Johnston Review of Zizek’s Parallax View diacritics Spring 2007, 37.1: 3–20
Corporeal: having, consisting of, or relating to a physical material body: as a : not spiritual b : not immaterial or intangible : substantial; material; tangible: corporeal property; the corporeal nature of matter
the materialism of which Žižek speaks here is, … what both “mechanical materialism” and “idealist obscurantism” share in common — this link firmly shackles these two positions to each other, establishing an agreement underlying and organizing their more superficial disagreements — is a consensus stipulating that materiality is, when all is said and done, really just the corporeal substance of, say, Galileo or Newton (that is, physical objects blindly obeying the clockwork automaton embodied in the cause-and-effect laws of nature as formulated at the level of seventeenth and eighteenth-century science).
… today’s predominant collective theoretical imagination, as expressed in continuing disputes between varieties of materialism and idealism that seemingly haven’t digested certain recent scientific discoveries, remains stuck with representations of matter that predate the twentieth century.
… certain crucial aspects of the sciences of the twentieth century accomplish, so to speak, a desubstantialization of substance [Parallax View 165, 239, 407] (à la, for instance, string theory’s grounding of physical reality on ephemeral vibrating strands of energy captured solely through the intangible abstractions of branches of mathematics operating well beyond the limitations and confines of crude imaginative picture-thinking). This desubstantialization of substance makes possible a conception of materiality as open and contingent — in other words, as something quite distinct from the closed and necessary tangible stuff of old. 9