Philosophy of the Encounter Quotes

“One of the goals of philosophy is wage theoretical battle. That is why we can say that every thesis is always, by its very nature, an antithesis. A thesis is only ever put forward in opposition to another thesis, or in defence of a new one.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“Without claiming to be exhaustive, I maintain that every philosophy reproduces within itself, in one way or another, the conflict in which it finds itself compromised and caught up in the outside world.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“...Marx was constrained to think within a horizon torn between the aleatory of the Encounter and the necessity of the Revolution.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“A man of nothing who has started out from nothing starting out from an unassignable place: these are, for Machiavelli, the conditions for regeneration.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

“There exists [a] word in German, Geschichte, which designates not accomplished history, but history in the present, doubtless determined in large part, yet only in part, by the already accomplished past; for a history which is present, which is living, is also open to a future that is uncertain, unforeseeable, not yet accomplished, and therefore aleatory. Living history obeys only a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not use the term 'constant', which I have taken from Levi-Strauss, but an expression of genius: 'tendential law', capable of inflecting (but not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a tendency does not possess the form or figure of linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the impact of an encounter with another tendency, and so on ad infinitum. At each intersection the tendency can take a path that is unforeseeable because it is aleatory.”
― Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987