Democracy of Objects

The "democracy of objects" is Zupančič's critical label for a move characteristic of realist and object-oriented ontologies (OOO) — the thesis that all objects are ontologically equivalent and equally deserving of attention, such that the human subject is demoted to just one object among many others. Zupančič's argument in What Is Sex? is that this apparently egalitarian, anti-anthropocentric gesture is itself a form of ideological mystification: by flattening all entities onto the same ontological plane, it actively obscures the antagonistic, contradictory structure of reality as such. The "democracy of objects" purchases its leveling move at the price of erasing the gap that is constitutive of both the subject and the Real.

Against this, Zupančič proposes that the Lacanian subject is not one object among others but rather the objective embodiment of reality's own internal contradiction — the point at which the gap in being becomes incarnate. The subject is not a privileged observer standing outside the object-world; it is the place where reality's self-division shows through. This reframes psychoanalytic materialism: genuine materialism, on this view, is not thinking that adds subjects to an inventory of objects, but thinking that advances through contradiction — thought that takes the antagonism immanent to being seriously rather than smoothing it over with a democratic ontological ledger.

The concept appears once in what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic (p.132), embedded in Zupančič's broader argument about what makes psychoanalysis genuinely materialist. It functions as a polemical foil: by naming and critiquing the "democracy of objects," Zupančič carves out the specificity of the Lacanian subject against contemporary realist metaphysics. The concept directly cross-references Contradiction — the core of Zupančič's counter-claim is that reality is antagonistic, and any ontology that levels objects suppresses this constitutive contradiction. It also implicates Ideology: the "democracy of objects" thesis is diagnosed as ideologically operative, not despite but because of its apparent neutrality — it "obfuscates reality" much as ideology, in the canonical synthesis, conceals antagonism behind a fantasmatic supplement of wholeness. The cross-reference to Gap is equally live: the flattening of all objects onto one plane is precisely what forecloses the structural gap that Lacanian theory identifies as the precondition of the subject and of desire. The "democracy of objects" thus represents, from the vantage point of this corpus, a symptomatic instance of what happens when ontology proceeds without a theory of the Real: it produces an apparently materialist but actually idealist picture — "subjectively" (as the quote puts it) obfuscating reality by replacing its contradictory texture with a harmonious inventory.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.132)

the fine-sounding thesis about the 'democracy of objects' (all objects are ontologically the same, and all are equally worthy of our attention) could be seen as actually (and quite 'subjectively') obfuscating reality 'such as it is': antagonistic.

The quote is theoretically charged in its self-referential irony: by inserting the adverb "subjectively" in scare quotes, Zupančič turns the object-oriented ontologist's own vocabulary against them — the very position that claims to dissolve the subject is shown to be covertly subjective (i.e., partisan, perspectival, distorting). The closing word "antagonistic" is the theoretical linchpin, invoking the Lacanian-Marxist concept of constitutive contradiction as precisely what the "democracy of objects" must suppress in order to sustain its egalitarian ontological surface.