Central to the historicizing work of recent decades has been the
concept of contingency, the realm of chance, change, and the
unnecessary. Following Nietzsche and Foucault, genealogists have
deployed contingency to show that all institutions and ideas could
have been otherwise as a critique of the status quo. Yet scholars
have spent very little time considering the genealogy of
contingency itself-or what its history means for its role in
politics. In Contingency and the Limits of History, Liane Carlson
historicizes contingency by tying it to its theological and
etymological roots in "touch," contending that much of its
critical, disruptive power is specific to our current historical
moment. She returns to an older definition of contingency found in
Christian theology that understands it as the lot of mortal
creatures, who suffer, feel, bleed, and change, in contrast to a
necessary, unchanging, impassible God. Far from dying out, Carlson
reveals, this theological past persists in continental philosophy,
where thinkers such as Novalis, Schelling, Merleau-Ponty, and
Serres have imagined contingency as a type of radical
destabilization brought about by the body's collision with a
changing world. Through studies of sickness, loneliness, violation,
and love, she shows that different experiences of contingency can
lead to dramatically dissimilar ethical and political projects. A
strikingly original reconsideration of one of continental
philosophy and critical theory's most cherished concepts, this book
reveals the limits of historicist accounts.
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