Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda (eds),Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism

Reviewed by Matthew Flisfeder, University of Winnipeg, Canada

Fredric Jameson (1971: 297) explains that because of the peculiarity of the object of its study—history and the class struggle—Marxism has at its disposal two alternate languages with which it can engage its object. Marxism makes use of both a subjective and an objective language. At the subjective level, Marxism reads history as the history of class struggles; at the objective level, it looks at the historical transition from one mode of production to the next, with each one developing out of the inherent contradictions of the previous system. When we are dealing with the objective code, looking at the historical transition from one mode of production to the next, we are at the level of historical materialism—we are here dealing with the objective level of the mode of production and the relations of production; however, at the level of the subjective code, the level of the class struggle, and the formation of “class consciousness,” we are effectively dealing with a properly dialectical materialism. These two languages (or codes) are the same in the sense that they speak to the same object, but from different perspectives in what Slavoj Žižek (2006) has referred to as a “parallax gap.” Historical materialism and dialectical materialism “are substantially the same,” according to Žižek; “the shift from the one to the other is purely a shift of perspective” (p. 5). Although, as Jameson notes, it is much easier to write a history of the transition from one mode of production to the next—say the transition from feudalism to capitalism—the task of looking at the historical form of consciousness proves much more difficult. In fact, Žižek’s project for at least the past decade has been to draw up a practice of dialectical materialism in recent productions of his Hegelian–Lacanian method, particularly in two books: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek, 2012) and Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (Žižek, 2014). These two books are the specific focus of Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda’s Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism (2016).

The explicit aim of the book is to produce a “serious” engagement with the concept of the dialectic in Hegel and Lacan as it has been developed in Žižek’s work. Although the goal of the book is to take up Žižek’s two more recent books, noted above, the contributions try to engage Žižek’s dialectical materialist method in the entirety of his work. What the editors want to achieve is a serious reading of Žižek’s thought outside of his popular persona and depictions of him and his readers as a so-called Žižek Industry, and in this undertaking I believe the book to be a success. In this vein, the book accomplishes its objectives in directing attention away from such detractions and does a marvelous job of reaching into the core of Žižek’s philosophical writings. On that note, the most pressing achievement of the book is its continuation of Žižek’s call to critically rethink dialectical materialism, not unlike the way that Žižek has encouraged new scholarship on the idea of Communism (see, for instance, Bosteels, 2011; Dean, 2012; Douzinas and Žižek, 2009; Lee and Žižek, 2016; Žižek, 2013).

Significantly, the editors and the contributing authors all seem to indicate that Žižek’s work is less about dialectical materialism; it is rather dialectical materialist at the level of its practice. Therefore, the subtitles to the books mentioned above (“Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” and “Toward a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism”) are somewhat misleading. As Ruda explains in his chapter, although both book titles mention dialectical materialism, “none of them claims to expound anything like the most fundamental principles of dialectical materialism or its constitutive features” (p. 149). To what, then, does the term refer in Žižek’s work? This is an ambiguity that the contributing authors attempt to reconcile each in their own way. Both Ruda and Hamza offer up their own response. Ruda explains that dialectical materialism, for Žižek, refers to a system or theory that exists only as it is practiced. As he puts it, “The systematicity of Žižek’s thought can… only be properly understood if it is done in a precise Hegelian sense and that is as being dialectical, performing, and moving via and through performative contradictions” (p. 149). Part of the ambiguity here lies in the dilemma of the term. Dialectical materialism is, after all, as Ruda puts it, a “ridiculous theory” simply because there are so many different versions of it, from its Enegelsian-Kautskyian version to its later references in Lenin and Stalin. Part of its ridiculousness is the fact that it has often tried to play out the contradictions between metaphysics and materialism, between materialism and idealism, and it has been presented as a theory or system of thought that is neither metaphysical nor idealist, but can at the same time “deal with everything that is” (p. 150). Hamza and Ruda’s book is thus not only an engagement with Žižek’s dialectical materialism. It is also a kind of deliberation on the usefulness of the concept.

To that end, Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism reaches beyond the translucence of Žižek’s method and brings to the reader a coherent and developed encounter—both critical and favorable—with his philosophy. In doing so, the contributing authors also produce something of their own approaches to dialectical materialism. Žižek, himself, is even including in the book in an Afterword that offers an interpretation of Levi Bryant’s Object Oriented Ontology (see Bryant, 2011). This reading adds further to the mix of Žižek’s materialism, but for my purposes here, I’d prefer to focus on what the book truly offers: a cogent reading of Žižek’s method by scholars of his work.¹¹ Todd McGowan’s chapter is a case in point.

McGowan says very little about Žižek. What we get instead is an interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic that owes much to Žižek. Via Žižek, McGowan argues, “Hegel has become a thinker of opening and new beginnings,” rather than “a philosopher of closure and endings” (p. 44). McGowan focuses on the role that contradiction plays in Hegel, claiming that it “does not function as a transcendental a priori truth for Hegel but rather emerges from the attempt to think through each position that Hegel confronts. Rather than trying to resolve contradictions in the way that other thinkers do, Hegel aims at uncovering them and sustaining them” (p. 46). This is a view of the Hegelian dialectic found in the opening pages of Žižek’s first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek, 1989), where he states that, “dialectics is for Hegel a systematic notation of the failure [of overcoming contradictions] – ‘absolute knowledge’ denotes a subjective position which finally accepts contradiction as an internal condition of every identity” (Žižek, 1989: 6). If McGowan’s chapter exemplifies the kind of influence that Žižek has provided scholars for rethinking Hegel’s dialectic, Adrian Johnston’s contribution is one that takes on and challenges his conception of “materialism.” In fact, it is the troubling of the term “materialism” that surfaces in the book as the central conceptual problematic.

Although, as Johnston notes, dialectical materialism is most often associated with versions produced by Engels and Lenin, Žižek’s practice is one that departs from these models. In contrast to the Engelsian and Soviet models, Žižek is avowedly enthusiastic about the “disappearance of matter.” Such a claim is often made in Žižek’s recent work where he seeks to distance himself from the so-called New Materialism. But in his attempt to do so, per Johnston, Žižek deviates too far from dialectical materialism in his efforts to “infuse materialism with idealism” (p. 3). This is also a theme that surfaces in Robert Pfaller’s reading of Žižek’s critique of Althusser.

Pfaller claims that in his critique of Althusser, Žižek misses solutions to his own questions about materialism, which can in fact be found in Althusser’s philosophy. While he is critical of Althusser, Žižek in fact, according to Pfaller, practices a version of materialism that fits within the Althusserian conceptual arena. For Althusser, “the materialist philosophical goal was not to find the all-encompassing concept that would hold materialism together; rather, it consisted in drawing (and making visible) the ‘lines of demarcation’, the ‘epistemological cuts’ that separated an idealist concept from a materialist one” (p. 25). Rather than attempting to search for a “new foundation” of dialectical materialism, Pfaller raises Althusser’s materialism as a process that does not aim to give the correct answer; instead it demonstrates how the question itself is something like a symptom or an ideological displacement of the ideology in question. The materialist solution is, then, one of refusing to answer such questions altogether (p. 24). While he appears critical of Althusser, Žižek, according to Pfaller, does precisely this in his challenge to New Materialism. That is, in books like Absolute Recoil, Žižek “constantly engages in battles and draws lines of demarcation.” This, for Pfaller, makes the book “a most sharp weapon” in what Althusser might have called Žižek’s “spontaneous philosophy” (p. 27). This aspect of a materialism that refuses the question is consistent with McGowan’s reading of contradiction, and resonates, too, in chapters by Simon Hajdini and Ed Pluth.

Hajdini notes that “for Žižek, dialectical materialism is first and foremost a name of deadlock” (p. 85). Focusing on the path from Lacan to Hegel in Žižek’s dialectical materialism, we see a double reading, which implies that dialectical materialism refers to the logic of the signifier, while dialectical materialism takes up a doctrine of the (Lacanian) Real. Similarly, for Pluth, the defining feature of Žižek’s Lacanian materialism is “its ontological application of the claim il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel,” which as he notes is “a thesis about a fundamental nonrelation” (p. 101). Like McGowan, Pluth argues that within Žižek’s brand of dialectical materialism conflicts and impasses are fundamental. It is only by equating matter with the Lacanian Real, or Žižek’s “pre-ontological void,” that the fundamental (sexual or class) non-relation, plagued by conflict and impasses, can be understood in a materialist way.

To make use of some Lacanian terminology, my reading of these conceptions of Žižek’s materialism—contradiction, refusal, deadlock, nonrelation, conflict, impasse, etc.—requires pointing to the conception of “subjective destitution.” That is, at a point when the subject registers the impasse/deadlock itself. For me, at least, this is the place at which the materialism of the dialectic comes to fruition. It is a conception that I find coincides with the Marxist approach that I’ve outlined above with reference to Jameson. It is also a conception that takes its second move in the role played by the “act”; and, it is on this topic that Hamza’s contribution provides clarification into a newer term in Žižek’s arsenal: “absolute recoil.”

Absolute recoil (AR) is, according to Hamza, the very name of Žižek’s dialectic (p. 164). Žižek’s dialectical materialism, in other words, “concerns the most radical attempt to ground subjectivity qua subjectivity into objectivity.” That is, it is an attempt “to ground subjectivity in its negative character” (p. 164). AR thus becomes something akin to the psychoanalytic concept of retroactivity. As Hamza explains, “a dialectical process retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility… what retroactively comes into existence is not the previously existing form of a thing or a matter, but the thing/matter which even though articulated in the Old, the emergence of the New altered from the form of the present” (p. 166). It is this retroactive reformulation of the Old, with the introduction of the New that is operated by Žižek’s notion of the “act.”

The act is what intervenes in the material world in order to retroactively make possible its own conditions of possibility. That is to say that if we are attempting here to resolve the contradiction between Žižek’s notion of the dialectic and his version of materialism, then we can see this through the notion of the act where fundamental contradictions existing at the level of consciousness are grounded in an attempt to recreate, or reformulate matter, but without any guarantee that this will ultimately resolve the contradiction. Put differently, a successful act does not resolve the contradiction. Instead, it reformulates it on another new level. This is why, according to Hamza, Žižek’s dialectic is one that works retroactively. AR is then, for Hamza, the Hegelian name for what Žižek refers to as a parallax gap: it withdraws from matter (recall Johnston’s reflection on Žižek’s “disappearance of matter”) in order to retroactively create the object that it withdraws from, but from another new perspective in the disparity of the parallax (p. 167).

Taken in its entirety, Slavoj Žižek and Dialectical Materialism figures less as an introduction to Žižek’s theory. It is more a collective effort to (re-)conceive a political–philosophical notion that has taken centre stage in Žižek’s recent work. In this respect, the book is itself exemplary of the kind of scholarship that Žižek inspires. It is not a treatment of a direct or total philosophical system. Its strength lies in its inquiry-based approach to questioning the contemporary vigor of the materialist dialectic. It is a dense reading that pays off in the way that readers learn, through a close study of the text, the practice of dialectical materialism. In this regard, and true to its method, the book raises more questions than it answers. Perhaps this, in retrospect, is the point after all.