Karen Barad (2012). Nature’s Queer Performativity (the authorized version). Kvinder, Køn & Forskning no. 1–2, pp. 25–53. DOI 10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067. An earlier version appeared in Qui Parle 19(2) (2011), pp. 121–158.
Key takeaways
From the reading, NOTE-1458.
- The agential cut, in Barad’s words. “A specific intra-action enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut – an inherent distinction – between subject and object) effecting a separation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. That is, the agential cut enacts a ‘local’ resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy” (p. 32). What results is “agential separability – the local condition of exteriority-within-phenomena”.
- Phenomena, not things. What we take for individual entities are “(entangled ‘parts of’) phenomena”, and phenomena are “ontologically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata” (p. 32, note 28).
- Cuts are not human. “Whatever a ‘cut’ is must not assume a prior notion of the ‘human’” (p. 31); the analysis must cover differentiating done by nonhumans too.
- The physics is Bohr’s, as she reads him. The which-path and quantum-eraser experiments are offered as “direct empirical evidence that identity is not fixed and inherent, but performative” (p. 43), on Bohr’s view that the referent is the phenomenon, the inseparability of object and apparatus (p. 42).
- The ethical claim. There are no “acts against nature”, only “acts of nature” (p. 47); accountability is for “how different cuts matter”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-30 as a first-hand reading of Barad for TERM-087, whose third sense of “cut” had rested on second-hand accounts. It states the agential cut and its contrast with the Cartesian cut in her own words. It does not define an apparatus, does not say that cuts are movable, and does not mention Heisenberg; those parts of TERM-087 still rest on Faye and Jaksland’s quotations from Barad 2007 (LIT-1657). It carries no instruction for machine-learning practice.