After 400 years of the ever-intensifying modern quest for ‘the taming of chance’ – to invoke the title and argument of a famous book by Ian Hacking – it seems that today chance would finally be entirely submitted to the domination of statistical rationality at every level of being and action, from quantum physics to the most quotidian decision-making. Yet something quite different seems to have become the case: we find a radicalisation from a range of perspectives of the concept-actuality of ‘the random.’ This radicalisation leads to some striking formulations which purport to bear on the absolute limits of reason itself; for instance, that the random is true without any reason at all. Drawing on a range of thinkers from Leo Strauss to Jacques Lacan, this essay attempts to draw some of the consequences of such formulations as they bear on the thinking of politics.
Justin Clemens (Tue,) studied this question.