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.”

Key Words:

• Aleatory Materialism
• Encounter
• Nonrelation
• Temporality
• Void

Acknowledgments

A short version of this essay was presented on the first day of “Problematics of Althusser: The Celebration Symposium for the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Louis Althusser” (Sogang University, 23–4 November 2018 in Seoul, Korea), organized by the Institute of Social Sciences of Sogang University, the Seogyo Institute for Humanites & Social Science, the Research Group for Contemporary Political Philosophies, and the Center for Culture & Society.

Notes

1 From November 1982 to February 1983, Althusser was negotiating publication of an unidentified manuscript with the publisher Gallimard. The correspondence about it in his archives suggests, but does not unambiguously show, that he was its author. See “Letters of 17 November 1982 and 11 February 1983 to L. Althusser” (Verny 1983).

2 For whom he “always had,” Althusser (1959) gushes in a love letter, “the most intense admiration.” For a different perspective, see Del Lucchese (2014, 1, 7–8).

3 The phrase recurs in the plural and in quotation marks in Althusser’s introduction to Reading “Capital,” where it is translated as “absences of works” (Althusser et al. 2016, 13).

4 English translation of Althusser (2018a) forthcoming from Polity in fall 2019 under the title History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963–1987.

5 The appendix dates from summer 1962, like the essay itself, but appeared only when “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” published in La Pensée in December 1962, was collected in the 1965 For Marx.

6 English translation of Althusser (2018c) forthcoming from Polity.

7 In the first English edition of For Marx as well as the 1996 and 2005 reprints (Althusser 1969, 1996a, 2005), the phrase “the forms of historicity as such” is absent as such, presumably because the translator forgot to translate it. I have not seen more recent editions. The French is “les formes de l’historique comme tel” (Althusser 1965, 126).

8 Décalage is later translated as “discrepancy” by the same translator, Ben Brewster (Althusser 1972a, 113–14n).

9 The French word for history, histoire, also means “story, affair, tra-la-la”—doubtless the primary meaning here.

10 Warren Montag (2013, 173–89), in an essay that draws a firm line of demarcation between the role of the “vide” in “The Piccolo Teatro” and the sentence I am here glossing, perhaps symptomatically mistakes this early occurrence of the concept of the “take” for bad translation (184, 189). To the best of my knowledge, the only study of Althusser’s essay that pays due attention to its consonance with his late work is Bargu (2012), to which I am indebted.

11 “On Genesis” is a kind of addendum to this letter, a copy of which Althusser no doubt sent to his collaborators along with “On Genesis” itself. It is unclear whether he sent or gave a copy of “On Genesis” to Diatkine.

12 This transformation is belatedly wrought in two footnotes to the abridged, revised 1968–9 edition of Lire “Le Capital.” One unabashedly states that “concrete social formations generally contain several different modes of production,” an issue that, the other admits, is “only touched on” in the book. There is no explicit indication that the discrepancy between text and footnotes stems from a temporal dislocation. This silence persists in both the first English edition, which is based on the abridged French edition, and the second, complete English edition. Both English editions also contain a glossary that adds a discrepancy or two. See Althusser and Balibar (1970, 207n5, 300n24; Althusser et al. 2016, 365n5, 471n2; Brewster 2016, 546–7).

13 The French title is Cours sur Rousseau. An English version is scheduled to be published by Verso in fall 2019 under the title Three Lessons on Rousseau.

14 Italy is said to be “aspiring to its form” in Machiavelli and Us because Althusser (1999, 13) is implicitly quoting (and criticizing) Gramsci. The moonstruck Aristotelianism of our epigraph (Althusser 1958b) calls for separate study.

15 “They talk of savage man and they depict civilized man” (Rousseau 2009, 24).

16 In a January 1969 “Letter to the Translator” of Reading “Capital,” Althusser contends that his contributions to the book are innocent of Balibar’s conception of the diachronic (Althusser et al. 2016, 545).

17 See Marx (2010a, 749).

18 For a view diametrically opposed to mine, see Balibar (2015, 15; cf., Balibar 1993, 103–9).

19 Like others, Althusser too attributes the formula “socialism or barbarism” to Engels, probably because Rosa Luxemburg’s (2004, 321) Junius Pamphlet does. The phrase was in fact put into circulation by Karl Kautsky (1965, 141), who perhaps told Luxemburg that he had it from Engels. As Althusser no doubt knew, Lenin (2011b, 285) cast it in “the renegade” Kautsky’s teeth in a prophetic article published after the Junius Pamphlet was written but before it appeared: “There is no escape from barbarism … without a civil war for socialism.”

20 The French title is “A propos de Marx et l’histoire.” See Althusser (2018a, 261–78).