9781844675531-frontcover

Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

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A profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, from Epicurus to Marx.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a “philosophy of the encounter,” which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.

Paperback, 299 pages

ISBN: 9781844675531

June 2006

$29.95 / £16.99

Other Editions

Hardback, 299 pages

ISBN: 9781844670697

June 2006

$90.00 / £50.00

Reviews

  • “Althusser traversed so many lives—so many personal, historical, philosophical and political adventures; marked, inflected, influenced so many discourses, actions and existences by the radiant and provocative force of his thought—that the most diverse and contradictory accounts could never exhaust their source.”

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    For philosophy, framing the phenomenological gift aligns an eidetic point that begins to bracket in Nothingness, which may or may not give rise to the Encounter. It is a matter of thinking about contingency.  The primacy of thinking about contingency is simply the facticity of existing there within the Unconscious and the ether of unreal atoms—parallelism ad nausea. “The world is a ‘gift’ that we have been given,” Althusser elucidated, “the ‘fact of the fact’ that we have not chosen, and it ‘opens up’ before us in the facticity of its contingency, and even beyond this facticity, in what is not merely an observation, but a ‘being-in-the-world’ that commands all possible Meaning.” Opening this gift does frame “being-in-the-world.” There is the possibility of meaning and the meaning of the possibility—there is an effect of fictional subjectivity. There are effects stemming from the facticity of this very contingency of being-in-the-world. It is an eidetic effect as philosophical effect. Philosophy postulates eidetic points. As materialist portrait, nothingness is nothing but the theoretical understanding of non-materiality--the original of Being-- and hence there is a retroactive excursion, more or less, that may or may not find nothingness as a material object that is idyllically graced by the Philosophical Void.

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Other books by Louis Althusser Edited by Oliver Corpet and François Matheron Translated by G. M. Goshgarian