encountering althusser

ENCOUNTERING ALTHUSSER

Encountering AlthusserPolitics and Materialism in Contemporary Radical ThoughtEdited by

Katja Diefenbach Sara R. Farris Gal Kirn and Peter D. Thomas

LON DON N E W DE L H I N E W YO R K SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 175 Fifth Avenue 50 Bedford Square New York London NY 10010 WC1B 3DP USAUK www.bloomsbury.com www.janvaneyck.nl First published 2013 This publication was made possible by the generous support of the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht. Katja Diefenbach, Sara R. Farris, Gal Kirn, and Peter D. Thomas All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Encountering Althusser: politics and materialism in contemporary radical thought / edited by Katja Diefenbach ... [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-5213-8 (pbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-4636-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Althusser, Louis, 1918-1990--Political and social views. 2. Political science--Philosophy. I. Diefenbach, Katja. JC261.A45E63 2013 320.53--dc23 2012021316 ISBN: 978-1-4411-1915-5 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

ContentsNotes on Contributors viii Introduction: Encountering Althusser xiii

Part I Aleatory materialism and the philosophy of the encounter11 The hazards of aleatory materialism in the late philosophy of Louis Althusser

Andr Tosel 32 Rethinking aleatory materialism

Panagiotis Sotiris 273 An immense aspiration to being: the causality and temporality of the aleatory

Giorgos Fourtounis 434 History as permanent revocation of the accomplished fact:

Machiavelli in the last Althusser Vittorio Morfino 615 The parallax object of Althussers materialist philosophy

Katja Kolek 756 The very essence of the object, the soul of Marxism and other singular things:

Spinoza in Althusser 195967 G. M. Goshgarian 89

Part II Althussers non-contemporaries1137 Althusser, Machiavelli and us: between philosophy and politics

Mikko Lahtinen 115

viContents

8 Conjuncture, conflict, war: Machiavelli between Althusser and Foucault (19756)

Warren Montag 1279 Althussers last encounter: Gramsci

Peter D. Thomas 13710 Althusser and Spinoza: the enigma of the subject

Caroline Williams 15311 Althusser with Deleuze: how to think Spinozas immanent cause

Katja Diefenbach 16512 Althusser and Tronti: the primacy of politics versus the autonomy of the political

Sara R. Farris 185

Part III Thinking production and reproduction20513 Louis Althusser and the concept of economy

Ceren zseluk 20714 Althusser and the critique of political economy

Michele Cangiani 22515 The problem of reproduction: probing the lacunae of Althussers theoretical

investigations of ideology and ideological state apparatuses Frieder Otto Wolf 24716 To think the new in the absence of its conditions:

Althusser and Negri and the philosophy of primitive accumulation Jason Read 261

Part IV The materiality of ideology, the primacy of politics27317 The impossible break: ideology in movement between philosophy and politics

Isabelle Garo 275

Contents

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18 The theory of ideology and the theory of the unconscious

Pascale Gillot 28919 Ideological interpellation: identification and subjectivation

Rastko Moc nik 30720Es kmmt drauf an: notes on Althussers critique of the subject

Ozren Pupovac 32321 Between the tenth and eleventh theses on Feuerbach:

Althussers return to new materialism Gal Kirn 335Bibliography 352 Index of Works 368 Index of Names 370 Index of Concepts 374

Notes on ContributorsMichele Cangiani is Associate Professor, in the Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali, Universit Ca Foscari Venezia (Italy). He is a member of the Board of Directors, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy. Recent publications include: Freedom to plan: on Kapps institutional outlook, in Social Costs and Public Action in Modern Capitalism, ed. by W. Elsner, P . Frigato, P . Ramazzotti (Routledge 2006); From Menger to Polanyi: The Institutional Way, in Austrian Economics in Transition, ed. by H. Hagemann, Y. Ikeda, T. Nishizawa (Palgrave Macmillan 2010); Karl Polanyis Institutional Theory: Market Society and Its Disembedded Economy, Journal of Economic Issues, XLV, 1, 2011. Katja Diefenbach is Advising Researcher at the Theory Department, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, where she directs a research project on the notion of politics in post-Marxism. She has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts, Berlin, and the Faculty of Philosophy III, Humboldt University, Berlin. Her research interests are the relationship between Marxism and post-structuralism, in particular the readings of Spinoza in Althusser, Deleuze, Agamben and Negri. Recent publications include texts on post-structuralism and post-workerism in Inventionen, ed. by I. Lorey et al. (Diaphanes 2011), Becoming Major, Becoming Minor, ed. by V. Brito et al. (JVE 2011); Virtualitt und Kontrolle, ed. by H.J. Lenger et.al. (Textem 2010); Andersheit, Fremdheit, Exklusion, ed. by B. Heiter et.al. (Parados 2009). Sara R. Farris is Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Social Science in Princeton (201213) and an Associated Researcher at Kings College, London. She is a sociologist and political theorist. Her main interests include classical and contemporary social and political theory, migration studies, gender studies, intersectionality, critical discourse theory. She is the author of Politics Enchanted. Religion, Subjectivity and Nationalism in Max Weber (Brill 2013) and co-editor of La Straniera. Informazioni, sito-bibliografie e ragionamenti su razzismo e sessismo (Alegre 2009). She is the author of numerous articles on sociological and political theory, international migrations and gender studies. She is member of the Editorial Board of Critical Sociology and Corresponding Editor for Historical Materialism. Giorgos Fourtounis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University (Athens). One of his major research interests is French post-war philosophy, especially (post)structuralism and historical epistemology, particularly in the works of Althusser, Foucault and Canguilhem. He publishes regularly on these topics and is co-author (with A. Baltas) of Louis Althusser and the End of Classical Marxism: the Precarious Immortality of a Null Philosophy (Athens 1994, in Greek).

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Isabelle Garo is co-director of the Seminar Marx au XXIe sicle, lesprit et la lettre at the Sorbonne and co-editor of the journal Contretemps. She is the author of numerous articles and books on philosophy and Marxism, including Marx et linvention historique (Syllepse 2012); L idologie ou la pense embarque (La Fabrique 2009); Marx, une critique de la philosophie (Seuil 2000), and editor of Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, lecteurs de Marx: La politique dans la philosophie (Dmopolis 2011). Pascale Gillot is Member of the research team Institut dHistoire de la Pense Classique at the cole Normale Suprieure in Lyon. Her work concerns the relationship between early modern theories of mind and subjectivity, and contemporary approaches in the analytic philosophy of mind as well as in the French tradition. She is the author of L esprit. Figures classiques et contemporaines (CNRS Editions 2007) and Althusser et la psychanalyse (PUF 2009). She has co-edited, with Pierre Cassou-Nogus, Le concept, le sujet et la science (Vrin 2009). G. M. Goshgarian taught American literature and civilisation for 11 years at the University of Burgundy in Dijon before becoming a fulltime freelance translator from French, German and Armenian into English in 2000. He has translated three collections of Louis Althussers posthumous writings into English for Verso Books, including introductions. He is currently working towards the publication in English translation of a number of unpublished books and other texts by Althusser. Gal Kirn is currently Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. He completed his dissertation in philosophy at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Ljubljana), where he combines contemporary French philosophy (especially Louis Althusser) with the history of the emergence of revolutionary Yugoslavia and its tragic break-up. He is a co-editor of Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (JVE 2012); editor of Postfordism and its discontents (JVE, B-Books and Mirovni Intitut 2010) and co-editor of New Public Spaces. Dissensual political and artistic practices in the postYugoslav context (JVE and Moderna Galerija 2009). He comments on politics in the Slovenian weekly Objektiv. In his hometown Ljubljana he participates in the Workers-Punks University. Katja Kolek is Research Fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie, the Science and Research Centre of Koper (Primorska, Slovenia) and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies of the Faculty of Humanities (Primorska, Slovenia). Her research interests include theories of ideology, problems of contemporary philosophy of politics, dialectics and materialism, work of Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancire. Her current research focuses on the questions of Chinese dialectics and Alain Badious Maoism. She also translates modern and contemporary Chinese fiction into Slovenian. Recent publications include: Philosophy of the Late Althusser as the Science of the Void (Problemi 2007); Economy as the Ideological Superstructure of the Contemporary State: the Neoliberal Attack on Public School (Problemi 2010, in Slovenian); Democracy as the Philosophical Concept (Filozofski vestnik 2010, in Slovenian) and The Other of Democracy: Problems of Immanence and Otherness in Contemporary Theories Of Democracy (Koper 2011, in Slovenian).

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Mikko Lahtinen is a Senior Lecturer in political science in the University of Tampere (Finland). His research interests include the history of political philosophy, the history of ideas and theories of political action. His several publications on Althusser and on materialist politics include Politics and Philosophy. Niccol Machiavelli and Louis Althussers Aleatory Materialism (Brill 2009). He has also contributed Althusserian entries to the Historisch-kritisches Wrterbuch des Marxismus (Argument). Rastko Monik is Professor of Theory of Discourse and Epistemology of the Humanities in the Philosophy of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He has published extensively in the fields of literary theory, the critique of political economy, history of socialism, cultural theory and sociology. His major books include: Three Theories: ideology, nation, institution (Ljubljana: zaloba 1999, in Slovenian); Global Economy and Revolutionary Politics (Ljubljana: zaloba 2006, in Slovenian). He also contributed an article on Ideology and Fantasy to The Althusserian Legacy (Verso 1993). Warren Montag is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He has published widely on Marxism, contemporary French philosophy and the history of philosophy. He is the author of Louis Althusser (Palgrave 2002); Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and his Contemporaries (Verso 1999) and The Unthinkable Swift: the Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man (Verso 1994). He is co-editor of Masses, Classes and The Public Sphere (Verso 2001) and The New Spinoza (Minnesota Press 1997). He is the editor of Dcalages: An Althusser Studies Journal. Vittorio Morfino is a Senior Researcher in the History of Philosophy at the Universit di Milano-Bicocca. He is the author of Substantia sive Organismus (Guerini 1997), Sulla violenza. Una lettura di Hegel (Ibis 2000); Il tempo e loccasione. L incontro Spinoza Machiavelli (LED 2002); Incursioni spinoziste (Mimesis 2002) Il tempo della moltitudine (Manifestolibri 2005) and Spinoza e il non contemporaneo (Ombre corte 2009). He has edited Spinoza contra Leibniz (Unicopli 1994); La Spinoza Renaissance nella Germania di fine Settecento (Unicopli 2000); L abisso dellunica sostanza (Quodlibet 2009), as well as the Italian edition of the late writings of Louis Althusser (Mimesis 2000). He is an editor of Quaderni materialisti and of Dcalages. Ceren zseluk is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Boazii University, Istanbul. Her research intersects the fields of post-Althusserian thought, Marxian political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Rethinking Marxism. She has published and co-authored essays in edited book volumes and a number of academic journals in English and Turkish, such as Rethinking Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, Subjectivity and Toplum ve Bilim. She is currently finishing a book entitled, Economic Necessity, Political Contingency and the Limits of Post-Marxism (forthcoming in Routledge, New Political Economy Book Series). Ozren Pupovac is a philosopher and social theorist based in Berlin. He studied In Zagreb, Warsaw and London. He was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Friedrich Schiller Universitt in Jena. He has published on Marxist philosophy and the (post)-Yugoslav

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political context, and translated works of Badiou, Rancire and Althusser into Serbo-Croatian. His work focuses on contemporary French thought, German idealism, Marxism and the question of the subject. Since 2008, he runs, together with Bruno Besana, the Versus Laboratory research platform. Jason Read is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern Maine. He is the author of The Micro-Politics of Capital: Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (SUNY 2003) as well as numerous articles on Althusser, Negri, Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Relations of Production: Transindividuality between Economics and Politics for the Historical Materialism book series. Among his publications on Althusser are: The Althusser Effect: Philosophy, History, and Temporality (Borderlands 2005) and Primitive Accumulation: The Aleatory Foundation of Capitalism (Rethinking Marxism 2002). Panagiotis Sotiris is Adjunct Lecturer in Political and Social Philosophy in the Department of Sociology, University of the Aegean, in Mytilene. His research interests include Marxist philosophy, the work of Louis Althusser, post-Marxist theory, and the theory of imperialism. He is the author of Communism and Philosophy. The Theoretical Adventure of Louis Althusser (2004, in Greek). Peter D. Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. His research interests include Marxist theory and philosophy, the history of modern political thought and theories of the political. He is the author of The Gramscian Moment. Philosophy, Hegemony and Marxism (Brill 2009). He is also the translator of Antonio Negris Goodbye Mr Socialism, (Seven Stories Press 2008); (with Alberto Toscano) Alain Badiou and Slavoj ieks, Philosophy in the Present (Polity 2009) and (with Sara R. Farris) Mario Trontis The Autonomy of the Political (forthcoming 2013). He is a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism: research in critical Marxist theory. Andr Tosel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nice. His research interests include political philosophy, the history of Marxism and philosophies of globalisation. His publications include Marx et sa critique de la politique (Cesare Luporini and Etienne Balibar (Maspero 1979); Praxis: Vers une refondation en philosophie marxiste, (Editions Sociales 1984) and Le marxisme du 20e sicle (Syllepse 2009). Caroline Williams is Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary, University of London. She is author of Contemporary French Philosophy: Modernity and the Persistence of the Subject (Athlone Press 2001) as well as articles on Spinoza, Althusser, Lacan, Castoriadis, poststructuralism and subjectivity. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Spinoza and Political Critique: Thinking the Political in the Wake of Althusser. Frieder Otto Wolf is Professor for Philosophy at the Freie Universitt Berlin and a former member of the European Parliament. He is the translator and editor of the complete works of Louis Althusser in German. He is a co-Initiator of the German network Forum for a New Politics of Labour and currently president of the German Humanist Association (HVD). He is a member

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of Advisory Editorial Boards of Das Argument, Historical Materialism, Cosmopolitiques and cologie et Politique. His books include Die Neue Wissenschaft des Thomas Hobbes (Frommann-Holzboog 1969); Radikale Philosophie (Westflisches Dampfboot 2002) and (as co-author) Europes Green Alternative: A Manifesto For a New World (Black Rose Books 1992 and 1996).

Introduction: Encountering AlthusserA detour of theoryhe work of Louis Althusser and his associates in the 1960s and 1970s attempted to rethink the philosophical and political potential of Marxs thought. The publication in 1965 of For Marx and Reading Capital quickly took on the dimensions of a genuine event, both for Marxist theory and in the wider critical intellectual culture, not only in France, but internationally. On the one hand, those two volumes proposed a renewal of Marxism by means of its elaboration as a rigorous theoretical research programme in critical dialogue with, but possessing its own relative autonomy from, left-wing political practice and organisation; on the other hand, these interventions combatively declared the emergence of a current of Marxist theory with ambitions to measure itself against the most advanced theoretical developments that had occurred outside the Marxist tradition in the twentieth century, as a mode of immanent politicisation. This operation aimed to strengthen the materialist tendency within Marxism, detaching it from economistic and evolutionist deformations and all idealising figures of reconciliation. Althussers attempt to write a philosophy for Marx purified of onto-theological remainders began as a search for a non-Hegelian dialectic without guarantees, but soon led him to undertake a series of theoretical detours, passing by way of limit-readings of Marx with political philosophers of the eighteenth century (Montesquieu, Rousseau) and, subsequently, those belonging to what he would come to call a forgotten underground current of materialist thought (Epicurus, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, later supplemented with Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein and Deleuze). What emerged from this line of research was a differential and topological analysis of societies within the capitalist mode of production and a radically renewed theory of ideology, inspired in part by another long theoretical detour he continuously made throughout his intellectual life, via Lacans return to Freud. The style of thought and sometimes contradictory substantive theses that came to be known as Althusserianism rapidly developed into one of the most influential intellectual paradigms that defined the politico-theoretical conjuncture of pre- and post-1968. It gave rise to a wide variety of new initiatives in many disciplinary fields, on an international scale. Equally as significantly, the prominence of Althusserian themes and approaches stimulated a series of vigorous debates in which the main coordinates of the contemporary radical thought of those years were delineated. Yet the theoretical dimension of Althussers work was always directed toward political ends. Althussers attempt to reinvent Marxism as a sophisticated theoretical paradigm was never an end in itself. Rather, his detour of theory aimed to stimulate political renewal in the French

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and international communist movements in the long decade straddling 1968. His fidelity to the French Communist Party (PCF) and the model of party organisation as such was not without ambivalence. On the one hand, Althussers criticism of economistic, evolutionist and revisionist positions from within the PCF had the effect of convincing many young activists to stay within a party from which they may otherwise have departed. On the other hand, his interventions were also taken as providing support, albeit not without contradictions, for breaks with communist party orthodoxy, particularly by those attracted to Maoism. While remaining within the PCF , and keeping his distance from traditions to the left of it, Althusser issued increasingly stronger criticisms of his party from the 1960s onwards, until he sought open conflict in the late 1970s, claiming that the party leadership attributed to itself the ideological guarantee of a kind of Absolute Knowledge, even to the extent of reproducing in the Party itself, in the difference between its leaders and its militants, the structure of the bourgeois State.1 Changes in the political conjuncture in the 1980s coinciding with personal tragedy in Althussers own life, when he killed his wife Hlne Rytman in an act inexplicable to himself2 saw an increasing marginalisation of his work and the debates associated with them. Many of the themes explored in Althussers work, such as the critique of essentialism, humanism, teleology and philosophies of the subject, remained important reference points for philosophical discussions. However, the Althusserian initiatives distinctive articulation of theoretical practice with a specifically Marxist form of political engagement increasingly appeared to many to be unable to confront the new challenges of the crisis of Marxism (ironically, announced by Althusser himself), and a new politico-philosophical conjuncture marked by the rise of various post-socialisms and post-Marxisms. The moment of Althusser, it seemed, had definitively passed; as a transitional formation, the product of a very specific theoretical and political conjuncture whose mutation helps to explain its fate,3 Althussers thought was consigned to the past, a remnant, to which one could seemingly only return in a nostalgic way.

RenewalsRecent years, however, have witnessed a renewed interest in Althussers thought, as a younger generation of researchers interpret it in very different forms.4 In the first instance, this is due to the prominence of some of Althussers former students and those influenced by him in contemporary critical thought, such as Balibar, Rancire, Macherey, Badiou, iek, Laclau and Butler. The themes developed by these authors, also and perhaps even most significantly in their criticisms of and departures from classical Althusserian positions, have allowed hitherto neglected elements of the original Althusserian synthesis to become visible. Among the most significant of these themes, one could mention the problematic status of theoretical anti-humanism in a period of the return of the subject, notions of ideological subjection and interpellation, of over- and underdetermination and articulation, and the relationship between structure and conjuncture. These discussions have indicated the extent to which seemingly settled debates of the past still have the potential to engage critical energies in unforeseen and productive ways. Perhaps even more importantly, the posthumous publication of some of Althussers writings from different stages in his intellectual development, published in English under the

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titles of the Humanist Controversy and Other Writings and particularly the so-called late writings collected in the Philosophy of the Encounter,5 has encouraged an intense international discussion and debate of Althusserianisms old and new. The central topics of these debates have ranged from the reformulation of conflicting notions of materialism, of the encounter as both philosophical concept and political construction, of the nature of politics and the political, to the internal cleavages in Althussers thought itself. The late Althussers variously entitled materialism of the encounter or aleatory materialism can be regarded as a deepening of some of the most productive perspectives of the original Althusserian moment, particularly in the way it offers many points of contact for a dialogue with thinkers associated with contemporary radical thought in its different affiliations, ranging from post-structuralism to post-workerism, deconstruction, left-Heideggerianism, among many others. At the same time, Althussers formulation of these themes arguably maintains a stronger connection to the Marxist tradition than many recent post-Marxisms, particularly in terms of his continuing affirmation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the primacy of politics and the articulation of economics and politics in a theory of the social whole. Representing a novel philosophical position in its own right, the untimely arrival of the late Althussers thought has thus intersected with and strengthened a widespread revival of interest in the history of Marxism and its possible contemporary forms of inheritance.

Returning to AlthusserIn his later years, Althusser explored what he called an underground current in the philosophical tradition, the materialism of the encounter, attempting to free it from its historical repression. Concepts such as the encounter, the swerve and the take [prise] became for him a type of golden thread linking such diverse thinkers as Spinoza, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger and Derrida in their search of a materialism freed from necessity and teleology. Even more importantly, Althussers specific encounter with these authors and problematics enabled him to open up new and unexplored trajectories within his own work. The encounter with Althusser that we propose in this volume is motivated by a similar need: namely, the need to free the thought of Althusser from the repression to which it was subjected until recently, in the long decades of post-Marxisms and the pense unique. Yet given Althussers subterranean influence on so much of contemporary radical thought, this encounter today can only take place in the form of a return, understood in the specific sense in which his own work was conducted as a return to, or ongoing encounter with, Marx and Marxism. For Althusser, a return to a thinker and the way one reads an intellectual source is never innocent or obvious. With reference to Spinoza, Althusser ceaselessly emphasised that one can read neither a text nor the world in the transparency of their givenness; on the contrary, their internal dislocations reveal any immediate reading to be a religious myth, a yearning for a reading at sight.6 Consequently, at stake in any return is not simply the repetition of a theoretical formula or its application in such a way one would forever circulate in the fictive immediacy of an originary text, but rather, the reinvention of a philosophical and political wager. Thus, in his return to Marx, Althussers principal aim was to think Marx in his historical context, thereby enabling readers to put Marxism into effect in their own times.

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At the same time, by grasping the theoretical repetition of an author as his or her differentiation in short, by knowing that to do it again is to do it differently Althusser turned to one of the great theoretical problematics of French critical thought in the second half of the twentieth century: namely, the return to a tradition in order to undo it from within, intensifying its productive contradictions in the act of seeking to efface them. One need only think of Lacans return to Freud, in order to analyse repetition as return of enjoyment, as its surplus stepping over the limits of the pleasure principle and seeking an excess over life; Deleuzes return to Nietzsche, pinpointing the torsion immanent to repetition that makes nothing but difference recur; or Derridas return to Heideggers formula of being as ecstatic difference to itself, in order to understand the disseminating deferral of difference. Althussers texts on Marxs philosophy reverberate with similarly diverging formulas of a repeating reinvention. Both the originality and aporia of Althussers return to Marx can be partially traced back to a very peculiar combination of an epistemological with a deconstructive strategy of reading. While Bachelard presupposed that a new scientific approach occurs unreservedly, by destroying the entire metaphorical texture of errors characterising previous positions in a theoretical field, a deconstructive understanding of symptomal reading finds in the old problematic the trace of the new one. The tension generated by this double understanding of the potential of a symptomal study of an author made Althusser constantly repeat his return to Marx, until he finally encountered in him a finite and heterogeneous body of ideas that cannot be reduced to the purity of a theoretical rupture. Rather, it can only be comprehended in the complex construction of an unfinished concatenation of concepts, each opening a specific field of problematisation, each supplementing and differing from the other, across and within their breaks; in other words, in the ongoing encounter that is the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact of Marxism itself as an unfinished project.7

Encountering AlthusserThe most recent volumes of critical commentaries on Althusser in English date from the early to mid-1990s, prior to the widespread availability of the late Althussers texts in the Anglophone world in the last decade.8 This volume seeks to fill this significant gap. The texts collected in this volume originated in contributions to an international conference hosted by the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in October 2009. Additionally, a number of other authors were invited to contribute texts in order to compose a representative volume of contemporary Althusserian scholarship in different fields, in an international (admittedly, largely European) perspective. The division of the texts in four different sections aims to provide a survey of a significant dimension of Althussers thought, while also representing an intervention into the existing forms of discussion of the Althusserian legacy.

Aleatory materialism and the philosophy of the encounterThe late Althussers proposal of the philosophy of the encounter or an aleatory materialism has constituted one of the most fertile fields of investigation in Althusserian scholarship in recent years, giving rise to divergent and sometimes opposed readings regarding supposed continuities


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and discontinuities in the development of Althussers thought. Following the publication in French of Althussers late writings in the 1990s, one interpretative current attempted to argue for a break or even Kehre in Althussers thinking, which abandoned the theoretical structure of For Marx and Reading Capital. More recently, another interpretation has emphasised continuities and attempted to demonstrate an on-going break in Althussers thought, within and against itself, in an act of self-critical redefinition. Many of the texts in this section subject these readings to philological scrutiny, seeking to delineate the internal coherence of the late Althussers incomplete texts, comparing them to his earlier positions, and identifying productive research fields that emerge from these encounters. Their unifying concern is to measure the extent to which aleatory materialism or the philosophy of the encounter can be interpreted and proposed as an intervention into the Kampfplatz of contemporary radical thought. Andr Tosels chapter considers the strengths and limitations of aleatory materialism. On the one hand, for Tosel the late Althusser successfully criticised the logocentric presuppositions of conventional materialisms. On the other hand, Tosel questions whether the new concept enabled Althusser to think the contingent relationship between ideology and class struggle and whether his heterodox genealogy of materialism ultimately ends up imitating traditional forms of philosophy. In a similar way, Panagiotis Sotiriss text focuses on aleatory materialism both in terms of its points of originality as well as in its contradictions. While Sotiris notes continuities with Althussers earlier texts, for instance, in the insistence on non-historicism and on the need for a transformation of philosophical practice, he ultimately argues that the late writingss emphasis upon the importance of contingent encounters is a source of contradictions. The texts by Giorgos Fourtounis and Vittorio Morfino, on the other hand, offer examinations of the importance of Machiavelli for Althussers definition of aleatory materialism. While Fortounis reads the Florentine Secretarys influence on Althusser through the lenses of the homology between the notions of aleatory encounter and that of an absolute beginning (both understood as notions of the radical emergence of a structured singularity or aleatory structuralism), Morfino reads Althussers Machiavelli through Darwin. For Morfino, it is the latter author who enables us to pose in a correct way the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over the form and to refute Schmittian interpretations of the role played by Machiavelli in the late Althussers aleatory materialism. The last two chapters of this section address the question of the thesis of the discontinuity, or even rupture, between the early and the later Althusser. Katja Koleks text argues that the relation between the epistemology of Althussers earlier materialist philosophy and the supposed ontology of his later period consists in the void as the object of the parallax view, between overdetermination and aleatoriness. Finally, G. M. Goshgarian demonstrates the continuity between early and late Althusser by showing how Althussers theory of the encounter, in which Spinozas Ethics in particular played a pivotal role, is prefigured in work from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. Albeit distinct from the materialism of the encounter he elaborated from 1972 onwards, Goshgarians notion of an early late Althusser sets out to indicate the existence of similar problematics throughout the period between 1959 and 1967 .

Althussers non-contemporariesAlthussers theoretical production, in all of its phases, was marked by a series of encounters with significant others, from both within and outside the Marxist tradition. Simultaneously his

xviiiIntroduction: Encountering Althusser

contemporaries and non-contemporaries, not simply in the sense of chronological proximity or distance but also in the sense of uniting and dividing concerns, Althussers distinctive readings of these authors helped to define his own project to a much greater extent, and included a much wider range of authors, than is commonly recognised in existing critical commentary. Furthermore, particularly in Althussers late writings, we can retrospectively discern subterranean currents of influence of which even and especially Althusser was unaware, overdetermining his texts and opening them up to their productive incompletion. The contributions to this section of the volume trace the extraordinary conflictual richness of Althussers practice of reading Marx by means of and through his non-contemporaries, who were at the same time Althussers own unheimlich interlocutors. Mikko Lahtinens chapter introduces Machiavelli as an author occupying a solitary key position in Althussers philosophical topology. As the first theoretician of the political conjuncture, Machiavelli is important for Althusser due to his analysis of the conflictual relations of forces that compose a conjuncture and the occasions it discloses for intervention. However, in comparison with Gramsci, Lahtinen argues, Althusser evades any concrete analyses regarding the political relationship of intellectuals and masses and the question of organisation. Similar themes are explored in Warren Montags chapter, which approaches Althussers Machiavelli through one of his encounters with Foucault, the marks of which are only legible in the margins of both authors texts. Machiavelli, Montag claims, allowed Althusser to return to the problem of multiple temporalities posed in Reading Capital, in order to emphasise the production of the new over that of reproduction. Montag not only highlights the Althusserian resonances of Foucaults Machiavelli, but also discerns a tension in Foucault, oscillating between the idea that the prince is an impersonal integration of a conflictual field of forces and the figure of the princes reintegration into a paradigm of sovereignty. Peter D. Thomas continues this effort to complexify Althussers reading of different authors by revisiting his encounter with Gramsci. Thomas deconstructs Althussers early criticism of Gramsci, claiming that rather than the Hegelianising model of the social totality attributed to him by Althusser, Gramsci instead presupposes the non-contemporaneity of the present and an anti-essentialist theory of translatability of politics, philosophy and history a position to which the late Althusser seemingly comes close, in the interval of a distance taken, in his considerations of a non-philosophy to come. In their respective chapters, Caroline Williams and Katja Diefenbach discuss the enduring presence of Spinoza throughout Althussers work. Mapping the internal cleavages in Althussers reading of Spinoza, Williams specifies the different usages made of his thought, in order to tackle epistemological, topological and ideological problematics. By highlighting the difference that Althusser introduces between the subject (subjected through interpellation) and the subject of the unconscious (subverting the first position), Williams emphasises in Althusser the concept of a subjectivity without a subject, which Alain Badiou has characterised as Althussers intra-philosophical mark of politics. Diefenbach, in a different perspective, refers to Deleuze in order to problematise the residual Hegelianism and instabilities in the idea of immanent causality in the early and late Althusser. Focussing on the category of intensive infinity in Deleuze, Diefenbach questions the extent to which traces of Lacans causality of the impossible and the Heideggerian influences in the meta-ontological concept of the encounter developed by the late Althusser can be reconciled with Spinozas idea of positive determination and dissimilar expression.


xix

Finally, Sara R. Farris provides a comparative analysis of Tronti and Althussers reflections on the state in the 1970s. In their proximity both declared the crisis of Marxism and the insufficiency of Marxs theory of politics and state, criticised determinism and economism, and found Lenins reflections on the nature of the state to be superior to Marxs Farris detects a major cleavage. While Tronti affirmed state mediation as the only possible level of political confrontation, Althusser asserted in the late 1970s the primary role of the masses for a politics aiming to disable the state machinery.

Thinking production and reproductionOne of the central aims of Reading Capital was to contribute to the revival of a philosophically informed Marxist critique of political economy. At the same time, chapters in that book and many of the essays collected in For Marx explored themes related to different forms of political struggle and, in particular, the tradition of ideology theory. Classical Althusserianism was constituted by a productive tension between these dimensions of production and reproduction, without ever being able to offer a wholly satisfactory answer regarding the conditions of their relationship or, even more crucially, their transformation. The texts in this section of the collection draw upon both classical Althusserianism and the late Althusser in order to think production and reproduction at the same time, in their distinction and unity, as integral elements of the capitalist mode of production. In particular, they aim to explore the resources that Althusser provides for reunifying perspectives from the critique of political economy and the critique of politics that are often divided in much contemporary postMarxist thought. This section of the collection thus explores the extent to which Althussers renovation of a Marxist critique of political economy has the capacity to interact productively with contemporary themes such as political anthropology, necessity versus contingency, class constitution and primitive accumulation. The section opens with an analysis by Ceren zseluk focusing on Althussers treatment of the concept of economy, which is scrutinised both in terms of the role Althusser ascribed to it in the development of Marxs critique of political economy and in terms of the tensions that the concept itself creates within Althussers own work. Still remaining within the horizon opened by Reading Capital, Michele Cangianis text analyses Althussers problematic approach to the structure of the first volume of Capital in its productive frictions, that is, as a fruitful misinterpretation which allows a deeper understanding of the Marxian problematic. Moving to Althussers texts of the late 1960s and 1970s, Frieder Otto Wolf highlights the problem of reproduction, emphasising in particular the anti-functionalist dimensions of Althussers conjugation of the problem of the reproduction of the relations of production and the critique of domination. Finally, Jason Reads chapter considers Althussers aleatory materialist phase through the lenses of the category of primitive accumulation. Placing his thought at the crossroad of traditions which include Deleuze, Badiou and Negri, Read attempts to re-read primitive accumulation not just through an engagement with Marx, but with and against the dominant and underground currents within the history of philosophy.

xxIntroduction: Encountering Althusser

The materiality of ideology, the primacy of politicsAlthussers work in the 1960s opened the way towards an exploration of the materiality of ideology, particularly in texts such as Marxism and Humanism and the famous Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses essay. Positing ideology in terms irreducible to the consciousness of a subject or a class, Althusser provided elements for theory of the subject as a material effect of ideology, centred on the concept of interpellation. However, this line of research on ideology was linked to the problem of thinking the state and its abolition in terms of the primacy of politics as a transformative instance that immanently ruptures the relations of production and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Subsequently some of the debates, criticisms and attempted inheritances of Althussers thought have tended to assume a binary opposition in terms of thinking about Althussers conceptualisation of the relationship between ideology and politics. The texts in the last section aim to reunite the theorisation of ideology and politics in Althussers thought, even and especially in its most problematic dimensions. The first text of Isabelle Garo provides a critical synthesis of recent discussions and a general theoretical introduction to Althussers continual movement between ideology and politics. Pascale Gillot focuses on the question of ideological interpellation by means of a close reading and encounter with Spinoza and Lacan, arguing for a specific understanding of Althussers concept of the subject. Rastko Monik, on the other hand, attempts to supplement Althussers work with concepts drawn from discourse-analysis that were absent or under-theorized in his theory of ideology. He also attempts to answer the question regarding the possibility of a theory of interpellation outside psychoanalysis and its potential articulation with a theory of politics. The last two chapters focus on Althussers oscillating conceptions of philosophy and its relations to science and politics. Ozren Pupovacs chapter revisits Althussers critique of the subject, stressing the importance of the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach, whereas Gal Kirn attempts to defend a reading that moves between the tenth and eleventh theses, in the perspective of the project of a new materialism. Taken together, these contributions emphasise the extent to which Althussers famous theses on ideology can only be adequately comprehended in a perspective that foregrounds question of the political constitution of the social formation and class struggle.

Between return and encounterTaken in its totality, this collection presents novel perspectives on the potentials, limits and contradictions of Althussers thought, in its various phases. Combining philological studies of recently published texts with re-examinations of classical theses, alongside engagement with the key themes of broader contemporary philosophical and political debates, this volume aims to contribute to the growing recognition that Althussers work represents not merely one of the most important historical sources of contemporary radical thought, but also one of its unresolved challenges. Ultimately, returning to Althusser today does not mean to repeat his return to Marx or other thinkers, but to understand how such a strategy of a return to the past can function as a theoretical laboratory for encountering the forms of a possible intervention in the present.


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Notes1 Marxism Today (Althusser 1990a), p. 278. See also What Must Change in the Party, (Althusser 1978b). 2 See the autobiography The Future lasts a Long Time and The Facts (Althusser 1993d) for Althusser's attempt to give an account of his act. 3 Elliott, 1992, p. 34. Elliott further argued that Althussers work, occupied a unique and precarious place in modern intellectual history between a tradition of Marxism, which he radically criticized and sought to reconstruct, and a post-Marxism , which has submerged its predecessor, and in which the class of 68 has found its self-image (pp. 334). 4 Monographs dedicated to parts or the entirety of Althussers thought that have been published in recent years include Warren Montag's Althusser (Palgrave Macmillan 2002); Luke Ferretters Louis Althusser (Routledge 2005); a new edition of Gregory Elliotts now classic study Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Brill/Haymarket, 2007) and Mikko Lahtinens Politics and Philosophy: Niccol Machiavelli and Louis Althussers Aleatory Materialism (Brill 2009). The first issue of the international Althusser studies Journal Dcalages, under the editorship of Warren Montag, was published in 2012. 5 Both published at Verso (2003 and 2006, respectively). 6 Althusser and Balibar 1970, p. 16. 7 Althusser 2006a, p. 174. 8 The three most recent collected volumes in English date from 1993 (The Althusserian Legacy, edited by Ann Kaplan and Michael Sprinker), 1994 (Althusser: A Critical Reader, edited by Gregory Elliott) and 1995 (Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, edited by Antonio Callari and David Ruccio), though the journal Borderlands dedicated an entire issue to the late Althussers thought in 2005, edited by David McInerney. In France, shortly after Althussers death, Sylvain Lazarus edited Politique et philosophie dans loeuvre de Louis Althusser (PUF: Paris 1993). Sartre, Lukcs, Althusser. Des marxistes en philosophie, edited by Kouvelakis and Charbonnier (Paris: PUF 2005) is partly dedicated to Althusser. Jean-Claude Bourdin has more recently edited the collection Althusser: une lecture de Marx (Paris: PUF 2008). In Italy, papers from the international Althusser studies conference in Venice in 2006 were published in two volumes, in Rileggere il Capitale (2007) and La lezione di Louis Althusser (2009), both edited by Maria Turchetto.

Part One

Aleatory materialism and the philosophy of the encounter

1The hazards of aleatory materialism in the late philosophy of Louis Althusser1Andr Tosel

... [T]he philosophy of the encounter whose existence, cause and fecundity I will be pleading has nothing at all speculative about it. It is, rather, the key to what we have read of Marx and, as it were, understood of what is thrust upon us: this world, torn between powers in collusion and the crisis which unites them in its circle, diabolical because it is almost entirely unknown ... This detour via theory ... is there only to enable us to understand politics, that politics in which we are engaged, that politics in which we are lost and without bearings.2

Towards a philosophical reading of the late Althusserouis Althusser (191890) is in danger of fading into posterity because of the tragedy which, on 16 November 1980, made of him the murderer of his wife. The figure cut by this philosopher who renewed Marxist thought in France, and who enjoyed international influence from 1964 to 1978, is now threatened with erasure. The part played in his thought by the psychiatric troubles from which he suffered and from which he sought to cure himself is a legitimate object of study. We are not qualified to pursue this path, but we appreciate the unbearable character of the figure of the criminal philosopher. We choose to retain the image of a liberal and attentive master. We wish especially to interrogate the philosophers late thought, that which was sketched out in the 1970s, and which was given public expression in the 1978 text Solitude de Machiavel [Machiavellis Solitude] itself a summary of previous seminars given at the cole normale suprieure. It is encapsulated in the sibylline formula materialism of the encounter, or aleatory materialism. Its explication can be traced throughout the manuscripts devoted to an autobiography which was intended as a defence of philosophy had he not been

L

4

Encountering Althusser

deemed insane at the moment of the murderous event. The editors of Louis Althussers unpublished works have now published his 1992 autobiography, The Future Lasts Forever;3 they have also collected, in the first tome of crits philosophiques et politiques,4 the theoretical texts composed in 1982 under the title The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter.5 It so happens that Althusser himself used the themes of certain of these texts as material for an interview with the Mexican academic, Fernanda Navarro (published in Spanish in 1985). This interview, his last public text, was published posthumously in French in the collection Sur la philosophie.6 He himself presents, in these few lines, the essential argument: ... instead of thinking contingency as a modality of necessity, or an exception to it, we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies. My intention, here, is to insist on the existence of a materialist tradition that has not been recognized by the history of philosophy. That of Democritus, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau (the Rousseau of the second Discourse), Marx and Heidegger, together with the categories that they defended: the void, the limit, the margin, the absence of a centre, the displacement of the centre to the margin (and vice versa), and freedom. A materialism of the encounter, of contingency in sum, of the aleatory, which is opposed even to the materialisms that have been recognized as such, including that commonly attributed to Marx, Engels and Lenin, which, like every other materialism of the rationalist tradition, is a materialism of necessity and teleology, that is, a disguised form of idealism. It is clearly because it represented a danger that the philosophical tradition has interpreted it and deflected it towards an idealism of freedom ...7

Against the rationalist tradition of materialism. Elements of a geneaologyA surprising genealogyAlthusserian research initially presents itself as the genealogy of the underground current, or, rather, as the revelation of discontinuous moments in this karstic river along with the revelation of philosophical theses which are held to be pertinent, and all this without the least historical analysis of this discontinuity or of its causes. The unpublished version of the text does not always coincide with the elements retained for the interview, Philosophy and Marxism, since this eliminates Spinoza from the presentation of the whole. The current of this materialism thus includes Democritus, Epicurus (and therefore Lucretius), Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, the Rousseau of the second Discourse, Marx, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida. Let us examine the significant characteristics.

EpicurusHe is in many ways the eponymous hero. He offers the basic model which is indissolubly physical and ontological. Epicurus is the first philosopher whom Marx studied in his doctoral thesis, and whose originality he stresses as lying in the process of decomposition of Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics through the development of a theory of the clinamen of atoms, a

The hazards of aleatory materialism

5

theory he singles out as an anticipation of free subjectivity. Althusser does not evoke this Marx. It is the contingency of things which interests him. At the beginning of Epicurean philosophy: rain. The rain of atoms falling through the void, propelled by their own weight. Yet almost instantaneously we do not know precisely when or where an infinitesimal deviation occurs from the predicted trajectory: an atom, instead of continuing to fall indefinitely in its series, in parallel with other series, collides [choque] with another atom, which then collides with others. It produces a pile-up which follows an immanent order of exponential reproduction. The physical properties of atoms (size, speed, weight) are of less import than that which enables their reciprocal collisions, that of linking themselves together, attaching themselves to each other to form provisional aggregates. Thus is born a world which is neither necessary nor the only possible one, which is not the result of an intention, nor of an end, nor of any other reason, but the causal-contingent fact of being there; and yet it can be enlarged to other atoms which encounter it and which it links to itself. It is only thus that this relatively stabilised world can develop its own laws (of a physico-materialist kind). An infinity of worlds of this kind is born: none of them is assured it will last, each of them can disaggregate and die as it is born by chance, a mere case. No logos, no pronoia, nothing guarantees the eternity of such a singular world. It can undergo accidit ruptures of linkages, as delinked atoms return to their parallel trajectories in the void. Only the atoms and the void are eternal; worlds are born and die continuously. Worlds are transitory. Thus we have the nucleus of the model which will constitute the materialism of the aleatory encounter: subjectless, without end(s), and which succeeds the homonymous process. As Jean-Claude Bourdin remarks, in a suggestive study,8 Epicurus is decisive in that he enables the conjunction of a critique of the principle of reason, dear to the whole rationalist tradition, with a rational explanation. A mode is always a given organisation, a singular combination of atoms. Only this organisation, its singular form, distinguishes one world from another world. It is possible to render intelligible the laws that define it, laws proper to it, and which are therefore singular and transitory. But no reason, no meaning,9 no principle presides over, commands, or desires prior to the alogical fact of the clinamen the possibility of such a world. Before this determinate world, with its meanings, its reasons, its principles, its determinate laws, there is nothing; there is a nothingness of meaning, of reason, of principle. There is the void, there is no world, because the rain of parallel series of atoms in the void does not constitute a world. It does not confer the meaning of a world on the atoms whose existence is merely virtual. It is the deviation that makes a world [fait monde] and that gives the atoms the minimal necessary movement for a world to take, for meaning to be produced, for it to make itself mean [pour quil se fasse (du) sens]. Only the encounter is cosmo-genetic and productive of meaning, of reasons, and this meaning and these reasons are determinate they have no universal and eternal meaning: they are the meanings and reasons of this world alone. They are all the meaning and all the reasons of this world. The existence of the rain of atoms in the void is the ontological nothingness, the nothingness of world [le nant de monde]. This nothingness is not the paradoxical negative matter from which the Judaeo-Christian God draws out the world to create it ex nihilo. It is the condition of possibility for the world as such and it is subtracted from the action of a principle of creation which combines intelligence and volition, cause and reason of the highest. Nothingness remains a condition through the assumption of world [la prise de monde]. Deviation unjustifiable, without reason, without law is itself an evanescent, unpredictable, impredicable limit; it is itself the aleatory, and if we accord it

6


the status of a principle, it is a principle which erases itself, denies itself, a principle beyond principles, a principle without arch, an anarchic principle, a non-principle. This reading radically devalues all materialisms to come including the diverse forms of Marxist materialism: the dialectical materialism of Engels or Lenin, Gramscis materialism of praxis, or (the last) Lukcs materialism of social being. It criticises them as so many metaphysical rationalisms obsessed with the question of meaning and reason. Aleatory materialism uncouples the materialist enunciation from the principle of reason with which it is traditionally associated and which is manifested by an unstable mixture of necessity and finality as attributes of the process of the real. There, where the materialist tradition declares that nothing is born of nothing and that nothing is without determining, if not inclining, reason, the Epicurean materialism of the encounter affirms that nothing justifies the fact of the world. This nothing is a neutral space, void of worldness, void of principle and of reason, of meaning and of law. The thematic that connects an origin, a subject and an end is discredited; it is this thematic that defines the idea. Thus, the question of knowing which is primary thought or being, matter or spirit is the primordial (ursprngliche) philosophical question according to Engels (in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy), according to Lenin (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism), and according to Louis Althusser himself in the 1970s; but this question now loses all pertinence because of its rationalist a priori that of primordiality or originarity. From now on, no first or last instance reason can be invoked. Materialism remains the mirror image of idealism; it is a reversed idealism. Idealism and materialism (including the Marxist variant) result from the rationalist economy of the same hypothetical Grundfrage to which they intend to offer opposed responses. It is the question that must be abandoned.10

MachiavelliHis presence is no surprise, we know. Althusser, indeed, accords him a decisive importance in that Machiavelli is the first to give aleatory materialism its political dimension and it is his own conceptuality that seems to have led Althusser recurrently to seek in Epicurus a pure philosophical equivalent. The problem of Machiavelli is that of the foundation of a new political world, a popular and national Italian state (to take up here the Gramscian reading). This creation is to be effected with those atoms known as Italian populations assembled in infra-state political unities, under the domination of foreign armies. These populations fall through the void of sixteenthcentury Italy, and yet they all aspire to unity. The problem is how to produce the deviation that will be constituted by the intervention [survenance] of a man endowed with political virt, capable of ensuring the encounter of these separate conditions (the plurality of political forms, the aspiration towards national unity). Everything hangs on the existence of the Prince, that nameless man who does not pre-exist his own action, who is confronted with the task of using fortune, the unpredictable contingency of an indifferent temporality, in order somewhere in Italy, at some atomic point, to join together the Italians around some grand project. A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place.11 The Machiavellian version of the aleatory model is unique in that the encounter of elements increases [dmultiplie], splits up into several levels. It is a system of encounters commanding one another. Indeed, as Federico Dinucci explains in his substantial work,12 with the encounter of Prince and place is combined the encounter through the Princes action of fortune and virt, this latter being the encounter of a human element (the capacity to produce and to respect laws) with an animal element, which is itself already doubled (the lions force and the


7

foxs cunning). The totality is overdetermined by a final encounter, that between the regional level, the national level and the international level. No law of historical necessity governs each of these levels; it is rather chance, hazards, an always precarious possibility that the encounters may or may not occur, may or may not endure. This model implies a dissociation between elements and subjects. Each subject is de facto constituted at a given level, with the possibility of linking itself to other subjects, and can be considered as the result of a link which, at a subjacent level, has already occurred. The aggregatory point of the new Prince induces shifts in the subject function. The model also has repercussions for the determination of historical causality: we do not reason according to the necessity proper to the logic of the fact considered as accomplished and according to its laws of synchronic constitution (the spirit of the laws dear to Montesquieu, Louis Althussers other author), but according to the contingency of the fact to be accomplished.13 Laws are constructed, so to speak, under the jurisdiction of the fulfilled. There is no law of the act of fulfilment which is identical to its fulfilled fact [ son fait mme]. No law of this kind organises the process which must be fulfilled in a conjuncture, the latter opening its always impossible possibility. Fulfilment arises from the effectivity of a practice-under-way which nothing predetermines or guarantees. The laws of fulfilment are immanent to the process which is realising itself and can only ever be thought ex post, from the point of view of the accomplished or non-accomplished act. They are not travel itineraries.

SpinozaHe is analysed in the 1982 text. The hypothetical and unfinished character of the account perhaps explains why this analysis would disappear in 1987 . Althusser gives an unexpected reading (perhaps inspired by certain developments in the work of Alain Badiou) based on a central thesis: the object of Spinozist philosophy God-Nature is identified with the void. Essentially, Spinoza would go back over the whole of Western philosophy in order to make the void his central philosopheme, God. To begin with God, who is the unique substance of all modes under all of their attributes, is effectively to say that one begins with nothing. The all-principle is translated into the nothing-principle, into nothing principal [en rien de principe]. The all is none of its determinations; they fall within it into a plenitude which is that of the void. From this borderline neo-Platonic thesis follows a reinterpretation of the infinity of attributes which fall like rain, parallel to one another without ever meeting. But it just so happens that in man there occurs it is a fact that one can but state an encounter without interaction, without dualism, of the two attributes which constitute him: extension and thought. Man is indeed the . . [an] assignable but minute parallelism of thought and case of an exceptional parallelism . the body ... In sum, a parallelism without encounter, yet a parallelism that is already, in itself, encounter thanks to the very structure of the relationship between the different elements of each attribute.14 A final consequence: if there is nothing to say of God, who is but nature, then there is also nothing to say of knowledge. It is a fact, homo cogitat; and thought is simply the succession of the modes of the attribute thought, which refers us, not to a Subject, but, as good parallelism requires, to the succession of the modes of the attribute extension.15 What is important is the de facto constitution of thought in man. The majority of men and of peoples, and therefore history and politics, remain at the level of the first kind of knowledge, that is, the imaginary, the illusion of thinking without actually thinking, as Machiavelli well understood.

8


Yet the imagination is not so much a kind of knowledge, a faculty, as the only world itself in its givenness.16 The imaginary as world is a unique totality that is not totalized, but experienced in its dispersion, and experienced as the given into which we are thrown and on the basis of which we forge all our illusions [fabricae].17 Thus we can return to the second kind of knowledge. If this world is that-beyond-which-there-is-nothing, this nothing is that of nature and its attributes, of which philosophy alone can know, by common notions, those of which man is the case: that is, the world itself thought according to common notions. Which is as much as to say that by its ontological condition the world remains given before them [the common notions, Tr.], as that prior to which there is nothing.18 Knowledge of the third kind is nothing other than knowledge of historical singularities, of their history and of their necessary imaginary structuration (as in those studied by the Theological-political Treatise, the history of a Hebrew people under Moses), philosophy contenting itself with deconstructing the values of morality and of religion as ends in themselves. If, by its work of deconstruction, philosophy enables the emergence and construction of other possibilities of worlds, these latter will be equally and differently as imaginary, and other encounters will ensue. Spinoza thus realises a complex model of aleatory materialism, constructed from the double encounter of the more theoretical Epicurean model and the political Machiavellian model; he then unifies these models in his conception of knowledge as simple fact there where the appropriation of the given world differentiates itself [se diffrencie].

HobbesContrary to the order of historical succession, Althusser presents Hobbes after Spinoza so as to effect a transition from Spinoza to Rousseau. This choice is a paradoxical one. In his classes devoted to modern natural law at the cole normale suprieure, Althusser criticised as the original form of bourgeois juridical ideology that whole current of thought which projects onto the state of nature a foundational anthropology and this in a time of revolutionary upheaval the better to assure its ideological and political objectives: the realisation of a legally constituted state [tat de droit] endowed with an absolute power, enabling the free activity of its subjects, understood as economic agents. Althusser attempts to make up for the unjust readings of Hobbes by recognising that he was able to think the radicalism of a genesis of power starting from the encounter of desiring and calculating atoms driving the void before them [faisant le vide devant eux], but forced to cede to the necessity of authorising this sovereign power in order to prevent their self-destruction. As it stands, this development would be contradictory if it were to rehabilitate the transcendental contractualism alien to Machiavelli and the Spinoza of the Political Treatise (inspired by Machiavelli). In any case, it remains incomplete, since Hobbess absolute state is presented in its capacity to produce peace and the free development of individual activities, that is, to absorb itself in this task whilst rendering useless the demonstration of its power of constraint. In this sense, it could even be defined as a presupposition of the Marxist theory of the withering away of the state. This, indeed, leads one to rethink beyond the preceding critique of natural law the relation between liberal anarchism and Marxist anarchism.

RousseauThe Rousseau of the Discourse on Inequality leads us back to those same classes on modern natural law of 19634 and to the texts published in the Cahiers pour lanalyse on the Social


9

Contract. It is the distinction between the state of pure nature and the state of nature that enables him to move beyond Hobbes and to present the materialism of the encounter thought not through a physical ontology, nor a politics, nor a political ontology, but through a theory of history. In the state of pure nature, men roam in the void of the forest without encountering one another until the clinamen constituted by a climactic and geological modification forces them to associate with one another and, after several discontinuous attempts, to engender a social world, resulting in a heretofore unsuspected perfectibility, the pure expectation of a becoming that might not have been [un devenir qui aurait pu ne pas advenir]. The nothingness of society is thus the condition for all society. And the movement of society is not a teleology ruled by the necessity of its end. History is made behind mens backs, without their conscious cooperation, as a function of the contingent change in conjunctures as proved by the leap from the youthful state of the world to the state of society, founded on private property, the division of labour and the dialectic of inequalities which henceforth becomes necessary right up to a state of war and the first contract, the dupes contract by which the rich promise juridical protection (which is nothing but domination) to the poor, who exchange their voluntary servitude in return for an illusory peace. Rousseau makes of history a process without a subject, one whose rhythms are set by the transformations issuing from aleatory encounters where socialised human nature is constructed within determinate conjunctures. The profundity of Rousseaus theory of history effects in advance a critique of teleological and necessitarist [ncessitariste] philosophies of history obsessed with their end in the revolution (French or otherwise). It consists in the fact that Rousseau thinks the contingency of necessity as an effect of the necessity of contingency.19 The historical materialism of the encounter proper to Rousseau is superior to that of Marx, who was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution.20

The Heidegger constellationFor now, let us skip the moment of Marx, who belongs to this history only on account of his suffering its lessons and providing its radical reformulation. The final moment of this discontinuous genealogy is Heidegger, or rather what we prefer to call the Heidegger constellation, inasmuch as the Heidegger who interests Althusser is not so much the thinker of the forgetting of Being and of the inspection of being by technique, as the Heidegger interpreted by Derrida, accomplishing the critique of western metaphysics initiated by Nietzsche, and continued in a rather cavalier manner by Deleuze and Wittgenstein. It would be vain to ask of these pages a rigour to which they do not aspire. It is more a matter of translating, to give it a solid base, the common foundation shared by all these philosophers: namely, a critique of the rationalism of the entire philosophical tradition and of its principle of reason. From this perspective, the 1985 interview is more explicit. Heidegger is presented as he who makes the end of the history of western philosophy correspond with its beginning: Epicurus. The latter inaugurates aleatory materialism; Heidegger gives an ultimate version of it. The repetition of Epicuruss gesture to refuse the question of the origin and of the end is realised in the perspective of a deconstruction of philosophy as dominated by idealism, non-aleatory materialisms included. It is effected in full consciousness of what is at stake: the calling into question of the principle of reason. Althussers reference to Leibniz seems to suggest that he had read the essay of Heidegger devoted to the principle of reason. Heidegger would say that idealism, just like materialism, obeys the principle of reason , that is, the principle according

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to which everything that exists, whether ideal [idel] or material, is subject to the question of the reason for its existence.21 Idealism is haunted by a single question which divides into two, since the principle of reason bears not only on the origin, but also on the end: indeed, the Origin always, and very naturally, refers to the End. We can go further still: the question of the Origin is a question that arises on the basis of the question of the End. Anticipating itself, the End (the meaning of the world, the meaning of its history, the ultimate purpose of the world and history) projects itself back on to and into the question of the Origin. The question of the Origin of anything whatsoever is always posed as a function of what one imagines to be its end. The question of the radical origin of things (Leibniz) is always posed as a function of what one imagines to be their final destination, their End, whether it is a question of the Ends of Providence or of Utopia.22 It is in this context that Althusser refers to the Heideggerian es gibt as a unique proposition of the materialism of the encounter in its defining feature [sa pointe aigu] which is a refusal of order whether it be rational, moral, religious, political or aesthetic. The notion of order is that which conjoins the origin and the end. The materialism of the encounter, in rejecting the Whole and every Order, rejects the Whole and order in favour of dispersion (Derrida would say, in his terminology, dissemination) and disorder.23 [T]here is = there is nothing; there is = there has always-already been nothing , that is to say, something , the always-already ... of each thing over itself, hence over every kind of origin.24 Or again: A philosophy of the es gibt, of the this is what is given ... opens up a prospect that restores a kind of transcendental contingency of the world, into which we are thrown , and of the meaning of the world, which in turn points to the opening up of Being, the original urge of Being, its destining , beyond which there is nothing to seek or to think. Thus the world is a gift that we have been given.25 We must note the equivocation of this reading: it fails to take into account that for Heidegger something is lost in this passive-active giving [donne] namely, the harmonious relation [juste rapport] of Being and that this loss is the motor of the history of metaphysics, the forgetting of the gift of Being. The problematic of the gift and of donation risks inflecting with a negative onto-theology the pure fact of occurrence [le pur fait du constat de la survenance] or accidence which itself presupposes no such ontological loss. That, perhaps, is the reason why in the 1985 text it is Wittgenstein who is identified as having given the best formulation of the unique proposition of aleatory materialism with the superb sentence from the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus: die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist ... hard to translate. We might try to render it as follows: the world is everything that happens; or, more literally, the world is everything that befalls us [tombe dessus]. There exists yet another translation, which has been proposed by Russells school: the world is everything that is the case [the world is what the case is].26 If Wittgensteins formulation lacks the history of the underground current of the new materialism which functions as if veiled, covered up [au voilement, au recouvrement] it has the merit of no longer thinking the given starting from an act of crypto-religious donation, and of keeping itself as closely as possible to the faktum, to the casus. This superb sentence says everything, for, in this world, there exists nothing but . . singular individuals wholly distinct cases, situations, things that befall us without warning . 27 from one another. Wittgenstein loses historicity in order the better to think the opening of


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the world towards the event in its non-subjectable neutrality. Heidegger thinks the historicity of the givens give [la donne du donn] whilst running the risk of gearing this give in giving [cette donne en donation] towards a theological connotation.

Aleatory materialism between deconstruction of the rationalist tradition and construction of a new conceptualityHenceforth it is possible to regroup in a synthetic manner the fundamental premises of the materialism of the encounter based on its genealogy. These premises form a minor Tractatus Logico-politicus which is divided into two parts: one deconstructive, the other constructive.

The pars destruensThis part is not limited to the critique of idealism, understood as that dominant mode of philosophising ruled by the principle of reason. This principle is intrinsically logico-political; it refers to a political power of domination. The principle is Prince and the Prince is principle. It is a power of imposition and of subjection that philosophy denies by presenting it as the power of truth. At this point aleatory materialism integrates Marx, his conception of practice and of ideologies, to make it known to philosophy that it always has an outside that it cannot see, a behind that it does not wish to see (as Mauriac has it), and whose existence it imagines. Aleatory materialism is not speculative, but operative or performative. It always intervenes remotely in the transformation of the habitual relations between theory and practice to the extent that it criticises that kind of theory which aims to guide practice without genuinely appreciating its irreducibility. The philosophical tradition, hegemonised by the idealism of freedom, desires to portray itself as the principle which subjects practice and imposes on it its moral, political, religious, aesthetic, or rational values, under the recurrence of truth. Philosophy is not totally oblivious to the outside world; it comes to an arrangement with it, at once violent and biased. It forces all practices into the domain of its thought and seeks to impose itself on them with the objective of telling them their truth which is the truth of philosophy. Philosophy cheats when it assimilates them and reworks them in accordance with its own philosophical form, it hardly does so with scrupulous respect for the reality the particular nature of such social practices and ideas. Quite the contrary: in order to affirm its power of truth over them, . . The philosophers of philosophy must first subject them to a veritable transformation . philosophy who set out to master the world by means of thought have always exercised the violence of the concept, of the Begriff, of seizure [de la mainmise]. They assert their power by bringing under the sway of the law of Truth (their truth) all the social practices of men, who continue to toil and to dwell in darkness.28 The materialism of the encounter encounters practice, or rather practices, according to a different relation than that of the mastery of the concept and the violence of an imposed truth. This relation is the opening of the event [louverture de lvnement], of its recognition

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and of its knowledge; it lowers itself to a relation of experimentation, interminable, beyond all fantasy of definitive domination. Practice is not a substitute for Truth for the purposes of an unshakeable philosophy; on the contrary, it is what shakes philosophy to its foundations; it is that other thing whether in the form of the variable cause of matter or in that of class struggle which philosophy has never been able to master. It is that other thing which alone makes it possible not merely to shake philosophy to its foundations, but also to begin to see clearly just what philosophy is.29 It is in this sense that we must understand the specificity of the deconstruction of the idealist tradition and of its principle-prince of reason. It does not merely take up again the Heideggerian destruction of logocentrism, reinterpreted by Derrida. The entire criticism of philosophical categories is an experiment attempting to liberate the philosophical and historical field from the power of imposition and submission that these categories exert over social practices, these latter being understood from the point of view of the mass of men who live the imaginary of their world in darkness and continue to toil. The deconstruction operated by aleatory materialism empties [fait le vide] the idealist mode of thinking so as to liberate positive theoretical elements that it can recover and transform into atomic points for other encounters within other combinations. The materialism of the encounter thus prepares the possibility for worlds. It is a laboratory which enables the dismantling of the nuclear constellation which obstructs as the invariant of its variations the opening of the event. This constellation has as its fixed star, as its sun, the principle of reason, the concept-truth, and as its stars the notions of meaning [Sens], subject and origin-end.

On meaningIt is the onto-theological and metaphysical idea that there exists a meaning [une signification], a logos, a reason which precedes the world or reveals itself there in any case, which founds it. The true world is the world of the principle-power realised. It is the fabric of the principle, idea, form, reason, humanity, communism. Here, Althusser refines somewhat the Nietzschean and Heideggerian vulgate via subtle references to the negative ontology of Derrida or to the negative theology of one who, until his death, remained a faithful friend through thick and thin Stanislas Breton, who, in his work Du principe, opposed to the principle-eminence and principle-all the principle-nothing of neo-Platonism and of Eckhartien mysticism. The void of Meaning frees us from order and opens out onto the disorder of the event.

On substanceIt is the idea of a unitary substratum that is supposed to guarantee the stability and homogeneity of all accidents that arise from it. Hume and empiricism, Nietzsche, all reread by Deleuze, are also called upon. Substance is the product of a procedure which blocks all thought of definite things and all material complexes. It prevents us from grasping that materiality is not limited to that which is studied by the physical or biological sciences, or by economics. There also exists, as Derrida has shown, a scriptural materiality: the trace, an element of all written tissue which imposes the primacy of absence over presence and logocentric representation.


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On the subjectAn old acquaintance. It remains ever the central category of idealism, especially the idealism of freedom from which even Marx never entirely delivered himself, nor Marxism at its best (see Gramsci and the praxis subject). It is the idea of a stable individuality, present to itself, which aims at realising itself in the continuity of its projects, in the name of its freedom and of its proper rights, all the while oblivious to the ideological mechanisms which interpellate it as such and direct it. It cannot see its own back. [T]he materialism of the encounter is the materialism, not of a subject (be it God or the proletariat), but of a process, a process that has no subject, yet imposes on the subjects (individuals or others) which it dominates the order of its development, with no assignable end.30 The thesis of anti-humanism is thus taken up again, but inflected. Indeed, the subject is no longer simply included in the structures of interpellation, but is a composition of unities of diverse levels in a sort of fractal geometry of orders of transindividual encounters.

On the origin-and-the-endAnother old acquaintance. It is the category which completes the structure of the idealism of freedom. The origin is merely the anticipation of the end internal to a primordial order. We always hypothesise a good, desirable, unitary origin that has been driven to fall [dchoir] by corruption, division, alienation into an alterity, an other. But this alterity reveals itself to be susceptible to integration and overcoming. The origin, reestablished and enriched by its development, is the end. There we have a well-known theological matrix according to which the absolute is the unity of three operations: the identitarian operation of remaining in-itself; the transitive operation of exteriorisation in the other, the object, outside of itself; and finally the converse operation of the return-to-itself from the other into an in-itself/for-itself. The deconstruction of this operative system which, at the same time, Stanislas Breton placed at the centre of his negative theology is crucial in opening up a theory of history and politics beyond the mythology of philosophies of history. It is henceforth impossible to tell oneself stories about history in its practice. History [lhistoire]: Practice is a process of transformation which is always subject to its own conditions of existence and produces, not the Truth, but, rather, truths, or some truth [de la vrit]: the truth, let us say, of results or of knowledge, all within the field of its own conditions of existence. And while practice has agents, it nevertheless does not have a subject as the transcendental or ontological origin of its intention or project; nor does it have a Goal as the truth of its process. It is a process without a subject or Goal (taking subject to mean an ahistorical element).31

The pars construensThe deconstruction complete, it becomes possible to reorder the conceptual atoms which will subdivide [dcliner] and form the schema of the construction of a new philosophical world. They are pure concepts, in the sense of lacking concrete objects: void, limits and margins, freedom-power and struggle, and contingency-conjuncture.

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On the voidThe void is at once nothingness, the nothingness of antecedent reason, and the instance of annihilation [nantification]. Like the Being of Heidegger which differs from beings and the totality of beings, the void which precedes the birth of a world, like the Heideggerian nothing, is the horizon which makes beings possible. It is not absolute nothingness but the non-world, absence, the condition of possibility of any possible world. The nothing of nothingness [Le Rien du nant] is Being, and not being [est tre, en non tant]. [A] philosophy of the void: not only the philosophy which says that the void pre-exists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which creates the philosophical void [fait le vide philosophique] in order to endow itself with existence: a philosophy which, rather than setting out from the famous philosophical problems (why is there something rather than nothing?), begins by evacuating all philosophical problems, hence by refusing to assign itself any object whatever .. We have then the primacy of (philosophy has no object) in order to set out from nothing . nothingness over all form, the primacy of absence (there is no Origin) over presence.32 No form, no world can be guaranteed against its being voided [son videment] by an encounter which will empty it of its structural law, by driving it back into the void, in order to liberate the unforeseen and unpredictable possibilities of another world.

On limits and marginsMargins designate the absence of a firm centre and thus the displacement towards the margins

encountering althusser

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