Are there One or Two Aleatory Materialisms?

The chapter will consider the continuity of Althusser’s thought and revise my previous interpretation backdating aleatory materialism to the sixties. I will analyse the context in which the concept of ‘encounter’ emerged in the sixties and show in a second moment that it is possible to identify this concept in the texts of the eighties, but only in one of the two tendencies which traverses this group of texts, the one I would call a materialist tendency. This tendency is intertwined with another tendency, an eschatological one — which emerged in the late seventies.

Left Hegelian Variations: on the Matter of Revolution in Marx. Bloch and Althusser

Although Ernst Bloch is often understood as an abstract, aesthetic philosopher of hope, his doctrine of concrete utopia is underpinned by an idiosyncratic, vital materialist ontology. Against many of Bloch’s critics, this article explains and defends his materialism as compatible with Marx’s project. It first situates the early Marx’s materialism in the generally Left Hegelian and more specifically Feuerbachian context of articulating a concrete account of human agency and social emancipation within a naturalistic framework. Two subsequent sections offer Bloch’s “Left Aristotelian” approach to matter and the later Louis Althusser’s “aleatory” materialism, respectively, as radical and tactically different variations on this theme.

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.

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

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.