ABSTRACT
As I said in the introduction, Literature and Materialisms strives to rehabilitate objects, things, materials, that is to say the environment: What surrounds us and also what is in us, the external environment composed of animals, plants, oceans, the atmosphere, and also the internal environment that constitutes our body, the more than thirty trillion bacteria that each of us contains. 1 Our environment is material and our mind does not exist without a body: An emancipated mind – remember what I explained in the last section of the introduction of my book – is not a mind severed from the universe. As 20th century north-American objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky wrote:
Thought is weightless but is stopped by a bullet, what? 2
Indeed, what an unpleasant surprise for those who tend to forget that they live in a material world and that they cannot think any longer if the material environment of their thought, that is to say their brain, is irremediably damaged. There is the lesson: We, human beings, are creatures gifted at thinking, we can use our reason and our imagination; but we exist amongst “anonymous materials” (Negarestani), that is to say, a mix of matter and forces. Is it not a perfect way to approach materialism? Materialist would be the one who pays attention to the materiality of the world, to matter, and materials. Materialist would be those who are aware of their environment.