Jean-Claude Bourdin

If the object of Althusser’s main theoretical work was Marx’s historical materialism, the form this work took was philosophy. Philosophy was his most important object. His reflections focused on the question of the existence of a Marxist philosophy, on philosophy as practice, the practice of philosophy and its role in ideological and political class struggles. This article sets out to understand how what is somewhat improperly called Althusser’s ‘last’ philosophy, the materialism of the encounter or aleatory materialism, is the philosophy that renounces the dominant form of philosophy to take the form of what I would call a counter-philosophy.

Os últimos textos de Althusser defendem a existência de um materialismo chamado materialismo do encontro ou aleatório. Esse materialismo se distingue do idealismo, do materialismo da necessidade e do materialismo dialético. Ele recusa as noções de Origem, de Fim, de Sujeito, a teleologia, o princípio de razão e recusa a negatividade dialética e a contradição. Recorrendo ao léxico de Epicuro-Lucrécio, ele coloca a contingência dos encontros que constituem o mundo (a história, as instituições, os dispositivos). Fortemente inspirado por Maquiavel, Althusser coloca esse materialismo “sob a conjuntura” que abre o pensamento a seu exterior (as lutas de classe). Ele decorre de novas categorias, o vazio, o centro e suas margens, o encontro, os deslocamentos, o todo sob a contingência. Quero mostrar que esse materialismo é mais do que um novo materialismo. Aanalisando a metáfora do “prato” utilizada por Althusser, compreendo que ele constitue uma lógica para o materialismo e para o marxismo, apartada de suas teses necessitaristas.

La morale occupe une place centrale dans l’oeuvre de Diderot et dans Le Neveu de Rameau. La morale a un double sens: les moeurs, les opinions et les comportements valorisés dans une société et la science des moeurs. À côté des études savantes ou apologétiques (religieuses), la satire offre un moyen pour comprendre les normes et les valeurs morales, en dénonçant leur transgression par des vicieux. Le Neveu de Rameau est une « satyre ». L’article analyse le genre de satire qu’est ce dialogue. Il apparaît que si d’un côté c’est Lui, le vicieux qui est la cible de la satire, de l’autre c’est lui qui fait la satire d’un milieu social qui nie les valeurs de la morale commune. L’hypothèse est que ce dispositif vise à montrer les limites de la philosophie en ce qui concerne la morale.

What is the use of trying to describe a philosophy as ‘materialistic’ or ‘idealistic’? Why multiply the species of each genus? We have ‘subjective’, ‘absolute’, and ‘objective’ idealism, ‘mechanistic’ and ‘dialectical’ materialism, to which we must now add ‘uncertain’ or ‘random’ materialism. Must we worry if a philosophy belongs to this or that ‘trend’, ‘current’, or ‘tradition’? We find ourselves asking all these types of questions when reading Louis Althusser’s later work, in which he appears to have devoted some effort to developing the idea of an “underground” or “subterranean” trend in philosophy. After some hesitation, he termed this “materialism of the encounter” or “uncertain materialism,” which I will refer to hereafter in abbreviated form as UM.

By proposing the notion of aleatory materialism, or Marxism of encounter, Althusser had three goals in mind: to give Marxism, finally in crisis, its philosophy; to identify this philosophy with an underground current starting with Epicure and Democritus; to provide the means to introduce points of heresy from which the crisis would gain intelligibility. This article purports to show that this form of materialism consists less in a new philosophy than in an ontology and a logic of the “not-much”, of the impoverishment of meaning and reason. The encounter is not a thesis on the materiality of the world, but on the conditions of thought of its very being: without origin, without purpose, without meaning, without necessity. By subscribing to such a thesis, one reintegrates within a reflection inhabited by emptiness, gap and difference, its outside, constituted by the singular practices of those who suffer and struggle in the emptiness and delinkage of the world.

Les énoncés philosophiques spéculatifs matérialistes de Diderot constituent une ontologie que Diderot expose dans une métaphysique où se nouent trois plans. Le premier est dominé par la catégorie de possible. Diderot pense le possible en termes de possibilité non téléologique : elle concerne le mode de manifestation de l'être. Le deuxième, portant sur la natura naturata et sa connaissance scientifique, s'adosse à la nécessité. Le troisième, s’inscrivant au cœur de la natura naturans et concernant le statut de l'existence des êtres, est l’aléatoire. Comment ces trois plans et ces trois catégories s'articulent-ils rationnellement? Comment se réalisent-ils dans l’écriture même de la philosophie?Diderot’s philosophical pronouncements are both speculative and materialist. They make up an ontology and Diderot sets this out in a metaphysics which has three levels. The category of the possible dominates the first level. Diderot thinks the possible in terms of a non-teleological possibiliy, one concerned with the mode in which being manifests itself. The second level, concerned with « natural naturata » and the scientific knowledge that can be had of it, relies on necessity. The third, operating at the very heart of « natura naturans » is concerned with the status of the existence of beings, and is random. How do these three levels and these three categories relate to each other rationally? How are they realised in the very way that philosophy is written?

A social and political philosophy that ignores invisibility and visibility are not the matters of perception but of violent conditions, methods and social processes of confirming or infirming human existing that disprove the claims of a pure and abstract philosophy, is nothing more than ideology. A critical reflection of the 'normal' state of things implies an option for mutilated and unclassified existence of excluded, subordinates, poor, unemployed, beggar, caretakers, domestic workers, housewives, who are present but do not exist, and are violated by discriminatory agendas of what is visible and invisible in modern society. Phenomenology and logic of the social question would analyze the living conditions of the public sphere, unravel this kind of violence, and discern the meaning and value of the struggle of invisible people to become visible ones.