Left Atomism: Marx, Badiou, and Althusser on the Greek

Atomists
Joseph M. Spencer

Theory & Event, Volume 17, Issue 3, 2014, (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/553384

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 Left Atomism 1

Left Atomism: Marx, Badiou, and Althusser on the Greek Atomists

Joseph M. Spencer

Abstract

Alain Badiou and Louis Althusser both wrote on the viability of grounding leftist politics in the ontology of the
ancient Greek atomists, each thus marking his complicated relation to Marx’s doctoral dissertation. There Marx
made two crucial claims: that the Epicurean development of atomism was dialectically materialist; and that
Epicureanism therefore models a politically productive ontology. In revisiting Marx’s dissertation, Badiou defends
the first of Marx’s claims while rejecting the second, but Althusser defends the second while rejecting the first. Due
to an inconsistency in Althusser’s position, Badiou’s is the more promising—though not the only—political take on
atomism.

Introduction

In the first of his justly famous “Theses on Feuerbach,” Karl Marx identified both what he took to be “the chief
defect of all hitherto existing materialism” and the unfortunate philosophical consequence of that defect. In
materialism leading up to and including Feuerbach, he claimed, “the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only
in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not subjectively.” For
this reason, moreover, “it happened that the active side, in contradistinction to materialism, was developed by
idealism—but only abstractly, since, of course, idealism does not know real, sensuous activity as such.”1 Thus, as is
well known, the “rational kernel” of Hegelian idealism had, according to Marx, to be freed from its “mystical shell”
so that it could be recognized as the motor of material history.2 Already in his 1841 doctoral dissertation, The
Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature, Marx’s conviction concerning the
necessary fusion of Hegel’s dialectic with an uncompromising materialism was central to his thought. There, as if to
contradict his later too-universal claim about the defect of all previous materialisms, he argued in essence that in
Epicurean materialism there could be found a subtle and universally overlooked Hegelian-like dialectic—the seed,
then, of exactly the sort of dialectical materialism that was needed in the nineteenth century.3

Generally speaking, Marxists have been content—and for good reasons—not to bother much with Marx’s
dissertation. The sort of detailed work Marx had to undertake even just to bring out of Epicurus’ texts what he took
to be the Hegelian twist of Epicurean materialism, coupled with the historical and cultural distance between post-
Aristotelian Greece and the modern era, suggests that the time of those engaged in political struggle could be better
spent than in revisiting the development of Greek atomism. Nonetheless, the late 1970s and early 1980s saw two of
France’s more important Marxist thinkers giving themselves to, precisely, close readings and reinvestigations of the
Greek atomists. First, in Theory of the Subject, Alain Badiou worked out his relation to the atomists as part of
“disassembl[ing] and reassembl[ing] in its entirety the old fool’s bridge of the relation Marx/Hegel.”4 Then, in
manuscripts and interviews that were published only posthumously, Louis Althusser worked out his own relation to
the atomists as part of contesting Marx’s reliance on “a philosophy—Hegel’s—which was arguably not the one
which best suited his objective.”5 Though, curiously, neither of these thinkers mentions Marx’s dissertation in his
work on the atomists,6 the fact that each saw it necessary to look closely at Greek atomism, and to do so in order to
think carefully about Marx’s relationship to Hegel, suggests that Marx’s dissertation has come in some sense to be of
realer importance than is recognized.

The first aim of this paper is simply to review the too-brief history of what I call in my title “left atomism.”7 I thus
aim to bring to light the fact that Badiou and Althusser, despite sharing the project of subtracting certain Hegelian
elements from Marx, come to radically opposed conclusions regarding the political and philosophical relevance of
Epicurean atomism. As I will show, Marx might be said ultimately to have set forth two claims in this regard—first,
that there is something crucially Hegelian about the development of atomism from Democritus to Epicurus, and
second, that Epicurean atomism should therefore be embraced as a productive ontology for political radicalism.
Badiou’s position amounts ultimately to the acceptance of the first of these claims and the rejection of the second,
while Althusser’s amounts to the acceptance of the second and the rejection of the first. Such is the history of sorts
that I will be tracing. The second aim of my paper is to offer, in the course of my discussion of Althusser, an
argument that Badiou’s position on atomism is ultimately more consistent than Althusser’s. More specifically, I will
 Left Atomism 2

suggest that, because Althusser fails to provide a fully non-Hegelian account of Epicurean atomism, he fails to
recognize what may be his own implicit dialectical commitments. In a brief conclusion, I suggest what especially the
difficulties faced by Althusser suggest about the limits of employing an atomistic ontology for Marxist political
practice.

Marx’s Left Atomism

The stated aim of Marx’s dissertation was to contest the prevalent opinion—ancient and modern—that Epicurean
philosophy is at best “a syncretic combination of Democritean physics and Cyrenaic morality.”8 Relying from the
beginning on Hegel, Marx asks whether it is “an accident that with the Epicureans, Stoics, and Sceptics all moments
of self-consciousness are represented completely, but every moment as a particular existence.”9 Summing up what
he therefore took to be the Hegelian element of post-Aristotelian Greek thought, he states his thesis:

It seems to me that though the earlier systems are more significant and interesting for the content, the post-
Aristotelian ones, and primarily the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptic schools, are more significant
and interesting for the subjective form, the character of Greek philosophy. But it is precisely the subjective
form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in
favor of their metaphysical characteristics.10

Marx examines the relationship between Epicurus and his predecessor Democritus at length to illustrate this larger
thesis.

The claim against which Marx takes particular aim is the prevalent one that Epicurus was, in his philosophy of
nature, “a mere plagiarist of Democritus.”11 This claim, according to Marx, comes up against “a curious and
insoluble riddle”: “Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but—how
inconsistent!—they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and
all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general.”12 After a brief demonstration of the
diametric opposition between Democritus and Epicurus on epistemology,13 Marx takes up a point-by-point
investigation of each thinker’s philosophy of nature. This latter comparison is presented in five chapters, but only
the first chapter, dealing with “The Declination of the Atom from the Straight Line” in the Epicurean adaptation of
Democritus, concerns me here. It is there that the peculiarly Hegelian twist Marx traces in Epicurus is to be found. It
is also, importantly, this question of the declination or the swerve (often called simply by its Latin name, as
employed in Lucretius: the clinamen) that draws attention from both Badiou and Althusser.

Marx summarizes the basic issues in the following words:

Epicurus assumes a threefold motion of the atoms in the void. One motion is the fall in a straight line, the
second originates in the deviation of the atom from the straight line, and the third is established through the
repulsion of the many atoms. Both Democritus and Epicurus accept the first and the third motion. The
declination of the atom from the straight line differentiates the one from the other.14

Because Democritus accounted for the development of the cosmos purely by necessity, Epicurus’ addition of an
aleatory swerve to the Democritean picture was often the subject of both ancient and modern criticism—even of
ridicule. All seem to be agreed that Epicurus introduced the swerve into the Democritean picture only when, with
some embarrassment, “it occurred to him that if all atoms were thrust downwards, no atom could ever meet another
one.”15 But, as Marx points out, Lucretius responded to this objection long ago, showing that though “the atoms
meet without declination,” there is still a swerve.16 “Cicero might well laugh,” Marx wrote in his preparatory
notebooks, but “he knew as little about philosophy as about the president of the United States of North America.”17
On Marx’s reading, then, there is much more to the story of Epicurus’ introduction of the swerve into the fall of the
atoms.

Marx begins, however, with a deeply Hegelian explanation of the pre-declination fall of the atoms, drawing directly
on Hegel’s crucial notion of Aufhebung (sublation):

Just as the point is negated [aufgehoben] in the line, so is every falling body negated [again: aufgehoben] in
the straight line it describes. Its specific quality does not matter here at all … Every body, insofar as we are
concerned with the motion of falling, is therefore nothing but a moving point, and indeed a point without
 Left Atomism 3

independence, which in a certain mode of being—the straight line which it describes—surrenders its
individuality.18

There is on Marx’s reading a sublation, an Aufhebung that takes place in the strictly linear motion of atomic fall.
Whatever may be particular or individual about a thing is rendered indifferent when it is regarded as a falling body,
as a body in strictly linear motion. As A. A. Long notes: “If an atom is unimpeded by collision with other atoms its
speed and direction of motion are invariant. Epicurus grasped the important fact that differences of weight make no
difference to the velocity of bodies falling in a vacuum.”19 In Marx’s own words: “A falling apple describes a
perpendicular line just as a piece of iron does.”20 What falls is thus negated—and preserved—in the trajectory of its
fall through a void. “The straight line,” Marx wrote in more obviously Hegelian terms in his notebooks on Epicurus,
“is the being-otherwise of the [particular] point,” as well, in the end, as “its existence”—in fact its material
existence.21 Marx explains this in the dissertation: “the atom, insofar as its motion is a straight line, is determined
only by space” and it is therefore “a relative being and a purely material existence.”22 It is thus the rain of the atoms
in the void that, on Marx’s view, constitutes the materialism both of Democritus and of Epicurus.

This materialism, however, is still an inert or one-sided materialism (the materialism of Newtonian mechanics), and
Marx was interested—even at this early point—in a materialism that could move beyond consideration of reality
“only in the form of the object or of contemplation.” Hence, on Marx’s reading, the importance of the Epicurean
swerve, which he introduces as follows:

The solidity of the atom does not even enter into the picture, insofar as it is only considered as something
falling in a straight line. To begin with, if the void is imagined as spatial void, then the atom [if it is not
negated in strictly linear motion] is the immediate negation of abstract space, hence a spatial point. The
solidity, the intensity, which maintains itself in itself against the incohesion of space, can only be added by
virtue of a principle which negates space in its entire domain … Moreover, if this itself is not admitted, the
atom, insofar as its motion is a straight line, is determined only by space and is prescribed a relative being
and a purely material existence. But we have seen that one moment in the concept of the [Epicurean] atom is
that of being pure form, negation of all relativity, of all relation to another mode of being … But the relative
existence which confronts the atom, the mode of being which it has to negate, is the straight line. The
immediate negation of this motion is another motion, which, therefore, spatially conceived, is the declination
from the straight line.23

The passage is difficult, but it becomes clearer when compared with Marx’s notebooks:

The atom, the material point, which excludes from itself the being-otherwise [of the point in the straight line]
and is absolute immediate being-for-self, excludes therefore the simple direction, the straight line, and
swerves away from it. It shows that its nature is not [mere] spatiality [or merely inert materiality], but being-
for-self. The law which it follows is different from that of spatiality … The atom is [thus] indifferent to the
breadth of [spatial] existence, it does not split up into differences which have being, but just as little is it mere
being, the immediate, which is, as it were, indifferent to its being, but it exists rather precisely in being
different from [inert material] existence; it encloses itself in itself against that existence; in terms of the
sensuous it swerves away from the straight line.24

Marx’s point in these passages might be encapsulated in a simple formula: The swerve marks a formal torsion in the
material. In Marx’s summary words: “If Epicurus therefore represents the materiality of the atom in terms of its
motion along a straight line, he has given reality to its form-determination in the declination from the straight line,
and these opposed determinations [material and formal] are represented as directly opposed motions.”25 The formal
is, as it were, produced—and produced arbitrarily, aleatorily—within the material. In the irrepressibly material atom
is realized the form of self-relation, of self-consciousness.26

With this gesture, at once dialectical and materialist, Marx’s Epicurus not only removes the defect of hitherto
existing (Democritean) materialism, but also—and so many centuries in advance—effectively frees the rational
kernel of the Hegelian dialectic from its mystical shell. That the Epicurean gesture is not without political import is
stated rather bluntly by Marx by way of conclusion: “Lucretius therefore is correct when he maintains that the
declination breaks the fati foedera and, since he applies this immediately to consciousness, it can be said of the atom
that the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist.”27 He suggests this political
relevance in another way in his notebooks: “This potestas, this declinare, is the defiance, the headstrongness of the
atom, the quiddam in pectore of the atom; it does not characterize its relationship to the world as the relationship of
 Left Atomism 4

the fragmented and mechanical world to the single individual.”28 Marx’s subsequent political thought, developed out
of these early reflections on the materialization of Hegel’s thought, is already on the horizon.

So much for Marx’s own work on Epicurus, his inauguration of a Left Atomism that would lie dormant for more
than a century. What should be said about its rebirth?

Badiou’s Left Atomism

In order to come to Badiou’s treatment of the atomists, it is necessary first to set up the project in which that
treatment appears, Theory of the Subject. The first part of that work is dedicated to a remarkable reading of Hegel’s
Science of Logic, one that dispenses with what Badiou calls the “worthless” opposition between “an (acceptable)
dialectical kernel” and “an (abominable) idealistic shell.” According to Badiou, “the dialectic, inasmuch as it is the
law of being, is necessarily materialist.”29 Of course, Badiou does not disagree with the larger Marxist tradition that
“Hegel vacillates,” and that he does so “in the vicinity of this rock that … Marxists call the ‘primacy of practice,’
and Lacan the real.”30 But according to Badiou, Hegel hovers between two sorts of dialectic rather than between
materialism and idealism:

The general idea is that a dialectical sequence approaches its closure when the practical process carries its
theory in its own wake, when it possesses in itself the active clarity of its temporal trace. But this can be
taken in two senses:
- Either in the sense of the theological circularity which, presupposing the absolute in the seeds of the
beginning, leads back to this very beginning once all the stages of its effectuation, its alienation, its going-
outside-itself, and so on, are unfolded …
- Or in the sense of the pure passage from one sequence to the other, in an irreconcilable, unsuturable lag,
where the truth of the first stage gives itself to begin with only as the condition of the second as fact, without
leading back to anything other than the unfolding of this fact.31

Badiou’s contention is that it is the latter, not the former, that provides the model for radical political work. “The
emphasis,” therefore, he says, “falls entirely on discontinuity, even on failure,”32 on successive periods of pursuing
the production of what Badiou in 1976 had already called “communist invariants.”33

To the dialectic that forestalls periodization for the sake of circularity Badiou gives the name “structural dialectic.”34
And it is in order to illustrate the structural dialectic—the trap into which, despite having glimpsed the possibility of
a periodizing and therefore fully materialist dialectic, Hegel ultimately fell—that Badiou turns to the atomists. In
choosing this particular illustration, importantly, he follows Hegel himself, though complexly, as will be seen.35

On Badiou’s account, every structural dialectician faces three “canonical problems,” three difficulties to be tackled
in the effort to allow “the structural aspect of the dialectic [to] prevail over its historical aspect.”36 The work of
producing a structural dialectic is thus the work, first, of replacing a strong qualitative difference with a
“homogeneous combinatory space, wherein a process becomes composed with terms of the same kind.”37 It is then,
second, the work of making disappear whatever (third) term was introduced to produce the desired “homogeneous
combinatory space.” Finally, it is the work of determining how the vanished term, as vanished term, can serve as
cause of all it supposedly brings about. According to Badiou, it was the Greek atomists—and in particular Epicurus
with his swerve—who were “the first in all this.”38

In setting up the context in which the swerve becomes philosophically important, Badiou follows Hegel closely.
Like Hegel, he asserts that atomism begins with a radical difference, that “between atoms and the void.”39 In Hegel’s
words (which Badiou quotes), the atomists make “this simple determinateness of the one [the oneness or “fullness”
of individual atoms] and the void the principle of all things, by reducing the manifold of the world to this simple
opposition and daring to derive knowledge of it [the world] from the latter [the simple opposition].”40 But, as Badiou
notes, this strong difference is a real obstacle, for “if the atoms stand in a radical qualitative exteriority to the void …
then it is clear that nothing happens.”41 Again in Hegel’s words (this time words not quoted by Badiou): “The one
and the void are being-for-itself, the highest qualitative in-itselfness that has sunk to the most complete externality;
immediacy, or the being of the one, since it is the negation of all otherness, is posited as no longer determinable and
alterable.”42

What is to be done in the face of this impasse? Badiou explains: “One will therefore argue … that the void
 Left Atomism 5

engenders the movement of the atoms … The void is causal.”43 Here, again, Badiou is following Hegel, and he
quotes him at length:

With the earliest thinkers, however, the atomistic principle did not remain in this externality but also had,
besides its abstraction, a speculative determination inasmuch as the void was recognized as the source of
movement, and this entails quite a different connection of atom and void than the mere juxtaposition and
mutual indifference of these two determinations.44

The result of this causal relationship between the void and the atoms is that “the atoms all move together eternally
and according to parallel trajectories”—the famous rain of the atoms in the void.45 And, moreover, this correlation
between atoms and the void provides, as Badiou says, the first “sign of dialectical and even … of speculative
profundity.”46 And it is precisely this that Hegel, in the passages from the Science of Logic to which Badiou is here
giving close attention, desires to affirm in ancient atomism. There is, according to Hegel, a dialectical twist in the
most ancient of atomist claims, namely, that the void is in some sense the cause of the atomic rain.

Importantly, though, this is as far as Hegel goes with the atomists in the Science of Logic. Having set the atoms in
motion, he finishes his remark on atomism and returns to his own concerns. One might say that Hegel’s interest
extends no further than Democritus.47 Badiou, however, is interested principally in Epicurus because he wants to
argue that the Epicurean swerve—a departure, as has already been made clear, from Democritus—outlines the
threefold gesture of the structural dialectic, eventually reproduced by Hegel. But if Hegel is, at least in the Science of
Logic, content to conclude his dialectical borrowings from the atomists with the Democritean gesture, it is Marx
who, in his dissertation, attempts to reveal a Hegelian dialectic at work in the Epicurean swerve. Badiou effectively
weaves Hegel’s own explicit interests in Democritus with Marx’s subsequent Hegelian interpretation of Epicurus in
order to show the manner in which the atomist project outlines in advance the (problematic) structural dialectic.

With the Democritean rain of atoms in the void underway, the atomists finally come up against the first of the three
canonical problems of the structural dialectic. As Badiou explains, “the simultaneous and isotropic vection of an
infinity of atoms, without the shadow of a doubt, [is] equivalent to their absolute immobility. Once again, nothing
happens.”48 What overcomes this difficulty, according to Badiou, is the Epicurean declination: “An atom is deviated,
the world can come into being. The sudden obliqueness of a trajectory interrupts the identical movement of the
atoms and produces a collision of particles from which is finally born a combined multiplicity, a thing, sufficient to
make up a world.”49 How, though, does it accomplish this? Here Badiou seems to rely, without ever saying so, on
Marx’s dissertation:

If an atom relates to the void in a manner that is not the general rule for all atoms, it may function as
atomistic designation of the void itself. It is here that strong difference begins its involution into weak
difference, since the opposition between the deviating atom … and the atom as pure principle reinscribes
from one atom to another, and thus within the same kind of principle, the absolute heterogeneity of the void
and the atom.50

The swerve amounts to an atom’s relating to the void in a novel way. Because this novel relation amounts to an
“atomistic designation of the void”—that is, to a kind of inscription of the otherwise absolutely heterogeneous void
within the swerving atom—there is a homogenization of atoms and void. The heterogeneity of the void as pure space
(of that which, according to Marx, secures the materiality of the atoms) is negated by the immediately self-relating-
because-swerving atoms that, precisely through that negation, render spatiality a moment internal to the process of
their own self-relatedness. Strong difference is transformed into weak difference precisely as the atoms undergo
what Marx described as a Hegelian dialectic, the inter-mediation of (formal) atoms and (material) void. As if to
make perfectly clear that he has Marx’s dissertation in mind, with its concluding talk of resistance and defiance,
Badiou compares the swerve to the way “masses make history”: “popular creativity, the revolt in action, marks the
antagonistic element within their very midst.”51

This is only the atomists’ response to the first of Badiou’s three canonical problems of the structural dialectic. In
addition to reducing heterogeneity to homogeneity, it is necessary to make the introduced agent of the reduction
disappear, and then to determine how that vanishing term, as vanishing term, can serve as cause. It remains, in short,
to make the swerve disappear, and then to determine how the indiscernible swerve can have been the cause of the
world. But what would it mean to make the swerve disappear? “It means,” says Badiou, “that no atom should ever
be mappable as deviant, in any combination of atoms whatsoever, even though the existence of deviation conditions
 Left Atomism 6

the very existence of a combinatory.”52 Consequently, Badiou goes on, “no sooner has [the swerve] marked the void
in the universe of atoms than it must be the absolute void of this mark.”53 The swerve, despite its being the condition
of the collapse of the absolutely heterogeneous into a homogeneous structure, has to be indiscernible.

With that gesture, the Epicureans were left, on Badiou’s account, to undertake the endless task of deciding how the
vanishing swerve, as vanishing, could function as genuine condition of all that one experiences with the senses.
They were left, in other words, to take up their unending debate with the Stoics about “the unity of causes ‘among
themselves,’” which the Stoics affirmed but—making reference precisely to the swerve—the Epicureans denied.54
The ancient atomists thus ultimately anticipated the Hegelian dialectic in that they produced a “theological
circularity which, presupposing the absolute in the seeds of the beginning, leads back to this very beginning once all
the stages of its effectuation, its alienation, its going-outside-itself, and so on, are unfolded.”

Badiou, like Marx, sees a properly Hegelian dialectic in Epicurus’ development of the Democritean project.
Similarly, Badiou, like Marx, sees in that dialectic the first hint of a genuinely materialist dialectic. But Badiou is
less optimistic than Marx about how far that dialectic can go. On Badiou’s account, the atomists should be revisited
in order to make clear that the young Marx’s interest in them indicated how much further he had still to go in the
development of his thought. Moving beyond Hegel and the atomists—but not without the help of, precisely, Hegel
and the atomists—Marx would have to separate out the periodizing dialectic from the structural dialectic and,
without reserve, embrace the former.

Althusser’s Left Atomism

Though he would only weigh in on atomism systematically after the publication of Badiou’s Theory of the Subject
(to which he never made reference), Althusser was hard at work on the relationship between Marx and Hegel long
before Badiou had anything to say in print on the matter. In profoundly influential works in the 1950s, 1960s, and
early 1970s, Althusser set as his task to complicate Marx’s debt to Hegel. While that complication took the shape at
first of outright rejection of Hegel’s relevance to Marxism,55 it eventually took the shape of a nuanced analysis of
what exactly Marx—and, more particularly, Lenin—saw to be productive in Hegel’s thought: the idea of a
subjectless process.56 In the place of whatever Hegelian strains are to be found in Marx’s writings, Althusser
attempted in those decades to insert what he would eventually call “a philosophy of Bachelardian and structuralist
inspiration.”57 But by the mid-1970s and especially the 1980s, he was willing to confess that in doing so, he had
“missed the mark” by “fail[ing] to give Marx the philosophy that best suited his work.”58 The ontology that had been
needed all along but whose place had been usurped in Marx himself was originally set out in what Althusser dubbed
“aleatory materialism, in the line of Epicurus and Democritus.”59 A return to atomism was needed, but emphatically
without Hegelian commitments.

In a posthumously published manuscript from the mid-1980s, Althusser laid out his most systematic account of
Epicurean atomism and its importance to Marxist thought. Like Marx and Badiou, he took as his project less to
distinguish between materialism and idealism than between two kinds of materialism. But whereas Marx had seen
dialectics to be at work only in the right sort of materialism and Badiou had seen dialectics—of two different
kinds—to be at work in both forms of materialism (a position Althusser had himself embraced in the 1960s),60
Althusser saw dialectics to be at work only in the wrong sort of materialism: Marx’s wrong-headed interest in Hegel.
To embrace atomism as an appropriate ontology for Marxism is, for Althusser, to reject Hegel out of hand. There is,
it seems, nothing Hegelian about atomism on Althusser’s account (a far less nuanced account than he had provided
of the relevance of Hegel to Marxism in the 1960s).61 In the end, though, the non-Hegelian nature of Epicurean
atomism is more asserted and assumed than argued for by Althusser. In addition, then, to simply summarizing
Althusser’s “left atomism” in this section of this paper, I will argue that Althusser overlooked some distinctly
Hegelian elements of atomism as he himself summarizes and appropriates it.

Rather than simply privileging Epicurus, Althusser attempts to see in him the beginnings of a long “underground
current,” “an almost completely unknown materialist tradition in the history of philosophy.”62 Though this current
begins with Epicurus, it runs, in Althusser’s eyes, through “Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Heidegger,”
culminating, fascinatingly, in “Derrida.”63 It is to be distinguished from “a wholly different mode of thought,”
namely, “the various materialisms on record,” each of which takes the shape of “a materialism of necessity and
teleology.”64 While aleatory materialism has remained underground, it has not been “neglected”; rather, “it was very
early on interpreted, repressed, and perverted into an idealism of freedom,” something already at work in the
 Left Atomism 7

reception of Epicurus’ thought.65 The task of engaged philosophy is, according to Althusser, to extract aleatory
materialism from its repression, and so to free it up to play its appropriate role in Marxist thought.

Althusser presents Epicurus’ basic ontology by weaving him together with Heidegger. Just as in Epicurus’ vision,
according to whom, “before the formation of the world, there was no Meaning, neither Cause nor End nor Reason
nor Unreason,”66 Heidegger “rejects all question of the Origin, or of the Cause and End of the world.”67 And just as
in Epicurus “the origin of every world, and therefore of all reality and meaning, is due to a swerve,”68 there is “in
Heidegger a long series of developments centered on the expression es gibt—‘there is,’ ‘this is what is given.’”69 In
each thinker, there is, due to their shared “subordination of necessity to contingency,” a full recognition of the fact
that the world into which one is thrown is “haunted by a radical instability.”70 Consequently, the task of philosophy
ceases to be that of providing an account of “the Reason and Origin of things,” and instead becomes “no more than
observation,”71 a kind of perpetually renewed phenomenological task dedicated to tracing the fact that “laws can
change … without reason, that is, without an intelligible end.”72

This sort of observation—an ultimately scientific affair, according to Althusser—is what Althusser sees as having
been worked out by Marx in his most important publications, and particularly in Capital. Marx the scientific
observer dedicates himself to tracing the pattern according to which “the capitalist mode of production arose from
the ‘encounter’ between ‘the owners of money’ and the proletarian stripped of everything but his labor-power.”73
These elements “exist in history in a ‘floating’ state prior to their ‘accumulation’ and ‘combination,’ each being the
product of its own history, and none being the teleological product of the others or their history.”74 If, nonetheless
and all too often, Marx allows this most crucial insight to fall prey to his own unfortunate commitments to Hegel,
thus “deliberately leav[ing] the aleatory nature of the ‘encounter’ and its ‘taking-hold’ to one side in order to think
solely in terms of the accomplished fact of the ‘take’ and, consequently, its predestination,”75 he is to be forgiven as
well as emended in order to further the Marxist project by holding it to its ultimately scientific, non-teleological core
insights.

Such is the account of atomism—in many ways far more basic than that of Badiou or of Marx—that Althusser
provides in his late writings. Diametrically opposed to Badiou, Althusser denies that there is any specifically
Hegelian character to Epicurean atomism. Unlike Badiou, then, he definitively parts ways with the project of Marx’s
dissertation in this regard. At the same time, however, and here again he is diametrically opposed to Badiou,
Althusser nonetheless does want to affirm the importance of Epicurean atomism for Marxist thought. Stripping the
atomists of their supposed avant-la-lettre Hegelian commitments, Althusser nonetheless might be said in a sense to
agree with the young Marx that the atomists are quite relevant to the project of developing a most rigorous
materialist ontology.76

Given this diametric opposition and although Althusser never mentions Badiou in his discussion of atomism, it is
worth distinguishing more clearly the basic picture Althusser works up from the one Badiou provides in Theory of
the Subject. Badiou criticizes atomism for its theological cast, for the role played by a Christ-like vanishing term that
allows for the weakening of a qualitatively strong heterogeneity into a homogeneous combinatory space. The swerve
plays in atomism the role played by Christ in theology, that of the canceled incarnation that weakens the ontological
incommensurability between creator and creature. The indiscernibility of the swerve—a kind of atomistic Holy
Spirit—marks its theological character.77 Althusser sees something different at work in the swerve. Rather than as an
incarnation subsequently canceled in its own passion, the swerve is to be understood as something like the
untraceable mark of every world’s inherent instability—something not entirely unlike what Badiou would call the
void only a few years later in Being and Event.78 Where Badiou sees a dialectical unfolding in the several stages
marking the temporal or historical pathway from the swerve’s initial incarnation to its subsequent passion and death,
Althusser sees in the swerve a simple feature of atemporal structurality as such, in something like the fashion of
Kurt Gödel. Both Badiou and Althusser see in Epicurus’ ontology the basic elements of structure, but where Badiou
sees dialectics, Althusser sees only reflection on structure as such.

What could justify Badiou’s assertion—apart from a mere appeal to the authority of Marx’s dissertation—that there
is something genuinely dialectical about the Epicurean account of structure? What ultimately drives Badiou’s
insistence that there is a structural dialectic at work where Althusser sees only a reflection on structure as such is the
role the swerve plays in making sure that something happens. It will be recalled from the previous section that
Badiou asserts that, without the intervention of the swerve, “nothing happens.” As he explains: “Even by subjecting
the atoms to the efficacy of the void as motor, it remains the case that the differential heterogeneity of the principles
 Left Atomism 8

is kept in a sterile rigidity. Strong difference (actually, absolute difference) serves at once as a halting point.”79 It is
for this reason that Badiou relies on Marx’s Hegelian reading of the swerve. Without a Hegelian and therefore
clearly dialectical inter-mediation of atoms and void—accomplished in the dialectics of the swerve—no world could
ever be formed. The dialectic is, on Badiou’s account, necessary to the production of the world.

It should be noted that Badiou here appears to part ways with Marx in at least one important regard. Marx, I noted in
the first section of this paper, motivates his Hegelian interpretation of the swerve in part by denying, in the name of
Lucretius, that the swerve plays a causal role—by denying that Epicurus invented the swerve simply to allow the
atoms to come into contact with one another rather than to fall side-by-side endlessly in the void. Badiou, it would
appear, affirms precisely that the swerve is the cause of the world’s coming to be, that the declination of the atoms is
what gets them to combine. A closer reading, however, suggests that appearances are here deceiving. Badiou never
assigns to the swerve a specifically causal role. The dialectical nature of the swerve is a necessary condition for the
possibility, but is not therefore the cause, of the agglomeration of atoms. If atoms do not dialectically intertwine
within themselves the two terms of the originally radical heterogeneity (of the full and the empty, of atoms and
void), they cannot actually ever combine with one another. Far from denying Marx’s insight that the swerve’s
existence in Epicurus’ thought has to be otherwise motivated, Badiou arguably provides a clarification of Marx’s
basic insight.

What, then, of Althusser’s assertion—without argument—that there is nothing dialectical about atomism? It should
be noted first that, despite certain appearances, he no more than Badiou denies Marx’s basic insight that Epicurus
did not introduce the swerve into the atoms in order to provide the world with its cause.80 But how can he affirm
Marx’s insight on this point without therefore affirming the presence of a dialectical twist within the atoms thanks to
the swerve? Unfortunately, the fact is that, at least in his available writings, Althusser provides no explicit argument
distancing Epicurus from Hegel; he more assumes than argues that Epicurus provides the model of a non- or anti-
dialectical (but nonetheless politically productive) materialism. Even more unfortunately, one passage at least in
Althusser’s discussion of the Epicurean swerve sounds remarkably Hegelian, with echoes of especially Marx’s
interpretation of atomism:

It is clear that the encounter creates nothing of the reality of the world, which is nothing but agglomerated
atoms, but that it confers their reality upon the atoms themselves, which, without swerve and encounter,
would be nothing but abstract elements, lacking all consistency and existence. So much so that we can say
that the atoms’ very existence is due to nothing but the swerve and the encounter prior to which they led only
a phantom existence.81

It is difficult to know how to interpret Althusser’s language here in a non-Hegelian way. The swerve “confers their
reality upon the atoms themselves” so that they cease to be “abstract elements, lacking all consistency and
existence.” What is this if not a borrowing from Marx’s account of how the atom, in its swerve, negates the merely
abstract and relative existence determined by its fall in a straight line?

Might there, though, be a non- or anti-dialectical account of the swerve that lies behind Althusser’s words here, one
that he might have assumed without argument? If there is, it seems to me, it would have to be the account of the
swerve provided by Gilles Deleuze’s version of Lucretius.82 It is worth noting that Althusser mentions Deleuze a few
times (in rather rapid succession) in the course of his discussion of Epicureanism, though he neither makes direct
reference to his essay on Lucretius nor makes him a centerpiece of his exposition of aleatory materialism.83
Nonetheless, it was perhaps Deleuze more effectively than anyone else in France in the 1960s who positioned
himself “against the dialectic,” from Nietzsche and Philosophy onward,84 and the fact that he was willing to do so in
part by drawing on Lucretius and his account of the swerve—especially given his general pattern of privileging the
Stoics over the Epicureans—is certainly suggestive. Might Althusser simply have been assuming that Deleuze’s
account of the Epicurean swerve was the right one?

Compact though Deleuze’s account of the swerve is (it takes up less than a page in the English text), even a basic
exposition of it would occupy too much space here. Key to his interpretation, however, is his insistence that,
although the swerve is what “relates one atom to another,” it is emphatically “not a secondary movement, nor a
secondary determination of the movement, which would be produced at any time, at any place.”85 What makes the
Epicurean swerve entirely non-dialectical and non-Hegelian for Deleuze is its status as “the original determination
of the direction of the movement of the atom,” rather than what comes secondarily to modify—and so to grant
 Left Atomism 9

reality to—the original linear fall of the atoms.86 Deleuze’s account, however, is difficult to reconcile with
Althusser’s, which repeats the traditional and therefore plainly non-Deleuzian account of Epicurus’ (or, for that
matter, Lucretius’) thought: “Epicurus tells us that, before the formation of the world, an infinity of atoms were
falling parallel to each other in the void. … Then the clinamen supervenes.”87 Or as Althusser puts it in the
Hegelian-sounding quotation from above, “prior to [the swerve] they [the atoms] led only a phantom existence.”
Deleuze avoids Marx’s Hegelian Epicureanism by making the swerve an original determination, “a kind of
conatus—a differential of matter,” at once displacing the swerve from its position as a moment in an unfolding
process and obviating the need for a differentiating dialectic at all.88 Althusser, on the other hand, avoids Marx’s
Hegelian Epicureanism—or at least attempts to do so—much more simply and much less convincingly by insisting
(but again, without argument) that the aleatory nature of the swerve definitively removes it from the realm of the
dialectical.

Althusser’s strikingly Hegelian language thus remains without an apparent non-Hegelian interpretation. Although
Althusser’s talk of the aleatory might point toward a dialectic stripped of Hegel’s rational or even rationalist
commitments, it is difficult to see how it might point toward something other than a dialectic. It is, at any rate, hard
to see how what Althusser has in mind with his conception of the Epicurean swerve is anything terribly different
from what Badiou and Marx describe as a dialectic internal to the atom, the unfolding of a logic through which what
would otherwise be one-sided and abstract becomes fully existent and concrete.

Conclusion

Although the too-brief history of “left atomism” in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as I have traced it here, is the
history of a fundamental opposition between Althusser and Badiou on the relevance of Hegel to atomism, there may
be good reason to suggest that, in the end, the opposition is not nearly so strong as it first appears. If Althusser
indeed hides a dialectic—perhaps even a Hegelian dialectic—beneath his account of the atomists, then it would
seem that he and Badiou are ultimately agreed that there is something most appropriate about the young Marx’s
Hegelian reading of Epicurus. Presumably, were Althusser to have seen the likelihood that Hegel lurks in the
shadowy corners of his presentation of the atomists, he would have agreed with Badiou as well that the atomists
ultimately do not provide Marxism with the ontology it needs. Both thinkers, it seems, suggest that although Marx’s
reading of Epicurus is interpretively on the mark, it remains politically unproductive. To that extent, it would seem
best to draw the conclusion that Badiou’s more obviously clear-headed interpretation of the atomists’ limitations is
the more politically productive assessment.

A rather different story might be told here, however. Perhaps Althusser, had he recognized that he had not fully
differentiated his aleatory materialism from Marx’s Hegelian Epicureanism, might have given himself to a closer
reading of Deleuze’s essay on Lucretius. Rather than abandoning the Epicurean ontology as politically unproductive
and therefore joining with his former student in a complicated embrace of an explicitly non-Hegelian dialectic,
Althusser might have attempted to tie his interest in Epicurus directly to Deleuze’s unmistakably non-Hegelian and
anti-dialectical interpretation of Epicurean ontology. Althusser may have been in the process—unfortunately cut
short—either of independently reproducing or of simply discovering Deleuze’s own left atomism, an atomism that
would reject the dialectical complications of Marx’s dissertation in the name of recuperating the anti-theological
force of Lucretius’ poem.89

Which of these two stories is the better? Badiou himself has suggested in his book on Deleuze that something not
unlike this question might be the most important philosophical question to be asked today, given the political
exigencies of our contemporary situation.90 And whichever story best represents where Althusser might have gone, it
is not unlikely that he would at least have agreed that this question is among the most important to be asked. It
seems to me that it is worth asking again and again, if only in order to clarify the stakes of the decision that remains
to be made.

Notes

1
Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 143, emphases in
original.
2
See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 103.
3
Marx has hardly been the only person to turn to the atomists—or to Epicurus more specifically—in an attempt to
 Left Atomism 10

found a robust materialist ontology. In a certain way, Marx’s move is quintessentially modern, an echo of a good
many other thinkers in the centuries before him. See, in this regard, Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins
of Modernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2008).
4
Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009), 53.
5
Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver
Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), 257.
6
The only exception, it seems, is a handwritten note in an unpublished late text by Althusser (an earlier version of
the published text with which I will concern myself in this paper), where he notes that Marx “devoted his doctoral
thesis to [Epicurus], basing it on a splendid piece of nonsense, which the thought of his ‘youth’ made inevitable: an
interpretation of the ‘clinamen’ as ‘freedom.’” See ibid., 206.
7
As will become clear at the end of this essay, the story I recount here leaves a particularly important “left atomist”
in the margins: Gilles Deleuze. My decision to do so has been motivated in part by the necessity of focusing on a
manageable amount of material within the limited space of a paper, but also in part by the fact that Deleuze’s
relationship to Marx—and especially to his dissertation—is more complicated and distant than either Badiou’s or
Althusser’s. I hope, nonetheless, that I have done justice to Deleuze’s importance to the story I do tell, particularly in
the course of my discussions of Althusser.
8
Karl Marx, “Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers,
1975-2005), 1:34.
9
Ibid., 35. See also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. Elizabeth
S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1892-1896), 2:232-373; as well
as the discussion, which omits Epicureanism, in G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 119-138.
10
Marx, “Difference,” 36.
11
Ibid., 37.
12
Ibid., 38.
13
See ibid., 38-45.
14
Ibid., 46, emphases in original. Marx asserts here that Democritus already assumed the original motion of atoms,
before they began to collide with one another, to be that of falling in a straight line. This is actually generally denied
by standard handbooks on Presocratic thought. See, for instance, G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The
Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 416-427; and Richard D.
McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates: An Introduction with Texts and Commentary, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 2010), 316-321. Note that even Hegel, before Marx, recognized the unlikelihood that the atoms fell in
straight lines in Democritus’ thought. See Hegel, Lectures, 1:308-310. It is, however, most accurate to say, as does
A. A. Long, that “we can only speculate about what [Democritus] might have said of the original motion of an
atom.” A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London: Duckworth, 1974), 35.
15
Marx, “Difference,” 46.
16
Ibid., 47-48, 90. See also Karl Marx, “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,
Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, 50 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1975-2005), 1:416.
17
Marx, “Notebooks,” 472.
18
Marx, “Difference,” 48.
19
Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 36. See paragraph 61 of Epicurus’s Letter to Herodotus in Hellenistic Philosophy:
Introductory Readings, edited by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 12.
20
Marx, “Difference,” 48.
21
Marx, “Notebooks,” 473.
22
Marx, “Difference,” 48.
23
Ibid., 48-49, emphases in original.
24
Marx, “Notebooks,” 473.
25
Marx, “Difference,” 49.
26
Marx speaks also of “self-sufficiency.” See ibid., 49, 66-73.
27
Ibid., 49, emphasis in original.
28
Marx, “Notebooks,” 475.
29
Badiou, Theory, 3.
30
Ibid., 19.
31
Ibid., emphasis in original.
 Left Atomism 11

32
Ibid., 20.
33
Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l’ideologie (Paris: F. Maspero, 1976), 67.
34
Badiou, Theory, 53.
35
On Badiou’s complex relationship to the atomists, see Lenin Bandres, “Badiou et l’atomisme ancien,” in Ecrits
autour de la pensee d'Alain Badiou, edited by Bruno Besana and Oliver Feltham (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), 41-52.
36
Badiou, Theory, 54.
37
Ibid., 57, emphasis in original.
38
Ibid., 55.
39
Ibid., 56.
40
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2010), 134. See also Badiou, Theory, 56. (I have drawn all quotations of Hegel directly from the
Science of Logic, rather than from the text of Theory of the Subject.)
41
Badiou, Theory, 56, emphasis in original.
42
Hegel, Science, 134, emphasis in original.
43
Badiou, Theory, 56.
44
Hegel, Science, 134, emphases in original. See also Badiou, Theory, 56.
45
Badiou, Theory, 57.
46
Badiou, Theory, 57.
47
Cf. Hegel, Lectures, 1:299-310.
48
Badiou, Theory, 57.
49
Ibid., 58. It should be noted that, though Badiou will go on to rely, apparently rather heavily, on Marx’s reading of
Epicurus, he here actually contradicts Marx. See, again, Marx, “Difference,” 47-48, 90; and Marx, “Notebooks,”
416.
50
Badiou, Theory, 58.
51
Ibid., 58-59.
52
Ibid., 61.
53
Ibid. This is a point Marx himself notes as well. See Marx, “Difference,” 49.
54
See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), 270; see also 183-184.
55
See especially Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M.
Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 1997), 173-184.
56
See in particular Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New
York: Verso, 2007), 161-186; and Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 107-125.
57
Althusser, Encounter, 257.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid., 256, emphasis in original. Cf. Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (New York:
New Left Books, 1976), 178-180.
60
See the essays in Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2005).
61
See ibid.
62
Althusser, Encounter, 167.
63
Ibid.
64
Ibid., 167-168.
65
Ibid., 168, emphasis in original.
66
Ibid., 168-169.
67
Ibid., 170.
68
Ibid., 169.
69
Ibid., 170.
70
Ibid., 195., emphasis in original.
71
Ibid., 170., emphasis in original.
72
Ibid., 195-196. This discussion of Heidegger should be compared with Althusser’s mid-1960s criticisms of
Heidegger. See Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 2009),
57.
73
Althusser, Encounter, 197, emphasis in original.
74
Ibid., 198, emphasis in original.
 Left Atomism 12

75
Ibid., emphasis in original.
76
See, again, however, the handwritten note mentioned in footnote 5.
77
See Badiou, Theory, 15-18.
78
See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006), 52-59, where Badiou
briefly revisits the atomists in his theorization of the ontological void.
79
Badiou, Theory, 57.
80
One might object that other passages in Althusser’s discussion suggest that he did reject Marx’s basic insight into
the swerve’s non-causal role. He says, for instance, the following: “In the ‘nothing’ of the swerve, there occurs an
encounter between one atom and another, and this event becomes advent on condition of the parallelism of the
atoms, for it is this parallelism which, violated on just one occasion, induces the gigantic pile-up and collision-
interlocking of an infinite number of atoms, from which a world is born.” Althusser, Encounter, 191, emphasis in
original. Such passages, however, despite what seems in them to indicate causality (“induces”), are at odds with
everything Althusser explicitly sets out to do in his appropriation of Epicureanism, in which he sees an account of
the world’s in/stability stripped both of its telos and of its reason. See, for instance, ibid., 169: “Swerve, not Reason
or Cause, is the origin of the world.”
81
Ibid., 169, emphases in original.
82
See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 266-279. Compare the very brief discussion in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 184.
83
See Althusser, Encounter, 189.
84
See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 147-194. See also, in this regard, Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31-34.
85
Deleuze, Logic, 269.
86
Ibid.
87
Althusser, Encounter, 168-169.
88
Deleuze, Logic, 269.
89
Obviously, there is another entire chapter to be written on the history of left atomism: the chapter on Deleuze. If I
have largely left him in the margins of the canvas on which I have presented this sketch of atomism, it is only
because my focus is principally on the left atomist return to Marx’s dissertation.
90
See especially Badiou, Deleuze, 95-102.