know, a defense of psychoanalysis here might be, well, this is sort of exactly opposed to the project of psychoanalysis, which is a real taking responsibility. But we noticed that this doctor at least does reference that by saying, oh, this text is a way of taking responsibility. So he knows this is the language you're supposed to use, but it's just not what it is. It's just not happening.
01:40:02
Speaker
Anyway.
Rating Subjects on Ferocity
01:40:03
Speaker
Okay. Are we ready for FAG ratings? Our FAG ratings, we rate all of our subjects on three different axes.
01:40:12
Speaker
F for their ferocity, A for their arrogance, and G for their gullibility. So, okay. One to five scale for each. Yeah, one to five scale, we've allowed to go to six if it's like really, really bad. But that's got to be like world historically bad or, you know, maybe not world historically, but it's got to be like exceptionally bad that we break the soft cap of five.
01:40:37
Speaker
I had a tough time with ferocity here. On the one hand, we're talking about a murderer. Strong case. So it should be high. On the other hand, we're talking, is going to be my like, this going my like galaxy brain take. Okay, ready. Nick hard on me. On the other hand, we are talking about a murderer who committed a type of murder that is extremely banal and happens in France every three days.
01:41:03
Speaker
So to give him a high rating on the basis of that, doesn't that just make us feel better? Shouldn't we admit that in fact, his ferocity is quite low? Right.
01:41:13
Speaker
Okay. Fascinating. I give him a five. Okay. I'm going to him a three. Wow. Wow. Really biting the bullet on that one.
01:41:25
Speaker
I'm going get canceled for it, but I'm not going to get canceled for it. Like if we had a listenership big enough to cancel me, that would be crazy. That would be fucking wild. When I'm saying I'm going get canceled for it, that's wishful thinking.
01:41:38
Speaker
Arrogance is a clear five. we I mean, there's just no other like we're talking about a French philosopher. So it's kind of unfair. Like, of course, he's going to be at least a four. But I think arrogance is a five.
01:41:50
Speaker
Yeah, I'm going to give him a three. Yeah. Yeah, actually. okay I think he's self-obsessed. Obviously, he's narcissistic, but he is so in a way which is cringing.
01:42:05
Speaker
I'm not sure I can interpret it as arrogance. Yeah, I think the, I mean, maybe, you know, this this undermines what I'm saying before about the banality of the murderer, because this is also a very banal kind of arrogance, but his ability to make any kind of violence or trauma, whether it is the sort of thing that happened to the person right across from him or reading about something historically like medieval torture and immediately interpret it as something which is victimizing him is such an arrogant move.
01:42:41
Speaker
Okay, I'm bumping it up to a four. That was extremely convincing. For the sake of agreement, I think I might go down to a four because as I think about it more, I don't think he's Shane Wolf arrogant. I don't think he's, well, he's certainly not Ayn Rand arrogant. mean, that was a six. Like that was the most arrogant. that was And I do want to admit, like, I i do think there is this element of of of so of cringing and of self self-loathing that is kind of evident here.
01:43:05
Speaker
Gullibility, I really don't know what to do with because on the one hand, I mean, part of what I was saying before is like, a narrative of gullibility. He has kind of absorbed this psychoanalytic perspective and is trying to narrativize this event that happened through the things that doctors are telling him he feels, right? Like it's sort of very ambiguous to me how much of this is something he came up with and how much, you know, how much of this narrative and how many of these explanations and, oh, this was a formative moment and this was a formative moment. Like how much of that was, know,
01:43:40
Speaker
sort of something he genuinely or, you know, I don't want to say genuinely thinks, but something he came up with or thought about and how much of it is sort of him just falling for the parade of psychiatric doctors who were telling him like, oh, you're not responsible. You're not a bad guy, even though he clearly is. You know, I buy your i buy your hoodwinking psychoanalyst narrative, but I actually think I'm still giving him probably a three, maybe even a two.
01:44:10
Speaker
And the reason for that is that he wrote this book and he read it and then he hid it. He locked it up. yeah That suggests a degree of self-awareness about the contemptibility of all this.
01:44:23
Speaker
I think that's a really good point. And I think that's part of where I think to just give him on the basis of what I was saying, a five or, you know, giving him a high gullibility score on the basis of like this psychoanalysis, you know, this psychoanalysis narrative is kind of playing this game of exonerating him, right? Which is like not really what I want to do.
01:44:43
Speaker
i think i'm going to I think I'm going to go with two. think you're right. that it's like There's an element of willfulness to failing to really look at what's actually happening. And especially the amount of, throughout this book, we saw misogynist things happening that he was just failing to call out as misogynist. But they are present enough that it's a willful choice to not see them. It's not Right. It's not ah it's not something which is totally absent from the book. It's something which he keeps almost getting to. And then instead of going to the place of recognizing it as misogyny, he veers off into his own vile interpretation.
Protection of Misogynists in Society
01:45:28
Speaker
So that's where that's what complicates things, I think, and makes it low gullibility.
01:45:33
Speaker
okay so you're settling on a two as well. Yeah, I'll go with a two. Okay. So I've given him a nine, which is the lowest score I've given anyone. Actually, either of us has given anyone on this podcast.
01:45:46
Speaker
You've given him an 11, which puts him with Leacock. And that's the rating. Okay, that feels appropriate to me. As it ought to, since these are objective. Exactly. Yeah, I don't know how to make this not really a downer.
01:46:02
Speaker
like Well, you know sometimes our episodes are about a misogynist and it's lovely. And we pull out the little sparklers and such when we hear about all the misogynist things they've done.
01:46:18
Speaker
And sometimes that doesn't happen. Yeah, I think it's really something where some of our reading has been distant enough or it's been weird enough or something that we can kind of find more humor in it. And we I mean, we had some we had some humor in this episode, right? It was not entirely free of us riffing. But the more I read this, the more it's not that I have any sympathy for him, but he's just such a pitiable figure in a way. He's so wretched. like I don't know. I feel like that's falling for his bit a little bit.
01:46:48
Speaker
He is wretched, but I don't find him wretched in a way that inspires pity. It's not exactly pity. It just feels... Because it's not even that I...
01:46:59
Speaker
And this is like built into this thing of like, oh, it's such a banal thing. That is why I'm giving him a three Reading this and understanding, like he was put in the hospital by the doctor at the École Normale after the guy saw his wife dead so quickly that before the cops came to the scene, like a big part of this story is not just his commission of this murder, but it's the like,
01:47:25
Speaker
immediate structure that sprang into action like within minutes to just protect him. It's so unexceptional. And the only sort of quote unquote exceptional aspect of it is that he had this you know it weird kind of elite academic status that allows him to have this kind of you know bizarre cult of personality around his life.
01:47:49
Speaker
thought But like just reading through this and understanding how this is all just like an exceptionally celebritized, like banal account of a guy killing his wife and getting away with it because men protect each other.
Final Thoughts and Call to Action
01:48:02
Speaker
And especially as I started like some of those statistics about femicide at the beginning, I was like reading through femicide statistics, prepping this episode, and it really is just bleak. Like, yeah. So it's not even like he's wretched and I pity him. It's like, it's kind of, again, my like anti great man theory of history. This isn't an exceptional case of like this horrible man. This is just like abuse is really common. And that abuse escalating to murder is like less common, but not uncommon.
01:48:31
Speaker
And people always are ready to spring into action and talk about the toxic relationship between these people and the psychology and the toxicity. And it's like as if that is somehow opposed to just pervasive structural misogyny.
01:48:47
Speaker
Okay. So subscribe to our Patreon. Yeah. If you enjoyed listening to this, check out our Patreon. patreon.com slash odium symposium. We would love to make bonus episodes, more lighthearted stuff like this, most likely.
01:49:03
Speaker
Yeah, we're going to get real lighthearted on the bonus episodes. For, yeah, $5 a month, you can get access to maybe future bonus content. um So far, we'll give you a shout out on the podcast and we ah you'll get early access to our episodes.
01:49:17
Speaker
So, yeah. Oh, and also tell your friends about the podcast because we have no idea how to market a podcast and we're not even really attempting to. So we rely on that.
01:49:28
Speaker
Yeah. Bye. There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live.
01:49:46
Speaker
Is Trump going to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And against us like Darth Vader. Do it live! Now listen, you. I'll suck you in your goddamn face. Let's stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:50:03
Speaker
some level of masochism,