Matthias Wasser wrote:
>
> Let's say we're good materialists, and good structuralists, too. A sign
> measures difference.
> If nature is everything, all-encompassing, that means "nature" signifies
> nothing, doesn't it?
Exactly. Which is why human thought, as Zizek noticed, depends on more radical alienation from nature. Unity with nature, with everything/nothing, is death. Politically, it means we have to escape the trap of the present, of thinking in terms of change as a linear progression from the world as we see it/experience it, now.
We need Jerry Monaco back on the list to point out that materialism is not a theory or a philosophy but merely a starting point from which we think. By recognizing that materialism is not a philosophy or a set of theories, we also escape quibbles about what matter is. (Those quibbles, in the domain of physics, cease to be quibbles and become important. But unless we are doing physics, questions about what matter is are more or less deliberate efforts to abort discourse.)
Carrol