“Between the encounter and the accomplished fact, ‘the lonely hour of the last instance’: encounter, determination and necessity in Louis Althusser,” by Thomas Carmichael, was first presented at the panel discussion “Althusser and beyond,” with Guido Mangialavori and Panagiotis Sotiris as co-panelists —the latter having acted also as a chair —, held on 9 November 2024 during Historical Materialism’s Twenty-first annual conference, “Countering the plague: Forces of reaction and war and how to fight them” (London, 7-10 November 2024).
It is now published for the first time in a new version revised and authorized for publication on Communis by the author and IMEC Fonds Althusser.
“Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter, his aleatory materialism, can be read as an answer or a completion of the project announced in For Marx and Reading Capital, one that succeeds by recasting the very category of determination as an aleatory relation, an encounter, and by moving class struggle to the center of that relation, neither subsumed by the levels or instances of the complex whole or lived as an effect of a metonymic determination.”
— Thomas Carmichael
“The lonely hour of the last instance”: Encounter, Determination, and Necessity in Louis Althusser
In a late unpublished text from 1986 entitled “Thèses de juin,” Louis Althusser observes that aleatory materialism and Marxist theory more broadly enable us to see in the then current moment what he calls, “The displacement of class struggle from politics and the economy toward ideology. This event is capital, and we must not ‘miss’ it”.[i] I have read this observation elsewhere as a clear indication of a greatly expanded notion of class struggle in the later Althusser, and my discussion will confirm that reading, but I also want to suggest that there is something else going on here. If we focus on the notions of displacement and struggle in Althusser’s observation, I believe we can uncover a more persistent and fundamental preoccupation in his work which is to be found in the fraught category of determination. In the Althusser of For Marx, for example, this is presented most memorably in his endorsement of the notion that the economic is determinant in the last instance, even though, as he puts it, “the specific effectivity of the superstructures and other ‘circumstances’ largely remains to be elaborated,” or, in other words, what is actually determinant is not easily identified.[ii] In the Althusser of the philosophy of the encounter, the same category of determination appears in the relation between the ‘taking hold’ and the encounter, between the “becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies” and the aleatory character of every encounter, and here, again, doubts about determination abound. As Althusser famously reminds us, “there is no taking hold with surprise” and that every encounter is “haunted by a radical instability,” so that what issues form the ‘taking hold’ can “change at the drop of a hat” and “can change without reason, that is, without an intelligible end.”[iii]
A nuanced view of what I am identifying, and one that is aligned with the direction I want to pursue, is to be found in Warren Montag’s eloquent demonstration of the convergence of the Lacanian and Althusserian wrestling with determination, particularly, for Althusser, in the period immediately after Reading Capital. Recall that for Lacan, we find the unconscious not in a place but in the relationship between the automaton and the tuché, or between, as Lacan glosses these Aristotelian terms, “the network of signifiers” and “the encounter with the real.”[iv] In proximate terms, Althusser, in his 1996 letters to René Diatkine, remarks, “The capitalist mode of production irrupts from the encounter (another one of your concepts to which I subscribe entirely) of a certain number of very precise elements and from the specific combination of those elements”; “And at the same time, once the new structure has irrupted, it functions atemporally, exactly like the unconscious.”[v] What I want to suggest does not dissent from this reading; rather, I want to assert that in this dynamic of determination the notions of metonymic causality or the encounter stand in every case for the determinations of class struggle, or, to borrow perhaps a more precise metaphor, class struggle in Althusser’s thought is what enables us to think of the notion of the mode of production, the structure in dominance, and the logic of the encounter as something like a single-sided Mobius strip.
In For Marx, we can find this grappling with determination in the first instance in “Contradiction and Overdetermination” and “On the Materialist Dialectic,” the central essays in the collection, along with “The ‘Piccolo Teatro’: Bertolazzi and Brecht’.” In the former, Althusser famously employs the notion of overdetermination to characterize the dynamic of the complex structured whole that is the capitalist mode of production. As he puts it in a celebrated an often-quoted passage, “. . . these instances, the superstructures, etc. — are never seen to step respectfully aside when their work is done or when the time comes, as his pure phenomena, to scatter before His Majesty the Economy as he strides along the royal road of the Dialectic. From the first moment to the last, the lonely hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes.”[vi] In the “Appendix” to that essay, Althusser turns to Engels’s September 1890 letter to Joseph Bloch to make essentially the same claim, but here the terms he employs to rein in the contingent facts of history would seem to point in more than one direction. Commenting on Engels’s assertion that a single historical event is produced from “innumerable intersecting forces,” so that it appears to us the product of “a power which works as a whole, unconsciously and without volition,” Althusser observes that, “It is clear that we have now found a basis and an origin for this force that triumphs in the last instance: determination by the economy is no longer external to the accidents amid which it asserts itself, it is the internal essences of these accidents.”[vii] But in the same passage Althusser describes this force as “a force without a subject,” and recall that he grounds his argument in this essay in the lessons of Lenin, which proceed, at least in Althusser’s reading, from the general contradiction “between the forces of production and the relations of production, essentially embodied in the relationship between two antagonistic classes,” an observation that Althusser offers in passing on his way to demonstrating the logic of metonymic causality, but one that the course of Althusser’s subsequent reflections leads us on a different course, albeit often in the mode of an underground current.[viii] We can find that very different direction in the essay “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in which Althusser now relies on a Maoist notion of complexity to advance the notion that “ . . . complex processes are never anything but given complexities, their reduction to simple origins is never envisaged, in fact or in principle,” and, in which, in his discussion of Lenin’s notion of the weakest link, he poetically envisions a Lenin, “. . . one man standing there in the plain of History . . . talking . . . about his revolutionary practice, about the practice of class struggle” “not to demonstrate or explain the ‘inevitable’ revolutions post festum, but to ‘make’ them in our unique present . . . a revolutionary method rather than the theory of the fait accompli.”[ix] It is this line of argumentation that is subsequently carried over into Reading Capital where it finds its clearest expression in Etienne Balibar’s discussion of the notion of a mode of production.
Even as he attempts to provide a substantiating confirmation of Althusser’s description of the social formation as a complex whole, Balibar, in my reading, appears to undo or at least unsettle its logic and set it on a divergent trajectory. Balibar begins by pointing out that “A plurality of instances must be an essential property of every social structure,” and, somewhat later, that “Marx does tell us that all the mode of production are historical moments, but he does not tell us that these moments descend one from the other”.[x] The center of Balibar’s account is to be found in the straightforward assertion that “. . . the elements combined by the capitalist structure have different and independent origins. It is not one and the same movement which makes free workers and transferable wealth.”[xi] Balibar explains, “The relative independence and historical variety of the constitution processes of capital are gathered together by Marx into a single word: the constitution of the structure is a ‘find’ (trouvaille): the capitalist mode of production is constituted by ‘finding already there’ (vorfinden) the elements which its structure combines (Grundrisse, p. 507). This find obvious does not imply change: it means that the formation of the capitalist mode of production is completely indifferent to the origin and genesis of the elements which it needs, ‘finds’ and ‘combines’. . .”[xii] As Balibar succinctly puts it, “All it requires is that the encounter should have been produced . . .”[xiii] In one sense, Balibar would seem here simply to be repeating Marx’s original assertions in the chapter on “The Sale and Purchase of Labour Power” in Part II of Volume I of Capital, “ . . . nature,” Marx writes, “does not produce on the one had owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing northing but their own labour-power;” and neither did the former produce the latter. “The knights of industry,” as he later reminds us, “. . . only succeeded in supplanting the knights of the sword by making use of events in which they had played no part whatsoever.”[xiv] But in his tarrying with this aspect of Marx’s account, Balibar also opens up somewhat a reconsideration of the notions of class and of struggle. At the outset of his discussion, he observes, “The definition of the capitalist class or of the proletarian class therefore does not precede that of the social relation of production,” and this is true neither practically not theoretically. At that point, the specific role of class and of struggle largely drops out of Balibar’s discussion, but it does anticipate the direction that Althusser will subsequently pursue.[xv]
In the years immediately following the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital, Althusser drafted and redrafted a text entitled “Rectification,” which remains unpublished, in which he engaged, perhaps predictably, in an extended self-criticism of theoreticism, all the while maintaining that central to the intervention represented by For Marx and Reading Capital was the importance of the absolute importance of theory for class struggle.[xvi] But in his 1974 Elements of Self-Criticism, Althusser is more blunt: “. . . the theoreticist tendency has not been without consequences”; “The more politically-oriented of my critics saw this: the class struggle does not figure in its own right in For Marx and Reading Capital” and then adds parenthetically, “(this is certainly the biggest mistake that I made in my essays on Marxist philosophy) . . .”[xvii]
In my reading this auto-critique moves us in the first instance toward a simple reassertion of the importance of class struggle, as we find in the “Postscript” to his ISA essay, or in his “Notes on the ISAs” published some six years after the original essay. In the latter, Althusser protests and perhaps even admonishes: “I do not think readers have paid enough attention to the notes at the end of my essay, which emphasize the ‘abstract’ nature of my analysis and explicitly locate the class struggle at the heart of my concerns,” and he then adds, “For the dominant ideology is never a fait accompli of class struggle that is itself exempt from class struggle.”[xviii] But if “History really is a ‘process without a Subject or Goal(s),” as Althusser reminds us the end of his “Reply to John Lewis,” a process that a is propelled willy nilly by a motor, which is class struggle, then what is the logic of that motor?[xix] And it is here, I believe that the long wrestling with determination in Althusser’s thought moves us most clearly along the road to aleatory materialism and the philosophy of the encounter. In Althusser’s Soutenance d’Amiens, he provides perhaps the clearest indication of the direction of this movement when he remarks, “The effects can be seen in Capital. Marx shows that what in the last instance determines a social formation, and allows us to grasp it, is not any chimerical human essence or human nature . . . but a relation, the production relation . . .”[xx] It is the precise character of this relation that is central to my discussion today because it is the working out of that relation that unites the formulations of the complex structured whole with the aleatory determinations of the encounter.
Althusser puts it perhaps most succinctly in his 1971 “Introduction” to Marta Harnecker’s Elementary Concepts of Historical Materialism: “Class struggle is not an effect (derived) from the existence of social classes: class struggle and the existence of classes is one and the same thing. Class struggle is the ‘decisive link’ for understanding Capital [Translation is mine]”[xxi] Similarly, in Les Vaches Noires, a text that was published only posthumously but which dates from the same period, he insists, “In contrast with bourgeois theorists . . . Marx posits the identity of class struggle and classes, and, within this identity, the primacy of class struggle over classes. This formula, which is abstract, signifies that class struggle, far from being more or less contingent and derived from the existence of classes, is one with that which divides classes into classes, and reproduces the division of classes in class struggle. [Translation is mine].”[xxii]
Which brings us to the later Althusser. Setting out the dynamics of that struggle is in many ways the consistent thread that holds together the large and largely unpublished manuscript from which “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” is carved, and which is the only sustained exposition of Althusser’s aleatory materialism. Recall that in its published form, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” is prefaced by a biographical introduction that concludes with Althusser’s request to the reader “ . . . to begin this book by reading the provisional chapter pretentiously entitled, after Chernyshevsky (from whom Lenin, in a time of disarray, borrowed his own title): What Is To Be Done?” (Althusser 2006, 166). In the manuscript, that paragraph is stroked out because the next chapter, entitled “What Is to Be Done?” (“Que Faire?”), does not begin for another dozen or so pages, but the paragraph that does conclude the first chapter and which is printed separately in the French edition, returns to this question, or as Althusser puts it, “this detour . . . through Marx’s theory is only there, as I just said, to allow us to understand the political, that in which we are engaged, that in which we are ‘lost’ and ‘without bearings”.[xxiii] In the larger manuscript, that understanding begins with a resolute insistence upon what is valuable in Marx. Althusser reminds us that he announced at a colloquium in Venice in 1978 that Marxism was in crisis, but it now seems he was wrong. As he puts it, “Marxism was not only in crisis, Marxism was dead, a dead man wandering throughout the world, dead, but no one knew it. Note that I am not saying that ‘Marx is dead’ . . . , I am saying that Marxism is dead, that is to say if class struggle is doing well, Marxist theory, Marxism as a theoretical system of truths, is dead, all of the immense body of dialectical materialism has collapsed and a good part of the body of historical materialism with it [Translation is mine].”[xxiv] Class struggle, by contrast, is doing well, as the manuscript insists, but under a very different understanding of the logic of the social organization of productivity.
In a passage in the manuscript that follows immediately after the final section of the published text, Althusser sets this out clearly, and I will quote from this passage at length:
“What matters, in the chapter on primitive accumulation, certainly inspired from afar by Engels, is an Epicurean conception of history (conscious or not) according to which modes of production are produced not by an immanent or transcendent necessity but by an encounter devoid of prior or predestined meaning between the elements of their constitution, including the variants to which the relations of production can give rise. One does not find in Marx — and for good reason — a theory of the feudal mode of production (very embarrassing), one finds only a theory of the capitalist mode of production: precisely as the result of the encounter and taking hold between men with money (l’homme aux écus) and workers dispossessed of every means of production. The ‘taking hold’ signifies only that the encounter ‘took’ (like ice cream or mayonnaise) and lasts, and that the random accomplishment of the fact is followed by the fait accompli of the taking hold . . . [Translation is mine]”.[xxv] “Let us understand,” Althusser reminds us, “that there is not end or goal to the encounter and that the elements that combine there were not constituted for this conjunction or conjuncture. On the contrary, they are as if ‘floating’ in the void of history, or, which amounts to the same thing, each one follows its own course, independent and aleatory. . .. Thus, there is no purposeful relation between primitive accumulation and the constitution of capitalism [Translation is mine].”[xxvi] The encounter is not an origin, but a relation of elements that can produces effects. We must allow of course among those effects and non-effects the possibility that the encounter that does not arrive or does not “take,” something that Althusser insists is central to the problematic of Machiavelli. But it is from the premise of the encounter as a relation of elements that produces effects that Althusser wants us to think Lenin’s question, “What is to be done?”. He sets this out explicitly when in the section of the manuscript that is immediately prior to the main body of the published text that we know as “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” he announces that he is providing a number of mots d’ordre. Among these mots d’ordre are his insistence that we need to adopt de-centralized tactics of struggle and to acquire a different vocabulary. As he puts it, “We must therefore not only learn to think otherwise, to organize ourselves otherwise, but also learn to speak otherwise [Translation is mine].”[xxvii] In a self-reflexive turn, Althusser then suggest that the manuscript we hold in our hands, including the published text we know as “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” is part of this task. As he explains, “Among the mots d’ordre I have announced figures above all the next to think otherwise, then to speak otherwise, then to elaborate a different conception of history. This essay would like to attempt within its limits to give substance to these mots d’ordre with respect to several major themes which concern at once philosophy, the history of philosophy, the political, the history of capitalism, and contemporary class struggles [Translation is mine].”[xxviii] And as he summarizes only bit earlier in this passage, “All this naturally leads to a truly materialist conception of history, based on abandoning the idea that history is governed and regulated by laws . . . We must learn to think history under the primacy not of classes but of class struggle and under its aleatory character: the surprise of unexpected “takings hold” like the 10th of May [Translation is mine].”[xxix]
In his later work, Althusser is fond of quoting Lenin’s identification of the dictatorship of the proletariat with the broadest possible democracy, and his interest in that broadest possible democracy cannot be separated from his insistence that in the contemporary conjuncture, we must, at least tactically and theoretically, enlarge our notion of class.[xxx] In many of his late texts, this takes the form of celebrating all forms of marginality as a sign of broad anti-systemic impulses, or of extolling the militant, utopian potential of every public gathering. Althusser’s enthusiasm in these passages can certainly give us pause; however, the notion that we might think more broadly about the notion of class is, I think, the logical outcome of an aleatory materialist reading of struggle in the encounter. In one of his last texts from 1985, “Qu’y faire? Que faire?,” he insists that “We must . . . while taking into account the absolute necessity of the worker organization of the working class struggle, affirm and practice in principle the primacy of popular movements over the trade union and ideological organizations that these same movements must give themselves in order to make the revolution [Translation is mine].”[xxxi] In one sense, this shift to an emphasis on movements is simply consistent with his celebration of every form of popular of collective as a potential scene in which we might locate instances of communist practice, also occasions Althusser to revise his thought on the very dynamics of struggle.[xxxii] In another late and still unpublished text, which I have cited elsewhere, entitled “Les Appareils idéologique de l’État et la Révolution mondiale,” Althusser observes that in the contemporary context of diverse collectives the state will not be taken by a frontal assault, which he elsewhere identifies with the Bolsheviks; or by an encirclement by civil society, which he identifies with Gramsci; but rather, as he puts it, “by what I would call a contagious coming together (in the sense of which Malebranche spoke of the contagion of strong imaginations) of all existing mass movements, whatever their individual ideologies.” But however conceived, struggle is still central.[xxxiii]
In this sense, Althusser’s philosophy of the encounter, his aleatory materialism, can be read as an answer or a completion, depending upon your view, of the project announced in For Marx and Reading Capital, one that succeeds by displacing onto or recasting the very category of determination as an aleatory relation, an encounter, and by moving class struggle to the center of that relation, neither subsumed by the levels or instances of the complex whole or lived as an effect of a metonymic determination.
Fredric Jameson once observed that the peculiarity and originality of Marxism lie “. . . in the way in which in it two complete Spinozian modes overlay each other and coexist: the one is that of capitalist economics, the other that of social class and class struggle. These are in one sense the same; and yet . . . they are not interrelated within some meta-language but constantly demand translation . . .”[xxxiv] In the long unwinding of the category of determination that leads us from For Marx to aleatory materialism, Althusser invites us to arrive at a point where the two modes no longer simply overlay and coexist but become, at least in my reading, inseparable, incapable of being thought other than together in the dense atomic rain of the aleatory encounter.
Notes
[i]. Louis Althusser, “Thèses du juin,” IMEC Fonds Althusser 813ALT/29/32 p. 11. I would like to thank the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) and the rights holders of the estate of Louis Althusser for the permission to quote from unpublished materials held in the Fonds Althusser at IMEC.
[ii]. Louis Althusser, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2005, p. 113.
[iii]. Louis Althusser, “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87, edited by François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, translated with an Introduction by G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2006. p. 194, 196, 195.
[iv]. Warren Montag, “‘To Shatter All the Classical Theories of Causality’: Immanent and Absent Causes in Althusser and Lacan (1963-1965),” in The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today, edited by Nick Nesbitt. Durham: Duke UP, 2017. pp. 166-188; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, translated by Alan Sheridan, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton, 1981. p. 52.
[v]. Louis Althusser, “Letters to D.” In Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan, edited by Olivier Corpert and François Matheron, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, New York: Columbia UP, 1996. pp. 61, 62.
[vi]. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2005. p. 113.
[vii]. Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” pp. 120, 121.
[viii]. Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” pp. 121, 99.
[ix]. Louis Althusser, “On the Materialist Dialectic,” in For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2005. pp. 195, 180.
[x]. Étienne Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts of Historical Materialism,” in Louis Althusser et al., Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, translated by David Fernbach and Ben Brewster, London: Verso, 2015. pp. 365, 387.
[xi]. Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts,” p. 450.
[xii]. Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts,” p. 452. The reference to the Grundrisse is to the Penguin edition. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1993.
[xiii]. Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts,” p. 450.
[xiv]. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin, 1990. pp. 273, 875.
[xv]. Balibar, “On the Basic Concepts,” p. 496.
[xvi]. Louis Althusser, “Rectification,” IMEC Fonds Althusser, 20ALT/20/22, p. 22.
[xvii]. Louis Althusser, “Elements of Self-Criticism,” in Essays in Self-Criticism. Trans. Grahame Lock. London: NLB, 1976. p. 146.
[xviii]. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism, London: Verso, 2014, p. 218.
[xix]. Louis Althusser, “Reply to John Lewis,” in Essays in Self-Criticism. Trans. Grahame Lock. London: NLB, 19767. p. 99.
[xx]. Louis Althusser, “Is It Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?” Trans. Grahame Lock, in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso, 1990. p. 2236.
[xxi]. Louis Althusser, “Marxisme et la lutte de classe,” Positions, Paris: Éditions sociales, 1976, p. 74-75.
[xxii]. Althusser, Les Vaches Noires, p. 212.
[xxiii]. Louis Althusser, “Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre,” in Écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome I, Paris: Éditions STOCK/IMEC, 1994, p. 537.
[xxiv]. Louis Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titre commencant par : J’ecris ce livre en octobre 1982,” IMEC Fonds Althusser, 20ALT/29/7, pp. 9-10.
[xxv]. Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titre,” p. 108.
[xxvi]. Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titre,” p. 108.
[xxvii]. Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titre,” p. 29.
[xxviii]. Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titre,” p. 31.
[xxix]. Althusser, “Ouvrage sans titure,” p. 29.
[xxx]. For Althusser’s interest in Lenin’s remarks, see, for example, Louis Althusser, “Marx in his Limits,” Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-87, Edited by François Matheron and Olivier Corpet, translated with an Introduction by G.M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2006, p. 91-92; and Althusser, Les Vaches Noires, p. 248.
[xxxi]. Louis Althusser, “Qu’y faire? Que faire?” Fonds Althusser 20ALT/29/26, pp. 3-4.
[xxxii]. Althusser, “Qu’y faire?,” p. 22.
[xxxiii] See my discussion of Althusser and Malebranche and the passage from “Les Appareils idéologique de l’État et la Révolution mondiale” in “‘[A]nother kind of rain’: Aesthetic Ontology and Contagious Imaginations in Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism,” Historical Materialism 33.3 (2022): 178-205.
[xxxiv] Fredric Jameson, “Lenin and Revisionism,” in Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastien Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, Duke: Duke UP, 2007, p. 65.
Featured image: Louis Althusser at François Maspero’s Théorie series. Image courtesy of Verso.
