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

Recent streams of thought arising in the wake of Speculative Realism have premised the possibility of materialism on the autonomy of the idea and the resistance of matter to ideal capture, thus stressing the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea. This article aims to show how this twofold premise ultimately grounds the viability of materialism in what will be described as its “aperture” or formal inconclusiveness, and then seeks to elucidate the question this raises for materialism as a philosophical project. Methodologically, the paper focuses on Ray Brassier’s “materialist monism.” It begins discussing his engagement with conceptual normativity, and then brings this into dialogue with Georges Bataille’s “non-logical difference” to hypothesize that the aperture of materialism rests on the following claim: matter eludes full ideal formalization insofar as it can contain – yet not exhaust – the idea. The article develops this line of thought by linking the mutual irreducibility of matter and idea to their mutual indispensability, suggesting that the question for materialism is a question whose saying mirrors its doing: in asking how to conceive the idea as simultaneously immanent and transcendent to matter, it both states and performs an uprooting gesture.