Georges Bataille as Ray Brassier Avant La Lettre

Digging around, I always thought that despite the scientific gleen of Ray Brassier’s intriguing project, that I recognised something of the Bataille’s base-materialism underneath.

Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist. They situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of diverse facts, without perceiving that in this way they gave in to an obsession with the ideal form of matter, with a form thai was closer than any other to what matter should be.

Materialism in Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess : Selected Writings, 1927-1939, p 15.

This amphiboly, we shall argue, leads to an fundamental indiscernibility between the theoretical postures of materialism and idealism, an indiscernibility in virtue of which philosophical materialism remains incapable of distinguishing itself from idealism. Consequently, ‘the decline of materialism in the name of matter’ describes that movement whereby any philosophical materialism which accepts the premise of a transcendental distinction between ‘thought’ and ‘matter’ must forsake the attempt to encompass matter in the concept and abandon the materiological register in order to initiate a theoretical posture whereby not only does materialism no longer presume to circumscribe matter by way of a concept, it is now matter which determines materialism through its very foreclosure to every concept. In other words, Part I argues that transcendental materialism achieves its most rigorous theoretical consummation at the point where it necessitates its own elimination as a system of discursive statements ‘about’ matter.

Ray Brassier, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter

Note to self: look into this. Further note to self: write something as good as Alien Theory for PHD thesis.