Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And
You know, one thing that both Zizek and I are very interested in is the idea that, no, for Hegel, one of the things that he pushes back against in his debates with and criticisms of Kant and Fichte is the idea that, well, we can get back behind human subjectivity, that starting from our own subjectivity, we can, through thinking, reverse engineer out of our own position a
a defensible philosophical narrative about, for instance, the pre-subjective conditions for the emergence of subjectivity itself, that we can tell a defensible philosophical story about the genesis or emergence of subjectivity from the pre- or non-subjective.
And that sort of project, for instance, a kind of ontology that would start with
in terms of the idea of what would be metaphysically or ontologically most foundational or zero level, would start with a picture of pre-non-subjective reality, however it's conceived, and then be able to account for how that sort of pre- or non-subjective reality could generate out of itself the thinking subject that then, after the fact of its emergence, eventually, for instance, if it achieves a kind of philosophical standpoint,
can retroactively cast its glance backwards and with the benefit of a certain kind of hindsight can explain its own origins, can account for its own genesis or emergence.
That sort of ambition, I think, is clearly there in Hegel and is something that both Zizek and I seek to run with, update, extend, bring into dialogue with Marxist
historical and dialectical materialism, psychoanalytic metapsychology, in Zizek's case, quantum physics, in my case, neurobiology, and can really flesh out that sort of Hegelian project in much greater detail than Hegel, given his inevitable limitations as confined to his own era, wasn't able to do.
Whereas for someone like Pippin, he just wants to deny that that's even a viable philosophical endeavor, to deny that it's Hegelian and deny that we could carry out such a project.
Yeah, well, it's funny because he sometimes...
in recent interviews, he has taken to occasionally, uh, saying, and here it's hard to judge how seriously or not he wishes to be taken when he says this sort of thing.
Um, but to claim that, well, look, really traditional dialectical materialism was, you know, uh, a ridiculous, untenable, intellectually bankrupt position.
Um, and it's part of my kind of, uh, uh,
you know, contemporary, you know, Marx-inspired political provocations to lay claim to this mantle, to redeploy it.
And, you know, when he says that, you know, I think, okay, you know, this is not really doing full justice to even traditional dialectical materialism, starting with Marx and Engels themselves.
You know, and so, you know, in some of my work, I've sought to actually go back to
you know, the history of the Marxist tradition and to, you know, in particular, the development of a dialectical materialism, which, you know, whereas Marx, of course, doesn't forge it himself.
I mean, he, you know, Marx develops a framework that comes to be called historical materialism, which is centered on, you know, as per what Marx really devoted most of his mature working life to.
is centered on a critique of political economy and specifically an analysis of capitalism and how it emerged out of prior history.
And Marx then, in terms of his materialism, it's a materialism that focuses on human beings and their social existences.
Showing 201–220 of 618 · page 11 of 31
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