The Stereoscopic Effects of Theory: Procedures of Contingency or Contingencies of Procedure? Notes on the Relationship Between Speculative Realism and Aleatory Materialism

This chapter reassesses contingency, one of the principal concepts of continental theory. The argument’s gist is to demonstrate how the dualities of contingency and necessities, reason and unreason, change and immutability, chance and cause, stability and volatility, order and disorder, and frequency and irregularity, do not simply appertain to relations of exclusion. Instead of being contraries, these opposed terms are complementaries, implying each other. It is proposed not to take these terms as oppositions but as compositions. Such conceptual compositions involving complementing contrapuntal relations transform dividing lines into overlapping zones. The argument is presented as a retrospective discussion starting with Quentin Meillassoux’s Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, a contemporary classic, and theoretical tour de force tending to blur the division between analytic and continental theory. Meillassoux’s argument is contrasted with David Hume’s non-probabilistic version of the pro et contra dialogue on miracles. The thesis is that the notion of miracles could be saved from theological, dogmatist, and superstitious interpretations if they were supplanted with the concept of contingency given in Althusser’s writings. Contrary to Meillassoux and his opponents, such as Badiou or Žižek, Althusser presents a compositional version of the relationship between contingency and necessity.