Immanent Materialisms

Speculation and critique

Charlie Blake, Patrice Haynes

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367589257
• eBook ISBN: 9781351400961
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.

john ó maoilearca

SPIRIT IN THE MATERIALIST WORLD

on the structure of regard

The duty of philosophy should be to intervene here actively, to examine the living without any reservation as to practical utility […] Its own special object is to speculate, that is to say, to see.¹

introducing the new materialisms: looking back again²

As soon as you believe social aggregates can hold their own being propped up by “social forces,” then objects vanish from view and the magical and tautological force of society is enough to hold every thing with, literally, no thing. It’s hard to imagine a more striking foreground/background reversal, a more radical paradigm shift.³

This essay will make an attempt to review a wide range of ideas stemming from recent work in Continental thought that espouse a turn to materialist and/or naturalist perspectives, be it through direct engagement with the natural or mathematical sciences, or more transcendental meta-theoretical approaches that either deduce or speculate upon (or both) certain findings. “Veracity,” “validity,” “coherence,” “explanatory power,” “truth-making” or any other epistemological value will not be explicitly invoked to assess these approaches. Rather, the attempt here is to gather them together in a value-neutral way and follow the hypothesis that these thoughts of materialism are materials themselves, consisting of both first-order macro-properties such as opticality, specularity, virtuality, (physical) consistency, circularity, clarity, darkness (or invisibility), and figures-grounds, as well as meta-level entities such as rigour, nihilism, consistency, logic, circularity, groundedness (foundations), and clarity. This gathering together is also a revisioning itself, a kind of “foreground/background reversal,” that will involve a reverse orientation as regards the image of philosophical “orientations” as such, be they materialist (of a plain manila variety), mathematical-materialist, nihilist-materialist, or object-oriented.⁴

What is on offer here, then, is not an improved theory qua any putative correspondence with the facts of the matter – with what there is – but a more inclusive theorising whose only inimical moment is targeted solely at the exclusionary aspects of any one material theory qua theory; that is, we only reject those aspects of theories that mount unique and exclusive truth-claims for themselves. For there is also a parallelism between the thoughts of these materialists as regards their own thoughts (respecting their rigour, truth, logic, and even what can count as thought and thinking) and their views of what matter is, and with that also the value of life vs. death, the void, pure matter as abstract matheme, and so on. When such totalising claims are divorced from the theory, what remains are its material “correlations” with other theories when held or reviewed together. One can call this method a “non-philosophical” or “non-standard philosophical” approach if one wishes – it is certainly framed as such via the work of François Laruelle and Henri Bergson. The “non-” here is not negation but extension, an inclusive amplification of thought, an expanded approach to what counts as philosophy. So, it can also be understood as a kind of philosophy, or at least a kind of combined metaphilosophy and metaphysics (though Laruelle himself would abhor such terms). It can be seen as a philosophy that looks in a new way at the material metaphysics of metaphilosophy, of theories as theories, especially monistic ones.

And to do this we return, once again, to Bergson. As Jane Bennett writes when looking at the new materialisms in Vibrant Matter: in order to turn the “figures of ‘life’ and ‘matter’ around and around” such that a “vital materiality can start to take shape,” one must awaken what Bergson described as “a latent belief in the spontaneity of nature.”⁵ But whether it be a “vital materiality” such as Bennett’s, or a dark vitalism (as in Eugene Thacker’s After Life), one question animating our research will be whether the dyad of life and matter can bring its two terms together without mutual asphyxiation.⁶ Can the two persist in one; that is, does one need a minimal duality within every putative monism? Be it the unacknowledged signs of life in mathematicised matter (Meillassoux’s mathemic valorisation of contingency), the avowed signs of death in cosmic thanatology (Brassier’s nihilism), or the ubiquitous life of objects in Latour and Harman’s ontology of actants/objects, the tensions brought out by such all-encompassing theories can themselves be reviewed as parts of a real inherent duality – one that is actually introduced by the Real (an introduction which some simply call error or illusion).

One recurring theme, then, will be the mind–body problem that Bergson put at the centre of Matter and Memory. It enters here, however, through the larger perspective of life and matter, and the interconnections between animate and inanimate objects, and even vitalism and anti-vitalism. We do this partly in order to look back again at the various purportedly mysterious, ghostly, “correlates” of the brain (often attacked simply as qualia, though sometimes also as an erroneous sense of self by the followers of Thomas Metzinger’s work).⁷ Far from wishing to explain such correlates away or eliminate them in the name of a new matter, we review them in order to raise their status as forms of haunting, background life. This will be an open exercise of “excessive anthropomorphism” on the one hand,⁸ as well as an attempt to naturalise this ghostly life as covarying parts of the body, as affects that properly belong to me, to a brain that is also “my brain” (or “our brain” as Catherine Malabou puts it in What Should We Do with Our Brain?).⁹ These “mysterious” correlates are explained both within “our” mind–body background and as a background to any viable (non-monistic) explanation. As such, they are rendered immanent equally as a physical, albeit disregarded, part of our material world and as a logical necessity when explaining the “hard problems” of the mind–body relation. The material medium becomes the spiritual medium.

The last time the question of materialism came to such prominence in French thought was in Bergson’s era at the turn on the twentieth century, and his attempt to materialise spirit (including the practice of philosophical thinking) and spiritualise matter, via his conception of images, remains a powerful resource when looking at the resurgence of materialism and naturalism in contemporary Continental thought. For the notions of spirit, spectrality, ghosts, and animate matter (vitalism) are closely connected to many ideas operating within the new materialism, be it in the concept of inter-theoretical reduction, the mind–brain problem, contingency, conceptual rigour and consistency, as well as the ontology of objects.

mathematical-materialism: the thought of absolute contingency

We are at ease only in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life.¹⁰

Outside of Marxist theories of production, it is probably the materialism born from contingency, from the clinamen,¹¹ the swerve, that has been the element colouring the materialism of Continental thought more than any other. This is the very French materialism of material-indeterminacy (rather than the Anglo-Saxon determinist materialism of Newtonian mechanics, which prevailed at least up until the rise of theories of quantum indeterminancy such as Roger Penrose’s). Alain Badiou, with his theory of the event, is one inheritor of this line of thought, turning the cast of dice into an emblem of the event “because this gesture symbolizes the event in general; that is, that which is purely hazardous, and which cannot be inferred from the situation [...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Something in the Air: An Introduction to Immanent Materialisms and the Unbounded Earth
• 1. Spirit in the Materialist World: On the Structure of Regard
• 2. Contingency without Unreason: Speculation after Meillassoux
• 3. Religious Immanence: A Critique of Meillassoux’s “Virtual” God
• 4. The Profanation of Revelation: On Language and Immanence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben
• 5. Idealism without Idealism: Badiou’s Materialist Renaissance
• 6. Prolegomena to a Materialist Humanism
• 7. Mere Life, Damaged Life and Ephemeral Life: Adorno and the Concept of Life
• 8. Creative Becoming and the Patiency of Matter: Feminism, New Materialism and Theology
• 9. Nature Deserves to be Side by Side with the Angels: Nature and Messianism by Way of Non-Islam
• 10. The Art of the Absolute: Relations, Objects, and Immanence
• Index