Elemental Materialism

Elemental Materialism is a term coined in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit to name the dialectical-materialist substructure internal to Hegel's own philosophical system — and, by inheritance, to Marx's — which foregrounds the element (Greek: stoicheion) over undifferentiated matter and the logic of dissolution (German: Auflösung) over static substance. Rather than treating matter as an inert substrate upon which forms are imposed from without, elemental materialism describes a dialectical movement in which determinate formations decompose back into their constitutive elements, which then recombine into qualitatively new configurations. The "element" here is not a simple building-block but a dialectically charged unit: it is what persists through transformation, holding together the moments of dissolution, transition, and recombination within a single continuous logical arc.

This concept is explicitly proposed as a counter-reading of the Althusserian "epistemological break" thesis: if Hegel already operated with a philosophical materialism of this dialectical character — visible in the Philosophy of Nature's treatment of elemental dissolution and in the Philosophy of Right's account of social decomposition — then Marx does not escape Hegelian idealism by turning to matter; he inherits and extends a materialism already operative within Hegel. Elemental materialism thereby functions as what the source calls a "counter-ideological practice," refusing both bourgeois philosophical materialism (which reifies matter as fixed substance) and reductive base/superstructure models (which mechanically oppose material ground to ideal superstructure). Instead, it treats subjects, modes of production, and social formations as historically contingent forms perpetually at risk of dissolving back into their elemental components — forms whose identity is never secured against the dialectical movement that produced them.

Elemental materialism appears exclusively in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit and is a concept coined within that source's argument. It does not circulate elsewhere in the 82-source corpus and must therefore be read as a localized theoretical intervention rather than an established term of the tradition. Its argumentative function is to collapse the standard opposition between Hegelian idealism and Marxian materialism by showing that the very dialectical logic Marx deploys in the Grundrisse and Capital — decomposition of existing formations into elements, recombination into a new quality or mode — is already at work in Hegel's natural and political philosophy.

The concept stands in productive tension with the cross-referenced canonical concepts. With respect to Dialectics, elemental materialism names a specific material register of dialectical movement: not the abstract logical progression of the concept, but the sensuous-historical process of dissolution and recombination — a dialectics of matter in transition. With respect to Sublation (Aufhebung), elemental materialism is both related and distinct: where Aufhebung preserves-and-elevates a determination into a higher synthesis, elemental materialism stresses the prior moment of dissolution back into elements before any new quality emerges, foregrounding the destructive-transitional moment that Aufhebung's tripartite logic can tend to rush past. With respect to Contradiction, elemental materialism operates as its material expression: the contradictions internal to a mode of production are what drive the dissolution of existing forms, so that elemental recombination is contradiction's material outcome. With respect to Abstract, there is a structural homology: just as Hegel's abstract moment isolates a determination from its relational whole as a necessary step toward the concrete, elemental dissolution separates the elements of a formation as a necessary step toward a new concrete totality — both movements are internal to, not negations of, the dialectical process. Finally, with respect to Universality, elemental materialism implies that no historical formation — no mode of production, no social "all" — is ever finally secured: every universal form is always already susceptible to dissolution back into the particular elements from which it was composed.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.93)

it is my wager that the elemental materialism we find in Hegel and Marx is a counter-ideological practice that defines what we fondly call dialectical materialism or, for that matter, 'critique.'

The phrase "counter-ideological practice" is theoretically loaded because it refuses to let elemental materialism rest as a mere ontological or epistemological thesis — it is named as a practice, a critical operation performed against ideology, and the identification of this practice with "what we fondly call dialectical materialism or, for that matter, 'critique'" does double work: it rehabilitates dialectical materialism from its dogmatic Stalinist associations by regrounding it in the Hegel-Marx continuity the source has argued for, while simultaneously equating it with the Kantian-Marxian tradition of Kritik, thereby positioning elemental materialism as the shared deep structure of both traditions.