It is fortunate that Sbriglia and Žižek do eventually show their hand as honestly as one could wish.

Their highest-ranking card is the same one thrown down by so many others in post-Kantian philosophy: the sheer impossibility of old-fashioned realism in the face of the closed circle of transcendental thought. As they put it, any "naïve notion of fully constituted material reality as the sole true reality outside our minds, of materiality as 'all,' relies on the overlooked exception of material reality's transcendental constitution […]" (9).

After all, how can anyone claim to speak of a reality apart from the subject when that same person is already a subject?

Here they find fault with an unusual trio of thinkers: "Lenin, but also […] Bennett and Bryant, all […] fail to account for the very position of the enunciation of the subject whose mind 'reflects' matter" (9). And later: "From where does the subject […] who deploys these object-oriented ontologies, these thing-power materialisms, speak? From what standpoint? Such theories obviously cannot be uttered from the position of merely one object among others" (15).

The editors inform us that, as German Idealism knew all along, "the more we try to isolate reality as it is 'in itself,' independently of the way we relate to it, the more this In-itself falls back into the domain of the transcendentally constituted, always already caught in the transcendental circle" (9).

This leads Sbriglia and Žižek to make a heroic call "to fearlessly think through the consequences of rejecting 'objective reality' […]" (10).

The reader will be  13 Žižek, "Afterword: Objects, Objects Everywhere," 17. 318  Graham Harman forgiven for saying that this sounds like a Berkeleyan solipsism, though we will soon be reminded of why the editors think it is not.


Before moving on, we should say something about the Ljubljana School's unusual relation to Meillassoux, whom they tend to see as an opponent who gets things basically wrong, despite the fact that there is a tremendous degree of agreement between them.

An early taste of this aversion can be had from Žižek's remark in Less Than Nothing that "the problem is not to think the Real outside of transcendental correlation, independently of the subject [as Meillassoux attempts]; the problem is to think the Real inside the subject, the hard core of the Real in the very heart of the subject, its ex-timate center. "¹⁴ Zupančič says much the same a few years later in her well-received book What IS Sex?: "[ Meillassoux's Great Outdoors] is a fantasy that conceals the Real that is already right here. "¹⁵ Johnston's article "Hume's Revenge" is even harder on Meillassoux, although mostly in connection with the latter's speculations on a virtual God.¹⁶ But while it is true that Meillassoux ultimately seeks a reality both prior and posterior to human consciousness - and to this extent is closer to traditional realism than anyone in the Ljubljana orbit - it is generally ignored that he accepts the same closed circle of thought on which Sbriglia and Žižek depend.

That is to say, Meillassoux accepts the limit that correlationism places on speculation about reality itself, as seen in his widely overlooked remarks at the 2007 Goldsmiths SR workshop:


I insist on this point - the exceptional strength of this [correlationist] argumentation, apparently and desperately implacable.

Correlationism rests on an argument as simple as it is powerful, and which can be formulated in the following way: No X without givenness of X, and no theory about X without a positing of X. If you speak about something, you speak about something that is given to you, and posited by you.¹⁷


So impressed is Meillassoux by the correlational circle ("you can't think something outside thought without turning it into a thought") that far from "refuting" it by way of the arche-fossil, he has to invent a rather complicated argument for how to get out of the circle, albeit one I have argued is faulty.¹⁸


Obviously, the insistence that we are unable to escape the closed circle of thought immediately raises the specter of an extreme form of idealism, which is why I alluded to Berkeley above.¹⁹ Ljubljana foresees such objections and already has prepared responses, such as Žižek's appeal to "the hard core of the Real in the very heart of the subject" and Zupančič's "Real that is already right here." Against "the autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual," what is defended is "the idea, as Freud earlier articulated it, that 'the ego is not master in its own house,' which means that subjectivity/subjectivation concerns not the ego but the unconscious" (8).

This explains the group's attraction to Schelling, with his gap between Existence and Ground of Existence rumbling within - if not beneath - the given, like a Lacanian cut or fracture in the subject itself (9).

My response is that neither Schelling nor Maurice Merleau-Ponty - another figure who claims to be on the scent of a purely immanent Real - escapes the onto-taxonomical assumption that the two basic poles of reality are (a) the human, and (b) everything else.²⁰ Moreover, we find no discussion of relations between two non-human objects, which make up the vast majority of interactions in the cosmos.

There is a related problem with Sbriglia and Žižek's claim that "prior to fully existent reality, there is […] a chaotic 'non-all' proto-reality, a pre-ontological virtual fluctuation of a not yet fully constituted Real.

In short, from the dialectical materialist standpoint, the true formula of materialism is that material reality is non-all" (9).

While such language of the "non-all" is comfortably reminiscent of Badiou's recourse to the transfinite mathematics of Georg Cantor, its link with materialism is by no means clear.²¹ As Bryant notes about a similar passage: That brings us to the topic of Lacan's objet petit a, or simply objet a, referring to the uttainable object of desire.

The polar opposite of any autonomous thing-in-itself, objet a is "an entity that has no substantial consistency, which is in itself […] 'nothing but confusion,' 'naught but shadows/Of what is not'," (12) as Bushy puts it in Shakespeare's Richard II.

Stated differently, "the [objet a] is a weird, alien object which is nothing but the inscription of the subject itself into the field of objects in the guise of a stain that acquires form only when part of this field is anamorphically distorted by the subject's desire" (12).

This weird, alien object is not just another species to be added to the objects already found in the OOO bestiary, but is meant to replace real objects altogether: "we pass from the secret core of an object inaccessible to other objects (the 'withdrawal' thesis of Harman and Bryant's object-oriented ontology) to inaccessibility as such" (12).

Objet a "is not simply the excess of the In-itself, what Harman characterizes as the 'withdrawn,' volcanic core of objects […]" (10).

Instead, it represents the hard core of a Real that is not hidden, but already right here in front of us.

Moreover, objet a itself turns out to be the "objective correlative" of the subject:


As defined by Lacan, the objet petit a is a strange object which is not only lacking, never fully here, always eluding the subject, but which is in itself nothing but the embodiment, the materialization of a lack.

That is to say, since the subject is the self-appearing of nothing, its "objective correlative" can only be a strange object whose nature is to be the embodiment of nothing, an "impossible" object, an object the entire being of which is an embodiment of its own impossibility, an object whose status is that of an anamorphosis, a distorted projection.

( 11)


As we have seen, no withdrawn real objects are permitted by the Ljubljana School.

This is due initially to its allegiance to the closed circle of thought as deployed by German Idealism against the Kantian Ding an sich. But it is further cemented by its ontologization of psychoanalysis as a theory not just about the psyche, but - since only a psyche can pursue philosophy - about reality as a whole.

For this reason we only have the subject, which is "nothing but its own inaccessibility, its own failure to be substance"  22 Bryant, Onto-Cartography, 2.

The citation from Žižek comes from The Parallax View, 17. 23 For another argument that materialism is actually a secret form of idealism see Latour, "Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?" 320  Graham Harman (12; emph. removed) along with its "objective correlative" the objet a.


It is not entirely clear, however, why the failure of the subject would lead it to generate an objective correlative in the first place.

Objet a is a perfectly fascinating psychoanalytic concept, and no doubt goes a long way toward explaining the vicissitudes of human desire and the clinical phenomenon of transference.

But psychoanalysis alone cannot establish that we must dispose of any object that is not merely the "objective correlative" of a subject.

That only makes sense if we agree with Ljubljana - and their unrecognized ally Meillassoux - that the correlational circle is a strong argument, a topic to which I will return at the end of this article.


Before moving on, we should raise the issue of relationism in philosophy, mentioned briefly above in connection with Whitehead.

A relational ontology is one in which there are no autonomous or independent elements, but only a network in which each term gains its reality differentially from the others.

Along with Whitehead's "philosophy of organism," Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory is another such case, and most people read the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure in this way.²⁴ OOO is adamantly opposed to such extreme relational theories, on the grounds that if entities are fully deployed in their current relations, there is nothing in them that could disengage from those relations and enter into others.

Change is impossible if objects are "overmined" into their current effects on other things.²⁵ Here, Sbriglia and Žižek take the opposite tack once again.

Whereas Bryant insists - as do I - on the nonrelational core of every object, the editors cite Lacan in making the opposite assertion.

In their words: "for Lacan, the subject is precisely a non-substantial entity, an object that is entirely - indeed, is perforce - reducible to its relations to other entities" (14).

They conclude as follows: "a truly radical materialism can only be a dialectical materialism […] according to which the subject is a purely relational entity - indeed, is nothing but this very relationality" (14).

As might be expected, this entails that objet a - as the mere "objective correlative" of the subject - also has a purely relational structure.

On this point Žižek cites Lacan from Seminar XX as saying that "[t]he reciprocity between the subject and object a is total"²⁶ (14).

But this leaves at least two questions hanging in midair.


First, if the reciprocity between subject and objet a is "total," we have to wonder where the rest of sense experience comes from: namely, the massive banal portion that is not cathected in the form of unfulfillable objects of desire.

If this giant commonplace sensory mass exists in total reciprocity with the subject as well, then we have a form of Berkeleyan idealism without God; if it does not, then we have no idea where it might come from.

Second, the notion of the subject as pure relational reciprocity makes an uneasy fit with Žižek's further description of the subject as "an excremental little piece of the Real, a recalcitrant, unsymbolizable remainder of every signifying process" (14).

For it is unclear why any system of pure relational reciprocity would even be able to have such a "recalcitrant, unsymbolizable remainder." Any such remainder should apparently stem from outside the relational system. And given that Lacan's Real is not an autonomous thing-in-itself, but simply a wound to the subject, this Real cannot provide anything more than an immanent remainder: in other words, it is no remainder at all.


McGowan's chapter has an amusing point of departure that he turns to real philosophical effect. " According to Fichte," he reminds us, "philosophy is inevitably caught up in a perpetual struggle between idealism and what he calls dogmatism (but which we would call materialism.) Though Fichte hopes to sway the reader in the direction of his version of Kantian idealism, he freely admits that neither side can persuade the other" (68).

This points to a possible element of choice at the basis of any philosophy: a theme so prominent in Heidegger and the existentialists, and more recently in Badiou's notion of fidelity to Sbriglia and Žižek's Subject Lessons  321 the event.

The status of this topic is far from settled.

But McGowan prefers to emphasize the humorous polemical consequences of the situation: "Since both idealists and materialists operate with an unquestioned fundamental principle […] in order to convince his reader about the superiority of idealism relative to materialism, Fichte has no alternative but to resort to name-calling" (68).


As even the casual reader of Fichte knows, his name-calling skills are extraordinary.

McGowan offers the following sample: "What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is […] A person indolent by nature or dulled and distorted by mental servitude, learned luxury, and vanity will never raise himself to the level of idealism. "²⁷ Quickly showing his own sense of fair play, McGowan notes that there is another side to the story, as represented most famously by Marx: "Subsequent thinkers haven't found Fichte's attempt at moral blackmail all that convincing.

In fact, after Marx inaugurates his materialist revolution that upends German Idealism, the moral valence of the decision undergoes a thoroughgoing transformation" (68).


Even so, Marx turns out to be just a mirror image of Fichte: "At no point does Marx attempt to refute the idealist position through an argument.

Instead, he meets idealism with assertion and ridicule" (69).

As we read in one of Marx's gentler statements on the matter: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. "²⁸ When it comes to more contemporary thinkers, McGowan goes so far as to claim that Badiou remains on the Fichtean side of the fence, and - perhaps less controversially - that Heidegger too remains stranded in idealism (79n5).


For McGowan himself there is no deadlock at all, since the opposition between idealism and materialism is already successfully overcome by Hegel: "at the moment when Hegel becomes Hegel, he comes to see the inseparability of idealism and materialism" (70).

The familiar term McGowan uses for the Hegelian solution is "objective idealism," though we can leave this term for our discussion of Johnston below.

More pressing here is the particular set of themes in Hegel that McGowan wishes to emphasize.

Although none of them is especially shocking for the reader of Hegel, they do lay the groundwork for McGowan's critique of OOO:


1. The Kantian thing-in-itself is nonsense.


2. Contradiction is not found in our inability to think about reality (as Kant holds) but in reality itself.


3. This central status of contradiction entails a relational model of philosophy.


It should already be clear that McGowan is as anti-object-oriented as he could possibly be.

After all, OOO stresses precisely the opposite of the three principles just listed: (1) Kant's thing-in-itself is real, (2) there is no contradiction in reality itself, and (3) relational models of philosophy automatically collapse through their own inherent weakness.


Like a number of authors in Subject Lessons, McGowan indulges in psychoanalysis of the philosophical positions with which he happens to disagree.

For instance, Kant's views on the impossibility of moral perfection are diagnosed as a form of "hysteria," although one might have expected a verdict of obsessional neurosis instead (71).

In McGowan's view, "Kant needs someone - the world - to play the bad guy, which is how hysteria operates" (71).

The same critique extends to the very notion of the thing-in- itself, which cannot be accessed any more directly than pure duty can in the ethical field.


But McGowan's diagnosis of Kant is of less interest than the positive, Hegelian alternative he offers: "Our knowledge cannot remain at a remove from what it knows.

It cannot treat what it encounters as phenomena distinct from things-in-themselves" (71).

Rather than making use of the "circle of thought" objection to the Ding an sich discussed in the previous section, McGowan makes dubious use of one of Hegel's funniest but least convincing passages.

The version McGowan selects is the one from the Philosophy of Nature: "Of a metaphysics prevalent today which maintains that we cannot know things because they are absolutely shut to us, it might be said that not even the animals are so stupid as these metaphysicians; for they go after things, seize and consume them. "²⁹ (A similar passage, of course, can be found in the Phenomenology of Spirit.³⁰) The problem with this  27 Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 16.

rebuke to the thing-in-itself is that it confuses inaccessibility with indestructibility.

I am not aware of Kant ever arguing that the in-itself must be eternal in the manner of Platonic forms, and even if he did, we would not be bound to accept such a conception of the an sich.


Admittedly, McGowan's main argument is slightly different, and hinges on the inherent anti-idealist properties of action: "Acting lifts us out of our hermetically sealed idealism" (70). But while action is an intriguing path to follow against the thing-in-itself, McGowan overplays his hand: "When we act, we cut into the world of objects and reveal that it is not epistemologically off-limits in the way that Kant and Fichte would have it" (71-72).

There are several problems with this, the first being the failure to consider that Fichte himself spent a good deal of time thinking about action, and simply reached different conclusions on the matter from Hegel.

The second problem is that the ability to act says nothing about whether the things are accessible "epistemologically," which concerns knowledge rather than action.

But the main problem here is the same as with Hegel's claim about animals and eating.

Namely, our ability to act on things - which no one denies - does not mean we are able to act on them directly.

We will consider this topic more closely below, when considering Rothenberg's chapter.


But the real heart of McGowan's chapter is the notion of contradiction as existing in the world itself rather than merely in the impasses of human thinking.

Whereas Kant treats his famous antinomies as red flags warning of the limits of human cognition, Hegel treats them positively: "According to Hegel, [the antinomies do not] mark reason's failure but its success.

The moment at which reason runs into contradiction indicates a contradiction in being itself that reason grasps through its own contradictions" (72).

He notes that this sharply distinguishes Hegel from Karl Popper, whose falsificationist model of science treats any contradiction as spelling the catastrophic end of a theory.³¹ Spirit, in its "fundamental masochism" (74), can endure contradiction in a way that lifeless materials cannot.

McGowan's crowning defense of contradiction had appeared earlier on the same page:


Contradiction manifests itself in the becoming of every entity that exists.

There is no entity that simply is what it is.

Instead, every entity is both itself and what it is not.

This is the fundamental contradiction that defines the entity as such.


If any entity were only itself and had no reference to what it was not, it could not exist in contrast with other entities. ( 74) This insistence on the truth of contradiction is reminiscent of the analytic philosopher Graham Priest, whose "dialetheism" asserts the existence of true contradictions, and the consequent downfall of any strict principle of identity.³² While this runs counter to my own and Meillassoux's differing defenses of identity, no less a OOO figure than Timothy Morton relies extensively on Priest's position, which is perhaps made easier by Morton's pre-OOO roots in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida - another prominent skeptic of identity.³³ At any rate, McGowan's focus on contradiction leads him straight to a relational ontology, on the basis that "[c]ontradiction is revealed through interaction" (74).

And with this conclusion, his third anti-OOO principle is established.


To solidify his case, McGowan notes OOO's roots in Heidegger and its relative lack of reliance on Hegelian principles.

Unfortunately, he misinterprets several key points in the OOO interpretation of Heidegger, in ways that sometimes make his argument difficult to follow.

While McGowan is certainly right that Heidegger - like Edmund Husserl - treats the question of the existence of the external world as a false problem from the outset, he is wrong to imply that OOO greets this as a liberation from stale epistemological problems.

Instead, OOO is openly horrified by this aspect of Husserl and Heidegger, which it regards as setting the table for a long tradition of mediocrity in continental meditations on reality- in-itself.

For example, I complained in discussion with Manuel DeLanda that "the usual procedure, following in the footsteps of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, is to treat realism as a pseudo-problem. "³⁴ As a rule, OOO would much rather pose the question of the objective existence of the world than deny the question's pertinence, as happens in nearly all strands of phenomenology.


McGowan  31 Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

That said, the weight of McGowan's argument about Heidegger comes to rest in his treatment of the distinction between "worldless" stones, "world-poor" animals, and "world-forming" humans in the widely read 1929/30 lecture course, which McGowan contrasts with Hegel's approach.³⁹ On the whole, McGowan's critique of Heidegger's threefold schema is persuasive.

As he rightly notes, the world-poverty of animals is never sufficiently illuminated by Heidegger, and the resulting distinction between stones and humans gives us little more than commonsensical banality: (75) the stone is worldless because it is aware of nothing, while humans are "world-forming" since they partake in language and are open to the world (76).

Here, McGowan announces, is where Heidegger will "[pay] a steep price" for his abandonment of subjectivity in favor of Dasein - though to repeat, OOO denies that the move from the subject to Dasein changes much at all.


As McGowan has it, what is the steep price that Heidegger pays but Hegel avoids? His first step toward an answer is puzzling, but not obviously wrong.

Here are McGowan's words on the matter:


For Kant, Heidegger's claim that the stone is worldless would already be going too far.

Though we might discuss the stone as a phenomenon, we cannot say anything about its status in-itself.

By identifying it with worldlessness, Heidegger steps beyond the limits that govern knowledge […].

In Kant's thought, our worldliness depends on not making claims about the worldlessness of stones.

( 76)


Is it really the case that Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself leaves him skeptical about our ability to make any statement at all about stones lacking inner life, while Heidegger's assertion that being-in-the- world eliminates the distance between Dasein and things makes him feel empowered to utter bald-faced statements about the status of non-human entities? I had not thought of it this way before, though I suspect McGowan is overstating both Kant's caution in making such statements and Heidegger's dogmatism in doing so.

In any case, the real problem is that McGowan goes on to ascribe this way of looking at things to OOO itself: "This is precisely why object-oriented ontologists find Heidegger's ontology more hospitable than Kant's.

Even though Heidegger sustains a radical difference between the relations are haunted by a noumenal surplus even when no humans are on the scene, this is the main point of Heidegger's superiority for us.


There is a final twist to McGowan's argument, and while it is pleasingly counterintuitive, it also repeats a problem we encountered in Sbriglia and Žižek.

Here is McGowan: "the moment that he avoids the distinction between subject and object, Heidegger loses the ability to recognize the nature of the difference between the subject and other entities [namely, a special relationship with contradiction]" (77).

Quite apart from OOO's refusal of the idea that Heidegger is a flat ontologist who smooths out the difference between Dasein and everything else, McGowan is simply repeating the Sbriglia/Žižek charge (already made by Žižek solo against Bryant in 2016) that what OOO thinks as subject does not meet the criteria for subjecthood.⁴⁰ Stated differently, McGowan is left with the tautology that since Heidegger no longer recognizes a fundamental difference between subject and object, he is unable to see what makes the subject so special.

I do not doubt that humans can do many things that other entities cannot, that in psychoanalytic terms we are distinguished even from other animals by repression and castration, that history plays an eminent role in human existence but not in the vegetable kingdom, and so forth. What has not been demonstrated is that the human subject is ontologically special, a claim that makes sense only for those who accept the Cartesian assumption that we have direct access to thought but indirect access to everything else.


Let's end this section with a final word about McGowan's reversal of Heidegger's worldless/world- forming schema, a reversal that I for one find interesting and imaginative.

Whereas Heidegger adopts the commonsensical stance that stones have no world but humans are very much immersed in one, McGowan sees Hegel as holding the contrary view: "Although Hegel doesn't theorize the stone as world-forming, he does see it as fully in the world in a way that the subject cannot be" (77).

That is to say, the stone is so fully delivered to the world as to be possibly shattered by causal forces with no hope of active self-preservation.

McGowan continues: "Hegel defines the organic as that which has the ability not to be simply a victim of its world.

Unlike the inorganic, the organic reacts to the destruction that the world heaps on it with self- restoration" (77).

This power of self-restoration is one that McGowan interprets not in the biological sense of immune response and regeneration, but in the ontological sense of contradiction. And this is where his article finally comes to rest, at the same unconvincing point toward which it has always been signaling:


We know that the stone is not self-identical, that it is not an independent substance, because it is capable of breaking. But the stone is not a subject, a being that makes its ability to break apart its founding principle.

Though it can suffer violence from the external world, the stone lacks the ability to perform any violence toward itself.

It is divided against itself, but not in a way that grants it any purchase upon contradiction.

( 78)


The second part of this passage is insufficiently clear about the difference between a thing being merely divided against itself, or divided against itself in a way that "grants it purchase upon contradiction," and thus it will be convincing only to those already in the Ljubljana camp.

The bigger problem comes at the beginning of the passage.

The claim that a thing cannot be self-identical if it is capable of breaking is not only introduced without argument, but is made in the face of the glaring counterexample of Aristotle: who was both the philosopher of self-identical substance par excellence and one of the great thinkers of motion and growth.


Johnston's chapter is framed explicitly as a response to his critics, myself included.

Since Johnston is a personal friend, and I fully expect to engage him in further debate in the future, this section will limit itself to one key point.

Namely, he is especially perturbed by what I do with a particular passage from Žižek's conversations with Glyn Daly.

The relevant words from Žižek are as follows:


The true formula of materialism is not that there is some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it.

The only consistent materialist position is that the world does not exist - in the Kantian sense of the term, as a self-enclosed whole.

The notion of the world as a positive universe presupposes an external observer, an observer not caught in it.

The very position from which you can perceive the world as a self-enclosed whole is the position of an external observer.

It is thus paradoxically this radical perspectivism which allows us to formulate a truly materialist position, not that the world exists outside the mind, but that our mind does not exist outside the world.⁴¹


It would be an exaggeration to say that there is "a lot going on" in this passage, since the exact number of things going on is three. ( 1) Žižek denies "noumenal reality," (2) Žižek denies that the world is a self- enclosed whole, and (3) Žižek asserts that the world could only be a self-enclosed whole if there were an external observer to look at it, but no such observer can possibly exist.

The dispute between me and Johnston turns on points (1) and (2), while (3) is one of the key arguments that recurs throughout the chapters of Subject Lessons.

Let's consider the situation briefly.


In essence, Johnston charges me with deliberately distorting the Žižek passage above by ending after "the world does not exist" instead of giving the full context for this phrase.

In Johnston's words, "Harman latches onto the line 'the world does not exist' without acknowledging the crucial caveat immediately following it: 'in the Kantian sense of the term, as a self-enclosed whole.' What this caveat unambiguously indicates is that Žižek does anything but, as Harman falsely charges, deny the real world's existence tout court" (127).

Yet the reason I elided the part about the world as a "self-enclosed whole" is its distracting irrelevance to my argument.


When Žižek denies "some noumenal reality beyond our distorting perception of it," this is not an accusation aimed at the Kantian noumena specifically, but at the idea of a reality "beyond our distorting perception of it." In other words, for Žižek, reality is simply not something that exists apart from our encounter with it.

This view is entirely unsurprising given his admiration for Hegel and Lacan, who argue respectively that the thing-in-itself is just a negativity immanent to thought, and that the Real exists only through being encountered as an unsymbolizable trauma.


Nowhere in Hegel do two things-in-themselves interact beyond surveillance by the subject; nowhere in Lacan do two pieces of the Real enter into relation apart from the human subject, however "barred" that subject may be.

As a reliably Hegelo-Lacanian thinker despite his numerous innovations, Žižek is not just opposed to a reality beyond our distorting perception of it, but even to a reality that is not beyond our distorting perception of it.

What exists for him is simply the subject, the objet a correlated with it, and a Real that does not come from outside in any rigorous sense of the term.


The portion of the passage that Johnston accuses me of eliding is nothing more than a Houdini-like effort by Žižek to escape from idealist handcuffs he has dangerously placed on his own hands.

This effort includes two separate elements: (1) his denial that the world is a self-enclosed whole, and (2) his assertion that such a self-enclosed world would require an observer external to it.

The problem with (1) is that there are many different ways to deny that the world is a whole other than Žižek's method, which is to proclaim a subject whose anamorphic squints of desire prevent the world from having any inherent status apart from such squints.

For instance, his part-time ally Badiou also frequently asserts that "the whole is not," but this is based on his interpretation of set theory rather than any Lacanian considerations.

OOO equally denies that reality forms a whole, but for the very different reason that relations are raggedy enough that at any moment some things - called "dormant objects" - exist in disconnection from the rest.⁴²  41 Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek, 97.

There is also Markus Gabriel, who wrote a best seller in Germany literally entitled Why the World Does Not Exist, but on the basis of reasons entirely different from Žižek's, Badiou's, and my own.⁴³ In short, the issue of whether the world is a whole is not the same as that of whether something exists independently of the subject. But point (2) is where we encounter the real soft spot in the argument.

The relevant portion of text is as follows (again, this is Žižek responding to Daly):


The notion of the world as a positive universe presupposes an external observer, an observer not caught in it.

The very position from which you can perceive the world as a self-enclosed whole is the position of an external observer.

It is thus paradoxically this radical perspectivism which allows us to formulate a truly materialist position, not that the world exists outside the mind, but that our mind does not exist outside the world.

Let's admire for a moment the sheer audacity of this passage.

Žižek is widely known as a gifted promoter and developer of the doctrines that the thing-in-itself is merely an immanent obstacle of thought itself (Hegel), that the object of desire is only the correlate of a posited lack (Lacan), and that the Real exists only in its traumatization of the subject (Lacan).

On this basis, any neutral reader would say there is at least a strong prima facie case for concluding that Žižek is a full-blown idealist, so that one of the most urgent challenges for his position is to account for a reality independent of the mind in sufficiently robust terms.

Given these circumstances, what does he do? Incredibly, he tries to displace the "observer-dependent" burden of idealism onto its polar opposite: realism.

After all, the argument runs, those who think the world exists apart from the mind must accept an external observer looking at that world from outside it, in a sort of God's-eye view.

No matter that no realist actually thinks this, since the whole point of realism is that the world exists (and not necessarily as a "whole") whether anyone is looking or not; the mere fact that one says this does not make one an "observer" in the same sense that Berkeley's (human or divine) subject is such an observer.

In other words, Žižek is trying to argue that if I think of a world outside thought, then precisely through doing so I become an "external observer" thinking and talking about the world.

This is the same argument that Meillassoux calls the "correlationist circle."


Žižek's special audacity in this case comes from the fact that he claims not to accept an external observer, but only an internal one. And with the external observer's statement about an independent world now disqualified by her apparent self-contradiction, only the internal observer is left to testify about the world, which makes the latter the only qualified party to tell us that there is anything at all.

Somehow this flagrant idealism is permitted to go by the nickname "materialism," and Žižek conceals this gesture behind an especially clever play on words: as he puts it, materialism means "not that the world exists outside the mind, but that our mind does not exist outside the world." We might just as well say that phenomenology (the most unapologetic idealism of its century) means "not that no world exists outside the mind, but that no mind exists without a world," which is essentially Husserl's argument, after all.


Rothenberg's chapter contains the most detailed engagement with OOO anywhere in Subject Lessons, and for this I am grateful.

Her main concern is the concept of "allure," which she treats as a self-defeating concept whose aims are better addressed by Lacan's notion of "extimate cause. "⁴⁵ "According to Harman," Rothenberg reports, "our failure to know the object-in-itself has nothing to do with the epistemological limitations of the subject but is due to the fact that the object withdraws from itself. For Harman, the object-in-itself has neither qualities nor relations […]" (190).

She cites Žižek's criticism that this amounts to "a quasi-magical reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological premise," such that my position Sbriglia and Žižek's Subject Lessons  327 entails transcendental subjectivity even while claiming to deny it.⁴⁶ Crossing from Hegelian into Lacanian territory, Rothenberg posits that the "self-withdrawn object" of OOO should really be understood as objet a, so that its supposed withdrawal is only an imaginary loss, "the fantasy of a substantialized object that is imagined to rectify the so-called loss accompanying subjectivization" (191).

However, she adds, OOO's attempted prohibition on accessing the in-itself is really just an impossibility, since no in-itself exists.


There are several things to be said in response.

First, it is inaccurate to say that for OOO our failure to know the in-itself is due to its self-withdrawal, since "withdrawal" alone (without adding the "self-" part) does the trick.

The notion of self-withdrawal occurs in OOO only with reference to the special case in which a specific kind of object (namely, a human being) looks at itself and fails to grasp it directly, just as it fails in the case of any other object.

This will not come as welcome news to the Ljubljana School, which accepts the Hegelo-Lacanian consensus that we do have direct access to the thought-world relation in a way that we do not for object-object relations, despite their great haste to disown the transparent Cartesian subject in favor of a turbulent subject that - in its traumatic madness - never quite coincides with itself.

Whatever the busy efforts of Ljubljana to create a "wobbly subject," as Meillassoux aptly puts it, the object-object interaction is entirely excluded from consideration.⁴⁷ Second, it is not the case that "for Harman, the object-in-itself has neither qualities nor relations." Here there is one serious mistake and one moderate one.

The moderate mistake is that the OOO real object (or "object-in-itself") does in fact often engage in relations, but only indirectly, through sensual mediators; real objects that are not currently in any relations at all are called "dormant objects," but they may be rather rare.

The serious mistake is the claim that real objects have no qualities.

Au contraire!

Real objects can have both sensual qualities and real qualities, though the former are found only in cases of allure.⁴⁸ As for Žižek's claim that referring to the withdrawal of objects is a "quasi-magical" imputation of a merely epistemological barrier into the object itself, this charge has frequently been made by critics, though none of them have bothered to demonstrate that the barrier is really just "epistemological." This claim is convincing only for those who assume that the circle of thought is valid, so that we must confine our initial remarks to a thought-world correlate, thereby ascribing everything to the "subject" pole and nothing to the "object."


We now turn to Rothenberg's discussion of the OOO idea of "allure," an intermediate experience in which we have a suggestive indirect access to objects.

The idea is crucial for the OOO account of aesthetics, where it is described as the heir of Socratic philosophia.

Rothenberg's first concern is to claim that OOO allure arises not only from the philosophy of Husserl, but from a flat-out misreading of his work.

For instance: "'allure' is Harman's (mis)appropriation of the Husserlian horizon of indeterminacy" (196), and "Harman's reading [of Husserl] constitutes a serious misprision" (198).

All right, then: what does a proper appropriation of Husserl look like for Rothenberg? At the very least, it apparently requires that we emphasize an object's horizon of indeterminacy.

In her own words: "No act of consciousness can completely grasp the object, if only because an [intentional] act occurs in the present and the object endures through time […] That is, the object, in Husserl's terms, necessarily transcends the intentional act that fixes its meaning (Sinn) for consciousness.

This indeterminate horizon draws consciousness to it" (196-197).

So far there is no problem; this is in fact what Husserl says. What is subtly wrong here, however, is the implication that allure is somehow related to Husserl's indeterminate horizons.

OOO's allure is a matter of real objects, and no such objects are permitted by Husserl to exist - given his outright rejection of objects that could not, in principle, be the terminus of some intentional act.

Rothenberg is free to argue the contrary, but then she would simply be siding with the mainstream Husserlians who claim that his "horizon" already contains everything that we find in Heidegger's Sein.

There is no time to argue the point here; I did so in my first book in connection with a similar argument made by Rudolf Bernet.⁴⁹ From a OOO standpoint, the idea of an object as having indeterminate horizons leading beyond its current By linking allure and vicarious causation with the long-discredited notion of an ether that fills cosmic space and allows for the transmission of electromagnetic waves, Rothenberg is trying to make these concepts look both superfluous and old-fashioned.

For this reason, it may be worth recalling why I introduce them at all, especially since my reasons are rooted in some of the most venerable currents in the history of philosophy.

The assumption that something can either be stated directly in clear propositional terms, or else it is nothing but negative-theological hand-waving, is a contemporary version of the sophist's trick known as Meno's Paradox: either we know something or we don't, have access to it or not, period.

Among other difficulties, this renders Socratic philosophia impossible, and turns all forms of human cognition into full-blown knowledge, despite ample evidence - from aesthetics and elsewhere - that direct access to reality is not the only kind.

Nor did we need to wait for Kant's thing-in- itself or Heideggerian withdrawal to encounter this point in the history of philosophy.

Although Aristotle was no theorist of indirect causation - this would only come later, with the early occasionalists of Islam - he already noticed that we cannot define a substance in words, since words employ universals but substances are always concrete.⁵³ Stated differently, there is an automatic gap between reality and anything we might say about it.


Now, any attempt to dismiss indirect causation as a pseudo-problem that OOO brings upon itself through a mere "dislike" of "immanent causation" (199) leads to an overmining situation, in which causation is "internal" and there is no surplus beneath the current set of relations in which a thing is involved.

Of course, Rothenberg has already rejected this claim, but then again, I have also refused her rejection of it.

The question of how things interact is a real one, and the term "vicarious causation" was coined in order to pin down this question for further study, rather than wish it away.

Nor is it merely posited as a "notional" or "mysterious" force, since a preliminary answer is given as to how it works.

While it is true that for OOO no two real objects can touch, and true as well that inserting another real object between them would simply multiply the problem, it is nonetheless evident that real objects can touch sensual ones: this is precisely what happens in human experience.

I am a real object, inexhaustible by any amount of introspection, and it is I myself who make contact with the sensual objects of experience: not just a sensual image of this "I." Thus, the first secret of vicarious causation is that I as a real object touch a sensual object directly through encountering it (say, a tree).

For its own part, the real tree touches the sensual tree by generating it; in this way, it is the medium through which I make second- hand contact with the other real object despite the impossibility of direct contact between us.

To assert that all contact is either direct or nonexistent is merely a way of evading the bona fide problem that OOO has noted with direct interaction.


Of the many wise remarks about philosophy made by Whitehead, the following is of especial importance: "It has been remarked that a system of philosophy is never refuted; it is only abandoned. "⁵⁴ He adds further that attempts at refutation have an in-built flaw: "logical contradictions […] are the most gratuitous of errors; and usually they are trivial.

Thus, after criticism, [philosophical] systems do not exhibit mere illogicalities.

They suffer from inadequacy and incoherence. "⁵⁵ Not logical flaws, but inadequacy and incoherence, are the real shortcomings of abandoned philosophies.

The need for  53 Aristotle, Metaphysics Z 7.

See also Harman, "A New Occasionalism?", and Harman, Aristotle With a Twist. coherence in a philosophy is real, though it should also not be rushed.

It is often fruitful to pursue contradictory intuitions for a time, and much can be lost through a forced or premature consistency: this is the grain of truth in Ralph Waldo Emerson's maxim that "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. "⁵⁶ It is best to think of consistency as a goal rather than a starting point of the philosopher.

The more pressing matter is always adequacy, meaning that nothing that exists should be excluded from a philosophy's scope; it is a bad sign if too much is explained away by a theory for the sake of easy self- consistency.

If philosophies are generally refuted rather than abandoned, what this means is that they are left behind not because of some purported mistake, but because they account for less of experience than their successors do.

Nonetheless, philosophers generally behave as if they were more afraid of being refuted than being abandoned.

They spend more time constructing ironclad proofs and "knockdown arguments" than asking themselves what portions of reality they are missing.

This is especially true in the modern period of philosophy, so eager to mimic the natural sciences and geometrical deduction whenever possible.


The importance of these remarks for the battle of objects and subjects should be clear.

Today's neo- rationalist philosophies think themselves rigorous because of their adherence to a very specific proof, one that they hold marks a permanent cut between obsolete and living philosophy.

I speak of the circle of thought, or Meillassoux's correlational circle: the notion that to speak of what lies beyond thought is itself already a thought.

Virtually every philosophical claim made in the pages of Subject Lessons stems directly from the acceptance of this circle: the replacement of the real object with the objet a, the transformation of reality into the traumatic Real, the replacement of a rift between phenomena and noumena with a "cut" internal to the subject, the surrender of independent material atoms in favor of a counterintuitive "materialism" defined as a "blind spot" of the subject, and the notion that to speak of a world-in-itself is to fantasize the existence of an observer looking at it from outside.

What is interesting about this particular "proof" is that it demands assent despite very weak adequacy.

After all, one wakes up in the morning thinking that there are trillions of entities in the cosmos, and that they are busily influencing one another even when no human subject is watching them.

Against this everyday assumption, the "irrefutable proof" of the Ljubljana version of the circle of thought tells us that no such interactions really occur, that the subject must always be on the scene to monitor them, and that objects of desire have no capacity to satisfy in their own right.

Of course, this is exactly what proofs are capable of doing: making us sacrifice our previous sense of adequacy in favor of a surprising limitation that can be demonstrated beyond all doubt.

For example, it is counterintuitive to think that at any given moment there must be two antipodal points on the equator with exactly the same temperature, yet this is decisively proven as a consequence of the so- called Borsuk-Ulam theorem.⁵⁷ Philosophy too has aspired to enter the ranks of the disciplines that work via proof, especially in the modern period.

Perhaps the best example is that, from Kant onward (with the remarkable exception of Whitehead) we have taught ourselves that the thought-world relation is the root of all others.

Not a page of Subject Lessons makes sense without this particular "wager." But is the wager a good one? Is it really the case that I cannot speak of the relation between fire and cotton, but only of the conditions of possibility for how this relation appears to me? This is not the place to argue the point once more. I merely wished to show how dependent Ljubljana's arguments - both the Hegelian and the Lacanian sort - are on the circle of thought.


Another remark about Subject Lessons is in order.

At the beginning of this article, I mentioned that the collection is stronger in its combined defense of German Idealism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis than in its critical remarks on "New Materialism" broadly conceived.


The reason may be as follows.

I cannot recall a single passage in the book, by any of its authors, that shows evidence of having learned anything new from the "New Materialist" figures.

They are treated as belonging to a purely retrograde tendency; the Ljubljana School that stands at the end of this anthology is identical to the one we knew coming in.


That makes the encounter proposed by the book a disappointing one.

Some of this is only to be expected.

Žižek in particular is better known and more influential than any New Materialist figure, including Karen Barad (whose relative absence from the book is surprising) and Bennett.⁵⁸ Thus a certain degree of "King of the Hill" attitude was to be expected, with the editors' Introduction going out of its way to remind us that Žižek was already fighting cultural materialism for a quarter of a century before the New Materialists came along (5).


Yet there is something unsatisfying about hearing the same arguments, the same claims that Hegel is being misrepresented by his critics, the same complaints that the subject of psychoanalysis is not being taken into account.

In that respect, the collection is a missed opportunity.


That is why I am far more likely to recommend the positive chapters on Ljubljana School doctrine - such as Dolar's, one of the gems of the anthology - than any of the critical treatments of the new philosophies.


The author is the editor in chief of the journal and editor of this topical issue.

The evaluation process was handled by another editor and the peer reviews were double blind.

The manuscript was anonymized (references to the author were written in the third person) for the purposes of review.


This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism.


In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.” I would like, here at the outset, to express my gratitude to Graham Harman for cordially inviting me to respond to his recent article, “The Battle of Objects and Subjects: Concerning Sbriglia and Žižek’s Subject Lessons Anthology,” in which he not only defends his object-oriented ontology (OOO) from the critiques leveled against it throughout my and Žižek’s anthology, but also critiques the Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism championed by the anthology’s contributors.


Seeing that Harman has limited his response to those chapters of the collection that most concern OOO, in what follows I have tried my best to limit my response to Harman himself, though I will occasionally have cause to address critiques from compatriots of his such as Levi Bryant, Manuel DeLanda, and Quentin Meillassoux [1].

Likewise, though I may now and then refer to Harman’s comments on chapters by other contributors to the volume such as Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, and Molly Anne Rothenberg, my focus will remain primarily on Harman’s response to my and Žižek’s introductory chapter, which, as we shall see, is of a piece with other of the critiques he has leveled against Žižek and the Lacano-Hegelian position more generally in recent years.


I should make it clear at the outset of this reply that those coming to it expecting to find a polemic will be sorely disappointed.

Both the current piece and that to which it responds constitute merely the most recent installment in an ongoing friendly debate between Harman and various members of the Lacano-Hegelian camp whose work is featured in Subject Lessons [2].

I should also make it clear that I am not interested in using this reply to wage a further critique of OOO, as I am happy to let what Žižek and I wrote in regard to it in the introduction to our collection stand on its own.


What I am interested in doing is looking closely at and responding to Harman’s main critiques of our collection – not in the hope of ultimately converting him to our cause or convincing him of the correctness of our position (like Žižek, I have “no illusions” in this regard), but in the hope that doing so will help to provide greater clarity, not only about some of the seemingly contradictory claims undergirding our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism – especially regarding the nature of the Lacanian “objet petit a,” the matter that matters most to this materialism – but also about where the true fault line between this “extimate materialism,” as I will be terming it, and Harman’s “immaterialism” lies [3].


Though it contains more granular critiques than these – especially when addressing those chapters of the book that engage OOO at the greatest length (Johnston’s, McGowan’s, and Rothenberg’s) – the two most overarching critiques throughout Harman’s response to Subject Lessons are the following: (1) we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, OOO, speculative realism, and actor–network theory (ANT) – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism.


I will address these critiques in order, beginning with the first; however, I will devote a good deal more space to the second, as there is far more at stake philosophically in this critique than in the first, which is more methodological in nature.


As outlined above, one of Harman’s more overarching complaints throughout his response to Subject Lessons is that we – specifically Žižek and I, but also some others in the collection, such as McGowan, Gorelick, and Alenka Zupančič – are “generally too indiscriminate in mixing various figures under the ‘New Materialist’ label, often suppressing crucial differences” [4]. I am tempted to both agree and disagree with Harman here.


As far as agreement goes, Harman is correct to note that such a “bulk treatment” of figures like himself and Levi Bryant (both of whom are object-oriented ontologists), Jane Bennett (a New Materialist), Quentin Meillassoux (a speculative materialist), and Bruno Latour (an actor–network theorist) cannot but help to “suppress” some of the more “crucial differences” among them [5].

To take Harman himself as an example, it is entirely understandable that he wouldn’t want to be lumped in with the New Materialists, if for no other reason than that his OOO, as he has argued on a number of occasions, is an “immaterialism.”


Indeed, in his book Immaterialism Harman explicitly distinguishes between the immaterialism of his OOO and the materialism of New Materialism by way of contrasting lists of “axioms” of both schools [6].

Thus, to give a few examples, whereas New Materialism holds that “[e]verything is contingent,” that “[t]hought and the world never exist separately, and therefore ‘intra-act’ rather than interact,” and that “[t]he world is purely immanent, and it’s a good thing, because any transcendence would be oppressive,” OOO holds that “[n]ot everything is contingent,” that “[t]hought and its object are no more and no less than any other two objects, and therefore they interact rather than ‘intra-act,’” and that “[t]he world is not just immanent, and it’s a good thing, because pure immanence would be oppressive” [7].


Given that Harman has gone out of his way to draw such distinctions as these, one can understand why he would bristle at seeing his OOO being grouped alongside New Materialism. And yet, as we will see, not only is this not an entirely accurate characterization of my and Žižek’s classification of these various schools of thought, but there is also considerable disagreement – even confusion – among these schools’ own members as to whether their philosophy is a materialism, a realism, or both.


In his response to Subject Lessons, Harman reiterates his anti-materialist stance by citing articles of his boasting such titles as “I Am Also of the Opinion That Materialism Must Be Destroyed,” “Realism Without Materialism,” and “Materialism Is Not the Solution” [8].

Surely, the title of the second of these three articles, “Realism Without Materialism,” would justify us in classifying Harman’s OOO as a “new realism” – especially given that, as I will address below, he explicitly rejects classic, “naïve” realism.


This brings me to the first of my objections to Harman’s criticism of our bulk treatment of these different schools: in our introduction, Žižek and I very explicitly – and very consistently – refer to them not merely as the “new materialisms” (which is itself somewhat more capacious a term than the proper noun “New Materialism”), but as the “new materialisms and realisms” [9].

Curiously, Harman doesn’t acknowledge this in his response (though he does quote our claim that, “from the Lacano-Hegelian perspective, what new materialists and realists understand as ‘subject’ simply fails to meet the criteria of the subject”) [10].


Instead, he takes Gorelick’s grouping of these different schools under the rubric of “new materialism” in his chapter “Why Sex Is Special: Psychoanalysis against New Materialism” as though it were indicative of the volume as a whole. But let us for a moment assume that this was indeed true of the book more generally.

Given the amount of disagreement that exists among the members of these various schools – even those belonging to the same school – not only as to whether their philosophies are materialist or realist, but even as to what “materialism” and “realism” mean, one could hardly blame other of the book’s contributors for following Gorelick’s example in resisting “the nominalist temptation to arbitrate such nuances,” especially seeing that such arbitration is “already a common preoccupation among these thinkers themselves” [11].


To indulge in a bit of this arbitration myself, we might note that though often considered the ur-text of speculative realism, Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude is, in Meillassoux’s own estimation, a work of “speculative materialism” [12].

As he asserts in his essay “Time Without Becoming,” “I prefer to describe my philosophy as a speculative materialism, rather than as a realism: because I remember the sentence of Foucault, who once said: ‘I am materialist, because I don’t believe in reality’” [13].


A similar tension exists within OOO.

Whereas Harman’s position, as we have seen, is staunchly anti-materialist, that of his fellow object-oriented ontologist Levi Bryant is staunchly materialist.

To exemplify this point, one need look no further than the very first sentence of Bryant’s Onto-Cartography, in which he proclaims, “This book attempts a defense and renewal of materialism” – both of which, he adds, are needed “in the face of critics and defenders alike” [14].


To take up this last point regarding defenders of materialism: in a passage that Harman often approvingly cites – including in his response to Subject Lessons – Bryant singles out Žižek’s work in particular as evidence that the word “materialism” has become an “empty” signifier, a mere “terme d’art which has little to do with anything material” [15].

I will quote and discuss this passage from Bryant at much greater length below.

For now, suffice it to note that his aim of “defending and renewing” materialism speaks to a fundamental disagreement among the two most prominent practitioners of OOO as to whether it is (or should be) a materialist or an immaterialist philosophy [16].


Complicating matters even further are disagreements and contradictions among these thinkers as to their very definitions of “materialism” and “realism.” As suggested earlier, by “realism” Harman means not a commonsense philosophy that insists upon the existence of material objects outside of human perception – a position whose naiveté is perhaps most famously (and colorfully) encapsulated by Samuel Johnson’s response to Berkeley’s idealism by kicking a large stone and proclaiming, “I refute it thus” – but rather a philosophy that “reject[s] the central teaching of Kant’s Copernican Revolution, which turns philosophy into a meditation on human finitude and forbids it from discussing reality in itself” [17].


While such a definition of realism could in certain respects double as a characterization of Meillassoux’s anti-correlationism, Meillassoux, as we have seen, rejects the label of realism, a move that would get him into trouble not only with Harman but with another figure in this orbit, Manuel DeLanda [18].

Responsible for having popularized the notion of “flat ontology” to which virtually all of the new materialists and realists that we discuss in our collection subscribe, DeLanda is, in Harman’s estimation, “both ardently realist and ardently materialist” [19].


As DeLanda himself asserts in his extended dialogue with Harman, The Rise of Realism – this after having confessed to “using the terms ‘realism’ and ‘materialism’ as if they were interchangeable when they are not” – “All (coherent) materialists must be realists, but not all realists must be materialists” [20].

From here, however, DeLanda, though critical of Žižek’s materialism (a critique which, like Bryant’s, I will address in greater detail below), proceeds to provide a definition of materialism which, were one to simply remove the term “realism” from it, would be entirely applicable to my and Žižek’s Lacano-Hegelian position: “a form of realism that rejects any entity that transcends the material world” [21].


Going by this definition, if ours is “a bad form of materialism,” then so too is DeLanda’s [22].

To reiterate, then: my response to Harman’s criticism of our “bulk treatment” of these various thinkers and schools is a simultaneous plea of “Guilty!” and “Not guilty!” While I can certainly appreciate his wanting us to have paid more attention to the differences both between and within OOO, New Materialism, speculative materialism, and ANT, I would nonetheless continue to insist that such differences do nothing to detract from the fact that all four of these schools share an overarching commitment to establishing a flat, horizontal ontology – a horizontology, if you will – the upshot of which is the decentering and demotion of the subject [23].


For this reason alone – especially seeing that, as its title suggests, Subject Lessons is a book dedicated to defending the subject against such decenterings and demotions – I stand by our grouping of these various schools under the rubric of “new materialisms and realisms.

” Harman’s second major accusation – that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a fully blown idealism – is not merely of greater interest to me, but, as I have already suggested, of greater philosophical concern as well.


Before directly addressing the charge of idealism, however, I would like to first consider Harman’s critique of our materialism, since it is the latter that paves the way for the former.

Though an avowed anti-materialist (as we have established), Harman has on numerous occasions criticized the Lacano-Hegelian position (Žižek’s articulation of it especially) for its failure to be truly materialist.


As he has done elsewhere, Harman frames his critique of the position laid out in Subject Lessons by way of the following, aforementioned passage from Levi Bryant’s Onto-Cartography, in which Bryant cites Žižek’s work as a prime example of the putative “emptiness” of contemporary materialism: The term materialism became so empty that Žižek could write, “[m]aterialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’ – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.” This is a peculiar proposition indeed. What need does matter have to be witnessed by anyone? What does a blind spot have to do with matter? Why is there no talk here of “stuff,” “physicality,” or material agencies? It would seem that among the defenders, materialism has become a terme d’art which has little to do with anything material.

Materialism has come to mean simply that something is historical, socially constructed, involves cultural practices, and is contingent.

It has nothing to do with processes that take place in the heart of stars, suffering from cancer, or transforming fossil fuels into greenhouse gases.

We wonder where the materialism in materialism is [24].


We will have cause to address Bryant’s critique of Žižek in its own right later.

For now, suffice it to note that Harman uses this passage as a means of teeing up his point that it is “by no means clear” where the materialism is in our claim that “from the dialectical materialist standpoint, the true formula of materialism is that material reality is non-all” [25].


As Harman explains in his Object-Oriented Ontology, “Traditional materialism was the idea that nothing exists other than tiny physical particles speeding through a void.

Everything else that seemed to exist was to be reduced to such particles, and everything immaterial was to be mocked ruthlessly on this basis” [26].

This is the sort of materialism with which Bryant explicitly aligns his “unabashedly naïve” materialism – a materialism which attends to the “‘stuff’ and ‘things’” that compose the physical world, from “trees, rocks, planets, stars, wombats, and automobiles” to “various forms of energy, strings, fundamental particles, and so on” [27].


To be clear, I am entirely sympathetic to the “meta-politic[al] and meta-ethic[al]” aims of Bryant’s “onto-cartographic” materialism.

After all, how could any self-respecting leftist not be interested in “expand[ing] our possibilities for intervening in the world to produce change so as to better understand how power functions and devise strategies so as to overcome various forms of oppression” [28]?

However, to claim, as Bryant and Harman do, that Lacano-Hegelian dialectical materialism is not really materialist because it doesn’t subscribe to the same tradition of naïve materialism as Bryant’s onto-cartography strikes me as not only rather peculiar (would Žižek and I be justified in claiming that Harman’s object-oriented ontology isn’t truly realist because it doesn’t subscribe to the naïve realism of Samuel Johnson or Scottish common sense philosophers like Thomas Reid and James Beattie?), but also simply incorrect.


Though it doesn’t come up in his response to Subject Lessons, a common accusation of Harman’s is that Žižek clings to the moniker “materialism” primarily as a means of demonstrating his leftist bona fides.

For instance, in his aforementioned dialogue with DeLanda, Harman, having claimed that Žižek isn’t “the least bit materialist,” goes on to suggest that the reason he continues to call himself such is that he “want[s] to link [himself] to the Left/Enlightenment political prestige of the term” [29].

Nodding in agreement, DeLanda not only dismisses the “old Left” as an “exhausted,” “embarrassing,” and “increasingly irrelevant tradition,” but, more importantly, accuses Žižek of having contributed to “the debasement of the term ‘materialism’” by using it “as short for either ‘dialectical materialism’ or ‘historical materialism,’” “as if Marxists had a monopoly on materialist ideas” [30].


Leaving aside DeLanda’s labeling of Žižek’s dialectical materialism as Marxian when, for over 30 years now, he has repeatedly gone out of his way to stress that it is Hegelian contra Marxian [31], the implication that Žižek is continuing to wave the banner of materialism primarily for the political prestige it carries on the Left overlooks the many links between his dialectical materialism and the very “traditional materialism” to which Harman (like Bryant) accuses it of bearing no relation [32].


Let us return to Harman’s query regarding where, exactly, the materialism lies in our claim that “from the dialectical materialist standpoint, the true formula of materialism is that material reality is non-all.” As Žižek and I explain in our introduction to Subject Lessons, the formula “material reality is non-all” is Lacanese for asserting that material reality is “ontologically incomplete,” “inconsistent,” “thwarted,” contradictory [33].

Though Harman claims that the link between “such language of the ‘non-all’” and materialism “is by no means clear,” it becomes quite clear if one looks more closely at the tradition of dialectical materialism whose torch he accuses us of carrying merely as a means of brandishing our leftist credentials [34].


In addition to Mladen Dolar’s and Andrew Cole’s chapters in Subject Lessons, I would refer readers to the recently-published second volume of Adrian Johnston’s Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism – A Weak Nature Alone – which covers much of this ground in painstaking detail and depth.

For our present purposes, suffice it to stress that our understanding of materialism as “non-all” can be traced back not only to “modern” dialectical materialists, from Hegel, Marx, and Engels in the nineteenth century to Lenin, Mao, and Lacan in the twentieth, but also to ancient materialists like Heraclitus, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius [35].


Let us not forget that Hegel, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all esteemed Heraclitus the father not only of the dialectic, but of dialectical materialism [36].

Let us also not forget that Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature,” a text in which, as Dolar notes, Marx “pinned the fate of materialism” on the great Epicurean archetype of contingency, “clinamen,” the swerve of atoms from their linear path [37].


Nor, finally, let us forget that not only did Lacan link the death drive, the “‘negative’ libido” that opens up “the dimension of a vital dehiscence constitutive of man,” to “the Heraclitean notion of Discord – which the Ephesian held to be prior to harmony,” but that he also cited both the Epicurean clinamen and the Democritean “den” (the “less than nothing”) as precursors of the psychoanalytic object par excellence (that object which Lacan claimed was his only invention), the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire [38].

Examples such as these would suggest that our continued use of the term “materialism” is far from a mere exercise in political branding.


My having (finally) mentioned Lacan’s objet petit a brings us, at long last, to Harman’s claim that throughout Subject Lessons “‘materialism’ is used as an alibi to advance a thoroughly idealist position while claiming to be immune to the usual defects of idealism” [39].

What makes such a position ineluctably idealist, according to Harman, is that the objet a, the miserable little piece of the Real, the traumatic kernel that resists symbolization (and thus integration into the Symbolic), “does not come from the outside in any rigorous sense of the term,” but is merely (and this is a wonderful turn of phrase) “a flaw in the jewel of consciousness” [40].


As the ensign of a Real that “has little reality about it” insofar as it “stands not for some sort of real world outside the mind, but for an immanent trauma in consciousness itself,” the objet a, whatever Lacan’s claim that his “discourse” is a dialectical materialist one, renders his teaching, perforce, an “extreme idealis[m]” [41].

For Harman, this holds true even when Lacanians like Žižek and I attempt to “finesse [ourselves] out of this jam” by calling attention not only to the reciprocity between the subject and objet a, but also to the way in which the objet a interpellates – or, more precisely, hystericizes – the subject.


Take, for instance, Harman’s recent discussion of Rosalind Krauss’s invocation of the famous “floating sardine can” anecdote from Lacan’s eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, in which Lacan explains his theory of the “gaze” (regard) as the look which an object casts at the subject rather than the typical vice versa of the subject looking at an object [42].

In Harman’s view, while this inversion may very well “suggest a novel equality between subject and object,” ultimately no reciprocity of this kind is ever enough to escape idealism, since human and world are still the only two terms allowed in the picture; above all, there is no talk of objects looking at each other, meaning that a human subject must always be somewhere on the scene.

Thus, we are still inside the Kantian formalism that was supposedly just overcome […].

[ T]he inversion of the human being from an active conscious agent into a passive receiver of something from elsewhere does nothing to escape idealism, as long as humans and non-humans remain the only two pieces of the puzzle [43].


For Harman, then, “placing ‘the gaze’ in the world itself rather than in a mind” and “proclaiming that the world looks at me just as I look at it” is neither a “genuine philosophical innovation” nor a genuine escape from correlationism [44].

So long as we remain within the “onto-taxonomical” subject–object dyad, it matters not if we attribute equal or greater agency to the object: failing to address “object–object relations” means that our so-called materialism will always already be “spoil[ed]” by the same “central idealist defect” [45].


Harman is not alone in holding such a view of our Lacanianism – a point of which he is well aware.

In an interview conducted by Harman, Meillassoux likewise accuses Žižek’s materialism of being a “disingenuous idealism” insofar as it is (in his estimation) merely a “misfired” or “sickened” correlationism.

Though lengthy, Meillassoux’s remarks are worth quoting in full: [The position] of Žižek [...] consist[s] at bottom in making of materialism a “misfired correlationism.” Ever since Derrida in particular, materialism seems to have taken the form of a “sickened correlationism”; it refuses both the return to a naïve pre-critical stage of thought and any investigation of what prevents the “circle of the subject” from harmoniously closing in on itself. Whether it be the Freudian unconscious, Marxist ideology, Derridean dissemination, the undecidability of the event, the Lacanian Real considered as the impossible, etc., these are all supposed to detect the trace of an impossible coincidence of the subject with itself, and thus of an extra-correlational residue in which one could localize a “materialist moment” of thought. But in fact, such misfires are only further correlations among others: it is always for a subject that there is an undecidable event or a failure of signification.

Unless we fall back on naïve realism, we cannot treat these misfires as “effects” of a cause that could definitely be established as external to the subject or even to consciousness.

In any case, a correlationist would have no difficulty in retorting that this genre of materialism is either a disingenuous idealism or a dogmatic realism of the “old style.” When a chair is wobbly, the “wobbly” exists only in relation to the chair, not independently of it.

When one clogs up the Subject, one does not go outside it: instead, one merely constructs a transcendental or speculative Wobbly Subject – a subject that is assured a priori, and according to a properly absolute Knowing, for which things always turn out badly in its world of representations [46].


Though not a realist (as we have seen), Meillassoux here makes all the same arguments as Harman.

Shifting the locus of subjectivity from consciousness to the unconscious does nothing to break us out of the correlationist circle (the “Kantian formalism,” as Harman puts it), for however “wobbly” such a subject of the unconscious may be, it remains a transcendental subject all the same, a subject for whom knowledge, precisely insofar as it is “assured a priori” (i.e., rationally constituted), is absolute [47].


Such being the case, the objet a whose materialization is an “effect” of this wobbliness, this “impossible coincidence of the subject with itself,” though it may very well be a little piece of the Real, is ultimately not a real outside, not a genuine “extra-correlational residue” that would usher us into what Meillassoux, in his After Finitude, refers to as “the great outdoors,” “the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers” [48].

Žižek has responded to this critique of Meillassoux’s on two occasions, both of which can also be taken as rejoinders to Harman avant la lettre [49].


I will here focus on the more extended of these two responses, which occurs in his book Less Than Nothing [50].

Having identified the thrust of Meillassoux’s (and, as we have seen, Harman’s) argument to be the accusation that “beneath the rhetorical materialist surface, there lies good old-fashioned idealism,” Žižek begins his reply as follows: On the face of it, the argument is convincing: do I not claim that, beneath the transcendental correlation between (the conscious) subject and reality, there is the correlative between the subject (of the unconscious) and its Real/impossible objectal counterpoint, S-a?

Strange as this correlation is, it still makes sense only if a subject is already there, that is, it does not enable us to think reality without a subject. But, again, is this truly the case?

The point Meillassoux misses is that this impossible/Real object is the very mode of inscription of the subject into trans-subjective reality; as such, it is not transcendental, but (what Derrida would have called) arche-transcendental, an attempt to circumscribe the “subject in becoming,” the trans-subjective process of the emergence of the subject [51].


To translate from Derridean to Lacanese, the subject of the unconscious is not a priori but objet a priori, by which pun I mean that it is not the subject that grounds the objet a, but the objet a that “grounds” the subject, that “gives body to,” that “positivizes,” the void that is the subject.

The objet a is the subject’s “only substance,” the “only positive support” of its being [52].

As such, it is not a question of what this impossible/Real object is “for a subject,” as Meillassoux (and Harman) want to frame things, but rather a question of what, for this object, is the subject.

This hysterical question, “What for an object am I (in the eyes of the Other, for the Other’s desire)?,” is the inaugural gesture of subjectivity [53].


Hence the Lacanian maxim, “the desire of the subject is the desire of the Other.” Indeed, one can only speak of a “subject” (in the strong, psychoanalytic sense of the term) insofar as a “radical perplexity persists as to the Other’s desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me” [54].

The objet a is thus not an answer to the question of the subject’s desire; on the contrary, the subject is the “answer” to the question provoked by the enigma of the Other’s desire, the question that Lacan famously identified as the “Chè vuoi?”: “ What does the Other want from me?” “ What am I for the Other?” “ Why am I what the Other says I am?” [ 55]


(Of course, we should also stress here that the Other is likewise desiring/lacking – hence another maxim of Lacan’s, “the big Other does not exist” – which is why, contra Harman’s accusation, Lacanian psychoanalysis does, in fact, attend to “object–object” relations: the relation between the “small other,” objet petit a, and the “big Other,” l’Autre.

As Žižek long ago explained, “the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory” lies not in the “commonplace” that the Lacanian subject is divided/barred, but in “realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barré, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack,” that the “structural network of relations” that comprises the symbolic order “can establish itself only in so far as it is embodied in a totally contingent material element, a little-bit-of-Real,” the objet a [56].

This, Žižek concludes, is the key to what Lacan called “traversing the fantasy,” the realization not that the subject is forever separated from the object, but that “the object is separated from the Other itself, that the Other itself ‘hasn’t got it,’ hasn’t got the final answer – that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring; that there is also a desire of the Other” [57].

Traversing the fantasy thus cannot help but concern object–object relations insofar as it entails recognizing “how the ever-lacking object-cause of desire is in itself nothing but an objectivation, an embodiment of a certain lack; [...] how its fascinating presence is here just to mask the emptiness of the place it occupies, the emptiness which is exactly the lack in the Other – which makes the big Other [...] perforated, inconsistent” [58].)


Having explained the “arche-transcendental” status of the objet a, Žižek, following “both Lacan and Hegel,” proceeds to reframe the correlationist problematic, arguing that its answer lies not in grasping for an “objective reality which is independent of (its correlation to) subjectivity,” but in grasping that “subjectivity is already inscribed into reality” in the form of the objet a. Žižek here anticipates our claim in the introduction to Subject Lessons that the In-itself is reached “not by tearing away subjective appearances and trying to isolate ‘objective reality’ as it is ‘out there,’ independently of the subject” – a move which only further mires us in the transcendental circle – but by attending to how the In-itself “inscribes itself precisely into the subjective excess, the subjective gap or inconsistency, that opens up a hole in reality” – the objet a – rendering it “inconsistent, thwarted, non-all” [59].


As Žižek further elaborates: we cannot gain full neutral access to reality because we are part of it.

The epistemological distortion of our access to reality is the result of our inclusion in it, not our distance from it.

The objet a is the splinter in the eye which distorts our clear perception of reality, and the agent of this distortion is desire (recall that the objet a is the object-cause of desire).

This brings us to the unique “short-circuit between epistemology and ontology”: the very epistemological failure (to reach reality) is an indication and effect of our being part of reality, our inclusion within it [60].


Žižek’s characterization of the objet a as “the splinter in the eye” recalls the very example that Harman, in his critique of Krauss, rejects as an authentic escape from the correlationist circle: Lacan’s floating sardine can as an instantiation of the objet a. As Lacan puts matters in this same episode, the objet a (in its manifestation as gaze) is the point of “opacity,” the “stain,” or “spot,” in the visual field “which is in no way mastered by me,” but which, on the contrary, “grasps me, solicits me at every moment, and makes of the landscape something other than a landscape” – a stain which Lacan comes to identify with the subject itself [61].


Sure enough, Žižek explicitly invokes this episode in his reply to Meillassoux, quoting what is arguably its most famous line as a means of encapsulating his point that the only way to access reality is through the subject’s inscription into that reality in the form of the objet a, the excess that distorts it: “not only is the picture in my eye, but I am also in the picture” [62].

With this fundamental Lacanian lesson in mind, Žižek concludes that “what Meillassoux calls ‘sickened’ or ‘failed’ correlationism, far from being a half-hearted break-out from the correlationist constraint, is the key component of any true escape” [63].


Indeed, from the Lacano-Hegelian perspective, the tragic irony of Meillassoux’s position is that it is his very “anti-transcendentalism” that keeps his speculative materialism “trapped within the confines of the Kantian-transcendental opposition between reality the way it appears to us and the transcendent beyond of reality-in-itself, independent of us” [64].

Hence Žižek’s insistence that the way out of this bind is not “to think the Real outside of transcendental correlation, independently of the subject,” but rather “to think the Real inside the subject, the hard core of the Real in the very heart of the subject, its ex-timate center” [65].


Based on what we have seen, Harman’s answer to such a claim would likely be that the objet a, however fond Lacanians are of dubbing it “a little piece of the Real,” is not a real outside, for though “a perfectly fascinating psychoanalytic concept,” the Lacanian Real is “merely a poor man’s realism in philosophy” [66].

Moreover, does not Žižek himself suggest as much when he says that we must “think the Real inside the subject,” in its “very heart”? Does this not confirm Harman’s suspicion that, at bottom, the Real is “just an immanent traumatic kernel in the subject,” “an immanent trauma in consciousness itself?” [ 67]


The key to properly responding to this question lies in Žižek’s invocation of the Lacanian concept of “extimacy.” In his seventh seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan coined the neologism “extimacy” (extimité) to characterize the relationship of the objet a to the subject as one of “intimate exteriority” [68].

As Jamil Khader nicely summarizes it, Lacan deployed the term extimacy as a means of designating “a paradoxical mode of subjectivity in which binary oppositions such as inside and outside, intimate and external or foreign, are spliced and conjoined to engender a radical zone of indistinction that can be referred to as interior-exteriority” [69].


Though it has gone on to become one of the more central concepts in Lacanian theory, Lacan himself didn’t use the term extimacy all that often; it would be left to collaborators and commentators like Jacques-Alain Miller and Žižek to pick it up and champion it [70].

Lacan did, however, frequently speak of the subject’s “ex-sistence,” a paradigmatic example of which occurs at the outset of his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” when he speaks of “the ex-sistence (that is, of the eccentric place) in which we must necessarily locate the subject of the unconscious, if we are to take Freud’s discovery seriously” [71].


Interestingly enough, as Bruce Fink explains in his translator’s notes on the “Seminar,” the term “ex-sistence” was first introduced into French by way of translations of Heidegger – arguably the most important thinker for Harman’s OOO – to represent both the Greek “ekstasis” and the German “Ekstase,” the root meaning of which in Greek is “standing outside of or standing apart from something,” and which was generally used to connote “the ‘removal’ or ‘displacement’ of something,” although “it also came to be applied to states of mind which we would now call ‘ecstatic.’” As Fink further explains, Lacan, drawing on Heidegger’s play on both the term’s root meaning as “standing outside” or “stepping outside oneself” and “its close connection in Greek with the root of the word for ‘existence,’” regularly uses the term “ex-sistence” to “talk about ‘an existence which stands apart from,’ which insists as it were from the outside, to talk about something not included on the inside, something which, rather than being intimate, is ‘extimate’” [72].


One of the few other instances in which Lacan explicitly uses the term “extimacy” is in his sixteenth seminar, D’un Autre à l’autre, where he again deploys it to designate a “conjoining of the intimate with the radically exterior” [73].

In this instance, however, he links it to a series of “unorientable” objects, foremost among them the Möbius strip [74].

As demonstrated by the illustration from Lacan’s essay “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever” (Figure 1), the Möbius strip is an object which appears to be two-sided but which, when we trace around its directrix, we come to find is actually only one-sided.


Lacan had already introduced the figure of the Möbius strip in his tenth seminar, Anxiety, wherein he illustrates its one-sidedness by describing an ant walking along its surface – an illustration of which by M.C. Escher would end up gracing the covers of both the French and English publications of the seminar (Figure 2).

As Lacan explains, “An ant walking along one of the apparent faces [of the strip] will pass over to the other face without needing to go over the edge” because, in actuality, a Möbius strip is “a surface that has just one face” [75].


Properly speaking, there is no “edge” to a Möbius strip; there is merely a torsion or “twist” that makes what would otherwise be a two-faced object a single-faced one [76].

One can thus never say whether an ant crawling along a Möbius strip is at any point on its “outside” or “inside” because a Möbius strip effectively has no outside or inside: the ant is at one and the same time both “inside” and “outside” the strip, which in turn means that it is really neither.

In short, the ant’s relation to the strip is an extimate one, a relationship of intimate exteriority, and it is this very same extimate relation, Lacan concludes, that “is involved when [objet] a enters the world of the real” [77].


There is considerable irony in the fact that although Harman devotes a sizeable portion of his response to Subject Lessons to engaging the chapter of it that most concerns the concept of extimacy, Molly Anne Rothenberg’s “Twisting ‘Flat Ontology’: Harman’s ‘Allure’ and Lacan’s Extimate Cause,” he doesn’t once engage the concept of extimacy [78].

To be fair, he comes close to doing so when, anticipating our response to the charge of idealism, he indulges in the following ventriloquization: “‘For us it is not like Berkeley where everything is just an image, you see: there is a bone in the throat, a trauma in the subject, an Anstoß that is sort of outside the mind even while not being really outside the mind’” – a position, he concludes, that amounts to wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too [79].


But as it turns out, it is Harman who “wants to have it both ways,” so to speak, for his insistence on positioning the unconscious inside the subject when the “position of the unconscious” (to invoke the title of one of Lacan’s most foundational écrits) is ultimately extimate, “ex-centric,” ends up reifying a non-existent boundary between inside and outside that cannot but leave us trapped within the correlationist circle [80].

In short, it is not Lacan himself that is guilty of idealism, but rather Harman’s (mis)reading of him as a thinker for whom the unconscious is merely “a flaw in the jewel of consciousness.”


To further elaborate on this point, it is not entirely accurate to claim, as Harman (quoting Krauss) does, that Lacan “pictures the unconscious [...] as inside consciousness, undermining it from within” [81].

To quote what Lacan himself says of the position of the unconscious (this from Seminar XI, the very same seminar in which he introduces his theory of the gaze as objet a): “I say somewhere that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other.

Now, the discourse of the Other that is to be realized, that of the unconscious, [...] is outside” [82].


Nodding to this very passage, Jacques-Alain Miller argues that Lacan’s point can be “expressed with a single word: ‘extimacy,’” for extimacy is precisely “what Lacan is commenting on when he speaks of the unconscious as discourse of the Other, of this Other who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs me.” As Miller concludes, “If we use the term ‘extimacy’ in this way, we can consequently make it be equivalent to the unconscious itself” [83].


Lacan insists that the unconscious is outside because its intimacy with respect to the subject is so in excess of the intimate that it can only be described as extimate, something that ex-sists, that is ex-centric. And that this excess inscribes itself in reality in the form of the objet a – the little piece of the Real whose “phenomenalization,” as Hegel might put it, effectuates a rend in this very reality, rendering it non-all – is the very “thing” that makes dialectical materialism a materialism [84].


It is also what makes it a non-idealism, for the co-relation between subject and objet a is, as those in the Ljubljana camp like to put it, a “relation of non-relation.” When it comes to the relation between subject and objet a, we are dealing not with two discrete entities participating in an “intersubjective” exchange of gazes that results in a “mutual recognition” between the two – which, incidentally, is the same misunderstanding of the dialectic perpetuated by those who read Hegel as a philosopher of “mutual recognition.

” For Lacan (as for Hegel), the (non-)relation between subject and objet a is one not of recognition but misrecognition (méconnaissance).


As Žižek and I explain in our introduction to Subject Lessons, subject and objet a “can never encounter each other in a direct opposition or mirroring, but are instead like the two sides of the same spot on a Möbius strip” [85].

This is the function of the lozenge/poinçon (◊) in Lacan’s formulaic rendering of the relationship between the (barred) subject and the objet a as “$◊a.” As Fink explains, the lozenge stands just as much for the “disjunction” between subject and objet a as their “conjunction” [86].


To thus invoke another line of Lacan’s that Harman is critical of in his response to Subject Lessons, “the reciprocity between the subject and object a is total” because subject and objet a are not two discrete, interrelating objects, but are, rather, “impossibly” one and the same object [87].

Hence our insistence that “what new materialists and realists understand as ‘subject’ simply fails to meet the criteria of the subject” [88].


To put a finer point on this claim, let us consider Lacan’s theory of the gaze as anamorphosis – which, like the floating sardine can anecdote, is found in Seminar XI.

The typical understanding of anamorphosis is that of a “subject” whose desire causes it to “look awry” at an object, thereby distorting and, subsequently, elevating/sublimating it to the position of objet a. But “anamorphosis” for Lacan names less the process whereby the subject creates/confronts the sublime object and more the phenomenon whereby the “human being” confronts that which is in excess of itself, that “vital dehiscence” which is at one and the same time “constitutive of man” (to recall an aforementioned line of Lacan’s) and which “renders man as such ‘nature sick unto death’” (to invoke a line from our introduction to Subject Lessons): the phenomenon of subjectivity.


And this returns us to Bryant’s critique of Žižek’s claim that “[m]aterialism means that the reality I see is never ‘whole’ – not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it,” a stain/blind spot that renders material reality “non-all.” I cannot but agree with Bryant that this is indeed a “peculiar proposition.” It is the proposition, in fact, of a “weird,” extimate materialism – “weird” insofar as, like Harman’s “weird realism,” it is primarily concerned with reality’s “incommensurability with any attempt to represent or measure it” [91].


Indeed, could not Harman’s definition of “weird realism” double as a very definition of the Lacanian Real as the remainder or leftover resultant from the incommensurability of reality and every attempt to represent it, to fully integrate it into the symbolic order? And yet, a crucial difference nonetheless persists between the two positions.

For whereas Harman insists that the way to access this weird, excessive reality is to flatten the ontological plane and attend to object–object relations, following Hegel and Lacan this excess can only be accessed by attending to the “weird,” extimate object that, in giving body to the subject’s “out-of-jointness,” curves or biases the ontological plane, “disorienting” reality, rendering it much like a Möbius strip – or an anamorphic skull [92].