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Brassier - Alien Theory - The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter (Cleaned Layout)
"Alien Theory - The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter (Cleaned Layout)" belongs to Brassier's realism line, where abstraction, truth, and rational critique are used to pressure-test the archive's more charismatic inheritances.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
These pages matter because they show one major route by which the archive is forced into clearer argumentative language. Brassier's realism turns the afterlife of Land and the CCRU into a problem of truth, abstraction, and rational critique rather than scene myth or stylistic intensity alone.
The mechanism is pressure through philosophy. Sellars, Laruelle, Badiou, nihilism, and realism all become ways of testing whether concepts survive once they are detached from their original scene charisma and forced into stricter conceptual articulation.
That matters because this section is about philosophical afterlives, not only loyalty or rejection. Brassier keeps the archive alive precisely by refusing to leave its concepts in their original rhetorical atmosphere.
How to read this text
Read for how realism, truth, or abstraction are being defined before following the page into its local debate or target.
Track where the page tests Land or post-CCRU concepts against a stricter account of philosophy. That pressure is usually the real hinge of the text.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 33
Badiou criticizes the Deleuzean naming of matter as ‘anorganic Life’ precisely because he believes it is a nomination which reintroduces equivocal transcendence into univocity. For its part, non-materialist theory will attempt to effect a transcendental axiomatisation and theorematisation of materialist Decision according to the radical immanence of ‘matter’ or ‘hyle’ as a first name or non-conceptual symbol cloned from philosophical materialism.
Definition · paragraph 8
In order to facilitate the difficult conceptual transition from the philosophical to the non-philosophical register, the thesis is divided into two parts. Part I, ‘The Decline of Materialism As Such’, comprises Chapters 1 through 4 and will try to identify the conditions of the philosophical problem which we intend to treat non-philosophically in Part II, ‘The Name of Matter Itself’, which consists of Chapters 5 through 9.
Definition · paragraph 8
Part I, ‘The Decline of Materialism As Such’, comprises Chapters 1 through 4 and will try to identify the conditions of the philosophical problem which we intend to treat non-philosophically in Part II, ‘The Name of Matter Itself’, which consists of Chapters 5 through 9. That problem is the materiological3 amphiboly of matter and logos, or of phenomenon and hyle, as exemplified both in the ‘material phenomenology’ of Michel Henry and in the ‘absolute hyletics’ of Deleuze & Guattari.
History · paragraph 1
ALIEN THEORY The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter Ray Brassier Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy April 2001
Method · paragraph 8
Part I, ‘The Decline of Materialism As Such’, comprises Chapters 1 through 4 and will try to identify the conditions of the philosophical problem which we intend to treat non-philosophically in Part II, ‘The Name of Matter Itself’, which consists of Chapters 5 through 9.
Appears in sections
Brassier, Grant, and Speculative Realism Primary section
Analytic and speculative receptions of Land and the CCRU through Brassier, Grant, and adjacent philosophical lines.