Dialectical materialism

Dialectical materialism is presented as the philosophical underpinning of Marxism and as a way to grasp contradiction without smoothing it into a higher, harmonious synthesis. Its decisive move is to treat the gap within reality—not a gap between reality and an external observer—as material and constitutive. The book calls this gap parallax: two closely connected perspectives may have no neutral common ground, yet their noncoincidence is precisely what makes dialectical thought possible.

A wager against passive reflection

The argument begins by distinguishing dialectical materialism from the more readily accepted idea of a materialist dialectic. The difference is not merely terminological: the book marks it as a shift from determinate reflection to reflective determination. Thought does not passively mirror an independently complete world. Nor, however, does it float free of material conditions. The question is how thought and being are related from within a process in which thought can participate in, and alter, what exists.

This distinction also frames the book’s diagnosis of Marxism’s crisis. The crisis is not only the result of political defeats; it includes the decline, even near-disappearance, of dialectical materialism as Marxism’s philosophical foundation. The book argues that contemporary sciences may practice materialist dialectic in their procedures while philosophically oscillating between mechanical materialism and idealist obscurantism. Its proposed response is not a compromise between those poles, but a renewed account of contradiction that avoids treating matter as a settled positive ground.

The book makes the sharpest version of this wager by asserting a speculative identity between its Hegelian-Lacanian position and dialectical materialism. That identity is deliberately figured as an infinite judgment, a coincidence of what appear to be the highest and lowest positions. The point is not to defend every historical doctrine advanced under the name of dialectical materialism. Rather, the philosophical inadequacy of Stalinist dialectical materialism is made part of the argument: the gap between crude doctrine and speculative thought cannot be resolved by pretending they are simply identical in the ordinary sense. Their surprising identity has to be produced as a shift of perspective.

Parallax within reality

The book rejects the idea that the struggle of opposites means a balanced polarity, like two complementary forces arranged into a whole. Its critical alternative is an inherent tension or noncoincidence within the One itself. Parallax names this internal division. The perspectives remain linked, but no common measure converts them into a single, neutral viewpoint; their relation is not a temporary obstacle awaiting synthesis.

The book illustrates this logic across distinct domains. Quantum physics presents wave-particle duality; neurobiology confronts the gap between meaning and the material brain, where looking behind the face does not disclose an occupant or a hidden self. Ontological difference likewise cannot be reduced either to the merely existing entities that make up the world or to an overarching horizon that supposedly creates them. The Lacanian Real has no positive substance behind its appearances: it is approached through the gap among perspectives on it.

A small, repeated failure makes the distinction between desire and drive concrete. Someone tries to grasp an object that keeps eluding them. If the person’s relation to the task changes so that pleasure comes from repeating the attempt itself, the activity shifts from desire toward drive. The object’s continued elusiveness is not simply a failure to reach the goal; repetition has become the point. In this example, the change of perspective does not remove the obstacle but reveals a different structure already operating within the same activity. The book also identifies a parallax in psychoanalysis between interpretations of unconscious formations and theories of drives: these aspects belong to one theoretical field but do not share a common measure.

Historical and dialectical materialism

Historical materialism and dialectical materialism are not presented as separate disciplines, one a universal ontology and the other its application to society. The book rejects the account that assigns them those distinct levels. Instead, their relation is itself parallax: they substantially concern the same field, but disclose different aspects of it. Dialectical materialism shifts the perspective within the human domain, introducing the death drive and the inhuman excess within humanity. The gap is not simply between human beings and something outside them; it runs through humanity’s relation to itself.

Their difference becomes clearest in their approaches to thought and being. Historical materialism overcomes the picture of consciousness as a passive mirror by locating thought within social being and collective praxis. Drawing on Georg Lukács, the book describes consciousness of a concrete social position and its revolutionary potential as capable of changing being itself: a passive working-class stratum can become the proletariat as a revolutionary subject. Thought is an active, constitutive moment in social reality.

Dialectical materialism approaches the knot from the other side. It asks how, within positive being, a gap between thought and being emerges at all. Its concern is the negativity that allows a living being to interrupt the reproduction of life: withdrawal, suspension, or a non-act can become a radical intervention rather than mere inactivity. The issue is not simply how thought can act upon being, but how distance from being becomes possible. The account of praxis in historical materialism is therefore indispensable but incomplete if social practice is treated as the final horizon and its own emergence left unexplained. Without this supplement, society risks becoming a pseudo-absolute subject, or thought must appeal to a more encompassing ontology.

The same relational logic appears in the account of the social order. Social practices and beliefs are not merely collective versions of private experience; individuals encounter them as an externalized, institutional order. Even a private cynic who dismisses public moral norms depends on those norms being publicly recognized and on others treating them as real. The social order exists through individuals’ relation to it, while also confronting them as something impersonal. The book’s example of Christ transposes the difference between God and humanity into the human figure itself, making division internal rather than assigning it to two wholly separate levels.

Negation, universality, and historical change

The book’s reading of Hegel clarifies why this account of contradiction is not a refusal of dialectics. Hegel’s move is not to abolish the division associated with Kant, nor to supply a transcendent domain that reconciles finite oppositions from above. It is to assert the division as such. The limit is no longer only an epistemological obstacle between a knowing subject and an otherwise complete thing; incompleteness becomes a positive feature of reality itself. The sought-for reconciliation lies in recognizing the distinction, not in adding a further unity beyond it.

This logic informs the idea of concrete universality. A universal is not a neutral container shared by all its particular instances. It becomes visible in the exception that does not fit the frame. The excluded element can disclose the universal dimension precisely because it has no proper place in the existing structure. Christ, as the outcast, figures humanity as such; in democracy, those with no proper place in the social order can stand for the universality of the people. Universality is therefore not an inert background to conflict, but the struggle and transition among particular arrangements.

The same point bears on historical change. The book warns against falling in love only with revolutionary unrest while refusing responsibility for the order that follows it. It contrasts the ferment of prerevolutionary France with the revolutionary Terror, and the creative experimentation of the first years after the October Revolution with the attempt to establish a new social order through forced collectivization in the late 1920s. These are not offered as simple moral equivalences. They test whether the freedom imagined before a transformation can be recognized in the difficult institutions and consequences of its aftermath. Dialectical materialism demands more than celebrating negation: it asks how the energies that unsettle an order become implicated in the order that replaces it.

The book extends this method to modern social forms, treating bureaucratic administration and capitalist self-revolutionizing as two incompatible aspects of modernity rather than reducing one to the other. Expert rule can organize populations through control and regulation; capitalism, by contrast, incorporates excess into its ongoing reproduction, continually transforming its own conditions. Their relation repeats the central parallax: the two processes are bound together, but there is no neutral metalanguage that translates either into the other. Across these examples, dialectical materialism names a discipline of attention to internal division—to the contradictions through which thought, social order, and historical change become possible, without pretending that their tensions can be dissolved into a seamless whole.