Althusser and the Absolute Beginning

This essay engages the debate around the Althusserian concept of the void, presented in “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter.” While Althusser claimed that an aleatory void is needed for a structural transformation to take place, his commentators object to linking the concepts of the void and the encounter. However, both Althusser and his commentators rely on the concept of the pure void to explain such a transformation, an idea that Hegel rejects. This essay shows that Hegel’s dialectics already provide a conceptual framework for grasping the transformation of social structures resulting from internal contradictions.