Close Encounters of a Critical Kind

Abstract

For a number of years, new material feminists have been developing new theoretical tools, new modes of conceptual analysis, and new ethical frameworks. Object-oriented ontology, part of the speculative realism “movement,” has been engaged in something similar. Yet these endeavors have often taken place in “parallel universes,” despite sharing—or at least colliding around—a range of somewhat similar ontological and epistemological commitments. Composed as a diffractive musing encounter, the article brings Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, already a “foundational” text for new material feminism, into an encounter with a speculative realist text of the same “foundational” status, Harman’s The Quadruple Object. The article develops a notion of diffractive musing as embodied, sensory struggle which instantiates intellectual generosity as a mode of critique.