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The Necessity of Contingency:

Some Notes
Gregory Elliott

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The Necessity of Contingency: Some Notes

Gregory Elliott

Recent years have been marked by a strong revival of interest in Louis Althusser and
his legacy. The principal occasion for it was, of course, the simultaneous appearance
in France of the autobiographical writings (Althusser 1992) and the first installment
of a comprehensive biography, taking the story to 1956 (Moulier Boutang 1992).
These disclosed the existence of a hitherto largely unknown Althusser, something of
whose complexity is revealed by the further eight volumes to date in a posthumous
edition of his writings. (The latest-two papers from the seminar on Lacan and psy-
choanalysis held at the Ecole Normale Suptrieure in 1963-4-was released at the
end of last year [Althusser 1996al. A selection from the correspondence is promised
for 1998.) And this is to omit from the reckoning the philosopher’s substantial ar-
chives, deposited at the Institut MCmoires de I’Edition Contemporaine in Paris in
1991, which contain some book-length manuscripts.
Conventionally, Althusser’s career has been periodized into three main phases,
encompassing two decades or so. They might be summarized as follows. The first,
1960-6, is the period of the elaboration of the “structural Marxism” of For Marx
and Reading Capital-the phase in which, for hostile critics, the Althusserian stance
bears an uncanny resemblance to that of the German imperial bureaucracy, whose
mind-set could allegedly be resumed as follows: that’s all very well in practice, but
does it work in theory? The second, stretching from the “Philosophy Course for
Scientists” in 1967 up to the midseventies, witnesses the criticism and revision of
Althusserian Marxism (Althusser 1990). And third, in 1976-8, we have no longer
the self-criticism, but a veritable autodeconstruction of Althusserianism, most evi-
dent in the 1978 encyclopedia article “Marxism Today” (Althusser 1990, 268-80).
 Althusser and Contingency 75

At the very least, this division must be chronologically supplemented by two fur-
ther phases of reflection and production, one antecedent and the other subsequent to
the conventional periodization. The former is a pre-Althusserian moment, circa
1945-51, comprising the “early writings,” which were published in French in 1994
and in English this spring (Althusser 1997). The philosophico-political adventure
recorded in them comprises an intricate, dual transition: on the one hand, from Ca-
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tholicism to Communism, to which Althusser formally adhered in 1948; on the other,

from a variant of (left) Hegelianism to a variety of Marxism. Hence the title chosen
for the English edition: The Spectre of Hegel (though Spectres of Hegel and Stalin
might have been more accurate, if less palatable).
What emerges from this material is the extent to which the young Althusser of the
Fourth Republic was immersed in the ideas of the age, some of them spawned by
the “return to Hegel” most notably associated with Alexandre Kojbve’s (1947) read-
ing of the Phenomenology. Althusser’s postwar native philosophical language was
that of French Hegelianism, his ideological orientation akin to what the ex-Communist
Edgar Morin once dubbed “Hegelo-Stalinism” (Morin 1959,60), for which the World
Spirit was not Napoleon on his horse, but Stalin in a tank. (It may be recalled that
Kojbve, once asked why he was not a member of the Communist party, responded
that he was a “Stalinist of strict observance”.) It is also clear, however, that at the
height of the cold war, Althusser participated in the crude anti-Hegelian turn of Stalinist
Marxism. While it would appear that he never endorsed the Lysenkoist notion of the
“two sciences” (bourgeois and proletarian), he certainly did subscribe to the Zhdanovite
line of “partisanship in philosophy” against which the subsequent claims for the “au-
tonomy of theory” were pressed. The young Althusser enrolled in the ranks of the
“intellectuals in arms,” evoked in the introduction to For Murx (Althusser 1965, 22).
The second major modification of our sense of Althusser’s trajectory concerns a
phase that postdates the termination of his public career. It involves a series of frag-
mentary texts published three years ago-in particular, written interviews conducted
by Fernanda Navarro in the mid-1980s (Althusser 1994a, 13-79) and a manuscript
from 1982, whose title can literally (if inelegantly) be rendered in English as “The
Subterranean Current of the Materialism of the Encounter” (Althusser 1994b, 539-
76). These revolve around the project of what Althusser calls an “aleatory material-
ism” or “materialism of the encounter,” supposedly originating with Epicurus and
extending to Heidegger and Derrida. Although admitted not to be the philosophy of
Marx, it is advanced by Althusser as a potential “philosophyfor Marxism” (1994a,
37-8), “a materialism of the encounter. . . or the conjuncture,’’ to which Marx him-
self was only ambiguously affiliated since “forced to think in a horizon tom between
the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution” (1994b, 560).
These late writings pose numerous interpretive problems. Not least is what Anto-
nio Negri, alluding to Heidegger’s Kehre, has identified as Althusser’s “turn” (Negri
1996, 58). Is the “last” Althusser radically distinct from his earlier philosophical
selves? Or are there discernible and demonstrable elements of continuity, as well as
discontinuity, between them-elements that might, in turn, necessitate the rereading
 76 Elliott

of an overly familiar Althusser? The concurrent posthumous publication of material

dating from 1962-77 (Althusser 1995, 1996a, 1996b) both permits more nuanced
delineation of him at the zenith of his celebrity and indicates a provisional answer
in the affirmative to the second question. Althusser unrehearsed contains references
to themes (such as the necessary contingency of history), and authors (such as the
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nineteenth-century philosopher of chance and probability, Antoine Augustin Coumot),

already cited in the mature Althusserian discourse on Marxist method, before being
foregrounded in the closing meditations on a philosophy for Marxism.
The extent to which the received image will be transformed by the assimilation of
the posthumous oeuvre cannot be predicted. But it may safely be ventured that when
it comes to (re)writing Althusser’s intellectual biography, we will have to bear in
mind his own strictures, in the opening salvo “On the Young Marx” in 1960, against
theoretical history in the “future anterior,” when he precisely underscores “the ne-
cessity and contingency of [Marx’s] beginning” (1965, 64); or in the overture to
Reading Capital, where he renounces “every teleology of reason,” urging a recon-
ceptualization of “the historical relation between a [theoretical] result and its condi-
tions of existence as a relation of production . . . and therefore as what, in a phrase
that clashes with the classical system of categories . . . we can call the necessity of its
contingency” (Althusser and Balibar 1965, 45); or again, seven years later, in Ele-
ments of Self-Criticism when, revisiting Marx’s putative “epistemological break,” he
insists that every science “is born out of the unpredictable, incredibly complex and
paradoxical-but, in its contingency, necessary-conjunction of ideological, politi-
cal, scientific . . . philosophical and other ‘elements”’ (Althusser 1976, 112). In short,
we will have to be guided by the maxim that contingency is the mother of inven-
tion-and make a virtue of such necessity.

In the remainder of this paper, I would like to do two things. First, I hope to pro-
vide an indication of just how pervasive the topic of “necessity and contingency” is
in Althusser’s oeuvre, although it is not always explicitly formulated as such (but
then, we have good reason to suppose that the lack of particular words cannot auto-
matically be construed as tantamount to a conceptual absence). And second, follow-
ing what is in effect a plain enumeration of references, I want to pose some open-
ended questions, suggesting possible lines of future research.
The first explicit conjugation of the terms occurs, then, in the 1947 Master’s the-
sis on Hegel. Appropriately enough, perhaps, it implicates Spinoza, simply alerting
us to the “contingency (or necessity) of the circumstance that Spinozism as a doc-
trine made its appearance in history by way of a lens-grinder” (Althusser 1997, 102).
Possibly of more substance is the use of the oxymoron in an article on Roman Ca-
tholicism, dating from 1949, in which Althusser writes of the “contingent necessity
that appeared, in France, as a need for an ‘extra dash of religious spirit’ to compen-
sate the relative decline in the Church’s state role” (232).
 Althusser and Contingency 77

I have already made reference to “On the Young Marx” of a decade or so later.
However, it is in his de facto philosophical manifesto of 1962, “Contradiction and
Overdetermination” (1965,87-128), that something like a theory of the necessary
contingency of history is adumbrated, prioritizing Lenin as the thinker par excel-
lence of the political conjuncture. Neither a transcription of historical necessity
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nor a ratification of historical accident, on Althusserian premises revolution is the

exception that proves the rule, because the exception is the rule. And how not to
be put in mind of Cournot’s definition of chance as those eminently intelligible
events produced by the intersection-the encounter-of independent causal series,
as Althusser unfolds his concept of “overdetermination” to surmount the duality
of “structure” and “conjuncture”? Cournot, to whom positive reference will be made
in a recently released lecture of 1966, “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marx-
ist Theoretical Research” (Althusser 1995, 397-8), and again, in 1968, in “Lenin
and Philosophy” (Althusser 1990, 173), before being assimilated to the “subterra-
nean current” of the 1982 manuscript (Althusser 1994b, 566-67). But also Cournot,
who will figure in a working note of 1966 that reads like something of an outline
for the last: “1. Theory of the encounter or conjunction (=genesis . . . ) (cf. Epicurus,
clinamen, Cournot), chance etc., precipitation, coagulation. 2. Theory of the con-
juncture (=structure) . . . philosophy as general theory of the conjuncture (=con-
junction)” (Althusser 1997, 10).
Indeed, throughout the phase of “high Althusserianism” we find what we might
characterize as indices of the same problematic-for example, in connection with those
historical events that are “epistemological breaks.” Althusser’s commonest term for the
advent of historical materialism and psychoanalysis alike issurgissement, with its sense
of “sudden appearance” or “springing up.” However, this has been partially concealed
from an Anglophone readership, since the word has hitherto invariably been translated
as “emergence,” with its more genetic-evolutionary connotations. In correspondence
with his analyst, RenC Diatkine, in 1966, Althusser will write in this idiom about not
only the advent of the theory of psychoanalysis but also its object: the unconscious. He
postulates “une logique du surgissement,” felicitously rendered as “a logic of irruption”
by Jeffrey Mehlman in his version of the Writings on Psychoanalysis, which he then
seeks to clarify by reference to “the irruption mechanism of one [determinate] mode of
production,” as analyzed by Etienne Balibar in Reading Capital (Althusser 1996b, 61).
Moreover, this is a reference to which he will return in his 1982 manuscript, breaking
off in the midst of a discussion of a “historico-aleatory” conception of mode of produc-
tion (1994b, 572-76). Althusser’s own contributions to Reading Capital address what
he identifies as the “classical opposition” of “necessity and contingency,” detecting in
the Lkvi-Straussian dichotomy of “synchrony and diachrony” a contemporary re-edition
of the paralogism (Althusser and Balibar 1965, 107ff.).
Finally, let me draw your attention to the jewel in the crown of Althusser’s post-
humous oeuvre: “Machiavelli and us” (Althusser 1995,42-161), with its analysis of
the aleatory encounter of Fortuna and Virtu in The Prince; and, at the same time, to
Emmanuel Terray’s remarkable anticipation of it, in a paper dating from 199 1, aptly
entitled “An Encounter: Althusser and Machiavelli” (Terray 1996).
 78 Elliott

By way of conclusion, I would like to pose four questions, while stressing that
they are not rhetorical. (In other words, I genuinely do not know the answers.) The
first is this: Is Balibar right, for example in his essay “Structural Causality, Over-
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determination, and Antagonism” (Balibar 1996), where he cites some of the evidence
assembled here to perceive a recurrent tension---even a permanent contradiction-
in Althusser? A tension between the LeninistA4achiavellian thinker of the singular-
ity of conjunctures and the Marxist-structuralist theorist of invariant structures-or,
in bibliographical terms, a disjunction between two essays whose composition was
separated by a mere ten months: “Contradiction and Overdetermination” and “On
the Materialist Dialectic” (Althusser 1965, 161-218).
Second, if this (or something like it) is the case, confirming in part Laclau and
Mouffe’s (1985) diagnosis of an antagonism between necessity and contingency
throughout the history of Marxism-in Althusser’s case, between “overdetermination”
in For Murx and “structural causality” in Reading C a p i t a l d o Althusser’s later writ-
ings seek to resolve it in the direction of “post-Marxism,’’ as does Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy? Do they retrospectively confirm Perry Anderson’s charge, laid
against structuralism and poststructuralism in general, of a sheer “randomization of
history” (1983,40-55)? Do they fall foul of the criticism that the theorization of con-
tingency is (in the words of one commentator on post-Marxism) “explanatory capitu-
lation in the face of happenstance” (McLennan 1996,67)? If so, would “aleatory ma-
terialism’’ represent not only an “imaginary Marxism” but also a contradiction in
terms-as much of a “yellow logarithm” as Althusser latterly considered “dialectical
materialism” to be (Althusser 1994a, 32)?
A third order of question: Is there, as Alex Callinicos has suggested to me, a pre-
cedent for Althusser’s concerns in non-Marxist, Anglophone philosophy of history?
More especially, in the work of J. T. Bury, who seems to have drawn upon Cournot
for his conception of history as a “chapter of accidents”-for example, in the essay
“Cleopatra’s Nose,” whose starting point is Pascal’s celebrated observation that “if
it had been shorter, the whole face of the world would have been different” (Pascal
1966, 162). Were the contingent and the accidental to be synonymous, as Anderson
takes them to be and as Althusser’s rubric of “aleatory materialism” intimates, how
does his own position differ from the kind of empiricist common sense of English
historians, encapsulated in H. A. L. Fisher’s oft quoted view of history as “the inter-
play of the contingent and the unforeseen”? Alternatively, is Althusser’s appropria-
tion of Cournot closer to that said to have been made by a French Marxist thinker
whom, following Lenin’s repudiation of him as a “notorious muddler” in Muterial-
ism and Empirio-Criticism, he dismissed in For Marx-namely, Georges Sorel, whose
concern with the “logic of contingency” may, in fact, render him a native “precur-
sor”? Another subject for research.
Last but not least, a provocation posing as a question. With Althusser’s closing
thoughts on necessity and contingency, are we not present at the strangest of encoun-
 Althusser and Contingency 79

ters, however brief? “Our whole age,” Foucault famously pronounced in 1970, “is
trying to escape Hegel. But any real escape. . . presupposes . . . that we know what
is still Hegelian in that which allows us to think against Hegel, and that we can as-
sess the extent to which our appeal against him is perhaps one more of the ruses he
employs against US” (1970,74-5). Insofar as the internal link between necessity and
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contingency is (so I am told) a theme of Hegel’s philosophy of history, was “alea-

t o y materiahm” the ultimate Altbussehan ruse of HegeJjan reason? And what ;f
the fastAlthusser, erstwhile author of a dissertation on Hegel, had staged a return to
the youngest Mam, sometime author of a doctorate on Democritus and . . . Epicurus?

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