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Zizek; Thing in itself; Realism; Transcendental; Materialism
The present rese’arch investigates the meaning of the transcendental materialism proposed by Slavoj Zizek, observing the influence of the question of the transcendental posited by Immanuel Kant, as well as the controversies about the thing in itself and the influence of Jacques Lacan in the understanding of a virtual object and the death drive of a virtual object that takes the place of the thing in itself. We elucidate portion of the conceptual entaglement of zizekian philosophy that is part of the construction of philosophy and observe its attempt to constructe an ontology and metaphysics capable of escaping the traps of relativism and realism. We show that, to proceed with the Kant legacy of thought forces a consistent philosophy to adopt a kind of skepticism in relation to what is beyond appearances, which Zizek could only avoid by radically modifying the meaning of the thing in itself, trivializing the question about what is “beyond appearances”. The world, thus, is contained in its appearing without the question “what appears?” to be made. The object that is not representation and can, therefore, take its place is understood as the object of the cause of desire, or in other words, the drive that, with its negativity, forces the movement of the splited elements into subjet and object; and, moreover, it precedes and creates the split itself. However, in this research, such negativity could only be found in the subject, leaving to the object the negativity of non-identity. In this way, a transcendental materialism that takes drive as matter, as a thing in itself, proves to be insufficient to overcome skepticism and relativism, due to abandon the thing in itself as something that exists independently of the subject. A solution found, and according to the author's thinking, is considered both moments (materialism that assumes the primacy of the thing in itself and transcendentalism that assumes the primacy of the transcendental imagination) as irreducible points of perspective and without a third term of synthesis, so it is necessary to move from one perspective to the other and remain in between to see the parallax truth of transcendental materialism.