Democratic Materialism

Democratic Materialism names the dominant ideological axiom of contemporary post-ideological conviction: that reality is exhaustively composed of "bodies and languages" — that is, of biological organisms and the cultural-linguistic frameworks through which they are interpreted. As a philosophical position it underwrites both naturalist-scientific reductionism (there are only bodies) and (post)structuralist culturalism (there are only languages/discourses), and especially their tacit alliance in contemporary liberal-democratic common sense, which tolerates any plurality of bodies and any proliferation of language-games so long as no trans-empirical Truth is asserted. The term thus condenses a specific ideological closure: the foreclosure of any exception to the immanent plane of bodies-and-languages, and consequently the refusal of any universal Truth that would interrupt the relativist circulation of particular identities and lifestyles.

In both occurrences the concept functions as a polemical foil. For Žižek (in slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v), democratic materialism is the position against which "materialist dialectics" — following Badiou — must be asserted: the axiom "There is nothing but bodies and languages" must be completed by the subtractive supplement "… with the exception of truths." For Dolar (in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit), the same bipartite formula is shown to leave out the objet petit a — the Lacanian Real that is neither body nor language but the impossible cut between them — thereby demonstrating that a genuinely radical materialism requires a third term that democratic materialism systematically disavows.

Democratic Materialism appears in two closely allied post-Lacanian sources as a shared polemical target, functioning as the negative ground against which both Žižek and Dolar define their respective projects of "materialist dialectics" and Lacanian materialism. In slavoj-zizek-less-than-nothing-hegel-and-the-shadow-of-dialectical-materialism-v, the concept is implicitly presupposed as the relativist-postmodern position that Badiou's "materialist dialectics" — and the Lacanian objet petit a's unification of Plato's agalma and excrement — must oppose. It connects directly to the cross-referenced concept of Truth: democratic materialism is precisely the axiom that forecloses the Badiouian exception ("with the exception of truths"), and it is the refusal of any trans-empirical Truth that makes it ideologically operative in the sense defined under Ideology — sustaining a "post-ideological" social reality through its own structural non-knowledge. The cross-referenced concept of Part of No-Part is also at stake: it is the dialectical irruption of an irreducible remainder (the "part of no-part") within the genus of bodies-and-languages that sets the dialectical process in motion against democratic materialism's flat ontology.

In subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, Dolar specifies democratic materialism more precisely as the conjunction of naturalism and culturalism, whose shared blind spot is the objet petit a — the Real at the impossible interface of body and symbolic cut. Here the concept is an extension and specification of the cross-referenced Objet petit a: a is precisely what democratic materialism cannot accommodate, and therefore what a genuinely materialist position must theorize. The concept also bears on Universality and Maeontology: democratic materialism endorses a pluralist universality (all bodies, all languages, equally valid) while foreclosing the ontological gap — the "no-being" or maeontological void — that Lacanian theory insists is constitutive. Democratic Materialism thus functions across both sources as the name of the ideological default that a Lacanian or dialectical-materialist intervention must interrupt.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.52)

I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism... There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it performs a double move: the word "conviction" (repeated twice) frames the position not as a neutral ontological description but as an ideological commitment — a belief structure masquerading as common sense — while the stark bipartite formula "bodies and languages" names the precise closure that both Žižek and Dolar aim to rupture by insisting on a third, irreducible term (Truth, or the objet petit a).