The Void of the Forms of Historicity as Such

Abstract

This essay puts one sentence from Althusser’s “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” in the context of other Althusserian texts, especially the 1972 course on Rousseau and 1973 “Book on Imperialism,” but also the 1962 course on Machiavelli and the fragmentary 1973 “Livre sur le communisme.” The “non-world” that the sentence evokes is, this essay contends, not ontological but historical, the privileged object of Marxist historigraphy and socialist politics: it designates the voids over which capitalism is suspended, notably the one to which it consigns the communist elements or “atoms” whose encounter could abolish it. Althusser’s 1962 study of mutually exclusive temporalities in Bertolazzi’s El nost Milan contains the basic figuration of these Epicurean-Lucretian voids in his thought and the kernel of the aleatory materialism underpinning his rectification of the early Balibar's theory of the transition between modes of production as presented in Reading “Capital.”