Dialectical Materialism

Dialectical materialism, as elaborated in this corpus, is not a simple inversion of Hegel whereby the "idealist" dialectic is placed on a "materialist" footing. Rather, it names the philosophical position that retains Hegel's absolute Idea — understood as the achieved unity of subject and substance, concept and reality, theory and practice — as an immanent moment within materialist thought itself. On this reading, Marx's materialism is "a materialism with the Idea": it does not discard the idealist core of Hegel's system but inherits it, recognising that the dialectic was already operating from within natural and cultural processes in Hegel's own philosophy. The error of Feuerbach's contemplative materialism was to treat matter as a brute given, evacuating the subject's constitutive activity; the error of Meillassoux's speculative materialism is the same performative contradiction writ large — a position that generates its own absolute from within a positing activity it refuses to acknowledge as idealist.

The second occurrence deepens this argument by targeting Engels specifically: "dialectical materialism" as Engels coined it is a perverse, reductive inversion that misses Hegel's own already-material idiom. Marx, by contrast, is cast as the better student of Hegel precisely because he absorbed the dialectical method organically, grasping that Hegel had already produced a comprehensive dialectical account of natural and cultural processes. Dialectical materialism is thus not a departure from Hegel but an inheritance of him — a specification of his method that takes seriously the materiality Hegel's logic had always carried within itself.

This concept appears exclusively in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, where it serves as a pivot around which the text adjudicates competing heirs to the Hegelian legacy. The concept draws directly on the canonical concept of Dialectics — but insists that dialectics, properly understood, was never merely a formal logical method separable from its material content. It also depends on Sublation (Aufhebung): the materialist inheritance of Hegel is itself an Aufhebung — not a cancellation of idealism but its preservation and elevation into a fuller, concrete account of nature, culture, and social practice. Absolute Knowing enters as a critical reference point: the "absolute Idea" that dialectical materialism retains is precisely the moment of acknowledged subject-substance unity, not a triumphalist claim to complete self-transparency. Contradiction is the engine that makes the dialectical method indispensable to any materialism: a materialism without contradiction (like Feuerbach's or Meillassoux's) collapses back into abstract, contemplative posture.

The concept thus functions in the corpus as a corrective specification of what "materialism" can mean once it has passed through the full force of Hegel. It is positioned against two failed alternatives — contemplative materialism (which loses the subject) and speculative materialism (which loses the idealist moment of its own positing) — and is defined positively by the inclusion of the Abstract-to-concrete movement that Hegel's logic already performs. It is less a novel coinage than a contested inheritance: what the text argues is that the term has been repeatedly mis-defined (by Engels, by Feuerbach, by post-Hegelian materialisms) and that recovering its proper meaning requires returning to what Hegel's Mediation and Ideology-critique were already doing.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.69)

dialectical materialism, as a materialism with the Idea, encompasses the subject-substance doctrine within itself.

The phrase "materialism with the Idea" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the standard opposition between idealism and materialism, insisting instead that the Idea — Hegel's term for the achieved unity of concept and reality, subject and substance — is not abandoned but retained within the materialist position; "encompasses the subject-substance doctrine within itself" further signals that the Marxist dialectic does not dissolve subjectivity into brute matter but carries the full Hegelian account of how subject and substance are co-constitutive.