2.9

Accompanying the repeated mention of class struggle in the post scriptum is an emphasis on the plural nature of ideologies.  "It is only from the point of view of the classes, i.e. of the class struggle, that it is possible to explain the ideologies existing in a social formation "(Lenin and Philosophy 172).  Althusser also stresses that ideologies are not born in the Ideological State Apparatus (ISAs) but in social classes.  He concludes his post scriptum thus:

ideologies are not "born" in the ISAs but from the social classes at grips in the class struggle:  from their conditions of existence, their practices, their experience of the struggle, etc. (Lenin and Philosophy 173)

In his English version Ben Brewster maintains the prepositional shift of Althusser's French.  Ideologies are not born in (dans) ideological state apparatuses but from (de) classes in conflict.  The parameters of the reproductive problematic have been refashioned:  class struggle is the interaction in which class becomes a parent.

2.9

2.10

The metaphor of birth that closes the post scriptum complicates the to and fro implications of abstraction that opens the post scriptum.  The assessment of truth and error recedes.  Furthermore, a functionalist and structuralist focus is displaced by a genealogical perspective.

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2.11

The prepositional relation is not symmetrical;  in is not the opposite of from.  This is not mere reversal.  In marking the difference between born in an apparatus and born from a social class, Althusser avoids simple negation of place of birth.  A simple assertion ­­ not here, there ­­ will not do for Althusser is justifying his own discursive paternity both as progenitor and progeny.

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2.12

In Althusser the question of correct analysis is never remote from considerations of the ownership of a brain child.  He often exploits the resonances of the French idiomatic expression "naître de père inconnu".  The fatherless child in Althusser's discourse figures an epistemic break, the coming into being of the radically revolutionary.  Not only do the nuances generated by the prepositional shift bear the trace of Althusser's preoccupation with epistemological ruptures and breaks evident in his insistence on the splits between the early and late Marx, the young and mature Freud, they also situate Althusser's own double-dated remarks within a similar narrative scheme with all its triumphist connotations.

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2.13

Never explicitly cast in the eschatological contours of a messianic scheme, the figure of the fatherless child nevertheless partakes of a conflation of epiphanic and redemptive moments.  Its deployment by Althusser brings an epistemological discovery into the ambit of an ethical stance.

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2.14

This gesture of epistemological-ethical fusion situates both the discoverer of the break and the break itself in the figure of the fatherless child.  Althusser is trying to occupy a place equivalent to that of Marx, a place combining both moral and epistemological power.  The figure of the fatherless child flits between the object of study (Marx) and the subject conducting that study (Althusser).  Its hovering movement is enhanced by its placement in apposition:

Dans le cas de la théorie marxiste, l'événement dénommable "coupure", tel que je l'ai défini plus haut, se trouve en effet produit, comme un "enfant sans père", par la confluence de ce que Lénine a appelé [...] (Éléments d'autocritique 99)

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2.15

Placed in such a medial position, the use of the fatherless child comparison troubles some readers.  For example, Grahame Lock's English version:

In the case of Marxist theory, the event which can be called a "break", as I defined it above, in fact seems to have been produced like a "fatherless child" by the meeting of what Lenin called [...] (Essays in Self-Criticism 149)

The apposition is lost.  The tense is shifted from the historical present to the past.  The break is found in English to have been produced whereas in the French the break finds itself to be produced or being produced.  Lock introduces a modal of doubt (seems) for Althusser's verb of discovery (finds).  Lock's resistive rendering foils identification between the subject of enunciation and the enunciating subject.  It smashes the textual mirror play.  The rendering also suppresses Althusser's idolatrous tendencies (n2). 

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2.16

When Althusser is most wont to idolize, the figure of the fatherless child surfaces.  For example in the exuberant opening of "Freud and Lacan" an ample unfolding of the fatherless child figure serves to praise three unexpected children of the nineteenth- century, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche, in the quite unMarxist evocation of the maverick thinker as individual genius.  At the outset of this text Althusser dramatizes the analogy.  Possession of the "natural child" is contested:

"When a young science is born, the family circle is always ready for astonishment, jubilation and baptism.  For a long time, every child, even the foundling, has been reputed the son of a father, and when it is a prodigy, the fathers would fight at the gate if it were not for the mother and the respect due to her. (Lenin and Philosophy 181)

Having served the function of ensuring decorum, no further mention of the mother is made.  Althusser lapses into the monoparental mode.  He stresses the rupture, the unexpectedness of the radical thinker.  For him, Freud's destiny was "to be himself his own father" (182).  The entrepreneurial tenor of this celebration of the self-made man becomes explicit when Althusser states "[t]heoretically, Freud set up in business alone" (182).  Althusser's diction generates the uncanny return of bourgeois individualism.

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2.17

In a variation on the epistemological-ethical fusion, Althusser assumes the self to be co-terminous with its intellectual productions.  In the fantasized postnatal welcome, epistemological break, radical thinker, and new science all reflect each other.  Likewise when the narrative syntagm of the postnatal scene becomes the basis for the general form of ideology in the ISA essay, the subject of ideology and the self are made congruent.

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2.18

The syntagm of the fantasized scene is composed of two moments.  Expectation is followed by baptism or naming.  The first can be related to the anticipatory moment of hailing or interpellation.  The second, baptism or naming, is a key element of the specular structure of the subject.  Focused on the function of ideology, Althusser models reproduction as conversion.  This emerges most clearly when Althusser illustrates interpellation by the example of a one hundred and eighty degree "turn".  Be it Christian or secular, in conversion an authority claims a body just as fathers claim a child.  The general form of ideology as explicated in "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus" replicates a story focalized by Althusser's investment in heroic images of knowledge production and his stake in the Oedipal game of the name of the father.

2.18