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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mathematics, the various building blocks of mathematics were discovered in particular times and places, right?
That for instance, you have the ancient Greeks and in the ancient Greek context, you had the development of mathematics, but the idea that just because, you know, ancient Greece was a particular set of bodies and languages was, you know, a, a just one
socio-historical locale among others, of course, we probably, most of us would reject the idea that, well, therefore, because, you know, certain elements of mathematics were invented by those contexts, those elements of mathematics remain valid only for someone, you know, tied to the ancient Greek context.
No, I mean, the ancient Greece birthed out of itself in that instance,
something which took on a trans-contextual, timeless, universal validity.
And, you know, Badiou, Zizek, and myself, I think all in our various ways are committed to the notion that, indeed, out of particular socio-historical contexts,
they can participate in or give rise to things which are not just a matter of, you know, this is one perspective, you know, versus another.
And there is no ultimate, you know, there is no larger, you know, possibility of a kind of universality that would overcome incommensurable partial perspectives.
So that's, you know, a big part of what is going on in terms of this particular Badiou reference that Zizek, you know, sometimes leans on.
Yeah, and to cut a very long story very short, for Zizek, and also this was developed very nicely by one of his colleagues, Alenka Zupanchich, in her 2000 book, Ethics of the Real.
For Zizek and Zupanchich, as they read it, there's a connection between how Kant in his Deontological Ethics of Pure Practical Reason, Kant's moral philosophy,
how Kant talks about the moral law and how Lacan talks about what Lacan calls an act.
Now, of course, for Kant, when my rational will is indeed operating morally and is therefore adhering to what Kant's famous categorical imperative tells me is the moral law in any given instance, that this involves
you know, me willing and hence on the base of my will acting in a way that potentially, if not actually is at odds with what various and sundry, what Kant calls pathological inclinations, you know, my human, all too human impulses and urges that, you know, when my rational will is operating out of pure respect for the moral law or as close as it can get to it you know, it is, it is, you know, exercising a power to,
hold at bay to override or veto what certain impulses and urges that I have as a human animal
would perhaps otherwise steer me towards doing.
And so this capacity for me, for one side of myself to, as we might put it, negate other sides of myself, for my rational will adhering to the moral law, through that law negating the influence of these other parts of myself that Kant associates with my human, all-too-human nature, my pathological inclinations, that
You know, there's a link that the Slovene Lacanians like to draw between this and then Lacan in especially his seminars of the mid to late 1960s.
And in particular, there's a yet, still yet to be published in an official French edition seminar, the 15th.
which was 1967 to 1968, in which in the opening sessions of it, Lacan develops a distinction between what he calls a mere action on the one hand versus
Showing 501–520 of 618 · page 26 of 31
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