In the suite of Text Festival images available to the media, the one by me most often picked up is the tragedy of althusserianism (here’s a good place to look at it http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2005/03/text-festival-begins-in-ten-days.html ). The key moment in this visual poem is the following line, he is . One of the things the poem seeks to do is replicate the experience of mystery – the majority of readers (even if they have heard of Althusser) will not know what althusserianism is, or what the tragedy of it is. If that mystery is lived with, the question next is: is ‘he’ Althusser? Or is ‘he’ someone else? This set of questions is actually what the poem is about. You can stop there, you don’t know, that is the tragedy. Louis Althusser was a fascinating figure and he and his wife Helene are frequent references in my work. In the 60’s he was a major figure in French Marxism. Ten years his senior, Helene had been a communist fighter against the Nazis. Reading his autobiography The Futur