Adrian Johnston | University of New Mexico (original) (raw)

Papers by Adrian Johnston

Philosophia, Oct 1, 2014

For approximately two decades now, Catherine Malabou, working both broadly and deeply, has been s... more For approximately two decades now, Catherine Malabou, working both broadly and deeply, has been steadily elaborating a unique contemporary variant of dialectical materialism. These efforts already are visible in an initial guise in her doctoral thesis on Hegelian philosophy (published in book form as The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic [1996]), a highly innovative text reinterpreting Hegel’s corpus in light of the theme of “plasticity” Malabou carefully tracks therein. This new perspective on Hegel not only involves the formulation of the Hegelian-Malabouian notion of the plastic as a dialecticalspeculative convergence of opposites combining the fixed and firm (as the capacity to acquire form) with the fluid and fluctuating (as the capacity to lose form)—the closing pages of The Future of Hegel foreshadow Malabou’s soon-to-follow further endeavors through gesturing at connections between plasticity à la Hegel and neuroplasticity as per recent life-scientific discoveries regarding the human central nervous system. Since her work on Hegel from the mid-1990s, Malabou quite productively has employed the conceptual thematic of plasticity as a guiding thread in her efforts to assemble a new materialist framework bringing together resources drawn primarily from various currents in continental philosophy (Hegelianism,

Duke University Press eBooks, Aug 13, 2017

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Mar 17, 2014

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influe... more For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, whose influence each new thinker tries in vain to escape. As a consequence, Hegel&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring his dominance as the philosopher of the epochal historical transition to modernity. In &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Less Than Nothing,&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot; the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj A iA ek argues that it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables A iA ek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.

Slavoj Žižek’s two most recent major philosophical works, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow... more Slavoj Žižek’s two most recent major philosophical works, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (2012) and Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (2014), both strive, as their subtitles indicate, to reinvent for the twenty-first century the Marxist tradition of “dialectical materialism.” Although this philosophical label is closely associated with such names as, first and foremost, Friedrich Engels and V. I. Lenin, Žižek seeks to develop a permutation that deviates markedly from the classical Engelsian and Soviet versions. As is to be expected, he pursues this via his characteristic blend of German idealism and psychoanalysis, utilizing the work of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Lacan in order to creatively update dialectical materialism.

Routledge eBooks, May 17, 2022

Revue Internationale De Philosophie, Sep 1, 2012

In this essay, I respond to Žižek's charges that my turns to biology risk naturalizing away k... more In this essay, I respond to Žižek's charges that my turns to biology risk naturalizing away key features of non-natural subjectivity a la German idealism and Lacanianism. The crux of this dispute between him and me concerns how close to or far from a life-science-based naturalism a materialist theory of the subject with allegiances to Kant, Hegel, Freud, and Lacan should be. I contend that materialism must be closer to naturalism than Žižek allows— while insisting simultaneously that the spontaneous naturalism of the cutting edge of the life sciences isn’t the semi-reductive paradigm Žižek believes it to be.

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2003

Theory and Event, 2002

Exactly who is Alain Badiou? His name is being mentioned with increasing frequency amongst Englis... more Exactly who is Alain Badiou? His name is being mentioned with increasing frequency amongst English-speaking theorists. Slavoj Zizek publicly proclaims that he is the next major philosophical figure emerging from France after Derrida. But, despite this, only three of his many books ...

Philosophia, Oct 1, 2014

Duke University Press eBooks, Aug 13, 2017

Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Mar 17, 2014

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Routledge eBooks, May 17, 2022

Revue Internationale De Philosophie, Sep 1, 2012

Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, 2003

Theory and Event, 2002

Historical Materialism, 2023

In Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1952), Schelling plays an especially important role. The l... more In Lukács's The Destruction of Reason (1952), Schelling plays an especially important role. The latter serves as the arch-villain of this 1952 book's narrative about the historical development and functioning of (primarily German) philosophical irrationalisms. Indeed, Lukács identifies the later Schelling of the Philosophies of Mythology and Revelation as the forefather of irrationalist currents eventually coming to participate in deplorably and speciously justifying fascist politics and Nazi ideology. Yet, this same Lukács, following in the footsteps of the likes of Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels, insists that Schelling's oeuvre, for all its grave faults, contains at least one redeeming aspect: the young Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Lukács, like his illustrious predecessors, treats the early-Schellingian Philosophy of Nature as anticipatory of Marxism's historical and dialectical materialisms. Herein, I argue that this Marxist-Lukácsian concession to the Schelling of the precocious Naturphilosophie remains too generous-and this because Schelling's Philosophy of Nature, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, is essentially anti-materialist and anti-naturalist, namely, an idealist monism of a divinized, immaterial spirit (i.e., a panpsychism of Deus sive natura). In the wake of Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, Marxism still needs to complete the task of thoroughly critiquing and finally disposing of for good Schelling's problematic legacy.

God is Undead: Psychoanalysis Between Agnosticism and Atheism, 2023

Pascal, especially as the author of the Pensées and the famous wager therein, is a recurring poin... more Pascal, especially as the author of the Pensées and the famous wager therein, is a recurring point of reference for Lacan. By Lacan’s own admission, he has a pronounced passion for the writings of the Jansenists. But, why do Pascal and his co-religionists at the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs fascinate Lacan? What does he see in them and, in particular, in Pascal? The combination of Lacan’s enthusiasm for Jansenism with the opacity and obscurity of his various commentaries on Pascal might lead some readers to take Lacan’s Pascalian meditations as further evidence of an alleged covert religiosity on his part (given also Lacan’s Catholic background, his early Jesuit education, his closeness to his Benedictine monk brother Marc-François, his frequent references to the likes of Augustine, and so on). However, I will argue on this occasion that, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Lacan’s recasting of Pascal’s wager, rather than signaling a lingering Catholicism within Lacanianism, actually reveals the profundity and intensity of Lacan’s virulent atheism. Indeed, through unpacking Lacan’s psychoanalytic interpretations of Pascal and his wager, I seek herein to articulate an atheism radicalized on the basis of a Lacanian advancement of certain atheistic theses contained in the works of Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud.

Crisis and Critique, 2021

Going back to Hegel himself, there is a long-standing tendency to associate dialectics with dynam... more Going back to Hegel himself, there is a long-standing tendency to associate dialectics with dynamics. That is to say, Hegel’s dialectical philosophy frequently is construed as an updated, sophisticated Heraclitean flux doctrine, a sort of process metaphysics constantly foregrounding becoming, change, fluidity, movement, transformation, and the like. Indeed, for Marx, Engels, and much of the Marxist tradition, dialectics-as-dynamics is the rational revolutionary kernel of Hegelian thinking. Yet, at least at the level of socio-political philosophizing, the past two-hundred years since the publication of Hegel’s political magnum opus, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), has made evident the need to reconsider this deeply-engrained intellectual habit of equating the dialectical with the dynamic. If Hegelianism (as well as Marxism) is to remain capable of reckoning with history up through the twenty-first-century present, it must be able to account for why and how so much of the future historical progress Hegel and Marx, as children of the Enlightenment, optimistically anticipated failed to happen. One could say that real social history itself from the nineteenth century through today has exhibited much in the way of stasis, setbacks, and regressions unforeseen by the likes of Hegel and Marx themselves. The sorts of socio-historical progress envisioned by Hegelianism and Marxism has for a long time been, and still continues to be, stalled. This fact calls for conceptualizing a dialectics of non-dynamism, a sluggish or stuck dialectic, so to speak. Herein, I attempt to contribute to this (re)conceptualization of historical dialectics by developing a Hegelian theory of failed revolutions precisely through an immanent-critical engagement with the full span of Hegel’s political writings from 1798 to 1831.

German Idealism and Poststructuralism, 2022

A shorter version of this essay will be appearing as a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume. H... more A shorter version of this essay will be appearing as a chapter in a forthcoming edited volume. Herein, I reconstruct Schelling's lengthy and protean philosophical odyssey as unfolding along the lines of an incompatibility between two fundamental ontologies: a hen-kai-pan ontology of the Absolute as harmonious, homogeneous Identity (i.e., as All, God, Indifference, Infinity, natura naturans, One, Whole, etc.) and a conflict ontology of the Absolute as discordant, heterogeneous Difference. On my reconstruction, although Empedoclean notes are sounded throughout Schelling's corpus, only in the 1815 third draft of his unfinished Weltalter project does a conflict ontology momentarily win out over an ontology of Unity sounding not only Parmenidean notes, but also notes echoing the neo-Platonists, Spinoza, and Hölderlin too. The latter has the upper hand throughout most of Schelling's oeuvre. At the same time, Schelling intermittently registers fatal flaws to his repeatedly affirmed hen kai pan. Through an immanent-critical employment of these intermittent registrations, I seek to outline a contemporary naturalistic conflict ontology inspired by, but moving beyond, Schelling's foreshadowings of such a philosophical program.

Žižek and His Critics, 2022

This is a longer version of what will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on Žižek and hi... more This is a longer version of what will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on Žižek and his critics. In it, I raise some problems for Žižek's dialectical materialist rendition of quantum mechanics by elaborating a series of Hegelian criticisms of the Schellingian philosophical framework favored by Žižek in his appropriations of the physics of the extremely small. Apropos Naturphilosophie and its relations to the natural sciences, both Schelling and Hegel propose what fairly can be characterized as emergentisms avant la lettre. However, whereas Hegel advances an emergentist layer cake model, in which the upper layers of Spirit arise from the lower layers of Nature, Schelling advances an emergentist layer doughnut model in which the top layer of the autonomous transcendental subject is nothing other or more than the resurgence of the bottom layer of something on the order of Spinoza's Deus sive natura. Schelling's pseudo-emergentism, by contrast with Hegel's genuine emergentism, explains away free sapient subjectivity through what Lacan would characterize as a conjuring trick in which the rabbit of Spirit Schelling pulls out of the hat of Nature is the one he put there in the first place. Schelling's hylozoism, panpsychism, pantheism, and vitalism, his spiritualization of nature, is neither dialectical nor materialist. As such, Žižek would do better to stick to his typical Hegelian guns when engaging with such sciences as quantum physics.

Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem, 2022

In this essay, I begin by arguing in favor of interpreting Freud as a spontaneous dialectical mat... more In this essay, I begin by arguing in favor of interpreting Freud as a spontaneous dialectical materialist, particularly apropos the perennial philosophical mind-body problem. In this, I follow in the footsteps both of certain classical Freudo-Marxists (such as Reich, Fenichel, and Marcuse) as well as, more recently, of Lacan, Althusser, and those one might dub “Lacano-Marxists” (such as Žižek). And, not only do I focus on the Freudian metapsychological concept of drive (Trieb) as pivotal to a psychoanalytic depiction of mind vis-à-vis body—I also zero-in on the anal drive in particular as a Cartesian-style metaphorical pineal gland knotting together soma and psyche. Moreover, as I go on to show, a Lacanian revisiting of Freud’s musings about anal erotism and anal character traits enables a theory of mind/psyche taking these musings into account to proffer not only a dialectical materialist model of subjectivity, but also a historical materialist one too in which like-mindedness is shaped and mediated by the socio-economic dimensions foregrounded by the Marxist critique of political economy. My intervention on this occasion ultimately aims to make progress on two fronts: first, within Marxism itself, facilitating further reconsideration of the infrastructure-superstructure distinction on the basis of what psychoanalysis suggests apropos the mind-body rapport; second, between Marxism and psychoanalysis, utilizing a Lacano-Marxist re-conception of the anal drive to advance the radical leftist criticism of capitalism.

Parallax: The Dependence of Reality on Its Subjective Constitution, 2021

One of the claims I will advance in this intervention is that there is a significant cross-resona... more One of the claims I will advance in this intervention is that there is a significant cross-resonance between, on the one hand, the earlier Karl Marx’s 1840s invocations of laborers’ nullity and, on the other hand, the status of commodified labor-power as the source of surplus-value under capitalism as per the Grundrisse and volumes of Das Kapital emblematic of the later Marx. Arguing for this first claim leads into and, in turn, is reciprocally supported by a second, perhaps surprising, claim: The Lacanian theory of subjectivity (especially as encapsulated by Jacques-Alain Miller’s model of “suture,” with its recourse to Gottlob Frege’s account of arithmetic and the number zero) is crucial to discerning and analyzing this link within Marx’s corpus between the nothingness of the proletariat and the position of commodified labor-power as the origin of surplus-value within the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s associations of labor with nothing (nichts) should be taken very literally, perhaps even more literally than he originally intended. The third and final claim I will defend here, flowing from the first two just mentioned, is that commodified labor-power as per a historical materialism retroactively illuminated by psychoanalysis can be put forward as the hidden material-economic basis for the coming to light of split forms of subjectivity from Immanuel Kant and the German idealists through Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

Psychoanalytic Reflections on Stupidity and Stupor, 2021

Unexpectedly for those not thoroughly familiar with the Lacanian corpus, Jacques Lacan regularly ... more Unexpectedly for those not thoroughly familiar with the Lacanian corpus, Jacques Lacan regularly discusses stupidity in its myriad guises. On my reading, the ultimate upshot of Lacan's meditations on matters stupid is a recasting of psychoanalysis as the very antithesis of what it usually is taken to be, namely, a hermeneutic depth psychology in search of the most profound meanings of persons' intimate inner lives. This commonplace notion of analysis sees it as a movement from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the superficial to the deep. In Lacan's hands, analysis instead is an anti-hermeneutic operation transforming pathos into bathos. The analytic process is a sort of thoroughgoing reduction-to-the-absurd of subjects' thinking, being, and suffering. My modest ambition in what follows is simply to unpack Lacan's reflections on stupidity and related topics (such as foolishness, knavery, ignorance, meaninglessness, bullshit, and nonsense). As far as I know, there has not been to date an exhaustive tracking and meticulous reconstruction of the numerous things Lacan says along these lines. Considering how central his struggle against renditions of analysis as a depth-psychological hermeneutics is for his "return to Freud" and its consequences, a systematic interpretation of stupidity in the Lacanian oeuvre is long overdue.

Herein, I examine money at the intersection of Marxism and psychoanalysis. In Marxist discussion... more Herein, I examine money at the intersection of Marxism and psychoanalysis. In Marxist discussions of the connected topics of currency and commodity fetishism (as reliant mainly on Capital, Volume One), it often is left under-appreciated that such fetishism reaches its apotheosis only with the development of interest-bearing money-as-capital (i.e., with the emergence of fictitious finance capital in the guises of credit, banking, etc. as dealt with in Capital, Volume Three). In psychoanalytic treatments of money from Freud himself onwards, monetary means typically are tied to libidinal sources and stages in the subject’s ontogenetic life history (in line with Freud’s tight tethering of psychical investments in money to anal erotism). Moreover, of course, the term “fetishism” features in the Freudian field too in ways that partially cross-resonate with Marxian commodity fetishism. My intervention on this occasion begins with two gestures apropos, first, Marxism and, second, psychoanalysis. With respect to Marxism, I counter-balance the usual, long-standing (over)emphasis on commodity fetishism as per the first volume of Das Kapital with a foregrounding of this fetishism as per the third volume. With respect to psychoanalysis, I shift away from its traditional fixation on reducing financial matters to libidinal contents. I explore instead the implications of the forms of capitalist fetishism for reconsidering the forms of intra-subjective defense mechanisms. This leads me to posit a complementary inversion of Lacan’s dictum according to which “repression is always the return of the repressed”: The return of the repressed sometimes is the most effective repression. To pose a rhetorical question paraphrasing Brecht: What is the laundering of money compared with the laundering that is money? Appreciating this question is important not only for the Marxist account of the unconscious of socio-economic ideologies, but also promises to be transformative for the psychoanalytic account of the unconscious of psychical defensive dynamics.

Philosophy Today, 2019

Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are very much children of the Enlightenment in certain manners. ... more Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are very much children of the Enlightenment in certain manners. As such, they each sometimes display a qualified but firm optimism about history inevitably making progress in specific desirable directions. For instance, Freud predicts that continuing scientific and technological advances eventually will drive religiosity from human societies once and for all. Marx likewise forecasts the withering away of religions. Moreover, he treats this predicted process as symptomatic of even more fundamental socioeconomic developments, namely, his (in)famous anticipations of subsequent transitions to socialism and communism. However, the past century of human history obviously has not been kind to any sort of Enlightenment-style progress narratives, Marx's and Freud's included. My intervention on this occasion takes inspiration especially from Jacques Lacan's sober reckoning with a "triumph of religion" defying Freud's expectations of relentlessly broadening and deepening secularization. I argue that socio-political phenomena of the past several decades bear witness to religious superstructures having infused themselves into economic superstructures.

New Realism and Contemporary Philosophy, 2020

For a number of years now, I have developed and defended a materialist theory of subjectivity und... more For a number of years now, I have developed and defended a materialist theory of subjectivity under the heading of "transcendental materialism." The present piece gets underway in its first section here with me explaining why I have come to consider the descriptive label "critical-dialectical naturalism" synonymous with, if not preferable to, this heading. Recasting transcendental materialism as (also) critical dialectical naturalism signals several things. Starting with the term "critical," I embrace an idealist method (although not an idealist ontology) by beginning with spontaneous subjectivity. I do so with an eye to the sorts of epistemological requirements imposed by Kantian critique on any future metaphysics. Then, the term "dialectical" designates a procedure of moving beyond subjectivity taken as a starting point through delineating and mobilizing intra-subjective antagonisms, conflicts, and the like (i.e., dialectical dimensions of subjects identified by German idealism and psychoanalysis especially). In short, I dialectically reverse-engineer an ontology of pre/non-subjective nature out of a theory of more-than-natural subjectivity-this being the crux of critical-dialectical naturalism.

God Is Undead: Lacan Between Agnosticism and Atheism, 2022

Whereas Sigmund Freud’s rapport with religious content seems unambiguously antagonistic, Jacques ... more Whereas Sigmund Freud’s rapport with religious content seems unambiguously antagonistic, Jacques Lacan’s relationship with religion generally and Christianity particularly appears to some to have a different, more ambivalent character. This apparent ambivalence has led to readings of Lacan according to which he is either a principled agnostic on (anti-)philosophical grounds or even an especially subtle (Christian) theological thinker. Herein, I argue against both of these types of readings by exhaustively establishing Lacan’s atheist credentials. In so doing, I seek, first, to elucidate the distinctive Lacanian conception of the essential features of true atheism and, second, to distinguish atheism à la Lacan from other varieties of irreligiosity. Moreover, I revisit the later years of Lacan’s teaching with an eye to asking questions about belief and disbelief pushing off from crucial points Lacan makes primarily during this period: Is atheism an indispensable aspect of the analytic experience? Can analysis produce subjects fully divested of any trace of theistic commitments? Is it possible and/or desirable for persons to abandon entirely everything associated with religiosity? What might the consequences of such abandonment be for subjects’ libidinal, desiring lives? If certain theistic dimensions are inescapable horizons for speaking subjectivity, is there any prospect for the invention, perhaps aided by psychoanalysis, of historically unprecedented forms of what religion has covered throughout history hitherto?

Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2019

Robert Pippin’s work of recent years, culminating in his 2019 book Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logi... more Robert Pippin’s work of recent years, culminating in his 2019 book Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic, has involved him undertaking two related tasks. First, in Hegel’s Realm of Shadows and contemporaneous texts of his, he launches a counter-offensive against recent efforts by particular others to situate G.W.F. Hegel in relation to permutations of materialism running from nineteenth-century Marxist dialectical materialism up through today. Second, Pippin wishes to rebut critics of his influential 1989 book Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Specifically, he seeks to defuse the objections of some according to which his earlier study is guilty of an excessive Kantianization of Hegel, namely, an operation of transforming Hegel’s absolute idealism, with its robust monist realism, into Immanuel Kant’s subjective idealism, with its dualist anti-realism. In this article, I will argue that Pippin both: one, fails to remain truly Hegelian in his repudiations of materialism and naturalism; as well as, two, continues to remain committed to an objectionable transcendental idealism of a Kantian (and Fichtean) type.

Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 2019