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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Appearances
But at the same time, you know, we live in also very dark times.
I think, um, we can't, you know, not acknowledge, um,
that there are reasons for being rather pessimistic or for, you know, you know, thinking that, yeah, perhaps if we had to place, you know, place bets on odds that things probably aren't going to turn out all that well, but it's not, nothing is guaranteed.
Well, here, I mean, in particular, the reference to Badiou.
So in the preface to his 2006 book, Logics of Worlds, Badiou now rather famously deploys a distinction between what he, Badiou, calls on the one hand, the materialist dialectic, and on the other hand, quote unquote, democratic materialism.
And, you know, this Badiouian distinction between the materialist dialectic and democratic materialism, you know, something that Zizek has very much embraced and, you know, over the course of the past decade plus has repeatedly deployed in his own ways.
And
The central gist of this distinction is Badiou draws it when he first introduces it at the start of the second book of his Being an Event project.
Badiou
characterizes democratic materialism as very much a kind of, you might say, the spontaneous ideological outlook or worldview of your average expectable denizen of a contemporary Western-style capitalist society.
And the notion there is that, well, you have a sort of spontaneous ontology in which the only things that are acknowledged as existing are, on the one hand,
various sorts of, you know, Badiou says, for democratic materialism, his axiom is, you know, there are only bodies and languages.
And, you know, what he means by bodies there, it would be, well,
You know, there are, for instance, you know, different types of living beings.
You know, there are individual human beings with their bodies and these bodies are marked by things like, you know, race, sex, gender, et cetera.
So you have, you know, all of these bodies which, you know, bear these markers that are taken up by non-Marxist forms of identity politics on both the right and left.
And then, you know, say there's that, and then there's languages.
And by languages there, Badiou means really different social universes, right?
With the idea that, you know, human language is kind of the, you know, some of the core scaffolding for, you know, everything we associate with, you know, what we count as our social, cultural, et cetera, existences.
And, you know, that we have an ontology in which you've got these different bodies that can be taken as bearing these markers of identity.
Showing 461–480 of 618 · page 24 of 31
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