The recent publication of Louis Althusser's 'autobiography' has incited renewed interest in a Marxist thinker whose abrupt disappearance from the intellectual scene long predated his death and betokened a pervasive transfer of intellectual allegiances. Its reception, however, has invariably endorsed Althusser's 'confessions' as the last word on his life and work, treating as transparent a text that is more than usually opaque. The simultaneous appearance of the first volume of a biography of Althusser facilitates the requisite symptomatic reading of his own 'wild analysis', indicating the degree to which Althusser has rewritten his history in die 'future anterior'. Notwithstanding an evident difficulty in engaging sympathetically with Althusser's Communism, it also discloses new and illuminating material on his 'road to Marx'- material which, whilst it does not qualify Althusser's affiliation to the Communist project, does underscore the complex non/contemporaneity of his Marxism.
