The Politics of Chance: Althusser's Aleatory Materialism and Badiou's Philosophy of the Event

Abstract

Despite its apparent transparency, the question of the relationship between the thought of Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou, teacher and student, can receive a new interpretation if we consider Althusser's late philosophy, called “aleatory materialism”, as an attempt to ground political practice through the concepts of contingency, encounter, and void, which pose an ontological problematic. The key function here is that of a materialist philosophy, which Althusser sought to define in different periods of his work. One of these definitions can be found in his interpretation of Machiavelli's or philosophical practice, which is singular in nature. Moreover, the text dedicated to Machiavelli reveals an attempt to construct the concept of the political subject, which disappears in later writings. Hence, it can be assumed that Althusser's "theory of the encounter" in its political explications splits into two different philosophical strategies, united by the primacy of aleatory: in the first one, a specific "void" of the historical conjuncture is constructed, which should be occupied by the future subject of political practice; in the second one, the dominant role is given to the ontological concept of the void and the action of the “clinamen”. A comparison of Althusser's internally split theory with Badiou's concept of the event allows us to conclude that the latter's philosophy combines two designated strategies in one way or another.