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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They're forms of modality.
And it's clear that Zizek wants to, when he's not just being tongue-in-cheek and saying, oh, I'm just using the phrase dialectical materialism to
provoke people who want to see me as a crazed Stalinist or what have you.
Um, he, when he's using it more seriously, you know, nowadays it's, it's very clear that he wants to say, yes, what it ultimately boils down to is this, um, prioritization of contingency over necessity that reality at its most fundamental basic level is, is, uh, a realm of, of the contingent rather than of the necessitated.
Um,
Now, this is related to an interesting development in his recent work.
So his most recent major philosophical text that appeared last year as well in 2019, Sex and the Failed Absolute.
One of the things that I was struck by in it was that, you know, Zizek has become even more adamant about the centrality of quantum physics for his ontology.
And, you know, in that book, in Sex and the Failed Absolute,
He, at certain moments, goes so far as to say basically that my dialectical materialist ontology is, in a way, just a certain version of quantum physics or what quantum physics tells us.
And here I think you can see the connection between boiling down dialectical materialism to a doctrine of modal categories, and in particular to asserting the primacy of contingency over necessities.
with the appeal to quantum physics, because Zizek's rendition of quantum physics in these contexts, it's to say, well, you have this, at the most fundamental level, this indeterminacy.
You have this kind of flux in which things are open, in which there is no one and only necessitation ruling in terms of entities and events.
And then with the collapse of the wave function, you have that sort of contingent openness then get turned into something which then appears to be, for instance, the macro level physical world that was central to Newtonian physics, in which it seems as though you have the rule of causal necessitation, which necessity holds sway in the guise of, for instance,
Newtonian mechanical physics, you know, matter in motion governed by efficient causal laws.
And so, you know, for Zizek, you know, you have ontologically primary, the weird quantum world that he associates with contingency.
And then at the level of a secondary derivative necessity, you have, you know, through the passages like the collapse of the wave function, you have, you know, come into the picture of
a reality which looks more like necessity has priority over contingency.
But for Zizek, that's kind of a secondary reversal of a more primordial condition.
And again, with this idea of moving from quantum to classical states at the level of physics, you can see how for him there's a connection between the modal categories of contingency and necessity and what he's interested in getting out of quantum physics as he reads it.
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