I begin this chapter with two apparently unrelated facts. In 1961 the naturalized French philosopher of Lithuanian descent Emmanuel Levinas published Totalité et infini, a book which one might plausibly claim to be the single most important work of ethics to appear in France in the twentieth century. On 16 November 1980 Louis Althusser, the leading Marxist philosopher of his generation, strangled his wife Hélène. I say ‘strangled’ rather than ‘murdered’ because Althusser was never charged or tried for any crime relating to the incident. Instead, he was judged to be not legally responsible for his acts on the grounds of mental health. Most of the remaining decade of his life was spent in psychiatric institutions.

What is the link between Levinas's book and Althusser's act? There certainly does not appear to be much in common between a work of philosophical ethics and a fatal assault. Nevertheless, Levinas and Althusser are connected by at least one important biographical factor: both of them spent more or less all of the Second World War in German prisoner of war camps. Levinas had the good fortune to be mobilized at the beginning of the war, then taken prisoner early in the hostilities in 1940, and held in various POW camps until 1945. To call this ‘good fortune’ may appear to be in poor taste, to say the very least. But Levinas was a Jew of Eastern European origin, and if he hadn't been a member of the French army at the time of his capture, instead of spending the war in a military prisoner of war camp, he would almost certainly have been arrested on racial grounds, deported and murdered in a death camp, like many of his family. So one might say that being a prisoner of war saved his life.

Like Levinas, Althusser was mobilized in 1939, taken captive in June 1940 and spent most of the next five years in POW camps, mainly Stalag XA. It is not a matter here of using their five years of captivity to explain what the two great philosophers subsequently said, wrote, did or thought.