ABSTRACT
A materialist position completely agrees with the idea that things escape the human will to control them: It would be a pure idealist perspective to claim that the human mind is the master-in-chief of everything, the source of reality as its control tower. But a materialist perspective must be at least suspicious of the ambition to contain reality into objects, like object-oriented ontologies strive to do. Instead of flatness, a materialist perspective should favor depth, the existential excess that prevents any object from being easily included in a list, the existential excess that gives any object the power to resist – “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist,” as contemporary North-American scholar and poet Fred Moten writes. To fix the measure of reality, the writer needs to appreciate not only what is seen in the situation, that is to say what is manifest, but also what is unseen.
