New Materialist Ontology

New Materialist Ontology, as the term is deployed in this source, names the theoretical position — associated primarily with Deleuzian and post-Deleuzian "new materialisms" — that posits desire and subjectivity as constituted by a positive, affirmative flux of Becoming, one that actively cancels or overcomes negativity, lack, and the void. In this framework, multiplicity is generated by pure productive difference rather than by any structural absence; desire is treated as inherently generative and full rather than as the effect of an irreducible loss. The argument of the passage — a Hegelo-Lacanian reading of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway — takes direct aim at this ontological claim, asserting that such a framework misrecognises the actual mechanism by which multiplicity and the intensity of lived experience are produced.

Against New Materialist Ontology, the passage insists that subjectivity is constituted through irreducible structural lack — the void, das Ding, the objet a, the absent Thing — and that it is precisely this negativity, rather than any positivity, that generates multiplicity and desire. The move is classically Hegelo-Lacanian: absence is not the enemy of richness but its condition of possibility. Lack does not cancel plurality; plurality "flowers around" the very absence New Materialism seeks to contravene. New Materialist Ontology thus functions in this passage as a polemical foil — a position that, in its celebration of unimpeded positive flux, inadvertently suppresses the constitutive role of negativity that psychoanalytic and Hegelian theory regards as foundational.

This concept appears in subject-lessons-hegel-lacan-and-the-future-of-materialism-northwestern-universit (p. 231), where it serves as the explicit theoretical antagonist in an argument about how subjectivity, multiplicity, and desire are constituted. The source positions New Materialist Ontology against the Lacanian-Hegelian tradition by staging the confrontation through a literary reading of Woolf. It is best understood as a critical foil rather than a concept the source endorses: it names the theoretical position that must be refused in order to rehabilitate negativity as productive.

The concept cross-references several canonical Lacanian anchors. Das Ding and Desire are the most directly operative: the source's counter-claim is precisely that desire is constituted by its structural distance from the Thing (the void, the irretrievable lost object), not by any positive plenitude — a claim fully consistent with the Lacanian definition of desire as circling endlessly around the constitutive Nothing. The Death Drive is also implicitly at stake, since new materialism's affirmative ontology of Becoming is precisely what Lacanian theory refuses when it insists that repetition compulsion and constitutive loss are not aberrations but the very engine of psychic life. Alienation enters as the structural condition that makes New Materialist Ontology's "recovered fullness" impossible: the subject can never return to an unalienated being-in-the-world. In this sense, New Materialist Ontology functions as the contemporary theoretical form of what Lacan diagnosed as the fantasy of an unalienated subject — a fantasy the vel of alienation forecloses permanently. The concept thus extends and specifies the Lacanian critique of any ontology that treats lack as merely contingent and surmountable.

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of MaterialismRussell Sbriglia & Slavoj Žižek (eds.) · 2020 (p.231)

In response to new materialism's celebrations of the positive flux of desire that cancels negativity and generates multiplicity, Lacan's Woolf reminds us that multiplicity flowers around the very absence it wants to contravene.

The phrase "multiplicity flowers around the very absence it wants to contravene" is theoretically loaded because it directly inverts the new materialist premise: absence (the void, das Ding, lack) is not what multiplicity must overcome but the structural condition — the "around which" — that makes multiplicity possible at all. The verb "flowers" performs the inversion beautifully: it attributes generative, vital productivity not to positive flux but to the negativity new materialism seeks to eliminate, thereby condensing the entire Hegelo-Lacanian counter-argument in a single image.