Adrian Johnston: Žižek's Ontology and Transcendental Materialism

[@telosbound]

Hell yeah. Excited for this one

[@RahulSam]

Cheers, bro!

[@bogdanandone9022]

Come in telos !

[@robes9947]

The latest video of PBS Space Time seems to point towards an interesting development on the topic of quantum consciousness and Penrose's book

[@RahulSam]

Interesting. I will add it to my to-watch list. Thanks!

[@bradmodd7856]

Adrian sure know how to build things out of vibrating air. I can't wait to see a flow diagram of what he just said.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

Sorry about blowing up the live comments. Well done interview, even if you thought it wasn't. 😊 He was pretty straightforward in his stance, even if he went off on jargon filled rants that were incredibly hard to follow without a deep understanding of academic texts. There weren't many. Your questions were very well constructed, and your follow-ups were insightful. You pressed him on ideas when you needed to and asked for very appropriate clarifications when something he said wasn't clear. All in all, you seemed very attentive to the conversation and not much like a fan boy. But I get it. Even if I don't agree with his stance on certain things and his ultimate conclusion, I found myself very engrossed in his explanations.

[@RahulSam]

Wow, you're too kind. Thank you very much, my friend. Have you read any of his books?

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

@RahulSam No. Again, I haven't been in academia for a long time. And find very few people to toss ideas around these days. You said something about a book club. Would that be like an online book club? What are your thoughts???

[@RahulSam]

@@Robert_McGarry_Poems Yes! A book club is something I'm planning to start next year, and it'll mostly be online. Send me an email at [e-mail], and we can chat about it, mate.

[@LabourOfTheNegative]

have you read Johnston's reply in the warwick journal of philosophy to Berger & Hackett? I think you would find it highly suggestive on Schellingian/Hegelian matters. Particularly this passage: Despite these concessions to Berger, I nevertheless continue to perceive myself as more Hegelian than Schellingian. Of course, Schelling is notorious for being an extremely mercurial thinker. His intensely Protean character is not undeserving of Hegel’s later accusation that he was guilty of conducting his philosophical education on the public stage. Given this, the exercise of trying decisively and definitively to criticize Schelling is akin to the attempt to nail Jello to a wall. . .Correspondingly but inversely, the flip side of this coin is that, given the inconsistent mass of claims and arguments made by Schelling over the six decades of his intellectual itinerary, everybody (and, hence, nobody really) can be shown to be at least partly “Schellingian,” whatever that might be. These cautionary observations made, I will run the risk of a few generalizations regarding Schelling in order to clarify why I do not accept Berger’s depiction of me as a closet Schellingian. First and foremost, even the early Schelling, with his rationalistic, formalistic constructions and deductions, is overall much too Spinozistic for my tastes. I deem Iain Hamilton Grant’s Spinozistic-Deleuzian reconstruction in Philosophies of Nature After Schelling of Schelling’s first decade of philosophizing (1794-1804) largely (although not totally) accurate-and this to Schelling’s detriment insofar as it makes him all the more vulnerable to Hegel’s wounding barbs about “the night in which all cows are black.” For dialectical-speculative reasons, the Verstand-type distinction of Spinoza, Schelling, and Deleuze between the productivity of natura naturans and the products of natura naturata (like the Heideggerian “ontological difference” between ontological Being and ontic beings) appears to me to be too neat and clean both philosophically and scientifically. Directly stemming from this, I see the periodic winning out in Schelling’s thought of a mystical, pantheistic “hen kai pan” à la both Spinozism and Romanticism to be symptomatic of an underlying failure ever truly and properly to achieve the Hegelian thinking of “substance also as subject.” Furthermore, and again by unfavorable contrast with Hegel, Schelling’s post-Hölderlin, nature-philosophical version of the Spinozism of freedom oscillates between two equally dissatisfactory poles, those of either the panpsychism of a Fichtean subjectivity writ large in the guise of Spinoza’s God/Nature or a Spinozistic pantheism in which subjectivity and everything (apparently) finite is swallowed wholesale into the flat, monochromatic abyss of a formalized One-All of Absolute Identity/Indifference. Essentially, Schelling shows himself to be trapped between, in his own terms, onesidedly dissolving philosophy of nature into transcendental philosophy (panpsychism) or vice versa (pantheism). It is left to Hegel, particularly in his mature systematic Encyclopedia, to establish a Spinozism of freedom authentically fulfilling “The Earliest System-Program of German Idealism,” one stepping off Schelling’s erratic see-saw and attaining a genuine equilibrium between the objective and the subjective, the natural and the spiritual. The vast bulk of my German idealist loyalties lie with this Hegel rather than Schelling. (pp. 34-35) www.academia.edu/40961416/Transcendentalism_in_Hegel_s_Wake_A_Reply_to_Timothy_M_Hackett_and_Benjamin_Berger

[@RahulSam]

I, in fact, came across it a few days ago. I have added it to my reading list. Thanks!

[@peterpan5906]

❤

[@KevinChou0909]

When are u going to interview Zizek？

[@DelandaBaudLacanian]

Hopefully he interviews Dugin who is more relevant to the geopolitical discourse

[@RahulSam]

I've been in the process of organising a podcast with Žižek. It's not easy to find his time as he's very busy and in high demand for public talks/interviews.

[@RahulSam]

@@DelandaBaudLacanian Ah haha, I wonder if Aleksandr Dugin does podcasts.

[@bradmodd7856]

Many have tried, I doubt anyone actually has achieved the feat

[@addammadd]

48:21 this potentially underpins an argument for standpoint epistemology.

[@addammadd]

1:31:39 the ego beatings will continue until political universalism is achieved.

[@addammadd]

1:09:15 regarding Malabou (especially in dialogue with Zizek on consciousness); it feels appropriate here to reference Isabel Millar’s work The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence.

[@addammadd]

1:13:27 it really wouldn’t though because it could ultimately simply resolve with a stochastic quasi determinism. 1:14:27 this only works if you presuppose an “ultimate/elementary constituency” and so on… it works, but only if that presupposition stands. To my Understanding, Ž has never made this presupposition.

[@addammadd]

Perhaps a means of recuperating what you’re connoting as a failure (I disagree, I think you did really well under the circumstances) might be to edit this video in a way that, say with voiceovers and maybe some minimal text or graphics, allows a more lay listener to parse the (perhaps egregiously IMO) hypotaxic, jargon and intertextual reference laden points being made here. Just a note, I’m not your boss. Who’s the boss? Not me. You did great tho man. Furthermore, this thinker is a powerhouse intellect and I can’t imagine being in your seat and feeling any differently from you.

[@addammadd]

Also, his entry in the Zizek dictionary was one of the more coherent (to the lay plebe like myself) of the batch.

[@RahulSam]

Thank you for the suggestion and the kind words, my friend. I'll be clipping out parts of this podcast to make smaller videos, and I might consider doing this if I manage time-wise. Regardless, I'll keep this in mind for future episodes.

[@danielatai8790]

I fail to see how zizek's account Of ontological incompleteness contradicts or stand in opposition to Johnston's and Malabou's idea of plastic emergentism of subjectivity. On the contrary, it seems like they advocate exactly an incompleteness which allows for such plasticity.

[@RahulSam]

Yep, they mostly agree on the incompleteness, but the differences lie in the "layered cake vs. doughnut" model ontology. There is a good back-and-forth on the book Žižek Responds!

[@TheHernanNoguera]

I have a feeling Adrian isn’t too fond of Todd McGowan

[@RahulSam]

Why would you say that?

[@TheHernanNoguera]

@@RahulSam it’s just an impression, but he wasn’t keen on his reading in politics of the death drive, and apparently he doesn’t engage much with his work. But if it were so, that’s okay, not everyone has to enjoy his work.

[@youtubeaccount-n2z]

he thanks todd in the beginning of the book...

[@TheHernanNoguera]

@@youtubeaccount-n2z cool 👍

[@pasqualified]

why does he sniffle and grab his shirt like Zizek?

[@RahulSam]

That's what happens when you read Hegel, bro.

[@natanaellizama6559]

In relation 37:30. I seriously do not understand this about the ontological ground zero, due to epistemological constraints is non-human nature seems wild to me. I have never understood this. It seems an impossible take and it's what underlies the distinction between idealisms and non-idealisms, including materialisms. I don't like the label naturalism, it seems a stolen term by materialists. As an idealist, I see no reason why I would not consider myself a naturalist. It depends on how one defines nature. In any case, to posit a non-subjective reality as ground-zero for ontology seems a posterior development of how the subject organizes things internally. Any non-subjective reality is, BY PRINCIPLE, inaccessible. Only realities either analogous or identical to subjectivity are candidates for access to a subject, and hence, there's no principled way to legitimately posit a non-subjective(materialist or 'naturalist') ontology as even if they existed, we could only access them through their idealized essence. In order words, such an idea springs forth as an idea, and if the idea can be known then it must correspond ideally to the formal essence of the idea through identity or analogy. This to me is ground-zero by principle. It's not as if it comes from a particular posterior philosophical take but springs conceptually from the very nature of postulates and subjective nature. In order to deny this, the materialist would have to posit that a subject can access what is essentially non-subjective, which seems like a very obvious contradiction. Furthermore, that this accessed non-subjective reality is ground-zero in terms of any ontological thought. This seems such a queer take to me I don't see why people think it natural. Maybe the distinction lies in that one is conceiving of the distinction between the phenomenal ego and external reality. This does seem a more proper ground-zero, yet this wouldn't entail a qualitative distinction between the phenomenal subject and the external reality given as either an internal category or "limit category" for the subject. That such a contact and ontological relation is possible implies there's a substantial unity between both and given that the ground-zero for the subject is its own subjectivity, the primary ontological category for the subject is itself as a substance, and hence any posterior substantial unity must be subjective.

[@james-cal]

i understand everything your saying here, and i don’t claim to be disagreeing or representing zizek or johnson. but perhaps i think zizek would actually as a materialist posit that a subject can access what is essentially non-subjective [objective], although i doubt he believes this literally i’d wager that he’s attempting to redefine objective here as being on the surface, not beyond the veil of subjectivity in the land of inaccessible objective ‘reality’. that the real, the truth, is on the surface. not underneath. not sure if this is his position however i should be clear. in part i’m drawing on recent engagement with baudrillard to articulate this opposing view.

[@Soundsofanetwork]

How does the physical world exist outside of being, materialists make a huge non scientific claim that existence can “be” without being. Then try to say that being is an emergent property in brains.

[@transformations1]

It's an inference that existence/reality preceeded any humans birth. Even as a baby, the subjectivity undergoes many developmental stages (Jean Piaget) highly influenced by an environment & body that as external to it makes best explanatory sense. Likewise - consider general anaesthesia where the organism is absolutely alive but subjectivity eliminated. The emergentist framework makes the most sense by a long shot that subjectivity emerges from a particular organisation of objective reakity that's not conscious phenomenology. (I would also say deep dreamless sleep but not going to get tangled by whether some minimal phenomenology exists and defining dreamless sleep - in essence, there is a gap in phenomenology but there are ways to validate the organism is alive for that first person subject on awakening) It's not just inference in the loose vague induction sense but also abduction, triangulation, weak deduction and conciilience from multiple vantage points for the above eg that a world exists prior to our birth or we are still alive even if there is no subjectivity during anaesthesia.

[@Soundsofanetwork]

@@transformations1 Good arguments , I still feel that just because during anaesthesia that being is gone and thus because the brain has been put under being is no where to be found and so the emergence of being from complexity in a brain seems the most logical, however we could point to periods in time in which we have memory loss or below the age of 2 years of age in which we have no recollection of and say that there being also has disappeared so how can we say there truly was being say at the age of 2 years.

[@pauldruhg2992]

The reflection appears on the mirror. The world must exist to be able to be reflected. Remove the mirror and the reflection is gone. Yet, the world is there.

[@mischievouseurasianist8671]

Can’t lie, I’m disappointed in this video. I think there is a response to Zizek that has yet to happen.

[@RahulSam]

What do you think the response ought to look like?

[@mischievouseurasianist8671]

@@RahulSam tbh, I think there is a Hegelian response to Zizek for me, like specifying the way in which there is a contradiction and this way renders the lack/impossibility superfluous. Here, we can return to Marx. Imo, I don’t see why we must posit the emergence from a naturalism.

[@mischievouseurasianist8671]

@@RahulSam also Zizek’s philosophy for me becomes an apologia for modern science since Lacan places science and religion at the forefront of history itself, here Zizek is on the side of the God of the philosophers with ‘knowledge in the real’. No one has yet to confront the possibility of ‘meaning in the real’