Lessons on Rousseau. Louis Althusser
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Above all, his posthumous autobiography sheds light on this development. He evokes the ‘materialism of the encounter’ in these terms in it: ‘I typed (between November 1982 and February 1983) a two-hundred-page philosophical manuscript which I have kept … Actually, I expressed for the first time in writing a certain number of ideas I had carefully stored away in my mind for over twenty years, ideas I told no one else about as they seemed so important to me (!).’32 These important ideas are those of the materialism of the encounter, the ‘underground current’ whose resurgence he wished to reveal. He attributes it to Epicurus and Democritus, but it is Rousseau who reactivates it,33 and Althusser partially reincorporates his 1972 course into this hastily written text.
There can be no question of presenting this new philosophy here.34 We shall restrict ourselves to displaying its themes, which echo the course on Rousseau that concerns us here. A few quotations will indicate the tone of it, while bringing out the radical difference between this materialism and the (mechanistic or dialectical) materialist tradition which, as is well known, is a thought of necessity, determinism, and the laws of Being.
My intention, here, is to insist on the existence of a materialist tradition that has not been recognized by the history of philosophy. That of Democritus, Epicurus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau (the Rousseau of the second Discourse), Marx and Heidegger, together with the categories that they defended: the void, the limit, the margin, the absence of a centre, the displacement of the centre to the margin (and vice versa), and of freedom. A materialism of the encounter, of contingency – in sum, of the aleatory.35
This philosophy is, in sum, a philosophy of the void … a philosophy which creates the philosophical void in order to endow itself with existence … philosophy’s ‘object’ par excellence is nothing, nothingness, or the void.36
This void is clearly the one that Althusser reveals in his interpretation of the theory of history in Rousseau; it is the radical absence of the future at the heart of the present, the absence of any general law that might make it possible to trace the contours of a possibility. The real is thus nothing other than the consequence of ‘accomplished facts’, of ‘encounters’, of ‘contingency’; necessity (which is so important in the schema of traditional materialism) is simply thought’s return to the absolutely unpredictable accomplished fact, which it takes up again in order to establish its necessity. The historical real invents its laws, while thought boards ‘a moving train’ and adapts to its rhythms in order to understand those laws after the fact.37
The posthumous text (‘The Underground Current’) declares its debt to Rousseau at length:38 ‘The most profound thing in Rousseau is doubtless … this vision of any possible theory of history, which thinks the contingency of necessity as an effect of the necessity of contingency, an unsettling pair of concepts … explicitly postulated in Rousseau.’39
In these pages, written in haste, we find Althusser’s 1972 Rousseau again, with, however, certain differences. In the course on Rousseau, it is the notion of the ‘circle’ which assigns the ‘void’ and ‘nothingness’ their theoretical status, for this void is the void of causality, bound up with an immobile, self-enclosed stage with no outside; the void is a confinement. In the text on the materialism of the encounter, the circle breaks open, freeing the void and nothingness, which pour out into the whole of the thinkable real, constituting not a particular figuration (state of nature, and so on), but philosophy as such. Rousseau’s theory is now shorn of its ‘circles’, which had provided it with its frame. The example of the forest is revelatory. In the 1972 course, the forest shields the circle of pure nature and puts a brake on all human evolution; in the text on the materialism of the encounter, however, it becomes a general paradigm of the void, an Epicurean void with no encounters between the atoms and no encounters between people. It had been an excessive fullness of food and an excessive fullness of shelter that ruled out the social, a natural excessive fullness that was a ‘radical absence of society’, inconceivable without the hypothesis of a pure, self-enclosed nature. In the following quotation from ‘The Underground Current’, in contrast, we see the ‘radical absence [néant] of society’ escape from the circle of pure nature, to be transformed into the ‘essence of all society’. In the course, however, this essence had not proceeded from ‘nothingness’ [néant], since this nothingness was not an ‘origin of nothing’: but, rather, from an utterly heterogeneous accident which, far from proceeding from this nothingness, put an end to it. Here is the posthumous passage on this question: ‘The forest is the equivalent of the Epicurean void in which the parallel rain of the atoms falls … In this way, Rousseau seeks to represent … a radical absence of society … the radical absence of society constitutes the essence of all society.’40
In the materialism of the encounter, there is no longer any room for the circle, and Althusser seems to abandon this figure, which constitutes the topological basis for his course.41 We find it again, by chance, in his autobiographical narrative, when he discusses his experience of captivity in Germany: just as Rousseau leaves the circle of denaturation by way of the inside (the heart), the prisoner-of-war had thought up a plan to escape by hiding in the very heart of the camp.42
More seriously, in ‘Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Philosophy?’, Althusser criticizes the notion of the circle, which he considers to be too Hegelian to suit materialism: ‘a circle is closed, and the corresponding notion of totality presupposes that one can grasp all the phenomena, exhaustively, and then reassemble them within the simple unity of its centre’.43
In contrast, the theme of the multiple laws of history specific to each period is forcefully taken up again, with its theoretical complement (already present in the course) of retroaction [l’aprèscoup]: ‘No determination … can be assigned [otherwise] than by working backwards from the result to its becoming, in its retroaction … we must think necessity as the becoming-necessary of the encounter of contingencies … every historical period has its laws.’44
Thus each of the sub-concepts that allow Althusser to reveal the neglected fabric (Rousseau directs his gaze elsewhere) of Rousseau’s theory derive from these ideas that he had in mind but confided to no one. They allow him to construct ‘his Rousseau’,45 just as he constructed a Marx all his own. Rousseau is an experimental field from which he makes nothingness, the encounter, retroaction, and so on surge up: so many non-Rousseauesque categories that nevertheless fit Rousseau to perfection: ‘It is to the author of the second Discourse … that we owe another reprise of the “materialism of the encounter”.’46
The word is, unmistakably, reprise, which plainly means that it is a question of a retroactive encounter, not a continuity. Rousseau took up the materialism of the encounter in the sense in which the materialism of the encounter took up Rousseau, thereby opening up a field of reading that is still largely unexplored.
Yves Vargas, May 2012
LAST TIME, I ANNOUNCED THAT I was planning to give you a lecture, or a few lectures, on the conception of law [droit] and politics in Spinoza. In reading up a little on the question, however, I discovered that an excellent work on it has been out for several months now: Matheron’s doctoral thesis, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza.1 If I were to take on this question, I wouldn’t do much more than reproduce, basically, what Matheron has written. That’s why I thought it would be more helpful to talk to you about another subject, another author, and to submit a few, less common, reflections on Rousseau to you.
Changing programmes is, obviously, a high-handed procedure. Please accept my apologies, but I didn’t have much choice: I’m not as competent as all that. I can really only talk about subjects I know at least a little and, for many authors, that is not the case. It is the case, somewhat, for Rousseau. So, after talking to you about Machiavelli, I shall try to talk to you