“Material knowledges”. Intra-acting van der Tuin’s new materialism with Barad’s agential realism

The paper will discuss the theory of Iris van der Tuin’s New Materialism together with Karen Barad’s Agential Realism. The purpose of this approach is to find differing practices that help to construct a turn to what is considered a relational ontology in which ethics, epistemology, ontology and methodology merged into each other. This new paradigm is a transversal approach that generates genealogies of minoritarian philosophies and feminist theories in order to approach matter as a dynamic, agentive and relational entanglement in which human and non-human practices intra-act equally. As a result, a different point of departure is produced in order to generate knowledge, since instead of thinking through separate entities, new materialism and agential realism depart from the relations of those entities understanding them as dynamic processes. Apart from an active approach to matter, these theories are framed under an affirmative approach to theory making, queering the traditional sense of linearity and moving away from dichotomical binaries.