ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explains why, and how, literature was always quantum. Literature has always kept company to what 20th century French philosopher Louis Althusser called an “aleatory materialism” – a contingency-based materialism that is compatible with quantum physics. A materialism learning from knowledge produced by quantum literature cannot be sure of itself, it is a materialism without guarantees. Encounter and swerve, aleatory trajectories and entanglement: Quantum physics and an encounter-based materialism can easily match. The author aims to explore Richard Feynman’s affirmation, to stretch it “to the utmost”: In which sense and to which extent can literature tell us something about the matter hypothesis, that is to say the fact that matter itself became, in the post-Newtonian era, a conjecture? A materialism that would try to really reckon with contingency should extend the matter of its inquiry to possible worlds – possible characters, possible stories, possible materialities.
