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 that, you know, whether we do this for a cause, like I decide that in the name of some sort of higher good cause,
uh, you know, like freedom, et cetera, I'm willing to lay down my life voluntarily, you know, or whether just out of despair and not wanting to go on with things I, I do myself in, um, that, uh, you know, that there's, and here we're getting close to Freud's death drive, um, that this idea of a power of radical negativity, a capacity for, uh, self cancellation, you know, for, uh, you know,
making ourselves radically other than we have been or are, that this is something that you get in both German idealism and even though psychoanalysis is often not thought of as involving this, that Zizek's reading of Freud and Lacan, you know, seeks to show that part of what, you know, Freud and Lacan are getting at with the phrase death drive is this something very, you know, that very much involves this power to negate,
Yes.
Well, when Zizek says things like, well, reality has to involve certain forms of inconsistency, that substance has to be internally conflicted, et cetera, in order for us to be the free subjects that we are.
in a way, the underlying reasoning is that, well, if we philosophically speaking, start with the idea of autonomous subjectivity as central, and then we seek to reverse engineer out of that subjectivity that we ourselves, even as philosophers are, that we seek to inscribe this free subjectivity within a pre or non-subjective substantial reality,
and still have this subject be a subject and be a free subject.
That, you know, for Zizek, it's, we could say that if it were the case that, you know, pre or non-subjective reality were this, you know, as it's often envisioned, you know, whether theologically or scientifically, or I should really say pseudoscientifically, you know, that views according to which
All right, that the underlying fabric of reality is this seamless tapestry of tightly interwoven threads where everything or like a clockwork mechanism and everything is, you know, synchronized with everything else.
and the entirety of reality is ultimately this giant mass scale harmony or carefully orchestrated dance of perfectly integrated and synthesized with each other elements, that if that were what the ultimate nature of reality was, then it would seem as though, yeah, indeed, a kind of radical, hard-nosed, reductive determinism would be the only really defensible way
And that would involve the notion that we would have to somehow or other argue away and deny as illusory, epiphenomenal, et cetera, anything like free subjectivity.
So if you're going to include, you know, free subject within, you know, pre or non-subjective substance, Zizek, one of his arguments is that, well, for that substance to have given rise to and to still, you know, hold out, you know, some wiggle room for free
free subjects.
It has to be an inconsistent, not coordinated, not fully pulled together, self-integrated field or domain.
And so there's that in the background of Zizek's reasoning as kind of a key line of argumentation for him.
But for me, I'm interested in this, though, in a much more, you might say, specific, targeted, and concrete way, which is that
if you talk about our human-mindedness and like-mindedness, ourselves as subjects in this way, well, of course, the level of reality dealt with by natural science that is clearly most proximate to this and most relevant would be our central nervous systems, right?
Talking about our human bodies and in particular, these aspects of our bodies that we know have certain key relationships with what we take to be our not only sentient, but also sapient
subjectivity, that we are the kinds of minded beings that we are.
And so obviously the brain, the body has a great deal to do with that.
Showing 541–560 of 618 · page 28 of 31
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