Contingency

The contingent is something that happens outside the realm of probability, it is incalculable, and “puts an end to the vanity of the game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable." [1] Contingency introduces the ultimate precarity into our world by undermining what (we think) we know, as a radical strike from outside common sense, a material or conceptual jolt that is utterly independent from existing human thought. These moments of contingency force us to restructure and rethink our accounts of causation in its wake. Contingency marks the reality of the real as an intrusion, separate from and indifferent to human thought or (previous) thinkability.

[1] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. R. Brassier, (New York : Continuum, 2008) 108.