Save

‘[A]nother kind of rain’: Aesthetic Ontology and Contagious Imaginations in Althusser’s Aleatory Materialism

In: Historical Materialism
Author:
Thomas Carmichael Professor Emeritus, Department of English and Writing Studies, University of Western Ontario London Canada

Search for other papers by Thomas Carmichael in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Close
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4628-5940
Download Citation Get Permissions

Access options

Get access to the full article by using one of the access options below.

Institutional Login

Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials

Login via Institution

Purchase

Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):

$40.00

Abstract

One of the remarkable features of recent interest in the work of Louis Althusser has been the prominence granted to Althusser’s cultural criticism. However, aside from one notable exception, Althusser’s cultural criticism has not figured prominently in discussions of his late work, and the absence of Althusser’s cultural criticism from those discussions has perhaps unwittingly obscured both the genealogy of Althusser’s late aesthetic ontology and the logic of his last texts, of ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ and related writings on aleatory materialism. By tracing the genealogy of the aleatory impulse in Althusser’s cultural criticism, it is possible to show how that work resonates in Althusser’s late texts including the larger unpublished manuscript from which ‘The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ has been drawn. This reading of the philosophy of the encounter also allows us to understand the importance of Nicolas Malebranche for Althusser’s aleatory materialism.

Content Metrics

All Time Past 365 days Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 787 163 22
Full Text Views 85 19 2
PDF Views & Downloads 225 52 5