Karen Barad Quotes & Sayings

The very nature of materiality is an entanglement. Matter itself is always already open to, or rather entangled with, the "Other." The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are coconstituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human . . . What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us--agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part. — Karen Barad

This book is about entanglements. To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as pare of their entangled intra-relating . Which is not to say that emergence happens once and for all, as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and of time, but rather that time and space, like matter and meaning, come into existence, are iteratively recon figured through each intra-action, there by making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future. — Karen Barad

In an agential realist account, agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or subjectivity. Nor does it merely entail resignification or other specific kinds of moves within a social geometry ofantihumanism. The space of agency is not only substantially larger than that allowed for in Butler's performative account,
for example, but also, perhaps rather surprisingly, larger than what liberal humanism proposes. Significantly, matter is an agentive factor in its iterative materialization. — Karen Barad

Agential realism is not a manifesto, it does not take for granted that all is or will or can be made manifest. On the contrary, it is a call, a plea, a provocation, a cry, a passionate yearning for an appreciation of, attention to the tissue of ethicality that runs through the world. — Karen Barad

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. — Karen Barad

Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. — Karen Barad

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. — Karen Barad

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. — Karen Barad