June 21, 2018:
Lastly, "Aleatory Materialism" is a late Althusserian attempt to extend his rejection of geneticist and teleological conceptions by formulating a "materialism of the encounter", in which chance plays a significant part. Because there are no universal laws of history, a degree of randomness determines how things turn out. He cites the example of the rise of the capitalist mode of production from the "encounter" between "the owners of money" and "the proletarian stripped of everything but his labor-power": this encounter might never have happened, or, it might have happened many times without "taking-hold" and lasting. He cites the Renaissance states of the Po valley, where there were men with plentiful money, plentiful energy provided by the hydraulic power of the river, and plentiful unemployed manpower, but where capitalism nevertheless failed to happen, "for lack of an element or a suitable arrangement of the elements", perhaps that of a domestic market capable of absorbing what might have been produced. Once this taking-hold is accomplished, it becomes possible to analyze its laws — but not before. A strict demotion of the idea of necessity in history.
Althusser's elaboration of his thinking on aleatory materialism is uniquely uncharacteristic within his so-far published work, relying on a metaphysical-beautiful-story paraphrased from Epicurus. "Before the beginning of the world, an infinity of atoms were falling parallel to each other in the void." An image, a myth, a foundational fiction, an act of poetry: a figure, not a concept: not what anyone expected from Louis Althusser at the end of his career.