Posthumously published works of Louis Althusser bear witness to the fact that his creative spells show signs of influence of various intellectual giants such as Bachelard, Cavailles, Lenin, Lacan, Heidegger and even Mao Zedong. His loyal companion in the revitalization of Marxist theory also became Spinoza, who was previously familiar to many thinkers inside the Marxist tradition. During the course of my diploma thesis, I will try to show, where the two thinkers influenced Althusser's work the most. I will also try to argue that the latter was politically oriented, with serious philosophical consequences. Political and theoretical efforts display two sides of the same coin of Althusser's project, which revolved around timeless and conjectural findings. Althusser's philosophy could thus hardly be coined as being functionalist and determinist, but was rather a product of deeper contradictions.
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