Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2016 edition
Žižek appears to me to hastily conflate two different possible senses of “a materialism without matter”: on the one hand, a materialism in which physical nature itself is deprived of its traditionally imagined positivity qua consistency, density, solidity, and unity, being envisioned instead as shot through and permeated with the immanent negativities of antagonisms, conflicts, discrepancies, and tensions (i.e., replacing God-like Nature-with-a-capital-N as an omnipotent and omniscient big Other or Whole/Totality as One-All with, in hybrid Hegelian–Lacanian–Žižekian parlance, weak [ohnmächtig], rotten [pourri] nature[s] as a nonwhole/not-all barred Real);
on the other hand, a “materialism” in which everything material is dissolved into the “purity” of logical (whether symbolic or dialectical–speculative) and/or mathematical “forms” (an ontology difficult to distinguish from Pythagorianism and Platonic metaphysical realism—one which, moreover, by no means entails necessarily either dialectics or anything material in a way distinguishable from the ideational).
I am convinced that Žižek possesses and frequently utilizes claims and arguments delineating a compelling, novel variant of dialectical materialism avoiding and surpassing both of these unpalatable options. As on previous occasions, I see myself as yet again conducting an immanent critique of Žižek himself, challenging some of his utterances on the basis of wh t I take to be the most charitable and powerful reconstruction of a systematic Žižekian metaphysics.
All the same, this reconstruction requires carefully sifting through the blackletter contents of Žižek’s texts and selectively amending or disputing some of their details. Playing Žižek contra Žižek, and moving toward a conclusion to this intervention, what sketch can I offer of a dialectical materialism that remains faithful to the spirit, while at the same time criticizes the letter, of Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil?
Specifically, biology is simultaneously, one, a natural science and region of nature emergent from but irreducible to physics and chemistry and, two, the threshold realm out of which arise sentient and sapient subjects.
For a current, genuine dialectical materialism, and by contrast with the pseudomaterialist ontology of a panpsychism of the divided psyche, the incompleteness of being as the weakness/rottenness of nature makes possible, without automatically or inevitably making actual, $. Put differently, the barred Real is necessary but not sufficient for the barred subject.