Close encounters of a critical kind: a diffractive musing in/between new material feminism and object-oriented ontology

For a number of years, new material feminists have been developing new theoretical tools, new modes of conceptual analysis and new ethical frameworks. Object-oriented ontology, part of the speculative realism ‘movement’, has been engaged in something similar. Yet these endeavours have often taken place in ‘parallel universes’, despite sharing – or at least colliding around – a range of somewhat similar ontological and epistemological commitments. Composed as a diffractive musing encounter in which insights are read ‘through one another’ (Barad, 2007: 25) in order to ‘attend to … details and specificities of relations of difference and how they matter’ (Barad, 2007:71), the article brings Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway, already a ‘foundational’ text for new material feminism, into an encounter with a speculative realist text of the same ‘foundational’ status, Harman’s The Quadruple Object. The article develops a notion of diffractive musing as embodied, sensory struggle which instantiates intellectual generosity as a mode of critique. Following this, it puts diffractive musing to work theoretically via an encounter between object-oriented ontology and new material feminism. Keywords : new material feminism, speculative realism, diffraction, musing, critique