Abstract: This talk will ask one of the most abstract and metaphysical questions possible, for which it will try to provide an extremely concrete and material answer: What does it mean for something to only slightly differ from nothing, that is, for something to barely be? Part of a larger project interrogating the category of ‘minimal being' in early modern metaphysics and natural philosophy, this talk focuses on René Descartes's extremely strange category of the essentially insensible ‘not-nothing'. Contrasting it with alternative accounts of the border between something and nothing such as that found in Pierre Gassendi's resurgent Epicureanism (where to be something is to be 'not utterly nothing'), it will argue that confrontations over nothingness frame the fundamental distinction between early modern materialism and Cartesianism as a difference with respect to the minimal condition for something to be. Another way of putting all this is that this talk will be an attempt to make the most potentially boring and frustrating bits of Descartes interesting again!