Natural Worlds, Historical Worlds, and Dialectical Materialism

Abstract

There is a problem that any attempt to bring together Lacanian theory and dialectical materialism faces. My discussions of Slavoj Žižek’s work elsewhere sort of orbit this problem without articulating it explicitly. So, to put it explicitly, here it is. A defining feature of any Lacanian materialism is its ontological application of the claim il ri’y a pas de rapport sexuel which, obviously, must be read as a thesis about a fundamental nonrelation. In Žižek’s work and in that of other Lacanian materialists, this becomes a thesis about a fundamental division at the very heart of things, a sort of fault in our stars. “There is no peace, even in the void,” as Žižek puts it at the end of Absolute Recoil.¹