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Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987
A profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, from Epicurus to Marx.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a “philosophy of the encounter,” which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a “philosophy of the encounter,” which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.
350 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2006
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About the author
Louis Althusser
179 books515 followersLouis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most influential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As they seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render Marxism philosophically respectable, the claims he advanced in the 1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated worldwide. Due to apparent reversals in his theoretical positions, to the ill-fated facts of his life, and to the historical fortunes of Marxism in the late twentieth century, this intense interest in Althusser's reading of Marx did not survive the 1970s. Despite the comparative indifference shown to his work as a whole after these events, the theory of ideology Althusser developed within it has been broadly deployed in the social sciences and humanities and has provided a foundation for much “post-Marxist” philosophy. In addition, aspects of Althusser's project have served as inspiration for Analytic Marxism as well as for Critical Realism. Though this influence is not always explicit, Althusser's work and that of his students continues to inform the research programs of literary studies, political philosophy, history, economics, and sociology. In addition, his autobiography has been subject to much critical attention over the last decade. At present, Althusser's philosophy as a whole is undergoing a critical reevaluation by scholars who have benefited from the anthologization of hard-to-find and previously unpublished texts and who have begun to engage with the great mass of writings that remain in his archives.
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April 30, 2015
This volume contains works by Louis Althusser written shortly before and after the author murdered his wife in a fit of madness. These works were left in unpublishable form due to Althusser's ongoing struggle with exhaustion and mental illness in his last years. The writings contained much repetition and it was clear that the philosopher was as yet unsure how to roll out his ideas before he died. The editors, Francois Matheron and Oliver Corpet, must be acknowledged almost as co-writers of this book in that they constructed the pieces contained here from fragments, piecing together as best they could the general direction of Althusser's thinking in his last years. The philosophical world owes them a great thanks, as this is some of the most powerful thinking Althusser did in his life. It came when the philosophical generation that came after him had already come into its own. Here, Althusser is clearly influenced by the generation of minds- particularly Derrida and Deleuze- that the young Althusser had previously influenced.
Obviously, for Althusser, philosophy was always a way of engaging in politics, and, to some degree, vice-versa. It is therefor important to understand the political context in which these works were written. Althusser's last major published philosophical work was “The Reproduction of Capitalism,” from which his most widely known piece of writing, the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” had been excerpted Taken as an isolated piece, the essay can, and often is, misunderstood as a call to cultural struggle within the state apparatuses- the school, the church, the family- for a healthier ideological culture. But in fact, Althusser was arguing that the ISAs could not be reformed. The capitalist state and its apparatuses, be they directly forceful (the police and military) or ideological, would have to be completely smashed before a revolutionary state could start to form itself and its own apparatuses. A state, Althusser argues, does not just rule over its subjects but in fact engenders subjectivity through ideological conditioning. No matter what economic reforms might take place, the apparatuses of a capitalist state can only engender capitalist subjects. Therefor, any attempt to reform the state from within was bound to simply reproduce capitalist relations in one form or another even if the Communist parties were “completely” victorious in the election results.
Althusser was adamant about this point because the late 1970s saw the Communist Party of France moving ever rightward and abandoning militant struggle (even in name, in practice it abandoned it long before the '70s) and entering electoral politics in the name of “Eurocommunism,” the theory, based on a right-wing appropriation of Gramsci's writings on hegemony, that the democratic states of the industrial west were, in and of themselves, inherently apolitical and could be transformed if a working-class party was in charge of them. The CPF was formally abandoning the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Althusser was trying to combat this trend.
But while Althusser was combating political revisionism in the Party, his own philosophy was becoming less and less orthodoxically Marxist. In his earlier works on Marx, “For Marx” and “Reading Capital”, Althusser held that in his mature works, such as Das Kapital, Marx had essentially, despite momentary lapses, purged himself of the Hegelian idealism at the heart of his early thought and founded a genuinely materialist philosophy. By the time of the writings collected in this volume, however, Althusser had come to interpret Das Kapital as, philosophically at least, an essentially idealist work, still operating with Hegel as its primary influence. Kapital contained, Althusser felt, dueling idealist and materialist logics, and Marx was probably only conscious of the former as he was writing. The greatness of the work, Althusser had come to believe, lied in the way Marx's idealist philosophical argument accidentally stumbled upon a new science- a way of understanding the way that class struggle operated in different forms of society, though most specifically capitalism.
Das Kapital, then, is a scientific, not a philosophic, masterpiece. Indeed, Althusser asserts that there is no Marxist philosophy contained in Das Kapital. (In his autobiography, Althusser goes so far as to say that Marx was a brilliant scientific thinker, but actually a rather lousy philosopher.) So Althusser gives up, as he had been doing in his previous work, trying to imagine a Marxist philosophy and instead goes about trying to find a philosophical explanation of the genesis of Marxism- to find in the history of philosophy an explanation as to how to account for the fact that an idealist philosopher founded a science (which is inherently materialist as such).
(Althusser subtlety equates the futility of Marx's appropriation of Hegel with his own appropriation of structuralism in his earlier work. Both men, he subtlety confesses, were using philosophical tools that were “in vogue” at the time that they were writing to try to invent a Marxist philosophy.)
His search for an explanation in the history of philosophy for the founding of Marxism leads Althusser to a radical critique of what has come to be known as “materialism” within the philosophical cannon. He points out that the idealism/materialism binary was introduced into western philosophy by Plato, perhaps the purest arch-type of an idealist in the cannon. But even Plato's notion of idealism has been reinterpreted and transformed through history, and indeed this practice started not long after Plato's death, even with Aristotle. We have come to think of idealism as thought which prioritizes the knowledge of the mind over the matter of which it holds knowledge, and materialism as thought which prioritizes the objects that inspire the knowledge of the mind about those objects. In fact, neither of these correspond to the original definitions set fourth by Plato. For Plato, it was not thought at all which was paramount but rather the Idea, the Forms hovering up in the skies with the Gods, which illuminated both mind and matter. Idealism was simply the divine Truth, and materialism the turning away from the Idea towards the dank cave of things, which is to say ignorance, the unexamined life which is not worthy of living.
In classically Althusserian fashion, the philosopher examines what he has always called the “philosophy effect,” a philosophical system's indirect effect (via ideology) on social practice, of Plato's originary idealism. The domination of the Idea implies, as Plato plainly asserts in “Republic,” the rejection of any form of democratic rights and the absolute mastery of he who understands the Form of Truth. Authentic materialism, then, is banished from the realm of western philosophy by Plato. Aristotle, Plato's less anti-democratic heir, began to reimagine idealism as a celebration of the human mind, and materialism as simply a more object-centered celebration of the human mind. This materialism, that known by western philosophers including Marx and his followers, Althusser defines as a disguised “idealism of freedom,” of what the transcendent human subject can do with and to the material world.
But what of authentically materialistic thinking? Is there such a thing in the history of thought? Might it be lurking in the shadows that Plato had tried so hard, and seemingly successfully, to repress? Althusser goes about trying to unearth this repressed tradition in western philosophy that he traces back to Epicurus's vision of a primordial rain of atoms falling vertically through a void. The clinamen was when one of Epicurus's atoms suddenly and randomly swerved in its downward trajectory and collided with another atom. Atoms then cascaded into each other. This “pile-up” of atoms results in the creation of a world. Creation, then, is the result of an encounter, and every encounter is arbitrary. Such an arbitrary, yet lasting encounter results in an established, factual world capable of deploying meaning. Most encounters are not lasting, just as most car collisions do not result in pile-ups. Two atoms might make an impression on each other, but this will not result in a new world. And even in the very rare scenario of a world coming into being, we should not expect this world to last. It will be shoved aside eventually, by a different world of equally arbitrary origin.
Althusser finds surprising echoes of Epicurus in various western philosophers. Heidegger, too, rejected any notion of originary meaning. The world is something we are simply thrown into, that we are forced to encounter.
Machiavelli also, Althusser believes, reflects Epicurus. Machiavelli's political aspirations were nothing more than imagining a series of arbitrary encounters: For Italy to become united, a leader must encounter a region ready to be unified. For there to be such a leader, certain qualities must encounter themselves in an individual. This individual must learn to lead- (s)he must learn to behave wickedly but appear to be good, and this is a hard trick to learn for any individual. All these elements must come together in the void that was Machiavelli's Italy, and unless they do they are not really elements of anything.
Spinoza, too, Althusser draws into the repressed tradition. In beginning with God, that which depends on nothing to be affirmed, Spinoza effectively begins with the void. God is that which can not be questioned or deconstructed, and thereby cannot be understood. God is a combination of elements of which we are plunged into as subjects without any concept of how this came to be.
Perhaps the clearest reflection of Epicurus's philosophy that Althusser finds is in the work of Rousseau, who divided “nature” into its “pure” and “political” forms. Originary nature is depicted as a huge, wild forest where individuals wander alone without encountering each other. Humans are alone, and thus absolutely free. Yet this radical absence of society is what makes the development of society possible. The State of Nature develops when people suddenly, arbitrarily start encountering each other. Competition and war develops and, following Hobbes, social contracts must be formed if all are not to exterminate all.
Proper legislation, Rousseau tells us, can only result from examining the circumstances and environments in which individuals arbitrarily encounter one another. Thus, there is no one “legitimate” form of governance for any one world, which can always be replaced by another world.
This buried, authentically materialist, or “aleatory” as Althsser comes to call it, tradition rejects both idealistic, inevitabilist beginnings as well as endings, which such beginnings point to as inevitable. The aleatory tradition truly and authentically embraces disorder. Unlike that which has been labeled “materialism” by the Platonic tradition, authentic, aleatory materialism is not subject-focused (be that subject God or the proletariat) but it is rather process-focused, a process which imposes itself on the subject, rather than the other way around.
In creating this history of the repressed history of philosophy, Althusser inherently offers a radical critique of the concept of “history”. For professional historians, history is that of the established facts of past histories, the worlds that took place in the past. The revolutionary historian, however, observes tendencies in the contradictory present, understanding that no physical laws apply to such contradictions, and that the colliding atoms could result in any type of world given the circumstances that apply to the conflagration. This, Althusser posits, must be remembered by any authentic Marxist or psychoanalyst. Practice, be it psychological or political, must inform theory, not the other way around. Only then can it be remembered that philosophical or psychological theory is only the attempt to arrive at a situationalistic truth, rather than an unbendable Truth.
Marx single-handedly re-creates this conscious/unconscious binary that haunts the western tradition. He is outwardly an Aristotilian materialist, which is to say an idealist. But unbeknownst even to him, he is continuing the sub-conscious work of aleatory materialism, and founding a science.
To bring this philosophical survey back to Marx and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition, Althusser, at the end of his life, posited that Marx was a thinker who understood himself as a child of Hegel (as Althusser had earlier understood himself as a child of structuralism). Marx was thus an idealistic materialist of the tradition inspired by Aristotle. In Das Kapital, Marx presents the commodity as an absolute origin of contemporary social relations. Marx's commodity, Althusser claims (perhaps ignoring Marx's clumsy, yet still relevant, notion of primitive accumulation) is not subjected to any kind of historical genealogy. It is an abstract absolute, which Marx, who was (consciously at least) the slave of western idealism, felt he had to begin with. Marx's conscious thought and politics were shaped by their historically determined limits, and those limits have thus shaped those who consciously thought and acted in Marx's wake.
That the Leninist state was ultimately, according to Althusser, incapable of interpolating truly radical subjectivities, that Communist parties in the West fell back on bourgeois-representational models, was a result of an idealist-materialism at the heart of Marx's (conscious) thought.
To move forward, we must understand the Marx that Marx himself never knew.
Obviously, for Althusser, philosophy was always a way of engaging in politics, and, to some degree, vice-versa. It is therefor important to understand the political context in which these works were written. Althusser's last major published philosophical work was “The Reproduction of Capitalism,” from which his most widely known piece of writing, the essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” had been excerpted Taken as an isolated piece, the essay can, and often is, misunderstood as a call to cultural struggle within the state apparatuses- the school, the church, the family- for a healthier ideological culture. But in fact, Althusser was arguing that the ISAs could not be reformed. The capitalist state and its apparatuses, be they directly forceful (the police and military) or ideological, would have to be completely smashed before a revolutionary state could start to form itself and its own apparatuses. A state, Althusser argues, does not just rule over its subjects but in fact engenders subjectivity through ideological conditioning. No matter what economic reforms might take place, the apparatuses of a capitalist state can only engender capitalist subjects. Therefor, any attempt to reform the state from within was bound to simply reproduce capitalist relations in one form or another even if the Communist parties were “completely” victorious in the election results.
Althusser was adamant about this point because the late 1970s saw the Communist Party of France moving ever rightward and abandoning militant struggle (even in name, in practice it abandoned it long before the '70s) and entering electoral politics in the name of “Eurocommunism,” the theory, based on a right-wing appropriation of Gramsci's writings on hegemony, that the democratic states of the industrial west were, in and of themselves, inherently apolitical and could be transformed if a working-class party was in charge of them. The CPF was formally abandoning the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Althusser was trying to combat this trend.
But while Althusser was combating political revisionism in the Party, his own philosophy was becoming less and less orthodoxically Marxist. In his earlier works on Marx, “For Marx” and “Reading Capital”, Althusser held that in his mature works, such as Das Kapital, Marx had essentially, despite momentary lapses, purged himself of the Hegelian idealism at the heart of his early thought and founded a genuinely materialist philosophy. By the time of the writings collected in this volume, however, Althusser had come to interpret Das Kapital as, philosophically at least, an essentially idealist work, still operating with Hegel as its primary influence. Kapital contained, Althusser felt, dueling idealist and materialist logics, and Marx was probably only conscious of the former as he was writing. The greatness of the work, Althusser had come to believe, lied in the way Marx's idealist philosophical argument accidentally stumbled upon a new science- a way of understanding the way that class struggle operated in different forms of society, though most specifically capitalism.
Das Kapital, then, is a scientific, not a philosophic, masterpiece. Indeed, Althusser asserts that there is no Marxist philosophy contained in Das Kapital. (In his autobiography, Althusser goes so far as to say that Marx was a brilliant scientific thinker, but actually a rather lousy philosopher.) So Althusser gives up, as he had been doing in his previous work, trying to imagine a Marxist philosophy and instead goes about trying to find a philosophical explanation of the genesis of Marxism- to find in the history of philosophy an explanation as to how to account for the fact that an idealist philosopher founded a science (which is inherently materialist as such).
(Althusser subtlety equates the futility of Marx's appropriation of Hegel with his own appropriation of structuralism in his earlier work. Both men, he subtlety confesses, were using philosophical tools that were “in vogue” at the time that they were writing to try to invent a Marxist philosophy.)
His search for an explanation in the history of philosophy for the founding of Marxism leads Althusser to a radical critique of what has come to be known as “materialism” within the philosophical cannon. He points out that the idealism/materialism binary was introduced into western philosophy by Plato, perhaps the purest arch-type of an idealist in the cannon. But even Plato's notion of idealism has been reinterpreted and transformed through history, and indeed this practice started not long after Plato's death, even with Aristotle. We have come to think of idealism as thought which prioritizes the knowledge of the mind over the matter of which it holds knowledge, and materialism as thought which prioritizes the objects that inspire the knowledge of the mind about those objects. In fact, neither of these correspond to the original definitions set fourth by Plato. For Plato, it was not thought at all which was paramount but rather the Idea, the Forms hovering up in the skies with the Gods, which illuminated both mind and matter. Idealism was simply the divine Truth, and materialism the turning away from the Idea towards the dank cave of things, which is to say ignorance, the unexamined life which is not worthy of living.
In classically Althusserian fashion, the philosopher examines what he has always called the “philosophy effect,” a philosophical system's indirect effect (via ideology) on social practice, of Plato's originary idealism. The domination of the Idea implies, as Plato plainly asserts in “Republic,” the rejection of any form of democratic rights and the absolute mastery of he who understands the Form of Truth. Authentic materialism, then, is banished from the realm of western philosophy by Plato. Aristotle, Plato's less anti-democratic heir, began to reimagine idealism as a celebration of the human mind, and materialism as simply a more object-centered celebration of the human mind. This materialism, that known by western philosophers including Marx and his followers, Althusser defines as a disguised “idealism of freedom,” of what the transcendent human subject can do with and to the material world.
But what of authentically materialistic thinking? Is there such a thing in the history of thought? Might it be lurking in the shadows that Plato had tried so hard, and seemingly successfully, to repress? Althusser goes about trying to unearth this repressed tradition in western philosophy that he traces back to Epicurus's vision of a primordial rain of atoms falling vertically through a void. The clinamen was when one of Epicurus's atoms suddenly and randomly swerved in its downward trajectory and collided with another atom. Atoms then cascaded into each other. This “pile-up” of atoms results in the creation of a world. Creation, then, is the result of an encounter, and every encounter is arbitrary. Such an arbitrary, yet lasting encounter results in an established, factual world capable of deploying meaning. Most encounters are not lasting, just as most car collisions do not result in pile-ups. Two atoms might make an impression on each other, but this will not result in a new world. And even in the very rare scenario of a world coming into being, we should not expect this world to last. It will be shoved aside eventually, by a different world of equally arbitrary origin.
Althusser finds surprising echoes of Epicurus in various western philosophers. Heidegger, too, rejected any notion of originary meaning. The world is something we are simply thrown into, that we are forced to encounter.
Machiavelli also, Althusser believes, reflects Epicurus. Machiavelli's political aspirations were nothing more than imagining a series of arbitrary encounters: For Italy to become united, a leader must encounter a region ready to be unified. For there to be such a leader, certain qualities must encounter themselves in an individual. This individual must learn to lead- (s)he must learn to behave wickedly but appear to be good, and this is a hard trick to learn for any individual. All these elements must come together in the void that was Machiavelli's Italy, and unless they do they are not really elements of anything.
Spinoza, too, Althusser draws into the repressed tradition. In beginning with God, that which depends on nothing to be affirmed, Spinoza effectively begins with the void. God is that which can not be questioned or deconstructed, and thereby cannot be understood. God is a combination of elements of which we are plunged into as subjects without any concept of how this came to be.
Perhaps the clearest reflection of Epicurus's philosophy that Althusser finds is in the work of Rousseau, who divided “nature” into its “pure” and “political” forms. Originary nature is depicted as a huge, wild forest where individuals wander alone without encountering each other. Humans are alone, and thus absolutely free. Yet this radical absence of society is what makes the development of society possible. The State of Nature develops when people suddenly, arbitrarily start encountering each other. Competition and war develops and, following Hobbes, social contracts must be formed if all are not to exterminate all.
Proper legislation, Rousseau tells us, can only result from examining the circumstances and environments in which individuals arbitrarily encounter one another. Thus, there is no one “legitimate” form of governance for any one world, which can always be replaced by another world.
This buried, authentically materialist, or “aleatory” as Althsser comes to call it, tradition rejects both idealistic, inevitabilist beginnings as well as endings, which such beginnings point to as inevitable. The aleatory tradition truly and authentically embraces disorder. Unlike that which has been labeled “materialism” by the Platonic tradition, authentic, aleatory materialism is not subject-focused (be that subject God or the proletariat) but it is rather process-focused, a process which imposes itself on the subject, rather than the other way around.
In creating this history of the repressed history of philosophy, Althusser inherently offers a radical critique of the concept of “history”. For professional historians, history is that of the established facts of past histories, the worlds that took place in the past. The revolutionary historian, however, observes tendencies in the contradictory present, understanding that no physical laws apply to such contradictions, and that the colliding atoms could result in any type of world given the circumstances that apply to the conflagration. This, Althusser posits, must be remembered by any authentic Marxist or psychoanalyst. Practice, be it psychological or political, must inform theory, not the other way around. Only then can it be remembered that philosophical or psychological theory is only the attempt to arrive at a situationalistic truth, rather than an unbendable Truth.
Marx single-handedly re-creates this conscious/unconscious binary that haunts the western tradition. He is outwardly an Aristotilian materialist, which is to say an idealist. But unbeknownst even to him, he is continuing the sub-conscious work of aleatory materialism, and founding a science.
To bring this philosophical survey back to Marx and the Marxist-Leninist political tradition, Althusser, at the end of his life, posited that Marx was a thinker who understood himself as a child of Hegel (as Althusser had earlier understood himself as a child of structuralism). Marx was thus an idealistic materialist of the tradition inspired by Aristotle. In Das Kapital, Marx presents the commodity as an absolute origin of contemporary social relations. Marx's commodity, Althusser claims (perhaps ignoring Marx's clumsy, yet still relevant, notion of primitive accumulation) is not subjected to any kind of historical genealogy. It is an abstract absolute, which Marx, who was (consciously at least) the slave of western idealism, felt he had to begin with. Marx's conscious thought and politics were shaped by their historically determined limits, and those limits have thus shaped those who consciously thought and acted in Marx's wake.
That the Leninist state was ultimately, according to Althusser, incapable of interpolating truly radical subjectivities, that Communist parties in the West fell back on bourgeois-representational models, was a result of an idealist-materialism at the heart of Marx's (conscious) thought.
To move forward, we must understand the Marx that Marx himself never knew.
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March 27, 2017'In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital.'
Please note the passive voice. He endured killing wife.
I'm certainly not one to judge a philosopher's work by his private peccadilloes. However, it's worth keeping in mind how the French Academy incubates worse barbarism than the NFL. Can't go on blaming the jocks forever, alas. The demon lies within.
*
Elephants are contagious
The fact is once you give him half a chance it's hard not to be charmed by Althusser. The crowning jewel of this collection would most certainly be 'The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter.' His skills as a rhetorician are here on full display. I'm now tempted to give 'aleatory materialism' as my official religion, even though I'm actually not even sure I agree with main point. Does philosophy really have the power to banish all forms of teleology from the universe? Althusser was always arguably a better Spinozist than he was a Marxist.
By contrast, 'Marx in his Limits' is a bit long and lumbering. Written as an attack on the reformist tendencies of Eurocommunism in the seventies, it feels pretty dated today. Althusser ends by criticizing Gramsci, and in my view comes out quite badly from this confrontation. The simple fact is that Gramsci is much more relevant to leftwing politics today than Althusser. The struggle for hegemony is the bread and butter of any worthwhile activist group. From this perspective, the usual contrast between reform and revolution is entirely too abstract and idealist. We really don't know when a modest request for reform may effectively turn into a revolutionary demand. It's not up to us on the left to decide this; it's up to the ruling class.
Please note the passive voice. He endured killing wife.
I'm certainly not one to judge a philosopher's work by his private peccadilloes. However, it's worth keeping in mind how the French Academy incubates worse barbarism than the NFL. Can't go on blaming the jocks forever, alas. The demon lies within.
*
Elephants are contagious
The fact is once you give him half a chance it's hard not to be charmed by Althusser. The crowning jewel of this collection would most certainly be 'The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter.' His skills as a rhetorician are here on full display. I'm now tempted to give 'aleatory materialism' as my official religion, even though I'm actually not even sure I agree with main point. Does philosophy really have the power to banish all forms of teleology from the universe? Althusser was always arguably a better Spinozist than he was a Marxist.
By contrast, 'Marx in his Limits' is a bit long and lumbering. Written as an attack on the reformist tendencies of Eurocommunism in the seventies, it feels pretty dated today. Althusser ends by criticizing Gramsci, and in my view comes out quite badly from this confrontation. The simple fact is that Gramsci is much more relevant to leftwing politics today than Althusser. The struggle for hegemony is the bread and butter of any worthwhile activist group. From this perspective, the usual contrast between reform and revolution is entirely too abstract and idealist. We really don't know when a modest request for reform may effectively turn into a revolutionary demand. It's not up to us on the left to decide this; it's up to the ruling class.
September 19, 2008
I told my grandmother about the rain of atoms and she said, 'Go have fun in the rain, Kate.'
January 16, 2008
Read the chapter 'Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter' for a class. Foucault was a student of his and I think many do not realize Althusser is the structuralist starting point for what would become the post-structuralism of the post-modernists (Foucault, etc). This helped me understand my critiques of PM better and was worth reading for that. Overall though, his theory is horrible.
May 31, 2020
The two strongest and most interesting parts of this collection are 'Marx in His Limits' and 'The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter'. The first serves both as a polemic against the French Communist Party during Althusser's time, discussing a variety of notions and concepts that are intriguing in his classical style, that of ideology, the state as well as the contradictions in Marx's philosophy that are interesting to anyone who found Reading Capital intriguing. 'The Underground Current' meanwhile is his weighter theoretical contribution to the philosophy of materialism, and arguably, the tracing of a philosophy of Marxism (which Althusser suggests was something that was otherwise absent, both in the core Marx texts and something that has been distorted through dialectical materialism (by Engels, his immortal nemesis)) through the concept of a clinamen as defined by Epicurus and applied to an understanding of politics (and to an extent, fititng his concept of an epistemic break and rationalism seen in his earlier works). Both of these are meaty texts in their own rights and serious contributions to Althusserian thought (though the former is something I experienced with relatively naive eyes and I'm well aware that the concepts introduced might not be new to veterans) and despite their fragmented nature, are presented in a rhetoric so sustained and determined that it facilitates grounds for a rich inquiry that Althusser himself never got to explore.
All that being said however, readers looking for reflections on his illnesses and the horrific murder he had committed towards his wife will not find it here. The interviews come across as sadly lifeless and even though there is more than a hint of humility in his letters, the issue is still something that hangs over his head that I understand people would find either difficult to swallow or base as grounds to reject the reading of the text outright. In that way, it is a neutral text that wouldn't be recommended to those not already interested in his thought. Structurally it's the best attempt at compiling the last coherent thoughts of a controversial figure in his twilight years, but with a continuation of the content one would expect from him. In many ways that's both a recommendation and a recommendation against.
All that being said however, readers looking for reflections on his illnesses and the horrific murder he had committed towards his wife will not find it here. The interviews come across as sadly lifeless and even though there is more than a hint of humility in his letters, the issue is still something that hangs over his head that I understand people would find either difficult to swallow or base as grounds to reject the reading of the text outright. In that way, it is a neutral text that wouldn't be recommended to those not already interested in his thought. Structurally it's the best attempt at compiling the last coherent thoughts of a controversial figure in his twilight years, but with a continuation of the content one would expect from him. In many ways that's both a recommendation and a recommendation against.
December 7, 2024
This is the true Althusser. This is not the conclusion of a system. It is not a redaction of his previous works. It is not the ramblings of a broken mind. Rather, this is a compilation of essays that should be read similarly to Nietzsche's "Ecce Homo." I mean this in the sense that we must understand this text as an explicit statement of how Althusser wants his work to be read from the very start. The aleatory always lurks in the background of Althusser, and this text makes that explicit.
March 3, 2014
In a time when I am deeply engaged in thinking about the temporality of the event in the context of Gezi resistance, late Althusser, the Althusser of the materalism of the encounter provided me with a precious philosophical armory starting from Epicurus. It would be even more delightful to combine it with the Nietzchean "intempestive" and its implications in Deleuze's philosophy.
"The world may be called the accomplished fact in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End. But the accomplishment of the fact is just a pure effect of contingency, since it depends on the aletory encounter of the atoms due to the swerve of the clinamen. Before the accomplishment of the facti before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment of the fact, the non-world that is merely the unreal existence of atoms." p.170
"The world may be called the accomplished fact in which, once the fact has been accomplished, is established the reign of Reason, Meaning, Necessity and End. But the accomplishment of the fact is just a pure effect of contingency, since it depends on the aletory encounter of the atoms due to the swerve of the clinamen. Before the accomplishment of the facti before the world, there is only the non-accomplishment of the fact, the non-world that is merely the unreal existence of atoms." p.170
January 7, 2018
As with most Althusser: profoundly unfinished, profoundly unbalanced, and just plain profound. The theme of aleatory materialism is integral, and the interview/correspondence with Fernanda Navarro is a great demonstration of it. Of course, The Underground Current... leaves much to be desired (like an entire work), but that's wishful thinking-- at least from Althusser...
January 22, 2024
A un comunista francés del siglo XX se le ocurre criticar y ampliar el corpus marxista acudiendo a Epicuro y mezclando una metafísica atomística con filosofía política. El resultado es un texto interesantísimo que permite entender el raciocinio detrás de muchas políticas actuales, individualistas y carentes de cualquier noción de bien común. Su influencia en ellas es innegable.
May 24, 2020
Der marxistische Strukturalist Louis Althusser ermoderte seine Frau und kam dafür in die geschlossene Psychiatrie. Nach 2 Jahren kam er frei und begann weiter zu philosophieren. Collagehaft geschrieben versucht er einen Materialismus des Zufalls zu konstruieren. Postmoderner Unsinn. Das Werk eines Verrückten. Höchstwahrscheinlich glaubte er auch die Erwürgung seiner Frau war reiner Zufall.
March 3, 2024
No sólo el acontecimiento sino el encuentro es importante. Sin lo uno no hay lo otro
April 24, 2024
Not much of value here that has not already been spoken about by others--often in a much more clear and insightful light. Of what is original, it is terrible.
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