TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 53
here, allows us to detach moments of connectivity, such as those
occurring in biological encounters, from our desires of attribution (to
origin, person, cause) and also from our desire for interpretation along
these lines, while retaining a sense of their immense impact or
consequences.
Seeing them through an Althusserian lens speaks of and to central
characteristics of biological encounters. They, too, are "that which
comes about in the mode of the unforeseeable" (Althusser,Philosophy
190),asinterventions,notintuitedbythoseaffectedbythem.Thisisso
because such biological encounters operate on the cellular level and
affectthemostvitalsystemsoftheirorganism.Hiddenintheinnermost
and (at least initially) private recesses of the body, invisible (at least
initially) to others, biological encounters exhibit one central
characteristicofAlthusserian"materialismoftheencounter":nothingin
them "prefigures... the contours and determinations of the being that
will emerge" (Althusser, Philosophy 193). Material encounters are
constellationsin whichhumansareconstantly involvedevenwhile they
elude their control, processes without subject or purpose, all the while
subjecting those exposed to them to a variety of shared biological risks
and vulnerabilities. Althusser's further point that such encounters
withhold meanings even as they insistently suggest them (Althusser,
Philosophy169-70) reminds us of a process that will be repeatedly
discussed in the following pages, namely when biological encounters
cannot (and therefore here will not) be theorized as an aggregate of
isolated ad hoc interactions, but only as thetotum simulof ceaseless
flows of exchanges, interventions, interpenetrations, among organisms
(humanandother)inthebiosphere.
And indeed, the myriad encounters forged in the invisible world of
germsandgenesareextremelydifficulttotrace:thebiotatravelingfrom
body to body^10 are microscopically small, the moments of encounter
because it addresses another characteristic of biological encounters, namely the
questionofagency.Iwillreturntothisinthenextsectionofthischapter.
(^10) For the purposes of the present argument the distinction—important in
medical and therapeutic contexts—between "contagion," the transmission of
pathogenic material from body to body (as in sexually transmitted diseases or
STDs)—and "infection" as invasive penetration by microorganisms that can
cause pathological conditions or diseases ("Infection" n. pag.) will be observed