La contingenza dello Stato, della società e della “multitudo”. Althusser di fronte a Hobbes

After having first interpreted Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy as a paradigmatic
 example of a questionable individualistic humanism, Louis Althusser saw it as a
 prefiguration of the alternative materialist approach, grounded on contingency, which he
 developed in the last part of his work as a new reading of the Marxist tradition. The paper
 reconstructs and assesses this late retrospective appropriation of Hobbes’ political
 philosophy. Focusing on the central thesis according to which society is not an organism,
 but an encounter, it offers a symptomatic reading of it, by showing that it reveals a deeper
 aporia of Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” itself. Indeed, the recourse to epicurean
 atomism prevents Althusser from maintaining his original and more fundamental thesis
 about the social formation as a complex overdetermined whole