Oppositional materialism can silently become speculative by asserting universal laws without evidence.

Evidence

The danger in the practice of any materialism is that whereas it begins by opposing all those speculative systems of thought which make universal and categorical claims without the necessary physical evidence for the grounding of such claims, its own sustained oppositional practice tends to push it in a direction where it is impelled to assert universal laws of its own, different from those it opposes, but without sufficient evidence of its own; a materialism which does not sufficiently resist such pressure, and does not recognize the gap between the validity of a universalist aspiration and the paucity of both evidence and method that might in fact give us a universal history of all humankind, becomes speculative in its own way. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 483

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense reflection on the structural pressure that pushes materialist critique into its own ungrounded speculation — a genuine paradox worth sitting with.