Encountering Althusser

Katja Diefenbach is Advising Researcher in the Theory Department, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. She has taught at the University of Arts, Berlin and Humboldt University. Recent publications include texts on post-structuralism and post-workerism in Inventionen, I. Lorey et al. eds. (Diaphanes 2011), Becoming Major, Becoming Minor, V. Brito et al. eds (JVE 2011). Sara R. Farris is a sociologist and political theorist. She is the author of numerous articles on sociological and political theory, international migrations and gender studies and of monographs and edited volumes including Politics Enchanted. Religion, Subjectivity and Nationalism in Max Weber (Brill 2012) and co-editor of La Straniera. Informazioni, sito-bibliografie e ragionamenti su razzismo e sessismo (Alegre 2009). She is a member of the Editorial Board of Critical Sociology.Gal Kirn is Research Fellow at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany. He is a co-editor of Yugoslav Black Wave Cinema and Its Transgressive Moments (JVE 2012), editor of Postfordism and its discontents (JVE, B-Books and Mirovni Inštitut 2010) and co-editor of New public spaces. Dissensual Political and Artistic Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context (JVE and Moderna Galerija 2009). He participates in the Workers'-Punks' University. Peter D. Thomas is Lecturer in the History of Political Thought at Brunel University, London. His publications include: The Gramscian Moment (Brill 2009); the translation of Antonio Negri's Goodbye Mr Socialism, (Seven Stories 2008), (with A. Toscano) Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek's, Philosophy in the Present (Polity 2009) and (with S. R. Farris) Mario Tronti's The Autonomy of the Political (2012). He serves on the editorial board of Historical Materialism.

• Introduction / I. Aleatory Materialism and the Philosophy of the Encounter / 1. The Hazards of Aleatory Materialism in the Late Philosophy of Louis Althusser (André Tosel) / 2. Rethinking Aleatory Materialism(Panagiotis Sotiris) / 3. "An Immense Aspiration to Being:" The Causality and Temporality of the Aleatory (Giorgos Fourtounis) / 4. History as "Permanent Revocation of the Accomplished Fact:" Machiavelli in the Last Althusser (Vittorio Morfino) / 5. The Parallax Object of Althusser's Materialist Philosophy (Katja Kolšek) / 6. The Very Essence of the Object, the Soul of Marxism, and Other Singular Things: Spinoza in Althusser 1959-67 (G.M. Goshgarian) / II. Althusser's Non-Contemporaries 7. Althusser, Machiavelli and Us: Between Philosophy and Politics (Mikko Lahtinen) / 8. Conjuncture, Conflict, War: Machiavelli between Althusser and Foucault (1975-6) (Warren Montag) / 9. Althusser's Last Encounter: Gramsci (Peter D. Thomas) / 10. Althusser and Spinoza: Thinking the Enigma of Subjectivity without a Subject (Caroline Williams) / 11. Althusser with Deleuze: How to Think Spinoza's Immanent Cause? (Katja Diefenbach) / 12. Althusser and Tronti: The Autonomy of the Political versus the Primacy of Politics (Sara Farris) / III. Thinking Production and Reproduction / 13. Louis Althusser and the Concept of Economy (Ceren Özselçuk) / 14. Althusser and the Critique of Political Economy(Michele Cangiani) / 15. The Problem of Reproduction: Probing the Lacunae of Althusser's Theoretical Investigations of Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Frieder Otto Wolf) / 16. To Think the New in the Absence of its Conditions: Althusser and Negri and the Philosophy of Primitive Accumulation (Jason Read) / IV. The Materiality of Ideology, the Primacy of Politics / 17. The Impossible Break: Ideology in movement between Philosophy and Politics (Isabelle Garo) / 18. The Theory of Ideology and the Theory of the Unconscious (Pascale Gillot) / 19. Ideological Interpellation: Identification and Subjectivation (Rastko Mocnik) ./ 20. "Es kömmt drauf an:" Notes on Althusser's Critique of the Subject )Ozren Pupovac) / 21. Between the Tenth and Eleventh Theses on Feuerbach: Althusser's Return to New Materialism (Gal Kirn)

Encountering Althusser spans the length of twenty-one essays, divided into four parts, each part attentive to a theme that occupied Althusser at different stages of his thought ... The Marxist philosopher pays homage to the aleatory that defines any encounter worthy of its name, and does so in the name of, or rather for, Marx.