Energetics of the Otherwise

A bold and revelatory exploration of Walter Benjamin's theory of history alongside experiments in quantum physics, giving us flashes of possibility in this dark moment of danger

Walter Benjamin's concept of messianic materialism, developed as fascism overtook Europe, has held out hope to thinkers, artists, and activists for nearly a century. Benjamin's key insight is that the potential for justice exists in the "thick-now" of the present moment, and not in pinning political hope on some future era. In this invigorating and audacious new book, philosopher and physicist Karen River Barad proposes a method to think time anew, one that brings Benjamin's ideas into conversation with the discoveries of quantum physics and the mystical-materialist insights of Jewish Kabbalah.

Arguing that Benjamin was himself a kind of "bench scientist," Barad demonstrates how Benjamin's conception of messianic time and the thick-now of the present (flashing through with bolts of eternal time), are material matters to be literally grasped (if you dare!). Diffractively reading each of Benjamin's key concepts together with natural phenomena (crystals, constellations, lightning), Barad transduces the tangible existence of Benjamin's revelatory theories. The memory-encrusted world all around us, Barad argues, holds energetic possibilities for remembering past injustices, reckoning with historic violence, and reconfiguring the world in ways that move us toward more just material conditions.