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54 CHAPTER FOUR The Politics of the Encounter Everything is formed out of connections, densities, shocks, encounters, concurrences, and motions. Lucretius What matters about this conception is less the elaboration of laws, hence of an essence, than the aleatory character of the “taking-hold” of the encounter, which gives rise to an accomplished fact whose laws it is possible to state. Louis Althusser You can pull up the flowers, but you can’t stop the spring. Rebecca Solnit I. Taking Hold by Surprise Some of the best and profoundest lines ever written about “the encounter” are Louis Althusser’s, done in the 1980s, during the final, troubled decade of his life. At first blush, these “later writings” seem to be a direct refutation of his earlier, famous (and infamous) structural Marxism of the 1960s, brilliantly voiced in texts like For Marx and Reading Capital; they seem to express Althusser’s own epistemological break, with a hyperdialectical Marxism getting replaced by a more metaphysical, nondialectical one. Now, “overdetermination” translates into a strange, chancy, almost-divine undercurrent that haunts both conscious and unconscious processes of life and politics. But Althusser would likely beg to differ: In those great early books, he’d doubtless contest, a nonteleological Marxism was consistently affirmed, a social theory and philosophy that saw Spinoza rather than Hegel as the true precursor of Marx; already here was a Marxism not so much about fixed laws as laws of tendencies, a Marxism not about essences but about possibilities that depend, that have neither definitive beginnings nor ends; things happen contingently, stuff comes together, collides and colludes by surprise, doing so because of a readiness to interlock. The Politics of the Encounter • 55 Althusser would be quick to acknowledge, too, how the “encounter” features in “untold passages” in Marx, in his mature oeuvre—in the first volume of Capital ’s “Working Day” chapter and in the “theory of the transition” from feudalism to capitalism, best articulated in “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation.” Marx, says Althusser, “explains that the capitalist mode of production arose from the ‘encounter’ between ‘the owners of money’ and ‘proletarians stripped of everything but their labor-power.’” “It so happens that this encounter took place, ‘took hold,’ which means that it did not come undone as soon as it came about, but lasted.”1 History takes hold because of encounters between immanent objective forces—resultant of past, contingent encounters that somehow lasted—and a subjective reality that is even more uncertain and unpredictable. Actions come without guarantees; potential outcomes can never be foreseen in advance. It is at particular moments or conjunctures when and where forces connect; when and where they come into collusion and collision with one another ; when and where they take shape, take hold, take off, transmogrify into something historically and geographically new. Such is the mark of the nonteleology of the process, the brilliant and slippery logic of Althusser’s “aleatory materialism.” No speculative philosophy this; it has nothing to do with an “idealism of freedom” since it is deeply, ontologically, materialist: materialism’s repressed tradition, in fact, a hint of the existence of human freedom in the world of necessity, of possibility buried within the plane of immanence. If anything has changed from the 1960s, it is perhaps that these “later writings ” wax much more lyrically and poetically. Althusser is a lot more figurative and allegorical than he ever was; he shows rather than explicitly tells, gives us form without any content, contingency without contextuality. There is no better illustration of Althusser’s poetry than his beautiful beginning, the opening lines to “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter,” destined a book but only materializing as nineteen-odd pages of longhand script. “It is raining,” says Althusser, on another dreary Parisian day. “Let this book therefore be, before all else, a book about ordinary rain.”2 But this ordinary rain is equally a profound rain, the rain of Lucretius’s atoms falling parallel to one another, the rain of the parallelism of Spinoza’s infinite attributes, the rain that reveals the whole history of philosophy, of the universe, of life on Earth. Ordinary , wonderful rain, raining down, providential and antiprovidential rain. The rain of life pitter-patters down into the “void” of prehistory, before the beginning of time and space. Steadily it falls, raining atoms—“the dance of atoms,” Lucretius calls it in The Nature of Things (circa 50 b.c.). Everything falls, atoms in parallel with one another. They fall...

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