New Materialism

New Materialism, as the term appears in Dolar's argument (in Subject Lessons), names a contemporary theoretical tendency that seeks to escape what it perceives as the prison of linguistic or discursive mediation by returning to bodies, objects, brains, animals, and a "real which is not a sign." Its exemplary expressions include object-oriented ontology, vibrant matter theory, speculative realism's "great outdoors," and posthumanist frameworks. The term is introduced critically — as a doxa, a received opinion — not as a position Dolar endorses.

The theoretical move Dolar makes is to show that New Materialism, despite its anti-idealist ambitions, fails to achieve a genuinely materialist position. It overcorrects against (post)structuralist culturalism ("there are only languages") by reinstating a naturalist-scientific materialism ("there are only bodies"), but in doing so it simply occupies one pole of a binary that Lacanian theory dissolves. The truly materialist position, Dolar argues, is one that locates the Real at the impossible interface where the symbolic cuts into the body — the site named by the objet a. New Materialism misses this third term: it cannot account for what is irreducible to either bodies or languages, namely the remainder that the signifier extracts from bodily substance. In this sense, New Materialism, for all its rhetoric of the "real," remains blind to the Real as Lacan theorizes it.

In the source subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit, the concept of New Materialism appears as the polemical foil against which Dolar defines a specifically Lacanian — and genuinely radical — materialism. It is positioned symmetrically opposite to (post)structuralist culturalism: both are false exits from the constitutive deadlock that Lacan names. The concept cross-references Democratic Materialism (Badiou's term for the doxa "there are only bodies and languages"), which New Materialism in effect exemplifies by privileging the first axiom — bodies — over the second. Against this, the objet a functions as what must be added as a third axiom, a remainder irreducible to either term.

New Materialism's failure, read through the cross-referenced canonical concepts, is above all a failure to think jouissance and the drive. Jouissance is grounded in the body yet is produced by the signifier's action on it — "the signifier is the cause of jouissance" — so any return to "pure" bodies prior to the cut of language misses the very mechanism that constitutes bodily satisfaction in the speaking being. Likewise, the drive is precisely what arises when instinct is subjected to language; it is not biological but the effect of the signifier on the body. New Materialism's posthumanist and neuroscientific horizons dissolve back into instinct and organism, bypassing the drive entirely. Similarly, by dismissing the discursive frame, New Materialism cannot account for the ideological operations that always already structure the "vibrant matter" or "great outdoors" it invokes — it risks a naïve realism that ideology critique, in the Lacanian register, would identify as itself fantasmatically structured.

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

This is where the doxa of the so-called new materialism is proposed: 'we must get back to bodies, brains—neuroscience, objects, animals, the posthuman, a real which is not a sign.' Object-oriented ontology, vibrant matter, the great outdoors, outside of our discursive cage.

The phrase "a real which is not a sign" is theoretically loaded because it reveals that New Materialism's operative concept of the real is defined purely negatively — by exclusion of the sign — rather than through any positive account of its own; this is precisely what distinguishes it from Lacan's Real, which is not simply non-linguistic matter but the impossible point produced at the intersection of body and signifier. Calling it a "doxa" further frames the entire movement as unexamined common sense rather than a rigorous theoretical position.