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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

seizing fortuna by the hair at the right moment « Previous | |Next »
April 9, 2006

In this post I mentioned that I was puzzled by the late Althusser's way of doing philosophy that is precisely a non-philosophy - or, perhaps, even an anti-philosophy. We are given an insight into Althusser's aleatory materialism or the materialism of the encounter as a new kind of philosophy by Augusto Illuminati review of some Iralian texts on Althusser. Illuminati says:

According to Althusser there is a formidable yet misunderstood tradition of aleatory materialism - of rain, deviation, of encounter and capture: the Epicurean and Lucretian rain of atoms, where a small clinamen imprints a chance combination, the parallel flow and the Spinozian entanglement of the infinite series of modifications of the two attributes of thought and extension, the Machiavellian ability to seize fortuna by the hair at the right moment, realising in the moment all of its virtu-potenza. This is also helped by the virtu of the fox and the (Spinozian!) power of the individual or the Prince to succeed in transforming sad passions into joyous ones. Fortuna faces the void with no other guarantees, it seizes the opportunity in short-circuits that could also be missing, almost secularising the relation between the mystic and God in negative theology. A materialism of the encounter and of contingency poses as a totally alternative theory and opposes the various materialisms of necessity and teleology; these are in the last instance the forms of a masked idealism, variations on the great theme of Western metaphysics, of the logocentrism that postulates the priority of Meaning over everything real.

It sounds more like politics and tactics to me, as distinct from a philosophy. I guess the philosophy in the materialism of encounter is the bit that takes contingency to be the realm of human freedom rather than Hegel's freedom as self-realization.

Illuminati goes on to offer us an image of philsosphy of the enccounter. He says:

The secret philosophy of the encounter runs from Epicurus to Marx in contraposition to every philosophy of essence, logos, origin and telos, of the rational, whether moral-religious or aesthetic Order; it rejects the Whole in favour of dissemination and disorder, it thinks of origin as nothingness and shapeless, it "catches a moving train" (Althusser 2006c) and, with strong arms, jumps on the wagon that runs from eternity like Heraclitus' water, without knowing where it comes from and where it's going. Through Althusser's image we see in the materialist philosopher almost an IWW activist who travels through America to trigger off strikes, hiding from the cops and beating the industrial centres and mine pits along the railway...

The philosophy of the encounter is born of the occasional encounter of virtu and fortuna.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:57 PM | | Comments (0)
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