Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

A profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, from Epicurus to Marx.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Louis Althusser endured a period of intense mental instability during which he murdered his wife and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Spanning this deeply troubling period, this fourth and final volume of political and philosophical writings reveals Althusser wrestling in a creative and unorthodox fashion with a whole series of theoretical problems to produce some of his very finest work. In his profound exploration of questions of determinism and contingency, Althusser developed a “philosophy of the encounter,” which he links to a hidden and subterranean tradition in the history of Western thought which stretches from Epicurus through Spinoza and Machiavelli to Marx, Derrida and Heidegger.
"Philosophy o f the Encounter collects nearly all the philosophical work that Louis Althusser produced from late 1977 to the year he stopped producing philosophy, 1987. The main texts in it, ‘M arx in his Limits’ and ‘T he U nderground C urrent of the M aterialism of the Encounter’, date, respectively, from 1978-79 and 1982-83. Between them lies an abyss, in one sense - in 1980, overtaken by the psychosis that stalked him down to his death a decade later, Althusser killed his wife Hćlćne Rytman - and nothing, in another: ‘The Underground Current’ (rather, the amorphous manuscript out of which Fran£ois Matheron has skilfully carved it) was the first piece of any note to come from Althusser’s pen after he laid ‘M arx in his Limits’ aside."