When the French philosopher Louis Althusser murdered his wife, his theories were fatally wounded as well. Playwright Steve Waters explains why he has made a drama out of this crisis

In the small hours of Sunday morning, 16 November 1980, a man in a dressing-gown banged on the door of the resident doctor at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris shouting: "My wife is dead, I've strangled her." The autopsy established that the woman's windpipe had been crushed, and that suicide was an impossibility. The self-confessed killer was diagnosed as suffering from diminished responsibility and committed to Sainte-Anne hospital. As a consequence, his case was never brought to trial, and he lived out his last ten years in silence, dying his "second death" in 1990.

It is a common enough story - an elderly couple living in isolation, hypermanic depression and a sordid domestic homicide. Yet the killer's identity raises the stakes: for he was Louis Althusser, a philosopher whose fierce rethinkings of Marx in the 1960s earned him a place in the pantheon of giants dominating the intellectual life of Europe and beyond in the postwar years: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida. And while the controversy and attention generated by his crime have abated, the implications reverberate down the years and lie behind the action of my new play After the Gods.

The affair is most lucidly and painfully documented in Althusser's posthumously published autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time. Debarred from the "juicy trial" that the French public demanded, silenced by his mental debilitation, Althusser embarked on a remarkable attempt to assemble, in full, the facts of his case, drawing on newspaper cuttings, diary entries of friends, interviews with his analyst and his own memories. The result is a classic, the sort of brutally frank self-scrutiny in which the French specialise, initiated by Rousseau's Confessions and its stark credo: "I shall say openly what I did, what I thought, what I was."

Althusser was born in Algeria in 1918, and led a star-crossed life from birth onwards. His mother's intended died in the trenches at Verdun, only to be replaced at the altar by his brother; Althusser's childhood was consequently haunted by the dead uncle's memory, his early years a bizarre reworking of Hamlet. Later, the humiliation of the German invasion deferred his academic career at the prestigious Ecole Normale, and he was deported to undergo forced labour and imprisonment. However, in the autobiography, his loathing of his family transforms this trauma into a liberation "from that most frightful, appalling and horrifying of Ideological State apparatuses . . . namely the family". Having been involved, as a teenager, in the Catholic Action Movement, his close contact with workers during internment drew him steadily leftwards. This inclination deepened in the closing years of the war after the defining encounter of his life: his meeting with his future wife Helene Legotien.

Helene was born in Paris of Lithuanian Jewish parents, and for harshness her formative years matched Althusser's. Abused as a child, she nursed both her parents through terminal illnesses during her teens, becoming a passionate activist in the Popular Front struggles of the Thirties. She was renowned for her militancy, selling L'Humanite to workers at the Citroen plant in the 13th district, and was later active in the resistance, establishing links with key French literary luminaries - Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Jean Renoir and Andre Malraux. To some onlookers, she was to have an undue influence on the direction of Althusser's work; yet, in his own words, her actions offered the "living confirmation of what I was about to write".

Their love, too, was marked by extremity from the outset - as his elder by about ten years, she inducted the 30-year-old virgin into sexuality as surely as she guided him away from the strictures of Catholicism and towards communism. Scandalously, they were unmarried until the Seventies, and their relationship was permanently breached by Althusser's manic infidelities. In his autobiography, he shamelessly and shamefacedly documents his numerous cruelties to this lifelong partner - a parade of younger students who want to "get their hands on" him, drawn into gruesome menages counterpointed by his deepening mental sickness.

What is compelling about Althusser's story is not merely his private affairs, but the ironic overlaps between his ideas and experience. For Althusser, the intellectual's task was to tighten up ideas that might serve political action; yet much of his work questions the possibility of action itself, free from the confines of ideology. His essays portray social existence as a machine designed to make us putty in the state's hands, through overt violence (the police, the army) or more subtle inculcation drip-fed through the church, school and even the family. It is a chilling image of a world without breathing space, where "ideology has no outside" and even an unborn child is "always already a subject". As the historian E P Thompson noted, it amounts to a paralysing portrait of human passivity, with "experience" ruled impotent; but as Thompson also observed prophetically in his essay "The Poverty of Theory": "Experience walks in without knocking at the door and announces deaths [and] crises of substance."

On that night in 1980, experience certainly came knocking unannounced. Possibly as the result of drugs, mania or even sleepwalking, Althusser massaged Helene's neck to the point of asphyxiation. Two victims followed - the dead woman herself and Althusser's theories, fatally wounded and useless in his subsequent attempt to make sense of his monstrous experience. The man who once commented that "it is difficult to be a Marxist philosopher", while seeking an audience with Pope John Paul II, entered into a telling and heartbreaking silence.

After the Gods attempts to reimagine this tragic predicament through the character of Michel Beaudricourt, a figure whose life and work evokes a whole host of influential French thinkers responsible for reshaping the common sense of our times. The great wave of intellectual activity represented by Althusser and his peers is still breaking on the shores of all our lives, evident both in our apparent inability to forge a working moral language and our appetite for dismantling values rather than constructing them. Althusser's two deaths indicate the perils that accompany this general crisis of conviction.

After the Gods by Steve Waters is at the Hampstead Theatre, London NW3 (020 7722 9301), until 6 July

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