Roger Garaudy (born 1913)

Garaudy was an important figure in post- war French 'humanist' marxism within the PCF and was a long term opponent of Althusser. Garaudy worked for reconciliation between radical movements and the catholic church - a sympathy for reactionary religious ideologies that extends up to his recent conversion to the teachings of Islam. Althusser's political polemics with Garaudy within the PCF extend over into his philosophical writings. In Althusser's discussion of Feuerbach, he singles out Garaudy as a modern culprit of the Feuerbachian error of 'materialist inversion' of the idealist dialectic internal to ideology. A prescient criticism indeed, given the variance within Garaudy's own toying with the absolute. see: Ideological Inversion