Abstract

We intend to come back to the Althusserian theory of the Ideological State Apparatuses and to the critiques it immediately sparked off during the theoretical-political conjuncture of the seventies. We have chosen to focus on the critique that Alain Badiou and François Balmès made in their anti-althusserian theoretical lampoon On ideology in 1976. They reproached him with the functionalist orientation of his theory which denied the importance of the class struggle and which preferred to develop a theory of the ideological subjection. Althusser replied to them in 1976 in a “Note on ISA” in which he reclaimed from Badiou and Balmès the idea of a contradictory and continuous process of constitution of the dominant ideology by preventive repression of the dominated ideology. He was led, in the second part of the seventies, to redefine the State as an apparatus of conversion of the violence of the ideological class struggle into dominant ideology.