For Barad, phenomena or objects do not precede their interaction, rather, 'objects' emerge through particular intra-actions. Thus, apparatuses, which produce phenomena, are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans (as in actor-network theory). Rather, they are the condition of possibility of 'humans' and 'non-humans', not merely as ideational concepts, but in their materiality.
Here, in an exploration bursting with transdisciplinary theological possibility, Barad reads matter itself, by virtue of its entanglement with a persistently not-nothing quantum void, as messianically inflected, kabbalistically encrypted, politically explosive. And so the “differential entanglements” that join us in our inextricable alterities echo “the mystical depth of Isaac Luria’s cosmology, with the iterative rematerialization of the world based on ongoing intra-actions whereby . . . the world is re-created anew in each moment.” (|from Entangled Worlds intro)
Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. (Barad, 2007, p. 185)