Aleatory Materialism Research Articles

The aleatory moment of finance and the structural production of class-based inequality

ABSTRACT This article considers the conceptual role that contingency plays in class-based inequality, by examining financial insecurity in the UK following the 2008 financial crisis, austerity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on Althusser’s aleatory materialism, I counter postmodern and poststructuralist ideas of contingency as a universally disruptive challenge to power and stratification, showing instead how a pervasive sense of uncertainty drives working households into debt and diminishes savings, creating ongoing financial strain or poverty. Using Althusser’s concept of the ‘encounter’, I note how the emergence of consumer finance is historically contingent, but has become normalized in the wage relation. Financial risk, with its potential to yield high rewards for institutional investors and financial firms trading stocks, securities, and assets, amplifies uncertainty that working households face in socially reproducing themselves, because it forces those who draw an income as their main source of wealth to manage the potential risk of loss on an untradeable commodity. The encounter between financial institutions and working households is thus unevenly weighted, with precarious households unable to offload risk in unpredictable times. I connect this aleatory reading of inequality with Althusser’s earlier work on contradiction and overdetermination, to understand the implications of stratification on crisis and change.

Ambivalences of a Tour de Force: “Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane” as Critique and as Literature

"Ambivalences of a Tour de Force: Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane as Critique and as Literature. This essay starts from hypothesizing a double dimension of Mihai Iovănel’s History: critical and literary (or, as Matei says, poetic). The idea of such an interpretation is given by Iovănel’s quoting a late text by Louis Althusser, in which the French philosopher defines the figure of an “aleatory materialist,” as opposed to a “dialectical” materialist. While critics have already discussed the critical dimension of Iovănel’s project, an aspect Matei also examines in the last part of his contribution, less has been said, he maintains, about the History as a literary project, as “writing.” Matei thus attends to the qualities and shortcomings of Iovănel’s project, which stem, he claims, from the aforementioned double dimension of the History. Keywords: Mihai Iovănel, poetics of literary history, aleatory materialism, contemporary Romanian literature"

‘[A]nother kind of rain’: Aesthetic Ontology and Contagious Imaginations in Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism

Abstract One of the remarkable features of recent interest in the work of Louis Althusser has been the prominence granted to Althusser’s cultural criticism. However, aside from one notable exception, Althusser’s cultural criticism has not figured prominently in discussions of his late work, and the absence of Althusser’s cultural criticism from those discussions has perhaps unwittingly obscured both the genealogy of Althusser’s late aesthetic ontology and the logic of his last texts, of ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ and related writings on aleatory materialism. By tracing the genealogy of the aleatory impulse in Althusser’s cultural criticism, it is possible to show how that work resonates in Althusser’s late texts including the larger unpublished manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ has been drawn. This reading of the philosophy of the encounter also allows us to understand the importance of Nicolas Malebranche for Althusser’s aleatory materialism.

LOUIS ALTHUSSER’S CRITIQUE OF THE POLITICAL THEORY

The article analyzes various projects of hybridization of materialism and political theory in one conceptual system. Special attention is paid to the critical analysis of the phenomenon of economic materialism of the nineteenth century, which for a long time remained the only example of a materialistic analysis of politics. The subsequent development of materialism that became a new limit of economic determinism, put new problems in the context of the capabilities of materialistic policy. The author proposes to follow the argument of the French philosopher Louis Althusser as a philosophy of aleatory materialism created by the thinker himself, including to substantiate the variations of materialistic understanding of the political. The article consistently disassembled the prerequisites for the crisis of the Marxist economic interpretation of history, which, at the original stage of its own formation, had extremely few common with philosophical materialism. The further struggle of new materialists with the idea of a universal explanatory principle ultimately allowed them to create a new type of philosophical knowledge that is not related to the idea of universal history. The focus in this case is chained to the political aspect of Althusser's Materialism regarding the theory of conjuncture as a genuine object of any materialistic politics. Finally, the author compares aleatory materialism with a number of other directions of post-modern materialistic ontology, whose representatives direct their own criticism towards the anthropological component of the political theory, which, however, leads to the denial of this discipline in principle. Thus, it is Althuserianism that in couple with Schmitterism, are the only examples of a successful project to create a materialistic theory of politics.

Theoretical Acupunctures: From Althusser to the Post-Althusserian Marxism of Robert Linhart

Departing from an epistemological investigation into the limitations of the conjoined Althusserian problematic of concrete analysis and aleatory materialism, this essay aims to circumscribe the original features and possible present contributions of Robert Linhart's Marxism, arguing that, thanks to an enriched “philosophical conception of productive labor” preoccupied with a materialist understanding of the categories of finitude and normativity, Linhart's texts of the late 1970s and early 1980s offer fresh insights into the question of how subjective experiences, singularly aleatory cases, and properly experimental setups should be articulated. The essay claims that Linhart's Marxism displays the characteristics of an original post-Althusserian enterprise whose ultimate relevance lies in its interest in the adequate extension, operationalization, and rectification of concepts involved in Marxian social research.

Materijalistička teorija avangarde i neoavangarde

U radu se analiziraju i raspravljaju dvije tematizacije: (1) razlike avangarde i neoavangarde i (2) različiti avangardistički i neoavangardistički pristupi materijalizmu u filozofskom, političkom i estetičkom smislu. Avangarde i neoavangarde su rijetko kada bile doktrinarne, prije se može govoriti o cirkularnosti uvjerenja i stavova, mobilnosti teorijskih i praktičnih platformi od autodestruktivnosti do umjetničkog i medijskog nomadizma te o antagonizmima istovremenog suočavanja s dijalektičkim napetostima i obratima, strukturnom proizvodnjom razlika i beskrajnim usložnjavanjima mogućnosti na način rizomatičnih mnogostrukosti. Svakako, postoje i zajedničke opsesije jedinstvom umjetnosti i života ili fundamentalnim obratom umjetnosti u život, koje se iskazuju makroutopijskim projekcijama novog društva (industrijskog društva, komunističkog društva) kod avangardista ili konkretizacijama mikroutopija (komune, alternativne produkcijske i izlagačke institucije) kod neoavangardista. Izvedeni su primjeri primarnog materijalizma, aleatornog materijalizma, historijskog materijalizma te baznog materijalizma da bi se upozorilo na relativne odnose medija (materijala) i medija (tehnike, tehnologije) komunikacije, ali i nekomunikacije.

Visiting Hegel at Dusk: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek

This interview endeavors to understand Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical theses on dialectical materialism from the point of view of aleatory materialism. The contents of the interview are philosophically based, despite detours through varied topics such as politics, ecology, and communism. Throughout, Žižek asserts Hegel’s philosophical materialism, which has been overlooked by philosophers in general. Through dialectical retroactivity, Žižek maintains that we have finally found a nonteleological dialectics that is not external to Hegel but is found within his philosophy. Throughout the conversation, Žižek offers concrete examples to complex categories such as absolute recoil, which he defines as the cause being “an effect of its effects.” In addition, Žižek presents what he sees as the deficiency in Althusser’s aleatory materialism, that it represents, in his opinion, a simplistic interpretation of Hegel. Žižek believes that Hegel is the only true materialist alternative to Marx, who never managed to free himself from a teleological view of communism.

An Introduction to the Calculus of Environments

The paper deals with the modern appropriation of Lucretius’ atomistic philosophy as presented in Louis Althusser’s late writings. The aleatory materialism that Althusser elaborated in some fragments from the 1980s argues for the total contingency of any world, which is nothing but an accidental clutch of atoms resulting from a Lucretian clinamen. Althusser interprets “world” in a broad sense as referring both to cosmological and ontological global arrangements and also to particular political and practical states of affairs. By claiming that thought and necessity are always determined by a certain connection among atoms, Althusser touches upon the problem of the “principles of cohesion” — the sub-semantic field which determines the semantic but is not itself semantic. However, these principles are described by Althusser only metaphorically and without further elaboration. The paper proposes a further development of these principles derived from aleatory materialism. Althusser’s late writings are placed in the context of Leibniz and Kant’s thought in order to clarify the importance of Althusser’s problematics for time dj-ing, or TJ-ing — the immanent protocols for intercutting between and stitching together possible worlds and time-series. Building upon Kant’s concept of transcendental schematism, the paper proposes a system of quaternary gestural code and twelve basic environmental types which provide an immanent answer to the question of what e principles govern the clutching of atoms. This in turn forms the basis for the operation of a new kind of computer as an alternative to the two basic New Age kinds of machinery based either on carbon-energy or silicon-information.

Althusser’s Relation to Hegel: French Hegelianism, Marxism, and Aleatory Materialism

This essay concerns the uneasy relationship between Althusser and Hegel that can be observed throughout Althusser’s oeuvre. In the 1960s Althusser pursued a rigorous project and tried to develop a systematic account of philosophy, history, and science from within Marxism—an account that would constitute a theoretical weapon against Hegelian idealism. Althusser’s arguments in For Marx and Reading “Capital” established his presence in French philosophical corners as a Marxist and anti-Hegelian thinker. However, in posthumous publications, Althusser’s relation to Hegel appears far more complicated than his simply being anti-Hegelian. By investigating this relationship from the lens of multiple encounters, this essay carves out two notions that emerged from these encounters, notions that we call “Althusserian”: philosophy as class struggle in theory and history as a process without a subject.

The Void of the Forms of Historicity as Such

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.”

Staging the Speculative

Staging the Speculative

A Vindication of Simondon’s Political Anthropology

This article questions Balibar’s claim that Simondon’s concept of the transindividual does not fulfil all the requirements (the ‘three orders of consideration’) for a materialist ‘philosophical anthropology’. In fact, we demonstrate that Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and notably his concept of the transindividual, can be, as it were, included in a genealogy of aleatory materialism. Simondon’s philosophy of individuation is indeed a philosophy of the transindividual insofar as it involves the constant revision of the different historical forms taken by social relations in the coevolution of human beings and their techno-social and natural milieu. Simondon’s way of conceiving anthropogenesis as an open and ‘metastable’ field in which individuals and processes relate to each other maintaining their own knowledge in motion, marks, in our view, a materialist style of thinking. Against this background we analyse Simondon’s overcoming of the dichotomy between the individual and society through a ‘double rejection’, we sketch his theory of a ‘double source’ for social relations, and we explain in what sense, from his perspective, the transindividual ‘can be said in many ways’.

Mute Cries: Louis Althusser Between Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam

Abstract This introductory essay examines the role of two articles on the Cuban painters Roberto Álvarez Ríos and Wifredo Lam, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos” (1962) and “Lam” (1977), in the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's writing on art. It argues that these largely ignored articles offer snapshots of two key shifts in Althusser's thought: his transition, during the early 1960s, from Hegelian Marxism to structural Marxism, and, during the late 1970s, from structural Marxism to so-called aleatory materialism. It contextualizes the articles in the social and political milieu of French philosophy during the 1960s and 70s and shows how his articles on the Cuban painters, specifically, and art, more generally, are largely concerned with contemporary developments in the third world, a subject that receives scant attention elsewhere in his work. The articles not only register Althusser's reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the nature of language, and the philosophy of history, but also reveal that his connections with Latin America to exceed mere questions of intellectual reception.

Althusser’s Materialist Theater: Ideology and Its Aporias

This essay offers a rejoinder to Balibar’s reconstruction of Althusser’s thought. The author analyzes Balibar’s reading by attending to its formal protocols and substantive arguments, especially the transposition of the aporias in Althusser’s theoretical formulations, moving from a politics of theater to a theatrical politics. Building on the movement Balibar traces on how the problematic of ideology is successively transformed through a series of décalages over a longitudinal view of Althusser’s oeuvre, this essay proposes another décalage in light of the posthumously published writings. Offering a reading of Althusser’s theory of ideology from the perspective of aleatory materialism, the essay calls attention to the radical instability of structures and the role of struggle in social reproduction that is otherwise hidden from view. The author also extrapolates a new conception of subjectivity, a theory of “bad subjects,” that attempts to address the aporias of interpellation by making room for disobedience and resistance. The essay develops the idea of a layered subjectivity based on the overdetermined effect of contingently sequenced subjectivations and countersubjectivations that result from interpellating encounters, and it theorizes disobedience as the becoming-dominant of countersubjectivations within each singular subjectivity understood as a contradictory unity. The essay contends that aleatory materialism puts forth the field of subjectivity as a theater within theater, designating it as the site of revolutionary politics today.

Althusser and Italy: A Two-Fold Challenge to Gramsci and Della Volpe

During the 1960s, the “exchange” between Louis Althusser and Italian Marxist philosophers developed around the theme of the autonomy of Marxism. Harmony between the theories of Althusser and Galvano Della Volpe (and his students) was short-lived, and there was a definitive break around the relationship between science and ideology. The chief intermediary for introducing Althusser's thought to Italy was Cesare Luporini, a philosopher and an active member of the Italian Communist Party who brought For Marx and Reading Capital to Italy. Althusser's grappling with Gramsci was constant, and after the critiques of historicist Marxism, the author of Prison Notebooks came to hold influence over the French philosopher with regard to political matters. As Althusser's thought developed, considerable weight was also held by the reading, mediated by Gramsci, of the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, which consolidated his relationship with Italian political and philosophical culture. Althusser managed to catch a glimpse of the philosophical significance of the Gramscian conception of reality as relations of forces (the philosophy of praxis) beyond the historicist and humanist schema within which he had enclosed Gramsci in Reading Capital. But his reading of Machiavelli would develop in the direction of so-called aleatory materialism, also because to Althusser (for deeply-held political reasons: his attachment to classism and to the division of the world into two adversarial camps), the Gramscian category of hegemony would always remain extraneous.

A Marxist in Philosophy

This lightly modified version of the editor’s introduction to Être marxiste en philosophie situates that 1976 text with respect to the aleatory materialism or materialism of the encounter that Althusser began to elaborate in the late 1950s; the theory of class dictatorship that he consistently took to be central to Marxism; and the deconstructive anti-philosophy that he espoused in the 1950s and again from his anti-theoreticist turn of 1966–67 on. The central stake of this turn was the elaboration of a theory of Marxist non-philosophy compatible with a materialism of the encounter: Althusser grounds it, in Être marxiste , on the concept of the “non-state” at the core of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat—unsurprisingly, because his understanding of the way a class dictatorship crystallizes (or fails to) out of the destruction of another doubtless provided the starting point for his elaboration of the materialism of the encounter. Whence a conceptualization of philosophy as an encounter—the encounter of class struggle—at the level of theory. Whence also a redefinition of the stakes of theoretical class struggle, of which the only significant record is Althusser’s newly published work of the mid-1970s, aside from an inconspicuous footnote in Reply to John Lewis . If Althusser had previously located the primary objective of philosophical-political battle in the social destiny of the sciences, he now broadens it to take in the destiny of all the social practices and the corresponding ideologies, whose domestication in the interests of the exploiting classes or liberation in the interests of the exploited is, he now says, what philosophical argument is ultimately about. “A Marxist in Philosophy” proposes to show how, in the mid-1970s, these elements gelled in a new configuration that gave rise to Althusser’s well-known aleatory-materialist writings of the mid-1980s.

Wolff, Althusser, and Hegel: Outlining an Aleatory Materialist Epistemology

In an argument first published in 1996, Richard Wolff showed that Marxist epistemology could be strengthened by introducing the Althusserian concept of overdetermination and elements of the Hegelian dialectic. While this essay wholeheartedly agrees with Wolff's work toward a reflexive Marxism, it finds his proposed reinsertion of Hegelian philosophy into Marxism problematic and argues that an alternative to Hegelianism can be found in Althusser's arguments for aleatory materialism. Highlighting the importance of “chance” events, aleatory materialism contains the same epistemological reflexivity that Wolff finds in Hegel's dialectic yet provides a stronger supporting ontology for Marxist theory. Aleatory materialism supports Marxist epistemology by detailing arguments for historical conjunctures that contain both overdetermined contradictions and situated causality. From this perspective, it becomes possible to argue that epistemology can contain both theoretical analysis of contradictions and concrete analysis. This allows for complexity without abstraction and specificity without reductionism or essentialism.

In the Theater of Politics: Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism and Aesthetics

In the Theater of Politics: Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism and Aesthetics

The politics of the encounter and the urbanization of the world

This article encounters the politics of the encounter. It tries to reframe another way of thinking about progressive urban politics. It encounters Althusser, who wrote some of the nicest and profoundest lines on the encounter, and it encounters Lefebvre, with his notion of the urban as the site of encounters. It equally encounters the Occupy movement and in so doing encounters space, urban space, specifically a reworked conception of centrality. Althusser's proverbial rain rains ordinary urban rain, elements that have encountered one another because of a swerve, induced by encounters created by prior swerves, those that created, go on creating, new densities of connections ripe for further swerves. The clinamen strikes, rains rain so hard on the old order, on the old city, that the swerve has created a new world urban order, the plane of immanence for new encounters, for an aleatory materialism of bodies encountering other bodies in public. Such is the Occupy movement. People here encounter other people within and through urban space; the urban confers the reality of the encounter, of the political encounter, and of the possibility for more encounters. It becomes the site as well as the nemesis of the encounter, its positive, unifying capacity as well as its negative, demonic charge of dissociation.

Aleatory Materialism and Speculative Jurisprudence (I): From Anti-Humanism to Non-Humanism

This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability (in French and English) of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law (2012), will take up.