Political Desirings - Yearnings For Mattering (,) Differently

Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently
Karen Barad, Daniela Gandorfer
Theory & Event, Volume 24, Number 1, January 2021, pp. 14-66 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/780766
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14 Theory & Event
Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,)

Differently
Karen Barad and Daniela Gandorfer
Matterphorics, as an aesthethics of thought, attends to modes of thought

as ones of matter and meaning production, which are, as such and
without exception, inextricable from questions of (in)justice(s).
Precisely because thinking is not accepted as representational, expres-
sion cannot be considered secondary, let alone separable from what is
expressed. As a material-discursive practice of doing theory, matter-
phorics would be partly unthinkable without Karen Barad’s agential-re-
alist rethinking and reworkings of classical concepts as fundamental as
space, time, and matter. Agential realism makes a case for the inextri-
cability of knowing and being, that is, of epistemology and ontology,
and offers modes of matter and meaning production that neither fall
prey to Cartesian representationalism, nor to Newtonian ontology.
The radical potential of this offer, or invitation, lies in the fact that it is
an incisive reworking not only of the modes of thought arising from
Descartes and Newton (and consequently from thinkers closely affili-
ated with the practice of critique), but also of various critical and post-
structural theories, respectively. For, ironically and despite their crit-
ical potential, these theories uncritically accept major ontological and
epistemological assumptions as, what Barad calls, the “sacred ground
of theorizing,” rarely engaging critically with the science. For Barad,
however, this ground, or, as they also write, “reflection surface,” ought
not be accepted as limit—be it for thought, critique, science, or ques-
tions of mattering. What is needed, then, is less a reflection on critique
than an ethico-ontoepistemology.
The vastness of the necessary rethinking suggested by this
approach, in addition to Barad’s diffractive reworking of social-polit-
ical and scientific theories, explains the particular positionality of their
work. It is of the Western canon while at the same time continuously
and rigorously undoing what is said to ground its very foundations—
not by means of deconstructing the origins of meanings, but by asking
both how meaning comes to matter, and how matter comes to mean
differently. The following conversation seeks to highlight this particular
positionality, drawing out its non-negotiable ethicality by engaging
matterphorically with questions of thinking, ontology, theory, concepts,
potential, the material force of justice, the yearning for mattering
differently, desirings touching touch, and the politicality of mattering.
Theory & Event Vol. 24, No. 1, 14–66 © 2021 Johns Hopkins University Press
Barad and Gandorfer | Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently 15
The very form, format, and formations the conversation takes and
the insistence on thinking thought and expressing expression differ-
ently, (re)articulates a shared commitment to both diffractive thinking
and an ethics of thought.
I. Theorizing Ontology
“Theorizing is a particular form of

intra-acting and as such part of the world.”
Daniela Gandorfer: Before asking more concretely about what a

concept is and what it does in the world (or, as we will see, how the
world does a concept), let me begin with the question of what theory is,
and what it does when thought and performed with agential realism?
The italics (is and does) already point to yet two other conceptions that,
as becomes clear in Meeting the Universe Halfway, are crucial for under-
standing agential realism, namely that of ontology and of performa-
tivity. You have written quite a bit about theory, already. In fact, your
understanding of theory is crucial for what we understand as matter-
phorical. First of all, your emphasis is not on theory as a noun, but on
theorizing as a mode of experimenting. It is not a capacity or practice
exclusive to human beings, as you also state clearly in your essay “On
Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am:”
The world theorizes as well as experiments with itself. Figuring,

reconfiguring. Animate and (so-called) inanimate creatures do not
merely embody mathematical theories; they do mathematics. But
life, whether organic or inorganic, animate or inanimate, is not an
unfolding algorithm. Electrons, molecules, brittlestars, jellyfish,
coral reefs, dogs, rocks, icebergs, plants, asteroids, snowflakes,
and bees stray from all calculable paths, making leaps here and
there, or rather, making here and there from leaps, shifting famil-
iarly patterned practices, testing the waters of what might yet be/
have been/could still have been, doing thought experiments with
their very being.1
Importantly, ethics is inextricable from theorizing, thought, and

experiment—an argument that has been quite influential to how we
think matterphorics. “Thought experiments are material matters” and
“[t]hinking has never been a disembodied or uniquely human
activity.”2 This ethics is neither humanistic, in its strict sense, nor is it
anthropocentric or exclusively human. Rather, “[t]heories, are living
and breathing reconfigurings of the world,” which is why “[s]pinning
off in any old direction is neither theorizing nor viable; it loses the
thread, the touch of entangled beings (be)coming together-apart.”3
16 Theory & Event
In beginning to unpack the radical potential these claims hold, let

me ask how to do theory without spinning into any old direction, nor
assuming that anything can be new (as detached from any historicity)?
How to do so from within academic fields (be it the humanities, the
social and legal sciences, the natural sciences, etc.) in which modes
of thinking (such as comparison, analogy, dialectic, dichotomies) are
built on a specific interpretation of how and what the world is? I am
thinking here of, for example, Cartesian dualism and Newtonian
notions of causality and force. How can we think ontology in a way
that opens up different concepts and practices of thought and being,
or, to put it more precisely, what are the onto-epistemological conditions
that allow you to imagine a different mode of doing theory?
Karen Barad: Let me start with saying that agential realism is not a
theory of the world in the way we usually mean that. When speaking
about theory it is often assumed to be that which describes the world.
The aim, in this view, is to write a theory that captures the world. This
is not how I see it, as it implies that theorizing is outside the world,
rather than being part of what the world does. It also holds the assump-
tion that the world is (in) a particular way. Part of what I am doing
is making a point that theorizing is a matter of already engaging as
part of the world (not even with the world). Crucially, when I speak
about ontology, I don’t mean an already given there-ness, but on the
contrary, an ongoing re-opening. Put differently, it is not just the fact
that ontology is neither a given nor fixed, but that “it” is radically
open (in an undoing of “it” in its alleged is-ness). By way of trying to
stay in touch with the dynamism of indeterminacy in its reiterative
reopening, its radical openness to an infinity of possibilities for recon-
figuring the very conditions of possibilities for materializing the world
in particular ways and not others, including making it matter differ-
ently—I (as part of what the world is doing) am trying to hold open
an ontological space (spacetime). An agential realist ontology (which
is neither singular nor one) is in this sense an undoing of the conven-
tional notions of ontology and an undercutting of the colonizing epis-
temic impulse to give over what the world is.
DG: This also speaks to a particular form of questioning that has

increased in the wake of the “ontological turn,” including, for instance,
new materialisms, object-oriented ontology, new vitalisms (all being
different phenomena). Questions pertaining to ontology often seek to
inquire about the relationship between (a) theory on the one hand and
ontology on the other. For if inquiry is geared towards such a relation—
one that links two fixed entities—“ontology” (what is) is assumed to
be a given and theory, seen as something independently existing from
ontology as its prior, relates in a particular way to it. This limits modes
of doing theory to those that accept this interpretation of the world.

However, in your reading of Bohr’s account of quantum physics, and
even more explicitly in your theory of agential realism, the question
is less about relations between givens. As you write in Meeting the
Universe Halfway regarding your agential realist account, “relata do not
preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through
specific intra-actions.”4 This is true for all phenomena, including
theories. And it allows us to think the relation between knowing and
being differently, as intelligibility is, you remind us, “an ontological
performance of the world in its ongoing articulation.”5 In this account,
neither knowing nor meaning production is restricted to humanist and
anthropocentric understandings, nor is it representationalist.
KB: Yes, that’s right. Representationalism and its variants is but one
mode of thinking about thought. And rather than simply provide an
alternative, some other account of the way the world is, what I am
trying to do is to open up the conditions of possibility of theorizing.
Theorizing in its radical openness provides not only possibilities for
thinking otherwise, but for thinking thinking otherwise. Importantly,
the conditions of possibility for theorizing are not external to theo-
rizing; the apparatus itself—that is, the material-discursive conditions
of possibility for theorizing—needs to be understood as an integral
and constitutive part of theorizing. This enables a response, which is
the matter of the response-ability of theorizing.
Part of what is being opened up is the sedimented assumption
in Western philosophy that holds that ontology is strictly a matter of
being. Quantum Field Theory (QFT) calls into question the nature of
being as something separate from non-being. There are some reverber-
ations here with Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology. Unfortunately,
the way hauntology is often understood and taken up is limited to
an account of human experience, especially in relationship to the
question of memory as a human capacity. In my diffractive reading,
hauntology is a material feature of the world in a radical undoing of
being/nonbeing (and relatedly, particular Newtonian notions of space
and time) that precedes the establishment of one or another notion of
the human (often implicitly gendered and racialized in its sedimenting
historicity). What I mean by memory is not a capacity of human
subject, but rather, a re-membering, a reconfiguring/re-articulating
(of) the world.
What I am trying to do with agential realism is to invite practices
of getting underneath thought, as it were, so that the material condi-
tions of theorizing are itself understood to be part of, indeed integral
to, theorizing. My desire in putting forward agential realism is to try to
propose some way of thinking that does not take cuts as given (whether
it is the cut between experiment and theory, physics and social theory,
18 Theory & Event
or the cut between human and its others), or in any case already in
place, before the analysis gets going. The point is to open up a space
for asking the prior question, and then the prior question, and then
again, the prior question. In doing so I am trying to provide an onto-
logical opening for taking into account that the questioning is part of
the world and the reworlding of the world, in particular ways and not
others. This matters greatly; indeed, it is an integral part of mattering
otherwise. Questioning goes all the way down.
DG: What becomes clear here also are the limits of expressibility,
especially when it comes to language and time (as well as space, or
spacetime). These limits are inseparable from the notion of ontology,
the physics underlying this notion, and the ways in which both inform
a particular language (its grammar, its use, its syntax, etc). It is worth
emphasizing that “prior,” here, does not imply a linear temporality,
and “all the way down” does not refer to traditional notions of space.
Yet, the questions of how to express differently, and of how to analyze
and attend to expressions without reproducing pre-supposed onto-
logical and epistemological assumptions, representationalism, and
anthropocentrism, remain a constant reminder of the challenges
different modes of theorizing need to address.
KB: Yes, exactly, I don’t mean “prior” in a temporal sense, nor “all the
way down” in a spatial sense; on the contrary, space and time are also
not given but come to matter in particular ways, particular configura-
tions/(re)configurings of spacetimemattering. I mean both of these in
an ontological sense, with all the qualifications of what I’ve said about
ontology (“itself”). The question of the limits of expressibility is a big
question. Let me speak to, or rather engage in, a particular aspect of it
here—namely, iterativity as integral to the unending desiring for express-
ability—and we can come back to this later because there is so much to
say about this. For now, I just want to make an important point about
this. Sense-making is always an iterative practice. Expression never
hits or captures some target as in representationalism, where there is
the possibility of mapping concept to object. Ontological indetermi-
nacy is the undoing of a modality of expression which assumes the
separability of word and world.
Materialization is also an iterative practice, and this is important.
Let me come back to the point I was trying to make about needing
to ask the prior question by clarifying what I mean by my use of the
term posthumanism. There are many conflicting conceptions in play of
what posthumanism is or ought to mean. My point is not to get beyond
the human, but to ask the prior question of what differentially consti-
tutes the human—and for whom. And it requires addressing it not in
some universalizing sense but always in its specificities. That is what
I mean by posthumanism.6 In other words, rather than assuming the

cut (human/non-human) and accepting it as a given, posthumanism,
as I mean it, is considering the cut itself as a constitutive part of what
the theorizing or analysis entails. For the cutting in itself is always
already an agential cut, a materialization. Not questioning that cut
means understanding the world in some materialized form as an
already given. But this would be to uncritically accept what has been
sedimented, rather than understanding the materiality of the world as
always already a historicity—the sedimenting of iterative intra-actions in
their specificity—and the possibilities for reconfiguring what becomes
the unquestioned ground of theorizing.
Starting with a humanist theory risks placing a certain conception
of the human as a ground for theorizing, rather than making it part of
the analysis, thereby contributing to its further sedimentation. Some
analytic frameworks accept various cuts rather than including as part
of the analysis an investigation into what has materialized around
these cuts and what gets further sedimented by simply accepting
them. I am not saying (or determining) which cuts should be investi-
gated, but I invite a way of theorizing that doesn’t start “later”—as it
were—by taking certain materializations for granted. For all theorizing,
all materializing, and all mattering is political.
Returning to the question of theory (or theorizing) and ontology,
then, it is not so much that I am trying to put forward an ontology of the
world. Rather I am issuing an invitation, or provocation, or opening.
Ontology, for me, is neither a thing, nor a theory of what is. Ontology
is the “theorizing of what is” by materializing things in certain ways, a
particular form of intra-acting, and as such part of the world. There is
almost a sense in which it is itself pre-ontological, although pre-ontolog-
ical might also not be the most accurate way to express this dynamic
since the pre-ontological would need to be understood as inseparable
from the ontological. As you pointed out, it is difficult to express and
use words, especially because sense-making is also dynamic and part
of the dynamics. Anyway, this is also what I mean by “prior,” it is not
temporarily prior, but ontologically prior, and prior, and prior…
DG: Let us stay with the question of expressibility, for it also indicates
limits of what has been considered thinkable, that is, the limit to what
is recognizable for our modes of thinking (and expressing), and as
such is also an ethical concern.
Deleuze and Guattari have worked carefully through that problem,
too—not in an attempt to solve it, but to posit it with as much nuance
as possible. To me, it is most thoroughly worked out with the non-con-
ceptual concept that, paradoxically, underlies all other concepts: the
plane of immanence, which does not necessarily refer to a particular
space, nor a being “prior” in terms of time, but to that which an imma-
20 Theory & Event
nent mode of thinking strives to think, and which consists neither of

pre-given and formed entities, nor anything that classical modes of
thought can recognize. Deleuze and Guattari, then, describe the plane
of immanence as “at the same time, that which must be thought and
that which cannot be thought,” the pure plane of “Being-thought.”7
As such, it neither follows, nor is intelligible with Cartesian dualism.
Being-thought is the expression of an onto-epistemology of thought,
being prior and prior being.
The reason why I bring this up here is not to compare agen-
tial realism to Deleuze and Guattari’s work, or to draw a parallel
between your understanding of ontology and the plane of immanence
(although I have made that argument8). Rather, I mention it to empha-
size something that has been crucial for my reading of your work, as
well as Deleuze and Guattari’s, namely the shared ethical imperative
of enabling thought (which is not simply human thought either, but
which does include critical thought) to encounter what is unrecogniz-
able and imperceptible, yet sensible and constructive of sense without
separating it from the physical world. It is a crucial part in how we
imagine and conduct matterphorical case studies.9 Neither you nor
Deleuze and Guattari work towards reaching an endpoint, but rather
towards continuing to think what cannot be thought, or, to use your
words, to trace entanglements and to continue asking the prior ques-
tion. The imperative seems to be to refuse reproducing the moral and
representationalist modes of thinking and sense-making, including the
violence(s) it carries with it.
KB: Thank you for not framing this in terms of a comparison. The
temptation to think analogically or to make comparisons is strong in
academia and yet flies in the face of the agential realist ontology we
have been talking about and goes directly to the point of why a diffrac-
tive methodology (which respects this ontology) has been crucial to
me. Also, your point about the ethical imperative of enabling thought
is very important. How to engage in thinking otherwise than the
traditions of Western modes of thought, such as representationalism,
is indeed an ethical, or rather, ethico-ontoepistemological matter.
Since theorizing is a material practice that is of the world, opening up
thought by getting underneath what has been sedimented is crucial
to keeping thought alive in its ongoingness, and this surely a polit-
ical matter. Thinking otherwise, and thinking thinking otherwise, as
I understand it and as I am trying to express it, is not about seeking
or trying to move towards an asymptotic limit point or plane that can
never be reached in practice but exists as some ideal in theory; rather,
it is part of the world’s dynamism that one is always already in the
middle of.
“All theorizing, all materializing, and all mattering is political.”

DG: You have mentioned to me last year in Santa Cruz that whenever
you are asked whether you would change your agential realist account
in the case the physics changes, that is, if experiments would contradict
the findings underlying your interpretation of quantum physics, you
respond with “Of course!”10 Can you say more about the role physics
has for and in your work, and also about different kinds of theories
and their relation to the theorizing you described?
KB: To respond to that question it might help if I say a little bit more
about the nature of my project. It has been and continues to be a project
driven by a commitment to work on behalf of justice in the face of the
multiple and diverse forms of injustice that must be addressed in their
inseparability. If as a physicist, it is my responsibility to understand the
depths of physics’ involvement with relations of power and its enact-
ment of and implication in particular forms of violence (as I believe
it is!), then it will be important but not sufficient to only consider the
ways in which physics itself has been socially constructed. That is, to
treat physics as an object of analysis that is looked at through the lens
of the social is to set up a kind of Newtonian experiment where the
subject and object are understood as separately determinate pre-given
entities, and the measurement of the object is performed at a distance,
positioning the subject outside the range of analysis. Using such a
Newtonian approach, we will only be able to see the marks of the
social left on the surface of the object (which may be an important first
step but is not sufficient). We will not be able to go beyond the surface
markings made by the human (whatever that concept has meant and
means in its sedimenting historicity) and explore the depths of how
physics is shot through with social-political-economic forces and more,
all the way to its core. That is, the limits of human exceptionalism are the
limits of analysis.
If the point is to understand how physical forces (e.g., nuclear
forces) do not live in a separate domain from that which we call the
political then we need to open up the analysis to the questioning of
these foundational assumptions of separation (e.g., between subject
and object, human and nonhuman, etc), and indeed, of separability itself.
The question of what constitutes the political (and for whom? when?
where?) must be asked inseparably from how we understand physics
(how it is constituted as universal, for example). It will not be sufficient
to assume each exists in and answers questions about wholly sepa-
rate epistemic and ontic domains, and from this assumption analyze
if and how physics has been infiltrated by the political. Because, if we
started there, we’d have jumped over crucial points about what the
nature of this “infiltration” is and why we think this is a good way to
begin to “interrogate” physics. This particular posing of the question
22 Theory & Event
(and not only this one) limits political analyses, and forecloses a deep
understanding of how politics and physics are mutually constituted.
To approach it in this way would be to position the very framing of
the analysis itself as outside the realm of analysis. That is, the implicit
Newtonianism would be left in place. The notion of “infiltration,”
for example, already speaks of an assumed relation of externality. To
proceed in this way would be to leave aside and unanalyzed the mate-
rializations that result from these assumptions. What is needed instead
is an approach to analysis itself in which these materializations would
also be open to questioning, and in which the separability of physics
and the political wouldn’t be posited before the analysis gets going.
This is the basis for the diffractive methodology that I work with.
Now, let me return more directly to your question. There’s nothing
inevitably just or sacred about turning to quantum physics. (As I
pointed out in Meeting in the Universe Halfway, quantum physics is the
source of the atom bomb and other forms of violence; it is not a salve to
save our weary Western souls.) The point rather is that so much of polit-
ical and social theorizing has drawn on Newtonianism and also earlier
physics (natural philosophy) and incorporated it into its thinking
without even noticing it. (Karl Marx, I would argue, surely recognized
this fact and consequently it’s no surprise that he focuses on physics in
his dissertation!) As such, thinking with quantum physics can unearth
these underlying assumptions and suggest other ways of thinking. But
to think with quantum physics analogically is to cut off the analysis
much as social constructivism does—both grant too much authority to
physics and underestimate the depth of the inseparability of politics
and physics. What is needed instead is to not accept “the” quantum
physics as pre-given and separate before the analysis gets started.
And so it is necessary in thinking quantum physics and social-polit-
ical theories together to switch optics: rather than using one as a lens
for examining the other in their assumed separateness, to diffractively
read their insights through one another in order to understand them in
their inseparability—that is, to be able to trace the entanglements across
all temporal and spatial scales, or rather, more to the point to rethink
the assumed natures of space and time, and indeed, scale itself.11 In this
way, both sets of theories and ways of theorizing are opened up to analysis and
to being reworked.12
In other words, I proposed to shift the approach, to not frame
the work as “the analysis of …”, that is, to assume a Newtonian
analytic (where analysis-at-a-distance already cuts the analysis short).
I suggested using quantum physics to unearth what underlies this,
and to do so in a way that respects the understanding of physics and
politics as always already inside one another. In particular, in tracing the
entanglements of this strange topology (where each is inside the other)
it was necessary to open up the notion of “the physics”, as well as
the political, to being reworked. This was no small task: to work with
and rework the physics. In Meeting the Universe Halfway, I propose a
new interpretation of quantum physics that is articulated in relation
to crucial insights from critical social and political theories, including
feminist, queer, postcolonial, decolonial, and critical race theories.
There’s a 100-page chapter that lays out in detail an explicitly polit-
ical physics. (In particular, this is a unique contribution to the field of
physics recognized by other physicists.) One crucial point not to be
missed is that there is no “the quantum theory” (just as there is no “the
political theory”). While the latter is taken for granted; some people
insist on pointing to “what quantum theory says.” The very fact that
there is no “the” quantum theory, that the interpretative issues are not
settled, is widely recognized by researchers in quantum physics. But
even if (almost) every physicist thought it was settled, it would none-
theless remain open to questioning. While I would reject a view that
insists that only physicists are qualified to speak about physics (actually
there’s an important (nontrivial) sense in which they are some of the
least qualified, or at least have significant deficits in this regard) there
has been a significant amount of engagement with quantum physics
where the taken-for-granted mode of analysis is analogical, and where
it is common to take quantum physics as a grab bag of counterintui-
tive ideas, sometimes with the implication that this will solve all our
problems. This approach leaves physics off the hook, and all too often
draws on a mishmash of cool quantum features from different inter-
pretations that contradict one another. Not only is it crucial in working
with quantum theory to say which interpretation you are drawing
from, but to do otherwise is to contribute to the sedimentation of habits
of thinking that take quantum physics as the alleged other to politics.
To simply take quantum theory as a given, to work with it analogically,
is to fetishize it by leaving it outside the frame of analysis.
Having explained these important points, I can now come back
to your question. My saying that I would change my agential realist
account has to first of all be understood in relation to my proposed
agential realist interpretation of quantum physics—a political physics—
that must be responsive—if it is to be that!—to the world in its iterative
reconfiguring. I take it that it would be clear to a political theorist that if
their theory was not responsive to the world it would be judged a poor
and ineffectual theory on some level. Suppose I am trying to understand
the nature of fascism—if I am not responsive to what is happening, then
what kind of theorizing is that? Making such abstractions is simply not
useful. Similarly, with science. If theories make pronouncements about
the world that are detached from the world (we might call them navel-
gazing theories) then what is the point? What I am talking about here
in framing the key point (gesture) as a certain responsiveness has to do
with an agential realist understanding of response-ability. And I mean
24 Theory & Event
response-ability in the sense of enabling a response,13 in the sense of a

longer history of response-ability.14 Response-ability, being in touch, is
about being ethically in touch with the other, as opposed to pretending
to theorize from the outside (as if this is the condition for objectivity,
rather than a conception of objectivity that is deeply flawed)—which
is a form of violence—and realizing that observers and theorizers are
an integral part of it.
II. Concepts
“Concepts are specific material doings or enactments of the world.”
DG: This leads us right into the question of concepts. In thinking

about ways of doing theory matterphoprically, that is, in understanding
theory as a particular practice of sensing and making-sense15 which
is committed to account for the fact that the physical world and what
is (mis)understood as representation are entangled, concepts are
significant (though not signifying). The work of many of this special
issue’s contributors has provided helpful ways to think about concepts
differently, often also materially and inextricable from the matter(s) of
the world. In Meeting the Universe Halfway you diffractively read the
work of quantum physicist Niels Bohr for whom, you argue, theoret-
ical concepts are not ideational in character, but are specific physical
arrangements.16 This undermines a representational account of both
thinking and concepts. Can you say more about your understanding
of concepts and the work they are doing?
KB: Perhaps it is helpful to start with Bohr. In representational under-

standings of theory, concepts are ideas that are thought to capture
aspects of the world. In my reading of Bohr, “capture” is a problem-
atic way to frame what concepts do.17 For example, the wave/particle
paradox is a mark of matter’s refusal to be captured by any linguistic
concept. Is it a particle? Is it a wave? Bohr argued that we can’t even
answer “yes” or “no,” that there is no determinate answer to these
questions in absence of specific material conditions that would condi-
tionally and partially resolve the indeterminacy. Rather than assume
that concepts (such as wave and particle) exist as free-floating abstract
ideas that capture aspects of the world, the point according to Bohr
is to ask what we mean by the very terms themselves: “wave” and
“particle”. His answer to what concepts mean, is a displacement of
the use of language for descriptive (indexical) purposes. Concepts
are not free-floating ideas but rather specific material arrangements,
they are instantiated/immanent in the agencies of observation, and as
such “wave” and “particle” are mutually exclusive notions since they
entail mutually exclusive material configurations. As such the giving

of meaning to one concept necessarily excludes making sense of the
other. This means that attempts to resolve all relevant indeterminacies
at once are doomed to failure. Using an apparatus that gives meaning
to particle will show the object to behave like a particle, but we will be
prohibited from learning anything about its wavelike behaviors made
evident only in using a complementary experimental apparatus which
gives meaning to wave at the exclusion of its giving meaning to particle.
Bohr argued that measuring apparatuses and objects of observation
necessarily become entangled, that is, inseparable from one another,
such that there is no determinate answer to the question of what some-
thing really is in and of itself. There is no determinate quality or even
boundary to itself; indeed, there is no determinate “itself”. On this
account, concepts (which entail measurements, if I can use that term in
a more generalized sense as an apparatus of sense-making) are not
descriptive but performative. There is no determinate state of matter
that is separable from how we go about giving it meaning. This is
not merely a statement about the limitations of our knowledge, but
a calling into question of the presumed separability of epistemology,
ontology, and ethics. Mattering (and the double entendre is crucial here) is
a matter of meaning-matter making.
On this account, so much of Western science and philosophy needs
to be reconsidered; crucially this includes the notions of matter, space,
time, agency, and causality, which inhabit so many different theories
in different disciplines as well as everyday forms of knowing for many
people. Intra-actions (since there is no separability as presumed in
inter-actions) entail the making, indeed, materialization, of some things
to the exclusion of others. What we do matters; at the same time, there
is no “we” that stands outside the intra-action deciding and choosing
to make cuts; for this would be to assume a liberal conception of the
(human) subject, which is being similarly problematized here along
with the nature of objects and their assumed cut between “object” and
“subject”. “We” neither preexists nor is external and separable from
what is iteratively delineated and remade. And furthermore, when
each intra-action entails constitutive exclusions—when some are intel-
ligible and some aren’t, when some count and not others, when some
matter and others don’t—it is not merely values and ethics that are at
stake but also the political. Now, in my agential realist elaboration of
Bohr’s insights, concepts are not merely static laboratory arrangements,
but rather, specific material doings or enactments of the world. Mattering is
about the iterative intra-active materialization of matter and meaning.
There are no material phenomena (specific material configurations/
articulations/ongoing-reconfigurings of the world) independently of
meaning-making/sense-making or concepts (discursive articulations
26 Theory & Event
in their materiality): matter and meaning are inseparable: hence, the

double entendre of mattering. The world, as I argued before, is doing
theory (is theorizing) and it is also doing concepts. We could say that this
is why concepts have to be understood matterphorically, as you suggest.
DG: Yes—and this is also why it is not a coincidence that the chal-
lenges with language and words, with expressibility even (and
expressibility not restricted to the realm of linguistics), keep on recur-
ring, even throughout this conversation. The question of expression—
which is not to be understood as subordinate to or following from
content or idea, but as co-constitutive—is inseparable from a mode of
doing theory matterphorically. Here, it pertains to how modes of mean-
ing-making, in this case by means of language and written words, are
thought to work. For example: If concepts (as defined, for example,
by the Oxford dictionary as “a general idea or notion, a universal; a
mental representation of the essential or typical properties of some-
thing”18) are not conceptual, then we are faced with the question about
whether or not it is useful to use the term. And if it is useful, we should
ask how to express not only the difference between one use of the
term and another, but also how that difference does not speak to the
substitution of one fixed meaning with another, but rather to a whole
different dynamic of differentiating that underlies it.
KB: These are very important points. Indeterminacy, as I have argued,

is not a state of affairs, but rather, an unending dynamism. Hence, there
is an important sense in which I am not simply offering one or another
alternative meaning for the word “concept.” Rather, I am challenging
the conceptual framework of how concepts are generally conceptu-
alized. At the same time, I use the term “concept” partly because it
does certain kinds of work in its recognizability, namely, making the
challenges to conceptualization intelligible. As such, it enables me to
be in conversation with traditional Western philosophy and its repre-
sentational and abstract notion of concepts, and at the same time to
challenge precisely that notion. To say that concepts are material config-
urations of the world and that the world doesn’t sit still is to acknowl-
edge concepts as a dynamism. A concept, as I understand it, is not just
an idea, let alone an idea of the mind, detached from the world and
nonetheless usable as an analytic tool to describe the world, or capture
something with it. Concepts neither describe nor capture. As specific
material doings or enactments of the world, concepts are of the world. So,
for me, thinking concepts is not a way of engaging with a framework
in which representations of things either match or do not match some
cultural notion or natural thing in the world.
DG: Your understanding of concepts then also challenges the notion of

‘the’ new, of invention, and creation, at least if those terms are under-
stood as necessarily in relation to a human subject as the thinking
I. With this in mind (so to speak), can we ‘invent’ concepts as it is
frequently called for?
KB: Can we invent concepts? First of all, it is not an “I” that is doing the
thinking, because to assume that would be to reinscribe the Cartesian
notion of the thinking subject as the human individual, closely aligned
with representationalism. Also, the notion of invention has to do with
a particular notion of “the new” as a coming into being out of nowhere,
as it were, in an erasure of mattering’s historicity and a-void-ance of
the ethical-political questions of staking a claim on an idea. This goes
to my own objections to the use of the adjective “new” in describing
so-called “new materialisms.”19 The “new” not only ignores matter/
ing’s inherent historicity but also assumes a progressive notion of time
that is explicitly challenged in agential realism. In the case of “new
materialisms” it also announces a discontinuity from other material-
isms, which is very unfortunate.20 In addition to that, “the new” capi-
talizes on individualist legal relationalities, such as the ownership of
ideas (copyright and patent laws, for example). For me, the question is
rather what thinking is. Who/what is doing the thinking and with what
and whom is thinking happening (because it never happens alone)?
“Concepts are not things in a conceptual space but

rather they are themselves a field of spacetimemattering.”
DG: Your agential realist argument according to which concepts are

material enactments of the world that do certain kinds of work faces
yet another intricacy, perhaps, I would argue, even exposing that intel-
ligibility, too, is a collaborative practice.
This can also be sensed in the difficulty that arises from the fact
that, according to your argument, concepts are not to be conceived in a
Cartesian way, presupposing the mind/matter cut, and that therefore,
even though you use the term “concept,” what you aim to express by
that is and works differently than concepts understood traditionally. In
other words, the difficulty is that the risk of words being understood
according to the traditional framework is as present as the potential
to think them differently. This predicament is omnipresent to modes
of doing theory that challenge the hegemony of language and the
signifier. My work is in large parts concerned with the possibility of
expressing (in) language—using words, sentences, punctuation, texts,
etc.—without reproducing the Cartesian cut, which consequently
demands collaborative modes of thinking and reading. It depends on
the readers’ acceptance of the invitation to think language matterphor-
28 Theory & Event
ically and, to use your concept, material-discursively; to look at it and

not see what has been seen for centuries, namely representation, refer-
encing signs. Undoing the cut is, it seems to me, collaborative research,
and not simply among humans, or what is understood as the human
thinker. Your work has been instructive in that regard. Ironically, your
concepts, probably precisely because they fundamentally challenge
analytical frameworks that accept cuts without interrogating them and
are material-discursive phenomena themselves, have frequently been
misread as representational units or entities. Despite your very precise
and careful language, the risk remains that a concept is simply taken,
grasped, without any attention being paid to the concepts’ dynamism
and with cuts imposed that make it fit into pre-established analytic
frameworks. Rather than being understood as specific material doings
of the world, concepts, then, become objects of and for thought. It is a
mode of appropriation.
KB: First of all, sense-making is never an individual affair, nor does it

happen once and for all through proclamation as it were. It is always
iterative and collaborative. And indeed, tracing the sedimented/sedi-
menting historicities of matter/ing in their entanglement requires
collaboration (and not only among humans). This goes to why we set
up collaborative cross-disciplinary groups for investigating specific
(material-discursive) phenomena (e.g., water, seeds, carbon, and
other) in their entanglements in order to take account of the questions
of justice that are integral to the doing of science, as part of the Science
& Justice Graduate Training Program.21
Also, with regard to the aspect of your question that speaks to the
difficulty of communicating modes of thinking that cut against the
grain of ingrained deeply sedimented ways of thinking, especially
perhaps in the undoing of particularly precious cuts such as subject/
object, word/world, matter/meaning, this/that, I/you, thought/
action. There have been many misunderstandings generated from an
approach to reading that looks for the main concepts to be grasped and
then utilized—as if agential realism were a formula for doing analyses,
or worse, that it is itself an analysis that should have already addressed
all workings of power rather than a thinking of thought in a way that
requires understanding the inseparability of thinking from its condi-
tions of im/possibility. Agential realism is offered as an opening up
of thought, of the spacetimemattering of thinking, which is always
already a thinking-with. Working with agential realism is a material
practice of being in touch with and being inseparable from the specific
phenomena being investigated: of tracing cuts and entanglements in
their differentiating materializations. Specificity is everything - and:
everything is specific—and this is where the work resides. And yes, I
do work with concepts in their specificities as specific material configu-

rations of the world and offer reworkings that attempt to interrupt the
violences of traditional conceptions in their sedimented historicities in
ways that change the material conditions of im/possibility. This is not
an invention of concepts but a way of working with concepts in their
materiality and having them rework me. Concepts are not things in a
conceptual space but rather they are themselves a field of spacetimemat-
tering. You might express it as a field of spacetimematteringconceiving.
DG: In your work you speak about spacetimemattering. In adding

“conceiving,” you are not pointing to semiotics, to making-sense
with signs. In following what you have given us, could we say that
conceiving is a practice of sense-making that is material-discursive?
KB: Yes, I added “conceiving” for emphasis; it’s already implied in

what I mean by “mattering.” In other words, that is precisely why I
use the term mattering with its dual sense of matter and meaning in
English: everything that I say about mattering is meant to imply this
double meaning (matter of mattering). Another way to put this point is
to focus on the core notion of “material-discursive” where the hyphen
is explicitly theorized. In particular, through my diffractive reading of
Foucault’s notion of discursive practices together with Bohr’s insights
regarding the materiality of concepts I craft a notion of discursive prac-
tices that goes to the material conditions of possibility (and impossi-
bility) of meaning-making in its materiality. Michel Foucault’s insights
about the discourse-power-knowledge nexus were crucial to my
thinking here, in further elaborating the critically important notion of
discursive practices as always already material and inseparable from the
conditions of im/possibility of meaning making.22 And furthermore,
diffractively reading Bohr’s understanding of the nature of matter as
inseparable from meaning-making through Judith Butler’s performa-
tive conception of mattering, I propose an understanding of matter as
a sedimenting historicity in its iterative intra-activity. In this way, matter
and meaning are understood in their inseparability.
Perhaps I should spell this out in a bit more detail. Matter is its
historicity, a stabilizing and destabilizing iterative reconfiguring of
the world in its re-membering. Matter is not the pregiven or the other
of signification or discursive practices. Matter is always involved in
meaning-making (and unmaking). Matter is material-discursive,
where discursive practices are boundary-drawing practices that enact
power relations. But these enactions are not merely enactions by the
human as such, as “the human” is always already the product of a
constitutive discursive practice that needs to be accounted for in its
materialization. Matter is political all the way down.
30 Theory & Event
To come at this yet another way: what I have said about matter,
I would also say about concepts and discourse. They are one piece:
mattering-conceiving is a matter of mattering. I have mostly placed the
emphasis on the nature of matter and the material world because I
was coming at this from within feminist science studies. But wher-
ever the emphasis is placed practices and cuts are material-discursive.
One could also put the emphasis on concepts, words, language. It is a
matter of emphasis not a different theory or a revision. In any case, it
was meant to imply both at once.
So, to return to your question, conceiving is a practice of making
sense—of mattering—and as such something that the world itself does:
The world is making sense—and is also not making sense, is sensing,
is being insensible and nonsensical. In doing so it is making cuts in
certain ways, not others. Meaning is not made through one individual
cut. What solidifies particular material configurations (concepts) are
practices of reiterative intra-activity. Thus, concepts are partial: there
is no endpoint, no totality, no determination or cut that is once and
for all. Concepts are material-discursive and cut together-apart. To
conclude then: In our conversation, I added the “conceiving” to space-
timemattering only to re-emphasize the dual meaning of mattering. It
would be redundant to keep the “conceiving,” and would also distract
from mattering.
DG: You have offered us a mode of doing theory that is, or desires to
be, in touch with the world’s theorizing, the world’s making sense. As
such, this mode neither centers on the thinking subject (and its moral
judgements), nor aims to release us from response-ability. How to
remain response-able while being involved in practices of knowledge
production? How to work towards an ethics of making sense of the
world’s sense-making?
KB: This is an important question. Let me emphasize again the diffi-

culty of speaking, and using personal pronouns, such as “I.” It would
be incorrect to assume that there is an “I” that decides on choosing
where to make a cut. This is a humanist flattening out of what I am
trying to articulate. In intra-acting there is no distance between the
“I” and “the world.” There is no “I” that acts from the outside; rather,
it is intra-actively constituted through practices of sense-making.
However, not only does that not get rid of responsibility altogether, it
is that which enables response-ability. Response-ability is an ongoing
practice, an interactive intra-active responding and enabling respon-
siveness. In this way, ethics is not about individual responsibility (this
traditional conception is thoroughly problematized here for there is no
individual that precedes the action, and it is not an abstract reflection
that happens after the fact). Indeed, ethics must be rethought in the
rethinking of space, time, and matter as spacetimemattering (in its iter-
ative intra-activity) such that ethical response-ability is understood as
a matter of what comes to matter and what is excluded from mattering,
that is, as matters of justice.
Another way of getting at this question of response-ability is the
matter of letting concepts breathe. It is what the diffractive method-
ology tries to do, namely working with concepts and at the same time
opening them up, aerating them, so they can continue to breathe. I
point to the aerating of concepts (including diffraction) as part of a
diffractive methodology already in “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting
Together-Apart.”23 In this paper I was working with the notion of
sedimenting, which was less about layers or an archeological under-
standing of depth, and more about the dynamism according to which
even that which is thought to be the lowest level (where questioning
stops) iteratively gets brought up to the surface, as it were, and is
reworked. Making-sense is very much about touching and aerating.
It is about concepts being in touch in their making-sense—in mate-
rializing certain matters, and not others, in their excluding of certain
matters, and not others—and about the enabling of a response, aerating
and breathing.
Response-ability is about attending to, tracing, and taking account
of entanglements, about being in touch with world’s practices of materi-
alizing/making-sense, including its material-discursive “concepting.”
DG: Picking up on your use of “breathing” in regard to concepts, I

think it might also be helpful to emphasize that it is not meant as a
metaphor, but rather speaks to the very “im/possibility for non/exis-
tence.” Precisely because being and knowing are entangled, the ques-
tion of non/existence pertains to modes of thinking and concepts as
much as it does to matters of matter. Can you maybe say more about
an ethics of thinking that might come with that?
KB: Yes, absolutely. In fact, the void—the no/thingness—of QFT is far

from empty, and it speaks (and does not speak!)—it yearns to express
the in/expressible—(to) the very im/possibility for non/existence.
The QFT void is very important for me in thinking about thinking,
theorizing, imagining, in/express-ability, justice, ethics, and more, as
I have written about. I cannot go into details here, but the irrepress-
ible question/ing of the void is far from immaterial—the void in its
yearning for existence, for expressibility, will not be silenced in the face
of forms of violence that would deny those desirings, including for
example, colonial violence whose strategies of a-void-ance are often a
matter of figuring the void as empty and devoid of all mattering. Your
paper on “breathing law” speaks very powerfully to the matterphorics
32 Theory & Event
of the void, law, breathing in relation to an ethics of thinking and the

question of what is (even) thinkable.24
With regard to your question about concepts, let me just say one
thing my reworking of QFT allows me to argue is that concepts do not
only pertain to what we usually call conceptual thinking as opposed to
non-conceptual thinking or other ways of engaging and knowing (and
even not knowing). Concepts are about being in touch in the sense
of virtuality as indeterminacy-in-action. There is no separation between
conceptual and non-conceptual thinking (or non-conceptual engage-
ment), because they are always already inside one-another. There is no
straight-up way of thinking that is not engaging what does not exist, or ques-
tioning the line of what exists and what does not exist, in the way that imag-
ination does. Imagination, I argue, is a material wandering/wondering
that is of the world, neither an individual subjective experience nor a
unique capacity of the human mind.25
This fundamentally questions the notion of rational thought as a
particular modality of having well defined concepts, where one foot is
put after the next, in order to “think correctly.” And this is important
because in using concepts, there is also the potential (or risk) of
violence that needs to be attended by tracing their entanglements. It
is, for example, the kind of violence we have been discussing in regard
to Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives),” detaching concepts from the world, from
matters of existence by making them into metaphors as you discuss
in your dissertation.26 This way of only attending to concepts in the
traditional Western philosophical conception does its own violence
by, among other things, making the concept into an idea rather than
turning to the material historicity that a concept is. You can walk around
in concepts. This is why it takes me forever to read an equation or a
sentence. I walk around in a sentence, I walk around in a word. A word,
or even a letter, entails stories, different stories. It is a phenomenon, an
entire entangled spacetimemattering of particular kinds of configurations—
and not others. These are matters of ethics, of justice.
DG: To me this would also mean not taking the word for a word, for an
linguistic entity, but a phenomenon (as you say), or, as I have argued
following Deleuze and Guattari, a material expression. In fact, this is
precisely the challenge I am aiming to address in my work, coming
from literature and legal studies which are both traditionally text-
based and language-based. As I have tried to show from my specific
(cross-)disciplinary situatedness, this mode of analysis would, in my
opinion, entail a mode of attending to the word that traces the mate-
rial entanglements, too, which is an endless, or never-ending task.
It would always mean beginning from and with what Deleuze and
Guattari call “the middle;” that is, tracing from and with the middle.
Going from, let’s say, the paper (which, of course is only one of many
entry points), or the digital screen on which letters appear, tracing all
the bits and pieces, their histories and geopolitical entanglements, the
bonds of molecules, the forces and dynamics across scales etc.27 Among
other things we would, for example, have to see the particular paper or
screen in relation to the book, and the book in relation to its relationali-
ties, and ad infinitum, as Spinoza would say. If seen in regard to literary
analysis, or even more text-based interpretations of critical theory, this
practice of tracing entanglements is a different analytical project, with
a different scope, a different spacetime conception even. It is not only
that words are uttered by a subject and contain multiple histories, the
word—every letter, the ink or pixel, molecular bonds, forces—is of the
world. It exists, it matters, and this is what makes it singular. No two
words are the same.28 Taking this seriously amounts to a major project
for each word, each phenomenon, each material expression.
KB: Yes, exactly. And this is also the very kind of agential realist anal-
ysis that I encourage students to engage in when tracing the entan-
glements that constitute a material object. I’ve taught this approach
to undergraduates, and we also used this agential realist approach
in the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program where students
from all divisions of the university came together to collaboratively
study water, carbon, seeds, and other phenomena. And yes, because
of the nature of entanglements it is an endless task. Each phenomenon
(whether it’s a word or a thing) is ultimately entangled with every-
thing else (not merely across spaces but also times, or more precisely,
spacetimematterings) but in specific ways, and not all the entan-
glements matter equally or in the same way. So it is an infinite yet
crucially important task to engage in. Tracing the entanglements is
essential to facing questions of justice; both are infinite tasks. Neither
sits still and in neither case is the task definable in advance. Justice
is always to-come, and always a matter of an incalculable number of
entanglements. But just because it is infinite it doesn’t mean that we
don’t engage in it. We must engage with it, even knowing that it is
infinite and we will never arrive, finally. No issue is ever resolved, finally.
No past is ever finished, finally.
III. Diffracting, Critically
“[T]here is a problem even speaking in terms of a ‘critique of something,’

because ‘of,’ in this sense, already implies an outside once again:
critique-at-a-distance.”
34 Theory & Event
DG: In Meeting the Universe Halfway you are developing agential

realism by diffractively reading insights from quantum mechanics
with those from critical social theories. In your current work, beginning
with “What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice”
(2012) you engage closely with QFT. You have on a couple of occasions
spoken about the potential of poetics when it comes to the difficulties of
expressing what your understanding of QFT is suggesting.
KB: Yes, what I have said before is that in my efforts to try to give over
how I understand QFT—including the task of identifying the ways
in which it is shot through with the political (e.g., with colonialism,
racism, and militarism all the way down into the nucleus and beyond),
as well as the fact that liberatory and revolutionary possibilities already
exist within it—I did not choose poetics—poetics chose me.
Let me back up a little here. When I was working on quantum
mechanics (a limit point of the larger manifold of quantum field theory),
the task was to try to make things as clear as possible to the different
readers from the very different fields I was in conversation with. This
was already difficult. When it comes to doing the same kind of project
for QFT, however, I feel myself to be in a whole other realm in terms of
finding vocabularies for expressing what is going on. The way I have
described it is that engaging with quantum mechanics (QM) felt like I
was holding on to the trunk of a tree, something solid and familiar that
one could get a grip on, whereas talking about QFT feels like I am way
out on a limb, at the really feathery part of the leaves, hanging over the
void like an inchworm on a thread. Part of what is happening in my
work with QFT is a further articulation of agential realism, which is
itself further elaborated, as I engage more deeply with the larger topo-
logical dynamism of QFT. With QM and QFT there are very different
experiences in terms of expression; there is something different about
the very materiality of what is being suggested by QFT. For one thing,
QM is one point, a limit point, on a very large manifold of theorizing
(with) a quantum understanding. QM only talks about individual
particles which are moving relatively slowly in relation to the speed of
light (that is, QM does not take relativity theory into account). What’s
more, in QM the quantum principle is not applied to fields (forces)
which are treated classically.
And there is also a big difference in how QM and QFT have been
approached and discussed. There has been a lot of work, and many
discussions, and much disagreement, in the last 100 years about what
QM might mean, how to interpret the theory, and what the philo-
sophical implications might be. As I tried to point out before, those
questions have, for the most part, not been asked with an orientation
towards the political, which are questions I specifically turned to in
my work.
With QFT, however, hardly any work has been done on the phil-
osophical implications of QFT, let alone the political dimensions. To
a degree, this has to do with the fact that there is a whole other level
of mathematics that comes to the fore in doing QFT. Part of what has
been hampering a deep analysis has to do with the fact that there is
a particular inexact narrative that gets repeated time and again. This
cartoony, overly-simplified, and reductive story serves a certain func-
tion in making physicists think they are communicating well with
the public, and unfortunately, this same story is repeated to students
(who go on to repeat the story). One example is what I call the banking
model of the quantum vacuum, which has been repeated so many
times in describing the void that it is taken as a truism. (Basically, this
tale goes like this: the vacuum can cheat the energy ledger as long as it
steals from it and returns what it stole before anyone looks. An inter-
esting tale, no?)29 This story is used by physicists and science reporters
alike, and this is usually done with an eye towards funding. That has
been especially important for particle physics (which depends on QFT)
which has come to depend on ever-larger expensive accelerators for
gathering experimental data. This reliance on very large amounts of
government support grew directly out of the Manhattan Project, in
which particle physicists and physicists working on quantum field
theory were key players. What grew out of this relationship is the
expectation that very large government resources would be at their
disposal.
DG: This is also to say that the question of express-ability is not only
related to the inaccessibility of the level of mathematics, its own
language, and it can also not only be attributed to the lack of modes
of signification and sense-making that would allow an expression in,
let’s say, English. Rather, there is an economy of expressing and circu-
lating figurative meanings that are recognizable, that tap into already
present images, and even imaginaries, and are as such inextricably tied
to political, economic, and military projects.
KB: Yes, that is a key part of it, for this economy of meaning-making is
material—it is, I argue, written into the very equations of how matter
comes to matter, including the fact that matter can be born and it can
die, that it has lifetimes, half-lives, and after-lives. This point—that the
apparatuses of bodily production, the material conditions of im/possi-
bility are inseparable from what comes to matter (again, in both senses
of the word)—breaks with the fact/value, pure/applied distinctions
on which Science is founded calling into question the sacred idea
that theoretical physics is apolitical and that politics can only enter at
the level of applied science or more commonly (and at an even safer
distance) in science policy.
36 Theory & Event
It is not merely an interesting story of scientific prowess regarding

the physicist’s successful construction of the atom bomb which makes
for a certain sense of entitlement that is the matter of politics here.
The point goes much deeper than that. For one thing, a particular
relationship had developed between the US government and the
particle physics community which created this expectation of financial
support for very expensive physics projects, like creating accelerators
that cost billions of dollars. It is a long story, and the narrative around
the Manhattan project is often that QFT was left behind in order to
develop the bomb. That is simply not true. In the book I am working
on I argue that there is, in fact, a continuity between the work done on
the development of the bomb and QFT. Indeed, the point is that the
entangled relationships with militarism, colonialism, and racism are
inside the equations.
Sometimes the economy of expression offers up forms of expres-
sion or namings that make the political nature of the endeavor explicit
even as it’s trying to portray itself as pure and apolitical. For example,
during the Reagan-Bush years when physicists were asking the US
Congress for more than $10 billion for the superconducting supercol-
lider (SSC) there were some quite interesting namings of the project
and its goals that were put forward. In an effort to make a convincing
case leading physicists wrote popular books with shocking titles such
as The God Particle (by Lederman and Teresi), which argued for the SSC
on the basis that it might reveal the ultimate particle—the One particle
that Unifies All (forces but gravity) and that explains the very genesis
of the universe: in other words, the upshot of the book, as suggested
by its title was not subtle; give us billions of dollars and we’ll show
you God (brought to you by the students of those who made the atom
bomb).30 The very naming of the accelerator (suggestions included
“Ronald Reagan Accelerator” after the President who told the phys-
icists designing the accelerator to be “bold and greedy”31) as well as
of an ultimate particle (“God particle”) that would be discovered by
this accelerator and would therefore provide its justification at a time
when so many social services were needed and there was, allegedly,
no money for such services, already announced the fact that matter is
political all the way down. But we will miss the real (and virtual!) matter
of the matter if we stay at this level of analysis by calling attention to
names when what is needed is to trace these forms of expression and
their entanglements into the equations themselves.
As mentioned, following the material nature of concepts and how
they are theorized has been crucial for my work on (and diffractive
reworking of) QM, as well as the newer work on (and diffractive
reworking of) QFT. QFT was the field of my doctoral dissertation, and
I have been working on this project since then (well before my first
publication on it in 2012). This work, too, consists of a diffractive crit-
ical engagement with physics and the way in which it is shot through
with the political, as well as with important liberatory and revolu-
tionary possibilities within QFT. This diffractive approach of reading
insights (e.g., from different fields of thought) through one another in
their entanglements is crucial because of the ways in which so much of
political thinking has been founded on a Newtonian understanding of
what matter, force, and causality are.
DG: If I understand you correctly, liberatory here also refers to possi-

bilities of breaking free from patterns and modes of thought that have
been structuring knowledge production in the sciences as well as the
humanities and the social sciences for centuries. So, there is a partic-
ular Newtonian imaginary that allows for particular conceptions of,
for example, space and time, and importantly not only excludes other
imaginaries but, from the very beginning, does not make them think-
able and imaginable?
KB: Yes, this has long been and continues to be a very important point
for me. The unearthing of Newtonian assumptions has been at the
crux of things for me: it is the pervasiveness of Newtonian thinking
and the Newtonian imaginary which makes the project of attending to
quantum physics so crucial, since quantum physics brings to the fore
the limits of Newtonian thought (including what was unthinkable or
unimaginable), and as such, it can be particularly helpful in breaking
out of certain habits of thinking (and thinking thought), not only those
tied to the strong and persistent tradition of Newtonianism in schol-
arship and in other forms of theorizing, but also in everyday forms
of thought. The Newtonian imaginary is arguably far more pervasive
than realized. Kantianism, for example, which has pervaded a good
deal of thinking in the humanities and social sciences is specifically
based on and embracing of Newtonian thinking. This is not to say that
I am not appreciative of the insights that Immanuel Kant’s critiques
have brought about, but why should that then be the sacred ground?
And of course, this is not something that is restricted to Kant. In fact,
Marx, or at least certain forms of Marxism, have Newtonian assump-
tions built into it, a point indirectly alluded to by Walter Benjamin who
questioned the inheritance of particular notions of time in thinking
history, for example.32
DG: In this sense, what you propose with agential realism is a partic-
ular mode of doing theory critically. Its modality cannot be understood
as simply a response to something, bouncing off a problem or issue, let
alone a dialectical movement of thought. Rather it suggests a way of
engaging with entangled practices of knowing and being, tracing these
entanglements across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries,
and remaining response-able throughout the process.33
38 Theory & Event
KB: Yes, it allows me to ask crucial—indeed, we might say, critical—

questions in a different way. Which physics? Whose physics? What
ways of thinking about nature and the nature of nature (of) are already
present inside particular modes of thought, including those we iden-
tify as political or philosophical, for example, in thinking about non/
being, nothingness, movement, agency, causality, liberty, force, justice,
revolution, or thought? Here is the issue (and irony!): physics, and its
predecessor/ancestor, natural philosophy, have been sedimented into
thinking about political issues. Some political thinkers have explicitly
taken this up (e.g., Marx and Althusser, to name just two); yet the sedi-
menting goes so deep that it is often the case that important aspects
of this mode of thinking are nonetheless uncritically embraced, itera-
tively materialized, and wind up further entrenched. What is needed is a
simultaneous investigation into how physics is already political and how the
political is already shot through with particular conceptions of physics.
This difficulty is evident in some contemporary approaches. It is
often quite evident in approaches where there is a reliance on analog-
ical thinking, and in particular, where quantum physics insights (often
an incoherent hodgepodge of them) are uncritically taken for granted
and analogically, even figuratively, applied to political and social theo-
ries. In this approach the science simply gets a pass. But science is not
neutral. What I seek to do, then, by working through the details and
specificities of the science—which requires a deep rigorous engage-
ment with the science—is to make sure it does not get a pass. My point
is not to reject critique as an important political tool out of hand, but
to push back on certain conceptions of critique. If critique must take
place from the outside, a way of looking at science critically under the
microscope (using a cultural lens), as it were, then too much is lost
in this Newtonian conception. Not only is this Newtonian conception
of the critical gaze through a microscope wanting from the point of
view of 20th century science, Bohr importantly pushed back against
Heisenberg’s conception of a quantum analysis of the effects of the
microscope on the measured object because it didn’t go deeply enough.
My point is that critique itself must be open to reconsiderations of its own
endeavors; in particular, it should be open to push-backs against its uncrit-
ical embrace of Newtonianism. If entanglements rather than objects are
what we are bringing our attention to, then there is a problem even
speaking in terms of a “critique of something,” because “of,” in this
sense, already implies an outside once again: critique-at-a-distance.
DG: What you are suggesting here opens up critique to a different

kind of analysis, one that, as you say, traces entanglements, and as
such, by no means abandons the commitment of thinking critically.
Can you say more about that analysis in relation to critique, and about
what this means for critical modes of thought?
KB: I appreciate the framing of critique by Raymond Williams, Theodor

Adorno, and Michel Foucault as a practice rather than a judgment, and
I have learned much from these and other thinkers about the impor-
tance of critique, many insights of which are incorporated into my
thinking diffraction (and diffractively). I would, however, suggest that
a further step is required: that the meta/physics of critique needs to be
brought to the surface to see what has sedimented there and open that
up to reworking. In particular, I would suggest that a critical practice
needs to be understood in its materiality as inseparable from and of
the very materials one is engaging; so it is not merely a probing of
an object and the limits of how it is thought (although this is surely
important) but there is also another crucial indeed ontological sense of
the “of” that needs critical attention: “of” in the sense of being mate-
rially inseparable from, being of the entanglement that constitutes
the phenomenon one is attending (to). In particular, being materially
entangled means that to ask after the limits of the epistemological
field alone is not sufficient. What is needed, as I have argued, is an
ethico-ontoepistemology.
To engage in a diffractive practice of attending (to) the entangle-
ments that we call “science”, for example, it would be necessary to
understand “oneself” and the apparatuses that constitute “oneself” as
being of the very material-discursive entanglements of which one is
intra-acting (not in some self-reflexive epistemological sense where an
individual self precedes the encounter but) in the sense of taking on a
different sense of response-ability, including response-ably opening up
and reworking the science itself, and the scientific imaginary embedded
inside the political, and so on (ad infinitum). This is an unending prac-
tice as we talked about before. For diffraction is a dynamism of itera-
tively reading insights through one another.34 The point of a diffrac-
tive approach is to open everything up and aerate it to new ways of
thinking with the commitment of not allowing anything to be a still
reflection surface, or a sacred ground upon which we cannot go any
further. And that must include the sciences and also notions of scien-
tific worldviews embedded in the notion of the political, economic,
social, and more.
This brings me to one of the things that have ironically been misun-
derstood in regard to my work and my engagement with quantum
physics. When speaking about physics, including quantum physics, I
am not gesturing to some general conception of quantum physics (as if
there were one, which there isn’t!), or one of the many competing inter-
pretations already out there, for that matter. It is important to under-
stand that when I say “according to quantum physics” I am talking
about my own interpretation of quantum physics, which is an explic-
itly political physics. Crucially, as I mentioned before, this is a unique
interpretation of quantum physics that other physicists working on
40 Theory & Event
foundational issues of quantum mechanics recognize and that has

been crafted by working not only with the materials of the theory of
quantum physics but also the materials of critical social and polit-
ical theories.35 Significantly, I am diffractively engaging with/in—or
rather, being of—the science, not from the outside, but as inseparable
from it—as always already within. I am less interested in how physics
and politics inform one-another, or impact one-another, influence
one-another at a distance, as if we can only approach them from the
outside, as if they are bounded objects that bounce off of each other (a
la Newton). Rather, the point is to understand how they are constitu-
tively entangled with one another all the way down.
Perhaps, we can say that what I am interested in is a kind of imma-
nent critique (but with the caveat that there cannot be “an immanent
critique of” some object, and instead there must be a recognition of the
ontological sense of “of” ) with a particular topological dynamism—a way
of engaging with what matters by taking account of the fact that each entan-
gled phenomenon is already inside of the other .36 What is needed are ways of
not letting the foundations of thinking sediment to the point where it prevents
us from thinking thoughts we need to think. This of course also goes to
a core concern of your dissertation, and especially to the chapter on
“Ethics of Immanent Thought: Doing Theory Matterphorically,” where
you argue for a mode of immanent, non-representational thought,
that “demands to account for lived relationality.”37 And furthermore,
crucially, there is a constructive element in the offering: a specifically
political physics, to give one example.
IV. Desirings. Poetics
“Desire is a felt sense of that field of yearning,

of the entangled inseparability with the other, a felt sense
of the entanglement with/in the other.”
DG: Let us also turn to your notion of poetics and the problem of
finding modes of expression that allow us to make sense of that for
which sense-making practices have not yet been developed. You were
elaborating a bit on the different challenges that await you with QFT,
and mentioned that even though it was already a challenge to find
expressions when working through your interpretation of QM—using
language, words, punctuation, spaces, even—it is yet different with
QFT. Can you say more about expression and poetics?
KB: Yes, to add to what I have already hinted at, there are differ-
ences in the challenges in trying to give expression to the felt sense
that I have of what the theory is articulating. One even has to play
with the grammatical structure. At some point, in order to express,

it becomes impossible to obey all the grammar and logics of how a
particular language prescribes what has to be. This was already hinted
at by Bohr, who complained that he was really challenged in trying
to express what he wanted to express about QM because the very
structure of Indo-European languages, especially the noun/verb split,
works against trying to explain his proto-performative account of QM.
That was already one way in which he was acknowledging—in argu-
ably the most radical line of questioning in the history of physics—the
material limits of language when it comes to how the physical world
expresses itself (although he didn’t put it in these terms).
When it comes to QFT this difficulty of the task of expressivity and
the limits of language are even more pronounced. One does not have
the trunk of the tree to hang on to anymore. It doesn’t suffice to just
introduce some new words and terms to get out of the situation. One
way I have tried to address a specific difficulty I faced was by using the
slash: For me, the slash does not indicate an either-or as it is conven-
tionally read; rather, I take the slash to indicate a cut or more precisely a
cutting-together-apart, rather than a sign of an absolute separation. If I
am, for example, talking about in/determinacy, it is a cutting-togeth-
er-apart of determinacy (and) indeterminacy (although even saying it
this way the “and” is too simplistic) in their inseparability; it is not an
either-or, because the binary logic of either-or does not hold here. This
is in the nature of indeterminacy (in/determinacy) which is a dynamism and
not a state of affairs or an event. It is in that sense that in trying to give
expression to that which does not follow logics of grammar, language,
or Newtonian thought, there is something that might be called poetics.
Importantly, I am not aiming to be poetic for the sake of poetics, but I
am trying to be as rigorous as possible in trying to express what I feel
that QFT articulates.
DG: Poetics, for you, has to do with expression, and with a mode of
sense-making that exceeds language. In that sense, it is, I would say,
less about form—thinking here of poetry as a literary form—which
goes back to agential realism and its refusal to separate form from
substance.
KB: For me, poetics has to do with expression, or rather, with virtual
experiments in yearning for expression in the face of a certain inex-
pressibility as measured according to existing modes of expression.
It has to do with making one’s way through sensing, of being in touch
with what one is yearning to express, which, in saying that, I am thinking
already in relation to my understanding of QFT’s sense of touching
and yearning. For me, trying to be as precise as possible involves a
bodily felt sense of what that sense-making sense is.
42 Theory & Event
DG: Just to clarify, “body” here does not refer to the body of the Cartesian
subject, or to the body of the subject as imagined by Enlightenment
philosophy. I am thinking here of Ngaire Naffire’s argument according
to which Kant, if he imagines a body at all, imagines it as discrete,
self-contained male, human body; and I am also thinking of other
feminist scholars that have pointed out the body image underlying
political and legal theories that build on the concept of the subject.38
KB: Yes, thanks for the opportunity to clarify, that is not what I mean
by a body. The notion of body you were referring to—the body of
the Cartesian subject—is again Newtonian which points to what we
have talked about before, namely Kant’s Newtonianism. QFT points
to a very different sense of self, subjectivity, individual, and body.
Indeed, there is no subject that precedes the yearning to express. In
fact, because of the diffractive methodology that I use there is an
important sense in which none of the concepts that I use are referring
to familiar concepts. Indeed, none of the concepts are referring. This is
not the work concepts do. There is always an iterative performative
engagement with concepts. The challenges of express-ability, that you
raised, in relation to being in touch are the kinds of things I was saying
earlier about theory. It is not that I am trying to represent the theory in
language per se; rather, I am trying to be in touch with the theory in
the way it inhabits me and that I am inhabiting it—the way in which
we inhabit each other in this strange topology, this material, embodied
sense of sense-making. I am trying to do it in a response-able way with
as much precision as possible. As I mentioned before, the theory is a
material articulation of the world that has embedded within it specific
entanglements of colonialism, capitalism, racism, but also possibilities
of disrupting and undoing these forces. A consequence of the diffrac-
tive reading is that nothing can be presumed as the already familiar
and old, but at the same time, nothing can be seen as producing the
“new” as if the new is a function of a discontinuous moment from the
old.
DG: In the course of our conversations about concepts and careful

reading practices you said something very interesting, namely that,
when a writer is engaging with certain kinds of concepts, doing certain
kinds of work with them in order to be in touch with something, then
you want to try to be in touch with that. What interests me here is your
notion of desire, or, rather desiring. For it is not the desire of the writer
(that is, the creator, author, genius), but it is the desiring of concepts to
be in touch. It is this desiring you desire to be in touch with. Desirings
touching.
The notion of poetics as it emerges from attempts to express what
QFT articulates seems to come in precisely here, where the world’s
desiring (whereas world is not to be understood as a singular agent)

and the desire to be in touch with it touch. Can you say more about
desire and how it relates to your interpretation of QFT?
KB: Yes, this is important. QFT offers an infinity of orders of desiring

and touching.39 There is touchings touching and desirings desiring and
desirings touching and so on. If I am not mistaken in this case, I was
talking about careful reading practices and a way in which there is
a desire to be in touch with a desire to express—desirings touching,
touching desirings, desiring touching desiring, and so on. I am not
speaking here of my desire or desire as something a given human
subject experiences. Desiring is a doing. I am thinking this en/action
in terms of fields, fields in their materiality. Desire, as I would express
it, is some felt sense of being pulled towards. Yearning is a field of differ-
encing (differentiating-entangling), and desire is a felt sense of that field of
yearning, of the entangled inseparability with the other, a felt sense of the
entanglement with/in the other.
DG: No morality is implied here. But could we speak of an ethics;

perhaps an ethics that is not, or not only, about ways of living, but of
non/existing?
KB: That’s right, there is no moral sense implied. There is, however, a
different ethics implied.
This field of yearning is a potential for responsiveness, for a response-
able connection with the other in the field of differencing. That is, response-
ability is not some mere idea or ideal; response-ability is material, it
is integral to the en/actions of the field. Desiring is a felt sense of the
entangled inseparability with the other, in its inseparable differencing,
in its differencing without exclusion. It is material: Matter is consti-
tuted as condensations of responses to the desires/desirtings to be in
touch, a collective responsiveness/responsivity. Each body of matter—
each “self”—is constituted in response-ability; each is constituted as
response-able for the other, as being in touch with the other. Each indi-
vidual is a multitude, a collectivity of already active/activated mate-
rial possibilities for/in/of response.
Yearning is a build-up of energy, or rather, energy difference, or,
potential. Thinking with lightning, classically speaking, potential is an
energy that might be put to use; an energy build-up that might yet be
activated. Potential entails the anticipation of a possible movement,
a situation in which nothing is happening and everything yearns to
happen.
And this is precisely where a Newtonian notion of potential
awaiting activation breaks down. For according to QFT, nothingness is
not passivity or lack but always already (a) happening(s); that is, noth-
44 Theory & Event
ingness (that is, the vacuum)40 is always already expressing (itself) as a

desiring for/of expression, for existence, for/of the ability to respond,
for/of responsiveness. Within/of the nothingness is a desiring to
be/come, a dynamism of in/determinacy: a liveliness, a life force, a
yearning towards existence/existing. It is a potential movement or move-
ability, a potential e/motion.
DG: In thinking with you here, we are not in some pre-existing space,
let alone in one where particles are pulled towards each other or repel
each other, where, in other words, distance is understood spatially.
What’s more, movement, moveability, and e/motion are not to be
understood in terms of linear time, progressing “forward.”
KB: Yes, space and time are not preexisting theaters for the play of
things—movement does not happen within such a space and time.
Movement is being rethought. And so is the notion of a field and
forces, along with matter and nothingness. So, while trying to say what
QFT is doing to the notion of fields, I am, in trying to be in touch with
the QFT, also intra-actively working with the theory and reworking it
in such a way that “field” now means something else. In the classical
notion of field we would say that a field is something that has a value
at each place in space, at each moment in time. So it already presumes
a spatial container and time as a parameter that marches forward
independently of everything that is happening (in good Newtonian
fashion). What I am suggesting by spacetimemattering is that there is no
givenness nor fixity nor separability of space, time, and matter; on the
contrary, spacetimemattering is a dynamism that is iteratively intra-ac-
tively articulated; what is at issue here in spacetimemattering is what
fields are fielding.
Part of what happens with QFT is that you come to understand
that yearning is both anticipatory and a looking back, but not in the
sense where time is a parameter that marches forward and the past
precedes the present which precedes the future. Rather, it is a re-mem-
bering of what might-yet-be/have-been, because both the past and the
future are contained inside every moment, in an undoing of inside/
outside. So this is clearly not a notion of space and time in the usual
sense.
Crucially, in its varying intensities the field of yearning doesn’t
so much hold the potential for something to happen in the future (for
example, for one out of a set of possibilities to be realized or actual-
ized), as much as it is always already a virtual/material experimenting
diffractive patterning enacting responses of all possible kinds in all
possible ways; a lively field of response-ability—abilities to respond,
to be responsive. Yearning is not anticipatory in the sense of not yet
arrived, not yet mattering, but is always already active in the Thick
Now of the present; possibilities and potential are not about what might
yet be, so much as what is already active, in motion, in this Thick Now.
What I am arguing is that potential is itself an ongoing activity, a material
en-acting that matters—potentiality always already in motion, e/motion. In
this ongoingness, the notion of desire as a felt sense of yearning and a
differencing field is not something that is resolved finally, that has an
endpoint, that will find ultimate fulfillment, or even strives towards an
object (as I pointed out in our discussion about lightning).
DG: What I appreciate about this conversation about desirings, and

especially in your rethinking of potential, is not only the rethinking
itself, but also the way in which appropriation, that is, the modes of
grasping and capture inherent to many modes of representational
thought, are not part of the dynamisms here. This really is a core
concern of this special issue and also something we have already
mentioned in this conversation. The concept, as dynamism, neither
captures, nor allows for, nor works by means of capture.
KB: Right, we were talking about that earlier: there is no grasping or

capturing possible, finally, and this is a matter of the dynamism of
in/determinacy. The yearning of the vacuum is irrepressible. It also
problematizes psychoanalytical theories which see desire as an anti-
dote to death. Because in QFT life and death are not opposites, but
entail or inhabit one-another, which is surely not to say that they are
the same. Nothingness expresses itself as a desiring for life, for exis-
tence, for expression, for the ability to respond. It is a material force
of life. Yearning for justice, then, is part of what is built into this field
because of the fact that what happens with the infinity of the field is
that the other is constituted as an integral part of oneself in an undoing
of difference as a matter of absolute exclusion. The violence of cuts
that draw distinctions and boundaries in ways that seek to circum-
scribe, capture, limit, and otherwise position the other as the Other
reverberate through the field in its spacetimemattering; though violent
cuts are enacted somewhere at some time (not necessarily at a partic-
ular moment, but once again specificity is crucial) they cause differen-
tial harms which cannot be generalized and are nonetheless entangled
across spaces and times.
DG: What you are suggesting then is also an understanding of justice,

of a yearning, that neither has a direction, nor can be understood
universally, that is, as being the same everywhere, at all times. Can
we say that something (or precisely not a thing) that is not a condition
(that either is or is not present), but a desire that desires touching and
being touched by a different form of desiring? A desire that is felt when
46 Theory & Event
injustice(s) take, capture, grasp, build walls, exclude, include; not as a

response but a yearning differently?
KB: Yes, I really like the way you put that. And I think it’s important to
articulate this further. Justice is a yearning in relation to how difference
come to matter, and not simply as a response (as if that could be enough),
but indeed, a desiring—a felt sense of yearning—for yearning differ-
ently, for material changes in the field of spacemattering, a reworking
of im/possibilities. And it’s important to also add that justice is the
lived possibility of difference/differencing without exclusion, a differ-
encing that undoes exclusions through the dynamism by which that
which is constitutively excluded becomes a constitutive part of the
self, precisely in an undoing of Self/Other (as well as the Self). In other
words, what is at issue here is once again agential separability: differ-
encing without othering—without separability, without exclusion.41 What
is built into this field of yearning for justice, then, is the undoing of
exclusion without taking away from differencing. Justice, thus, is not
morality, but a responsive ethical relationality with the other. This has to
do also with this material force of justice, this yearning for justice that
is written into the world, into the very nature of matter itself, in an
undoing of itself, of essence, of kind.
DG: In a way, this continues, or elaborates even further, the last para-
graph of Meeting the Universe Halfway, in which you write that there is
“no getting away from ethics” as “mattering is an integral part of the
ontology of the world in its dynamic presencing,” and that “[m]eeting
each moment, being alive to the possibilities of becoming, is an ethical
call, an invitation that is written into the very matter of all being and
becoming.”42
What you are offering us here, if I may put it that way, is not a
theory of justice, or a reduction of justice to physical phenomena
detached from the socio-political context, but rather, in understanding
theorizing as being in touch with the material articulations of the world
and in reworking the physics intra-actively, an undoing of the under-
lying Newtonian conceptions that structure, determine, and regulate
many of the traditional, contemporary, as well as yet-to-come concepts
of justice. This also means that you are not handing over a concept
of justice, let alone a theory, but, by reworking your field of engage-
ment—exposing its violence(s) and liberatory potentiality—invite us
to attend to those dynamics, complicities, and cuts in our fields of
engagement.
KB: Yes, that’s right. Engaging with questions of justice cannot mean
capturing the correct concept and putting it to use. There cannot be
one universal concept or ideal of justice that applies across time and
space. There is no endpoint, no destination, no one right state or just
configuration that can be reached finally. Justice is an ongoing open-
ended practice.
“Poetics are all the material dances, errant wandering/wonderings, diffract-

ings, entanglings, reconfigurings happening in the field of desiring.”
DG: Yet another relation that came to my mind when you were talking
about the field of differencing and in regard to what agential realism
is undoing, is the very beginning of the first chapter (“Difference in
Itself”) of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Here, Deleuze criti-
cizes a concept of difference that renders its own mediation, that is
representation, as a necessary (moral) response to the “cruelty” and
“monstrosity” of difference-in-itself, meaning, of “unilateral differ-
ence.”43 In this chapter, Deleuze will go on asking, what difference
is, whether the question of difference has to be asked in moral terms
(of course not), and whether difference must have been mediated “in
order to render it both livable and thinkable.”44 There is certainly a lot
more to say about this chapter, and also about how Deleuze’s concept
of difference relates to yours, but I suggest we reserve that for another
conversation. What I find interesting in regard to our conversation
here is that he proposes a different understanding of difference by first
rejecting the notion of difference as “something distinguished from
something else,” and consequently inviting us to “imagine something
which distinguishes itself—and yet that from which it distinguishes
itself does not distinguish itself from it.” To illuminate (so to speak)
that point, he chooses lightning which, in many ways and sometimes
very hiddenly, makes appearances throughout the book.45
Interestingly, when we first talked about desire and a field of
differencing you mentioned lightning as an expression of this partic-
ular mode of desiring and differencing. Even in this conversation
you have hinted at a classical understanding of lightning in order to
expose a Newtonian understanding of potential. Now, although our
conversation in which you first mentioned lightning to me did not
involve Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, let alone the said passage,
I was wondering if we could return to lightning and how it relates to
discerning and differencing (as you understand it) again?
KB: Very interesting—I have not studied the text by Deleuze so I

can’t comment on it. But there is certainly so much to say about light-
ening. Interestingly, while it is one of the largest phenomena we can
point to on Earth, I would suggest that it cannot be understood using
Newtonian physics: that it is, in fact, a quantum phenomena.46 In fact,
I have argued that lightning is a QFT phenomenon,47 which may seem
48 Theory & Event
counterintuitive as people tend to fetishize quantum physics as only

being about the very small.
There is of course a lot to say about that, but, staying with what
we were talking about, let me start this way: We already have some felt
sense of lightning (and here I am speaking matterphorically) because
when lightning storms are about to happen, or are happening to us
(meaning, when we are being considered or even sampled by the
desiring field) our hair stands on end; that is, if you find yourself in such
a situation (and this is not uncommon among mountain hikers) you can
feel in an embodied way the desiring field that is being enacted. You
are, in this case, what is called a test particle in the field. This desire for
connection, which in a classical way would be understood as “across
distance,” is what a field is about. The problem is that in the classical
sense of fields, lightning is seen as a way to dissolve this difference.
Because in the usual explanation, clouds are said to build up charge on
one surface (through a not entirely understood mechanism), and this
polarization then sets up a strong field.48 The next part of the story is
that the surplus of electrons in the cloud rush to the earth seeking to
neutralize this charged desiring. At least this is the usual way in which
this is talked about (although to be clear, the usual story puts this in
terms of the neutralization of charge buildup). However, if you look
at the science of lightning, it does not support this notion of a charge
buildup in the clouds that is dissolved by coming to the earth; light-
ning is not that kind of direct resolution of tensions between heaven
and earth argued for by classical physics. In fact, lightning doesn’t just
“come down” from the sky, nor does it happen in anything like a unidi-
rectional fashion. Very high-speed cameras have shown that there is
this very intriguing enaction whereby a stepped leader experiments
with every possibility, errant wanderings, expressions of desirings,
potential paths of possible connection—all of this before there is even
something we would call a lightning bolt!49 I have suggested that these
are in fact the virtual happenings of the field already enacting electri-
fying e/motions, electrical stirrings of desiring. The aliveness of this
field in its virtuality is an expression of yearning, indeed, it is yearning
to express itself in its desire for connection in a way that is already
engaged in touching and touchings touching and desirings desiring
and so on. To me, this is indeed the field desiring, this field of yearning
variously expressing its longings, longings to express the yearning for
connection … engaging in all manners of touching upon touching.
(Here I’m caught up in trying to express what is already inexpress-
ible, or indeed, in/expressible in its very materiality, in particular, in
its yearning to express its desire.) Electrons feeling out this desiring
field, exploring entanglements of yearning, yearning for connection.
Electrical flirtations signaling connections-to-come through a queer
dance of in/determinacy.
Ultimately, there may yet be a lightning strike, but this will not
be a direct resolution of tensions. Lightning strikes don’t even neces-
sarily proceed form the sky, from the clouds, to the earth at all. First of
all, there is the phenomenon of cloud-to-cloud lightning. For another,
before the lightning bolt is “issued” (and this is the old classical way
of speaking) the ground first responds! A tenuous electrifying gesture
comes by way of the making of an upwards reaching positive stream-
er—a yearning expressed or seeking to be expressed in response
to a stepped leader that not only yearns to connect (but with what
isn’t clear) but (in any case) has not yet made contact. (Again, this is
before the lightning bolt!) One might ask, how is this desire commu-
nicated? How does the ground have any excitation in response to ...
any yearning towards … well before there is any contact, before any
such signal would (as it were) descend from the sky? It seems to be
responding to what may yet happen; that is, there is an evident break-
down of Newtonian temporality and causality.50 A slowed down video
of a lightning bolt shows a complicated dance of desire/desiring.
There is a way in which the yearnings from the clouds and from the
ground gesture towards one another through an intra-active dyna-
mism and ultimately you can see (if you watch the lightning strike in
slow motion) how the light that is emitted does not proceed from the
sky down or even from the ground up but follows errant pathways
that are virtual gestures of yearning as part of the desiring field. So
lightning isn’t this classical notion of resolving difference at all. On the
contrary, it is enacting a way in which differencing is entangling.
DG: What is intriguing here is also that desire, rather than being about
fulfillment or reaching an object, is intimately (a different kind of inti-
macy) tied to expression. And it is also precisely here that I see the link
to both poetics and the challenge we have discussed throughout that
interview, namely express-ability not only beyond, but in, or by means
of, language. When you say that in the course of your attempt of artic-
ulating quantum physics concepts poetics has chosen you, and that
poetics is a way of expressing what necessarily defies the logic of (here:
English) language, then this does not necessarily mean that poetics,
even in your written work, refers to the use of words.
KB: Yes, that’s right. Desiring, as I think it intra-actively with QFT and
lightning, is neither about fulfillment nor lack. And it is not about a
desire that I as a subject possess. It is about the world’s doing of poetics,
an intra-active meeting of desires: desirings touching touch. Poetics are
all the material dances, errant wandering/wonderings, diffractings, entan-
glings, reconfigurings happening in the field of desiring. There is no final
discharge of desiring or an object that pre-exists this desiring, but the
ongoing yearning for expression.
50 Theory & Event
DG: Thinking back to your documenta piece “Measure of Nothingness,”

we might say that poetics is of the void. In fact, in this piece, writing
about the void and showing what an agential realist understanding
can offer, you ask what it might mean to “utter words about nothing-
ness” and you suggest to “let the emptiness speak for itself.”51 The void
as a field of yearning, you describe as a “desiring orientation towards
being/becoming,” and, after speaking in terms of sounds in trou-
bling linguistic expression and metaphors, as “the blank page teeming
with the desires of wouldbe traces of every symbol, equation, word,
book, library, punctuation mark, vowel, diagram, scribble, inscription,
graphic, letter, inkblot, as they yearn toward expression.”52 This is how
and where I sensed poetics in your work. If it is to be found “in” (which
is also not an appropriate preposition here) the book, then not neces-
sarily as a play of words or form, but in the desires of “wouldbe traces”
yearning toward expression. For me, being in touch with that desire
would mean to not only ethically choose our entry points into the
analysis or investigation of specific matter(s) and concepts, but also to
understand them in their specificity and matterphoricality. It goes back
to a line in A Thousand Plateaus that is, in a way, constantly writing and
thinking with me, namely that “an electron crashes into a language.”53
I am interested in tracing these encounters, these touchings (as you
call it), this “silent dance” (as Deleuze and Guattari write), not only to
do away with the body/mind dualism, but because to me poetry, too,
is tied to an aesthethics. Returning to agential realism, then, we can say
that this understanding of poetics becomes sensible only when matter
and meaning are understood as inseparable in terms of expression and
sense-making, when they are, to use your concepts, read diffractively
and intra-actively.
KB: Why am I not surprised that an electron crashing into language

has surfaced? (laughs) I’m going to go out on a limb here and riff on
this since you’ve invited me and since electrons constantly entice me.
If anyone wants a nuanced analysis, they should consult your work.
I suppose the phrase “an electron crashes into a language” provoc-
atively invites a reaction in which this is read as entailing a category
error and so in that sense one would assume it could only be meant
poetically (in the more traditional sense not how we’ve been talking
about it). But language is no less material than an electron (which it
bears remembering is always already material-discursive—indeed,
both are!), and both need to be opened up to genealogical/ spaceti-
memattering analysis where the tracing of entanglements goes all the
way down, as it were. Such analyses must be done by attending to
the precise phenomenon in its all specificities, and so general state-
ments can’t be made, but one can imagine a literal encounter between
an electron and language: suppose that one is looking at a word on
a computer screen and as such it is literally made of photons created

by electrons impinging on a light emitting material, for example. Of
course, there is also the question of how the light-emitting diodes are
made and where the materials came from, etc. And now we are in the
realm of analysis that your research agency, the Logische Phantasie
Lab, is focusing on.54 And also the kinds of collaborative analyses
students in the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program have
engaged in. Coming back to poetics (in the sense of experiments in
yearning towards expression), the point for me (pun intended) is that
part of what materially constitutes both “language” and “electron” is
the would-be traces of yearning towards expression, in their specific-
ities.55 So that the touching in question here (and it is the very nature
of this touching that is a question) is not one that necessarily operates
through a human subject—an author or reader, for example.
The assumption of a category mistake in the example of an elec-
tron crashing into language is premised on a certain metaphysics of
individualism that the notion of entanglement undoes. Importantly,
as you point out, this goes to the question of methodology. Because
entanglements are vital to understanding relationalities in their spec-
ificities, what is needed is an approach that does not tear them apart
before the analysis gets going. This is what a diffractive methodology
was designed to do. It attends to how cuts (which cut together-apart)
matter in their differentiating-entangling rather than taking certain cuts
for granted and then trying to determine relations among (presum-
ably) separate things. That is, separability is not taken for granted and
this means that all phenomena—all the entanglements—are open to
analysis and questioning. Nothing gets to have some privileged exis-
tence because entangled phenomena in their specificity are inseparable
from one another.
Implicit in the assumption of the existence of a category error is
not only the notion that electrons and language are disparate kinds—
that is, not the kinds of things that would crash into each other—but
also the notion that they exist at disparate scales: electrons are micro-
scopic and language is a social phenomenon. It may be important to
emphasize in this regard that agential realism is an invitation to investi-
gate the unanalyzed workings of Newtonianism that are often simply taken
for granted, including the metaphysics of individualism and also
perhaps especially in this regard (but not only) notions of scale, matter,
time, and space. The point is that oftentimes analyses already assume
a Newtonian and Cartesian understanding of space and time, where
space is laid out as a theater for the happening of events and time is
an assembly line of self-similar moments counted out as a clock going
tik, tok, tik, tok, and scale is taken to be a natural measure of space
and time in terms of intervals or distances. To leave these Newtonian
assumptions and the ways in which they have been used outside of
52 Theory & Event
the analysis is to leave in place the sedimented cuts and materializa-

tions that are then being further sedimented. That is, space, time, and
mattering materialize in particular kinds of configurations which anal-
ysis should get at.
I try to do that in my own work. For example, it is clear that
there is a connection between QFT and the construction of an atomic
(nuclear) bomb. But if one attends only to the details of social relations
(assumed to be at one scale) between say the physicists involved in the
Manhattan Project and the government then the analysis of the physics
(assumed to at another scale) in relation to political issues only goes so
far. I argue that one can take the analysis much further by not taking
scale for granted but instead making the question of scale part of the
material analysis itself. When you allow that a whole other world of
questioning opens up. There is the question first of all the assumption
of how small the nucleus is; because it is the core part of the atom and
atoms—as everybody “knows”—are really small, and so clearly nuclei
are really really small. Except, what everybody always knows is part
of what we ought to question here. So one of the things that happens
is that the way that I work with and rework quantum physics is that
even an electron, which is classically a point particle (nothing can be
smaller, it has zero dimension, no interior) has, in a specifically entan-
gled sense, the entire world inside of it. We come to understand that
something so simple and something that should be without question,
namely that an elementary particle is very small, all of the sudden is
in question in a very, very big way. What is the size of an electron if it
is shot through with the infinite; if there are multiple infinities inside
of it? Doesn’t it have to be enormous? Doesn’t it have to be really
big? How big? These are questions that are put forward as a result of
reading diffractively, and that is hugely important.
DG: What does this mean for our notions of scale? How to unthink
and rework scale(s)?
KB: Thanks for the opportunity to go further into this matter. I have
been arguing that rather than simply assuming that quantum physics
and the social exist at different non-overlapping scales, we first need
to inquire into the very making of scale itself. Which is not to say that
scale doesn’t matter, but that what needs to be part of the analysis is
precisely how it comes to matter, how it is materialized. 56
In fact, the atom bomb cuts directly to these questions of scale in
ways that should give pause to those who would hang onto a nested
notion of scale as pre-existing and outside of all that happens.57 When
the nucleus of an atom—which is of the order of 10-15 meter in diam-
eter—reaches into the stratosphere (104 meters up from the surface of
the earth; constituting a difference in scale of 1019meters—of the order
of the distance from Earth to the Orion Nebula—an unbridgeable gap

if we take scale as the given), it should be clear that scale cannot be
taken as the backdrop to what happens.
Thermonuclear bombs, invented after the war, dwarf the bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Close to two thousand thermo-
nuclear bombs were tested during the so-called Cold War, most on
indigenous lands, including the Marshall Islands. The scale of these
displays of raw power are difficult to imagine. Some of the bombs were
powerful enough to obliterate entire atolls in the Marshall Islands. They
were literally blown to bits. They no longer exist. They were made into
‘voids’; indeed, particular kinds of voids coupled with particular kinds
of a-void-ance, as part of the practices of nuclear colonialisms. (Not all
voids are the same—again, the importance of specificity!). And other
atolls made into nuclear testing grounds have holes blown into them—
enormous craters—an astonishing 2000 meters in diameter.58
When the radioactive blasts coming from the nucleus of an atom
reaches into the stratosphere something has clearly gone awry with
the fixed nested notion of scale. What makes for these new unearthly
kinds of transplanetary scales? Shouldn’t this be part of the analysis?
As I argue in “After the End of the World,” the bomb and the theory
inhabit one another.59 If “[i]nside the nucleus of the atom is an implosion of
violent legacies, sedimenting historicities of colonialism, racism, extractivist
capitalism, militarism, neocolonialism, and also the seeds of their down-
fall and possibilities for living and dying otherwise,” then how big is the
nucleus? 60 As I mentioned before, physics and politics are always
already threaded through one-another. To presume the notion of scale
and skip over this analysis amounts to a further sedimentation of the
Newtonian notion of scale, with all its universalisms and entangled
sedimented histories of colonialism.
V. Moving Politics
“Indeterminacy means that no wall to thought can succeed, finally.”
DG: Rather than invoking a concluding question or simple phrase to

wrap up our conversation, let alone attempting to summarize it, I wish
to ask you about movement, or, more precisely, about what imagina-
tions might become possible if we, as you suggest, critically address
the Newtonianism inherent in the concept of spatial, political, affec-
tive and physical movement. Various political regimes, as well as their
resistance(s), make use of, address, mobilize, romanticize, or appro-
priate movement(s). And there is of course also the idea of theory
(be it Marxist, anarchist, or, very differently from that, far-right theo-
ries) becoming or being a movement, of moving, removing, or being
54 Theory & Event
moved. Knowing that any answer would certainly require more time
and consideration than possible in the course of this (printed) conver-
sation, can you give us a sense, only a sense, of what the rethinking of
movement might offer?
KB: Let me first put forward some of the groundwork of Newtonian

physics since we may want to draw on this. In Newtonian physics each
entity exists at a specific location at any given moment in time; it also
has a specific velocity or momentum (mass times velocity) at any given
moment in time. According to Newton, knowledge of the entity’s posi-
tion and momentum at any one time together with the forces acting on
it is sufficient to predict and retrodict their values for all time. This is a
sense of strict determinism. Any change in the momentum, including
any divergence from a straight-line path, is due to some external force
acting on the entity. Newton also provides the ground for common-
sense and taken-for-granted assumptions of space, time, and matter.
Political and social theories often incorporate or assume particular
aspects of physics, or more generally, particular understandings of the
physical world (including conceptions that go back to the Greeks as
well as Newton).61 For example, liberalism, understood as a political
philosophy, as well as, or perhaps even more so, neoliberalism as the
fetishization of the individual manifested in the corporation, takes the
individual as the unit of political rights and economic rights, respec-
tively: in particular, each individual is assumed to have its own indi-
vidual roster of attributes and rights—thus incorporating Newtonian
meta/physics into its foundations. Forces (including constraints such
as borders, prisons, walls, policing) can be externally applied to move
or corral individuals as well as to stop (their) movements. (Of course,
this isn’t the only form of power enacted, but it remains a common
form used by states both abroad and within the nation state.) I could
go on about this for some time, but I know you are trying to get me to
give you a rough answer and not an elaborate exposition on it.
So I will quickly turn now to a specific method of resistance, a
counter-tactic, based on an alternative to the common individual
particles frame, used by the Hong Kong pro-democracy protestors.
Months into the protests and with an awareness that police violence
was ramping up and defeating the protestors they shifted to a form
of creative resistance that belies the expected atomistic engagement:
rather than masses of people showing up at one given location, like
a particle (which occupies a given position), they started thinking of
movement in terms of being (like) water—that is, like waves rather
than particles. It is a different kind of movement to move like water
rather than as individual entities. It is to be fluid, formless, and shape-
less, to surge up in one spot, quickly dissipate, only to reemerge with
intensity elsewhere a short time later—protest making and moving as
waves diffracting. This movement was not a form of chaos but rather
a decentralized well-coordinated effort. Pro-democracy protestors in
Belarus adopted this water tactic as well. This is not to suggest that
being-water is inherently more effective and should be universally
adopted. Neither is it the only embodied interpretation of water. In
fact, Hong Kong protestors further elaborated their tactics in terms of
different states of matter, demonstrating that there is no universal best
tactic or state of matter: be strong like ice when confronted by police, be
fluid like water when escaping through the cities’ narrow streets, gather
like dew for flash mob protests, and scatter like mist to avoid arrest to
fight for another day.62 Movements can be differently conceived and
mobilized, and this is true even staying within a Newtonian frame-
work (where the metaphysics itself encourages analogical thinking).
The point is that although it is not always evident, physics pervades
political thought and activism, and this is also true when it comes to
thinking about and with different conceptions of movement.
Now, to think of movement against the grain of Newtonianism
would get us into a lengthy discussion. Let me just say that what I
have in mind is not thinking analogically in terms of ‘being quantum’
(whatever that means), but rather the fact of how the concepts of
force, mass, body, individual, property, acceleration, speed, velocity,
momentum, pressure, work, energy, motion, trajectory, path, space,
time, matter, agency, causality, and movement, to name a few, need
to be reworked. That is, when a group of protestors are cornered by a
mob of police (say, in the militarized move of kettling), it is not simply
a matter of saying “let’s be quantum” and just wind up on the other
side of the barrier. The violence of this corralling is not to be underes-
timated and neither are the barriers to thinking. I’m not thinking in
terms of analogy or metaphor here. This is a matterphorical concern. It is
a matter of what gets sedimented in the repeated use of certain modes
of thinking because these modes wind up making walls to thought.
This is not to say, as Derrida insists,63 that we are thereby walled-in
by language; on the contrary, this is a material obstruction that needs
to be broken through; and I would argue that breaking through does
not require the application of a force, but can happen by other means.
Quantum physics, for example, provides a different imaginary.
DG: Yes, and this relates very well to what lies behind this special issue
on matterphorical as outlined in the introduction, namely an ethics (or:
aesthethics) of thought and modes of doing theory that neither fall prey
to what Deleuze calls the image of thought, nor to representational
modes of thought, which not only refuse to critically attend to their
own unmattering processes but reproduce and reinforce the onto-epis-
temological assumptions underlying them.64
56 Theory & Event
And, what you just said also links interestingly to Eyal Weizman’s
“Lethal Theory” essay, which is also discussed in this issue. Weizman
shows how the IDF’s strategy of “walking through wall” was devel-
oped to significant parts by military strategists’ reading and inter-
preting of what is considered leftist theory, including Deleuze and
Guattari’s work. It involved a different conception of the city, namely
as “the very medium of warfare—a flexible, almost liquid medium that
is forever contingent and in flux.”65 Weizman, in showing the IDF’s use
of critical and post-structural theory, problematizes the idea of a pure
theory as such—which is assumed to be either good or bad, left or
right—detached from the events and happenings in the world. In this
special issue, Weizman adds that critical theory is not pure, but in fact,
even entangled with fascism in multiple, often complex ways, and that
“we have to be attentive to the way in which all things are in the world
and could be turned this way or the other.”66 This is also why it is so
crucial to us, in our work and in this special issue, to put the emphasis
not on theory (as noun), but on modes of doing theory, which are insep-
arable from the underlying modes of thinking and their ethical impli-
cations. The IDF might use their (instrumentalized) interpretation of
smooth and striated space, but in doing so they undermine the ethics
of thought proposed by Deleuze, as well as by Deleuze and Guattari.
To me, both Weizman’s reading of the IDF as well as the statement
about theory’s complicity speaks to a mode of theory that collapses
the thought/praxis divide,67 and calls attention to the fact that theory
is often easily considered “pure” (either left or right, critical, or not
critical) as long as it is understood representationally—as ideas, as
written text, outside the physical and embodied world. And further,
it suggests that if theory is in or (as you emphasize) of the world, then
other modes of moving, even other modes of “walking through walls”
or “moving like water,” are thinkable. Critically analyzing what this
might mean—which must, as you say, include a critical engagement
of the all but neutral physics underlying social and political theories—
does therefore bear the potential to disturb and re-work concepts,
such as movement and force, and with them the particular violences
inherent to them.
KB: That’s a really interesting connection. I completely agree that there

is no pure theory. I remember reading about the IDF’s appropriation
of Deleuze and Guattari’s work many years ago and it struck me in a
similar way. Indeed, I have emphasized since early on in my work on
agential realism that quantum physics is not inherently liberatory, that
indeed “quantum physics underlies the workings of the A-bomb, that
particle physics (which relies on quantum theory) is the ultimate mani-
festation of the tendency towards scientific reductionism,” and more.68
I want to pick up on this point that it is possible to think about

“walking through walls” or “breaking through walls or barriers”
otherwise. When I was signaling the possibility of breaking through
walls without force, I was gesturing towards a specifically quantum
phenomenon called “quantum tunneling.” This is an unfortunate
naming because it is not a matter of ‘tunneling’ in the sense of making
a hole or tunnel, that is, some means of breaking through walls by
force, including the violence of smashing through buildings and
people’s lives. On the contrary, quantum tunneling, I would argue is
a matter of ontological indeterminacy in action: a matter of breaking
out of confinement not by making a hole in a barrier but rather by
simply winding up on the other side.69 Now, it might be interesting
for a movement to think with quantum tunneling and embrace it as a
means of escaping confinement without violence: breaking out or breaking
through without breaking into bits, without obliterating. But the crucial
point that I would want to get at is what makes quantum tunneling
possible and how can it be engaged to think politics and political praxis
otherwise. What makes quantum tunneling possible is indeterminacy:
the ineliminable ontological indeterminacy that is not a mere state of
affairs nor an event, but rather an unending dynamism. And for this
reason, fascism and other authoritarian theories that seek to contain
thought will ultimately fail, inevitably. Indeterminacy means that no wall
to thought can succeed, finally. Which is not to say that resistance and
creativity aren’t necessary; on the contrary, the fact that thought will
inevitably break through any attempt at its confinement provides the
impetus and energy to do the work of unearthing and aerating sedi-
mented ways of thinking.
DG: This is a very powerful claim and speaks in an important way to

the very possibility of thinking differently (and here your reworking
of quantum physics offers a way of breaking through the dominant
imaginaries and modes of thinking). What is more, it is a reminder
that thinking requires a matter of ethics (and why). Thinking, too, is
political all the way down. In fact, what you are describing here, espe-
cially the political potential of reworking and aerating concepts such
as body and movement, also opens up the question of agency—more
concretely that of political agency attributed to an individual or group
(of protesters)—differently. This kind of agency is often measured in
terms of the intensity of the impact (thinking here of your argument
about Newtonian force) that an individual, a group, or a movement
has. That is to say, the reworking of agency in its entanglement with
movement and body (and other matterphorical concepts) might allow
for an understanding of political agency that is neither in the indi-
vidual nor in the group and that shows that it matters, rather than
58 Theory & Event
impacts, that there are many protestors in the street making articula-
tions of (in)justice.
KB: Yes, it matters a great deal. First of all, what I am suggesting is that
there is something about a certain potential that bodies have together
that far exceeds the notion that a crowd or any social unit is the sum
of individuals encountered in Newtonian physics. What is needed
are modes of thinking and imagining that go against this reduction
of bodies to Newtonian particles so that moving and encountering
barriers can happen differently. There are many different possibilities
for understanding this dynamism than the two options that either
figure the individual as a unit or society as a collection of individual
bodies forming an undifferentiated whole, one mass (as in fascism,
for example). First of all, within physics there are different ways to
understand collectivities beyond the notion that they are mere sums.
In the example of the Hong Kong protestors there were different tactics
for different situations that had the protestors being and moving like
different states of matter. Might there be situations in which multiple
tactics are called for at the same place and time? The coexistence of
different states of matter happens during a phase transition: where
one state of matter changes into another (e.g., water becomes ice at
the freezing point). What happens in the midst of a phase change is
that multiple forms (e.g., water and ice) coexist and you have things
happening on multiple scales at once. One might say that this is in
fact something that happens as part of anarchist demonstrations
where there is a gathering of different collectivities or affinity groups
of various sizes that act separately and together, and plan coordinated
actions in the face of violence. My point is not to suggest that we think
analogically so much as pointing to the ways in which political imagi-
naries can be constrained by particular ways of conceiving of different phys-
ical possibilities.
I have argued that thinking with quantum physics entails thinking
in terms of relationality rather than relations between entities, which
already fundamentally challenges Newtonian meta/physics and in
particular what it means to be a body or an individual. Individuals
do not preexist their encounters and they are not separable, let alone
separate entities. Which is not to deny the existence of individuals but
to think (with) them differently. The individual is neither the political
or economic unit of rights and properties, neither is it the case that the
individual is subordinated to the state who allegedly acts on behalf
of society knowing better than the masses what is good for the whole
and derivatively the individual (as in fascism). Alfredo Rocco (the
Minister of Justice under Mussolini and his premiere theorist) specif-
ically rejects the “atomism of liberal, democratic and socialist theo-
ries” where society is understood to be the sum of individuals, and

yet Rocco nonetheless enlists Newtonian conceptions of time, history,
masses, forces, agency, among others for theorizing fascism.70 This is
not to say that all traces of Newtonianism must be eliminated because
a quantum political theory would be inherently more just, as I continue
to caution. But in answer to your question, I do want to point out that
the notion that agency is a property of groups of individuals who have
more or less agency is a conception that again fits well with Newtonian
meta/physics (which includes the physics of individualism).
But agency need not be thought and limited in this way. I have
argued that agency is not something that someone has; it is not an
attribute of subjects (or objects for that matter), nor limited to humans.
Indeed, it is not an attribute whatsoever. Agency is a matter of intra-
acting: it is an enactment.71 Agency is a matter of changing the possibilities
for change in their materiality. And when people come together en mass
to protest injustices, to articulate their demands and desires for justice,
this is political agency in its enactment, in its multiply expressed desirings
for being in connection and collectively reworking the material condition of
human and nonhuman lives as well as reworking the very possibilities for
change. What is at root in this conception of agency is the dynamism
of indeterminacy—that is, intra-activity—which is a reworking of the
notion of causality.
I want to speak to this point about causality. To slow down here
a moment. Causality is one of the forbidden concepts to work with
in contemporary theories, including critical theories. Despite the
concerted refusal to think about causality, it matters a great deal how
we understand cause and effect relations. Importantly, causality need
not be an on/off proposition: either linear monocausal causality (like
billiard balls) or not causal. This limited way of thinking is yet another
contemporary articulation of a particular reading of Newtonian meta/
physics. What does it mean to refuse to think about causality in the late
20th and early 21st centuries? Why during these times? One might even
ask, as a test case: Why now?
As the pandemic surges, does breathing in other people’s exha-
lation cloud increase the risk of contracting Covid-19 such that mask
wearing might stem the spread of the disease, or is mask-wearing
merely a political ploy? How do we assess causal claims and what work
do they do? The pandemic has exposed, or rather brought into relief,
the systemic violence of healthcare and other social and economic
systems, and also the violence in walls constructed around structures
of thought. There seems to be a profound inability to think causally
and to think causality and this is quite glaring when it comes to how
people engage (or not) in risk assessment these days. Even when
considering only those who take science seriously and are well-edu-
cated about how the virus is transmitted, there seems to be an inability
60 Theory & Event
to think things through. For example, some people say they only see
a limited number of people who only see a limited number of people,
and think they are being safe. Or the person who picks up a relative at
the airport, has them sit in the passenger seat during the drive home,
in a car with the windows closed, and then has that person quarantine
in their home. There is a tendency to attribute such refusals or inabil-
ities to think things through to wishful thinking or the psychological
shortcomings of the human mind when faced with the challenges of
assessing relative risks. But is psychology the sole explanatory factor?
And why is that the first (and sometimes only) place to look for an
answer? Might there be some way in which the notion of interde-
pendence, for example, is insufficient to grasp the degree of intimacy
(the complexity of causal linkages) entailed in being in touch with a
few people who are in touch with a few people and so on, especially
when each “individual” is always already a crowd (and not merely in
a psychological sense)? I want to suggest that this isn’t just a failure
to think exponentially but also to think in terms of multi-causality
(which may already be too simplistic a way to put it), or what might
constitute causality other than a kind of billiard-ball causality where
one ball bashing into another causes another ball to move which then
causes another ball to move, etc. What happens when multiple causes
coexist? (Can we think the inseparability of multiple causes? Or the
inseparability of cause and effect? Or a notion of causality where cause
doesn’t precede effect?) Could it be that this resistance or failure to
think causally has gone viral?
I can’t help wondering if this (near) systemic inability to (or avoid-
ance of, or allergy to) thinking casually and the refusal of critical theo-
ries to think about causality, aren’t both, in fact, a repetition, an echo,
or a form of complicity with the kind of limits to thought that sustain
the ruling class. Might this not be why, in an important sense, causality
lies in the domain of the unthinkable?
How might we understand this? Or dare I ask: What are the causes
of these inabilities and refusals? What work does it do to disable a soci-
ety’s ability to think casually, and to think about the nature of causality?
The pandemic has not only advantaged the rich to the tune of trillions
of dollars in newly accumulated wealth by the most wealthy people
on the planet while “8 million Americans slipped [note the passive
verb in this news heading] into poverty,” in mere months since the
beginning of the pandemic,72 but letting the pandemic rip in the face of
glaring structural inequality enacts a form of eugenics, disproportion-
ately killing black, brown, and indigenous peoples, the poor, the elder
population, and those with disabilities. I am not in any way implying
that leftist theorists have created this situation; on the contrary, it is
evident that those theorists—and I would consider myself as engaged
with precisely these endeavors—are trying their best to analyze and
interrupt this killing machine. And, lest we forget, this killing appa-
ratus is entangled with others (and I do mean this causally!): including,
for example, the mass slaughter of millions of nonhumans through
industrial meat farming, which is also inseparably entangled with
capitalist forms of production that produce and fuel the climate crisis,
which is entangled with plantation economies and the legal state-sanc-
tioned violence of the enslavement of Africans stolen from their lands,
which is entangled with practices of colonialism and the genocide of
Indigenous peoples, to name just a few. (Of course, listing entangle-
ments is not in any way sufficient; it is necessary to trace the entan-
glements in their specificity—that is where the work lies.) My point
is that we need to keep asking: What concepts are off limits to think and
think with, and why? What, when, where, how, why … is this refusal to think
certain thoughts?
Notes
1. Karen Barad, “On Touching: The Inhuman That Therefore I Am,” differences:
A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23, no. 3 (2012), 207-8.
2. Barad, 208.
3. Barad, 207, 208.
4. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement
of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 334.
5. Barad, 149.
6. The “post” here is not temporal in the sense of beyond the human (which
would arguably be trans, not post), as if the human no longer matters; nor
is it to suggest that everything matters equally (e.g., just as much as the
human) in all times and spaces. Rather, perhaps more akin to post as in
poststructuralism, which incorporates as it challenges the insights of struc-
turalism; posthumanism is not against everything humanism stands for,
but rather is an ongoing question of humanism in its dynamic reworkings
(e.g., as in poststructuralism which is not against the notion of structures
but a certain way of conceiving of structures through structuralism).
7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press,
1994), 59, 88.
8. Daniela Gandorfer, Matterphorics: On the Laws of Theory (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, forthcoming).
9. See also the investigative work by the Logisches Phantasie Lab, a research
agency conducting matterphorical case studies in order to address injustice(s)
unrecognizable by contemporary law(s) and legal thought: https://lo-ph.
agency.
10. In this regard see Barad, “Erasers and Erasures: Pinch’s Unfortunate
‘Uncertainty Principle’,” Social Studies of Science 41, no. 3 (June 2011):
443–454.
62 Theory & Event
11. According to agential realism “scale” is a matter of specific practices of

making sense, of mattering, and this entails specific agential cuts; that is
to say, “scale” is not a universal given, which is surely not to say that it
doesn’t matter.
12. In fact, to use a methodology that has separation built into it would have
undermined the understanding of quantum physics that I was craft-
ing—a feminist understanding of quantum theory threaded through with
insights from critical social and political theories—which calls separa-
bility itself into question.
13. On the importance of figuring response-ability as enabling response and
how it matters in terms of the science and in science policy, see especially
Astrid Schrader, “Responding to Pfiesteria piscicida (the Fish Killer):
Phantomatic Ontologies, Indeterminacy, and Responsibility in Toxic
Microbiology,” Social Studies of Science 40, no. 2 (April 2010): 275–306.
14. Response-ability is a term used by that was also part of a nomenclature
in the streets in the 1980s. As far as I know if first appears in scholarly
literature in Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
(San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987). See also Barad, “Diffracting
Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart,” Parallax 20, no. 3 (July 2014): 168-187.
15. As will be discussed later, Eyal Weizman also, yet in a different manner,
speaks about theory in relation to sensing and sense-making. See
Weizman, “Epilogue: Theory, Momentarily,” in this issue.
16. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 109.
17. Barad, “Language is Bound to Escape Capture,” Invited talk for the
Language of Conservation Conference, University of California, Santa
Cruz Philosophy Department, May 4, 2018.
18. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Concept, n.,” accessed November
30, 2020, https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.princeton.edu/view/
Entry/38130?rskey=8DE9Ax&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.
19. The call for a new domain of thought (as if thought should have domains)
was not mine and I have critiqued the use of “new” in “new material-
isms” since its founding, both for the use of “new” in its reliance on a
progressivist notion of temporality and the discontinuity implied from the
presumed “old” materialism of Marx. Barad, “Nothing is New, Nothing
is Not New” (keynote lecture, “What’s New about New Materialisms”
Conference organized by Mel Chen, University of California, Berkeley,
May 4, 2012).
20. Not only does this cut erase important connections and continuities with
“old” materialisms, including Marxisms and Indigenous epistemolo-
gies, but it also ignores the fact that cuts cut together-apart so that even
the alleged discontinuity between continuity and discontinuity is called
into question. See Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological
Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and
Justice-to-Come, Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (November 2010): 240-268.
21. Jenny Reardon, Jacob Metcalf, Martha Kenney, and Karen Barad, “Science
& Justice: The Trouble and the Promise,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory,
Technoscience 1, no. 1 (2015): 1-36.
22. My reason for not going with material-semiotic (for example, which
Donna Haraway introduced) is that, rather than putting the material in
relation to signs, I wanted to propose an understanding of it in relation to
power-knowledge (and hence I worked with Foucault’s notion of discur-
sive practices).
23. Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction.”
24. Gandorfer, “Breathing Law. Real Imaginings of What it Might Mean to
Matter Differently,” in The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws, ed. Peter Goodrich
and Thanos Zartaloudis (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2021).
25. Barad, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political
Imaginings,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2-3 (June
2015): 387-422.
26. Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven
Missiles, Seven Missives,” Diacritics 14, no. 2 (1984): 20-31. For a close
analysis of the representational thought Derrida uses in this essay, see
Gandorfer, Matterphorics.
27. See chapter one of Gandorfer, Matterphorics.
28. See also Elizabeth Povinelli, Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub,
“Mattering-Forth: Thinking with Karrabing,” in this issue.
29. See Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice
(Osfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012).
30. The fact that Lederman called it the “goddamn particle” in reference to
its villainous nature doesn’t take away from the political-theology at play.
Lederman and Teresi, by the way, explain the book’s title as follows: “[T]
he publisher wouldn’t let us call it the Goddamn Particle, though that
might be a more appropriate title, given its villainous nature and the
expense it is causing”; see Leon M. Lederman and Dick Teresi, The God
Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? (New York: Dell
Publishing, 1993), 2. Yet another book expressing this particular hubris
is Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the
Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992).
31. David Appell, “The Supercollider That Never Was,” Scientific American,
October 15, 2013, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-su-
percollider-that-never-was/.
32. I find it significant that Marx’s dissertation, which I have been studying
for some time now, is directly engaging with questions of physics. It is not
that Marx’s dissertation is apolitical as compared to his other works, but
arguably the reverse, namely, that Marx understands that the metaphys-
ical assumptions of physics are written into our ways of conceptualizing
politics.
33. A related conversation, focusing more on how theory and response might
relate to “life” is discussed by Stefan Helmreich in conversation with
Daniela Gandorfer and Zulaikha Ayub in this issue; see “Doing Theory:
Life, Ethics, and Force.”
34. Diffraction is a different optics than reflection; where the latter is about
mirroring and sameness (as Haraway points out). This is the optics under-
64 Theory & Event
lying analogy and comparative methodologies where one thing (that

preexists) is compared to another (which is also presumed to preexist). But
this metaphysical assumption of pre-existence also needs to be opened up
and questioned.
35. Barad, “Agential Realism: A Relational Ontology Interpretation of
Quantum Physics,” in Oxford Handbook: The History of Interpretations of
Quantum Mechanics, ed. Olival Freire, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
forthcoming).
36. I have called this a “strange topology” in order to try to bring to the
fore the unconventional nature of this relation. I have also referred to it,
somewhat more precisely, as “the topological dynamism” of QFT, which
emphasizes the dynamic nature of this relationality.
37. See chapter one of Gandorfer, Matterphorics.
38. See especially Ngaire Naffine, “Embodiment: Humans as Biological
Beings,” in Law’s Meaning of Life: Philosophy, Religion, Darwin and the Legal
Person (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2009): 143-162 and Naffine, “The Body
Bag,” in Sexing the Subject of Law, ed. Ngaire Naffine and Rosemary Owens
(North Ryde, NSW: LBC Information Services, 1997): 79-93.
39. See Barad, “TransMaterialities,” “On Touching,” and What is the Measure of
Nothingness?
40. Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness?
41. Agential separability is a core concept of agential realism. It is directly
related to the notion of intra-action. Since intra-actions cut together-apart/
entangle-differentiate there is no absolute separation—or indeed, sepa-
rability—in differentiating. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway,
and “Diffracting Diffraction.” Denise Ferreira da Silva also writes about
difference without separability, drawing on quantum physics; see Denise
Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference without Separability,” Incerteza viva =
Living Uncertainty (São Paulo: São Paulo Fundaçao Bienal, 2016): 57-65.
Agential separability is further elaborated by Barad in works on QFT; see
for example, “On Touching” in relation to the troubling of an absolute
notion of exclusion.
42. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 396.
43. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 28.
44. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 30.
45. The passage reads as follows: “Lightning, for example, distinguishes itself
from the black sky but must also trail it behind, as though it were distin-
guishing itself from that which does not distinguish itself from it. It is as
if the ground rose to the surface, without ceasing to be ground. There is
cruelty, even monstrosity, on both sides of this struggle against an elusive
adversary, in which the distinguished opposes something which cannot
distinguish itself from it but continues to espouse that which divorces it.
Difference is this state in which determination takes the form of unilateral
distinction. We must therefore say that difference is made, or makes itself,
as in the expression ‘make the difference’. This difference or determina-
tion as such is also cruelty.” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28.
46. Barad, “Nature’s Queer Performativity (the authorized version),” in

Special Issue on “Feminist Materialisms” in Kvinder, Køn & Forskning
(Women, Gender & Research, 2012), No. 1-2, pp. 25-53. See also Vicki
Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011).
47. Barad, “TransMaterialities.”
48. For example, if the bottom of the clouds are negatively charged this forces
electrons making up the surface of the earth further into the ground,
leaving the earth’s surface with a local overall positive charge.
49. Barad, “TransMaterialities.”
50. Relatedly, see Barad’s agential realist interpretation of the quantum
eraser experiment in Barad, “Quantum Entanglements: Experimental
Metaphysics and the Nature of Nature,” in Meeting the University Halfway:
247-352.
53. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1440: The Smooth and the Striated,” in
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014): 474-500.
54. https://lo-ph.agency
55. The reference here is to my reading of QFT where the electron (allegedly
a tiny negatively charged particle that is so small it has no internal struc-
ture, that is, it is a point particle) is anything but an individual with its
own roster of properties. On the contrary, the electron is a crowd, a multi-
tude of others in an undoing of kinds, properties, and being as distin-
guished from nonbeing.
56. Barad, “Re(con)figuring Space, Time, and Matter,” in Feminist Locations:
Global and Local, Theory and Practice, ed. Marianne DeKoven (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2001): 75-109. See also, Barad, “Spacetime Re(con)
figurings: Naturalcultural Forces and Changing Topologies of Power,” in
Meeting the University Halfway: 223-246.
57. Barad, “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness,
and Strange Topologies of Spacetimemattering,” in Arts of Living on a
Damaged Planet, ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils
Bubandt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press): 103-120.
58. Barad, “After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms,
Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice,” Theory & Event 22, no.
3 (July 2019), 524-50.
59. Barad, “After the End of the World,” 528.
60. Barad, “After the End of the World,” 543.
61. This is true of many (if not all) different disciplinary forms of thought
within the Western canon. When I taught at Barnard College in the 1980s,
I had the students do a project on unearthing aspects of Newtonian
thinking within their major disciplines. This was very powerful for many
of these undergraduates, sometimes disrupting particular modes of
thought before they had the chance to become cemented.
66 Theory & Event
62. NTDTV “Bruce Lee’s ‘be water’ philosophy inspires Hong Kong protes-
tors” (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzZWG1hWNaA
63. Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in
Deconstruction and the possibility of justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel
Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992): 3-67.
64. Gandorfer and Ayub, “Introduction: Matterphorical” in this issue.
65. Eyal Weizman, “Lethal Theory,” Log, no.7 (Winter/Spring 2006), 53.
66. Eyal Weizman in Conversation with Daniela Gandorfer, “Epilogue:
Theory, Momentarily,” this issue: 408.
67. Weizman speaks about theory as that which “inhabits the gap between
sensing and sense making.” See Weizman and Gandorfer, “Epilogue,” this
issue: 401.
68. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 67–8.
69. For example, when we twist two wires together to make an electrical
connection the electrons “quantum tunnel” through a barrier of dust and
grease from your fingers constituting an insulating or nonconducting
barrier; this is an everyday phenomena that make such mundane connec-
tions work.
70. Alfredo Rocco, “The Political Doctrine of Fascism” (1925), trans. Dino
Bigongiari, International Conciliation 11 (October 1926): 400.
71. Barad, “Agency without Agents,” in Power, Practice, Agency: Working
Papers from the Women in the Public Sphere Seminar 1997-1998, ed. Marianne
DeKoven (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute for Research on Women, 1999).
72. Simon Read, “Billionaires see fortunes rise by 27% during the pandemic,”
BBC, October 7, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54446285.
See also, Stefan Sykes, “8 million Americans slipped into poverty amid
coronavirus pandemic, new study says,” NBC News, Oct 16, 2020, https://
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/8-million-americans-slipped-pover-
ty-amid-coronavirus-pandemic-new-study-n1243762.

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Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,) Differently

Karen Barad, Daniela Gandorfer

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Political Desirings: Yearnings for Mattering (,)

Karen Barad and Daniela Gandorfer

Matterphorics, as an aesthethics of thought, attends to modes of thought

“Theorizing is a particular form of

Daniela Gandorfer: Before asking more concretely about what a

The world theorizes as well as experiments with itself. Figuring,

Importantly, ethics is inextricable from theorizing, thought, and

In beginning to unpack the radical potential these claims hold, let

DG: This also speaks to a particular form of questioning that has

of doing theory to those that accept this interpretation of the world.

I mean by posthumanism.6 In other words, rather than assuming the

nent mode of thinking strives to think, and which consists neither of

“All theorizing, all materializing, and all mattering is political.”

response-ability in the sense of enabling a response,13 in the sense of a

“Concepts are specific material doings or enactments of the world.”

DG: This leads us right into the question of concepts. In thinking

KB: Perhaps it is helpful to start with Bohr. In representational under-

entail mutually exclusive material configurations. As such the giving

in their materiality): matter and meaning are inseparable: hence, the

KB: These are very important points. Indeterminacy, as I have argued,

DG: Your understanding of concepts then also challenges the notion of

“Concepts are not things in a conceptual space but

DG: Your agential realist argument according to which concepts are

ically and, to use your concept, material-discursively; to look at it and

KB: First of all, sense-making is never an individual affair, nor does it

do work with concepts in their specificities as specific material configu-

DG: In your work you speak about spacetimemattering. In adding

KB: Yes, I added “conceiving” for emphasis; it’s already implied in

KB: This is an important question. Let me emphasize again the diffi-

DG: Picking up on your use of “breathing” in regard to concepts, I

KB: Yes, absolutely. In fact, the void—the no/thingness—of QFT is far

of the void, law, breathing in relation to an ethics of thinking and the

III. Diffracting, Critically

“[T]here is a problem even speaking in terms of a ‘critique of something,’

DG: In Meeting the Universe Halfway you are developing agential

It is not merely an interesting story of scientific prowess regarding

DG: If I understand you correctly, liberatory here also refers to possi-

KB: Yes, it allows me to ask crucial—indeed, we might say, critical—

DG: What you are suggesting here opens up critique to a different

KB: I appreciate the framing of critique by Raymond Williams, Theodor

foundational issues of quantum mechanics recognize and that has

IV. Desirings. Poetics

“Desire is a felt sense of that field of yearning,

with the grammatical structure. At some point, in order to express,

DG: In the course of our conversations about concepts and careful

desiring (whereas world is not to be understood as a singular agent)

KB: Yes, this is important. QFT offers an infinity of orders of desiring

DG: No morality is implied here. But could we speak of an ethics;

ingness (that is, the vacuum)40 is always already expressing (itself) as a

DG: What I appreciate about this conversation about desirings, and

KB: Right, we were talking about that earlier: there is no grasping or

DG: What you are suggesting then is also an understanding of justice,

injustice(s) take, capture, grasp, build walls, exclude, include; not as a

“Poetics are all the material dances, errant wandering/wonderings, diffract-

KB: Very interesting—I have not studied the text by Deleuze so I

counterintuitive as people tend to fetishize quantum physics as only

DG: Thinking back to your documenta piece “Measure of Nothingness,”

KB: Why am I not surprised that an electron crashing into language