Adrian Johnston, "A New German Idealism: Hegel, Žižek and Dialectical Materialism" (Columbia UP, 2018)
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Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Stephen Dozman. In 2012, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek published his 1,000-page tome, Less Than Nothing, following it up in 2014 with its shorter reformulation, Absolute Recoil. The books offered substantial reformulations of his own theories, but also in-depth engagements with a number of his influences, especially Hegel and Lacan. Joining me to talk about some of these developments is Adrian Johnston, author of A New German Idealism, Hegel, Zizek, and Dialectical Materialism from Columbia University Press in 2018. Adrian Johnston is distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico, and is a faculty member at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Atlanta.
He is the author of around a dozen books, including Žižek's Ontology in 2008, and Bidu, Zizek, and Political Transformations in 2009, as well as being the co-editor with Zizek himself and Todd McGowan of the book series Diuresis, all from Northwestern University Press. So Adrian Johnston, thank you so much for being with us.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very much looking forward to our discussion.
Yeah, so before we dive in, we usually ask guests to kind of introduce themselves and kind of talk about a lot of their main academic interests. Obviously, Zizek is a key one for you, but it also connects or you kind of connect it to a number of other fields. So can you kind of... give listeners a sense of what your overall philosophical interests are?
Yes. Well, starting with Zizek as a point of reference, what he and I share most in common are our set of interests and a commitment to interfacing those with each other in a systematic fashion. And so for both of us, there are three main orientations that we each conjure with and that we seek to weave together in various ways. And that would be German idealism, so Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and some of the figures surrounding them. Secondly, Marxism, so the Marxist tradition from Marx and Engels themselves all the way up through the present. And third and finally, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. And these three European intellectual traditions or orientations are are crucial for both Zizek and myself.
And we are both interested in developing a systematic philosophical framework that is grounded on an ontology informed by all three of these sources. And in terms of some of my other interests that are related to what I've just sketched, I, in the past decade or so of my work, have spent a lot of time looking at connections between this project of a systematic philosophical framework with an ontology and theory of subjectivity, bringing together these three European sources of inspiration, interfacing this with, on the one hand, the natural sciences, and for me particularly, neurobiology. Zizek has become increasingly more interested in and committed to engaging with quantum physics. And then also, of course, contemporary political theory.
So the connection between this kind of philosophical framework and both science and politics keeps me busy, let's say, and will probably keep me busy for a good number of years to come in terms of my ongoing research work.
Yeah, you've definitely got a lot to work with. So to kind of get things going and dig into the book, it's pretty technical, so we can't cover everything, but I want to kind of tease out some of the key arguments. So to kind of start off, Zizek's attempt to recover and kind of reanimate Hegel throughout some of his more recent texts involves an attempt to recapture not just the moves he was making, but kind of understand them in their own intellectual context. And in the spirit of recovering this context, you spend some time in the beginning of the book kind of unpacking kind of in the wake of Kant and to some degree Spinoza, the discussions going on between like Schelling and Fichte and Jacobi. Can you kind of unpack what the major questions were at this time that Hegel would be intervening in?
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