Abstract

This book is dedicated to the proposition that we must return to language to develop a coherent materialism that can grasp the forms and forces of abstraction that determine our existence. If, today, the prison-house of language has been abandoned for the ‘great outdoors’ of matter and things, this hasty exit has abandoned the possibility of grasping abstraction. The qualities once attributed to the human subject – will, freedom, contingency, etc. – are simply now displaced on to the thing or object. This displacement deliberately forgets the power of language as medium of exteriorisation and abstraction. To return to language is to return to the problem of materialism as a relation of language to matter. The aim of this book, through a series of interventions, is to sketch and specify this relation as one in which language engages and transforms the material. Poetry, here, is the supplement that by placing language under pressure to engage matter, turning language to matter, offers the possibility of a new thinking of the concrete that traverses abstraction.