Editing Louis Althusser (section)

=== Aleatory materialism<!--'Philosophy of the encounter' and 'Aleatory materialism' redirect here--> ===
In various short papers drafted from 1982 to 1986 and published posthumously,<ref>Louis Althusser, Qu’y faire ? Que faire ?, May 30, 1985. Fonds Althusser. L’Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine.</ref><ref>Louis Althusser, Thèses de juin 1986 (typewritten sheets, Archives IMEC), published on a site of Multitudes.</ref> Althusser is critical of the relation of Marxist science to the philosophy of dialectical materialism and [[materialism|materialist]] philosophy in general. Althusser rejects dialectical materialism and introduces a new concept: the '''philosophy of the encounter'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA-->, renamed '''aleatory materialism'''<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> in 1986.{{sfn|Althusser|2006b|p=xv}} To develop this idea, Althusser holds that there exists an “underground” or barely recognized philosophical current of aleatory Materialism,{{sfn|Althusser|2006b|p=163-207 The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter}} articulated by Marx, Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Hobbes, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida.<ref>The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Louis Althusser, First published Oct 16, 2009; substantive revision Aug 22, 2022.</ref>

He argues that it was an idealist and teleological mistake to think that there are general laws of history and that social relations are determined in the same manner as physical relations. Emphasising the role of contingency in history over laws of development he states that reconstructed historical materialism has as its object complex historical singularities or ''conjunctures'',{{sfn|Althusser|2006b|p=xl}} The ''conjuncture'' is the pivotal point, where political practice may intervene,<ref>Ross Speer, The Machiavellian Marxism of Althusser and Gramsci, Décalages: Vol. 2: Iss. 1., 2016</ref> and aleatory materialism is a materialist philosophy to understand this conjuncture.