ABSTRACT
This chapter examines relationship through the lens provided by the special issue of Angelaki, that is, through the concepts in their respective lexicons deriving from the notion of the problem, namely those of “the problematic” and “problematization.” While Louis Althusser might have picked up the word “problematic” from his friend Jacques Martin, Martin certainly did not invent the term. Patrice Maniglier has argued that the notion was itself rather invented by Gaston Bachelard. If the term “problematic” was not particularly important for Bachelard, he did not actually use the phrase ascribed to him by Althusser, “epistemological break,” at all. Étienne Balibar is thus arguing that while the episteme for Foucault is a fixed facet of knowledge at any given time, for Althusser there is no invariant implied by the concept of the problematic. The episteme then ends up being a filter by which certain claims or kinds of claim are ruled out within scientific discourses at a given time.
