“Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers”

Barad elaborates on their philosophy of agential realism, which rethinks the relationship between matter, meaning, and agency. They challenge the traditional view of matter as passive and inert, arguing instead that matter is active and dynamic, imbued with its own capacities to “feel” and “remember” in a way that blurs the boundaries between the human and non-human. Barad draws on feminist theory, quantum physics, and new materialism to suggest that matter is not simply a backdrop for human action but is fundamentally involved in the processes of knowing, relating, and being. Their view encourages a more interconnected, relational understanding of reality where both human and non-human entities are seen as part of a larger, ongoing material-discursive web.