Quotes from Karen Barad

The void is a spectral realm; not even nothing can be free of ghosts.

It is ironic that while environmental activists are busy reifying a notion of nature based on purity, with all its problematic implications, the enterprise of bioengineering is making it crystal clear that the nature-culture dualism is a construction, a point that feminists and other social critics have been trying to get across for some time.

Objectivity means being accountablefor marks on bodies, that is, specific materializations in their differential mattering. We are responsible for the cuts that we help enact not because we do the choosing (neither do we escape responsibility because we are chosen by them), but because we are an agential part of the material becoming of the universe.

We do not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming

Furthermore, I argue that ethics is not simply about responsible actions in relation to human experiences of the world; rather, it is a question of material entanglements and how each intra-action matters in the reconfiguring of these entanglements, that is, it is a matter of the ethical call that is embodied in the very worlding of the world.

Ethics is not a geometrical calculation; others are never very far from us; they and we are co-constituted and entangled through the very cuts we help to enact. Cuts cut things together and apart. Cuts are not enacted from the outside, nor are they ever enacted once and for all.

But then again, representations are not (more or less faithful) pictures of what is, but productive evocations, provocations, and generative material articulations or recon-figurings of what is and what is possible.

What if we were to acknowledge that the nature of materiality itself, not merely the materiality of human embodiment, always already entails "an exposure to the Other"?

Central to my analysis is the agential realist understanding of matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations, rather than as a property of things.

Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.