Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism

by (2020)

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Synopsis

Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism (Northwestern University Press, 2020), edited by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek, is a collectively authored intervention into the contemporary debates over materialism and realism in continental philosophy. Its central argument is that both the dominant "culturalist" materialisms inherited from Althusser and Foucault and the emergent "new materialisms" (speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, neovitalism) fail to account for the non-substantial, split subject that Hegel and Lacan together theorize, and that any adequate materialism must pass through rather than around this subject. Against the culturalists, the volume insists that the subject cannot be dissolved into socio-symbolic networks; against the new materialists and realists, it insists that a "democracy of objects" occludes the irreducible Real whose trace is the barred subject. The book's organizing wager is that "Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism" offers the most rigorous materialist position available today — one grounded not in the inert density of matter but in the ontological incompleteness of reality itself, the constitutive gap between Existence and its Ground, figured in Lacanian terms as the "non-all" (pas-tout). The eleven essays are organized into two sections — Hegel and philosophical materialism, Lacan and psychoanalytic materialism — which together argue that Hegel's critique of substantiality (substance must be grasped as subject) and Lacan's theorization of the objet petit a as the subject's inscription into the Real are twin inheritances of a single materialist legacy. Literary and cultural readings (Melville's Moby Dick, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) anchor the theoretical arguments in textual practice, demonstrating the productive force of this framework beyond philosophy proper. The collection closes by articulating the political stakes: a materialism without the subject forfeits the very concept of freedom and the ethical capacity for rupture.

Distinctive contribution

What distinguishes Subject Lessons from most other Lacanian or Hegelian volumes in the secondary corpus is its sustained, polemical engagement with the full landscape of contemporary materialisms — not just speculative realism or OOO in isolation, but the entire field from cultural materialism to neovitalism — prosecuted in the name of a specifically Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism. Where books such as Žižek's Less Than Nothing or Johnston's Prolegomena volumes develop aspects of this position at length in the voice of a single author, Subject Lessons stages it as a multi-voiced collective demonstration: the same thesis (the non-substantial subject is the condition for any robust materialism) is argued through Hegel's Phenomenology, Freud's clinical cases, Deleuze's ontology of difference, Harman's OOO, and Melville's fiction in turn, giving the volume an unusual breadth of application. The result is that the Lacano-Hegelian framework is tested against the widest range of interlocutors assembled in any single secondary volume.

The volume also makes a distinctive move by treating the history of the concept of "materialism" itself as a philosophical problem — beginning with Dolar's genealogy from Walch's 1726 Philosophisches Lexicon through Enlightenment mechanism, Hegel's dissolution of substantiality, Freud's clinical materialism, and Badiou's "democratic materialism" — before arguing that what all received materialisms share is an unacknowledged reliance on a transcendental exception (whether the Cartesian res cogitans, Lenin's objective reality, or Bryant's autopoietic observer). This meta-critical move, dispersed across multiple essays, effectively reframes the question of materialism as one that cannot be settled by appeal to matter alone but requires a theory of the subject. No other secondary volume in the Lacanian corpus makes this argument with the same degree of historical sweep and systematic cross-examination of competing positions.

Finally, Subject Lessons is unusual in its attention to literary texts as philosophical demonstrations rather than mere illustrations. Sbriglia's reading of Ahab as a figure for the Hegelian-Lacanian sublime (objet petit a as object-cause of desire in the register of das Ding) and Van Wert's reading of Woolf's Clarissa and Septimus as rival figures for the Lacanian subject versus the Deleuzean line of flight represent a sustained methodological commitment to what the volume calls speculative — rather than historicist — literary analysis. This positions the collection as a resource not only for philosophers but for literary and cultural scholars working on questions of materialism, the subject, and form.

Main themes

• Dialectical materialism as requiring rather than expelling the non-substantial subject
• Critique of new materialism's 'allergy to the Real' and its unacknowledged transcendental presuppositions
• Hegel's dissolution of substantiality as the condition for a genuine materialism ('substance is subject')
• The objet petit a as the subject's inscription into the Real, irreducible to both bodies and languages
• Death drive, repetition compulsion, and the originary trauma that cannot register as experience
• Lacan versus Deleuze: the subject as proof of the Real versus radical desubjectivation
• Extimacy, the Möbius topology of subject/object, and the critique of OOO's flat ontology
• The Hegelian and Lacanian sublime as convergent theories of negativity and sublimation
• Elemental materialism in Hegel and Marx: dissolution, transition, and dialectical recombination
• Sexuality as ontological lapse: psychoanalysis against correlationism and against new materialism

Chapter outline

• Introduction: Subject Matters (Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek) — p.3-36
• What's the Matter? On Matter and Related Matters (Mladen Dolar) — p.31-49
• Subjectivity in Times of (New) Materialisms: Hegel and Conceptualization (Borna Radnik) — p.50-75
• Objects after Subjects: Hegel's Broken Ontology (Todd McGowan) — p.68-81
• The Nature of Dialectical Materialism in Hegel and Marx (Andrew Cole) — p.82-103
• Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel (Slavoj Žižek) — p.102-130
• Fear of Science: Transcendental Materialism and Its Discontents (Adrian Johnston) — p.125-149
• Ontology and the Death Drive: Lacan and Deleuze (Alenka Zupančič) — p.142-174
• Why Sex Is Special: Psychoanalysis against New Materialism (Nathan Gorelick) — p.171-197
• Twisting 'Flat Ontology': Harman's 'Allure' and Lacan's Extimate Cause (Adrian Johnston / Molly Anne Rothenberg) — p.190-216
• Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf avec Lacan contra Deleuze (Kathryn Van Wert) — p.209-234
• From Sublimity to Sublimation: Hegel, Lacan, Melville (Russell Sbriglia) — p.227-256

Chapter summaries

Introduction: Subject Matters (Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek) (p.3-36)

The introduction maps the contemporary field of materialisms and establishes the volume's central polemical thesis. Sbriglia and Žižek identify two dominant but inadequate materialist currents: 'culturalist' or historical materialisms (Althusser, Foucault, new historicism), which dissolve the subject into socio-symbolic networks; and the emergent new materialisms and realisms (speculative realism, OOO, neovitalism, actor-network theory), which seek to bypass the subject entirely in favor of a 'democracy of objects.' Both fail, the editors argue, because they either presuppose or silently rely on a transcendental subject whose constitution of reality they refuse to acknowledge. The minimal formula of contemporary materialism — Badiou's 'there are only bodies and languages' — is itself an ideological doxa, the ruling common sense of our era, and both new materialism and culturalism are variations on it.

Against this field, the introduction proposes 'Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism' as the only consistent materialist position. Its key claim is that material reality is 'non-all' (pas-tout): prior to fully constituted reality there is a pre-ontological, virtual fluctuation — a chaotic Real — that is the condition and the gap of any actual world. This is not idealism: the subject the volume defends is not the autonomous ego or the consciously thinking monad targeted by cultural materialism, but the unconscious subject, the subject of the unconscious, a 'beingless' entity (Lacan's manque à être) that exists only as a gap, a wound in the Real. The subject, as the introduction's most striking formulation has it, 'is itself the wound it tries to heal' — an 'absolute contradiction' that Hegel names the 'night of the world.'

The introduction also critiques OOO directly, arguing that Bryant's 'democracy of objects,' despite its anti-subjectivist ambitions, smuggles in a transcendental perspective from which its pluriverse of withdrawn objects is described. The editors deploy Lacan's formulae of sexuation to show that the new materialists' claim that 'everything is matter' relies on a constitutive exception — the unacknowledged observer — just as the masculine formula of universality requires its founding exception. The alternative they propose is not a return to the bourgeois subject but a theory of the subject as the very void, the gap, that any materialist ontology must reckon with.

Key concepts: Non-substantial subject, Objet petit a, Real, Dialectical materialism, Night of the world, Non-all (pas-tout) Notable examples: Jameson on the 'death of the subject'; Coole and Frost's New Materialisms anthology; Bryant's Democracy of Objects; Lacan's formulae of sexuation

What's the Matter? On Matter and Related Matters (Mladen Dolar) (p.31-49)

Dolar opens with a genealogy of 'materialism' as a philosophical term, tracing it from Walch's 1726 Philosophisches Lexicon through Enlightenment mechanism (La Mettrie, Helvétius, Diderot's Encyclopédie), Schopenhauer's materialism, and nineteenth-century scientific materialism, before pivoting to argue that the history of materialism is the history of an antinomy: matter, the supposed foundation, turns out to be itself an abstraction, a product of thought. His key exhibit is Hegel, who repeatedly insists that 'matter is a pure abstraction,' a Gedankending — 'one cannot see matter.' For Hegel, the materialist's gesture of grounding everything in matter reproduces, at a lower level, the very idealism it claims to oppose, since 'matter' is a conceptual determination like any other.

Dolar then reads Freud's scientific formation as a second materialist departure: trained in the mechanist-materialist milieu of Brücke, Du Bois-Reymond, and the Berlin Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, Freud nonetheless found himself compelled to follow what insists 'despite theory' — the Charcot adage ça n'empêche pas d'exister — into a 'difficult and paradoxical materialist path' that extended scientific materialism by including unobservable entities (the unconscious, drives) that resist the usual criteria of verification. Psychoanalysis is, for Dolar, a materialism nested in scientific materialism's bosom but irreducible to it.

The chapter's climax is Dolar's argument that Badiou's diagnosis of 'democratic materialism' ('there are only bodies and languages') captures the ruling doxa of our era but remains incomplete. Against the two axioms of scientific naturalism ('there are only bodies') and poststructuralism ('there are only languages'), Dolar proposes a third: 'there are only bodies and languages, except that there is the objet a.' The objet a is what is irreducible to either pole, naming the point where the symbolic cuts into the body and produces an excess — a non-sensuous sensuous thing analogous to Marx's commodity fetishism — that cannot be captured by either naturalism or textualism. This third axiom is the specifically psychoanalytic contribution to materialism, and it requires, Dolar argues, following Hegel, that matter itself be dissolved as a foundational category so that its psychoanalytic heir can take its proper place.

Key concepts: Objet petit a, Substance, Dialectics, Das Ding, Sublation, Signifier Notable examples: Walch's Philosophisches Lexicon (1726); La Mettrie's L'Homme machine; Diderot's Encyclopédie; Brücke's laboratory and Freud's neurological formation; Badiou's 'democratic materialism' in Logics of Worlds

Subjectivity in Times of (New) Materialisms: Hegel and Conceptualization (Borna Radnik) (p.50-75)

Radnik addresses Meillassoux's critique of correlationism — the charge that post-Kantian philosophy has imprisoned thought within the subject-object correlation, severing access to the 'great outdoors' of things as they exist independently of mind — and argues that Hegel's absolute idealism offers not a more extreme correlationism but its speculative overcoming. The key move is to show that Meillassoux's own anti-correlationist discourse is unavoidably constituted by conceptual determinations (givenness, arche-fossil, relationality) that are only intelligible to thinking subjects, and that the attempt to separate thought from being necessarily involves a reflexive recoil: there is no metalanguage, no outside position from which to think the other-than-human without that thinking being itself human. The very effort to escape the subject reinstates it.

Hegel's response to this predicament is not to surrender to subjectivism but to show that conceptual determination is not merely subjective: the universal concepts through which we grasp particulars are immanent to the objects themselves. The logic of the concept (Begriff) is simultaneously epistemological and ontologically constitutive of reality. Radnik elaborates this through Hegel's doctrine of positing and presupposing — the logic of 'absolute recoil' (absoluter Gegenstoß): conceptual determination is reflective in the sense that it turns back upon itself, so that the effect retroactively posits its cause as presupposition. This is neither a Kantian transcendental structure (subjective forms imposed on sensory content) nor an Aristotelian-Thomist ontology (forms immanent to things as given); it is a dialectical logic in which thinking and being are mutually constituted through their very opposition.

The chapter concludes with Marx as the thinker who inherits this dialectical logic and transforms it into a philosophy of praxis. Against Feuerbach's merely contemplative materialism, Marx insists that truth is proven not in thought but in human activity — yet this activity cannot be understood apart from its conceptual comprehension. Dialectical materialism is, for Radnik following Marx, a 'materialism with the Idea': the Hegelian absolute Idea, understood as the unity of conceptual determination and objectivity, is not abandoned but inherited and materialized in the proletariat's revolutionary practice. The thesis 'social life is essentially practical' does not eliminate philosophy but demands its actualization.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Sublation, Contradiction, Phenomenology, Negation, Subjectivity Notable examples: Meillassoux's arche-fossil argument in After Finitude; Hegel's Science of Logic (absolute recoil); Marx's Theses on Feuerbach; Gillian Rose on Hegel's absolute Idea as transformative praxis

Objects after Subjects: Hegel's Broken Ontology (Todd McGowan) (p.68-81)

McGowan takes Fichte's claim that the choice between idealism and materialism is ultimately one of disposition — not argument — as his starting point, and traces how this unresolvable opposition is repeated in Marx's 'upending' of Hegel, which relies on rhetorical assertion rather than philosophical refutation. His central argument is that Hegel, by following idealism to its absolute end, finds himself on the other side of the idealism-materialism divide: the radical contradiction that Hegel locates in the subject — and, crucially, in external reality — overcomes the opposition that Fichte establishes between the two positions. This makes Hegel's philosophy more consistently materialist than Marx's explicit materialism.

The chapter's key move is the contrast between Hegel and Heidegger on the status of the stone. Where Heidegger's typology runs from the 'worldless' stone through the 'world-poor' animal to the 'world-forming' human, Hegel reverses the valuation: it is the subject, not the stone, that is worldless, alienated from the world in which it exists — and it is precisely this alienation that constitutes the subject's freedom. The stone, by contrast, is entirely 'in' the world, subject to its destructive forces without the capacity to recognize or internalize contradiction. The animal can resist the world's destructiveness through organic self-restoration; the subject goes further by making contradiction its own, by 'doing violence to itself' through thought. This is what distinguishes the subject not only from the stone but from the object-oriented ontologists' 'withdrawn' objects.

McGowan then argues that the subject's relationship to contradiction — its capacity to recognize and act on internal division — is the key not only to subjectivity but to the nature of objective reality as well. By identifying contradiction in things-in-themselves through the Kantian antinomies, Hegel demonstrates that the real world, like thought, is internally divided. The conclusion is that to be a genuine materialist, one must follow idealism absolutely rather than rejecting it: idealism leads, when followed to its end, to a materialism in which reality itself is broken, internally contradictory — a 'broken ontology' in which the subject's relationship to its own splitting holds the key to the structure of the Real.

Key concepts: Contradiction, Sublation, Dialectics, Splitting of the Subject, Negation, Subjectivity Notable examples: Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (the choice of philosophy); Heidegger's stone/animal/human typology in Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics; Harman's OOO and the 'withdrawn' object; Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (organic self-restoration); Hegel, Science of Logic (antinomies and contradiction in being)

The Nature of Dialectical Materialism in Hegel and Marx (Andrew Cole) (p.82-103)

Cole makes a philological and philosophical argument for an 'elemental materialism' running continuously from Hegel through the young and old Marx alike, thereby dissolving the standard narrative of a 'break' between an early Hegelian Marx and a mature scientific Marx. His key concept is the 'element' (not the Empedoclean four, but Hegel's reconceptualized notion): elements are only knowable in relation, never in abstraction; they are characterized by processes of dissolution (Auflösung), transition, and recombination rather than by fixed, law-governed necessity. Hegel develops this concept in the Philosophy of Nature precisely to resist the mechanist-reductionist vision of nature as governed by universal laws — the elements 'express the contingency' of what Hegel calls 'the free life of Nature.'

Cole then demonstrates that this vocabulary of dissolution, recombination, and elemental transition pervades Marx's Grundrisse (where he uses 'elements' some forty-six times in contexts of historical transition) and Capital (where the 'dissolution' of feudal elements sets free the elements of capitalism). Far from marking a departure from Hegel, the mature Marx's historical vocabulary — crystallization, dissolution, combination, the 'divorce of elements' — is a direct inheritance of Hegel's elemental materialism. This means that historical materialism and dialectical materialism are not opposed but are subtended by the same dialectical logic of dissolution and reconstitution.

A key critical target is Engels's Dialectics of Nature, which Cole reads as a perverse reduction of Hegel's subtle and anti-reductionist elemental logic to three iron 'laws of the dialectic.' Engels's inversion of Hegel (turning him 'right-side up') actually destroys what is most materialist in Hegel — the refusal to subsume nature under abstract scientific laws — and replaces it with a positivist scientism that Hegel himself would have rejected. Cole's argument implicitly positions Hegel's Philosophy of Nature as a more genuinely materialist text than Engels's Dialectics of Nature, and suggests that a recovery of elemental materialism is a necessary precondition for any viable Marxian philosophy today.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Sublation, Negation, Substance, Contradiction, Mediation Notable examples: Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (elemental relations and dissolution); Marx, Grundrisse (divorce of elements in historical transition); Marx, Capital (dissolution of feudalism setting free capitalist elements); Engels, Dialectics of Nature (three laws of dialectics); Gramsci on 'historical' materialism

Intellectual Intuition and Intellectus Archetypus: Reflexivity from Kant to Hegel (Slavoj Žižek) (p.102-130)

Žižek's chapter is organized around the tension between two models of subjectivity in German Idealism: subjectivity as 'intellectual intuition' (the immediate unity of freedom and necessity, activity and passivity, in which the subject is transparent to itself) and subjectivity as reflexivity (the power of distance, mediation, and the 'tearing apart' of immediate unity). Kant rejects intellectual intuition as inaccessible to finite beings, insisting that the transcendental 'I' is constitutively separated from its noumenal support — a gap that is 'inseparably bound up' with the 'I's' very structure. Fichte attempts to ground philosophy in the self-positing 'I' while acknowledging intellectual intuition as its foundation; Schelling asserts intellectual intuition as the highest organon of philosophy and links it to the bodily register of sexuality. Hegel overcomes the tension not by siding with intellectual intuition but by asserting that reflexivity itself — the power of Understanding to 'tear apart' and dissolve — is the absolute power.

Žižek's distinctive move in the chapter's second half is to focus on Kant's concept of the intellectus archetypus — the 'divine understanding' that spontaneously generates all particular content from its own form, requiring no external sensory input — as a 'purely subjective presupposition' that is nonetheless constitutive of our sense of reality. Kant posits this divine intellect as a necessary but unverifiable regulative idea, the gap between which and the finite intellectus ectypus structures the very possibility of reflective judgment. Hegel's critique of this move, Žižek argues, is not a simple return to pre-critical Aristotelian-Thomist ontology but something more radical: for Hegel, we should not try to overcome the 'limitations' of intellectus ectypus and pass to the divine intellect; rather, we should radically shift perspective and recognize those very limitations as positive features. The finite intellect's need for external sensory input, its inability to generate all content from itself, is not a deficiency to be remedied but the very structure through which the Idea comes to know itself.

The chapter is framed by a provocative opening that reads a paradigmatic pornographic scene as illustrating the 'minimal reflexivity' — the woman's gaze back at the viewer — that cuts from within every immediate unity and prevents the purely Spinozian position of intellectual intuition without an 'I.' This image condenses the chapter's argument: the Lacanian Real corresponds to the gap constitutive of the Kantian 'I,' the crack that makes intellectual intuition impossible for finite beings and that psychoanalysis, rather than suturing, insists upon as the condition of any genuine subjectivity.

Key concepts: Subjectivity, Dialectics, Real, Splitting of the Subject, Negation, Phenomenology Notable examples: Schelling's assertion of intellectual intuition and the female orgasm as ontological proof; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (transcendental subject as 'bare consciousness'); Kant, Critique of Judgment (intellectus archetypus vs. ectypus); Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Understanding as 'absolute power'); Fichte, Wissenschaftslehre

Fear of Science: Transcendental Materialism and Its Discontents (Adrian Johnston) (p.125-149)

Johnston's chapter is an extended defense of his philosophy of 'transcendental materialism' against a set of critics who have characterized it as either a crude positivism and science-fetishism (Harman, De Vos) or as a reductionist naturalism that betrays Lacanian sophistication (Chiesa, Pluth). Against Harman's charge that Hegelian idealism is an antirealist 'spirit monism,' Johnston argues at length that both Hegel and Žižek deny not the existence of the real world but only the Kantian-Leninist model of an objective reality constituted as a self-enclosed whole independent of and opposed to subjectivity. The true materialist position, Johnston insists, is that 'our mind does not exist outside the world' — not that the world does not exist outside our mind.

Against De Vos's charge that Johnston's appeal to 'convulsing, writhing flesh' reduces the subject to naked animality and ignores Lacanian sophistication, Johnston distinguishes his position carefully from eliminativist naturalism: transcendental materialism is not the claim that everything can be explained from bodies alone, but that the sciences of life (the 'Darwin-event' and the 'Hebb-event') generate evental breaks that demand a new philosophical response — one that is responsive to empirical knowledge without being reducible to it. Johnston compares his position to Badiou's conditioning of philosophy by mathematical events, but insists that his conditioning is by biological rather than formal events, and that this is what distinguishes dialectical-transcendental materialism from both OOO speculation (which 'shoots off' unchecked by empirical friction) and from naive scientism.

The chapter also argues against the 'fear of science' characteristic of several Lacanian critics: De Vos's and Pluth's apparent suggestion that the life sciences are wholly contaminated by ideology such that philosophy must maintain a strict separation from them is itself a form of anti-naturalism incompatible with genuine materialism. Johnston's concluding position, paraphrasing Lenin, is that philosophy should be 'a few steps ahead, but a few steps only' of the sciences — speculative but grounded, critical but not phobic.

Key concepts: Dialectics, Subjectivity, Real, Substance, Ideology, Unconscious Notable examples: Harman's debates with Johnston at SUNY Buffalo (2012); Žižek's remarks on Lenin in Conversations with Žižek; De Vos's critique of Johnston's 'convulsing, writhing flesh'; The Darwin-event and Hebb-event as philosophical conditioning breaks; Badiou's conditioning of philosophy by mathematical events

Ontology and the Death Drive: Lacan and Deleuze (Alenka Zupančič) (p.142-174)

Zupančič's chapter begins by mapping the striking resemblances between Lacan's and Deleuze's readings of the death drive, above all their shared rejection of the dualistic Freudian model in which Eros and Thanatos are competing opposed principles. Both thinkers insist on the primacy of the death drive and refuse to read it as a tendency toward destruction or a return to the inanimate. Both argue that repetition does not repeat a pre-existing traumatic original but produces its own excess — the 'surplus' that it strives to bind is itself the product of repetition, not its cause. And both develop a tripartite topology (crack/fêlure/Real) around which the drives circulate, distinguishing the originary negativity from the particular empirical expressions (instincts/objects) that form around it.

Zupančič then traces Deleuze's concept of the fêlure (crack) in his reading of Zola and Fitzgerald, showing how Deleuze distinguishes between the crack as 'grand heredity' (the ontological rift itself) and the 'small heredity' of transmitted determinations, and how the two levels are 'tightly joined, like a ring within a larger ring, but never confused.' This topology closely parallels Lacan's discussion of the drive's circuit around the void. The crucial divergence, however, concerns what Deleuze calls 'realized ontology': for Deleuze, the centrifugal force of repetition (Difference) will eventually expel the reified, identity-conferring encumbrances and realize Being as univocal difference. Lacan, by contrast, insists that drives are 'indifferent' to repression — they are accomplices of repression as much as vectors of liberation — and that no centrifugal force of repetition can guarantee the 'right' selection. Only a new signifier (S1), produced in analytic discourse, can disentangle what exists only in entangled form.

The chapter's conclusion identifies the fundamental divergence: for Deleuze, 'realism' implies radical desubjectivation — the subject is expelled as an effect of metaphysical encrustation; for Lacan, subjectivation is the very 'proof' of an irreducible Real, the effect of ontology's inherent contradiction. Zupančič argues that only Lacan's position can sustain a genuine materialism, because the Real of reality's antagonism is only accessible through the subject's irreducible excessiveness. A materialism that dissolves the subject also dissolves its access to the Real.

Key concepts: Death Drive, Real, Repetition, Drive, Objet petit a, Fantasy Notable examples: Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (compulsion to repeat, fort-da); Deleuze on the crack (fêlure) in Zola's La Bête humaine and Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up; Brassier, Nihil Unbound (aboriginal trauma outside experience); Lacan, Seminar XI (lamella and indestructible life); Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (death drive as transcendental principle)

Why Sex Is Special: Psychoanalysis against New Materialism (Nathan Gorelick) (p.171-197)

Gorelick argues that psychoanalysis should position itself against new materialism not in order to defend anthropocentrism but because new materialism lacks what it most needs: a theorization of the Real as the consequence of castration, and of sexuality as the 'ontological lapse' that marks the specificity of human being without grounding a hierarchy of beings. The chapter begins by reconstructing the new materialist critique of correlationism (Whitehead, Meillassoux, Bryant, Shaviro): Kant's Copernican revolution, on this account, installed an anthropocentric metaphysics in which reality is meaningful only as correlated with consciousness, thereby authorizing the instrumental reduction of the nonhuman. New materialism responds by 'leveling' being, situating the human alongside all other 'actual entities.'

Against this, Gorelick argues that psychoanalysis does not reinforce correlationism but radically subverts it: Lacan replaces the Kantian unity of apperception with the imaginary misrecognition of the ego, and grounds the subject in the unconscious rather than in consciousness. The drive — illustrated through the Wolf Man's somatic symptom, whose bowels 'join in the conversation' when Freud touches a cluster of signifiers pertaining to infantile sexuality — reveals a materiality that 'does not think but nonetheless enjoys.' The body is not a correlate of consciousness but the inscription of the drive upon the organism; jouissance is squarely in the domain of materiality, yet irreducible to mere physicality. This is what Gorelick calls the 'ontological lapse': sexuality as the point at which the human is never at home in the field of natural determinations, always 'out of sync' with the world.

Gorelick concludes by arguing that new materialism's 'leveling' of being, by nullifying the peculiarity of the human object, simultaneously forecloses the ethical basis of its own critique. Freedom — as the capacity to rupture the prescribed parameters of the social order, exemplified by Antigone's defiance and Sade's graphomania — requires the subject's constitutive disquietude, which is the product of desire structured through fantasy. A 'flat ontology' that eliminates this disquietude leaves new materialism as a hysterical provocation rather than a genuine ethical intervention: it rehearses Mannoni's formula of fetishistic disavowal — 'I know well that humans are irreparably bound to language, but all the same ...'

Key concepts: Jouissance, Objet petit a, Fantasy, Real, Desire, Castration (implicit in 'ontological lapse') Notable examples: Wolf Man's somatic symptom (bowels joining the conversation); Whitehead's 'democracy of fellow creatures' in Process and Reality; Copjec, Read My Desire (the Real as what incompletes language); Lacan on Antigone and Sade as figures of the Act; Mannoni's formula of fetishistic disavowal

Twisting 'Flat Ontology': Harman's 'Allure' and Lacan's Extimate Cause (Adrian Johnston / Molly Anne Rothenberg) (p.190-216)

This chapter (by Rothenberg, per the table of contents) develops a detailed critique of Graham Harman's OOO, focusing on the central problem of object-to-object causation. Harman's key difficulty is that his objects are 'withdrawn' into a non-relational core inaccessible even to themselves, yet must somehow enter into relations that produce change. His solution — 'allure,' a mysterious property by which the object's hidden reserve beckons other objects into contact — merely displaces the problem: it divides the object into a relational surface and a non-relational core, creating a two-tier structure whose internal connection is no less mysterious than the external contact it was supposed to explain.

Rothenberg proposes that Harman's paradox points toward the need for a non-orientable topology — the Möbius band, the Klein bottle — in which inside and outside are not rigidly separated but continuously pass into each other via a constitutive 'twist.' Such objects are genuinely paradoxical (violating Aristotle's law of non-contradiction) yet real, and their topology offers what Harman's object, despite itself, requires: an excess that is 'everywhere,' bringing cause and effect into contiguity without merging them into flat immanence. Harman's error is not in generating a paradoxical object but in refusing to acknowledge the value of paradox to his own project.

From this topological analysis, Rothenberg argues that Harman's object inadvertently imports a Lacanian structure: in his most suggestive formulation, one object 'makes contact with the strife between the unitary reality [its hidden recess] and specific notes of its neighbor' — which means the object-in-itself must contend with the same split that defines the Lacanian subject. What Harman takes to be the object-in-itself 'in actuality' is nothing other than the Real of the cut — featureless, non-relational, unsymbolizable — that makes the subject correlative to objet a. The objet a is, moreover, both substantialized (object of desire) and permanently inaccessible (a void), and its 'allure' is not a property of a withdrawn object but the structure of fantasmatic causation. By working to eliminate subjectivity, Harman's own framework supplies the structure of fantasy that makes the object appear as substance rather than as the inscription of the subject into the field of objects.

Key concepts: Extimacy, Objet petit a, Real, Fantasy, Sublimation, Gap Notable examples: Harman's 'allure' in Guerrilla Metaphysics and The Speculative Turn debates; Möbius band and Klein bottle as non-orientable topological objects; Lacanian structure of objet a as object-cause of desire; Žižek's critique of Harman's 'quasi-magical reversal' of epistemological obstacle into ontological premise; Husserl's intentionality and Harman's adaptation

Becoming and the Challenge of Ontological Incompleteness: Virginia Woolf avec Lacan contra Deleuze (Kathryn Van Wert) (p.209-234)

Van Wert applies the Lacan/Deleuze debate to literary analysis, reading Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway as a text that stages a Hegelo-Lacanian ontology of irreducible negativity against the Deleuzean celebration of Becoming as continuous flux. Her central argument is that Woolf's two protagonists — Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith — embody rival relationships to the constitutive lack of the subject. Clarissa's 'exquisite moments' (the swish of Lucy's skirts, the typewriter's click) are not moments of pure Deleuzean intensity but figures of the 'virtual-in-actual': the substantial flower ('flowers of darkness') always bears the trace of the void from which it exfoliates. Clarissa is 'always arriving' from an absolute elsewhere immanent to the world — what Hegel calls the 'night of the world' — and her tentative reconciliation with absence draws her into intense, mediated relations with objects.

Septimus, by contrast, is read as a figure for the Deleuzean 'line of flight' taken to its extreme: schizophrenically identified with multiplicity, existing so close to the world that he is always 'elsewhere,' unable to feel anything but disgust and alienation except for the brief moment when his wife's hat-making coaxes him into a small infatuation with mundane objects. Van Wert argues that Septimus is not catapulted out of time by shell-shock but goes to war hoping to address a melancholic void that has always been with him — the void that is his origin story. His dissolution demonstrates that the evacuation of subjective lack (the Deleuzean line of flight) leads not to liberation but to the dead end of pure drive, stripping the subject of the productive reflexivity that iterability and temporal disparity make possible.

The chapter's methodological commitment is explicitly 'speculative' rather than historicist: rather than reading Woolf's modernism through its historical context, Van Wert reads it through its ontological structure. Clarissa's 'flowers of darkness' and Septimus's dissolution together constitute a literary demonstration that a materialism attentive to the lack constitutive of matter is 'affirmative precisely because it scars, dislocates, and tears the experience of present being' — and that the Deleuzean fantasy of continuous Becoming as freedom forgets this constitutive scarring.

Key concepts: Fantasy, Objet petit a, Death Drive, Real, Lack, Desire Notable examples: Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa's 'flowers of darkness', Septimus's dissolution); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (plateau, line of flight, anti-memory); Hegel's 'night of the world' (Jena Lectures on Philosophy of Spirit); Bennett's 'entelechy' and neovitalist impersonal agency; Zola's La Bête humaine and Deleuze's concept of the crack

From Sublimity to Sublimation: Hegel, Lacan, Melville (Russell Sbriglia) (p.227-256)

Sbriglia's closing chapter argues that Captain Ahab's quest in Moby Dick is best understood through the Hegelian theory of the sublime and the Lacanian theory of sublimation, rather than through the more commonly invoked Burkean or Kantian sublimes. Drawing on Hegel's Aesthetics, Sbriglia establishes that the Hegelian sublime differs from Kant's: for Hegel, the Idea has no positive existence beyond its appearance as phenomena, and the experience of the sublime — the radical inadequacy of all material phenomena to represent the Idea — is already the Idea in its mode of immanence as 'pure negativity.' There is no reconciliation, no Aufhebung of noumena and phenomena, because there is nothing beyond phenomenality; the sublime object's transcendence is the retroactive effect of its own radical negativity, not a positive beyond.

This Hegelian sublime converges with Lacanian sublimation as theorized in Seminar VII: to sublimate is to 'elevate an object to the dignity of the Thing,' to make a pathetic, ordinary object stand in for das Ding — the impossible, incestuous Thing — through the structure of anamorphosis. The sublime object is a 'miserable little piece of the Real,' a partial object that fills the empty place of the Thing as void. Sbriglia reads Moby Dick in exactly these terms: for Ahab, the White Whale possesses a mysterious je ne sais quoi — his 'inscrutable' evil reason — that in him is 'more than himself,' making him an object of extimacy: 'strange to me, although it is at the heart of me.' Ahab's relation to the Whale thus exemplifies the barred subject's ($◊a) relation to the objet petit a: the object bars the subject, yet this barring is constitutive of subjectivity.

The chapter also connects Ahab's 'monomaniacal' quest to the Lacanian drive and the death drive in particular: Ahab is 'iron-way,' derailed, a figure of 'nature sick unto death,' whose fascination with the lethal Thing demonstrates the 'traumatic imbalance' that Lacan identifies as the core of drive. Sbriglia concludes by arguing that Ahab's transcendentalism is a form of fetishistic disavowal: he knows that the Whale is merely a dumb brute, but he believes — needs to believe — that there is something more, something evil and intentional, in it. This disavowal is what allows him to sustain his quest and his desire, making Moby Dick a literary staging of the very structure of sublime object-cause of desire.

Key concepts: Sublime, Sublimation, Objet petit a, Das Ding, Extimacy, Death Drive Notable examples: Melville, Moby Dick (Ahab's quest, 'The Whiteness of the Whale'); Hegel, Aesthetics (sublime as Idea's immanence as pure negativity); Lacan, Seminar VII (sublimation as elevating object to dignity of the Thing); Holbein's The Ambassadors as paradigm of anamorphosis; Žižek on the sublime object and objet petit a

Main interlocutors

• Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
• Hegel, Science of Logic
• Hegel, Philosophy of Nature
• Hegel, Aesthetics
• Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (Four Fundamental Concepts)
• Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX (Encore)
• Jacques Lacan, Écrits
• Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology
• Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing
• Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
• Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
• Kant, Critique of Judgment
• Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
• Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology
• Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
• Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
• Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound
• Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds
• Joan Copjec, Read My Desire
• Adrian Johnston, Adventures in Transcendental Materialism
• Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
• Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects
• Marx, Grundrisse and Capital
• Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

Position in the corpus

Subject Lessons occupies a distinctive position in the secondary Lacanian corpus as the most comprehensive collective defense of Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism against the full field of contemporary materialisms and realisms. It shares ground most directly with Žižek's Less Than Nothing (which provides the philosophical framework extended here), Johnston's Prolegomena volumes (whose transcendental materialism is both defended and contextualized), and Zupančič's What IS Sex? (from which her chapter here is drawn). Readers encountering Subject Lessons will benefit from prior familiarity with Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology — whose argument about the sublime object and objet petit a is presupposed by Sbriglia's Melville chapter — as well as with Copjec's Read My Desire, which provides the Lacanian critique of historicism that Gorelick's chapter extends to new materialism. Dolar's contribution presupposes acquaintance with his earlier work on the voice and on Hegel; the Zupančič chapter presupposes familiarity with her What IS Sex? The volume also engages Meillassoux's After Finitude more extensively than most other secondary Lacanian texts, making it useful reading for those tracking the speculative realism debate from a Lacanian perspective.\n\nFor readers new to Lacano-Hegelian materialism, Subject Lessons is best approached after Žižek's Sublime Object of Ideology and before Less Than Nothing — it provides a useful middle-level orientation to the major debates. For specialists, it is most valuable as a document of the Lacanian response to the 'new materialist turn' of the 2010s, standing alongside Badiou's Logics of Worlds and Johnston's Prolegomena as a key intervention in the question of what materialism means after the cultural and speculative turns. Its literary chapters (Woolf, Melville) make it additionally relevant to scholars in literary and cultural studies working on materialism, the subject, and form, where it provides an alternative to both historicist and new materialist approaches.

Canonical concepts deployed

• Dialectics
• Real
• Objet petit a
• Subject
• Sublation
• Fantasy
• Splitting of the Subject
• Ideology
• Contradiction
• Lack
• Death Drive
• Das Ding
• Extimacy
• Desire
• Unconscious
• Negation
• Jouissance
• Gap
• Signifier
• Substance
• Sublimation
• Repetition
• Drive
• Universality
• Sublime