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.” 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; second, matter refuses subordination to the idea by exceeding every concept of matter. In short, matter and idea are mutually irreducible. 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.