From Refusal to Excess: Confluences and Demarcations in the Contemporary Philosophical Landscape

This essay takes as its starting point a decisive convergence across philosophy and the sciences over the past half-century: the shared refusal of substance, foundation, and transcendence by post-structuralism, complexity theory, and the sociology of associations. That convergence, however, leaves open the operational question that determines the standing of any immanent ontology: what drives the emergence of novelty without reinstating ontological reserves under new guises. Through a demarcating engagement with Deleuze, Prigogine/Morin, Maturana/Varela, and Latour, the essay argues that influential solutions exact a cost: the virtual as a reserve beyond the actual, ‘fluctuation’ as a rubric for explanatory opacity at the point of bifurcation, and actor-network symmetry as an attenuation of the difference between material reorganisation and symbolic reorganisation. In its place, this essay proposes the concept of the operative excess of present matter, defined as the asymmetry between a form’s organisational capacity and the set of material compatibilities it houses. To stabilise the passage from the real to knowledge, the trace–mark–symbol chain is made explicit, permitting the localisation of error, the discrimination of ruptures in inscription, and the grounding of correction as a confrontation between symbolic predictions and the resistance of marks. The result is a positive, materialist ontology—non-teleological in its logic—in which novelty emerges through the internal recombination of what already exists, under dissipative regimes and historically tested structural couplings.