Infinitesimal swerve in Louis Althusser’s letter on art

The study shows the socio-philosophical value of the ontological foundation that Louis Althusser laid into his thought in late writings, demonstrating at the same time how this foundation correlates with fragments of Althusser’s letter on art. The article focuses on Louis Althusser’s 1982 text “The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter", where the author identified a series of closely related elements of thought in works by Epicurus, Lucretius, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Heidegger, and Derrida, interpreting these elements from an implicit Leibnizian perspective. Althusser called the line that he traced on historical and philosophical material “aleatory materialism". We pay special attention to the analysis of Althusser’s late writing as well as to his letter on art as a fact of social reality. The article emphasizes the issues of art as a social phenomenon, and considers the ontological perspective of Althusser’s writings, within which, in particular, an interpellation model of subjectification of the individual during his incorporation into the social body takes on the meaning of fundamental structure of the aleatory Event. As a result, he shows the specificity of works of art as an area where the subject discovers the structure of social relations that reproduces himself.