Lacan's Materialism

Lacan's materialism, as articulated by Zupančič in What Is Sex?, is a specific philosophical position distinguishing psychoanalysis from both idealism and from the flat or "realist" materialisms that populate contemporary speculative philosophy (such as object-oriented ontology). Against the latter's move to dissolve the subject into one object among many within a democracy of objects, Lacanian materialism insists that the subject is not simply an object in the world but rather the site at which reality's own internal contradiction becomes embodied and subjectivized. Materialism here does not mean the reduction of mind or culture to a substrate of inert matter; it means that thinking is irreducibly implicated in the contradictions that structure existence — "materialism is thinking that advances as thinking of contradictions."

The key theoretical move is to hold together two things that conventional materialisms tend to separate: determination and subjectivation. Yes, the subject is determined by forces and things that exist independently of it — this is the materialist baseline. But the very things that determine the subject are themselves internally contradictory, constitutively split. The subject does not stand outside this split; rather, the subject is the place where that split becomes a lived, embodied paradox. Subjectivity, on this account, is not an escape from or supplement to material determination; it is the form in which matter's own antagonism comes to appear and insist. This aligns with the broader Lacanian principle that the subject is a gap or lack within the symbolic order, not an agent standing over against it.

This concept appears in what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic (p. 131) and is best understood as Zupančič's attempt to articulate the precise ontological status of psychoanalytic subjectivity against contemporary realist and materialist philosophies. It functions as an extension and sharpening of several canonical concepts in the corpus. Most directly, it depends on Contradiction: if materialism means "thinking that advances as thinking of contradictions," then the subject's role is to be the locus where contradiction in the Real becomes reflexive — not resolved, but experienced as the impossibility structuring existence. The concept also connects to the Gap: just as the gap is the productive void at the heart of every symbolic system, the subject in Lacan's materialism is the embodiment of the gap within reality itself, the point where existence fails to coincide with itself. The Death Drive is implicitly at stake too, since the subject's subjectivation of contradiction is not a harmonious self-constitution but a repetitive, asymmetrical process rooted in the constitutive loss that the death drive names.

Zupančič's formulation also implicitly responds to the Democracy of Objects (a cross-referenced canonical concept here representing flat ontologies) by insisting that the subject cannot simply be flattened into one object among others, because the subject uniquely occupies the site of the Real's internal antagonism rather than merely existing alongside it. In this sense Lacan's materialism is both an extension of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition (where materialism has always been a thinking of contradiction, as in the Ideology and Contradiction entries) and a psychoanalytic specification of it: the mechanism by which contradiction becomes subjectively real is not class struggle or commodity form alone, but the structural impossibility of the sexual relation and the constitutive division of the subject — a division that Lack and Fantasy help to sustain and screen simultaneously.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.131)

This, I think, would be the gist of Lacan's materialism: of course I am determined, as a subject, by things that exist independently of me; yet the subjective position… is also and at the same time the subjectivation of a paradox/contradiction involved in the very things that determine me.

The phrase "subjectivation of a paradox/contradiction involved in the very things that determine me" is theoretically loaded because it refuses the standard opposition between determination (materialism) and subjectivity (idealism): the subject is not passively determined by a contradiction-free matter, nor does it introduce contradiction from outside — rather, it is the form in which matter's own internal contradiction becomes a lived subjective position, making the subject simultaneously an effect of and the embodiment of the Real's antagonism.