ABSTRACT
Materialism is a corrosive intellectual machine. Materialism cannot really be a complete system of thought whose goal would be to identify the essence of Being. Materialism is the experience of thought revealing the excess of the world – not a vitalist excess, some spiritual or divine surplus, but an existential one. Consequently, materialism does not reject fictions, ghosts, and the power of imagination, materialism distinguishes between fictions added to reality to hide its truth and fictions expressing the ghostly dimension of reality. A materialist politics could learn from ghosts, even what Alain Badiou calls “dialectic materialism” could learn from them. Badiou opposes dialectic materialism to “democratic materialism,” a kind of materialism that he encapsulates with the following formula: “there are only bodies and languages". Negative and critical, materialism destroys the idols and opens a void in our ideological environments.
