Article
Notes Toward an Extimate Materialism: A Reply to Graham Harman
Open Philosophy
(2021)
Abstract
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.”
Keywords
- Graham Harman,
- Slavoj Žižek,
- Ljubljana School,
- Jacques Lacan,
- G. W. F. Hegel,
- subjectivity,
- dialectical materialism,
- idealism,
- realism,
- objet petit a
Disciplines
Publication Date
August 25, 2021
DOI
10.1515/opphil-2020-0175
Citation Information
Russell Sbriglia. "Notes Toward an Extimate Materialism: A Reply to Graham Harman" Open Philosophy Vol. 4 Iss. 1 (2021) ISSN: 2543-8875 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/russell-sbriglia/23/