Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism
ISBN: 9780810141391
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Northwestern University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Materialism; Dialectical materialism; Ontology; Hegel Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1770-1831; Lacan Jacques 1901-1981;

Responding to the ongoing "objectal turn" in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays in Subject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance-- indeed, the indispensability--of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought.

Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, Mladen Dolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Borna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert, and Alenka Zupančič--many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship--agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but, rather, because of the subject.

Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies, Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.


RUSSELL SBRIGLIA is an assistant professor of English at Seton Hall University. He is the editor of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Zizek.

SLAVOJ ZIZEK is Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University, Seoul; Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University; and the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He is the author of more than fifty books, including The Sublime Object of Ideology , Less Than Nothing , Incontinence of the Void , and Sex and the Failed Absolute .
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