The primacy of encounter over form

Abstract

The essay considers The subterranean current ofthe materialism of encounter as the most important among Althusser's writings of the Eighties. The risk underlynig this text is to consider it as a setting aside of the powerful rationalism of the
Sixties' writings in a philosophy of the event, of chance, or, even worst, of liberty. Thus, the challenge is not so much in the negation of the ambiguities on which such interpretations are based, as to acknowledge them and bring them out, trying to solve them throught a theoretical stroke that allows to put at the centre of Althusser's text an unwritten thesis, which however represents its keystone: the thesis of the primacy of the encounter over the form. Hence a fundamental question suddenly arises, which regards the connection between that thesis and the account of the primacy of relation over the elements, on which Althusser insisted in his Sixties' and Seventeen's writings.