Diffractive Reading as New Materialist Methodology: Unpacking Barad’s References to Foucault and Deleuze

Description

The two scholars who have developed the diffractive reading methodology –Haraway and Barad – relate ambiguously to the philosophy of both Foucault and Deleuze (and Guattari). However, Barad refers to Deleuze’s Foucault as well as Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge in her seminal monograph Meeting the Universe Halfway from 2007. Quotes from both books are in fact used as epigraphs to a section dealing with representationalism. Distinguishing representationalism from practices of representing in order to make clear that some work on representation is done in una- wareness of an assumed gap between ontology and epistemology, and therefore forecloses the study of how ‘the represented’ participates in the entangled, material-semiotic or material-discursive pro- cess of its own representation, Foucault’s Archaeology is referenced for its problematization of ‘discourses as groups of signs’ and Deleuze’s Foucault for its ‘rais[ing of words and sight] to a high- er exercise that is a priori’. This paper will unpack both diffractive reading as such and Barad’s ref- erences to Foucault and Deleuze. How is ‘reading diffractively’ a new materialism? And what are the allusions Foucault and Deleuze themselves make to diffraction?

Period	28 Jan 2015
Held at	Linköping University, Sweden