Critically engaging with thinkers including Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Catherine Malabou, Jean-Claude Milner, Martin Hagglund, William Connolly and Jane Bennett, Johnston formulates a materialist and naturalist account of subjectivity that does full justice to human beings as irreducible to natural matter alone.

Adrian Johnston offers a first-of-its-kind sustained critical response to Slavoj Zizek's Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil, in which Zizek returns to Hegel. Johnston develops what he calls transcendental materialism, an antireductive materialism capable of preserving and advancing the legacies of the Hegelian, Marxian, and Freudian traditions.

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines--European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience-- Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis (...) with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science. (shrink)

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most interesting and important philosophers working today, known chiefly for his theoretical explorations of popular culture and contemporary politics. This book focuses on the generally neglected and often overshadowed philosophical core of Žižek’s work—an essential component in any true appreciation of this unique thinker’s accomplishment. His central concern, Žižek has proclaimed, is to use psychoanalysis to redeploy the insights of late-modern German philosophy, in particular, the thought of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel. By taking this (...) avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Žižek’s efforts. His book charts the interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity constructed by Žižek at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian theory. Johnston also uses Žižek’s combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis to address two perennial philosophical problems: the relationship of mind and body, and the nature of human freedom. By bringing together the past two centuries of European philosophy, psychoanalytic metapsychology, and cutting-edge work in the natural sciences, Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity—in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. His work shows how an engagement with Žižek’s philosophy can produce compelling answers to today’s most vexing and urgent questions as inherited from the history of ideas. (shrink)

Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek together have emerged as two of Europe’s most significant living philosophers. In a shared spirit of resistance to global capitalism, both are committed to bringing philosophical reflection to bear upon present-day political circumstances. These thinkers are especially interested in asking what consequences the supposed twentieth-century demise of communism entails for leftist political theory in the early twenty-first century. _ Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations_ examines Badiouian and Žižekian depictions of change, particularly as deployed at the (...) intersection of philosophy and politics. The book details the origins of Badiou’s concept of the event and Žižek’s concept of the act as related theoretical visions of revolutionary happenings, delineating a number of difficulties arising from these similar concepts. Johnston finds that Badiou and Žižek tend to favor models of transformation that risk discouraging in advance precisely the efforts at changing the world of today that these uncompromising leftists so ardently desire. _Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations_ will surely join Johnston’s _Žižek’s Ontology _as an instant classic in its field. (shrink)

Introduction; "One surely will be found one day to make an ontology with what I am telling you": the road to a post-Lacanian materialism -- Part One. Jacques Lacan: between the sacred and the secular -- 1. Conflicted matter: the challenge of secularizing materialism -- 2. Turning the sciences inside out: revisiting "Science and truth" -- 3. On deep history and psychoanalysis: phylogenetic time in Lacanian theory --Part Two. Alain Badiou: between form and matter -- 4. What matter(s) in ontology: (...) the Hebb-event and materialism split from within -- 5. Phantom of consistency: Kant troubles -- Part Three. Quentin Meillassoux: between faith and knowledge -- 6. The world before worlds: the ancestral and Badiou's anti-Kantian transcendentalism -- 7. Hume's revenge: a Dieu, Meillassoux? -- Postface: from critique to construction: toward a transcendental materialism. (shrink)

Freud outlines two types of conflict; that between drives and reality; and that between the drives themselves. Adrian Johnston identifies a third; the conflict embedded within each and every drive.

We propose that corporations should be subject to a legal obligation to identify and internalise their social costs or negative externalities. Our proposal reframes corporate social responsibility as obligated internalisation of social costs, and relies on reflexive governance through mandated hybrid fora. We argue that our approach advances theory, as well as practice and policy, by building on and going beyond prior attempts to address social costs, such as prescriptive government regulation, Coasian bargaining and political CSR.

Immanuel Kant is one of Alain Badiou’s principle philosophical enemies. Kant’s critical philosophy is anathema to Badiou not only because of the latter’s openly aired hatred of the motif of finitude so omnipresent in post-Kantian European intellectual traditions—Badiou blames Kant for inventing this motif—but also because of its idealism. For Badiou-the-materialist, as for any serious philosophical materialist writing in Kant’s wake, transcendental idealism must be dismantled and overcome. In his most recent works, Badiou attempts to invent a non-Kantian notion of (...) the transcendental, a notion compatible with the basic tenets of materialism. However, from 1988’s Being and Event up through the present, Badiou’s oeuvre contains indications that he hasn’t managed fully to purge the traces of Kantian transcendental idealism that arguably continue to haunt his system—with these traces clustering around a concept Badiou christens “counting-for-one”. The result is that, in the end, Kant’s shadow still falls over Badiouian philosophy—this is despite Badiou’s admirable, sophisticated, and instructive attempts to step out from under it—thus calling into question this philosophy’s self-proclaimed status as materialist through and through. (shrink)

Although not mentioning Žižek specifically, Adrian Johnston's "The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation" is referred to in detail by Žižek in this Issue's opening article and so is included for the sake of completeness and as a useful resource for scholars of both Žižek and Badioiu.

Alain Badiou credits Jacques Lacan with the formulation of an idea of love that demands to be granted a central place in the structure of any contemporary philosophy worthy of the name. However, at the same time, Badiou is understandably wary of the psychoanalytic tendency to dismiss the amorous as epiphenomenal in relation to the libidinal, to treat love as disguised lust. In both avoiding the indefensible move of strictly partitioning the amorous and the libidinal by situating them as two (...) poles of a mutually-exclusive opposition as well as refusing to reduce one to the other, it must be asked: How does desiring something occasionally become loving nothing? The true challenge for a joint philosophical-psychoanalytic delineation of the amorous is to develop the basis for an explanation of how love miraculously emerges from lust, that is, of how the interplay between various libidinal factors creates the amorous seemingly ex nihilo via ontogenetic processes in the midst of which transpires what appears as a dynamic of transubstantiation elevating lust to love.". (shrink)

We welcome Ballantyne & Schaefer’s discussion of the issues concerning consent and use of health data for research. In response to their acknowledgement of the need for public debate and discussion, we provide evidence from our own public consultation on this topic.

In this article Adrian Johnston replies to Žižek's account of his interpretation of Badiou's notion of the event.

Despite Jacques Lacan's somewhat deserved reputation as an adamant antinaturalist, his teachings, when read carefully to the letter, should not be construed as categorically hostile to any and every possible interfacing of psychoanalysis and biology. In recent years, several authors, including myself, have begun exploring the implications of reinterpreting Lacan's corpus on the basis of questions concerning naturalism, materialism, realism, and the position of analysis with respect to the sciences of today. Herein, I focus primarily on the efforts of analyst (...) François Ansermet and neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti to forge a specifically Lacanian variant of neuropsychoanalysis (as distinct from Anglo-American variants). Taking up Ansermet and Magistretti's interlinked theories of drive (Trieb) and autonomous subjectivity, I develop an immanent critique of their project. Doing so in a manner that is intended to acknowledge and preserve this neuropsychoanalytic duo's significant insights and contributions, I seek to bring into sharper relief the exact set of necessary, as well as sufficient, conditions for what Ansermet, Magistretti, and I all are commonly pursuing: an account of the genesis of denaturalized subjects out of embodied libidinal economies, itself situated within the framework of a nonreductive, quasi-naturalist materialism synthesizing resources drawn from psychoanalysis, neurobiology, and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper was first published in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, no. 15, Spring 2004, pp. 199-228.

The paper was first published in -turn: A Journal of Lacanian Studies, vol. 2, Spring 2005, pp. 85-141.

One of the more superficially perplexing features of Lacan’s notion of objet petit a is the fact that he simultaneously characterizes it as both non-specularizable (i.e., incapable of being captured in spatio-temporal representations) and specular (i.e., incarnated in visible avatars). This assignment of the apparently contradictory attributes of visibility and invisibility to object a is a reflection of this object’s strange position at the intersection of transcendental and empirical dimensions. Indeed, this object, which Lacan holds up as his central psychoanalytic (...) discovery, raises important philosophical questions about the transcendental-empirical distinction, arguably short-circuiting in interesting, productive ways this dichotomy and many of its permutations. This article seeks to achieve two aims: one, to clarify how and why Lacan situates object a between the specular and the non-specular; and, two, to extract from the results of this clarification a preliminary sketch of a post-Lacanian transcendentalism that is also thoroughly materialist. (shrink)

International political economy identifies declining nominal interest rates, securitization, and financial liberalization as drivers of rising housing prices. Despite witnessing these common credit shocks, however, developed economies experienced divergent trends in housing inflation since the 1980s. We offer a comparative political economy explanation of variation in house prices, arguing that by restraining household incomes, wage-setting institutions can blunt financial liberalization’s inflationary impact on housing markets. Employing quantitative analysis and a comparative study of Ireland and the Netherlands, we uncover two findings. (...) First, countries where political coalitions in the export sector held veto powers over those in the nontraded sector in national wage setting realized lower housing inflation. Second, the impact of sectoral coalitions on housing prices in OECD countries is similar to that of financial variables. Our results suggest that the organization of labor politics continues to play an important role in mitigating the destabilizing effects of global finance on developed economies. (shrink)

Schelling argues that the Kantian transcendental apparatus lacks the ability to systematically ground itself. He insists that one must account for the prior emergence of experiential reality in addition to delineating this reality’s structure once constituted, and he presents his genetic model of epistemological subjectivity as a supplement completing the Kantian edifice. Although he never finally arrives at a satisfactory system of his own, Schelling repeatedly attempts, in various ways, to strike a productive compromise between transcendental and historico-genetic approaches to (...) subjectivity. Given that contemporary thinkers are still wrangling with the problem of how to adjudicate between those who make claims regarding the existence of invariant features of subjectivity and those who reject the notion that there are non-empirical, ahistorical constants defining human cognition, Schelling’s struggle with these same issues promises to furnish today’s readers with instructive lessons about the potentials and pitfalls of the endeavor to resolve this impasse. (shrink)

This chapter shows that, when it comes to topics such as realism, naturalism, and philosophy of nature, Hegel’s advances over Schelling are achieved partly in and through his immanent-critical appropriation of and reckoning with (the early) Schelling’s legacy. Hence, likewise, any twenty-first-century reactivation of “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism” must reckon with the relevance of Schelling, as well as the ambivalences both uniting and dividing him from Hegel. The chapter makes this case by charting a tension in Schelling’s philosophy (...) between its monistic and nature-philosophical tendencies in relation to the problem of error. (shrink)

Herein, I distinguish between two basic, fundamental conceptions of the sorts of negativity associated with subjectivity throughout modern European philosophy up to the present: on the one hand, a mystical vision in which the unexplained explainer of a mysterious nothingness is appealed to as a ground-zero given; on the other hand, a materialist idea according to which the real privative causes of absences and antagonisms are internally generated out of precisely specifiable natural and human historical processes involving accumulations of multitudes (...) of concrete elements and features. Arguing against the former as complacently resting upon the dogma of a “myth of the non-given” (to borrow a phrase from Wilfrid Sellars so as to refer to the notion of the factical givenness of negativity as itself non-given), I plead for the latter and sketch a dialectical-speculative “more is less” dynamic in which surpluses of positivity immanently give rise to negativities. This dynamic is an essential part of a non-reductive materialism including within itself lacks and conflicts as causally efficacious factors. I flesh out these lines of thought through reinterpretations of the transition from the organic to the anthropological in Hegel as well as the mirror stage as an account of ego- and subject-formation in Lacan. (shrink)

This essay returns to the Azande tribe of Africa, discussed by Polanyi (in Personal Knowledge) and others, in order to rethink the issues of rationality and irrationality and of essentialism and relativism, and to consider what these issues mean in our actual lives as daily we make epistemological and moral judgements.

This article is an installment in an ongoing debate between me and Hägglund. Both here and throughout our exchanges, I argue on behalf of Freud and Lacan against Hägglund's Derrida-inspired critique of psychoanalysis. Prior to the appearance of Hägglund's 2012 book Dying for Time, the back-and-forth between us centered primarily around the issue of just how atheistic Freudian-Lacanian analysis really is in light of the Derridean-Hägglundian ‘radical atheism’ delineated by Hägglund's 2008 book of that title. In this piece, which focuses (...) on the final chapter of Dying for Time, I carry out two interrelated tasks. First, I highlight what I allege to be certain limitations to Hägglund's Derridean ‘chronolibidinalism’ preventing it from doing full justice to the multiple dimensions of psychoanalysis both theoretical and clinical. Second, I offer interpretations of Freud and Lacan sharply contrasting with the readings of these two figures presented by Hägglund in Dying for Time as well as his other texts engaging with analysis. Moreover, in the process, I defend my version of Freudian-Lacanian drive theory as per my 2005 book Time Driven: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive in the face of Hägglund's explicit criticisms of it. (shrink)

Not only is Lacan’s repeatedly advanced assertion that Freud categorically denies the existence of unconscious affects a misleading oversimplification of Freud’s various ambivalent discussions of this issue—Lacan’s own circumnavigations around the topic of affect are much more nuanced and subtle than either he or many of his commentators often acknowledge. What’s more, such complexities aren’t confined solely to the tenth seminar of 1962-1963 devoted to a sustained discussion of anxiety, a seminar to which Lacan sometimes appeals in response to criticisms (...) according to which he reduces the psychoanalytic unconscious to the lifeless formal skeleton of pure linguistic-symbolic units alone. Through analyzing Lacan’s explorations of the distinction between signifiers and affects as articulated across the full span of le Séminaire, this essay seeks to complicate and problematize the standard picture of Lacan’s metapsychology of affective life. In so doing, it strives to clarify hitherto obscure remarks made about affects by Lacan as well as, through this work of clarification, to lay down foundational elements for the construction of a much more accurate and systematic rendition of a Lacanian theory of affects. (shrink)

This is a letter written in January 2008 by Adrian Johnston to Slavoj Žižek after the former had read a pre-publication draft version of the manuscript of In Defense of Lost Causes. Herein, Johnston outlines a series of his responses to various lines of argumentation contained in In Defense of Lost Causes.

This article is a chapter in Did Somebody Say Ideology?: Slavoj Žižek in a Post-Ideological Universe, Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner [ed.], Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007.