A Question that Says What it Does: On the Aperture of Materialism with Brassier and Bataille

1 Introduction

For more than a decade now, various materialist streams of thought have once again reclaimed the centrality of reason in philosophical speculation. This revival has been on the cards for some time; initiated by a subset of materialist concerns that took shape during the wave of Speculative Realism, its unrelenting march gave rise to various rationalist projects whose orientation has been loosely described as “neorationalist.”^[1] If, at first, securing the powers of reason aimed at setting foot in the in-itself, rationalist proposals such as those of Ray Brassier or Reza Negarestani have opened alternative yet complementary paths: it is not by dismissing the mechanics of thought that materialism gains epistemic access to reality, but by minutely attending to the mediations involved in the practice of reason. Two premises have been described as central here: first, reason’s re-elaboration of its own normative structures surpasses the physical and social dimensions of its sensible substrate;^[2] second, matter refuses subordination to the idea by exceeding every concept of matter.^[3] In short, matter and idea are mutually irreducible.^[4] This article aims first to show how this twofold premise ultimately grounds the viability of materialism in what will be described as its aperture or formal inconclusiveness, and then seeks to elucidate the challenge this raises for materialism as a philosophical project: what is the question of a materialism premised on the autonomy of the idea and the resistance of matter to conceptual formalization?

The central contribution of this article lies in presenting the question of materialism as an inquiry into how the idea might remain at once internal and external to matter: internal insofar as matter can involve the idea without compromising the latter’s autonomy; external insofar as it is precisely the possibility of this involvement that enables matter to elude ideal capture. The aim here is not to answer or resolve this question, but to make it thinkable by elaborating on the web of premises that sustain it.

At the heart of this endeavour lies Ray Brassier’s “materialist monism.” In the wake of thinkers such as Laruelle or Sellars, Brassier has developed a lucid and stimulating agenda whose claim for a meaningless, mind-independent reality is central to both Speculative Realism and Neorationalism. Over time, Brassier has premised the viability of materialism on the revalorization of nihilism as a “speculative opportunity” to access a non-subjective absolute, engaging with the aforementioned twofold premise by arguing both for the reality of abstraction and the evacuation of matter from conceptual determination. However, a materialism without a concept of matter is not necessarily one of matter without concept; in fact, it will be argued that determining what matter must or must not contain is to root matter in conceptual structures, thereby reintroducing ideality. The paper develops this argument by bringing Brassier’s “materialist monism” into dialogue with Georges Bataille’s base materialism; in his attention to “non-logical difference,” Bataille ultimately links matter’s elusion of conceptual capture to the re-injection of thought into matter, as if the impossibility of conceptualizing matter in terms of form resulted from the possibility of its entwining with the concept in terms of content. This distinction sets the ground to conceive the aperture of materialism as the claim that matter resists full conceptual formalization insofar as it can contain – yet not exhaust – the conceptual. The article develops this hypothesis by linking the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea to their mutual indispensability, which leads to present the question of materialism as a question whose saying mirrors its doing: by asking how the reality of the idea can be simultaneously immanent in and transcendent to matter, it engages in an uprooting gesture that propels what the question does as much as it informs what it says.

After this introduction, Section 2 follows Brassier in premising the autonomy of reason on “the non-being of the normative,” arguing that its instrumentalization toward “the disenchantment of the world” risks reintroducing ideality by framing matter in terms of monism. Section 3 brings these considerations into dialogue with Bataille’s base materialism and his notion of “non-logical difference”; despite suspending conceptual representation, Bataille’s refusal to formalize matter while interweaving it with conceptual content endorses the aperture of materialism by suggesting not to confuse the interpenetration of matter and idea with the ideal formalization of matter. By developing these considerations through the distinction between matter-as-a-totality and matter-as-a-whole, Section 4 presents the question for materialism that results from this line of thought, portraying it as a question in which saying and doing converge. By way of conclusion, Section 5 calls attention to the “oracular talk” of the Cumean Sibyl, presenting it as a fertile, experimental site for further engagement with this inquiry.

2 Brassier and the Non-Being of the Idea

The starting point of Brassier’s materialist project is not difficult to formulate: “Existence is worthless.”^[5] The speculative promise of this claim is the elaboration of a philosophical realism that affirms the possibility of conceptual access to a non-subjective absolute.^[6] The union of nihilism and speculation lies at the heart of Brassier’s philosophy: “I am a nihilist precisely because I still believe in truth: I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition.”^[7] What is central to this formulation is the realization that, as Brassier contends in Nihil Unbound, “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living;”^[8] by assuming that life is no longer “the fundamental source of empowerment and the ultimate arbiter of the difference between life-enhancing and life-depreciating fictions,”^[9] nihilism becomes the methodological condition for representing a world indifferent to and ontologically independent from subjectivity. Thinking belongs to no one; conceptual abstraction must resist reduction to its corporeal infrastructure as much as to its socio-historical context, since concepts behave as predicates endowed with functional coordinates, while causes unfold as effective links operating in time and space.^[10] In other words, “the predicative function is linguistically instantiated and so neither mental nor physical: reifying concepts as entities is a category mistake.”^[11] This is why, in “Wandering Abstraction,” Ray Brassier seems to address our quest for the question of materialism by proposing that “the challenge for materialism is to acknowledge the reality of abstraction without conceding to idealism that reality possesses irreducible conceptual form.”^[12]

Brassier’s challenge rests on a crucial assumption: there is a distinction between matter and idea, and this distinction is fundamental to all philosophical inquiry. However illuminating or sophisticated the various ways of questioning this assertion might be,^[13] it remains extremely difficult, if not impossible, to ignore the following: if every contention about the world derives its vigour from the instrumentalization of reason’s conceptual normativity, then the intricacies of such vigour and of such instrumentalization can hardly be overlooked, since the very practice of giving and asking for reasons lies on them. Every ideal approach to material reality invites discussion not only of that material reality itself, but also of the ideal activity without which the former could not be addressed in argument. The claim here is not so much that “any talk of being requires reference to a concept,”^[14] but that any argument whatsoever requires reference to conceptual normativity. This is not to prioritize epistemology over metaphysics, but more simply, to acknowledge that the practice of one is inextricably linked to that of the other.^[15]

However, Brassier’s challenge prompts us to consider the distinction between matter and idea without falling into two traps. First, we must avoid opposing humans to nature on the basis that the former instrumentalizes concepts while the latter only causes, since thinking has no birthplace, and therefore, no privileged species. Second, we must avoid the elimination of the conceptual – or its reduction to the physical or the sacred, since this renders unaccountable the descriptive and explanatory basis upon which all philosophical discourse rests.^[16] In short, Brassier’s challenge consists of preserving the autonomy of thought while rejecting the equivalence of being and thinking. His commitment to the irreducibility of the idea, understood as “the integrated whole presupposed by any system of functionally differentiated concepts,”^[17] does not aim at hypostazing conceptual practice into an essential faculty or substantive realm. Brassier’s aim is rather to provide the necessary precondition for what he describes as “materialist monism,” the claim that all that exists is “a mind-independent reality which, despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the “values” and “meanings” which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.”^[18] In short, matter and idea are mutually irreducible. The question, of course, is not only why the possibility of materialist monism is inextricably linked to the reality of the idea, but also what kind of reality the idea possesses if it is not that of being.

Brassier’s response to both questions lies in his meticulous engagement with Plato’s Sophist. As the dialogue winds its way toward its central section, Plato gradually stages being and non-being as dancers in a strange ballet where non-being somehow is, or insists on being. Theaetetus and his Eleatic visitor discuss this peculiar form of being. They concur in associating two queries: the question about the being of a sophistic speech that has no relation to truth, and the question about the being of those appearances that configure eidolas: idols and other false pretenders to the status of the idea, all those entities whose phantasmagoric condition is inherent to them, such as shadows, water reflexions, or optical illusions. What is crucial to this association is that it connects the question about truth and falsity with that between being and non-being: we must understand what non-being is in order to consider falsehood, the claim asserting the non-existence of things which are, and the existence of things which are not. It is Plato’s attention to the reality of non-being that interests Brassier; in it lies the possibility of a philosophical compact between truth and negation that opens space for thinking the reality of the idea in ways that enable materialist monism.

How does Brassier proceed? First, he presents the sophistic discourse as an affirmationist discourse: “[T]he sophist maintains [that] negation is impossible, since to think what is not is not to think. Therefore, the sophist concludes, not only is every thought of something, and hence affirmative, it is itself something that is. Thinking is doubly affirmative: it affirms what is thought of as well as that one is thinking.”^[19] Thinking affirms what is thought of: if every thought is necessarily the thought of something, then this something must be, since what is not cannot be intended, and thus it cannot be thought. Thinking affirms that one is thinking: if to think what is not is not to think, then to think is to think something that is, and thus thinking itself must be. The idealist equivalence between being and thinking underlies both affirmations: if every attempt to think of nothing turns it into something, then non-being is itself impossible. This is what the sophist asserts by suspending the difference between true and false, philosophy and sophistry, essence and appearance: if what is true is and what is false is not then everything is true insofar as the sophist has proclaimed non-being to be meaningless. Corollary: the qualitative difference between representation and reality is a mere difference in force.

At this point, Brassier invokes Plato’s argument for the being of the negative.^[20] To claim, as the Sophist does, that non-being is meaningless, one must nevertheless treat it as somehow being, in order to deny it the property of intelligibility. But then, isn’t the Sophist invoking precisely what she claims cannot be invoked – the non-being of something? The assertion that being and non-being are mutually exclusive causes contradiction.

The Eleatic visitor moves then to defend their entwinement. Let us summarize the argument. Everything must not be one, for if it is one, then either we have “one” as the name of being and the being that is named as “one,” or the name is the same thing as what is named, and then, since it is the name of itself, we cannot distinguish one from nothing because we cannot think of it. Everything must not be multiple, for if it is multiple, then everything is other than itself, and thus, everything is one insofar as it is other. Being must thus combine the stasis of unity and the becoming of multiplicity. But then, since being is common to them, being must be a third thing, one that both associates and separates them. Being thus comprises four basic forms: movement, rest, sameness, and otherness. However, it is otherness what holds them together, for movement, rest and sameness are in virtue of being other than being: Movement is, yet it is other than being because being does not move; rest is, yet it is other than being because movement is; sameness is, yet it is other than being because it shares in movement and rest. Being and non-being, understood as otherness, are interlaced.^[21]

This entwining grounds the difference between essence and appearance. Two interlaced implications must be noted. First, by furnishing that which is not with being, falsehood acquires reality: it is possible to think of something that is not, or in other words, not every thought that is is true. Second, by furnishing that which is with non-being, the fact that thought is not reifiable does not compromise its reality: it is possible to formally distinguish between things and their representations, that is, their difference is not a mere difference in force. In short, by acknowledging that a false thought (what is not) somehow is (it is real), we are also bound to recognize that thought (what is), somehow is not (it is not reifiable). This entails that “the logical infrastructure of conceptual rationality implicated in every attempt to articulate what is cannot itself be reinscribed as part of reality without immediately generating contradictions that stymie the coherence of discourse.”^[22] The impossibility of such reinscription is the impossibility of “subordinating the autonomy of thought to the immanence of being,” an impossibility that ultimately marks the “transcendental difference between appearance and reality.”

Negativity is thus at once the condition of objective truth in discourse and that which cannot be objectified without undermining the possibility of such truth.^[23] In short, negativity enables objective truths; its objectification hinders them. These two conditions converge in the notion of normativity: formal and logical rather than ethico-juridical, Brassier’s normativity acknowledges that all reasoning activity is a rule-governed activity that renders propositional contents mutually interdependent and conceptual commitments reciprocally constraining,^[24] but only insofar as normativity possesses the reality of non-being. By endowing concepts with the being of that which is not, Brassier ultimately frees the being of that which is from the task of underpinning conceptual existence, which can then be thought of in nihilist terms: matter can now be conceived as entirely independent from the idea while remaining compatible with its autonomy and its peculiar mode of existence.^[25] With this gesture, Brassier’s “materialist monism” appears as a “genuinely critical materialism,”^[26] a materialism that, by acknowledging how the non-being of the idea is entwined with the being of matter, gives rise to a nihilist conceptualization of matter whose fundamental meaninglessness comes with a promise: to provide the enabling condition of ontological objectivity.

However compelling such a monism of “meaningless matter” may be as a foundation for a nihilistic, non-anthropocentric materialism that retains the difference between truth and falsity without reifying the idea, one cannot help but wonder to what extent this entails another idealization of matter. Isn’t the quest for a monist materialism ultimately the quest for an ideal materialism? For a matter enclosed to an idea – the idea of the One – by which it can become intelligible? Isn’t this enclosing gesture the essentialist gesture par excellence? Ironically, the very effort to purify matter from the ideal is ultimately carried out in the name of the ideal: to claim that materialism must be articulated in a monist, dialectical, historical, mechanical, vistalist, libidinal, agential or vibrant key is to confine matter within a stable conceptual form, thus repeating in materialist terms the idealist gesture of enclosing things in essences or archetypes.

Central to any materialism that accepts the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea is what I propose to describe with the term aperture: the fundamental inconclusiveness of materialism in virtue of its refusal to stabilize matter within any determinate form. To contend the aperture of materialism is not to present matter as an unfinished mass that is handed over to the idea like the components of a construction kit, as if unconcerned with – or even incapable of – determining the manner of its own eventual assemblage.^[27] It is not about celebrating the multiplicity or mobility of formal readings that matter would accommodate, but about signalling the inappropriacy of any attempt to endow matter with an overarching form or conceptual framework, however transient, subtle, or precarious it may be.

These concerns are, of course, not foreign to Brassier. In his dissertation Alien Theory, he advocates “the decline of materialism in the name of matter,” a gesture that must be understood as the “movement whereby any philosophical materialism which accepts the premise of a transcendental distinction between “thought” and “matter” must forsake the attempt to encompass matter in the concept.”^[28] In line with our previous considerations on the idealization of matter, Brassier contends that most forms of materialism are ultimately idealist, since they assume that matter can be fully conceptualized, such that it is not truly distinct from thought at all – that is, from our capacity to think of relations, objects, atoms, fields, difference, or any other principle by means of which conceptualize matter.

Brassier’s concerns about the viability of materialism must be situated within his attention to the non-philosophy of François Laruelle.^[29] In his dissertation, Brassier invokes Laruelle’s account of philosophy as grounded in a decision that divides the real into, first, an a priori component that constitutes thought, and second, an a posteriori component that constitutes its object, only to bring them back together in the semblance of a pre-established harmony adequate to its own intelligibility. Laurelle’s claim that thought in-the-last-instance is rooted in the real prevents its intelligibility to thought, since the distinction between real and thought operates only from the side of thought itself. This unilateral duality is crucial for Brassier’s nihilist project; already in his introduction to Alien Theory, Brassier quotes a passage from Principe de Minorité where Laruelle describes those forms of materialism that conceptualize matter as “still subordinat[ing] in the last instance matter to the last possible form of the logos (logos or Idea of matter as such), instead of subordinating the logos of matter, and initiating a truly dispersive becoming-real of ideality rather than a continuous becoming-ideal of the real.”^[30] It is precisely because Brassier follows Laruelle in holding that every materialism is doomed to remain idealist insofar as it fails to consider matter as exterior to the concept in virtue of the unilaterality of their duality, that in Nihil Unbound, he associates the impossibility of conceptualizing matter with death and the nihilistic tradition. The conviction underlying this connection is not difficult to formulate: if matter resists conceptual capture, then matter must itself be void of value, it must be meaningless, and nihilism the only possible conclusion.

But why should the impossibility of conceptualizing matter entail its absolute meaninglessness? Put differently: why must matter’s enmeshment with the concept necessarily imply matter’s conceptual capture? Aren’t these two interactions unfolding on different planes? Couldn’t we even argue that the purging of matter from the concept in search of a purely meaningless matter ultimately entails another conceptual distillation, one that suspends the aperture of materialism by enclosing matter in the idea of monism?

I propose addressing these questions by bringing into the equation what is perhaps one of the most slippery approaches to matters of the past century: Georges Bataille’s “base materialism.” Whatever the differences – and they are immense – between Brassier’s engagement with conceptual representation and Bataille’s celebration of inner experience, their materialisms have something decisive in common: both explicitly question the viability of materialism by identifying as idealist the gesture of enclosing matter in the concept. And yet, if mobilizing Bataille seems a promising manoeuvre to consider the aperture of materialism without endorsing the idealist claim that matter possesses a fundamental ideal form, it is because his refusal to conceptualize matter does not culminate in a purifying gesture aimed at a monism of “meaningless matter.” Matter’s elusion of conceptual appropriation seems in Bataille to rely on an entirely different operation: the re-injection of thought into matter, as though the resistance of matter to conceptual capture and the possibility of its entwining with the concept unfolded across two different dimensions of matter.

3 Bataille: Reinjecting Thought into Being in the Name of Matter

No philosopher, and perhaps no writer at all, has more vividly presented the conceptual elusiveness of matter as a lever for addressing the inconclusiveness of materialism than Georges Bataille. In the 1920s and 1930s, Bataille adopted a resolute intolerance toward the idealism he believed still underpinned thought, even in avant-garde movements explicitly claiming allegiance to materialism, such as Dadaism or Surrealism. Most strikingly, Bataille’s reflections on the irreducibility of matter to ideal aspirations extended to those doctrines that treated inert or “dead” matter as the foundation of any materialism worthy of the name. In a short essay entitled “Materialism,” Bataille seems to address in advance Brassier’s nihilism when he claims that,

“Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist. They situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse facts, without perceiving that in this way they gave in to an obsession with the ideal form of matter, with a form that was closer than any other to what matter should be. Dead matter, the pure idea, and God in fact answer a question in the same way …, the question of the essence of things, precisely of the idea by which things become intelligible.”^[31]

Bataille’s matter is matter insofar as it is in flight from any original pertinence to ontology. Enclosing matter in an ideal structure must be avoided at all costs, including the glorification of nihilism as the ultimate configuration of matter, which postulates a hierarchy in which “dead matter” is idealized as the object of scientific investigation.^[32] But death is not the only determination that Bataille has in mind. However much it presents itself as grounded in socio-economic, sensuous relations rather than in eternal truths or abstract reason, dialectical materialism also preserves a hierarchy in which matter is bound to a particular, ideal form, the form of dialectics.^[33] Yet the gesture performed by this movement is ultimately an ideal construct, a human aspiration that roots matter within a grand ontological machine at the service of intelligibility. The same could be said of any other form of materialism, or more precisely, of any attempt to confine matter in the form: to claim that it is only possible to do justice to matter by reading it in this or that form, under the sign of this or that qualifier, is to stabilize matter in the name of the idea, to capture it within the conceptual machinery of a cognitive discourse.

The extent to which this radicalizes the aperture of materialism is overwhelming. How are we to think of matter without articulating it in some way or another? If Brassier claims that the question for materialism is to acknowledge “the reality of abstraction without conceding to idealism that reality possesses irreducible conceptual form,” then Bataille’s question seems to consist in pushing this irreducibility further, implicitly suggesting that materialism must be articulated in ways that elude every possible form, including the glorification of death and nihilism that result from the absolute purging of matter from the concept. It is not even a question of describing matter as implying a thing-in-itself opposing appearance,^[34] but rather of questioning opposition as such, of refusing to root matter within any conceptual form whatsoever. Matter must be thought in terms that escape the stability of logic, including that which purifies it from the concept. To describe materialism in terms of aperture is to acknowledge that matter is in flight from any discourse of knowledge, that it circumvents all philosophical apparatus. This is perhaps why it has often been suggested, almost as if in desperation, that Bataille seeks not only “an undialecticized materialism,”^[35] but also, and perhaps above all, its integral disappearance^[36] – in what, in an ironic twist of events, would make Bataille the ultimate idealist.

Yet things are, of course, more complicated. As critical theorist Benjamin Noys writes, the resistance of Bataille’s matter to ideal capture “should not only be thought of as a disappearance but as the impossible conjunction of disappearance and persistence: it is always disappearing from the grasp and at the same time persisting as this evasion.”^[37] The image of matter as the “persistence of evasion,” as the “active flux of instability that ruins the closure of any discourse”^[38] is worth retaining to consider Bataille’s proposal to evade conceptual appropriation when approaching matter: base materialism.

This expression names the unnameable: matter not as enclosed in a sanitized ideal form, but as “a crude liberation of human life from the imprisonment and masked pathology of ethics, an appeal to all that is offensive, indestructible, and even despicable, to all that overthrows, perverts, and ridicules spirit.”^[39] It would be a mistake, of course, to take Bataille’s words at face value. His association of matter and ridicule is not an attempt to reverse the evaluative hierarchy of high values versus low values. Base matter is not an inversion of all that is elevated – transcendence, spiritual purity, morality – in the name of what is conventionally deemed vile – bodily waste, madness, malignity. Rather than being inherently low or high, base matter is what appears as low while in fact serving as the origin of the high. Bataille illustrates this with the example of the big toe: despite being seen as despicable on the pretext that it is in touch with the mud, the big toe is also what grounds human’s ability to stand upright and all the glory that flows from this – cognition, dignity, grandeur[…].^[40] Base matter both enables and ruins the very structure of high/low, and this is why Bataille will claim that “matter, in fact, can only be defined as the non-logical difference.”^[41]

This comes as no surprise: evading the homogeneity that he attributes to ideation requires some sort of heterogeneity. “Heterology” is the term Bataille coins to describe his “scientific” interest in difference.^[42] Here, it is again worthwhile to avoid taking Bataille’s words at face value. With the term “heterology” Bataille does not seek to inaugurate another branch of science – which, by definition, can only operate with elements already homogenized so as to be rendered calculable. Rather, he pursues a “conscious and resolute” engagement with those substances typically associated with heterogeneity – substances that, until now, “have been seen as the abortion and the shame of human thought.”^[43] The examples Bataille offers here repeat those given for base matter: trash, vermin, violence, excess, delirium, madness…;^[44] heterogeneity refers here to all what pertains to excretion, that is, to all that remains unworthy of appropriation. Excretion thus epitomizes what is always slipping away from ideal stability: while the process of appropriation results in the homogenization of both possessor and possessed, excretion – that is, base matter – moves instead toward ever greater heterogeneity, toward a form that splits apart again and again.

If thinking of matter as difference entails thinking of difference as non-logical it is only insofar as matter contains something excessive or excremental, something that obstinately resists putting down roots in a fixed form. It is precisely in this sense that Noys sees in Bataille “a major influence on what comes to be called “poststructuralism,”^[45] which has often been described as a thought of difference.^[46] Despite the significant distance mediating between, on the one side, Bataille’s “non-logical difference,” and on the other, Derrida’s “différance,” Irigaray’s “sexual difference” or Deleuze’s “difference in itself,” Bataille’s reading of matter as the persistence of evasion, as an “active principle”^[47] that is certainly more Heraclitean than Marxist,^[48] cannot but evoke the understanding of differentiation as the sole and decisive index of reality that we often find in post-structuralism.

It is thus perhaps not entirely senseless to see in Bataille’s obsession with non-logical difference something of what Brassier describes in “Concepts and Objects” as a “doctrine of ontological univocity which dissolves representation and with it the tri-partite distinction between representing, represented, and reality.”^[49] While Bataille is unequivocal in rejecting any attempt to root base matter in an ontological doctrine or philosophical system,^[50] he nonetheless insists on the necessity “to constitute a knowledge of the non-explainable difference, which supposes the immediate access of the intellect to a body of material prior to any intellectual reduction.”^[51]

What I want to emphasize here is not so much Bataille’s aim to constitute a knowledge of non-logical difference, but rather his characterization of that knowledge as a form of intellectual immediacy, which Bataille famously conceives as involving the “inner experience” of eroticism, laughter, sacrifice, etc. Bataille’s allergy to conceptual mediation aligns with his description of heterology as “opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world”^[52]: in its insatiable wish for conceptual capture, the result of representative mediation “is always the deprivation of our universe’s sources of excitation and the development of a servile human species, fit only for the fabrication, rational consumption, and conservation of products.”^[53] Bataille goes so far as to describe this result not only as an impoverishment of humanity, but also, and perhaps above all, as a mere illusion, a fantasy, a mirage, since “the intellectual process automatically limits itself by producing of its own accord its own waste products, thus liberating in a disordered way the heterogeneous excremental element.”^[54] Bataille’s implicit understanding of the question for materialism as the task to think of matter without stabilizing it in some form or another – including the nihilism of a “meaningless matter,” finds accommodation within a non-logical difference that ultimately supplants the question “What differences are real?” with the affirmation of a differential reality that can be known through the “immediate access of the intellect to a body of material.” Bataille’s quest for the intellectual immediacy at work in the inner experience of eroticism, laughter or sacrifice is not far from what Brassier describes as the practice of “re-injecting thought directly into being so as to obtain the non-representational intuition of being as real difference.”^[55] It is precisely because knowledge of matter’s non-logical difference occurs through the intellect but “prior to any intellectual reduction” that thought becomes embedded in matter rather than purified in some transcendent realm of representation in pursuit of a materialist monism.

Ironically, and this is the point I wish to emphasize from Bataille, the impossibility of thought to conceptualize matter goes hand in hand with the reinjection of thought into matter. This sets the stage to consider the aperture of materialism as a question of form and content: matter resists conceptual formalization insofar as it can contain the conceptual. Matter’s interpenetration with the concept is hardly an incidental setback for Bataille; his subordination of conceptual representation to the non-logical difference of matter aims to unsettle what is perhaps the most obvious target of base matter: the philosophical notion of universal. The destabilization of universality is the experimentum crucis of base materialism: by both underpinning and undermining the oppositions that structure philosophy, base matter aims not only at questioning the viability of certain theoretical, political, or artistic discourses, but the very notion of discourse, which obviously depends on conceptual representation. This, of course, includes not only the discourse of materialism, but also Bataille’s own meditations; the non-logical difference of base matter is not a foundation upon which to build a materialist philosophy or anti-philosophy, but a point of instability arising from a strategy always conscious of the risk of being formalized through thinking and writing. It is a strategy that refuses to come to light, to become present, to settle within thought; one cannot become a “base materialist” in the same way as one may follow Brassier in becoming a nihilist, and the more we qualify base matter, the more we suspend it. What base matter contains exists only as a difference, and if Bataille’s proposal can be considered materialist, it is not because it triggers the production of a new materialism, but because it calls for rethinking the very viability of materialism as a closed metaphysical discourse.

Yet this can hardly be achieved by discarding conceptual representation. If Bataille’s re-injection of thought into being in the name of matter exposes the impossibility of matter’s conceptual capture by thought, Brassier’s non-being of the idea reveals the impossibility of subordinating thought’s autonomy to the immanence of matter. The postulate that ultimately pulses beneath the surface of those materialisms which subordinate the autonomy of thought to a non-conceptual flux – whether understood in terms of affect, life, potency, or, as with Bataille, non-logical difference – echoes, to varying degrees, Parmenides’ fundamental insight: beings are; non-beings are not.^[56] However inadequate it may seem to bring Bataille’s base matter into the orbit of Parmenides’ being, there is at least one compelling point of contact; by questioning the very notion of philosophical opposition, Bataille destabilizes the distinction between appearance and reality,^[57] thereby evoking what Brassier sees as the corollary to Parmenides’ equation of thinking and being: the reduction of everything to meaning.^[58]

This reduction is inseparable from Bataille’s aversion to representational mediation: in calling for “the immediate access of the intellect to a body of material prior to any intellectual reduction,” everything becomes always already suffused with meaning, since the difference between “reality” and “appearance” turns out to be a functional distinction subsumed by the concept of base matter. Bataille’s non-logical difference thus echoes Parmenides’ denial of non-being insofar as it inflates the predicate “meaningful” to the point of rendering it worthless, since there is nothing with which it can border.

In its attempt to remain nothing but a trace of the limit that any effort to produce a materialist discourse encounters, non-logical difference becomes self-referential: it has no object but itself. Base matter represents no reality insofar as it functions as the hinge that both connects and disrupts the opposition between representation and reality, deliberately tainting the distinction of these terms from the outset; “Above all,” writes Bataille, “heterology is opposed to any homogeneous representation of the world, in other words, to any philosophical system.” Yet to give reasons against the construction of systematically interlinked propositions held together by valid argumentative chains is to implicitly depend on what one explicitly disavows: the autonomy of thought and its normative valence. In other words, the unsettling of the opposition between reality and representation proposes itself as a set of principles, imperatives, generalizations, and assertions that tacitly depend on conceptual representation.

Bataille’s refusal to conceptualize matter while infusing it with the conceptual suggests the possibility to think of matter as enmeshed with the idea without succumbing to conceptual capture: it paves the way to address the aperture of materialism by considering the impossibility of matter’s entwining with the concept in terms of form as relating or even deriving from the possibility of matter’s entwining with the concept in terms of content. In other words, Bataille’s gesture points to the possibility of entwining matter and idea without necessarily implying the idealization – the formalization – of matter. Idealization is, however, what ultimately marks the aperture of Bataille’s materialism; in premising his discourse on the evasion of normativity and conceptual representation, Bataille is doomed to fall into performative contradiction: by obscuring its own conditions of intelligibility, Bataille risks extrapolating, or even reifying, aspects of human experience onto the natural world, thereby relapsing into idealist postulation.

However much Brassier’s and Bataille’s materialisms may differ, to affirm the non-being of conceptual normativity and to acknowledge the impossibility of formalizing the being of matter (even in monist terms) do not constitute two entirely incompatible gestures. In fact, their association is central to the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea insofar as they trigger the aperture or formal inconclusiveness of materialism itself. The issue, however, is not only to consider the extent to which Brassier’s and Bataille’s considerations on the viability of materialism converge, but also to elucidate the lines of flight their integration open for anyone working within a materialist set-up: what is the question of a materialism whose aperture is premised both on the reality of the idea and the resistance of matter to formalization?

4 A Question that Says What it Does

It has often been suggested – not least by Blanchot – that to seek a question is not to seek incomplete discourse. A question is discourse that fulfils itself by affirming its own incompleteness; through a question, we say something of what we are looking for, and at the same time, we give ourselves the void that permits us not to have it yet, or to have it as aspiration.^[59] This absence lacks the severity of negation: it does not get rid of, it does not oppose. It is a lack that opens a space of possibilities, an interval where what is in question has been uprooted from any naturalized framework. “To question is to seek,” writes Blanchot, “and to seek is to search radically, to go to the bottom, to sound, to work at the bottom, and finally, to uproot.”^[60] What the question does is this uprooting that holds onto the root.

As with any other question, the hypothetical question arising from a materialism whose aperture is premised on the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea must be speech whose doing performs an uprooting labour; it must bring the aperture of materialism into the void, not to negate it, but to let it float adrift, to pervade it with the richness of possibility. Yet there is perhaps another reason to associate such a possible question with an uprooting gesture. For if a materialism premised on the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea is a materialism in exodus and exile from every conceptual structure – monistic, dialectical, mechanical, agential, vibrant, or otherwise – then its question would be one whose saying invites interlocutors not only to come up with this or that response, but also to uproot the very process of responding from grand ideal frameworks.

This, in fact, comes as no surprise: at the heart of the divergent attitudes of Brassier and Bataille regarding the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea is the realization that the aperture of materialism concerns not that much the purging of matter from all ideal residue, but the possibility of thinking matter without rooting it in ideal configurations. Matter is matter not because there is nothing ideal in the material or nothing material in the ideal, that is, not because matter cannot contain the conceptual, but because matter evades conceptual formalization, that is, because its ultimate form cannot be brought fully into perspective by the idea.

Elucidating the question of materialism thus requires meticulously differentiating the modes in which matter appears within this contention: first, matter-as-a-totality, that is, matter as a given transcendence whose form eludes full ideal capture, even in the guise of a monism of meaningless matter; and second, matter-as-a-whole, that is, matter as a pervading immanence whose content may involve the idea, although neither is ever fully exhausted by the other. To differentiate matter-as-a-totality from matter-as-a-whole is not to posit two classes or types of matter, but rather to differentiate the how and the what of matter, to approach it from two different planes regarding the idea: a plane of exteriority, in which matter appears as a reified entity that lies in front of us and resists ideal formalization, and a plane of interiority, in which matter appears as a processual medium that contains – yet not exhausts – the idea.

This distinction is not entirely foreign to Brassier. In his dissertation Alien Theory, he devotes the opening chapter to what one might be tempted to read as a similar gesture: Laruelle’s differentiation between matter “itself” and matter “as such.” Brassier introduces the chapter with the following quotation from Principe de Minorité:

“When, in its better moments, materialism abandoned its empiricist concept of matter, on the whole it never proved able to go beyond the hyle, the identity of thought and the real, of ideality and matter – the level of relative materiality or of materiality “as such” [comme telle] rather than of matter “itself” [telle quelle] or absolute matter.”^[61]

Matter “as such” refers to matter insofar as it is phenomenologically disclosed through the logos; instead, matter “itself” invokes matter as it is beyond every horizon of apophantic disclosure. The risk, of course, lies in confusing the real but unobjectifiable immanence of matter “itself,” independent of its phenomenological presentation, for the idealized or transcendent reality of matter “as such,” that is, matter as subordinated to a “materiality” whose theoretical status remains for Laruelle that of an idealized abstraction. This subordination echoes Bataille’s critique of those materialisms that, in their obsession with devising a form of matter that resembles as much as possible what matter should be, end up “positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark them as specifically idealist.”^[62] The differentiation between matter-as-a-totality and matter-as-a-whole is closely related to these considerations; whereas reading matter as a totality acknowledges its persistent evasion of the concept in terms of form, reading matter as a whole re-injects thought into it by assuming the possibility of its involvement with the idea in terms of content.

Yet every temptation to equate the distinctions “totality/whole” and “itself/as such” must be rigorously resisted. While Laruelle conceives matter “itself” as absolutely indifferent to matter “as such,” the resistance to ideal capture that characterizes matter as a totality goes hand in hand with the possibility of interweaving matter and idea that defines matter as a whole. We have already seen it: a materialism that operates without a concept of matter is not one of matter without concept. To claim that the form of matter resists conceptual capture does not mean that the content of matter must lack conceptual participation. In fact, it is precisely by claiming that the content of matter must or must not be such and such that we end up formalizing matter and thus abolishing the aperture of materialism. In other words, to determine what does or does not necessarily participate in the content of matter – by positing, for instance, a monism of meaningless matter – is ultimately to contour matter in accordance with an ideal form, thereby rooting matter within the idea. Central to the pair totality/whole is thus the claim that matter-as-a-totality resists reduction to the concept only insofar as matter-as-a-whole remains open to involving the conceptual. Differently put: matter bypasses idealization on a plane of exteriority only insofar as the material and the ideal can overlap on a plane of interiority. Thus, rather than assuming that matter becomes vulnerable to conceptual capture the moment it intertwines with the conceptual, the claim at stake is that it is precisely by remaining open to contain everything, even the concept, that matter resists conceptual formalization.

We must therefore abandon any inclination to base the aperture of materialism on the decline of matter-as-a-whole in favour of matter-as-a-totality. Matter’s resistance to conceptual capture lies neither in the strict isolation of matter from idea, nor in indifference to their intertwining, but rather in the necessary possibility of such intertwining – both as historical possibility and as possibility in becoming. This is why, differently from Brassier, the interest here does not lie in formulating the conditions for “a thinking which, by simultaneously liberating matter from what Laruelle calls its ‘materiological’ subordination to the logos, and by emancipating cognition from the constraints of phenomenological presentation, would furnish us with the theoretical means required in order to access ‘matter itself’ – ‘la matière telle quelle’.”^[63] Neither the “liberation” of matter-as-a-totality from matter-as-a-whole nor the epistemological privilege of the former over the latter; what the distinction totality/whole brings into focus regarding the aperture of materialism are the conditions for a thinking whose commitment to the emancipation of matter from conceptual form lies in the necessary possibility of its involvement with the concept.

Yet if we want to avoid performative contradiction, we would certainly do well not to forget a crucial element implicit in the conceptual representation of the pair totality/whole: Brassier’s non-being of the normative. To release matter from any space of ideal closure does not oblige us to follow Bataille in dismissing the autonomy of conceptual representation. Matter resists reduction to the idea no less than the idea resists reduction to matter: to argue for the suspension of conceptual representation is not only to engage in a performative contradiction, but also to obscure the very means of one’s intelligibility, thereby risking idealist postulation. At first glance, bringing the autonomy of the concept into proximity with matter’s possibility to contain the conceptual without exhausting it seems hardly a severe setback; one of the most insightful consequences of following Brassier in affirming the reality of the conceptual without hypostatizing it is that, since its autonomy arises from the being of that which is not, conceptual practice may be thought of as involving the being of matter without calling its own normativity into question. Autonomy is not independence: the fact that the normative dimension of conceptual practice resides in the reality of non-being does not imply that the nature and amplitude of the conceptual must be limited to that realm; it may rather suggest that a possible participation of the conceptual within the content of material being needs not obstruct thought’s autonomy, since such autonomy relates to the reality of non-being.

Yet things are, of course, more complex. For isn’t it precisely in light of this reality that the very distinction between matter-as-a-totality and matter-as-a-whole is drawn? Isn’t such a distinction – like the very distinction between matter and idea – ultimately internal to the idea itself? Isn’t thinking of matter in terms of form and content its formalization par excellence, its ultimate rooting in a conceptual scheme? Something along these lines is what Brassier stresses when he observes that “as far as Laruelle is concerned, structural differentiation cannot but presuppose a supra-conceptual ideality; it continues to operate within an ultimately ideal, objectivating continuum of relation. Discrete differential elements remain subsumed within an all-embracing continuum of differential relativity.”^[64] With other terms, and certainly from a different place, we have seen Bataille make a similar claim regarding matter’s non-logical difference: to frame matter within any conceptual form is to stabilize it in the name of the idea, to trap it in the meshes of discourse itself.

At the heart of any effort to alleviate these concerns lies the following line of thought: the distinction between matter-as-a-whole and matter-as-a-totality – between content and form – does not entail the formalization of matter. The reasons for this are not difficult to formulate: the distinction between content and form is itself not formal insofar as it does not provide its object with a form – that is, with a structure or framework. Form is one of the poles of this distinction, not what emerges in virtue of it. Put differently: to claim that matter can be thought in terms of content and form is not to force matter to take this or that particular form – which would trap us in a loop ad infinitum – but to remain sensible to the distinction between what matter involves and how matter involves it.

If all this bears on attempting to elucidate the question of a materialism whose aperture is premised on the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea, it is because the relation between matter-as-a-whole and matter-as-a-totality points toward a materialism in which the possibility of the idea is not accidental. To embrace this realization is to extend our initial premise: the aperture of materialism rests not only on the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea, but also on their mutual indispensability. Four basic claims are at work here:

First, matter is irreducible to the idea. However much the idea may grant epistemic access to material being, matter subsists beyond the conceptual categories that stabilize meaning. Central to this claim is the notion of relation: to insist that matter can be fully idealized under the strictures of thought is to reduce matter to its interrelation with thought, and thereby to relationality. Yet if matter were entirely relational, change would be impossible, since every material being would remain fixed in an overarching, exhaustive web of relations, with nothing left in reserve from which transformation could arise.^[65]

Second, the idea is irreducible to matter. Although its intimate association with material being, the logical infrastructure implicit in every attempt to conceptually articulate matter exceeds material subordination. Were being equivalent to thinking, the distinction between reality and representation would collapse, or at best contract into a mere difference in force. Yet to dispense with this distinction is to render all contentions innocuous, including the assertion that matter is irreducible to the idea: any argument purporting to suspend conceptual representation necessarily unfolds through principles, imperatives, generalizations, and assertions that tacitly depend on what they explicitly disavow.^[66]

Third, matter is indispensable to the idea. Even granting that, to a certain extent, the idea approaches both itself and the world from coordinates that elude spatio-temporal circumscription, its emergence and realization remain premised on a material-causal substrate. To claim the existence of a free-floating intelligence amounts to assert not only the autonomy of the idea, but also its independence from matter, that is, its self-sufficiency. Yet in the absence of material being, the idea implodes in a tautological formalism: it annuls itself insofar as its relational vocation collapses into an infinite self-referentiality.^[67]

Fourth, the idea is indispensable to matter. Matter’s elision of conceptual capture is premised upon the possibility of the idea. To describe matter as necessarily purged of conceptual content is to formalize it as an ideal monism of meaningless matter. Put differently, matter-as-a-totality resists conceptual appropriation only insofar as matter-as-a-whole remains open to conceptual participation. It is not that much a question of subordinating the existence of matter to ideal activity, but of conceiving the possibility of containing the idea as what enables matter to evade conceptual capture – regardless of whether any ideal activity is in fact there to be contained.

Central to this fourfold premise is the realization that the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea from which this article takes its point of departure is ultimately bound to their mutual indispensability: just as the autonomy of the idea collapses without matter’s externality, the resistance of matter to ideal formalization rests upon the possibility of its involvement with the idea. It would be a mistake, however, to take this formulation as indicative of reciprocity. Every temptation to consider matter and idea in symmetric terms must be rigorously abandoned; as we have seen with Brassier, the non-being of conceptual normativity neither reiterates nor reverses the substantiality of material being. Matter and idea are neither isomorphic nor coextensive, but fundamentally asymmetrical; if the fourfold premise linking irreducibility and indispensability qualifies as materialistic, it is only insofar as, unlike the idea, matter is inextricably linked to being. All these points toward a materialism whose aperture or formal inconclusiveness requires cultivating the art of simultaneity: if matter resists ideal capture insofar as it can accommodate ideal participation, then the idea must remain at once immanent and transcendent to matter.

The question of materialism is how to articulate such an ideal concurrence. To endorse the claim that matter eludes conceptual formalization insofar as it can contain – yet not exhaust – the idea is ultimately to ask how the idea can remain both internal and external to matter: internal insofar as matter can involve the idea without compromising the latter’s autonomy; external insofar as it is precisely the possibility of this involvement that enables matter to resist ideal appropriation.

What is surprising about this question is the correspondence between what it says and what it does. Like any other question, what it does is to uproot. We have already seen it: the work of a question is to release what it inquires, even if only for an instant, from the necessity of its native or current framework, from homogeneity and linear continuity, from any provenance that presents itself as absolute or conclusive. To inquire about how the reality of the idea remains both internal and external to matter is thus to leave the aperture of materialism hanging, unresolved, suffused with the richness of possibility. It is to witness an exodus and exile: the momentary, yet certainly absolute, disentanglement of such an aperture from the discursive structures that have engendered it. Not to favour its dispersion or dissipation, nor even to call for some sort of liberation, but to raise it dramatically up to its eventuality: beyond the firmness of being and the fencing of established conceptual frameworks, in the intensity of an interval whose aperture is certainly more profound than it has ever been.

The irony is that such an uprooting gesture propels what our question does just as much as it informs what it says. It gives way to a question that says what it does: by explicitly seeking manners to articulate the idea’s interior and exterior relation to matter, the saying of this formulation – the premise or thing given by the question – implicitly invites us not only to disentangle matter from grand ideal structures, but to respond through modes and dispositions of thought uprooted from them. Certainly, as with any other question, our question carries a lack that seeks to be made up for. It awaits an answer. But if the answer, in answering, must take up within itself the spirit of the question, a spirit that no answer ever abolishes, then the saying of such question does not only appeal its interlocutors by asking them to offer this or that response; it also incites them to uproot the very process of responding, to release it from the grounds of fixed schemes or frameworks – whether monist, dialectical, historical, mechanical, vitalist, libidinal, agential, vibrant, or otherwise. This, of course, is not to dismiss the very practice of conceptual structuration, especially when it unfolds, for example, through mobile schemas and plural arrangements, but to acknowledge that thought on the world is either coherent (structured through a plurality of consistent yet incomplete models) or exhaustive (depicted through a complete yet inconsistent singular image). This is ultimately an invitation to abandon modes of thinking bound to a singular, overarching form, to an ancestral origin, source, or centre, an ideal and idealizing structure glorified as the navel of all things and events – something perhaps akin to what Michel Serres describes as “umbilical thinking.”^[68]

The uprooting of a question that says what it does, then, does not aim to legitimate the idea as independent from matter, nor matter as independent from the idea. It longs neither for a self-sufficient word nor for a matter purified from all conceptual residue. If our question says what it does, if its formulation both states and performs an uprooting gesture, this is not in pursuit of extirpating conceptual practice from the carnal interplay of hearing, feeling, reflecting, and speaking, as if thinking were carried out by subjects endowed with wholly unbound and voluntarily exercisable cognitive capacities.^[69] It is not the purging of matter from all conceptual affiliation that one pursues when asking about how to pull the roots of matter from conceptual soil, but the disentangling of matter from umbilical conceptual structures.

Such an uprooting gesture thus arises neither from renunciation nor from discontent with a supposedly degraded origin; it is not an act of refusal or a sudden impulse of abandonment. By inquiring into how the reality of the idea can remain both internal and external to matter, one does not seek to discard or abolish conceptual representation, nor even to revive it in some weakened mode of being, but rather to affirm the non-being of the idea’s autonomy in the very gesture that releases the being of matter from the meshes of ideal form. In its uprooting vocation, the question arising through these lines is ultimately an invitation to do what one says and say what one does: it prompts us to uproot matter from conceptual structures by uprooting our response from ways of thinking and reasoning fixed in all-encompassing frameworks, as though to respond were to drive the incompleteness of the question to its limit, to the point where the response is nothing more than the question’s last step.

5 Conclusion

The lines of thought highlighted in these appreciations may evoke a certain pessimism about the possibility of a response, perhaps even about the very notion of response. And not only because of the almost oxymoronic gesture implied in asking how to think the reality of the idea as both immanent and transcendent to matter, or in presenting this question as an inquiry into how the idea might allow matter to elude ideal capture. If the work of the question is to uproot, isn’t the utterance of a response the question’s ruin, its misfortune? Doesn’t the answer mobilize a mode of speech that, in filling the absence opened by the question, suspends the very void, granting what is in question its richness of possibility? Yet if the answer is the question’s setback, if it is its suspension and defeat, this is only insofar as it exposes an adversity that is hidden in the question itself. This is why the question proposed here must be thought of more as a quest than as an inquisition, since even when explicitly posed in an interrogative register, it escapes from being stated as a problem in search of a solution. Or if it does, it is only insofar as the seed of such a solution comes with the question itself: by inviting us to disentangle our response from umbilical frameworks and schemes, it ultimately prompts us to talk in the manner of those oracles that are oracles through signs, scorings and chants, mobilizing a choral language that, as for example with Virgil’s Cumean Sibyl and her invitation to co-fabulating, escapes the necessity of showing, in escaping that of hiding. It is precisely in this oracular language – one that neither covers nor uncovers, that speaks without either saying or being silent – that not only question and response find a strange continuity, but where the idea may perhaps be thought as at once participating in, and resisting reduction to, the materiality of fate.