One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.
Louis AlthusserIf someone asks, โBut what in the end is a philosopher?โ I would say โA philosopher is a human being who fights in theory.โ
Louis AlthusserWhat art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.
Louis AlthusserIn truth, ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness', even supposing this term to have an unambiguous meaning. It is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form.
Louis AlthusserWithout claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.
Louis AlthusserWhatseems to take place outside ideology (to be precise, in the street), in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, 'I am ideological.'
Louis Althusser