The Late Althusser: Materialism of the Encounter or Philosophy of Nothing?

Warren Montag

Abstract   The ‘late Althusser,’ above all the posthumously published ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,’ is often regarded as a ‘break’ with his earlier work. The late works are read as a rejection of the ‘determinism’ supposedly characteristic of such texts as For Marx and Reading Capital. This essay seeks to show in contrast that a ‘materialism of the encounter’ is at work in the early texts, and that what is new in the late works is a return to a philosophy of origins, of an originary void as the guarantee that all that exists will pass away. There is thus a Messianism which remains the unthought residue of the late Althusser and which calls for analysis.

And I heard, but I did not understand, and I said, ‘my Lord what is the end of these?’ And he said, ‘go, Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed until the time of the end’. (Daniel 12: 8–9)

The text of the ‘Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ poses serious challenges to anyone who seeks to read philosophical works according to the protocol initiated by Althusser himself. To read it carefully is to confront the fact that the published version consists of two sections, a short autobiographical preface and what the editor Francois Matheron describes as ‘le coeur’ or core of the work (Althusser 2006: 164), some 37 pages of what appears to be an uninterrupted discourse, both excerpted by Matheron from a 142-page typed manuscript. Althusser’s protocol of reading assumed that philosophical texts presented the dissimulation of coherence and consistency, not simply in order to supply to the reader what is normally expected of philosophy, but also and more importantly as a defence against the force of their own conflicts, a sort of obsessional and therefore imaginary mastery of an irreconcilable antagonism. As an ‘a posteriori construction’ (Althusser 2006: 163–64) to cite the words of the editor, it differs not only from texts such as ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, but even the 1970 version of ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’ which consisted, according to Althusser himself, of ‘fragments of a much longer study’ (Althusser 1976: 80). The latter text, although a composite, was carefully edited by Althusser and, however we may evaluate it today, exhibits a rigor and precision that is absent from ‘The Underground Current’ with its numerous errors of fact and attribution.

What then would justify treating this now-celebrated text written, according to Matheron, by an Althusser who was no longer Althusser, as a text at all, and to take its discrepancies as symptoms (and therefore endowed with theoretical significance) rather than mere accidents of its composition and publication? To begin to answer this unavoidable question, we might consult Althusser’s own description of a work which he himself initially calls ‘strange’:

As always, I have said everything in a single breath [d’un trait] trusting in some sort to the movement of a form of writing that is, as it were, ‘spoken’ rather than ‘written’; and trusting also that readers of goodwill will meet it with something like a movement of the same kind. I have swept past [enjambant] the difficulties flagged along the way, repeated established truths when necessary, and hastened towards its end in expectation of the sequel. (Althusser 2006: 166)

The text, then, spoken in one breath, or written in one stroke, the ‘condensation’ as he says a few lines earlier of all he is capable of saying at that moment, hastens towards its end, but also towards an end to which there will be no sequel. As such, despite the insistence of so many readers on its novelty in relation to Althusser’s earlier work, as if it marked an epistemological break internal to his own theory, ‘The Underground Current’ possesses the characteristics of a last testament or confession, spoken all at once, as if he were making manifest what was heretofore latent in his published oeuvre, or, perhaps more accurately, bringing what had been hidden into the open for all to see, the philosophical analogue of his autobiography.

I propose to take seriously the description of the text as a movement towards an end and to take as a starting point the problem of chronology both as it is practised and as it is theorised in the text, the sense that it is organised around an observable historical development of the idea of a ‘materialism of the encounter’ from its origins in Epicurus and Lucretius (with, it is true, a linking of this philosophy to that of Heidegger in order to demonstrate its contemporaneity, or rather, to demonstrate the non-contemporaneity of Heidegger whose work, as he himself insisted, marked a rejection of modernity and a return to the questions that occupied the Greeks), to Machiavelli, to the seventeenth century of Hobbes and Spinoza, to Rousseau and finally Marx. This history as presented by Althusser is all but exempt of the dramas of other such histories: it is not a time of breaks, interruptions and reversals, but a cumulative, remarkably continuous, linear time in which all that follows Epicurus and Lucretius seems little more than a progressive revelation of their doctrines as they are applied to increasingly complex historical and political problems. Of these, the most important problem is that of the origins of capitalism (and its corollary, which, as we shall see, haunts the entire narrative from start to finish, the end of capitalism).

At one point alone does the chronological organisation of the argument become itself an object of scrutiny: in the conclusion of Althusser’s discussion of Spinoza, who is termed the heir to Machiavelli, he declares Hobbes to be a transitional moment between Spinoza and Rousseau. He follows this reordering of the history of philosophy with the statement that ‘chronology hardly matters in the business, because each of these bodies of thought is developed for itself, despite the intermediary role played by Mersenne because what is in question is above all the resonances of a tradition buried and then revived, resonances which must be registered’ (Althusser 2006: 179–80). The implication here is two-fold: (1) because each of these works is a manifestation of a buried tradition, it is not so much the development of a theory that is at issue, as the gradual excavation of what has so far remained underground; and (2) the historical or even accidental order of revelation is not therefore identical to the logical order of which the tradition is composed. In fact, Althusser’s insistence that ‘each of these bodies of thought developed for itself’, tends to dissociate them and render relations of influence or antagonism unthinkable. But Althusser’s critique of chronology remains extrinsic to the work as a whole; it is in fact, as we have noted, at odds with the organising principle of ‘The Underground Current’: the only exception to chronology is the inversion of Spinoza and Hobbes who were in fact contemporaries.

Why assign this lapse any importance at all? Is it not simply a lapse in rigour, a moment of confusion in an otherwise lucid text, a moment underscored by the reference to Mersenne (who died in 1648 – when Spinoza was 16) as an intermediary between Hobbes and Spinoza (which among other things suggests an association of Spinoza with Descartes for whom he is substituted in this passage)? Despite the fact that Hobbes is obviously (too obviously in fact) closer to Rousseau’s doctrine than Spinoza, Althusser’s chronological reversal allows him to avoid acknowledging the extent to which Spinoza’s philosophy, and not just his theologico-political philosophy, represents a severe critique of Hobbes. This allows him to perform, the last thing we might have expected from Althusser, a Hobbesian reading of Spinoza, according to which, in a certain sense, Spinoza may be read as the anticipation of Hobbes, laying a metaphysical groundwork for Hobbes’s political philosophy.

As if to underscore the problematisation of chronology in this text, Althusser begins his discussion of Spinoza by situating his philosophy in a period ‘less than a century after Machiavelli’s death’ (Machiavelli died in 1527). Almost immediately, Althusser advances the thesis which he admits will appear ‘paradoxical’ (although, we should note, without explaining why), that ‘for Spinoza, the object of philosophy is the void’ (Althusser 2006: 176). Matheron inserts a note at this point in the text, informing the perhaps sceptical reader that in the very same year, 1982, Pierre Macherey ‘was defending much the same paradoxical thesis’ (Althusser 2006: 204) at a conference in Urbino. Before we can determine the extent to which Macherey’s argument coincides with or even resembles Althusser’s, we must first examine Althusser’s account of the void in Spinoza.

To grasp the existence, otherwise disavowed, of the void in Spinoza’s Ethics, we must note, Althusser contends, ‘how Spinoza begins’, that is, with God, although a God who is ‘only nature’, or ‘nothing other than nature’ (Althusser 2006: 176). In other words, outside of nature there is nothing, rien, that is, le vide, the void. Althusser, however, is not content merely to establish the infinity of God, but proceeds to posit the existence, outside of nature, of the void and to do so requires more than mere wordplay. To demonstrate the existence of the void as a concept in Ethics I, he takes up the theory of the attributes. The attributes, he tells us, can be read as a version of Epicurus’ rain: they

fall in the empty space of their determination like raindrops that can undergo encounters only in this exceptional parallelism without encounter or union (of body and soul …) known as man, in this assignable but minute parallelism of thought and the body, which is still only parallelism, since here, as in all things, ‘the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’. In sum, a parallelism without encounter, yet a parallelism that is already, in itself, encounter thanks to the very structure of the relationship between the different elements of each attribute. (Althusser 2006: 177)

Those familiar with Althusser, and more particularly with his commentary on Spinoza, will no doubt wonder at his use of Ethics II, Proposition 7 to support the theory of ‘parallelism’, a term that occurs nowhere else in Althusser’s treatment of Spinoza for the very reason that it runs counter to virtually the entire of Althusser’s oeuvre. In fact, it was none other than Macherey who, in his commentary on Ethics II, P7 reminds us that ‘the parallelist reading of Proposition 7 of de Mente reinscribes Spinozist doctrine in a dualist perspective, explaining all of nature on the basis of the relation between extended substance and thinking substance’, a position that Spinoza has ‘precisely invalidated’ (Macherey 1997: 73). Rather than allowing the attributes to remain extrinsic to each other even as they develop in correspondence, Spinoza explains in the scholium to the proposition that ‘thinking substance and extended substance are one and the same substance’ (Ethics II, P7, scholium). It was precisely in this spirit that Althusser himself would write in 1970 that ideas had a material existence and the consciousness was nothing other than action. Here, in ‘The Underground Current’, he has not only separated mind and body, but has inserted between them the infinite space of the void through which they are destined to fall in parallel for eternity.

It is possible at this point simply to dismiss Althusser’s wilful distortion of Spinoza’s text as a more or less clumsy attempt to cast it as a slightly disguised version of Lucretius, as if the history of ‘aleatory materialism’ were nothing more than a series of variations on a single theme. To do so, however, would be, in my view, a serious error; it would prevent us from understanding a concept the importance of which is not peculiar to Althusser: the concept of le vide, the void. This concept appears throughout the work of Althusser in diverse contexts and serves diverse and contradictory functions (Matheron 1998: 22–37; Morfino 2005: 3–6); in a sense it appears as if this entire, irreducibly complex history is staged all at once in one grand finale in ‘The Underground Current’. The passage on Spinoza’s theory of the attributes, described in an editorial note as nearly covered over by corrections and only barely legible, may thus be understood as a symptom, the effect of an unrecognised conflict at the heart of the text between two incompatible notions of the void.

At no point in the text is the conflictual character of the void more apparent than the following passage from the discussion of Machiavelli. Here the discussion of Machiavelli’s theory of the non-accomplishment of Italy, the ‘atomized country, every atom of which was descending in free fall without encountering its neighbor’ (Althusser 2006: 171), moves to an exposition of the philosophy that underlies this theory. It is a philosophy which furnishes the principles that allow Althusser not so much to transform his own philosophy as to translate it into its true form, the form proper to it. Thus, ‘philosophy has no object’ is a ‘way of saying that philosophy’s “object” par excellence is nothingness, nothing or the void’ [le néant, le rien ou le vide] (Althusser 2006: 174–75). When Althusser argued at an earlier point (notably in the cours de philosophie pour scientifiques delivered in 1967) that philosophy had no object, he was careful to specify that by this he meant that it had no object external to it. Strictly speaking, philosophy was its own object, or the element in which its own objects, philosophical objects, existed. These were the object not of a representation but of an intervention; in a striking phrase, Althusser advanced the idea that philosophy produced effects outside of itself only by intervening within itself. In its practical existence, philosophy must constantly pose to itself the question of its orientation, of the place it occupies and that which the conjuncture demands it accomplish; it must constantly ask: ‘what is to be done?’ Such practical questions, however, warns Althusser, can easily ‘re-awaken the old religious question of destiny’ which is ‘the mirror image of a theory of the radical “origin” of things’ (Althusser 1974: 25–26). Philosophy, to be sure, must take its distance from such notions which in a sense surround and lay siege to it, but the void of a distance taken is not even a void, and the taking of a distance by drawing a line of demarcation did not even leave an empty space in its wake. In fact, Althusser concluded his course by drawing a line between himself and Rousseau and precisely warning against the theoretical effects of a certain concept of the void: ‘One does not occupy a position in philosophy in the sense that Rousseau’s noble savage occupies in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality an empty corner of the forest’ [un coin de forêt vide] (Althusser 1974: 116).

In ‘The Underground Current’, the act of demarcation, of taking a distance is substantified: the void is not practised but possessed or represented in the form of le néant, or le vide. Althusser endows philosophy, indeed, the history of philosophy with an object external to it: the nothingness that is the origin (or rather originary non-origin, a theoretical compromise which in no way escapes the implications of the concept of origins) and destiny of all things. If philosophy creates a void it does so not to occupy a space, but to unveil the heretofore concealed void that not only precedes but accompanies like a shadow all that exists as its secret and its truth. This ontological conception of the void, as we must call it, becomes for Althusser the defining characteristic, the specific difference of that ‘profound tradition’ (Althusser 2006: 188) that led from Epicurus to Marx. The originary void is thus at its centre, although a centre denied, repressed and forgotten by the dominant tradition which, far from neglecting these thinkers, assimilated them into itself in order better to mute their radicalism. This tradition, Althusser tells us, gave up ‘thinking the origin as reason or end in order to think it as nothingness’ (Althusser 2006: 188). The question for us, as we read ‘The Underground Current’, is whether this now openly avowed ‘theory of the radical ‘origin’ of things’, to cite Althusser’s own words, will ‘reawaken the old religious question of destiny’ (Althusser 1990: 82).

If Machiavelli sought to evacuate every form of providentialism and teleology from his political thought, Althusser argues, it was to reveal that the apparently teeming world of fifteenth-century Italy was in fact a void, ‘every atom of which was descending in free fall without encountering its neighbor’ (Althusser 2006: 171) and therefore without the possibility of the ‘carambolage’, that is, pile-up or crystallisation out of which nations, like species or worlds, could be created. In the most important sense, the sense that mattered to Machiavelli, Italy was a non-world of the non-accomplishment of the fact, the empty table awaiting the throw of the dice. If, for Machiavelli, Italy was the non-encounter among the lasting encounters of political atoms known as France and Spain, Hobbes will take the theory forward in a radical gesture that appears to abolish history, but in fact furnished its conditions of possibility. His state of nature was less the projection onto an origin of a social, historical result, that of primitive accumulation itself, the forced dissolution of rural communities and the emergence of a multitude of ‘masterless men’, as a figuration of the void, the originary disorder in which individuals, ‘the atoms of society’ sought to ‘persevere in their being’ like so many ‘atoms descending in free fall parallel to each other’ (Althusser 2006: 181). Such a condition was not simply the origin of any society no matter how lasting, it remained in abeyance but was never definitively abolished as the ever present possibility that haunted every society. It was this threat that justified and necessitated the Leviathan state.

Rousseau, in the second Discourse, will further refine Hobbes’s theses, pointing out that Hobbes’s state of nature is already a social state even if the sole social relation is one of hostility and enmity. It is therefore a pseudo-origin, not the genuine social void that must precede any society, but a counterfeit designed to justify tyranny. Rousseau, Althusser argues, returns, past the compromises that mar earlier conceptions of the state of nature associated not only with Hobbes, but even more with Locke, to ‘the radical Origin of everything’, that is, the state of pure nature, the ‘truly radical absence of society that constitutes the essence of any possible society’ (Althusser 2006: 184). What constitutes the ‘radical absence of society’? Precisely the lack of any social relation, ‘whether positive or negative’ (Althusser 2006: 184). The ‘fantastic image of the primeval forest’ will serve to make palpable and conceivable the infinite void of individuals without encounters. This world without event or encounter cannot itself produce society. The conjunction of individuals can only be ‘imposed’ from without, by external causes that divide this infinity into contained spaces. That these atoms possess characteristics that allow them to conjoin, especially the pity that lies latent in them, awaiting only such an encounter to awaken, does not change the fact that this original condition constitutes the constant threat of the abyss into which society ‘can fall back at any moment’ (Althusser 2006: 186).

It is only in Althusser’s discussion of Marx, to which, as he says, all his ‘historical remarks are just a prelude’, that the stakes of a materialism of the encounter, or more precisely, the relation of a philosophy of the void to a materialism of the encounter become apparent: ‘to say that in the beginning was nothingness or disorder is to take up a position prior to any assembling and ordering’ (Althusser 2006: 188). While there existed in Marx a theory of the dialectical progression of modes of production and, therefore, a theory of history as order, there coexisted with this first theory, a second, irreducibly different theory of modes of production as aleatory encounters: ‘the whole that results from the taking hold of the “encounter” does not precede the “taking-hold” of its elements, but follows it; for this reason it might not have “taken hold” and a fortiori, “the encounter might not have taken place”’ (Althusser 2006: 197). Capitalism might never have come into existence.

Of course, it might at this point be objected, and Althusser is well aware of this possible objection, that the fact of the possible non-accomplishment of capitalism has given way to its actual accomplishment and not simply as a brief encounter, but as one that has lasted. In fact, it has lasted longer than the time so many of its theoreticians allotted it, ‘inducing stable relationships and a necessity the study of which yields “laws” – tendential laws, of course’ (Althusser 2006: 197). The encounter that produces capitalism cannot be said a priori to be any less durable than that which produces nations or even biological species. It was Althusser himself who often recalled Spinoza’s analysis of the durability of the Hebrew people – as aleatory a phenomenon as one could find in human history – which in certain ways was, in the typical Spinozist manner, nothing more than a metonym for the far more provocative and perhaps intolerable question of the rise to dominance and durability of Christianity itself (once the question of its truth is set aside), a question that Spinoza never directly posed, and in fact could not pose even in his correspondence (another sign of his solitude) in spite of its theologico-political urgency. In discussing this question, Althusser will have recourse to a term that would otherwise seem strangely out of place in this text: structure (Goshgarian in Althusser 2006: xli–xliii). He argues that every lasting encounter has a structure and that once the encounter takes place, there comes into being a ‘primacy of the structure over its elements’ (Althusser 2006: 191). Citing Lucretius and alluding less directly to Spinoza, Althusser must admit that not every atom, element or singular thing is capable not merely of ‘colliding’ with any other, but of becoming interlocked (he uses the verb ‘accrocher’) with it to form a being, a singular thing. Thus, although this order with its coherence and its laws has arisen from disorder, it is no less an order. In fact, it might well be said that this is what haunts Althusser’s text: the fear of the aleatory encounter that, once established, will persist not for eternity, but, again to cite Spinoza, indefinitely, a fear of that which, in Althusser’s words, dure longtemps, lasts a long time, that which fails to end on time, as expected and predicted. It is as a defence against even a theoretical possibility of this type that Althusser must postulate an origin, an original abyss from which all comes and to which all must return, the ‘radical instability’ that haunts the most interlocked structures. They too are only provisional: just as they might not have taken place they ‘may no longer take place’ (Althusser 2006: 174).

Interestingly, it is here, around an entire series of problems and references, that Althusser’s theoretical trajectory more closely approaches Derrida’s than at any other time in the history of their relationship. He reported in a letter in 1984 having recently re-read Derrida after having earlier read him ‘in another context’. Derrida has led him back to Heidegger (whom he has read ‘with the help of Derrida’), while Althusser has read Derrida in order to determine ‘in what respect, and how he has criticized Heidegger even while basing himself on him’ (Althusser 2006: 227). And although Althusser will rather quickly report having ‘finished’ with Heidegger (‘who in the end annoyed me because of the streak of “country priest” in him’ (Althusser 2006: 237)), we would be mistaken to dismiss too quickly the brief encounter between Althusser, Derrida and Heidegger. Francois Matheron has dated the first draft of ‘The Underground Current’ to July–September 1982; in October 1982, Derrida delivered an address at Johns Hopkins entitled ‘My Chances/Mes chances: a Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’ (Derrida 1984: 1–31). The latter text, otherwise devoted to an analysis of the notion of chance in psychoanalysis, contains a brief and extremely dense reading of Heidegger (primarily section 38 of Being and Time) from the perspective of Epicurus and Lucretius.

It is in this context that Derrida poses a question concerning the history and function of the concept of chance that illuminates a heretofore unnoticed theme in Althusser’s text, responding to it so precisely, to its words, motifs and assumptions, that Derrida might as well have been directly commenting on ‘The Underground Current’:

when chance or luck are under consideration, why do the words and concepts impose the particular signification, sense, and direction of a downward movement, regardless of whether we are dealing with a throw or a fall? Why does this sense enjoy a privileged relation to the non-sense or insignificance which we find frequently associated with chance? What would such a movement of descent have to do with luck or chance? (Derrida 1984: 4–5)

Derrida’s remarks call attention to Althusser’s privileging of the rain as the image of atoms and of the fall [la chute] or falling [tomber] as their primary form of movement, a fact that becomes all the more noteworthy given the archival evidence that he read both Epicurus and Lucretius very closely and in the original languages. While the most frequent verb used by Epicurus to describe the motion of atoms and bodies is κινω (to move) and by Lucretius moveo (to move), Althusser almost exclusively describes atoms as falling. And rain has no privileged place even in Lucretius, who indeed uses the expression ‘atoms raining in the void’; in De Rerum Natura the metaphors of rushing rivers, stormy seas, blasts of wind are far more common. At the extreme Lucretius will even, in a phrase he repeats a number of times, refer to atoms per inane vagantur, ‘wandering through the void’ (Lucretius II: ll. 83, 105, 109).

Althusser so privileges the notion of the fall as to translate the first line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Die Welt is alles, was der Fall ist (translated in the English edition of the work as ‘The world is all that is the case’) as ‘the world is everything that “falls”’, although modifying the translation as his sentence progresses to ‘everything that comes about [advient], everything that is the case – by case, let us understand casus: at once occurrence and chance, that which comes about in the mode of the unforeseeable, and yet of being’ (Althusser 2006: 190). The noun, der Fall (the case) becomes a verb ‘tomber’, conjugated in the phrase ‘tout ce qui “tombe“‘. It is clear Althusser regards the verb ‘to fall’ as the most forceful way to render the case or the event, to separate such notions from any finalism, that is, origin or end. Is Althusser correct in his assumption, or, conversely, is ‘fall’ linked to an entire theological and philosophical history of which Althusser takes no account and which therefore determines his text in ways that escape his knowledge and control?

The question of the fall leads Derrida from Epicurus and Lucretius to Heidegger in what he himself will call ‘an admittedly violent condensation’ which produces an apparently only ‘fortuitous connection’ (Derrida 1984: 9). He refers specifically to ‘the analytic of Dasein’ as discussed in Section 38 of Being and Time, ‘Falling and Thrownness’ [Das Verfallen und die Geworfenheit], which contains the Heideggerian motifs mobilised by Althusser: ‘in Heidegger … “things are thrown” in an inaugural “destining”’’ (Althusser 2006: 191), while his philosophy ‘“opens up” a prospect that restores a kind of transcendental contingency of the world, into which we are “thrown”’ (Althusser 2006: 170). It is here that Heidegger theorises being in the world, the ‘da’ or ‘there’ of Dasein as a fallenness, and the belonging of Being to the world is conceived as ‘das Verfallen des Daseins’ or the falling of Dasein. The ‘violent condensation’ of Epicurus and Heidegger proposed by Althusser and Derrida permits us to read das Verfallen as movement without origin, the movement by which Being becomes what it is. But, as Derrida points out in a remark that may be as relevant to Althusser as to Heidegger, Heidegger himself admits only to deny and disavow the other meaning from which the term ‘fall’ cannot be entirely disassociated: the ‘negative evaluation’ [der negative Bewertung], the sense of a ‘fall’ from a purer and higher ‘primal state’ [als ‘fall’ einem reineren und höheren ‘Urstand’], that is, not simply or even primarily the Christian notion of the Fall, but perhaps also notions of a historically determined and therefore finite alienation (as opposed to the alienation – or inauthenticity – of Being fallen into the world), of a ‘deplorable’ state of which ‘more advanced stages of human culture generations might be able to rid themselves’ (Heidegger 1960: 220). And while Heidegger takes great pains to differentiate the Fall as he uses it from such theological and political notions, Derrida argues that ‘one is all the more struck with certain analogies with such a discourse’ (Derrida 1984: 9). Derrida undoubtedly refers here to the linking of Verfallenheit to inauthenticity; we might however apply his very brief remarks to Heidegger’s (and Althusser’s) discussion of Thrownness [Geworfenheit].

While Geworfenheit is a way of thinking the original dispersion of being (again for Althusser as well as for Heidegger), thrownness is not precisely synonymous with dispersion and retains a theological and anthropological cast absent from such terms as projection, propulsion, movement, etc. Similarly, for Althusser, following Heidegger’s commentary in the Letter on Humanism, the German expression ‘es gibt’ (‘there is’, the equivalent of ‘il y a’) is no longer allowed simply to function as a postulation, but is returned to its origins in the verb ‘geben’, to give: the ‘there is’ becomes ‘it gives’ and the ‘it’ [es] in the expression, Heidegger insists, is being itself. ‘There is’ becomes ‘Being gives’. In ‘The Underground Current’, Althusser takes a certain distance from Heidegger’s formulations, even as he deploys them: the idea that ‘the world is a gift’ (Althusser 2006: 170) gives way to the idea of donner as the dealing of cards: what is, is the ‘donne primitive’, the original deal, before which there is nothing and which thus marks the ‘primacy of absence over presence’ (Derrida)’ (Althusser 2006: 190–91), the ‘horizon which recedes endlessly before the walker’ (Althusser 2006: 191). Later in the text, Althusser will return to ‘es gibt’ to render it equivalent to ‘there is nothing’ (Althusser 2006: 190). Destiny itself (der Geschick, derived from the verb ‘schicken’, to send) would seem to have ceased as a concept to refer to the end and instead come to signify an inaugural or originary sending, even, as Nancy (1993) and Derrida have suggested, an originary abandonment.

The world is thus falling: it has been given (away), dealt (out), sent, abandoned, actions which the thesis of the primacy of absence over presence renders irreducible, actions before which there is nothing or no one. All of this tends to solidify and make permanent the issue and indeed the urgency of origin. ‘Before the world’, a phrase that is repeated throughout, the ‘Underground Current’, there is ‘the non-world’, before ‘the accomplishment of the fact, its non-accomplishment’; it is precisely in the nothing that precedes what is that philosophy dwells, the eternal void in relation to which being is mere rain, fleeting condensations of matter destined quickly to dissolve. Being is not fallen, but that instantaneous falling into dissolution, into the ‘nothingness and disorder’ (a perfect translation of the Hebrew of the second sentence of Genesis: before creation, the world was nothingness and disorder) out of which it which it came. It is nothingness itself that declines into being, sending that which exists to its destruction. This is precisely the doctrine Hegel, in the Phenomenology (1970), ascribed to scepticism: everything is ‘Nichtigkeit’ or nothingness. Hyppolite in his commentary suggests that this is not the epistemological scepticism of Greek and Roman antiquity, but rather that of the book accused by the Rabbinical commentators of Epicurean heresy, Ecclesiastes: all is vanity () or nothingness.¹ The sceptical consciousness ‘declares the absolute vanishing’ [das Absolute Verschwinden] and the nothingness [Nichtigkeit] of all things: ‘Before the silver cord is snapped asunder and the golden bowl is shattered, and the pitcher is broken at the fountain, and the wheel falls shattered into the pit, and the dust returns to the earth as it was … nothingness of nothingnesses, says Koheleth, all is nothingness’ (Ecclesiastes 12:6). For Althusser, however, the principle of nothingness as destiny serves not to condemn or devalue the human world in its evanescence (as is the case with Hegel’s account of scepticism); it instead furnishes a principle of hope, of anticipation.

The entire principle of an originary and final nothingness is summed up in a proposition that deserves some scrutiny: ‘History here is the permanent revocation of the accomplished fact by another undecipherable fact to be accomplished, without our knowing in advance whether, or when, or how the event that revokes it will come about’ (Althusser 2006: 174). It is worth recalling at this point that Althusser’s discussion of Spinoza ends with a reference to the prophet Daniel: here it is Althusser’s own hand that inscribes the indecipherable announcement of the destruction to come, of the undoing of the accomplished fact and ‘the dice thrown again on the empty table’ (Althusser 2006: 174). We should not be deceived by Althusser’s insistence on original nothingness. The meaning of the void is here not at the moment of the encounter that ‘takes hold’ and produces a world, but the moment of its inevitable destruction, not the past, but the future, although a future not given to us to know, but a future to await. Is it too much to say that Althusser, writing in the 1980s, a time of defeat and despair, has thus re-written the conclusion of Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin 1968: 253–64), producing a theory of messianicity without a messiah?

But Daniel, as Althusser liked to say, following Spinoza, often did not know the meaning of his own prophecies. Is there not a meaning of the void as it is developed in this text that eludes Althusser? Indeed, if the void in ‘The Underground Current’ were reducible to an ontology we would be compelled to repeat to him his own words of twenty years earlier, when he could describe in a lecture to his students Foucault’s Folie et déraison as finally unable to break with a theory of the origin as the condition of possibility of history’s intelligibility. And the specific form of the origin that haunted Foucault’s first great work would survive to haunt Althusser himself. That which the Althusser of 1963 could describe as a ‘transcendental abyss’ allowed Foucault to argue that ‘the great work [grande œuvre] of history is indelibly accompanied by an absence of work, which renews itself at each instant, but which runs unaltered in its inevitable emptiness all throughout history: and even before history, since it is already there in the primitive decision, and after it as well since it will triumph in history’s last words’ (Foucault 1961: 5). ‘The Underground Current’ thus exhibits a strange unthought mimicry of the very ‘transcendentalism’ Althusser once subjected to critical scrutiny, tracking it in all its ruses through the thickets of Foucault’s first major text.

To discern the existence of another notion of the void, not only irreducible to the first but actively antagonistic to it, we will return to Althusser’s summary of ‘the philosophy of the void’: it is not only ‘a philosophy which says that the void preexists the atoms that fall in it, but a philosophy which makes a philosophical void in order to endow itself with existence’ (Althusser 2006: 174). Not only, but also: Althusser presents the two aspects of philosophy as if they were complementary, as if a philosophy that represents an ontological fact, that of the void that pre-exists all things, would serve as the foundation of the philosophy that makes a void, as if the latter’s activity were to represent in discourse the former. If, however, we follow the itinerary of the statement ‘philosophy makes a void’, not only through this text, but through Althusser’s work as a whole, we are forced to confront the fact that the work of ‘evacuating all philosophical problems’ cannot leave even the void itself, especially insofar as it serves as ‘the radical origin of all things’ (Althusser 2006: 174), untouched and unaffected.

In another symptomatic moment in the text, a moment perhaps not entirely separable from the discussion of Spinoza cited earlier, Althusser attributes the position that ‘to say that in the beginning was nothingness or disorder is to take up a position prior to any assembling and ordering, and to give up thinking the origin as Reason or End in order to think it as nothingness’ to a triumvirate of philosophers: Nietzsche, Deleuze and Derrida. Of the three, of course, Deleuze stands out and not only as a fellow Spinozist as Althusser once addressed him in their correspondence. For it was he, in an essay well known to Althusser, who would offer a reading of Lucretius (which could legitimately be called a Spinozist reading) which passionately contested the notion that De rerum natura founded its concept of nature on an originary nothingness. According to Deleuze, Lucretius, following Epicurus, rejected all previous philosophy on the grounds that it was unable to think ‘nature as the production of the diverse’ (Deleuze 1990: 267), seeking instead to reduce diversity to identity and to overcome difference in the name of Being or the One. It is in relation to this tendency alone that Lucretius’s notion of the void may be understood: the problem with earlier philosophies is not that they lacked a conception of the void, a lack that he would attempt to fill. It was, rather, that ‘because they did not want to consider the void, the void encompassed everything. Their being, their One, and their whole are artificial and unnatural, always corruptible, fleeting’ (Deleuze 1990: 268). Rather than confront irreducible diversity and singularity, ‘they would rather say, “being is nothing”’ (Deleuze 1990: 268). At this point it is difficult not to see ‘The Underground Current’, at least in part, as a continuation of a philosophical tradition that, far from rejecting the void, makes of it, in however disavowed a form, the ground and truth of existence. We might even go further to see that Althusser makes explicit the all-encompassing void that earlier philosophies sought to conceal, saying out loud what they could only silently think. Is not the void for Althusser the principle which overcomes the difference between the brief and the lasting encounter, the principle in relation to which all things are resolved into the identity of pure nothingness, the origin and destiny of all things?

Indeed, Deleuze suggests that Lucretius’s concept of the void functions precisely to counter the figure of an original nothingness that haunts philosophy, to empty or evacuate it, as it were, in order to allow philosophy to think the singular and the diverse. In a bold step he will declare Lucretius’s clinamen not so much a swerve of the atom through the void as ‘a kind of conatus’, the persistence of a singular thing not in spite but by means of encounters and conjunctions. By thus invoking Spinoza, Deleuze points to a philosophy from which the void has already been evacuated, a philosophy whose aim is to think the infinite productivity of singularities, that is, to put it in Althusser’s terms, a philosophy of the encounter without the void.

But would not the idea of a philosophy that makes a void in order to free the infinite production of the diverse and the singular from the transcendental unity imposed by the originary void mark, in its very dissociation from a reality to which it would appear to stand opposed, another form of transcendence, even a dualism of thought and extension, idea and thing, mind and body? It is at this point that Althusser’s text is most in conflict with itself: the idea that philosophy does not find the void, but makes it, compels us to reverse many of the propositions Althusser advances. From this perspective, the void is not the condition of the encounter, rather, the encounter is the condition of the void, although understood as a verb, an activity rather than a substance, even if that substance is a negation of substance. In this sense, we can say of the void, as Spinoza does of God, that it does not exist prior to or outside of the encounters, conjunctions and disjunctions in which it is immanent. The void that philosophy makes would not be a constatation of the real, as if it were external to that which it represents, but rather one of its effects, a means by which it frees itself of origins and ends in order to become the infinite diversity it is, the indissociable simultaneity of thought and action that Althusser once tried to capture in the phrase ‘theoretical practice’ (Althusser 1969: 163–218).

Why is this other concept of the void, a concept perpetually inscribed in and on Althusser’s texts, at their centre or their margins, sometimes visible, often invisible, so submerged or written over in this, Althusser’s last text? Setting aside psychological explanations, we find the beginnings of a response twenty years earlier in another text whose object was the aleatory, the encounter, the singular: ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’. It was as if in that moment, a moment characterised by a balance of forces so apparently favourable to an undoing of the present, one could afford to contemplate not the dissolution to come or the void to which all would return, but, precisely, the opposite: the ‘véritable blocage’, the ‘inhibition historique’ (Althusser 1969: 106) that prevented a social formation or even a mode of production from ending ‘on time’, that is, the time allotted to it by the theoreticians of historical evolution. How could societies that had ripened into maturity persist for so long? How could their ‘decomposition’ take the form of a system that could endure for decades or even centuries? Encounters of extraordinary number and variety might, it is true, bring about the destruction of a social order, but more commonly, far more commonly, such forces might serve to freeze it in place, to render it impervious to and neutralise the antagonistic forces that arise in its very effort to persist in its own being.

To situate the ontological conception of the void in the context of Althusser’s corpus as a whole is then to be able to assign it its symptomatic value and force. Another text, perhaps the only other text, in which the concepts of le vide and le néant play a central role is ‘The Piccolo Teatro: Bertolazzi and Brecht’, published the same year as ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ and which shares many of the concerns mentioned a moment ago. What is striking about these terms in this early text is that they are the concepts that allow Althusser to think another time than that of the encounter that strikes like lightening in the void. They are the concepts of an ‘empty time’ [d’un temps vide], ‘a time empty of events and collisions’, a time ‘long and slow to live’, a time in which a structure formed by an encounter long since forgotten remains silent and immobile (Althusser 1969: 134; translation modified). It is ‘a time in which nothing happens’, nothing that is, that can be called an event, ‘a time without hope or future, a time in which the past itself is frozen in repetition’ (Althusser 1969: 135–36; translation modified). It is a ‘time in which gestures have neither result nor effect’, not because the effects are doomed immediately to pass away, but because there are no effects. It is a time of ‘unbearable vacuity’ [d’une vacuité insoutenable]. When will the event that in an instant shatters this world of empty repetition occur? Only ‘when everyone has departed’, for its time is irreducibly foreign to the time of nothingness. This play, like those of Brecht, subjects the ‘illusions of consciousness’ to the experience of an intolerable temporality: ‘thus, in Galileo the history that is slower than the consciousness impatient for truth, the history which is also disconcerting for a consciousness never able to “grasp” it durably in the time of its short life’ (Althusser 1969: 143). ‘The Underground Current’, then, is the chronicle of ‘a waiting that knows itself in vain’ (Beckett 1991: 241), for a future that does not arrive late or on time, of a consciousness that confuses its time with the time of history, and its end with the end of a mode of production, unwilling and perhaps unable to grasp the fact that from the perspective of a genuine materialism of the encounter, just as nothing guarantees the arrival of the best, so nothing absolutely prohibits the endurance of the worst.

References

Althusser, L. 1969. For Marx. Translated by B. Brewster. London: Verso.

Althusser, L. 1974. Philosophie et la philosophie spontanée des savants. Paris: Maspero.

Althusser, L. 1976. Positions. Paris: Editions Sociales.

Althusser, L. 1990. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. Translated by W. Montag. London: Verso.

Althusser, L. 2006. Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987. Translated by G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso.

Beckett, S. 1991. Three Novels. New York: Grove Press.

Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations. New York: Schocken.

Deleuze, G. 1990. ‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’. In The Logic of Sense. New York: Columbia, 266–279.

Derrida, J. 1984. ‘My Chances/Mes chances: a Rendezvous with some Epicurean Stereophonies’. In J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan (eds), Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1–32.

Foucault, M. 1961. Folie et déraison: l’histoire de le folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard.

Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Phänomenology des Geistes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Heidegger, M. 1960. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Macherey, P. 1997. Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza. La seconde partie: la réalité mentale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Matheron, F. 1998. ‘The Recurrence of the Void in Louis Althusser’. Rethinking Marxism 10:3, 22–37.

Morfino, V. 2005. ‘An Althusserian Lexicon’, Borderlands 4:2. Available online: http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol4no2_2005/morfino_lexicon.htm (accessed 12 January 2010).

Nancy, J.-L. 1993. ‘Abandoned Being’. In The Birth to Presence. Translated by B. Holmes et al. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 36–47.

¹ In the Yiddish translation of Ecclesiastes by the great poet Yehoash, the phrase ‘Vanity’ is translated with the Yiddish equivalent of ‘Nichtigkeit’ ().