Matter can only be defined by non-logical difference. Matter can never be equivalent to an idea that expresses it or represents it – there are no equal exchanges or easy communications. This inequality, the impossibility of a precise exchange requires a science of the other – heterology – exceeding the possibilities of reason and logic.

When we want to assume an equivalence between our words, figures and drawings and the world, we must guard against the excess, the non-sense that might challenge the equivalence. So we get concerned about precise definitions and aim to contain things, make them fit the categories, the boxes that inform understanding. Meaning here implies the foreclosure of the subject. Meaning must not bring the subject into play, or the irreducibility of the subject we’re interested in knowing will threaten to exceed the boundaries of understanding. Meaning in this project of containment must be no more than a mechanical effect of language, a product of linguistic functioning, with language, as words, letters, syntax, grammar, a machine producing objects.meaning may guard itself against nonsense.

But there is always more, there’s always an excess that doesn’t fit reason and understanding. Here sense comes by risking nonsense – signal requires noise, a figure needs to be set against a background that goes beyond, sense requires the outside, the other, the excess that makes the inside sensible.