2017, Vol.

5(1) 94111
Book Reviews ! The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/2050303217690898
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Agon Hamza and Frank Ruda (eds), Slavoj Zizek and Dialectical Materialism, New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016, ISBN: 978-1-137-54542-8, xi + 197 pp. $100 (hbk).

Reviewed by Matthew Flisfeder, University of Winnipeg, Canada

Fredric Jameson (1971: 297) explains that because of the peculiarity of the object of its
studyhistory and the class struggleMarxism 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 materialismwe 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 eectively 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 dierent perspectives in what Slavoj Zizek (2006) has referred to as a parallax
gap. Historical materialism and dialectical materialism are substantially the same,
according to Zizek; 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 nextsay the transition from feudalism to capitalismthe
task of looking at the historical form of consciousness proves much more dicult. In fact,
Zizeks project for at least the past decade has been to draw up a practice of dialectical
materialism in recent productions of his HegelianLacanian method, particularly in two
books: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Zizek, 2012)
and Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (Zizek, 2014).
These two books are the specic focus of Agon Hamza and Frank Rudas Slavoj Zizek 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 Zizeks work. Although the goal of
the book is to take up Zizeks two more recent books, noted above, the contributions try to
engage Zizeks dialectical materialist method in the entirety of his work. What the editors
want to achieve is a serious reading of Zizeks thought outside of his popular persona and
depictions of him and his readers as a so-called Zizek 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
Zizeks philosophical writings. On that note, the most pressing achievement of the book is its
Book Reviews 95

continuation of Zizeks call to critically rethink dialectical materialism, not unlike the way
that Zizek has encouraged new scholarship on the idea of Communism (see, for instance,
Bosteels, 2011; Dean, 2012; Douzinas and Zizek, 2009; Lee and Zizek, 2016; Zizek, 2013).
Signicantly, the editors and the contributing authors all seem to indicate that Zizeks
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 fundamen-
tal principles of dialectical materialism or its constitutive features (p. 149). To what, then,
does the term refer in Zizeks work? This is an ambiguity that the contributing authors
attempt to reconcile each in their own way. Both Ruda and Hamza oer up their own
response. Ruda explains that dialectical materialism, for Zizek, refers to a system or
theory that exists only as it is practiced. As he puts it, The systematicity of Zizeks 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 dierent
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 contradic-
tions 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 Rudas book is thus
not only an engagement with Zizeks dialectical materialism. It is also a kind of deliberation
on the usefulness of the concept.
To that end, Slavoj Zizek and Dialectical Materialism reaches beyond the translucence of
Zizeks method and brings to the reader a coherent and developed encounterboth critical
and favorablewith his philosophy. In doing so, the contributing authors also produce
something of their own approaches to dialectical materialism. Zizek, himself, is even includ-
ing in the book in an Afterword that oers an interpretation of Levi Bryants Object
Oriented Ontology (see Bryant, 2011). This reading adds further to the mix of Zizeks
materialism, but for my purposes here, Id prefer to focus on what the book truly oers:
a cogent reading of Zizeks method by scholars of his work.11 Todd McGowans chapter is a
case in point.
McGowan says very little about Zizek. What we get instead is an interpretation of the
Hegelian dialectic that owes much to Zizek. Via Zizek, 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 Zizeks rst book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Zizek, 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
nally accepts contradiction as an internal condition of every identity (Zizek, 1989: 6).
If McGowans chapter exemplies the kind of inuence that Zizek has provided scholars
96 Critical Research on Religion 5(1)

for rethinking Hegels dialectic, Adrian Johnstons contribution is one that takes on and
challenges his conception of materialism. In fact, it is the troubling of the term materi-
alism that surfaces in the book as the central conceptual problematic.
Although, as Johnston notes, dialectical materialism is most often associated with ver-
sions produced by Engels and Lenin, Zizeks practice is one that departs from these models.
In contrast to the Engelsian and Soviet models, Zizek is avowedly enthusiastic about the
disappearance of matter. Such a claim is often made in Zizeks recent work where he seeks
to distance himself from the so-called New Materialism. But in his attempt to do so, per
Johnston, Zizek deviates too far from dialectical materialism in his eorts to infuse materi-
alism with idealism (p. 3). This is also a theme that surfaces in Robert Pfallers reading of
Zizeks critique of Althusser.
Pfaller claims that in his critique of Althusser, Zizek misses solutions to his own questions
about materialism, which can in fact be found in Althussers philosophy. While he is critical
of Althusser, Zizek in fact, according to Pfaller, practices a version of materialism that ts
within the Althusserian conceptual arena. For Althusser, the materialist philosophical goal
was not to nd 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 attempt-
ing to search for a new foundation of dialectical materialism, Pfaller raises Althussers
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 ques-
tions altogether (p. 24). While he appears critical of Althusser, Zizek, according to Pfaller,
does precisely this in his challenge to New Materialism. That is, in books like Absolute
Recoil, Zizek 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
Zizeks spontaneous philosophy (p. 27). This aspect of a materialism that refuses the
question is consistent with McGowans reading of contradiction, and resonates, too, in
chapters by Simon Hajdini and Ed Pluth.
Hajdini notes that for Zizek, dialectical materialism is rst and foremost a name of
deadlock (p. 85). Focusing on the path from Lacan to Hegel in Zizeks dialectical materi-
alism, we see a double reading, which implies that dialectical materialism refers to the logic
of the signier, while dialectical materialism takes up a doctrine of the (Lacanian) Real.
Similarly, for Pluth, the dening feature of Zizeks Lacanian materialism is its ontological
application of the claim il ny a pas de rapport sexuel, which as he notes is a thesis about a
fundamental nonrelation (p. 101). Like McGowan, Pluth argues that within Zizeks brand
of dialectical materialism conicts and impasses are fundamental. It is only by equating
matter with the Lacanian Real, or Zizeks pre-ontological void, that the fundamental
(sexual or class) non-relation, plagued by conict and impasses, can be understood in a
materialist way.
To make use of some Lacanian terminology, my reading of these conceptions of Zizeks
materialismcontradiction, refusal, deadlock, nonrelation, conict, 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 materi-
alism of the dialectic comes to fruition. It is a conception that I nd coincides with the
Marxist approach that Ive 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
Book Reviews 97

Hamzas contribution provides clarication into a newer term in Zizeks arsenal: absolute
recoil.
Absolute recoil (AR) is, according to Hamza, the very name of Zizeks dialectic. Zizeks
dialectical materialism, in other words, concerns the most radical attempt to ground sub-
jectivity 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
Zizeks 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 Zizeks 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 dierently, a
successful act does not resolve the contradiction. Instead, it reformulates it on another new
level. This is why, according to Hamza, Zizeks dialectic is one that works retroactively. AR
is then, for Hamza, the Hegelian name for what Zizek refers to as a parallax gap: it with-
draws from matter (recall Johnstons reection on Zizeks disappearance of matter) in
order to retroactively create the object that it withdraws from, but from another new per-
spective in the disparity of the parallax (p. 167).
Taken in its entirety, Slavoj Zizek and Dialectical Materialism gures less as an introduc-
tion to Zizeks theory. It is more a collective eort to (re-)conceive a politicalphilosophical
notion that has taken centre stage in Zizeks recent work. In this respect, the book is itself
exemplary of the kind of scholarship that Zizek 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 o 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.

Note
1. Zizeks (2016) critique of Bryant is also more developed in his most recent philosophical book,
Disparities.

References
Bosteels B (2011) The Actuality of Communism. New York: Verso.
Bryant LR (2011) The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.
Dean J (2012) The Communist Horizon. New York: Verso.
Douzinas C and Zizek S (eds) (2009) The Idea of Communism. New York: Verso.
Jameson F (1971) Marxism and Form: 20th Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Lee AT-G and Zizek S (eds) (2016) The Idea of Communism 3: The Seoul Conference. New York:
Verso.
98 Critical Research on Religion 5(1)

Zizek S (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.

Zizek S (2006) The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zizek S (2012) Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso.
Zizek S (ed.) (2013) The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference. New York: Verso.
Zizek S (2014) Absolute Recoil: Toward a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. New York:
Verso.
Zizek S (2016) Disparities. New York: Bloomsbury.

Author biography
Matthew Flisfeder is an assistant professor in the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and
Communications at the University of Winnipeg. He is the author of The Symbolic, The
Sublime, and Slavoj Zizeks Theory of Film (2012) and Postmodern Theory and Blade
Runner (2017), and coeditor (with Louis-Paul Willis) of Zizek and Media Studies: A
Reader (2014).

Mayra Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015; 207 pp. ISBN
0822359871, $79.95 (hbk), ISBN 0822360136, $22.95 (pbk)

Reviewed by Karmen MacKendrick, Le Moyne College, USA

Mayra Riveras Poetics of the Flesh oers us a nuanced consideration of competing lines of
thought, or competing cultural imaginaries, about esh: on the one hand, the rejection of its
many aws and limits in favor of the clean, enduring purity of the idea; on the other, a love
of the esh of the world in its entanglement with and as our own. It does this through a range
of considerationsscientic, phenomenological, feminist, and poeticbut it begins and
ends with Christianity. Between the beginning and the end, Rivera makes a persuasive
case that our understandings of Christianity and of esh must be transformed together.
The book is an interdisciplinary conversation that leads the reader to understand the
value and the ethical importance of what she calls the carnal reading of esh, one that
values esh even (perhaps especially) in theological terms, over the somatic reading still
widely associated with Christianity generally.
The word esh has been among the most vexed terms in Christianity throughout its
history, even before Christianity as such could rightly be said to exist. The earliest of
canonical Christian scriptures, the letters of Paul, are fairly harsh on the subject, and oer a
picture of esh as sharply divided from spirit. Some of the strongest lines occur in the letter
to the Romans: While we were living in the esh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law,
were at work in our members to bear fruit for death (Rom. 7:5); with my mind I am a
slave to the law of God, but with my esh I am a slave to the law of sin (Rom. 7:25), and
the mind that is set on the esh is hostile to God (Rom. 8:7). One passage from this letter,
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the esh, to gratify its desires
(Rom. 13:14), was central to the conversion of Augustine of Hippo in the late fourth century.
Augustine, in turn, standardized much of Christian dogma for centuries to come. Despite his
insistence on the goodness of all creation, Augustine is widely read and understood as a
source of lingering hostility to eshly pleasures.