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Althusser worked out two distinct and subsequent interpretation of the political philosophy of Hobbes. In this paper I focus on the older one. According to this interpretation, the philosophy of Hobbes is framed within individualistic humanism. Individualist humanism is one of the conceptual frameworks Marx broke away from when he founded the science of socio-historical reality, that is, historical materialism. This science has made possible to recognize individualistic humanism not just as a false theory, but as a socially active ideology. I thus offer a wide reconstruction of the place of this interpretation in Althusser's philosophy.

Recently, a significant part of the psychoanalytical world, especially the psychoanalysts belonging to the Lacanian orientation, under the guide of J.-A. Miller, has committed to the project of "making psychoanalysis exist in the political field". In this article, first I reconstruct and discuss the ways in which contemporary Lacanian psychoanalysts tried to realize this project; second, I illustrate some of the past political inventions of radical feminism that could constitute as many symbolic and practical resources to develop that project more consistently.

After having first interpreted Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy as a paradigmatic example of a questionable individualistic humanism, Louis Althusser saw it as a prefiguration of the alternative materialist approach, grounded on contingency, which he developed in the last part of his work as a new reading of the Marxist tradition. The paper reconstructs and assesses this late retrospective appropriation of Hobbes' political philosophy. Focusing on the central thesis according to which society is not an organism, but an encounter, it offers a symptomatic reading of it, by showing that it reveals a deeper aporia of Althusser's "aleatory materialism" itself. Indeed, the recourse to epicurean atomism prevents Althusser from maintaining his original and more fundamental thesis about the social formation as a complex overdetermined whole.

Althusser dedicated to Montesquieu's thought his first book. Two aspects make it still interesting to us: the first concerns the new ideas it introduced, the second regards Montesquieu's capacity to simultaneously theorize and take position in the political conflicts of his time. This article examines the second of such aspects: the partisanship in philosophy and the connection between philosophy, science and politico-ideological conflict.

In this paper I reply to the objections raised against my book in this symposium. I also get back on some issue outlined in that book. For instance, Philosophical method, Structure of experience, symbolic uneasiness, Good and Right, politics and pratical philosophy, question of existential meaning. I give some explanation about these topics and I develop their implications.