The Future Lasts a Long Time

On the morning of 16th November 1980, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser burst out of his university apartment into the courtyard of the Ecole Normale, screaming that he had killed his wife. Spared trial on grounds of mental illness, he lived out the rest of his life in clinics until his death in 1990. In this autobiography Althusser, one of the most influential French thinkers of the Sixties and Seventies, admits to his fears of exposure as an intellectual fraud, analyzes his fraught, unconventional relationship with his wife, Helene, and reveals a history of severe identity crises and mental illness.