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
And then you've got these different sociocultural milieus that we all inhabit and that this is it.
And that in particular for Badiou, this perspective denies that there are any kind of universals, you know, that there is anything universal.
You know, timelessly trans individually valuable.
It's a kind of you might say it's a kind of relativism, you know, where there are just competing partial perspectives.
They're incommensurable.
They're different bodies.
There are incommensurable languages, you know, social perspectives, cultural outlooks, etc.,
And that's it.
We just have this marketplace of diversities and differences and no and the denial, whether implicit or explicit, the denial that there's any kind of stronger sense of, you know,
to use Plato's triad of terms and get in bed to use, embrace of Plato is not inappropriate, that there are no universal, eternal truths, beauties, or goodnesses that we can put into play.
And any attempt on our part to, you know,
To be faithful to the idea of, you know, truth, beauty and goodness in a strong, you know, universalist sense can only result in totalitarian catastrophe.
This inevitably bottoms out in, you know, the gulag or the concentration camp.
And Badiou and Zizek both are opposed to the idea that that should be accepted as sort of the ultimate horizon of our thinking, both philosophically and politically.
And so the alternative to this sort of democratic materialism, as I've just sketched it, according to Badiou, the alternative is what Badiou calls this materialist dialectic.
And here it's something, even though Badiou does not, for instance, draw from Hegel and that context of German idealism in the way that Zizek or myself does, for Badiou there's something similar in terms of what he calls the materialist dialectic opposition to democratic materialism.
And for Badiou, that's the idea that although you have all of these different bodies and languages, although you have this reality that seems to involve
you know, just this play of differences, that nonetheless, there are occasional moments, at least, when this reality can generate out of itself something which can come to transcend those, you know, local, contextual, specific, you know, individual, you
particular bodies and languages and can indeed come to function as a, you know, as a universal.
So, you know, Badiou's notion that, you know, the realm of bodies and languages can produce out of itself a universality or various universalities, you know, such as, you know, for Badiou, things like, you know, the kinds of ideals of justice that would be involved in a communist politics that, you know, just as, for instance, you could say, look,
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