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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different versions of his drive theory as he laid it out at different stages of his intellectual itinerary always involved an emphasis on conflicting sets of drives, right?
And the final version of this dual drive picture was, you know, for him, the antagonism between Eros or the life drives on the one hand and the Todestrieb, the death drive or drives on the other hand.
And, you know, of course, in the 20th century, I mean, going back to, you know, figures like Wilhelm Reich,
in the 1930s, there began to be efforts by certain Marxists to put Marxism and psychoanalysis into close connection with each other.
And one of the projects I'm working on now involves revisiting these intersections.
But you could say that in terms of the development of first Freudian Marxism, starting with Reich and Company in the earlier part of the 20th century,
And then in the French context, in the post-war period, the emergence of Locano-Marxism.
And certainly Zizek and some of his fellow travelers, including myself, could be described as Locano-Marxists in a certain way.
Initially, of course, one of the services that psychoanalysis seemed to offer these Marxists was
It helps us account for why Marx's more optimistic predictions about social progress have not come to pass.
So why is it that even if the proletariat begins to see how exploited they are, the manner in which capitalism takes advantage of them,
you know, why they still seem to, you know, hug their chains, you know, why they just are content to continue to sing in their cages, etc.
And, you know, the idea of unconscious libidinal investments in our own oppression, exploitation, etc.
You know, this, you know, side of psychoanalysis, you know, came to be seen by certain 20th century Marxists as
This is important to take on board.
And if we take it on board, we're not entitled to be as optimistic as, you know, earlier, more classical enlightenment style Marxists were.
But, you know, given the fact that, you know, there's not just one overriding direction to our libidinal economies, that we have different drives that are pulling different directions.
That, of course, also holds out the idea that although there might be, you could say, powerful forces that make it so that the Enlightenment idea of know the truth and the truth shall set you free is far too cheap, easy, and optimistic, that we may be much more deeply, libidinally complicit with our own
unfortunate circumstances, and we might want to acknowledge, you know, that nonetheless, to come back to the idea of, you know, death drive is radical negativity, we also have this capacity for, you know, being able at certain moments, at least, to not only, you know, mitigate or step back from our, you know, this inertia, but to even perhaps, you know, smash it to pieces and make way for something dramatically different.
So it's like with Benjamin's situation, you know,
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