Text page
Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000)
A Grant essay that treats darkness chemically, making obscurity a material process rather than a metaphor of ignorance.
Contextual work page available
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Archive condition
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Core idea
This page matters because darkness is treated as a physical process with chemical force, not as a poetic synonym for mystery or ignorance.
Grant uses reaction, obscurity, and material transformation to show how matter hides and reveals itself without needing a human observer to complete the scene.
That matters because geotrauma often becomes persuasive when opacity itself acquires agency. Darkness stops being atmosphere and becomes part of the argument about what matter does.
How to read this text
Follow the moments when darkness is described as reaction or transformation rather than as symbol. That is where the essay stops being rhetorical and becomes materialist.
Keep one eye on chemistry and one on style. The drama of the prose is there to intensify a claim about process, not to replace it.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Pli 9 (2000), 36-52. The Chemistry of Darkness* IAIN HAMILTON GRANT 1 The nuclear night of the Unthinged Bringing Deleuze and Idealism into some sort of contact seems anathema, a resignation in the face of too many wrong turns having ended up in confrontation with Hegel. It is an accepted wisdom of the age that Hegelian difference, as a prelude to its resolution, has nothing to do with its French avatars over the last thirty years.
Definition · paragraph 12
Pli 9 (2000) 42 What sort of earth does depth give us? a quasi earth, an “als ob”, regulative rather than constitutive earth, a merely subjective, or Kantian earth. Ants are like Ideas (note the capital), and depth is like the heated profiles of techtonic plates.
Definition · paragraph 8
Note, however, that the metallurgical-manufactorial aspect of chemistry is overlooked in the authors’ rapid and disappointing conclusion. The lesson Schelling took from chemistry was not one of domiciliation, but of invention, of the irreducibility of alloys in the body of the earth, as we shall see below.
Mechanism · paragraph 1
Pli 9 (2000), 36-52. The Chemistry of Darkness* IAIN HAMILTON GRANT 1 The nuclear night of the Unthinged Bringing Deleuze and Idealism into some sort of contact seems anathema, a resignation in the face of too many wrong turns having ended up in confrontation with Hegel.
History · paragraph 8
The lesson Schelling took from chemistry was not one of domiciliation, but of invention, of the irreducibility of alloys in the body of the earth, as we shall see below. For the moment, suffice it to quote again from Bensaude-Vincent in another context, discussing Lavoisier’s ‘chemical revolution’, “Chemistry creates its own object, manufactures its Universal” (1994: 671).
Appears in sections
Geotrauma and the Outside Primary section
Molten earth, Barker, the inhuman Outside, and the archive's geological imagination.