Becoming

Becoming, as the concept is staged across these occurrences, names the Deleuzean-inflected ontological thesis that reality — and subjectivity with it — is constituted by continuous, immanent flux: a movement of pure difference and mutation that dissolves fixed points, identities, and the negativity of lack into a rhizomatic line of flight. In Sartre's distinct but related usage (Occurrence 1), becoming is possible precisely because the for-itself and the in-itself are heterogeneous — being and non-being are held together by an internal bond rather than external succession, so that change is grounded in the very structure of non-identity between past (as surpassed facticity) and present (as nihilating act). Here becoming presupposes ontological split and internal negation, not their dissolution.

The corpus's primary theoretical deployment of the term, however, is critical and polemic. In subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, Becoming (capitalized, Deleuzean) is identified as the totalizing gesture of new materialism: the substitution of one totality (fixed identity) with another (continuous flux), presented as liberation but functioning as an evasion of the irreducible structural lack constitutive of the subject. Against this, the Hegelo-Lacanian argument holds that the void — the barred subject ($), das Ding, objet a, the gap in the Other — is not an obstacle to multiplicity, desire, and intensity but their very condition of possibility. Even figures of becoming such as musical rhapsody are shown to be "riven with absence," demonstrating that no line of flight escapes the structural negativity that Deleuzean Becoming promises to surpass.

Within subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, the concept of Becoming occupies a polemical position: it is the principal antagonist against which the Hegelo-Lacanian framework of constitutive Lack, the barred Subject, Negation, and Desire is defended. The source uses Becoming as a test case for what it diagnoses as new materialism's failed evasion of totality — replacing arborescent structure with rhizomatic flux, but reinstating a new totalism in doing so. This positions Becoming as incompatible with the Lacanian insistence that "if one eliminates this lack, one eliminates the subject" (per the canonical Lack synthesis): dissolving the subject into pure flux is not liberation but the foreclosure of subjectivity's productive reflexivity. The concept also intersects with Jouissance: the Deleuzean "line of flight" that bypasses lack is read as approaching the register of pure drive or the undifferentiated Real — jouissance without the mediating bar of desire, which the Lacanian framework identifies not as liberation but as the dead end of Septimus's dissolution in Woolf's novel.

The Sartrean occurrence (from jean-paul-sartre-hazel-barnes-being-and-nothingness-an-essay-on-phenomenological) sits in a structurally adjacent but theoretically distinct position: here becoming is not dissolved but grounded in heterogeneity — the internal bond of non-being between past (in-itself) and present (for-itself). This aligns more closely with the Lacanian-Hegelian corpus's own view of Negation as productive and constitutive rather than merely destructive. In this sense the Sartrean usage functions as an unwitting ally: becoming is only possible where ontological split — the heterogeneity of being and non-being — is irreducible. Both the Sartrean and Lacanian-Hegelian framings converge on the claim that Becoming, properly understood, requires and does not abolish internal negativity, the split subject, and the structural gap of lack.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.217)

Ironically, new materialism tries to evade totalizing forces by introducing another totalizing force: the continuous flux of Becoming, a hallmark of Deleuzean philosophy.

The quote's theoretical charge lies in the term "totalizing force" applied symmetrically to both what new materialism opposes and what it proposes: by naming the "continuous flux of Becoming" as itself a totalization, the passage exposes the performative contradiction at the heart of the Deleuzean move — the attempt to escape the closed whole by positing another closed whole — and thereby clears the ground for the Lacanian-Hegelian counter-claim that only constitutive lack (not flux) can produce genuine openness and subjectivity.