Marx, Science of Contingency

Abstract

In his book On the Nature of Marx’s Things Jacques Lezra inherits another Marx and another materialism. It is an aleatory materialism: a materialism of the dynamic contingency of Marx and his “things”.  This “subterranean current” of aleatory materialism is excavated by Lezra in his swerve through the letters, notebooks, and “private notes” of a young Marx working on his doctorate thesis. Following Lezra’s necrophilological thread –which encounters Lucretius and his “things”– we find that, in a parallel fashion, Marx is also searching for a concept of science in his dissertation. This is what here is tentatively called a science of contingency. This science - though not in the usual disciplinary sense- opens the possibility of an alliance with Karen Barad’s performative materialism that displaces the humanism of the “new materialisms” by thinking alongside another science of contingency, also of a certain Lucretian inheritance, and which Marx did not get to think: quantum mechanics.