Start with paragraph 1.
Why this work matters
Grant makes darkness active rather than atmospheric, treating opacity as a chemical and geological process that reorganizes what matter can do.
Then and now
Why this mattered then
Presented at Warwick in May 1999 and printed in Pli 9 in 2000, Grant’s essay gave the local Deleuze-Schelling circuit a hard chemical register. Grant cites Lavoisier’s revolution, argues that “chemistry creates its own object”, and says the ideal “develops from the real” [c5][c6]. That timing mattered for the Warwick scene, already turning thought toward earth, metallurgy, substrate independence, and the productivity of the Ungrund [c5][c9][c10].
Why it matters now
Grant still matters because he treats darkness as a material process rather than an epistemic metaphor. “Where there is chemistry, there is sensation,” he writes, then asks, “how do mountains think” once complexity gathers [c2][c4]. That claim cuts into current arguments about artificial intelligence, nonhuman cognition, and planetary process. Thought appears here as chemically instantiated recursion, “substrate independent” and only contingently human [c6][c13].
How to read this
For Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000), 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.
For Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000), 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.
Argument map
Primary claim
This page matters because darkness is treated as a physical process with chemical force, not as a poetic synonym for mystery or ignorance.
The work's mechanism
Grant uses reaction, obscurity, and material transformation to show how matter hides and reveals itself without needing a human observer to complete the scene.
What this work claims
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.
Style and mode
Essay / text work
Grant - The Chemistry of Darkness (Pli v.9) (2000) works best when read as compressed scene-writing: argument, terminology, and style arrive together rather than in separate academic stages.
Key concepts and people
Key passage
Best entry extract · 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.
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).