Diderot’s egg Divorcing materialism from eliminativism
Isabelle Stengers

I have taken the invitation to speak about materials and materialisms* as an opportunity to re-examine the position I adopted nearly thirty years ago now, when writing La Nouvelle Alliance (translated as Order Out of Chaos) with Ilya Prigogine.1 In that book, I proposed a definition of materialism from the scientific point of view, and more precisely of materialism as a challenge to the sciences. Materialism, I wrote, demands ‘that we understand nature in such a way that there would be no absurdity in affirming that it produced us’. At that time, this sentence was meant only to emphasize that the far-from-equilibrium physics which was presented in that book was a step in this direction, because the possibility of matter spontaneously adopting, far from equilibrium, a collective self-organized form of activity was somehow diminishing the gap between life and non-life.

Today the situation has changed. On the one hand, what I took for granted thirty years ago – that understanding nature is at stake in natural sciences – would now be hotly contested by those who are busy deconstructing and eliminating any connection between the sciences and the claims associated with understanding. But, on the other hand, new and academically more and more powerful protagonists have appeared, who would endorse the demand I formulated, but would give it a rather different meaning. Indeed, they happily equate understanding with actively eliminating everything about ‘us’ that cannot be aligned with their conception of what matter is all about. This is why – and it will be the theme of this talk – I now propose that the demands of materialism cannot be identified in terms of knowledge alone, scientific or other. Rather, just like the Marxist concept of class, materialism loses its meaning when it is separated from its relations with struggle.

Struggle must obviously be distinguished from the academic war games conducted around so many versions of what can be called ‘eliminativism’. In ‘Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic’, in Radical Philosophy 130 (March/April 2005), Alain Badiou critically associated the postmodern claim that there are only bodies and languages with what he called ‘democratic materialism’. I would emphasize that the eliminative claim expressed by ‘only’ may well sound democratic, in the sad sense of erasing all differences that oppose general equivalence, but it is first and foremost part of such an academic war game. Indeed the ones who make this claim take the classic academic high ground: they know while others just believe.

Against such a ‘democratic’ materialism, it is tempting to invoke Spinoza: ‘We do not even know what a body can do.’ But we also have to invoke other, more compromising voices. It is academically fashionable to quote Spinoza today, but less so to recall that both religion and the craft of magic implied some knowledge of what language can do – of the power of words crafted to bless or kill, or save, or curse – of ritual words or ancestral words. Only languages indeed!

back