Continental Thought and Theory. Vol 2, Issue 2, August 2018
Object-Disoriented Ontology; or, the Subject of What Is Sex?
Russell Sbriglia
Can there be a serious materialism without the subject — that is, without a strong concept of the subject?
The subject names an object that is precisely not just an object among others” is “the whole point.”
The subject “is not simply an object among many objects, it is also the form of existence of the contradiction, antagonism, at work in the very existence of objects as objects …
The subject exists among objects, yet it exists there as the point that gives access to a possible objectivation of their inner antagonism, its inscription into their reality.”
And here we arrive at why the subject is both inextricable from and indispensable to Lacanian materialism: the subject is “not simply the one who thinks,” but who, above all, “makes certain contradictions accessible to thought,” the one through which “these contradictions [in being] appear as a ‘matter of thought.’” Subtract the “‘matter of thought’” that is the subject, and “it is difficult to speak of materialism
In short, the subject stands for the radical negativity, the radical out-of-jointness, of reality (in) itself, the hole in reality that renders being unwhole, disoriented — or, even better, like the topological figures Lacan was so fond of invoking (the torus, Möbius strip, cross-cap, Klein bottle, etc.), non-orientable.