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.
This article addresses two explanatory gaps in Althusser’s late work. One has to do with the relation between nominalism and materialism; the other engages the relation between Althusser’s later ...materialism and a broadly materialist approach to history. In the first part of the article, I develop a response to the problem of nominalism that makes use of Hobbes’s nominalism and Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence. In the second part, I address the problem of history by explaining the concept of an aleatory causal chain, and showing how such chains could be at work in human history. I also make use of Hobbes’s materialist account of causation, applying it to social relations, social collectivities, and historical events.
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.
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.
Este artículo quiere introducir al concepto de “interpelación fantasmagórica”. Este esfuerzo teórico está inspirado en los conceptos de “fantasmagoría”, de Walter Benjamin, y de “interpelación ...ideológica”, de Louis Althusser. El propósito es aliar sus respectivas filosofías en proceso en sus materialismos “antropológico” y “aleatorio” para un análisis socio-político de la estética capitalista de hoy, tal como aparece en la arquitectura posmoderna o en el diseño de la vida cotidiana. Se trata también de construir nuevas perspectivas de resistencias a la normatividad del imaginario consumista con una interpretación crítica de las creaciones culturales (teatro, cine…) que, según la inspiración de los autores, puede revelar un nuevo sujeto capaz de irrumpir en la escena de la historia.
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.
This response essay contends that Tyson E. Lewis's concept of the seminar as a revolutionary mechanism within the university is based on misunderstandings of Althusser's theory of ideology and class ...struggle. Lewis formulates interpellation as Althusser's "fundamental educational problematic." To counter, this response clarifies how Althusser analyzes ISAs (with the operations of education as one of the diverse kinds of ISA). Further, it examines interpellation-the ongoing constitution of subjects-as a formation that is precedent to specific engagements in and across all apparatuses. We cannot readily reject, dissolve, or counter interpellation. Rather, interpellation ensnares individuals such that their potential relief from how they are constituted likely leads to another form of constitution-that is, interpellation. In opposition to Lewis, regarding the liberative gains to individuals through the seminar, this response proposes that, while navigating Althusser's problematic, we keep in mind that revolution is not external to apparatuses or productive processes.
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."
Resumen:El presente escrito recorre algunos de los momentos centrales de la producción teórica de Louis Althusser a los fines de señalar un eje con el que abordar la continuidad de su obra: el ...rechazo a la contradicción tal y como es planteada por Hegel. Este rechazo lo conduce a impugnar que las contradicciones que fundan el orden social produzcan en su propio seno las figuras que la superarán. A estos fines, se recorren las premisas fundamentales del estructuralismo, del concepto de proceso sin sujeto ni fines y del materialismo aleatorio, propuesta que resume la perspectiva de los escritos últimos de Althusser.
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